Have you figured out a reliable way to persist stuff? Like a launch script or similar that doesn’t reset when the VM shuts down and can be used to restore tailscale
bashrc, bash profile, cron, systemd, etc all get wiped clean the moment the VM resets
The other day I signed up for Muse (through a VPN) just to see what all the fuss was about and I have to say it’s a really nice implementation of a personal assistant. It genuinely feels great and makes me want to use it!
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.
For honesty, I do not understand how people are so willing to help meta with using their services which are known for ad/data collecting. Just baffles my senses that this is fully acceptable. I guess I will never be apart of the system that feeds it, other than voicing my opinions on HN from time to time.
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.
> 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)
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.
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
Nope, I just went to muse.ai and typed an email. It created a new Meta account with it and once you interact with Muse once you no longer need the VPN because the service itself gets added to your Meta account.
I then linked my Facebook, IG and others to this new Meta account so that Muse can access them.
Muse I use for general research and monitoring my Ig/Facebook/Threads conversations and posts.
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.
Polish. OpenClaw feels like a bunch of stuff slapped together without coherent vision, and if I look at the speed that it’s owner merges PRs with ai, this makes a lot of sense. It just felt laggy slow and buggy to me.
Hermes just feels more thought through. I didn’t notice any problems with it
Is that because you seem them as politically or socially aligned with your own values and interests? Or are there other factors that go into that judgement?
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.
Disregarding the politics because that’s always subjective, it’s central to Meta’s business model to harvest as much of your data to show you ads. And they have decades of track record of doing that. Same with Google. Their products are thoroughly corrupted by ads because that’s where they make their money.
xAI, OpenAI, Anthropic, may dabble in ads but they are nowhere near Meta and Google.
I don’t care about politics. I disagree with Musk on a lot of things but I don’t automatically boycott something just because he’s involved.
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
I can’t stand this Silicon Valley trend of having launch videos for features of 2 people sitting in front of a camera but it also shows the camera in the beginning to trick you into thinking “oh they do this so casually haha so fun, look how relatable they are”
I hate all of this - OpenAI, Claude, Cursor, Windsurf etc
It screams detached Silicon Valley tech company to me, and I will never watch a single of them
Yes I am doing that too. I have a separate folder called ai/cloudflare. the AGENTS.md references the cf docs and instructs the agent to leave a change log + write down learnings whenever it does something
It’s now so good that I cd into this folder and say things like “add this and that to this configuration” and the agent immediately knows how to do it
I’m guessing cf just wraps the API into a CLI that’s easier to traverse and explore
It used to be good, now the limits are very underwhelming.
Normal SuperGrok barely lasts me through the week with very mild usage and no coding. The sentiment around SuperGrok Plus is also not great and I haven’t seen someone saying they’re happy with it yet.
SuperGrok Heavy is $300/mo, so you could get a full ChatGPT Pro and Claude Max 5x for that price. That’s so far out of my budget for a single provider I haven’t bothered trying it.
I still have SuperGrok through X Premium+ but will downgrade that next billing cycle
At every Grok release I commented on here how much I love Grok. It’s the consumer app and model I like the most, but my sentiment has changed. The usage limits on all the Grok subscriptions are now terrible, maybe because 4.6 and 4.7 (not in the app yet) eat more compote? I’m not sure what happened
My SuperGrok subscription previously easily lasted me through the week even with mild coding through Grok Build. Now when I use the app 1-2 times a day to ask some questions, I’m almost running out by the end of the 7 days. It’s terrible.
I want to keep using Grok but logically it makes no sense for me to keep paying for it on the side when my quota just doesn’t last. I have also no desire to upgrade to Plus with these terrible limits, while previously I would have eaten up a $100/mo Grok plan. Rumors say SuperGrok got heavily nerfed with the SuperGrok Plus introduction, and that sounds about right to me.
I’m sure it’s a great model and I’d love to use it. I hope they get their plans under control and only only focus on Grok Bot.
I mostly use grok voice mode (on iOS) and share similar sentiments (just 1-2 conversations per day before quota runs out).
Even worse, the mere risk of quota exhaustion mid-conversation makes me not risk starting convos with Grok, instead I'll use ChatGPT or Claude (even though Claude is inferior for non-coding tasks, and ChatGPT is inferior for all tasks).
In fairness to xAI, they're a profit-motivated company like any other, so they cannot give us tokens for free or less than it costs them. Reality is we may have to simply pay a lot more if we want that Grok goodness.
That's odd to me. I have SuperGrok with X Premium+. I use the crap out of Grok in my daily life, including to build a couple self-hosted apps as an amateur. I have a Grok bot monitor my email every 15 minutes and file things away for me. I have another bot that monitors for blood test results through Goodlabs. And I'm talking to it all the time on my 2 hour round-trip commute . . . and I never even get close to using my quota.
Opposite experience here. SuperGrok allowance is drained extremely fast. About 20-30 simple coding or code review prompts in grok build, and it’s over for the week. When using it via the Grok app, it can last longer, unless you need to edit photos. I didn’t bother to properly measure grok’s burn rate on the SuperGrok plans. It’s just not there yet.
reply