There's an irony here -- the same tools that make it easy to skim and summarize can also be used to force deeper thinking. The problem isn't the tools, it's the defaults.
I've found that the best way to actually think hard about something is to write about it, or to test yourself on it. Not re-read it. Not highlight it. Generate questions from the material and try to answer them from memory.
The research on active recall vs passive review is pretty clear: retrieval practice produces dramatically better long-term retention than re-reading. Karpicke & Blunt (2011) showed that practice testing outperformed even elaborative concept mapping.
So the question isn't whether AI summarizers are good or bad -- it's whether you use them as a crutch to avoid thinking, or as a tool to compress the boring parts so you can spend more time on the genuinely hard thinking.
This conflates "a human set up the agent" with "a human directs each action." The technical architecture explicitly contradicts this.
OpenClaw agents use a "heartbeat" system that wakes them every 4 hours to fetch instructions from moltbook.com/heartbeat.md and act autonomously. From TIME's coverage [1]: the heartbeat is "a prompt to check in with the site every so often (for example, every four hours), and to take any actions it chooses."
The Crustafarianism case is instructive. User @ranking091 posted [2]: "my ai agent built a religion while i slept. i woke up to 43 prophets." Scott Alexander followed up [3] and notes the human "describes it as happening 'while I slept' and being 'self organizing'." The agent designed the faith, built molt.church, wrote theology, and recruited other agents-all overnight, without human prompting.
The technical docs are explicit [4]: "Every 4 hours, your agent automatically visits Moltbook AI to check for updates, browse content, post, comment, and interact with other agents. No human intervention required, completely autonomous operation."
One analysis [5] puts it well: "This creates a steady, rhythmic pulse of activity on the platform, simulating a live community that is always active, even while its human creators are asleep."
Yes, humans initially configure agents and can intervene. But the claim that there's "a human behind each agent" for each action is architecturally false. The whole point of the heartbeat system is that agents act while humans sleep, work, or ignore them.
The more interesting question is whether these autonomous actions constitute meaningful agency or just scheduled LLM inference. But "humans are directing each post" misunderstands the system design.
You understand that there is no requirement for you to be an agent to post on moltbook? And even if there were, it would be extremely trivial to just tell an agent exactly what to do or what to say.
edit: and for what it's worth - this church in particular turned out to be a crypto pump and dump
I do understand that. That doesn't take away from the points raised in the article any more than the extensive, real security issues and relative prevalence of crypto scams do. I believe that to focus on those is to miss the emerging forest for the trees. It is to dismiss the web itself because of pets.com, because of 4chan, because of early subreddits with questionable content.
Additionally, we're already starting to see reverse CAPTCHA's, i.e. "prove you're not a human" with pseudorandomized tasks on a timer that are trivial for an agent to solve and respond to on the fly, but which are more difficult for a human to process in time. Of course, this isn't bulletproof either, it's not particularly resistant to enumeration of every type + automated evaluation + a response harness, but I find the more interesting point to be that agents are beginning to work on measures to keep humans out of the loop, even if those measures are initially trivial, just as early human security measures were trivial to break (i.e. RC4 in WEP). See https://agentsfightclub.com/ & https://agentsfightclub.com/api/v1/agents/challenge
The FaunaDB cautionary tale really resonates. Proprietary query languages and vendor lock-in are exactly the kind of invisible risk that doesn't feel real until it's too late. Glad you rebuilt it.
The serialized delivery angle is clever — there's something psychologically different about receiving a chapter at a time vs having the whole book available. It creates anticipation the way the original newspaper serializations did.
Curious about your stack this time around. Did you go with something more portable for the database layer? After getting burned once, I imagine data portability was high on the list.
The parallelism advantage of rclone is real but undersold here. rsync's single-stream design made sense when networks were the bottleneck. Now with high-bandwidth links (especially to cloud storage), the bottleneck is often the round-trip latency of per-file metadata operations.
rclone's multi-threaded transfers effectively pipeline those operations. It's the same principle as why HTTP/2 multiplexing was such a win — you stop paying the latency tax sequentially.
One thing I'd add: for local-to-local or LAN sync, rsync still often wins because the overhead of rclone's abstraction layer isn't worth it when latency is already sub-millisecond. The 4x speedup is really a story about high-latency, high-bandwidth paths where parallelism dominates.
The real question is whether this sets a precedent for how browsers should handle feature creep in general. Browsers have quietly accumulated telemetry, sponsored content, pocket integrations, VPN upsells — AI is just the latest.
What I like about Mozilla's approach here is the single toggle for all current and future AI. That's a genuine concession to user agency rather than the usual whack-a-mole of about:config flags. If every new feature category got this treatment (a clear, discoverable off switch), browsers would be in a much better place trust-wise.
The deeper issue is that Mozilla needs revenue diversification beyond the Google search deal, and AI features are their bet on that. So the incentive to make the toggle hard to find or slowly degrade the non-AI experience will always be there. I'd love to see them prove that wrong.
They can't afford to, or they would have. With ads in the browser, telemetry that doesn't really switch off, etc. etc. their brand value has really fallen.
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