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Claude Cowork replaced his Google alerts
Instructions Like an Intern
Mark Cuban gets hundreds, if not a thousand, emails a day. Before Claude Cowork, an assistant like this meant a command line interface and the API. Now he gives it instructions the way he would to an intern or an employee: go do this, this, this, and email it to him at a set time on a set schedule. It always shows up, and when something needs to change he tells it to make the change and it does.
Beyond Google Alerts
He had tons of Google alerts, too many, and had to call them back. Now Cowork sends him a report that knows what's new versus what's not new, so none of the repetitiveness of a Google alert comes through. All of this has happened within the last two weeks.
Starting to Suggest
It's starting to suggest things too. That doesn't make it smart, but it recognizes the repetitive tasks and the things he's interested in and delivers them on request or suggests them, which has been a big time saver.
Why do keyword alerts keep repeating stories?
Google Alerts emails people when new web pages match their search terms. The system matches keywords rather than novelty, so when many outlets republish or rewrite the same item, each copy can trigger another message. Spotting that two articles report the same event means comparing meaning, which language models do well. Search engines have long grouped near-duplicate pages using text-similarity techniques such as shingling, described by Andrei Broder in 1997.
How did command lines give way to chat?
Command line interfaces date to the 1960s, when users typed exact commands at a terminal. The Xerox Alto, built in 1973, pioneered windows and a mouse, and the Apple Macintosh brought that style to a mass market in 1984. Chat with a language model lets people give instructions in ordinary sentences instead of exact commands.
How do tasks run on a schedule?
The Unix scheduler cron, which runs commands at set times, has been part of Unix systems since the 1970s. A schedule is written as five fields that set the minute, hour, day of month, month, and day of week. Descendants of cron still run on servers around the world.
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