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Art-Obsessed 4chan Founder Chris “moot” Poole Opens Up About His New App DrawQuest

After spending most of his life tackling the world of digital media, 4chan and Canv.as founder Chris “moot” Poole has gone back to basics with a gamified iPad drawing app called DrawQuest.

The idea is that you spend most of your childhood representing and expressing yourself through art, whether it be pictures or words or some combination. But after a certain age, the majority of us become consumers, trying to pack the maths and sciences and spread sheets and meeting planners into our brain.

“Putting an adult in front of a blank piece of paper and a pen and ask them to do something with it is one of the scariest situations you can put them in,” explains Poole.

After founding Canv.as (post 4chan), Poole found that around 10 percent of users were using the remix feature, which lets you add text, drawings, and essentially meme-ify pictures and re-share them. They worked for a long time refining the webapp’s image editor, and realized that it wasn’t the quality of the editor, but a general insecurity to start creating that hindered growth of the feature.

That’s where DrawQuest comes in. DrawQuest offers a daily challenge, with a question and a template to start off the creative process. The editing tools are relatively simple, offering a marker, pencil, paintbrush, and eraser, along with a color wheel with the basic ROYGBIV + BW spectrum.

Every picture you complete and submit into the daily pool is an opportunity to get stars from friends and accrue coins, which can go toward more colors and other add-ons.

The most interesting feature is the ability to watch a replay of any given drawing, to see how the artist set up the shot and went step by step.

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The whole motivation is giving people a place to start drawing and learning. Poole told TechCrunch that he never imagined how good some of the drawings would be, but that DrawQuest is more about giving people the tools they need to express themselves.

At the end of the day, it’s not as much about having a beautiful work of art that you frame on your wall, but about having an artistic outlet.

In its first two weeks of availability, the DrawQuest app has seen over 500K downloads with over 1 million quests completed by users. The app is available now and can be found in the Apple App Store.

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Y Combinator crew dressed like crabs
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AI

A Meta AI security researcher said an OpenClaw agent ran amok on her inbox 

The now-viral X post from Meta AI security researcher Summer Yue reads, at first, like satire. She told her OpenClaw AI agent to check her overstuffed email inbox and suggest what to delete or archive.  

The agent proceeded to run amok. It started deleting all her email in a “speed run” while ignoring her commands from her phone telling it to stop. 

“I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb,” she wrote, posting images of the ignored stop prompts as receipts.  

The Mac Mini, an affordable Apple computer that sits flat on a desk and fits in the palm of your hand, has become the favored device these days for running OpenClaw. (The Mini is selling “like hotcakes,” one “confused” Apple employee apparently told famed AI researcher Andrej Karpathy when he bought one to run an OpenClaw alternative called NanoClaw.) 

OpenClaw is, of course, the open source AI agent that achieved fame through Moltbook, an AI-only social network. OpenClaw agents were at the center of that now largely debunked episode on Moltbook in which it looked like the AIs were plotting against humans.  

But OpenClaw’s mission, according to its GitHub page, is not focused on social networks. It aims to be a personal AI assistant that runs on your own devices.  

The Silicon Valley in-crowd has fallen so in love with OpenClaw that “claw” and “claws” have become the buzzwords of choice for agents that run on personal hardware. Other such agents include ZeroClaw, IronClaw, and PicoClaw. Y Combinator’s podcast team even appeared on their most recent episode dressed in lobster costumes. 

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But Yue’s post serves as a warning. As others on X noted, if an AI security researcher could run into this problem, what hope do mere mortals have? 

“Were you intentionally testing its guardrails or did you make a rookie mistake?” a software developer asked her on X.  

“Rookie mistake tbh,” she replied. She had been testing her agent with a smaller “toy” inbox, as she called it, and it had been running well on less important email. It had earned her trust, so she thought she’d let it loose on the real thing. 

Yue believes that the large amount of data in her real inbox “triggered compaction,” she wrote. Compaction happens when the context window — the running record of everything the AI has been told and has done in a session — grows too large, causing the agent to begin summarizing, compressing, and managing the conversation.  

At that point, the AI may skip over instructions that the human considers quite important.  

In this case, it may have skipped her last prompt — where she told it not to act — and reverted back to its instructions from the “toy” inbox. 

As several others on X pointed out, prompts can’t be trusted to act as security guardrails. Models may misconstrue or ignore them. 

Various people offered suggestions that ranged from the exact syntax Yue should have used to stop the agent, to various methods to ensure better adherence to guardrails, like writing instructions to dedicated files or using other open source tools. 

In the interest of full transparency, TechCrunch could not independently verify what happened to Yue’s inbox. (She didn’t respond to our request for comment, though she did respond to many questions and comments sent her way on X.) 

But it doesn’t really matter. 

The point of the tale is that agents aimed at knowledge workers, at their current stage of development, are risky. People who say they are using them successfully are cobbling together methods to protect themselves.

One day, perhaps soon (by 2027? 2028?), they may be ready for widespread use. Goodness knows many of us would love help with email, grocery orders, and scheduling dentist appointments. But that day has not yet come. 

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