What Meta got right with Muse
metedata.substack.com
metedata.substack.com
> you better believe the other thing it's supposed to do aside from build a picture of your friends and loved ones is to figure out what makes you love to shop. This is actually some of the most nauseating prompt text i have ever read.
That investigation is still ongoing, and that subthread doesn't contain all the information from it. You should pop up to that -er- blog's top level, scroll back until you find the start of the investigation, and then start reading. Yeah, it's a huge pain in the ass, but this is -AFAICT- the guy's personal notepad, rather than some place where formal reports usually go. If someone walked over, picked up my personal notepad at $DAYJOB, and complained about how they couldn't make sense of it, I'd tell them to fuck right off, yanno?
And idk what's even being implied by that quote. (Yes, it tries to help you shop. And? Or is the critique just that OP doesn't like the prose in that markdown file?)
Disclaimer: I work at Meta, not on Muse
I don't know how anyone can use Muse. It's like taking everything that Facebook has had to guess and infer about you over the years using various analytics and instead just dumping it directly into a chat bot and giving the company everything it wants. Zuckerberg and his soulless C-suite must be licking their lips.
You're free to speculate that Meta is lying about what it will or won't use the data for. I won't argue over that. That's an important topic and I'm not gonna persuade anyone via an HN comment. Skepticism is fine
But the example linked to in the above comment is not evidence of that at all. A skill explaining how to format purchase history in markdown format is not evidence of hidden motivations.
In general the entire thread is nothing-burger, and that's all I'm getting at.
We all know Meta can already track things like certain purchases. A skill file telling AI how to format purchase history in markdown format is not going to help any of Meta's ads or RecSys systems.
You can believe Meta does bad things without thinking everything Meta does is an example of said bad things
Facebook has broken its promises about user data many times before. I don't buy anything they say about Muse, and nobody in their right mind should. Unless they’re getting paid to, of course.
Aside, if “a skill file organizing purchase history in markdown format” is the only thing you took away from that thread, you might want to take a closer look.
I mean… little drops of water make the ocean, so if the complaint is with the drop then yes. Doesn’t mean the ocean is poisoned by some of these droplets though.
Two things can be true at the same time - Facebook as a whole is untrustable but you can use Muse Glimmer from them without giving them this data.
Since the article discusses metaphors... think about it as a snitch.
You're free to believe whatever you want about Meta. But no, you shouldn't point to non-evidence, interpret it through the lens of your prior beliefs, and then claim that it's actually evidence supporting your beliefs.
> Aside, if “a skill file organizing purchase history in markdown format” is the only thing you took away from that thread, you might want to take a closer look.
That's what that specific quote I was referencing was referring to. I already responded to the supposed prompt injection/security concerns above.
Not parent, but it is worth responding to as it applies. Not prior beliefs. From prior actions. Unless you are only now becoming aware of the existing ecosystem, there is almost no way in which you can buy into that ecosystem without expecting hard rug pull. And the beauty is, everyone gets to make a choice, but they best do it is with eyes wide open and the understanding of the deal for it will be changing soon.
I think you're saying that prior actions justify the beliefs you hold. Fair enough, I'll concede that for the sake of argument.
My above comment still stands. Even if your beliefs are justified, that doesn't mean you should treat non-evidence as evidence supporting your beliefs. (Tbh my point is kinda trivial/pedantic. But I feel like folks just always want to double down that every criticism of meta is correct).
Ayyy! You're one of the folks I wrote my comment [0] for!
But if someone posts the thread with no other context than "check this out", then it seems appropriate explain this missing context.
And for the record, I did scroll back read through what he's saying as you suggested. The broader context is exactly what makes it clear he's just a bit confused about what he's "uncovered". (Obvious caveat: I haven't read through everything this guy has written, I could be missing something)
Did you also scroll forward to read what he wrote after the stuff in the thread that was linked to? This tool is pretty obviously designed -whether intentionally or not- to enable the exfiltration of a ton of sensitive data to untrusted third parties while leaving its intended user none the wiser.
a) More being surprised the muse will just provide internal details (which again, as intended) b) the bash scripts are ugly (okay? I don't think that's what we're arguing about) c) surprise that muse runs as root (then realizing this is explained by the VM-in-VM model and linking to the blog which explains this) d) surprise that muse can run as a seed box (idk is this supposed to be the security concern?)
Could you please be more specific about which part you're concerned about? I think that'd be more productive than linking to a long thread, me responding to what I see, then being told that it's just a scratch pad and I'm silly for taking it seriously but also if I look closer I'll see the deeper truth.
Yeah, given how this has been going, I expected that sort of misrepresentation. A careful reader remembers that this is what I said:
You should pop up to that -er- blog's top level, scroll back until you find the start of the investigation, and then start reading. Yeah, it's a huge pain in the ass, but this is -AFAICT- the guy's personal notepad, rather than some place where formal reports usually go. If someone walked over, picked up my personal notepad at $DAYJOB, and complained about how they couldn't make sense of it, I'd tell them to fuck right off, yanno?
<https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117353184983766316>
<https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117361988874888258>
<https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117381101404641742>
TBH I saw none of those comments by scrolling forward or backwards from the original link. Now it turns out I supposed to be checking quote tweets, not just scrolling like you said above? (tbf I'm not familiar with the neuromatch UI, could be user error on my part).
Again, I think this would've gone smoother if you actually articulated the problem you're concerned about, instead of linking to a "personal notepad" which you acknowledge has mistakes and isn't easily intelligible, and then blaming me for missing the actual point.
I'll look through these new comments later.
Edit: I see from your original comment what you meant by "top-level". I originally assumed you just meant top of the thread. I'll take the L here.
Like I mentioned I don't work on Muse, and I suppose it'd wouldn't be appropriate for me (self-identified Meta employee) to publicly speculate on what defenses do and don't exist or what is intended. (sorry kinda a cop-out, I know).
Thanks for providing specific links to the specific concerns being raised.
I'd very much rather you commit to
* Slowing the hell down when you're reading things that other people write. If you don't have time to slow down and actually read, stay the hell out of the conversation.
* Upon receiving a notification that you've massively misunderstood something that someone has said in writing, immediately stop, carefully inspect what you know and what you assume, and then go back and carefully re-read the thing you've been told you massively misunderstood while keeping at the front of your mind the knowledge that your task is to find out what parts you totally misunderstood during your prior reads
This second point is a huge part of that whole "principle of charity" thing that's the fundamental part of good "netiquette". This principle should be abandoned when you have personal knowledge that your conversation partner is a fucking bozo or is otherwise intentionally fucking with you... but -as I'm sure you know- one cannot possibly possess that knowledge at the start of one's first conversation with a stranger.
> I suppose it'd wouldn't be appropriate for me ... to publicly speculate on what defenses do and don't exist or what is intended.
With all due respect, that's not what I asked for. What I asked was
...are the combination of these things simply no problem?
No? I'm rather excited that perhaps you'll take this as a "teachable moment" to adjust your behavior in a much more prosocial direction.
So many people wade into a conversation without actually having the time and energy required to actually participate in that conversation. Even if we ignore the ragebait bots and people paid to act like them, I'd expect that this describes the behavior of the vast majority of folks -when measuring by comment volume- who choose to comment on the internet.
Public discourse would be far better if more people were aware of the liberation delivered to each of us long ago by Mr. Marcus Aurelius. [0]
And -well- if you jumped in here because of a vague sense of duty towards your employer... remember that not only are they a -more or less- multi-trillion-dollar company, but they have survived -among so many other things- renaming the company to commemorate its new "this will wreck the company if we don't win it!" project and then burning tens of billions of dollars on said project over the course of just a few years with precious little to show for it. They'll survive some negative sentiment in some random HN thread just fine... they don't need your backup.
Nice Aurelius quote, I'll remember that one
1. I responded to the quote and thread tokepi posted. I stand by that response—the supposed "prompt injection" was a trivial misunderstanding which Meta had already publicly clarified.
2. You sarcastically replied by linking me to another comment that said "pop up to that -er- blog's top level, scroll back until you find the start of the investigation, and then start reading." I read that as the top of the linked thread. You meant his profile page, which would have meant reading everything he'd posted since the investigation began to find the posts you had in mind, which came days later in separate threads. I noted I didn't read everything he wrote, clarified what I did read, and asked you to state your specific concern.
3. You didn't state it. You linked five more posts on issues unrelated to the thread I'd responded to. I acknowledged I hadn't seen those, said they were at least not trivially confused the way the first thread was, and bowed out because I shouldn’t discuss specifics of my employer’s security setup beyond what's been publicly disclosed (for obvious reasons).
4. You responded with more sarcasm and a lecture on "netiquette". Then you finished by explaining "prompt injection", which is strange: even @jonny acknowledged the supposed prompt injection from the initial thread was intended behavior, and the posts you linked provide no evidence of prompt injection. So you bringing it up calls into question whether you were actually parsing our conversation and jonny's investigation.
5. I tried twice to end this amicably. Both times you came back with insults and more lectures.
Do you think you upheld your own standards of "netiquette" and "healthy discourse" here? How is being simultaneously antagonistic while refusing to articulate your own perspective helpful to anyone?
Yes and the last thing I want to do is to integrate my life with best ad business in the world
"targeting" is a myth imo. If they even tried a little bit, they wouldn't have these problems.
It has a simple surface but you can dig deep, from customizing personality, rules, communication style, avatar, etc. You can even install Tailscale onto its VM to SSH into it, but sadly once the machine shuts down, the overlay resets and that’s gone. Couldn’t figure a way to persist it out yet. Still very cool to dig around and explore all the CLIs Meta created for Muse to interact with stuff, like instagram or facebook (you can scp them off the VM)
If I had to rank them I would say: Grok Bot -> Muse -> Hermes -> dot -> OpenClaw
I would love to use Muse more but same as everyone else, there’s no way I’m giving Meta more access to my life. So for now, my Muse is jailed to only Meta owned services and general research, and for that it’s great.
I then linked my Facebook, IG and others to this new Meta account so that Muse can access them.
No problems whatsoever
You completed the circle!
Research here meaning stuff I need a browser for, like the other day I asked Muse to monitor the Apple website every few hours to tell me when iPhones in my area are back in stock. Or another task was to explore an undocumented API for me by issuing curl requests to traverse it.
Grok Bot I use for more things, like keeping me updated on GitHub activity, surfacing important notifications I might have missed, managing my Calendar and travel schedule, booking WeWork desks in the city I’m in automatically, etc. Mostly small QoL stuff.
dot I use to orchestrate Codex Cloud tasks mostly from GitHub PRs and issues, look up stuff in a browser, click around websites.
In general though yeah X is probably less competent in the execution of manipulating you through insights from your data.
I was a big fan of SpaceX and Tesla and Musk's other endeavors as well, until he crossed the line from quirky to erratic and went completely off the far-right deep end. Today he's a champion of social-conservative politics and revanchism, but he could just as easily wake up tomorrow and decide he's a hyper-progressive One-Worlder kind of guy. Either way, no matter what, he still has your data.
xAI, OpenAI, Anthropic, may dabble in ads but they are nowhere near Meta and Google.
While as for Meta, there’s just way too much negative track record for me to ever trust them as a company or their products. I just assume everything it touches will be used to profile me and sell me ads
oh this is cool. I would be very interested in a Facebook CLI
But who knows how long they will be available. Kinda surprised it’s not a MCP connection to be honest.
I also haven’t looked into how they authenticate or if they would even be usable outside of the Muse vm. Just played with them through SSH on the machine itself. If it was me I would probably inject the auth stuff on a proxy level, so those CLIs may be useless in the end
Fucking awesome, I remember back in 2011 sometime when I got banned from Facebook (the first time) just because I was using a CLI to access it. I also remember people used to get fines for piracy, and even people being upset about warrantless surveillance, I guess that's the "old world" now.
Hermes just feels more thought through. I didn’t notice any problems with it
My local LLM with voice interaction and fine-tuning is free and works fast enough. I can do everything frontiers can without it bleeding into my social life. yolo.
Honest question as I just can't come up with a single use case for me
Having that done at a “good enough” accuracy is easily achievable with any frontier open model, much less SOTA, and would be incredibly valuable to most normal folks going about their days.
People don't care about privacy. They want something that just works.
It will be interesting to see if muse's privacy features can get users over this.
I’m hoping someone makes a lower maintenance version of open source Muse or Grokbot or Dots (more user friendly than OpenClaw or Hermes) that I can easily deploy to my own AWS, Cloudflare, Vercel, or Fly account and use some ZDR friendly inference provider like Fireworks.
I think VPS are going to be expensive because of the RAM and GPU requirements - 32GB RAM is beefy for a VPS and might run like $30/month on the cheap end. Thats $360/year so running something at home might be more secure, capable and cheaper. Remote/mobile access might be viable with something like tailscale.
What exactly is high maintenance about Hermes? I agree the setup could be a little more user-friendly, but I have it running on my VPS with Matrix and the actual maintenance has been very minimal.
Spending a lot of time on harness engineering to try to compensate for deficiencies with Deepseek v4 flash because I'm too cheap to use better models on the other hand...
In hindsight I should have simply rotated SD cards instead of treating one as the authoritative ones.
I agree Hermes usually works without maintenance more or less but I don't really trust these agents much and haven't found a great use for it.
The other advantage long running sessions have is that very low tok/s are perfectly acceptable. In fact, hardly noticeable.
(aside, of course, from Google and Apple both having incentives to prevent this from happening, as both depend on selling centralized services to you and advertisers, and the local model breaks both)
I host all of my custom applications on a machine in my home with Tailscale, k8, infrastructure as code
It’s wired, always on, has access to my gpu running on another machine or falls back to cloud inference
Self hosted GitHub action runners on each different platform for build/deploy of various projects: tauri v2, apis, web uis, native macOS apps, Unity 3d
None of this existed a month ago and it’s been a blast pretending to run my own platform
Now I have persistent chats and a persistent environment that I can talk to from any device, including my phone. Even have X11 + CUA + Chromium inside the VM so the agent can use a real browser for sites that require it. DSH bwrap is the first layer of containment, VM is the second layer. I can swap between API models and local inference with a drop-down in the UI.
I realise this is way more setup than Meta's customers would tolerate, but the HN crowd could slap something together quite quickly. Using a coding agent with a nice chat UI as your general chat client is surprisingly smooth: just create an empty workspace.
I think Muse is the right shape in a lot of ways but I come unstuck at the point where my personal details and credentials are inside the VM.
Apple is my long term bet for personal AI computing.
No way in hell am I letting FaceBook/OpenAI/Anthropic/Deepseek/anybody have complete access to my personal digital life. That’s just dumb.
Just look at OpenAI digging through ChatGPT logs to get the idea to solve the math problems etc. I’m sure all the subscription plans and subsidies are aimed at gathering enough breadth of real people comms to get the models to improve on wider signals…
Worst case, I don’t want to be voluntarily giving up my digital footprint to get profiled a certain way and be fed what AI overlords (or the companies that wield them really) think I should get as an answer/response.
My thoughts and activity stays private as much as practical and feasible.
there already is technology for this, which is Confidential Computing which is implemented on Nvidia etc.
it requires transparency to audit it properly and if there's an exploit which weakens it then the security guarantees fall apart
but in terms of commercial viability, it's the most promising way to tackle this and it seems like Apple is already pushing for it with their Private Cloud Compute
That’s already in production. Look for Apple Private Cloud Compute
"I can answer my emails 30s faster!" Cool but now meta knows everyone in your family's status, the bills you have, the Drs appts you have, your families health status, who services your loans, the emails you open the ones you don't, etc. it's a wet dream for surveillance capitalism and the mic subsidized by ignorant customers.
Most personal tasks take trivial amounts of time these days. Does a 5th grade teacher or an auto mechanic need a personal assistant? Do we need to be able to book a trip faster? It feels very gimmicky to me, but I realize I'm not their target audience.
Given that, I do think Meta will probably get the lions share of B2C AI and they have a proven track record of using personal data to serve ads and make a lot of profit. If they capture more of their user base's time, it keeps them engaged and away from a list of competitors. If Meta starts crushing it in this fashion I could see IPO's of OpenAI and Anthropic land like fart in church.
It also handled payment splitting. I told it what person x spent for the group split 3 ways (it originally split by the total number of people, but I clarified that only me + x + y are paying) and it kept running totals. When I got an email from Venmo saying x sent me money, muse automatically updated the balance sheet.
We saw some signs written in an unfamiliar language. Muse told me what language it was.
Like I said, I'm not the target audience for a personal assistant. That does sound like a more ideal UX than what chat gippity and the others offer though. I would expect that with Meta - they really get the UX mostly right for people.
But this is where friends are and don't give me 'you could just call them'
Not everyone has access to email/phone. Facebook should work in theory, if they weren't so enthusiastic about intentionally eroding privacy (physically changing the privacy options). Multicast. I post some status to multiple people at once. I can find people I don't already know/have lost touch with, and connect with them
What Meta does, does not mean its users don't care and I wish you people would stop saying that
Chatbots have been tried for a decade and were a total failure. With AI, it has become the fastest-growing way to interact with technology, ever.
GPT-5 tried to have an auto router and create abstraction for the user; people hated it. Instinct and Muse are doing the same with a different framing; it's going wild.
There are tons of these little examples where a small difference in framing, a small threshold in tech, and product assumptions completely flip on their heads.
It's amazing to follow but requires you to be way more flexible in your assumptions.
Re: chatbots were tried but it’s a wrong model for a deterministic system. It’s the best one for a probabilistic one.
Re: chatGPT auto-router - 1) I suspect explicit model selection matters less in agentic contexts (this thing is coordinating a bunch of other agents for me) vs QA context where you want to make sure you’re getting the best answer. 2) I suspect auto-routing matters less now that models are way better
But I have to admit that in the design field we have a strong tendency to over-rely on "proper rules" and to overgeneralize learnings. (My pet peeve is when B2C patterns are transferred as-is in B2B or prosumers)
AI makes some old UX viable but can also unlock tons of value once you break your assumptions and reluctance. An example I see a lot here and on socials is how much of the code developers actually read nowadays. In the case of Instict, it is how many people actually share their credit card with an unknown startup's IA to buy stuff. I just heard on a podcast that 40% of them actually used their AI to buy something online (I didn't verify the %)
I'm the kind of guy who didn't understand why people use phones so much when a desktop is way more comfortable, so I have to keep track of the crazy ones!
Once you recognize and overcome that thinking, and learn to distinguish between those two things, you can see where things are going.
Agents are going to replace almost all the UI in computers. For a trivial example, things like a control panel or settings menu will cease to exist, you'll handle coarse things via conversation ("set volume to 20%"), and UIs will be presented only for things where chat is cumbersome ("the password for the printer is !-*Donkey_Loves_Shrek^^@"). The UI that remains will become heavily decoupled, like supercharged versions of the office ribbons, with the intent that the agent will compose menu fragments and capability widgets dynamically so you only ever need to see controls for the settings that are relevant and that you care about.
haha oh god no please don’t.
EDIT:
Sorry for being dismissive. What I mean is, volume is something people generally don’t think about in percentages, but by feel/ear. It’s also adjusted so often and impulsively that doing it via chat would be extremely slow and unergonomic. So yeah, I don’t think that should happen.
There was a study that showed users "felt" faster on a keyboard even while completing tasks faster on a mouse. Similarly, with low latency models, "chromium volume 20%, actually, 10%" will be faster than clicking the sound control icon, finding the chromium volume from the list and reducing it, not to mention you don't have to look away from what you're doing. Direct interaction will probably only be faster if you need extremely precise control, for example, you wouldn't do digital painting with an agent, which seems pretty intuitive.
About that study: I‘m interested to read it, as it seems to contradict established literature on UX (not to mention lived experience) - do you have a link for that?
I seemed to recall that Tog made that point back then. Note that both Tog‘s text and Keystroke-Level are from the very early days of GUIs, so, grain of salt.
Omanson, OTOH actually contradicts them a bit: expert users are generally faster with well-learned shortcuts – a widely-held view point and the whole reason for shortcuts.
A key point is that the box might as well be running BeOS or Windows or HP-UX or OS/360 or something. It doesn't matter much anymore, any more than my choice of programming language does. Requires some mental adjustment.
> don't know much Linux, but I've had no problems putting together a capable, well-configured, and secure Linux box by using Claude Code
How can you be sure of it being well configured and secure? Especially if you don‘t know much about Linux?
In practice, that means I at least stick around and watch when Claude tells me to curl | sudo bash something. :-P
This is what happens if you try to read the data like gospel without having a mental model to interpret it... in other words, critical thinking.
Chatbots are a failure because chat capabilities have sucked for most of the past decade and chatbots weren't really capable enough to do anything meaningful. Not because chat is fundamentally bad. Similarly with auto-router.
Also, if you want to "cross the chasm" you cannot measure reactions from current AI users (early adopters) and extrapolate to the rest of the populace. Early adopters are paying you for tokens and try to wieid them like a surgical tool; across the chasm the rest really don't want to know anything about "tokens" or models tiers or "thinking level".
Chatbots also had huge drawbacks that are still present with AI: - Inability to see what outcomes are possible - Very constrained environment with only lightly formatted text - Sequential flow
You can see how the modern AI chat interface tries to overcome these issues. But even then, just the power of LLMs made users adopt this approach massively despite these drawbacks
Hindsight is 20/20, maybe you can accurately predict the inflection point of every modality, but the fact that most AI patterns currently used started as a quick experiment shows that most people can't, and probably shouldn't.
I don't get it. Is Meta handing out big $ for everyone to make Muse happen?
DF and their ilk, are irrelevant so they need to talk it up to get their blogs, and podcasts relevant again in the 'AI' conversation.
You would have thought that Gruber would be talking about their own expert subject matter i.e. Apple more, but since 2016 he has been going off the Apple expert opinion into Politics, Trump, AI, etc and not mainly (or exclusively) Apple.
I don't know why anybody still follows DF anymore as in the age of video, social media and podcasts the DF blog has fallen off.
That being said, on Muse, I will reserve my judgement there.
Wait till Meta's earnings to see if Muse has got any numbers to share to see if it made a difference.
I cannot even deign to imagine someone trusting that company with an iota of their personal information, or that it would do anything constructive with it.
But I've seen enough people (presumably) astroturfing about it to know what their latest desperate "we matter" pitch is, and it just doesn't sound compelling at all. Certainly not to warrant the constant citations.
I understand that a lot of people use Meta products as an inertia from decades past. Indisputable. Yet several long-time avowed Meta critics, who I am quite certain do not use the product, are suddenly gushing about yet another agent and endlessly namedropping Muse. It is hugely suspicious.
?
On the other part of your comment: well, agree to disagree. Its probably just a good product and not everyone's hyper sensitive to privacy concerns.
People like Muse because you can put your password in and it does the thing end-to-end, which is something that I can only assume OpenAI and Anthropic had deliberately been avoiding because it's obviously a bad idea. It's pushing the "Overton window" of actions you're letting it do without regard for what happens when it goes wrong.
Just like how OpenClaw pushed it with no human-in-the-loop, Claude code pushed it before that with the all the risks of giving a third-party RCE on your machine.
You could argue that the main difference with CLI agents and OpenClaw is that they are aimed at technical users who understand the risks, whereas with Muse and GrokBot the target is explicitly "normal people" who put their password as their birthday and fall for phishing pages.
The pattern is clear, the leaders will take less risks than those in 3rd and 4th place because they have more to lose. The frontiers, smartly, keep liability low by leaving the dangerous/stupid (but incredibly fun/productive) AI uses outside of anything they actively encourage.
The insane part about Muse is that generally things like Coding agents/OpenClaw were stupider the cheaper the model you were using, which meant most people were paying for frontier to get good results (at least initially) - if you try to do complex tasks with a crappy model, you would face way more "delete production" moments. Meta is pushing boundaries AND doing so on a free plan - suggesting the use of an economical model, which makes it even more insane.
The question now becomes... will the risk be worth it? Or will people be turned away by horror stories of LLMs going on a spending spree and then being unable to make rent.
I have a local repo with my home lab mapped out and Claude manages servers via ssh. It is completely fine with using my ssh keys and pass.
Claude will also drive the browser. After a couple times, it will even offer to do something via the browser where no API or other machine interface exists.
And yes, the digital drudgery has definitely reached a point where this is worth the risk.
bashrc, bash profile, cron, systemd, etc all get wiped clean the moment the VM resets
"Project" for remote connections are local to the device they are created on. So if you create a project on your laptop for a remote server with a session in it, and want to access that same connection on your phone with the same project folder structure and session grouping, you need to manually recreate the project on that new device and add the session.
And you cannot mix local and remote sessions in a single project. So if you need to do anything locally for a remote project, get in the habit of naming projects things like "Project Foo [Local]" and "Project Foo [Dev]".
Many times, UI/UX makes all the difference in user adoption & use.
Muse is:
- a single thread
- has avatars that you can name
- has approval cards
Now dots is similar in concept but that only launched a few days ago and Muse launched a month ago.
Meta is reducing the friction for your parents to run OpenClaw without any assistance.
Yeah this is spot on.
Meta though has a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde side and you never know which are you getting.
Those other issues, while perhaps examples of bad corporate behavior, aren't really security lapses per se.
They’ve also had a long history of using shady/deceptive practices to gather data, such as Onavo.
Is their internal security up to par with other cloud providers? Maybe. Security from them? Definitely not to be trusted.
(Former employee)
The worst security faux pas of companies is storing user passwords - because the most common source of account breaches is via credential stuffing, where they get hacked, have their user base's passwords stolen and tried on other websites. The remedy being... not to store passwords, only salted, secure hashes.
Muse sounds like a disaster - your credentials for other sites are floating around on their servers, with the capability of being decrypted. Maybe if sites decided to offer a form of auth tied to the agent that could be revoked in bulk in the event of a breach it might be a ok, but this is crazy.
The word “my” is doing some work here. Maybe you personally have been lucky, but Meta has had quite a few data breaches.
https://breachhistory.com/blog/facebook-data-breaches-full-t...
When it comes to being mainstream, an approachable UI sells
I'm not sure to what extent they chose that, versus their privacy woes in the EU and elsewhere chose it for them. Turns out meta's reputation among US consumers is sparkling compared to their overseas reputation...
I'd argue that this is more of a testament of how US regulatory regime facilitates consumer choice compared to paternalism of other major markets. I personally can't wait to have a free AI assistant like Muse available in my country.
At that point, you can see that limiting your liability to a single jurisdiction is probably a good idea.
Is this just a productivity thing?
Out of the top of my head I can't think of a lot of use cases but maybe RSS? Maybe I could ask it to give me a summary of cool tech news for each morning, and on very specific topics too?
Not sure what else I'd use it for.
Agents talking to Agents talking to Agents, spending our money. That’s the future Meta wants.
I guess he was taking about their business partners, not the users.
Credentials and payments for agents and local proxy browsing is a non-trivial problem.
And I promise you my Hermes agent is not sitting here trying to get me to buy things.
I know things change, but I don't know what giving money to Zuck has to do with hacking.
Well I'm happy to know I'll have a job for a few years because this was incredibly weak.
It’s boomers
Umm what? Having billions of hourly active users across YouTube, Google, Google Maps, and Chrome still doesn’t mean they have the product chops to build another consumer facing app/service? I think it’s inevitable that Muse will get crushed.
You listed products that have been around for ~20 years. Keeping up already entrenched products running doesn't correlate with being able to launch new products.
We should look to see how Shorts vs IG Reels have adapted to the short form video landscape for product chops in this area. IMO IG has adapted far better to the new era, and I very often get people sending me Reels (they used to send TikToks). I very rarely see anyone send Shorts but it still happens. I expect this trend to continue and IG to extend their lead here. And Muse certainly has first mover advantage in personalized AI apps, who knows when Google will finally release one.
Just yesterday I tried out Gemini again after a while, and it was not able to open Google Maps in navigation mode to the destination i wanted.
For the purposes of writing this comment, i asked it to put on some Jazz in Youtube (i have youtube music with a premium account on the same device and same google account) and it started a Spotify Jazz playlist.
Google might still have the popular products from 20 years of history, but after years of them trying there's no indication whatsoever that they have the ability to shape it into a coherent product.
They have a lot more to lose in introducing something as ridiculous as Muse - changing the pre-established security boundaries like not decrypting your cloud-synced passwords.
Meta on the other hand has nothing to lose in the consumer privacy/trust space. They don't have enterprise users of Muse to worry about. Anybody putting their data into their apps has clearly no regard for the at data, so they're the only one who the risk/reward might be in their favour.
Google Video was a competitor to YouTube and it's a perfect illustration of what native Google products look like.
So, yeah that was disappointing. No muse in the UK either.
Facebook is not run or owned or operated by trustworthy individuals, and until such time as the greatest majority of their leadership if removed, the company's dissolution across its various sectors of global political control and influence ended - just stop giving it attention.
Please. I don't know how much more I can take of people demanding justice from a company that is only now being fined for sins of the past to a tune of meaningless dollars while also goofing "ooh shiny fun avatar that does an ai how useful!"
Please. Stop.
A refreshing dose of sanity in this thread.
It feels that everyone is quick to forget the sins of these corporations.. akin to a toxic relationship and after breakup, you keep on going back for mote.
you already know what will happen. if the model is good enough, people will use it.
you're asking for a lot of things here. I don't think most people take it that personally.
and I think there's also a point to be made that you shouldn't be too caring about issues that you can't influence, it simply causes harm toward yourself.
How are you going to 100% stop this?
You of all people should know this.
Let people use what they want to use.
People don't like being told what to do, so saying "Stop using Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp/Threads" is going to cause the opposite effect, people will "rebel" and keep using whatever Facebook has.
Another point is inertia (which all of you should know by now)
If you want to stop Meta, I mean "Facebook" you must answer the age old question:
How do you move these users friends over to Mastodon, BlueSky or PixelFed?
If you don't have an answer to this single question, people will continue to use Facebook's products and no amount of "Stop using ..." would solve this.
I freaked out when I saw Muse.
A few months ago I made this website when it occurred to me that I and friends were starting to hand their lives to AI:
Http://lifeos.nexus
It’s bizarre it’s almost exactly what Muse is - the characters even look like Muse.
One of my characters is NAMED Muse.
It’s deeply weird what a precise copy the concept is.
Have a look at this page then compare the characters to https://lifeos.nexus
https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/25/meta-is-putting-its-muscle...
Maybe you should be addressing this to a law firm instead of a public forum?