Jabber bots as familiars.
Would help me remember stuff.
I think you stumbled across the best euphemism for virtual assistant ever.
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I’ve always fancied running a Dokku instance and loading it up with a bunch of Hubots. Now I could host it at thepit.interi.org (all my bots are infernal). 
I have two new use cases I’d like to use a jabber bot for:
- Web searches
- Weather reports
I don’t have a home internet connection, and the hill I live on has poor reception (especially when it rains…), so while I can search and check reports, it takes a lot of crufty HTML loading before folks will give me what I want. Something a bot could easily parse and return a concise report or list of direct links.
Oh my God my old weather app would be useful in this situation. I can update to output html and not wml.
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What I’d really like is a nudge bot that is addressable by other people.
[12:05pm] #sam-and-smithers
sam > remind dan in one hour call the doctor. repeat every half hour. require confirmation.
smithers > OK! I will remind Dan to call the doctor at 12:35pm. I will require confirmation from him that the task is done and notifiy you once I have confirmation. If he opts to defer the task, I will remind him every 30 minutes.
[12:35pm] #me-and-smithers
smithers > Samantha has requested you call the doctor and she has requested confirmation. You may opt to defer, and I will remind you in 30 minutes. Confirm with code RJ29A
[12:38pm] #me-and-smithers
me > confirm RJ29A with message “I’ve earned a brownie”
[12:38pm] #sam-and-smithers
smithers > I have confirmation that Dan has called the doctor! He said, “I’ve earned a brownie”
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I think a nudgebot is a horrible idea.
Haha, well, it’s pretty much just for me to be honest. I’ve noticed that I do best tracking tasks that remind me by email (for example, I only pay my student loans every other month because they only remind me after I’ve missed a whole month’s payment 
)
The problem with email for other people that aren’t services I owe money to is that email is slightly more inconvenient than just, ya know, asking me, but they also don’t want to manage my life for me and ping me a bunch of times to make sure its done.
So, smithers will do it for me, and beep my phone when I’m away from email. I need nudges
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I basically manage my life with 3 or 4 Discourse sites and various settings for auto-bumping and reminders. I just don’t want others to control it anymore. Too much distractive power in their hands!
I think “family” instances of Discourse will become more common; it is basically the WordPress for family everyone wanted. But when you add all the collab plugins, its pretty good at managing a home.
@draloff, you can let folks assign you stuff!
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Interesting!