shostack

Love the post and have a similar setup. But I have questions about how you handle sensitive personal info with Codex and Claude with this setup given Hermes has no boundaries on its own with its integrations with Codex for example. It can leak memory and tool calls and context through.

At home I have Hermes on a VPS with matrix and mnemosyne and it is largely for personal use. While I was excited to try out the seamless Codex wrapper, this leakage was unacceptable compared to a ZDR OpenRouter provider like fireworks.

Where I struggle is now in architecting a clean way to have Hermes separate out personal stuff from coding stuff, and then orchestrate coding through Codex as that seems to be the only way to use it headlessly on my phone since they have no way of doing that in the ChatGPT app right now on Linux.

Does Buzz let you neatly silo that?

I'm struggling between: "I want to use Hermes with frontier models with a seamless wrapper on my $20 ChatGPT pro subscription so I can go through my Hermes setup for everything including coding"

And

"OpenAI and Anthropic are not ZDR and I am not comfortable sending sensitive personal and family data to them. But I at least want a mobile-friendly remote coding experience with them on my phone and VPS"

It is great for getting aggregate insights about the privacy and security picture of model providers.

For example if you want zero data retention and US -based hosting you can find that easily. You will not find that through Deepseek.

Am I understanding correctly that I still can't run a headless session on my VPS in a way that let's me use remote control for a better 1st party mobile experience that doesn't require my laptop to be awake?

I really don't want to have to boot into a whole desktop Ubuntu instance simply to run this.

I've gone as far as starting to build my own handoff layer with Hermes as I want to use codex purely for coding in a more isolated fashion and not have it co-mingle my memory and unrelated sensitive context and tool calls. The newly announced integration was so close to what I wanted and yet so far for anyone that wants to keep sensitive data separated.

I wish they offered a consumer zero data retention plan.

Having flown in VATSIM towered air space and airports it is some of the best VR flight sim time I ever had.

Had someone on ground and tower at KPAO and several of us pilots were just flying the pattern and it was a blast. Not to mention one was a licensed pilot based out of there who gave me IRL tips for my lesson that week about the field which were really helpful.

Such a remarkable community.

Except California where it is expensive due to pg&e and corruption.

Are there any Android remote terminal apps that don't suck on mobile? Termius is painful.

I felt that way initially. It is also a headache when you invest a lot in that and need to continually test ripping that stuff out as new models come out. Or in the case of opus 5, Anthropic says ditch it entirely and trust it.

But there is another aspect which I do enjoy which is closer to the feeling of dialing in key bindings in vim or getting a really good rhythm going with your vscode extensions or zhs plugins. It is that level of "I want my system to do exactly this thing in exactly this way" customization that a lot of technical people crave.

And you can do it with harness and context engineering in many cases. In other cases it introduces friction because it will be like "cool, I will only output 15 words max unless told otherwise" and then in the next turn completely disregards it with an "oops, you did tell me to do that didn't you."

And that frustration compounds when older model versions may have done a better job of that but new models are like "thank you for your suggestion, your opinion, while appreciated, is irrelevant. Now let me get back to overspending on your token budget. "

Because AI enables a new layer more akin to an actual OS. But also because I imagine they all want all the things running through them and an OS is the widest net they can cast in that direction.

> * When an action requires approval, the agent does not need to stop and wait for it. A Gatekeeper will simulate the outcome, allowing the agent to keep running and queue up more work. You can then approve everything in a batch at the end. Hopefully, this means you no longer feel the need to turn on auto-approve! (But you still can if you want.)

Can you say more about how you simulate outcomes of approvals? For example, if I need an approval to be granted permission to read a document, how could it simulate the document contents?

An example of this in action is the utter inability to get deepseek v4 flash (even the new version) to stay concise. I have jumped through all sorts of hoops with deterministic checks, pre-message injection hooks, memory framework, etc and when it fails still and I ask why it essentially says "I forgot."

This makes it unreliable and preferences are things I need to assume are treated as exactly that, preferences, not hard settings.

It is an area where it is more like working with an unreliable human than I would prefer.

The closest I get to that is when I am getting a massage actually. If I get a 90 minute one, about halfway through my brain stops racing and I enter this, not quite hypnogogic, state where things are quiet and fluid and peaceful. The closest thing is waking up after a good night's sleep with an empty brain before the weight of the world comes crashing in.

Am I parsing the providers correctly that if I want a US-based zdr provider that offers the best price and performance that is currently Cloudflare and no longer Fireworks (which is that it was with the previous version)?

What am I missing?

Introduce a larger one that you have to sign up for digitally to wait in line and be notified when it is available and charge for the privilege. Hell, make it auction based so if you want to jump the line you can if you pay for it.

Is fireworks not private enough?

Or for anyone on Windows 10 Home

I have built out something similar that let's me use my phone's hardware buttons to open an input stream with the mic for my Hermes agent over my matrix gateway and then has it play back with a local TTS model on my Pixel 10 Pro.

But the Deepseek v4 flash model I am using through OpenRouter is killing me on latency. Any suggestions to improve that?

I work with someone who did a lot of work with this to improve our ability to generate awesome visualizations with little thinking. It's a very powerful language but needs guardrails and guidance, particularly if you want end users to be able to produce consistent and standardized visualizations without knowing anything about it.

Affiliates trying to get you to buy something have been using fake reviews since the beginning of time. AI simply helps do it at scale.

Generally when people have a house cleaner they know who it is and have some form of relationship with them that establishes a baseline of trust. That would not exist here.

The world would be a smarter place if every study and resulting news article were required by law to include something like this at the top.

If you're using Matrix, consider Hermes as a harness if you haven't already. Native gateway support. I've been primarily using mine through Element and it has largely been great.

There are so many things I wish I had time to learn about. I don't need my learning resources, I need a way to jack in and have them uploaded to my brain.

With a sufficiently sophisticated harness you can actually do quite a lot by just talking to your AI. I have regularly dictated to build things on my phone while walking to lunch for example.

Which of those providers are:

1. Keeping your data private on in the US

2. Not training on it

3. Not quantizing the model

4. Offer reasonable latency adds rate limits

This is literal whataboutism. Refute the comment if you have a valid point to make.

I wonder how many issues 5.1 could have caught if you ran it as multiple adversarial reviews against the original output it gave you.

And how does this compare to openai which is an ad company now? I am interested in trying codex but I want to know how my data will be used for ads or measurement and training data if I become a paid subscriber. And what happens to that data when I stop subscribing?

10% off is practically nothing and also irrelevant because it is the total cost of the trip that matters and they can easily increase that over time behind the scenes in a way that makes up for that 10% and then some once they determine the price elasticity of these premium customers which I imagine is quite higher.

Also, a lot of people have dreams about a perfect idealized version of something instead of the reality. If they actually got to experience the reality they might find that they no longer hold that dream as they originally knew it.

More like incredibly lucky that the global hardware market dried up for compute capacity even as his AI product flopped. Right place at the right time.

I just dislike that it is now harder to avoid giving Musk money directly or indirectly.