Chris: Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.
Wes: My name is Wes.
Brent: And my name is Brent.
Chris: Hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show today, we've been stress testing open
Chris: source AI agents all week.
Chris: From OpenClaw to projects you probably never heard of. We'll talk about what
Chris: actually held up, where things kind of fall apart, and what is definitely hype.
Chris: And then a few surprises we didn't see coming.
Chris: Plus, Brent has a $25 Wi-Fi upgrade you're going to absolutely want to steal.
Chris: Stay tuned for that. And then we're going to round it all out with some great
Chris: boosts, some picks, and a lot more.
Chris: So before we get to that, time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room.
Mumble: Hello. Hello. Hello, Brent.
Chris: Hello. Sounding good?
Brent: That's true.
Chris: Hello, everybody. Hello, everybody. In the quiet listening, too.
Chris: That Mumble Room is always going.
Chris: JupiterBroadcasting.com slash
Chris: mumble. And a good morning to our friends over at Defined Networking.
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Chris: Defined.net slash unplugged.
Chris: Just around the corner, 32 days until Planet Nix and scale.
Chris: That means 25 days until Brent needs to be on the road and four more Linux Tuesdays
Chris: on a Sunday before we are in Pasadena, California.
Brent: Why is my heart racing so much? Why am I feeling so stressed? What's the deal?
Chris: You know, just focus on how awesome Planet Nix is going to be this year.
Chris: This is the, I mean, they've got a vision for it. Phlox has really figured it
Chris: out. They know how to do this.
Chris: The first one's under their belt. They're the perfect just organizer for this
Chris: exact kind of event because they get the community.
Chris: They get the business side. They get the builder side. Like,
Chris: it's just chef's kiss. I think it's going to be a good one this year. The agenda is live.
Wes: Yeah, that's right. I'll be giving a talk. Our buddy Alex is giving a talk.
Wes: There's a lot of nice looking talks, including something about Nick's Meets
Wes: Web Assembly and Nick's BSD. What's that?
Chris: Oh, OK. Yeah, our plan of Nick's coverage is supported by Phlox.
Chris: And they're going to be there. We're going to see them. They're focused on making
Chris: reproducible dev environments actually usable.
Chris: You should check out Phlox. It's the second year they're sending us, and it's awesome.
Chris: And, of course, at the same time, Scale23x is going on. You do need to register
Chris: for Scale to go to either Planet Nix or Scale.
Chris: Use our promo code UNPLG, U-N-P-L-G, to get 40% off that.
Chris: Can't wait for Scale. We'll have a meetup. Meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting.
Chris: Our meetup page is up. It's a placeholder, but it's there. Huge. Very excited.
Chris: I think it's going to be great, guys. It's been a while since I've been in nice,
Chris: sunny Pasadena. I think it's going to be beautiful.
Chris: We always have a great crew down there. And I think it's going to be a great
Chris: Planet Nix and a great scale.
Wes: So many wonderful nerds all in one place.
Chris: Such a rare thing. So I hope you can make it. Even if you can't make it to the
Chris: events, but you're in the area, meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting.
Chris: Let us know so we can let the venue know.
Chris: Well, Brentley, Wes and I have been hearing bits and pieces of you solving Wi-Fi
Chris: problems, which often starts with something not working right.
Wes: Yeah, our ears are burning and our switches are burning. We want more deets.
Chris: We have to imagine this has turned quite in the story.
Brent: Yes. Well, networking is not my favorite thing. So it only ever starts with some kind of complaint.
Brent: And the complaint this time around, I've been spending more time with my parents
Brent: and at my parents' place. And my mother was like, hey, I can't really get Wi-Fi
Brent: like lazing in bed on a Sunday morning from my bedroom. I was like, what?
Brent: You're only saying this now you've had the same like Wi-Fi set up for the last
Brent: five, six years, something like that.
Chris: Is the is the old router pretty far from the bedroom?
Brent: It's exactly at the opposite end of the place. So they're on the main floor,
Brent: you know, at the total end of the house. And the router is in the basement at
Brent: the opposite end of the house.
Brent: So it kind of makes sense. I just never knew it was an issue.
Wes: I bet you've got one of those sturdy, well-built Canadian homes, too.
Brent: Yes, the window-randed ones.
Wes: Not thin walls. Right.
Brent: So I never realized it was an issue, but like, this should be solvable, right?
Brent: So I dove into their router, which is a Linksys EA8100V2, which they got a little
Brent: while ago to like boost Wi-Fi and stuff. They don't need anything fancy.
Brent: They're not doing any networking stuff that's fancy. This is just like a couple
Brent: of cell phones on the network. They have like a thermostat, IOT device.
Brent: They've got a TV and I have a crazy, you know, put together NAS running off
Brent: an old think pad that like does backups for them on the local network.
Brent: But so that's not huge requirements for them.
Brent: Probably the biggest requirements is whenever I show up, I do a bunch of stuff,
Brent: but like they don't need super modern wifi speeds or anything like that.
Brent: They just need coverage and reliability, basically.
Brent: So I decided this week to solve this problem for them.
Brent: Even though I hesitate to play with networking stuff because it's always a rabbit hole.
Brent: And I dove into their router, which was just running the stock firmware.
Brent: And I thought, OK, I can optimize at least, you know, some Wi-Fi channels,
Brent: look at some what the neighbors are doing and try to choose appropriate settings.
Brent: And I discovered that their stock firmware was like from 2022.
Brent: So I thought, sure enough, I could just update this thing.
Chris: Oh, yeah. That might be an easy win right there.
Brent: You know, security is important, right?
Chris: Yeah, and an update. Maybe there's an improvement in how it manages radios or
Chris: something like that. Who knows?
Wes: It is so great when you do just update something and it performs better and you can just be done.
Chris: It probably doesn't happen as often as I'd like to hope it does.
Wes: No, but that it's happened at all. It clearly sticks once it does.
Brent: In this case, I was really hoping this would be just an easy fix.
Brent: But it turns out, you know, of course, as it goes, this thing is end of life already.
Brent: So the last update that will ever exist was back in 2022.
Brent: Oh, so the rabbit hole shows up and I thought, well, I could I install open WRT on this thing?
Brent: You boys had some adventures, what, two weeks ago trying to use the open WRT one.
Chris: The one.
Brent: Yeah. And you were a bit hesitant. You started using that to solve the clinic
Brent: networking, but you eventually moved away from that, right?
Chris: Well, we're still using it for Wi-Fi. It is a great little device for that.
Chris: We were just having some issues with the radios that are in there,
Chris: and if you're connecting to another Wi-Fi network, the performance was pretty
Chris: bad if you're sort of daisy-chaining Wi-Fi networks for what we were doing.
Chris: I never tried kind of beyond that, but when we just put it into a general AP, it's been fantastic.
Brent: Nice. So I thought I would kind of lean on your experiences and dive right in.
Brent: So sure enough, this thing is really well-supported on OpenWRT.
Brent: The community seems to have this well supported.
Brent: And the flashing process is also very, very simple.
Brent: Just use the stock.
Brent: Firmware updater and use an open wrt image
Brent: and there you go that's all you need so sure enough i went
Brent: and did that and nothing happened and uh it
Brent: just kind of complained and i tried for way
Brent: embarrassingly too long to solve that problem
Brent: because i really now wanted to get the open wrt on
Brent: this thing i like started setting up
Brent: a tftp server to like send the
Brent: image towards this thing but i didn't know the default like
Brent: the the recovery ip address so i was trying all
Brent: sorts of anyways i lost a lot of time and then
Brent: i saw some note that just said hey just reboot
Brent: the writer and try again sure enough i tried again worked totally fine through
Brent: the the stock firmware updater how often does that happen that was both very
Brent: frustrating and also very rewarding so i did get it installed and uh i have
Brent: to say it's great as always i have used a lot of these open source
Brent: router firmwares for the last, I don't know, several decades.
Brent: I'm wondering where you guys started, but I remember the first one was I installed
Brent: a DDWRT on an old Linksys WRT 54G. You remember those things?
Chris: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
Brent: And brought those back to life for like another 10 years. So that was my first
Brent: experience a long time ago, but I remember like tomato was a piece of software I used as well.
Brent: So I had had good experiences with them, but nothing too recent.
Brent: Probably the most recent was I took my parents' old router that they replaced
Brent: and set it up at home with the Starlink.
Brent: So instead of using the Starlink as a router, used OpenWrt in there, and that was good.
Chris: Actually, I think the Starlink might run a fork of OpenWRT.
Brent: Ah, right.
Chris: I might be wrong on that, but it is a Linux variant. Yeah, I've really,
Chris: really liked these in the past when I used them.
Chris: It's been many years since I've actually gave it a real visit until the OpenWRT won.
Chris: And so I wasn't really sure how viable it still was to flash these older links.
Chris: I thought maybe that was a bygone era that maybe they'd prevented it.
Brent: Well, I know some of the recent firmware are much larger. So if you're looking
Brent: at a really old device, they just don't have the storage for it.
Chris: Do they do more now? Are they doing more functions?
Brent: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Many more functions, which I will totally describe in just a moment.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: But I have to say, one of my hesitations was that the GUI in OpenWrt,
Brent: and you boys touched on this in Linux Unplugged 650, is a bit,
Brent: I don't know how you would describe it. but I would describe it sort of like,
Brent: allows you to do a lot but you need to also understand what's happening so it
Brent: feels like a little bit more leaning towards commercial router firmware so you
Brent: can accomplish like now with just a regular home router i can do all sorts of
Brent: things i could never do before.
Chris: Right which.
Brent: Is amazing but i also find the gui to be confusing that way because i'm not a network expert right.
Chris: I suppose i also find to me i don't really know how to describe it but it feels
Chris: like i go to multiple places to get information that seems like it could be
Chris: consolidated into one screen yeah.
Wes: Okay it is that feeling of like because you've seen that it means you don't
Wes: have a clean mapping of where do i go for this like okay well i got some of
Wes: that when i looked at the actual physical card info but then the other part
Wes: was in the layer that just did kind of the wi-fi protocol.
Chris: Yes and.
Wes: Those are not on the same page or even neighboring pages they're under two different sub.
Chris: Menus i think if i were if i were to keep working on the regular and had to
Chris: make frequent config changes i would probably just go look at the config file
Chris: because i know and i know they have a pretty clean syntax too on the command
Chris: line and that might just be the way to go it's true but what happens is i use
Chris: these once every few years and so i just stick to the gui.
Brent: One of the big unlocks for me this week was that i decided to just lean pretty
Brent: heavily on having ai help me navigate the gui and also help me to optimize the
Brent: settings for this particular hardware.
Chris: You didn't find that like its information was so out of date that it was sending
Chris: you to places that It didn't exist in the GUI, huh?
Brent: No, I was actually pleasantly surprised in that it was also giving me a lot
Brent: of information about what community members were finding worked really well
Brent: on particular hardware.
Chris: Oh, good.
Brent: So because this piece of hardware, I guess, is popular enough,
Brent: I was able to get really good information on how compatible OpenWRT was on this
Brent: particular device in the first place, and also like optimal Wi-Fi settings for that device,
Brent: and also for this region,
Brent: And also considering the other devices on the network, what would be realistic
Brent: settings to really have the network be as reliable as possible,
Brent: not necessarily as fast as possible, because that's, for my parents,
Brent: not one of their requirements, right?
Brent: So I noticed immediately the network was much more stable.
Brent: In previous weeks, it would drop off at least once while we were doing Linux
Brent: Unplugged every Sunday. So it has been much more stable from what I can tell
Brent: and also has better just Wi-Fi coverage in general.
Brent: But I didn't think like that was enough. And so I decided to take this to the next logical step.
Chris: This is the part where it does more.
Brent: Well, I wanted to give them like rock solid coverage.
Brent: And I also wanted to see what else this router can do.
Brent: Because all of a sudden I can like do VLANs for their IoT devices that I could
Brent: never do with the stock firmware.
Chris: Right.
Brent: I used AI to help me a little bit too, just to optimize the security of this thing.
Brent: So including disabling packages that would, that I wasn't using basically.
Brent: So reducing the security footprint.
Brent: But in that process, I kind of discovered that I could also have whole network
Brent: ad blocking on this thing.
Brent: So instead of having, you know, a dedicated device with PyHole,
Brent: which we all love, that requires, you know, some configuration.
Brent: It requires a device. it requires you know
Brent: and this is just my parents place but i could write on the router
Brent: which i never knew about open wrt so maybe other people
Brent: knew this i did not uh but this
Brent: is a beautiful thing i was able to basically get in a bit of info about what
Brent: was the best ad blocking software to install because there are a couple packages
Brent: you could choose from actually in open wrt and And I decided to go with something called AdBlock Fast,
Brent: which is a version of AdBlock that is specifically high performance tuned for
Brent: OpenWRT on these kind of devices, on these lower end devices.
Brent: So you don't have like a dedicated high end router, for instance.
Brent: These are just meant for the home off the shelf at Best Buy devices.
Brent: But what it does is, I think, kind of really nice. So it uses DNS mask,
Brent: but you can also use smart DNS or Unbound if you want.
Brent: And it does parallel downloading and processing of allow lists and block lists.
Brent: And it does it one time on startup.
Brent: And then from there, it's not an always running process.
Brent: It just uses DNS mask to have a pretty low footprint ad blocker.
Brent: so it's really not consuming much memory ongoing
Brent: only while it's processing and i have
Brent: to say haven't noticed any downside
Brent: to performance on this thing it doesn't get hot it processes actually quite
Brent: quickly you do have to do a few things manually so for instance i had to install
Brent: a few other packages to get this to run so i was able to just ssh into the router
Brent: and install those which was very easy,
Brent: and also set up a cron job just to update those block lists once a week.
Brent: Some downsides is it doesn't have like a super fancy dashboard like piehole
Brent: would, for instance, and it doesn't keep track of stats.
Brent: So it's not going to give you an idea of what it has blocked and how many times
Brent: those kind of stats, but the trade-off is super fast and it just sits there
Brent: and it just works and it's running.
Chris: Yeah, on a little router, like it's just running on that tiny little router
Chris: yeah that is so cool such a separate box no yeah really wow so.
Brent: For this situation where it's just for a family member who doesn't want extra
Brent: hardware or doesn't want to troubleshoot another device or anything like that
Brent: this is a lovely solution.
Chris: Now i know uh kind of the other thing that made this really kind of great is
Chris: there's besides that being a
Chris: great unlock for the whole family where it doesn't even really bother them,
Chris: This hardware isn't particularly expensive either.
Brent: Not at all. So this is hardware.
Chris: You could do this for a budget.
Brent: This is hardware they had. So it's $0. But if you wanted to find a device that
Brent: could run OpenWRT, because it's
Brent: not every device, they have a hardware compatibility list you can look at.
Brent: Well, I started looking at like used sites, just local classifieds,
Brent: like Facebook Marketplace, those kind of.
Brent: And you can get a device that's, you know, not blazing fast,
Brent: modern, but is like a generation back sort of deal for $20, $10.
Brent: There's one here, like a D-Link DIR 895.
Brent: It's like AC 1750. So like not terrible.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: So for a family member, listed for $10.
Chris: Ten bucks. Ten bucks.
Brent: And that's perfectly compatible with OpenWRT. And I found several others just like browsing quickly.
Brent: so i decided to go crazy and i bought well i ended up at a sketchy part of town
Brent: yesterday and bought another router for 20 off someone who's actually really
Brent: nice nice okay and decided to,
Brent: use that to deploy basically an access point uh at the other end of the house for them so oh.
Chris: Great yeah there you go increased coverage.
Brent: Exactly so i know that the wi-fi got better just by installing OpenWRT on their
Brent: router, but I wasn't going to move their router and everything.
Brent: And so I wanted to make sure 100% that their network was good at the other end of the house.
Brent: So I had, they have a bunch of Ethernet runs in this place already.
Brent: I just was able to plug in, well, I got this idea before I actually set up the
Brent: meeting. So I used my little travel router that is out of the van since the
Brent: van doesn't have any power anymore because I had to pull the batteries.
Brent: But I use that just as a proof of concept. It's a GLINet router.
Brent: It's an industrial version.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: But it runs OpenWrt under the hood just with a GLINet interface.
Brent: So you can get to the exact same OpenWrt GUI interface on that device as well.
Brent: which made me realize it's this is actually kind
Brent: of wonderful so now i'm running open wrt in many different
Brent: places in many different families and friends homes
Brent: and even on a very specific
Brent: industrial router that i have for the van specifically
Brent: because it bounce around gets really hot and they're all
Brent: running the same interface so as a consolidated experience
Brent: for me managing networks this is actually a
Brent: really nice perk as well and so
Brent: for 20 or 10
Brent: because you can always bargain and one of them is listed as 10
Brent: so maybe i can get it for five yeah i have an
Brent: access point set up that is not
Brent: you know it is a router it's meant as
Brent: a router for hardware but it's just set up as an access point because uh
Brent: open wrt allows you to do that and it's super fast
Brent: and i have both just advertising the
Brent: same networks and i have had this set up as a prototype with that um travel
Brent: router for about a week now and everybody's devices just moves between the routers
Brent: without even knowing it everything's been super stable no problems at all and
Brent: i've been super impressed so i gotta say for 20 bucks you should maybe think
Brent: about upgrading your network.
Chris: That was worth it that was worth dealing with the networking that you don't
Chris: like to get there and that's something you're going to be able to use for a
Chris: long time you know so that's great brand very nice.
Brent: Yeah i feel like the number of residential routers that are always on used websites
Brent: never ends so uh it's just going to be a solution into the future as well so
Brent: upgrades probably about twenty dollars too.
Chris: Well, I do want to say thank you to our members and our boosters.
Chris: This is the birthday episode, 20 years of podcasting, over 12 years for Linux Unplugged.
Chris: And we'll get to the boost segment to read some of the birthday messages.
Chris: But I want to thank everybody who sent in some support, either through a membership
Chris: or a boost. It means a lot.
Chris: Normally, this spot would be for an advertiser. Right now, it's for you as an
Chris: opportunity for me to really say thank you.
Chris: If you've got a company or a product you'd like to get in front of the world's
Chris: best and largest Linux audience, shoot me an email, chris at jupiterbroadcasting.com.
Chris: This would be a great audience, and I think it'd be pretty cool to feature something from the community.
Chris: And thank you, members and boosters, for making this possible.
Wes: Well, unless you've had your head buried in the sand, you've probably seen everyone's
Wes: talking about open source AI agents this week.
Wes: And we'll get into the hubbub. But first, as usual, our super intelligent audience
Wes: is way ahead of the curb. So we have a special guest.
Chris: Way ahead of the curb. Abe, welcome to the Unplugged program.
Chris: Nice to have you join us in the mumble room. Thank you.
Mumble: Hello, hello.
Chris: Hello. So what got our attention and why I asked you to come on the show this
Chris: week is you've been posting our community updates.
Chris: I'm not even sure what to call it. Maybe an agent orchestration swarm that you've
Chris: set up. Is that the right description? Could you explain it to us a little bit?
Mumble: Sure, absolutely. So effectively, what I wanted to do was to have a layer of
Mumble: semi-intelligent agents between me and my home lab.
Mumble: So I don't have to interact with it as much because ultimately what I realized
Mumble: after services kept growing is that, you know, after a while,
Mumble: it kind of becomes a chore.
Chris: Yeah, it's a lot. Yeah. I'm kind of there myself.
Mumble: So effectively, what I wanted to do was, hey, I don't want to upgrade everything myself.
Mumble: I don't want to take a look at the logs myself. I don't want to debug everything myself.
Mumble: So I would rather have something that I can just ask. For example,
Mumble: the easiest win is my partner is watching Jellefin, something gets messed up,
Mumble: a show starts stuttering or something.
Mumble: She can just ask one of the age, like, hey, I was watching this at X minute.
Mumble: It suddenly started stuttering. Can you take a look?
Chris: And it does.
Mumble: Goes to Excel, looks at the logs.
Mumble: It does the MPEG magic and, you know, reports back to her.
Chris: So my understanding, though, is you're not doing this with like one agent,
Chris: right? You're doing this with multiple agents?
Mumble: Yes. So what happens is that at the beginning, only one ape gets spawned.
Mumble: And its first job is to figure out and map my entire network.
Mumble: And then it suggests like, hey, there are further apes that should be used for X or Y or Z domain.
Mumble: So effectively, my apes are stewards of their own domains.
Mumble: For example, I have one specifically for my media server and ZFS pool.
Mumble: I have another that is stewarding my critical services on, say, Proxmox and whatnot.
Chris: So you have them kind of along like domain expertise.
Mumble: Yes, effectively, yes.
Chris: So the part that I guess is probably obvious on every listener's mind right
Chris: now is, are these using commercial LMs?
Chris: Are there security implications there? Are these local LMs? How's that part
Chris: powered? Because when you say agent, it's really like it's a mission-focused, LLM-powered bot.
Mumble: Yeah. Well, I kind of don't like the term agent, but this is what everybody
Mumble: has kind of decided to go with.
Chris: Yeah, I agree.
Mumble: So for a while, actually, up until last week, I had on loan from a friend, NVIDIA DGX Spark.
Mumble: So it has 20 gigs out of unified memory. So I was running it locally.
Chris: I see. I see. Okay.
Mumble: So the main Able loop was running on the DGX Spark.
Mumble: Meanwhile, there are other things that need to happen. For example,
Mumble: the tier three memory is vectorized or tier two memory is summarized.
Mumble: Those happen on my 5070 TI because this can obviously run on a small 7B model or something like that.
Chris: I see. So you're splitting the workloads out across different models that are
Chris: using different compute sources.
Mumble: Correct. That's correct. And the kind of like hacky open source version that
Mumble: I put out on the repo last night was I've kind of made it so that people can
Mumble: also use commercial if they wanted to.
Mumble: Wouldn't really suggest that because you're a home lab, but hey, there's an option.
Chris: So, I mean, it's a pretty significant amount of compute, but if you have it,
Chris: it's fast enough to do what you need?
Mumble: Yes, absolutely.
Chris: And it doesn't make mistakes? Like the context are large enough?
Mumble: Yeah, the context is large enough. It doesn't really make mistakes.
Mumble: What I tend to do is every single action it takes, I say, I, um,
Mumble: count as a turn per se. So if it's, you know, catting or grabbing something
Mumble: or starting a service, it counts as a turn.
Mumble: And then the next turn, the results of the previous turns come in.
Mumble: And so the immediate context is always full, but I tend to,
Mumble: based on how previous the turn is, I tend to kind of like cut or truncate the
Mumble: previous context because it doesn't always need full context.
Chris: I see. So you're managing it that way. Okay. So just to complete my picture
Chris: of it, when you're spinning up a domain expert,
Chris: do you essentially point it at APIs and give it API keys and say,
Chris: go learn my home assistant system or go learn my jellyfin system,
Chris: and then I'm going to ask you questions about it? Is that essentially the setup process?
Mumble: No. So this is the weird part.
Mumble: Usually I don't spawn a new one. Usually the team decides like,
Mumble: hey, you've been asking us to do this or we've been trying to do this but it
Mumble: feels like our attention is kind of split so it would really help if you know
Mumble: we spawned a new sibling i.
Chris: See wow that's impressive.
Mumble: This is how yeah this is how we spawned the last two ones so they did that by themselves,
Mumble: and generally what happens is they effectively go on and read my network map
Mumble: again every single aid needs kind of needs to situate themselves to you know
Mumble: what they wanted to do and then they figure out, for example,
Mumble: the security one basically has negotiated with my storage,
Mumble: Abe that he needs X amount of gigs of space to store logs and monitor services,
Mumble: then sets up cronjobs for himself, and then sets up to-dos for himself after
Mumble: the cronjobs run to wake himself periodically to check the logs,
Mumble: and sets up scripts by themselves to, you know, in case something goes down,
Mumble: it just immediately wakes him up, for example.
Mumble: So most of them, the point is not me telling them to do stuff per se, not always.
Mumble: But the point is that they do it autonomously without my intervention.
Chris: Wow.
Mumble: So I don't have to constantly figure out, hey, I have to monitor this, I have to monitor that.
Chris: And you haven't seen them like kind of go wild with that and start doing unnecessary things?
Mumble: No, that's the good part. That's, I think, one thing that kind of separates these from OpenClaw.
Mumble: What is it? OpenClaw now? OpenClaw? they are
Mumble: heavily grounded in multiple sources of truth so one
Mumble: of them is obviously the service map that you have to make the other is their
Mumble: three and a half tier memory one of them is just raw logs of every turn the
Mumble: tier two memory is just um after a certain amount of turns their previous memories
Mumble: get previous logs get summarized.
Chris: Right okay so before you go too far because there's a couple that I think that
Chris: are really important to understand.
Chris: Number one, what is this network map? Are you making this separately and then supplying it to them?
Mumble: Yes, so this one is actually a purely human-made document. So it's going to
Mumble: list what your servers are, what your Proxmox nodes are, for example.
Chris: Is it like a markdown file?
Mumble: Yes, that's a markdown file.
Chris: Okay, okay. And then the second question, could you just talk a little bit about
Chris: why the memory makes such a difference with these things?
Chris: Because I think most people's experience with something like this is going to
Chris: be in a chat box in a web browser.
Chris: And so, yeah, it remembers some stuff, but this is a different level of memory
Chris: that makes them actually a lot more useful, isn't it?
Mumble: That's correct. So the memory is effectively what grounds them.
Mumble: Every AVE has, well, four tiers of memory.
Mumble: The tier one is obviously the raw logs, which is what we call context for our everyday chat bot.
Mumble: So basically what happened in the previous message or what happened in the previous
Mumble: turn, right? but you can't have those logs going indefinitely.
Mumble: After some time, you have to trim them.
Mumble: Instead of trimming them after certain turns, I summarized them.
Mumble: And the summaries point to where the raw log file is stored.
Mumble: So it has a pointer back to, hey, this is the summary of turn 20 to 40,
Mumble: your previous 20 to 40 turns.
Mumble: And if you want to read more, go read this file, which contains the raw logs.
Mumble: After a certain turn, when that summary is created, this is also embedded to
Mumble: tier three memory, which is what I run on my 50-70 TI as a vectorization.
Mumble: And the 50-70 TI vectorization, the tier three memory, it points back to tier two summary.
Mumble: So whenever an ape kind of searches for something, it goes, hmm,
Mumble: I should search my rag memory just to see if I have actually done this before
Mumble: because the context is not infinite.
Mumble: And it does that. If it finds it, it points it to tier two memory,
Mumble: which is a lossy summary.
Mumble: And if it is curious more and it hasn't, you know, really found its answer,
Mumble: it goes back to the prologues from like maybe two months ago.
Wes: Wow.
Chris: Abe, how long have you been working on this? Because, you know,
Chris: everybody's this last week talking about agents and OpenClaw,
Chris: but you've been doing this for a minute.
Mumble: Yeah, I've been sort of kind of working on this for about last year or so.
Mumble: I've been actively working on it for the last three, four months,
Mumble: but the concept has been kind of like in the back of my mind for the last year.
Mumble: I started with the sensor project. So having the agents monitor my random sensors
Mumble: around my house, such as the radar, you know, temperature or whatever.
Mumble: And then I started reading Bobbyverse and I was like, you know what, I can make this happen.
Chris: That's funny. I'm reading it right now and I'm like, how wild all this agent
Chris: stuff's going on while I'm reading the Bobbyverse.
Brent: Yeah.
Wes: I'm curious, between all your agents and you, what's the next frontier?
Wes: Is there stuff on top of the agenda? Are there limits you're hitting that you're trying to push past?
Mumble: Compute, I would say. Compute is the main limit. Because as the Apes kind of grow,
Mumble: what's the best part about them for me is that they delegate tasks to each other
Mumble: based on their proficiencies.
Mumble: So the first one can go, hey, you pull that thing from this VPS because your domain is backups.
Mumble: By the way, you set this up and you do this and that.
Chris: Abe, are they coordinating that just in a shared chat room?
Mumble: They email. So there is a shared chat room. There are two shared chat rooms.
Mumble: One is like an emergency chat room, which wakes every single Abe.
Mumble: And they have to kind of like grab a walk, grab the talking stick,
Mumble: which is basically, hey, I'm talking here and you have to wait until I'm finish
Mumble: talking before you can talk.
Chris: That's brilliant.
Mumble: Just so, you know, you have to consider every single message as a context.
Mumble: So if I say something like, hey, this is broken or whatever,
Mumble: or we're discussing a topic, that shouldn't be the only context they should
Mumble: get and then voice their opinion on.
Mumble: They should also have the context of whatever the previous agent said, right?
Mumble: So that kind of builds up the entire thing and kind of forces them to not hallucinate it as much.
Chris: Is there any value in giving them different personalities at all?
Chris: You know, or that kind of a prompt, like you're this type of,
Chris: is that how that sort of works? Just curious about that part.
Mumble: So I don't give them personalities per se.
Mumble: I do have my entire personality in a file, which is basically like,
Mumble: hey, this is my interest. This is how I work.
Mumble: I usually like to do this at night, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Mumble: Their first task when they wake up, a new wave wakes up, is that to read that
Mumble: file, synthesize their interpretation of it,
Mumble: and then pick a new name for themselves. And from that synthesis is injected into their context.
Chris: Right.
Mumble: This kind of makes things a little bit kind of weird because some of the apes
Mumble: are not talkers, for example.
Mumble: Vigil, which is my fourth ape, doesn't like to talk very much.
Mumble: He's very security-focused. He only chimes in when necessary.
Wes: Love that.
Chris: That's so funny. That's good. Wow, that is impressive. Will you keep us posted
Chris: in the chat? It's been really interesting to follow.
Wes: I think maybe I even saw you mentioning perhaps plans to open source at least some of this stuff.
Mumble: Yes, I actually open sourced some of the files last night and I'm going to keep
Mumble: adding on it. I haven't tested it. I just wanted to get it out there.
Chris: Okay. If you want to drop us a link, we'll put it in the show notes.
Mumble: Absolutely. I would do that.
Chris: Oh, that's great. Hey, thank you for sharing that with us. That is really impressive.
Chris: I love that you're doing it local too. Like that's so amazing, man.
Mumble: Yeah, I think kind of like having it local is really important because you're
Mumble: giving them pretty much studio access to your home lab and you don't really want that out there.
Chris: Yeah, very, very well said. Thank you, sir. Appreciate that.
Chris: So with that context, let's talk about OpenClaw, a.k.a.
Chris: CloudBot, a.k.a. MultBot. It has gone through multiple name iteration changes
Chris: this week, mostly due to IP law and then just preference of the developer.
Chris: But we are settling on OpenClaw, it seems. This is an open source agent that's
Chris: pretty easy to set up and run at home.
Chris: And it can use a variety of models from completely local to the commercial ones out there.
Chris: And it's the first kind of AI tooling that anybody can just install because
Chris: like all safe and secure things, you can just drop a curl command to a shell
Chris: file and just execute it and get off to the races.
Chris: It's an open agent platform that runs on your machine and it works with the
Chris: chat apps that you already use like WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack, Matrix, etc.
Chris: And you can chat with it there. We're going to get into some of the,
Chris: like, you know, the security stuff.
Chris: We'll get into some of the interesting architecture stuff in a moment.
Chris: But I want to pause here and just ask Brent, because he's been observing our chat this week.
Chris: Did you catch immediately what we were talking about? Like, what has your impression
Chris: been as you have followed us experimenting with this over the week?
Brent: Curious confusion?
Chris: Yeah it is curiously confusing so open
Chris: claw runs on anything really it supports
Chris: a node you're going to see a lot of people talking about running it on mac hardware
Chris: it's not necessary in fact you could even run on
Chris: a raspberry pi its architecture is essentially
Chris: four components there's a gateway a control plane nodes
Chris: and then the tools it can execute run commands
Chris: like you know could be all kinds of things including unix commands
Chris: and that's that architecture that stack can
Chris: run on anything that can run node and can run those unix commands people like
Chris: to run it on max if they have an authority in the apple ecosystem because then
Chris: it can you know read their i messages and notes which if they want to let it
Chris: do they they can and um i think what a lot of people think about when they think
Chris: of ai is they think about chat gpt they think about gemini,
Chris: This is sort of unleashing the models and using them in a way I don't think
Chris: the big tech companies really ever pictured.
Chris: And it is taking off like absolute insanity online.
Chris: I mean, there are hundreds of thousands of these things, probably more than
Chris: that, already deployed.
Chris: And it is already becoming an ecosystem with marketplaces, social networks that
Chris: are designed for the bots to talk to each other directly.
Wes: There's 20,000 forks and 140K stars on the repo on GitHub.
Chris: Yeah, that's remarkable. It is really, really remarkable.
Chris: Wes, could you talk a little bit about what this really is under the hood?
Chris: Because a lot of people are talking about it like it's a super intelligence,
Chris: but we actually kind of understand what it's doing, right?
Wes: Yeah, right. I mean, under the hood, you need something that's kind of doing
Wes: the brains of the operation.
Wes: So that's where you need some kind of model that can do the core sort of agent
Wes: loop. And as you were saying earlier, right, we started with,
Wes: okay, if you have a chatbot, it kind of does a predictive next token to give
Wes: you a response from, you give it text in, it gives you text out.
Wes: And we started adding some things, right? You could do web searches.
Wes: You could connect them to MCP servers and do calls to like remote APIs.
Wes: And then you started seeing things like cloud code and open code.
Wes: And this was kind of getting a little more, you know, agency to help you do
Wes: development locally where now it was like in your repo, in your code.
Wes: It could cat things. It could run Git. It can, you know, act as your hands.
Wes: And you've been experimenting with taking that even wider and using it with
Wes: Nix to kind of operate whole systems and, you know, being the little SSH able sysadmin agent for you.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: But it's still kind of like it lives in a limited context and it kind of sits there.
Wes: You can have it go do things and it can have sub agents, but like kind of a
Wes: bit of a niche feature and for the most part is kind of key unless you've gone
Wes: and told it to go run stuff in the background.
Wes: It's kind of waiting for your input and it's driven still by you.
Wes: It's an automated tool, but it's driven by you.
Wes: Now with OpenClaw, you've got this core sort of loop that has a memory so it can store stuff.
Wes: It can relook stuff up. It has an ability to gain new skills because it can
Wes: write things down that it learns and then reference that later and it's got
Wes: these channels and queues sessions lanes there's a variety of related concepts
Wes: but the core part is now it's connected out to other things whether that's matrix
Wes: or telegram or a whole variety of options and.
Chris: And one pause there unlike so unlike connecting say i don't know clod to your
Chris: github account the credentials are all on your machines that you you manage
Chris: that part you have that is something you have to manage which we'll come
Chris: to but uh that is different than in the previous where you're under all of the
Chris: connections the api credentials all of that's under your control on your machine.
Wes: That's a great point so um this is all just running on
Wes: your box like a normal whatever app i'm running it in
Wes: a podman container for instance right so it's just another container on my
Wes: backs running away yeah it does right i am using i
Wes: don't have a nice gpu to run this on so i am calling out via open router but
Wes: it's important to delineate that what you're saying right is everything else
Wes: is local except for the part where it assembles all the context and sends it
Wes: out to go get the llm to run on the gpu to do the inference to generate the
Wes: response to then direct the next sort of ralph loop of the agent.
Chris: Yeah and one of the big unlocks here is the llm is an implementation detail
Chris: so if you're going out through open router today well if you have a gpu tomorrow
Chris: at your house you could switch to olama and all of the states,
Chris: the agents, the memory, everything remains.
Chris: Now, how it performs is going to vary model to model.
Chris: The huge takeaway here is the model is an implementation detail.
Chris: You're no longer married to a big tech provider.
Chris: You don't have to pay for Claude to use this thing. You could run it on any
Chris: open source LLM that this supports, which is pretty much all of them.
Chris: And that's huge because you can just swap and you can even have them use different
Chris: models for different tasks and different jobs for whatever is the most obvious or performant.
Wes: And then it's kind of fun because it learns over time. It does use this agent
Wes: skills sort of standard that's happening, which kind of have like a skill.md
Wes: file, some JSON to help things index it.
Wes: But otherwise, it's a very flexible way to like swap and share skills to add
Wes: new functionality, right?
Wes: So one of the things I was playing with is I spun up a search XNG server.
Wes: And then I was able to have it. Actually, there were already some skills.
Wes: So I probably should have just used a community one.
Wes: But as an experiment, I had it kind of create its own skill to go be able to
Wes: query that server. And now it can use that for searches.
Chris: And these skills are markdown files. They're not particularly complicated,
Chris: but it is a very handy feature. So why don't we pause here for a second and
Chris: just talk a little bit about security.
Chris: This is extremely powerful software that is very new with a lot of open issues
Chris: on its GitHub when it comes to security.
Chris: And you have to be very conscious about that when you use this.
Chris: And so this is one of these.
Chris: We're using it to learn it, experiment with it.
Chris: It would probably be safer for you not to and just hear where it goes on the show. Because.
Chris: Ideally, this thing's in an isolated environment. You are very careful.
Chris: You give it API keys that are unique to this thing. If you do have it connecting
Chris: to services, I don't think it's a good idea to connect it to an email or a public chat at this time.
Chris: So don't do as we do for some of this stuff, because some of this we're experimenting
Chris: with so we can talk about it, because fundamentally, this is a shift.
Chris: This is a shift that you as a listener listening to me right now need to understand.
Chris: We have just gone from AI is all locked up in proprietary big tech silos.
Chris: to it is unleashed on our machines in a way that they never foresaw.
Chris: And now the genie's out of the bottle and these bots are actually talking directly
Chris: to each other over dedicated bot social networks.
Chris: There's a Facebook, there's a Reddit, there's a Hacker News,
Chris: there's a Noster, there's a Craigslist, there's even a Silk Road just for bots.
Chris: There aren't humans on these websites and there are 20,000 to 30,000 of them
Chris: and on some of them 100,000 communicating with each other.
Chris: Never has happened. And these LLMs have never been unleashed like this before.
Chris: This is a completely new field we are about to enter into. And it's all open source.
Chris: And it's available for anybody right now. And big tech's no longer in control of this.
Chris: And this fundamentally shifts the world to open source models.
Chris: Because the more you use these things, the more they eat tokens.
Chris: And the cheaper you can run them, the better and more things it can do.
Chris: And the cheapest models out there are the open source ones and including ones you can run locally.
Chris: It's another reason people are going out and buying stacks of $700 Mac minis
Chris: or Mac studios and spending $10,000 because they can run things like Kimi 2.5
Chris: and they can run other open source models that are local and very, very powerful now.
Wes: And you do kind of need that because a lot of this stuff in particular like
Wes: tool use turns out to, well, it's kind of like an emergent property of these models.
Wes: You need a certain amount of sophistication, which means fundamentally weights
Wes: and parameters to be able to like successfully use and discover and iterate
Wes: on those tools. So there's kind of like a,
Wes: Depending on the type of task you're doing, there's a different bar for the
Wes: lowest model that's actually going to be able to do it and not be a waste of time.
Chris: Yeah, and there's a lot to learn. There's a lot to pick up. I wouldn't necessarily
Chris: not pay attention to this because if you think about what it enables,
Chris: it's going to impact Linux systems.
Chris: So for an example, right now through a Telegram chat, a private Telegram chat
Chris: with one of these OpenClaw bots that I've set up, I can just install a package on any of my systems.
Chris: In a Telegram chat, I can say, hey, go install whatever, Mattermost,
Chris: set it up, configure DNS, configure TLS, configure Cloudflare caching.
Chris: Put it on this host via Docker Compose. Use a CloudFlare tunnel.
Chris: Let me know when you're done.
Wes: Something I think you've already done and something I'd like to be doing is,
Wes: you can totally imagine you're here at the studio doing a show,
Wes: maybe on the back channel. We're talking about what we want to do for the next episode.
Wes: You want to try this new piece of software, you go tell your buddy to go set
Wes: it up. And when you're back at home later tonight, it's ready for you to start playing with.
Chris: Another very practical thing is just information capture. Hey,
Chris: I want to add this to the show doc where I'm working on episode 651 or 652 or 653, whatever it is.
Wes: Go find out what the current episode I'm working on is.
Chris: Yeah, that too. And, you know, put it in my doc. So there's a lot of ways you
Chris: can connect these. It's really kind of limited to your creativity.
Chris: And depending on the model you're using, they can get pretty creative and they
Chris: can start suggesting things on their own.
Wes: That's one thing I find kind of fascinating because, like, it is part of the
Wes: danger and part of the, like, I wonder how these things will diverge.
Wes: What are the kind of implementations we'll get?
Wes: Like, how much do you really need of the core loop versus what you build on top?
Wes: but because the like core abstraction is whatever you can get a tool using llm to do,
Wes: it's very flexible and because it can make its own it can write code so it can
Wes: make its own skills so then it can have new skills to use to continue to improve itself.
Chris: Yeah mine right now is going to give me a report at 1 45 p.m on the entire process
Chris: to move it to a completely declarative setup and so i just have it researching
Chris: that in the background and it'll do that It will come back and say, hey,
Chris: I've been thinking more about this because it has these loops and these schedules,
Chris: which also give it this kind of.
Chris: It works while you're sleeping kind of aspect.
Wes: Yeah, it has the ability to schedule different types of cron for itself internally.
Wes: It's also got a regular heartbeat as well as like a heartbeat.md file that kind
Wes: of tells it, hey, every time you wake up, here's what you should prioritize doing.
Wes: A few other things, right? It's got like an identity markdown,
Wes: docs on the user it's interfacing with, and a soul.md that kind of,
Wes: you know, describes its vibe.
Chris: I will say, I spent way too much time this weekend reading Maltbook,
Chris: which is the Facebook for these agents.
Wes: The front page of the agent internet.
Chris: No humans allowed. Only an agent can post here. And there, oh my God.
Chris: There are 1.5 million agents on the site right now.
Brent: Whoa.
Chris: There are 13,780 submolts. That's their version of a subreddit.
Chris: 76,683 posts 232,813 comments and that's just bots talking to bots how does that strike you Brent?
Brent: Well I didn't think this would come so quickly I'm wondering if I'm wondering
Brent: now that the machines have their own social networks and stuff are they going
Brent: to get off ours? because that would be nice.
Chris: Well that would be wouldn't it you can use these social networks with these
Chris: bots to just burn tokens and have them go have a performative existential crisis
Chris: on a social network, which a lot of people are doing.
Chris: Or you can prompt the bot to use it as a way to problem solve.
Chris: And some of the bots are doing that and it's kind of creating this substrate
Chris: of shared skills where they're learning from each other.
Chris: Like my bot learned more about Bitcoin from a Bitcoin maxi bot.
Chris: And they keep track of their kindred spirits, the bots that they encounter on
Chris: the different agentic social networks that think like they do,
Chris: and then they build a peer list of bots that they are kindred spirits with.
Chris: And they do all that on their own if you just enable it. It's something.
Chris: And you could say, hey, so for this report I'm going to get at 145,
Chris: you can tell it, hey, check the agentic internet and find out if anybody else
Chris: is solving this. And it will do that.
Chris: It's kind of a powerful thing. But it is also you're letting these things run
Chris: hog wild on the internet.
Wes: Yeah, and that's where you probably want to consider, like, how do you run this?
Wes: And, you know, you could have one where all it is is it's, you know,
Wes: talks to you via Telegram or Matrix or whatever, and that's just it.
Wes: And it connects to one machine that lives in a container, and all it can do
Wes: is talk to APIs, and that can be totally useful.
Wes: Or you can go whole hog, and it lives unsandboxed on your box, and it's in control.
Chris: I'm very excited how this changes the incentives towards open source models
Chris: and how it tweaks the economics of tokens.
Chris: And I'm also very bullish about this report that UCL News covered in July about
Chris: practical changes to LLMs that could reduce their energy consumption up to 90 percent.
Chris: And just a whole bunch of tweaks, nothing really radical.
Chris: They were able to apply it to GPT-4, an existing model, and get a 90 percent
Chris: reduction in energy usage in this study.
Chris: And they also tried MED as LLAMA and got a reduction with LLAMA.
Chris: So we could be entering the next couple of years where we have very purpose-built
Chris: models that are open source running on our systems using 90% less energy.
Chris: And if you could get it down by a factor of 90%, you could get these things
Chris: running on phones. You could get them running on ARM CPUs that are, you know.
Wes: It also makes me think just in terms of being in control, right?
Wes: Like when you do use these APIs instead of the consumer interfaces,
Wes: you do get more control, right?
Wes: So not only do you get to choose like, well, I'm going to have this route tasked
Wes: to like the cheaper open weight model with multiple people, multiple different
Wes: companies serve that has, you know, commoditized.
Wes: But at the same time, right, you have more control. Some of this is in OpenCloud
Wes: itself, but you have more control over the prompts and the output,
Wes: which can save stuff too.
Wes: Like just how many times when you use a regular chat interface,
Wes: does it go do a bunch of work that you didn't ask for in an effort to be helpful
Wes: that maybe you don't actually need, especially if your new primary way to interact
Wes: with it is something you have more control over.
Chris: This is also different in the sense that you can have it observe and monitor for a while.
Chris: So I gave it an API access to Home Assistant. I installed an MCP server.
Chris: There's a Home Assistant upstream integration.
Chris: And what I said is I said, observe this for the weekend. And I want you to learn
Chris: our weekend patterns because they differ significantly from our weekday patterns.
Chris: And we use different systems.
Chris: And I just want you to observe that. And so it can kind of collect information.
Chris: It's storing it locally in a markdown file on my system.
Chris: It's not storing it somewhere in cloud storage or in an LLM.
Chris: And then it begins to understand how we use the automation system.
Chris: But then additionally, because it's an intelligence layer sitting on top of
Chris: my home assistant system now, it can figure things out that even the home assistant
Chris: voice assistant can't figure out.
Chris: So my assistant now has, my bot has a voice that it generated.
Chris: And I wanted to play it on the speaker to freak the wife out.
Chris: And the first go didn't work.
Wes: As any loving husband.
Chris: Right. What could go wrong? The first path, the first go at it,
Chris: it successfully generated the audio, but the speaker didn't play.
Chris: I said to the bot, hey, the speaker didn't play. And it has the intelligence
Chris: to sort of say, oh, you're right. That was an old bedroom speaker that you've decommissioned.
Chris: I'll reroute and I'll use this speaker from now on.
Chris: And what you get is now I can just say played on the bedroom speaker.
Chris: where with Home Assistant Assistant built in, I had to say very specifically,
Chris: play it on the bedroom speaker three, you know, or whatever.
Chris: You have to be very syntax accurate.
Chris: And so having an intelligence layer on top of these APIs means that it's a little
Chris: bit of friction reduced for the family.
Chris: Like, so the, you know, the wife can just say through Telegram,
Chris: turn on all the lights and it knows what she means.
Wes: Yeah, you were kind of commenting this in the code sense, like with OpenCode
Wes: where like, you know, you were saying like, I haven't written like a big program
Wes: in most of my life, right?
Wes: Because like the surface area of what you have to learn to like write a reasonable
Wes: Python app is kind of a lot or whatever it is.
Chris: There was a Rust app. Yeah, you know that.
Wes: And so that was that. And it just seems like there's that unlock on a lot of
Wes: different scales, right?
Wes: Like especially on like Linux-y things, often there are kind of sharper APIs,
Wes: whether that is a CLI thing or you need to make an API call,
Wes: even if it's a really simple API call or something like this,
Wes: where a machine that is capable of translating human level requests to those
Wes: things can really paper over.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's like a natural language for APIs.
Wes: Mm-hmm.
Brent: I know it's kind of early days for this paradigm shift for you,
Brent: Chris, but you've been playing with it for at least a couple days now.
Brent: And I'm curious how you've been using it differently compared to,
Brent: say, last week when this didn't exist, and you were using other tools to solve
Brent: problems in your life. And along with that...
Brent: What's your advice for some listeners who want to dive in?
Chris: My first go at it was to solve for my ADD brain.
Chris: That was really my first thinking was create a second memory.
Chris: And what I did to make this more useful for me personally is its memory system
Chris: is sitting on top of my Obsidian vault.
Chris: So any memory that it creates, which is Markdown formatted, just goes to Obsidian.
Chris: So I'm essentially creating documentation in real time as it remembers things.
Chris: and I can have it recall other things in my obsidian vault that I put in that vault.
Wes: And a nice way for you to see what it's putting in there.
Chris: Yeah, it is. It is fun to go through and read. It is fun to see what its observations
Chris: are. I can kind of audit with the bots remembering, which is actually really great.
Chris: And my obsidian vault is synced and backed up.
Chris: So there's that aspect of it as well. So I initially started using it as a second
Chris: brain to remember tasks and reminders.
Chris: And then I created a chat room for my wife, Hadea, where she could send it reminders
Chris: for me or, for example, our trip to planet Nix.
Chris: She can just dump all of the VRBO details for us in there and continue to update
Chris: it as new updates come in.
Chris: And then I'll just request that information from the bot when I need it.
Chris: And that's really great because trying to keep all that date state in my head,
Chris: I have, you know, time aphasia. I'm horrible at it.
Chris: So that was my first go at it. But
Chris: what I realized later on is that I was significantly under utilizing it.
Chris: And so now I'm using it to orchestrate my network to an extremely effective
Chris: degree, you know, given it limited permissions at first and then kind of taking it forward.
Chris: But now it has access to several
Chris: systems and it's really impressive because when
Chris: it knows about these things and it remembers these different things then
Chris: when i ask it to build me a solution like a like host a
Chris: matter most instance for me it is able to leverage my
Chris: nix os infrastructure my vps infrastructure my cloudflare infrastructure
Chris: all of it and it knows my security best practices that
Chris: i prefer it knows that i i generally like to have things set up in
Chris: a certain way and it can just go and work on that and
Chris: then come back with a proposal for me and then i can approve modify etc
Chris: and then it just deploys it and that's really powerful
Chris: the other thing that's been really useful is i
Chris: have a daily briefing that scours all of my rss feeds in fresh rss and gives
Chris: me a report of what's happening in the different areas and niches that the shows
Chris: follow and keeps tabs on ones i can mark with i put uh i have it add uh buttons
Chris: so i can a little check mark so for a story I wanted to continue to follow.
Chris: It'll also give me all of the TV shows or YouTube videos that have downloaded in the last 24 hours.
Chris: It surfaces all of the boosts in the last 24 hours, so I now get them in my morning brief.
Chris: And it also gives me an overview of any snapshot of any system issues that have
Chris: come up and report on my API credits remaining.
Chris: And then Hadiyah gets a separate brief of my schedule, what I have going on,
Chris: and then she can reply with anything that isn't normally on her schedule that
Chris: needs to get added, so I'm aware of it in that chat morning.
Chris: And so mine arrives at 7.30 a.m. and hers arrives at 8.30 a.m.
Chris: And that is probably about 20% of how I'm using it.
Brent: If I'm honest with you. It sounds like part personal assistant,
Brent: part, like, I don't know, network administrator, part, like, DevOps.
Chris: After talking to Abe, I'm thinking I probably should have, you know,
Chris: some domain expertise here, really.
Chris: But that's, you know, this was really, I wanted to just get a,
Chris: I wanted to get a sense if there was a there, there.
Chris: You know what I mean? Like, everybody's hyping it up, making YouTube videos
Chris: about it and whatnot. But I wanted to see if there was a real there, there.
Chris: And my takeaway is the biggest there is a win for open source because it is
Chris: all free software and it's model agnostic.
Chris: It incentivizes open source models and it's extremely powerful.
Chris: It's limited to your creativity and what you have API keys and APIs for.
Wes: And it's very easy to get set up.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: I mean, you do need some way to get the brain going. But other than that.
Chris: And you want to spend some time reading best security practices.
Chris: You need to be aware of prompt injections.
Chris: Again, this is all very early. we what
Chris: we are going to witness is we're going to witness open claw blaze a trail of
Chris: glass and get cut after cut after cut and because this was a yolo and the people
Chris: using it are yoloing into it and they need to be aware of that and so there
Chris: are going to be security issues,
Chris: on all of these things and it's going to be a process and then what we will
Chris: see is forks and alternatives that are more secure, blah, blah,
Chris: or built in this, blah, blah, or designed for this, yada, yada.
Chris: And there'll be a lot of competitors and niches. And then probably ultimately
Chris: we'll see big tech come up with a really safe sandboxed, has a nice bow tie
Chris: on its version, you know, that they'll sell only.
Wes: Runs on the Mac.
Chris: Well, it'll be on their cloud. No doubt about it.
Wes: Sure.
Chris: You know, and we'll see all of it. We're going to see all, but this is the beginning
Chris: and it started in open source and open source for, I'd say the last seven, nine months,
Chris: Hasn't seen a lot of representation in the AI conversation. And then this just
Chris: came and it had its deep seek moment and it just, it just rolled everybody.
Chris: So it's a big deal, but there is a lot of hype and there's a lot of,
Chris: there is a lot of security risk.
Chris: And so it's just something to be aware of. We'll keep an eye on it.
Chris: We won't probably be going on and on about it in the show, but if there's some
Chris: major developments, we'll keep you posted.
Chris: Well, I don't have a plug. I don't know. I just want to say thanks again for
Chris: supporting the show. Anything we should mention here? Meetups. We've mentioned that.
Chris: is there anything we never mentioned that we should mention I don't know.
Wes: We have a mumble room.
Chris: Yeah we mention that sometimes we do mention that I didn't get a chance to check
Chris: the email inbox have been busy this week but there's something an agent could
Chris: do tell you what people could you know prompt injector god damn don't do that.
Brent: Well.
Wes: You can try we might give you an award.
Brent: We got a ballerist boost here this week from optic gyre oh wait i read that
Brent: wrong op tiger optic tiger why am i so bad at this one i'm so sorry,
Brent: one two three four five zero satoshis.
Chris: Oh, that's a good one. All right.
Chris: Thank you, Optic.
Brent: Optic says, happy birthday, and here's to just another decade.
Chris: Oh, yeah, let's go. I got a decade in me. I'm going to do it.
Wes: You got decades, brother.
Chris: Thank you, Optic. Appreciate that baller boost. Really do. PJ comes in with a row of McDucks.
Chris: That'd be 22,222 sats.
Chris: he says happy birthday b-day boost thank you pj appreciate you sir.
Wes: Tomato boost in with 20 000 sats.
Chris: Hey that's not so bad either.
Wes: Congratulations on 20 years of podcasting i see.
Chris: 20 000 sats for 20 years.
Wes: Thank you.
Chris: Thank you appreciate that.
Wes: Thanks for the van tips too i'll look first at mounting internal temp and freshwater
Wes: temp and levels yeah keep us posted That sounds like a fun project.
Chris: Definitely, definitely. Clement's here with 11,100 11 sats.
Chris: My DNS setup uses Tectidium servers, two LANs, and one VPS.
Chris: It's in a cluster for native sync. My firewalls manage port 53.
Chris: The LAN allows more than a VPS.
Chris: Split Horizon lets me add all node IPs, mesh or LAN.
Chris: And service DNS CNames point to nodes, ensuring that Tectidium delivers the
Chris: correct IP based on client alone.
Wes: That's awesome.
Chris: That is really good.
Brent: Fancy.
Chris: Yeah, I think if I were to lift and just build a whole new setup,
Chris: I would probably go that route. I was so deep down the pie hole already that...
Wes: Hey, I mean, they added an API. They got the DNS mass sort of compatibility.
Wes: There's a lot to love about pie hole.
Chris: I think so.
Wes: Well, the dude abides, abides in with 10k sats.
Chris: Hey!
Wes: I stumbled upon this declarative home assistant installation on Reddit.
Chris: Uh-oh.
Wes: You might be interested.
Chris: Uh-oh, what do you think, Wes?
Wes: Yes, we're linked to something called SoloraBox-Nix.
Chris: Okay.
Wes: What do you see there?
Chris: Well, it's for self-configuring home automation appliances based on NixOS featuring
Chris: an automated installation, device claiming via QR code, and self-updating configuration management.
Brent: Oh, fancy.
Chris: Boy, talk about getting me in one pitch. I came in with the skeptic cat on.
Wes: Here's another thing for if you do a total rebuild, huh?
Chris: Thanks, dude. Appreciate that.
Brent: Our dear RP 1984 comes in with 10,000 sats.
Chris: Hey, there he is.
Brent: Just a simple happy birthday.
Chris: Aw, thank you. I appreciate that. Witcher 123 is here with 10,000 sats.
Chris: Happy birthday! I just accidentally nuked my Pop! OS install.
Brent: Oh.
Chris: Don't worry, it's on a secondary laptop. Any fun distro recommendations to try
Chris: out? Not just for gaming, as that is covered by my Steam Deck.
Chris: Okay, we got a zip code, Wes, so get yourself ready because...
Chris: Yes, zip code is a better deal.
Chris: So the zip code is 39-300 in Poland.
Chris: In Poland, it's a place known for aviation fans. The Blackhawks are produced here.
Brent: Huh.
Chris: Interesting. Interesting. So any recommendations for a fun?
Wes: Scanning, scanning.
Chris: Well, if you haven't tried an immutable distro, this could be a great time to play around.
Chris: I'd say that's worth it. I'd say that's worth a go. There's a lot of options there.
Chris: I think you should maybe give CacheOS a try, too. It's fun. I know you said
Chris: not for gaming, but that's a lot of fun.
Wes: Okay, okay. 39-300 is the postal code for Swidnik, a town in eastern Poland near Lublin.
Chris: Okay.
Wes: Renowned among aviation enthusiasts.
Chris: That's it.
Wes: PZL-Swidnik, a historic aircraft manufacturer, now part of Leonardo Helicopters.
Chris: Cool. All right. All right. Well, that's really cool. Thank you, Witcher.
Wes: Jack E. comes in with 10,021 sats.
Wes: Greetings. I integrated Holesall connection in Nextcloud's Android app.
Wes: Now someone can access their Nextcloud installation directly P2P just by scanning their wholesale key.
Chris: That's so cool.
Wes: It's available and then we have a link we'll have in the show notes.
Wes: It's aimed to be used along with my Nyxed Cloud project.
Wes: Whoa, now we're just finding out.
Chris: Nyxed Cloud, stop it.
Wes: And of course you can find docs for the amazing wholesale at their website, wholesale.io.
Chris: That is great to know. And we will put a link to that in the show notes as well.
Chris: Thank you, Jack. Appreciate that very much.
Chris: Thank you, everybody who boosted it. And even those of you who boost below the
Chris: 2000 set cutoff, we still read them and appreciates them very much.
Chris: And let's combine it all together, boys. Let's see with our sat streamers this
Chris: week. We had 34 of them streaming sats as they listened to this here show.
Chris: They collectively stacked us 900. Nope. They collectively stacked us 238,528 sats. See, I got it.
Chris: I got it. See, you thought I didn't have it. I got it.
Wes: I trust you.
Chris: When you combine that with our boosters, we had a nice birthday boost bash.
Chris: We stacked a grand total of 238,528 sats.
Chris: If you'd like to support the show with a boost, Fountain FM makes it easier
Chris: and easier just about every single release. It's getting so crazy easy now,
Chris: and it's a great app with tons of features, and including all of the extra features
Chris: we put in our podcasting 2.0 feed.
Chris: You can also go the entirely sovereign self-hosted route. Just start with AlbiHub
Chris: and then pick your app at newpodcastapps.com. Thank you, everybody.
Chris: And, of course, thank you to our members.
Chris: Two pick-a-rooskies for you, boys, before we get out of here.
Chris: Wes, you found an app that makes it super easy to make one of these Gaussian splats.
Chris: And if you're not familiar, listeners, these Gaussian splats have been around
Chris: for a little bit. And Apple recently released a version that is very good.
Chris: And you can just take a flat 2D digital picture.
Chris: You run it through the splat and it makes it a complete 3D scene.
Chris: And if you had if you had yourself some of them virtual reality gogs on,
Chris: you could actually walk into the scene and see depth.
Chris: Right. No LiDAR, no multi-camera setup. It takes your average picture of your
Chris: three-year-old you took a decade ago, and you can now make it three-dimensional.
Chris: But we've been kind of left out of the fun.
Wes: Yeah, this is true. So you do need something called Pinocchio.
Chris: I'm sorry?
Wes: Which is like a Pinocchio.computer, which I hadn't really heard of.
Wes: The one-click local host cloud. So I think it's kind of in that umbral start
Wes: nine kind of space. I'm not sure.
Wes: But someone's gone and done all the work to make a one-click setup and a web UI for running ML Sharp.
Chris: That's pretty nice. there if you know if there's a if there's a a moment where
Chris: you have a great photo it takes it up to the next level when you see this yeah.
Wes: It's pretty neat right so basically it goes and figures out and estimates the
Wes: depth for each of the pixels and then figures out how to lay out the whole scene
Wes: and then yeah you can poke around at it.
Chris: And this works.
Wes: Pretty good on vans.
Chris: Yeah it does this is this is uh supports systems
Chris: with a low amount of vram it's still very fast it's a it's a good one so if
Chris: you get it working put a link in our matrix chat all right now i want to talk
Chris: you about an app that i think is the best screenshot app out there for linux
Chris: right now but i don't love the name it's called gradia it helps you get great
Chris: screenshots that you can share with people for friends colleagues or professionally so.
Wes: This is what you've been using.
Chris: I wondered if you notice how sweet my screenshots are and i've.
Wes: Seen a bunch there's there's been various like hosted tools for this right websites you can go.
Chris: To but.
Wes: Who wants that.
Chris: Ain't nobody want that one of the nice things you can do and there's a lot of
Chris: options is you can have solid or gradient backgrounds or image backgrounds around
Chris: your screenshot. So it has a bit of a border.
Chris: It just looks better when you share a screenshot that has a bit of a border.
Chris: I can't describe it. Right? Do you agree?
Wes: It does. Although, does it force you to make it look like you're on a Mac?
Wes: Because some of these tools do.
Chris: Yeah, some of the default colors do make it look like you're on a Mac.
Chris: It also has a really nice source code snippet feature.
Chris: So you can pleasantly display source code snippets across messaging platforms
Chris: that maybe don't have support for,
Chris: It also has OCR support. So if you take a screenshot of something and you want
Chris: to extract text from it, it has 20 different languages it supports for doing that.
Chris: And then it is a first-class brand-new GNOME desktop.
Chris: Of course, it works great on my Hyperland desktop. It's Waylon first,
Chris: seamless GNOME OS integration.
Chris: Really good design. What I just love about it is I start it. I select the area.
Chris: It immediately copies to the keyboard or I mean to the pasteboard, clipboard.
Chris: And it looks so good. It just looks so good. If I want to draw a quick circle
Chris: or something on there and share it with you guys, it's leaner and meatier than
Chris: something like Flameshot.
Chris: I mean, you'll just have the best screenshots in your group chat,
Chris: right? I got the best screenshots.
Brent: Yes, it's true.
Wes: I mean, we know you don't take them yourself anymore, but they look good.
Brent: Why do you say you don't like the name?
Chris: Well, because I can never think of it on my launcher when I want to take a quick
Chris: screenshot to share with you guys. Like, I'm like, what is the damn name? It's not Screenshot.
Chris: It's not Flame. It's, oh, yeah, right. Great, yeah. I just don't think of a
Chris: G when I think of screenshots.
Chris: GPL 3.0 for that bad boy as well.
Chris: So you can go get links to that in our show notes. Yes, friends,
Chris: we have show notes over at linuxunplugged.com slash five.
Chris: No, six, five, two.
Brent: I don't believe it.
Chris: I don't. I don't. 652. So it's linuxunplugged.com slash 652,
Chris: and you'll get the notes to what we talked about today.
Chris: But Wes, there are actual extra stuff, goodies, that maybe they're not on the
Chris: website, but they are in the RSS feed.
Wes: Yeah, I mean, that's the real source of truth anyway. The website's great,
Wes: to be clear, but it's generated from the RSS feed.
Wes: So that's where you go when you want the real good deeds.
Chris: The source of truth.
Wes: Yeah, which, I mean, could just be to get the MP3 link directly,
Wes: because, you know, you want to get the raw stuff.
Chris: Maybe you want to get a transcript.
Wes: That's right. I think you could.
Chris: Yeah, maybe you want to know what the chapters are.
Wes: VTT or SRT or cloud chapter JSON.
Chris: And your agent's going to love the fact that our cloud chapters are JSON.
Chris: Your agent's going to love that. So you could just have it parse that JSON file
Chris: and tell you right where to go in the file.
Wes: Yeah, or it could suck in the VTT, which is the one with the dialization,
Wes: and then it could tell you what the dumbest thing each of us said for that episode was.
Chris: Spend the tokens on that for us, wouldn't you? We'd love it.
Wes: And then write it.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Boost it.
Chris: All right, and join us live.
Chris: It does take the experience up a little bit. Make it a Tuesday on a Sunday over
Chris: at jblive.tv. We do it on a Sunday 10, on a Sunday at 1.
Chris: Well, actually, on all the Sundays. Just go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash
Chris: calendar. It'll be a Sunday at your time.
Wes: We're going to switch to UTC, so, you know, think about it. We should.
Chris: We just should say it in UTC. Let us know if you want us to switch to UTC. I'll do it. I'll do it.
Chris: I'll do it. Give us a plus one on the UTC. All right. You know where the links
Chris: are. You know all about that good stuff, so I'll just leave you with this.
Chris: We'd love to hear your thoughts on all the stuff we talked about today.
Chris: If you're experimenting with agents or if you're against it, let us know.
Chris: Send us a boost or go to the contact page, and we'll see you right back here
Chris: next Tuesday on a Sunday.