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 this week, well, for the last three
Chris: months, we've been building multiple open source agent platforms.
Chris: The gains have been real, but the friction has been just as real.
Chris: Our expensive, challenging, and humbling journey with open source agents.
Chris: They'll round the show out with some great picks, some boosts,
Chris: and a lot more. So before we get into that and the challenging journey,
Chris: let's say good morning to our mumble room. Time appropriate greetings,
Chris: Virtual Lug. Hello, hello.
Mumble: Hello. Hey, Chris, hey, Wes, and hello, Brent.
Chris: Hello. Nice of you to join us on air. Hello, everybody up there in quiet listening.
Chris: Nice to have you along as well. Look at them. Aren't they looking nice today, Wes?
Wes: Wow, dressed up and everything.
Chris: I love it when they do that on a Sunday. Also, good morning to our friends over at Define Networking.
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Chris: Of the Unplugged program defined.net slash Unplugged.
Chris: All right, so we want your feedback for these topics that we're about to get
Chris: into. For example, this episode is based solely on questions that have come into the show.
Chris: But we also get questions or maybe sentiment that is don't talk about these kinds of things.
Chris: Like on March 24th, Matt wrote, and I think it's maybe his first time writing
Chris: the show, You boys seem enthusiastic about AI.
Chris: I recommend you create a new podcast dedicated to AI so it doesn't dominate
Chris: Linux Unplugged. Half the audience can't stand AI. It's very polarizing.
Chris: If you start leaning heavily into it, I'm just going to unsubscribe.
Chris: I thought I'd give this feedback to let you know why you might lose some viewership in the future.
Chris: Fair enough, too. Like, all kinds of feedback are appreciated.
Chris: So we're not roasting Matt here. Just wanted to share, like,
Chris: we get both ends of this, right?
Chris: So today we're going to represent the questions that have come in about agents and whatnot.
Chris: But I think it's fair to say we want to check the temperature on this just in
Chris: general with the audience.
Chris: So send us a boost or go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact.
Chris: And I do want to also say I think sometimes people, because they are so polarized
Chris: about a particular topic, don't recognize that we do intentionally try to space this out.
Chris: So you consider that AI has been the number one topic for the last three years
Chris: in just about every economic story, every employment story, every tech story.
Chris: And so we have worked very intentionally to try to space these topics out.
Chris: Last week, we talked about Ubuntu and their grub plans. The week before that,
Chris: we talked about ersatz TV wrapping up.
Chris: And a little bit before that, I talked about my Keeper calendar program.
Chris: So we try to space it out. We try to have episodes that don't just hit AI every
Chris: single week, which means, you know, we're digging whole cloth and building that
Chris: stuff for you, which is part of the value we try to bring.
Chris: But it doesn't just accidentally happen that we go two or three weeks not talking about AI.
Chris: And then one week we talk about AI. It's not just, that's just not like the
Chris: topics fall into the show by accident. It's very intentional design on our part.
Wes: And if we weren't doing that, it would look a lot different.
Chris: Right.
Wes: Just if that filter was not in place and all you were doing was going based
Wes: on like what's hot in the world and what news stories are out there and what's changing.
Chris: And what would get us advertising very easily.
Wes: Right.
Chris: Like we could, like we could just lean into it and lose some audience and make
Chris: some advertising money there, but we're not doing that.
Chris: And what we're trying to do is when we talk about it, we're trying to talk about
Chris: in practical ways that are here today that are the open source angle,
Chris: angle because that's what we cover and really impact linux users and we try
Chris: to bring something even for the skeptics even if it's an episode that's about
Chris: ai you're not an ai fan we try to bring something for everyone.
Brent: I would argue also solving actual problems that we have either in our infrastructure
Brent: or like some of the reverse engineering that we did of that diesel heater is
Brent: a good example of using a new tool to accomplish something that we've been thinking
Brent: about for what a year two years something like that so attaching it to a real world,
Brent: use case and problem set i think hopefully it describes how we're finding actual
Brent: uses for it not just burning up a bunch of credits.
Chris: Yeah, we're doing that, too. We'll talk about that. But it is a balance, right?
Chris: Because we don't want to lean too heavily into it. We want to make a show that's
Chris: for as many people as possible. After all, it's a show we're making for you.
Chris: So we do want to get this balance right. And it's something we want to hear from you about.
Chris: We think that the terrain is still being discovered, right? The map still has a lot of fog on it.
Chris: And there's a lot of mixed information out there, good and bad ideas and takes.
Chris: And a lot of interesting technology that is really growing this year,
Chris: 2026, if we're open source.
Chris: And this week was another significant step for open source this week.
Chris: We had another one about three months ago. This is another one.
Chris: And these keep happening specifically in the open source domain.
Chris: So we're trying to balance all this out.
Chris: Let us know what you think with a boost or, you know, go to the unplugged.com
Chris: Linux. What is it? LinuxActionShow.com?
Wes: Yeah, that's right.
Chris: We got the Unplugged, you know, we got the contact page over there. You can figure it out.
Wes: LinuxUnplugged.com slash contact.
Chris: What? No.
Brent: Never heard of it.
Chris: Right? Unplugged? What kind of show? What, is that a show about radio?
Wes: Yes, it is.
Chris: Oh, okay. All right.
Wes: But internet radio.
Chris: All right, so let's talk about the good, the bad, the ugly here.
Chris: We've got some common questions into the show, and we're going to go through
Chris: some of these and then talk about our setups and talk about some of the big
Chris: stuff landing for open source.
Chris: And it's not all just one particular flavor. So I think let's start with probably
Chris: the one that everybody's talking about right now, OpenClaw, which is a project
Chris: that's getting a lot of the attention for something you can run locally and
Chris: it can use local LMs or cloud LMs.
Chris: And do we really need to get much into OpenClaw? We've had a couple of people
Chris: ask, but I don't really feel like we need to spend a lot of time on it.
Chris: It's a node-based agent's gateway stack.
Chris: Okay, let's talk about what's a gateway, Wes. Maybe that's what we could explain.
Wes: Well, yeah, I mean, it kind of depends on how deep you want to get,
Wes: but there's a lot of different versions now of what people are calling an agent harness.
Wes: And on one hand, you have just sort of the basic model, like the first version
Wes: of ChatGPT in a browser tab that you're sort of typing into and interacting with.
Wes: And at one point, maybe you're copying code in, and it writes code,
Wes: and you copy it out or whatever.
Wes: But then we switched to this version where it's like, it's living with us in
Wes: our projects, in our editors, in the terminal.
Wes: And it probably has something like tools, right?
Wes: And it has, so that gives it like sort of mechanisms that it can affect change,
Wes: edit files, run scripts.
Wes: And, but beyond that sort of core set, then you have like a lot of different
Wes: other features sort of like, how is the context assembled?
Wes: Well, how does the memory system work? Is there a memory system?
Chris: How do you chat with it?
Wes: Yeah. And then you have the inputs and the outputs, which is like,
Wes: what is the control interface and control surface? It's like,
Wes: how do you trigger it? Is it autonomously triggered?
Wes: Does it have mechanisms to like ping you anywhere you're at?
Wes: Or it just presents on like an interface on your screen?
Wes: And so like on one version, you have sort of like an open code or a cloud code
Wes: or codex sort of thing where, I mean, they can do more than this.
Wes: But the primary thing you first see is just like a TUI interface for you to
Wes: sort of be human now with better helpers embedded right there.
Wes: And OpenClaw you get is a very different experience where like you just sort
Wes: of are presented with a telegram chat window into this bot who lives in its
Wes: own entire other sort of universe of its own.
Chris: A persistent running backend called the gateway that is connected to the LM
Chris: that you chose and can run some of the tools like...
Chris: Could be basic bash commands could be uh other things like a model context protocol
Chris: and things like that but the gateway just sort of does that via like your commands
Chris: in telegram chat or whatsapp or slack or whatever it might be.
Wes: Yeah so it sort of um is the organizer right it's
Wes: so it monitors like the telegram api or the slack api and gets incoming web
Wes: hooks or whatever and then from there it says like oh right let's trigger the
Wes: lm assemble its context give it all the stuff that it needs and then it also
Wes: handles when the lm comes back with like i want to run a tool the gateway is
Wes: actually what goes and like executes the tool call calls the mcp server.
Chris: And i want to make kind of a common confusion clear that we've
Chris: seen come into the show so say you're using olama with
Chris: an open source lm or you're using chat gpt54
Chris: for the back end of your open
Chris: claw agent and maybe you're also using open code they're the same thing you're
Chris: not going to really get dramatically different results because one's open claw
Chris: and one's open code other than some of this harness that wes is talking about
Chris: like the memories or the skills and those things kind of make it different and
Chris: they give the agent the ability to,
Chris: to remember mistakes, to remember that when I say custodian,
Chris: I'm referring to 172.16.0.10.
Chris: And so I don't have to write 172.16.0.10. I just say SSH to custodian.
Chris: And memory and, of course, DNS help with things like that, where maybe if you
Chris: just went to a fresh open code session or a fresh GPT session and just said
Chris: ping custodian, it'd have no effing idea what you're talking about.
Wes: And that's where it's like they kind of all exist in a design sort
Wes: of possible design space and they have a lot of shared components and
Wes: then some of them are just optimized for different experiences like open
Wes: cloud really started as this sort of personal assistant that could manage your
Wes: calendar and email and interface with you and like you know help you you
Wes: know chat with you as in your telegram instance and maybe something more like
Wes: open code is you know they have customized prompts focused on coding and they
Wes: have a different style of sub-agent implementation it's focused on orchestrating
Wes: multiple agents working specifically on code i mean it can do more than that
Wes: right but you can see how sort of the defaults and the shape of the interface
Wes: drive what they're primarily used for.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: So like all of them, right? Because it's all just an LM under the hood.
Wes: They can all write scripts. They can all run tool calls. It's just kind of what
Wes: you put on top to let them do.
Chris: So in my case, I'm using OpenClaw, and I have five agents running through OpenClaw
Chris: that have domain-specific focuses. And we can talk more about that in a moment.
Chris: So because one of the questions we also get into the show is,
Chris: what the hell is even the use case?
Chris: What are people even using this for? I don't really get it. Like I could just
Chris: write a cron job with a Python script or a Bash script and do most of what you're
Chris: doing. Or I could just use ClogCode or OpenCode. I can do most of these things.
Chris: Like what the hell are people actually using this for? I don't get it.
Chris: And so uh i think i wanted to start with brent because brent so far i know you've
Chris: been busy but i think partially too you're kind of waiting to see where this
Chris: goes because it is really early days he's watching.
Wes: Us uh frequently post embarrassing you know things that our agents messed.
Chris: Up yeah and so i thought i'd give you a chance because you probably represent
Chris: where a lot of the audience is at on.
Brent: This and just.
Chris: Kind of talk about like where you feel it is on your adoption curve.
Brent: Yeah i'm typically a little slower on the
Brent: adoption curve than you boys which is beautiful because i get to
Brent: watch you intimately screw things up and then
Brent: learn from your mistakes so that's lovely but we
Brent: do it for the show right boys but my hesitation always around new technologies
Brent: tends to be you know of course privacy but also security because i might not
Brent: have the same confidence as either of you to either not make the mistakes that
Brent: i will regret later or to recover from them gracefully.
Brent: So I like to wait just a little longer to see, let's say like a project like
Brent: Open Claw reach more maturity than adopting it, you know, on week one,
Brent: as so many people have done throughout the internet.
Brent: So I would say that's probably pretty accurate that some of our audience fall
Brent: into the category that I sit in, or maybe wait even longer.
Brent: And I would say that's not a bad thing. That's okay. It means you're falling
Brent: a little bit behind because the tools are moving so fast these days like every other day it seems.
Brent: I just add to my list of things to learn. But that said, it's an evolution that
Brent: you still need to keep up on, in my opinion.
Brent: And I didn't have this opinion several months ago, because I was still kind
Brent: of pausing and waiting to see.
Brent: But having put my own pause on some of these tools, I got to say,
Brent: it's made me a better open source software user.
Brent: And allowed me to accomplish a bunch of projects that I've had on my to-do list
Brent: for years and do them at speeds that I never would have anticipated.
Brent: So that part, even though I hesitated to start to adopt, it's incontrovertible
Brent: to me now that it's useful if you point it at the right thing.
Chris: Yeah, so I think your take is pretty spot on.
Chris: I don't know if you agree, Wes, But I think like it is, it is breaking and moving fast.
Chris: And if you're not comfortable going in there and using something like a codex
Chris: or an open code to sometimes fix it, you're probably going to have a bad time.
Wes: Yeah. And I think that's to where like the difference in model sort of matters,
Wes: right? Like open code is I tend or cloud code.
Wes: I tend to like, you know, you, you open it, you run it on your computer or you run it somewhere.
Wes: It sort of has a, maybe you run it for a long time and it runs persistently
Wes: for days and weeks or whatever. But yeah.
Wes: Versus the gateway for open claw is a systemd service that
Wes: runs on a server and so um just the
Wes: models are very different and the introspection and the default of how much info
Wes: and sort of the inner state that you're exposed to
Wes: of the system is very different and then on top of
Wes: that you know you're so there you're sort of pressing the bounds
Wes: of like how little interface can you have and
Wes: still have this thing manage productive work which is its own question but
Wes: that sort of imposes a lot on the whole model and just
Wes: the nature of the project yes like it just
Wes: moves crazy crazy fast so fast that we've both now had
Wes: to sort of fork the up the upstream nix
Wes: code which wasn't updating fast enough to keep up with the proper upstream
Wes: source code and it's just you know it's trying to
Wes: do a lot there's a ton of features so i think
Wes: we've maybe both been continuing to run it because we have been curious
Wes: about i mean we run other things but just because it has been sort of the locus
Wes: of a lot of the frontier but if you don't care about that aspect you can still
Wes: even have this model style of approach and have much more stable things or things
Wes: that are moving slower or you know aren't based on the node ecosystem but have
Wes: like a go core or a rust core python i want.
Chris: To i want to talk about a couple of those tools because because it's not i think
Chris: you're touching on a good point is it's not going to be just open claw and some
Chris: of them are going to be more stable more lts style.
Wes: Yeah there's going to be enterprise versions and like debian style versions
Wes: and you And I think I'll manner of them.
Chris: Here's how I boil it down, is right now, it's not worth burning a lot of money
Chris: on tokens to run OpenClaw.
Chris: I just, I genuinely don't think it is, because you'll spend a lot of those tokens fixing it.
Chris: And if you have a plan where you have access to a lot of AI tokens,
Chris: or you have local AI hardware, where it costs you nothing, then go for it.
Chris: Because if you do, you will learn so much.
Chris: It is an incredible learning experience, but also...
Chris: You do become a better operator. Like I know where their deficiencies are now.
Chris: So I prompt better and better and better and I get better and better results
Chris: and I have them doing more and more things, which we'll get into a couple of
Chris: those because I do want to talk about use cases.
Chris: But that's my hot take is I don't think it's worth spending a bunch of money
Chris: on Open Router or going and getting some $100 a month plan to run Open Claw right now.
Wes: I think especially if you're going to try to use it as like the only thing you're
Wes: doing, like if you're trying to push through building the entire thing through that.
Chris: It's going to be a bad time.
Wes: It's an interesting experiment.
Chris: Right? It's just not there yet.
Wes: But yes, versus like if you're kind of having it orchestrate battle-tested open
Wes: source services or scripts that you have open code right for you.
Wes: Like that is a very different experience.
Chris: That's it. So let's get into that's it because that I think gets us to our use cases and our setups.
Chris: If you're comfortable using a superior model and a superior tool to build the
Chris: infrastructure around these things and then have them operate it with guardrails,
Chris: you're going to get great results.
Chris: If what I just said doesn't make sense to you, it's going to be a hard time.
Chris: And that's where we're at.
Chris: And I just, if I, it is a really tough thing. It's like, it's like when it took
Chris: you days to get Linux running.
Chris: I mean, this has a lot of this same energy I've been putting into this where like, I don't have time.
Chris: But yet, just like I didn't have time 20 years ago when I was learning Gentoo,
Chris: I somehow did it, right? Like I just, the drive is there.
Wes: Yes, because you can see there's potential. There's a lot of fun in it and a
Wes: lot of frustration. And so I think it's worth knowing that and like,
Wes: it's almost like a pet, you know, it's like a pet.
Wes: It's a big side project, but don't go in necessarily expecting to convert it
Wes: into a production thing that's going to be rock solid that you forget about.
Chris: I think pet is one, you know, like the Tamagotchi is one thing and that's fine
Chris: if that's what you want. And you've got a way to do that economically.
Chris: I kind of look at it more as an intern or a really kind of basic producer.
Chris: And I, I've gotten it pretty close.
Chris: Um, so in my case, I have a doing a lot of analysis for the show.
Chris: Every episode of pulls down the transcripts, it does sentiment analysis.
Chris: It does, it keeps track of everything we've talked about.
Chris: I can also pull down emails and like that email we got earlier that I read in the show.
Chris: I, it matched them the sentiment analysis of the things we actually talked about
Chris: in a surface that email, because, Hey, this is actually, you guys,
Chris: you know, this email is kind of on point.
Chris: Like, I don't think Matt likes to hear this, but it was the agent that surfaces
Chris: email to me that said, Hey, he's complaining and you have been talking about it in this episode.
Chris: Episode this episode episode you mentioned this and it's like he might have
Chris: a point here it's worth reading this and that's why his email made into the
Chris: show today and that's something i would task a producer to do if i had uh you know i don't know a.
Wes: Budget for producers.
Chris: What would it be in washington state a hundred thousand dollars i don't know
Chris: it's crazy here so it's just not going to happen i'm not not even paying myself
Chris: at the moment so it's not that's not going to happen it also generates news
Chris: briefings for me every day both in text with sources but also in audio that
Chris: uses my fresh RSS server feeds.
Chris: So the feeds I've curated for the last decade that I have in my local fresh
Chris: RSS server, every morning it goes, it does analysis on that,
Chris: and it generates me a seven to 15 minute long report of the stories that are relevant to our shows.
Chris: And then it marks them red in my fresh RSS feed.
Chris: So then later when I go to read my news stories, because I'm always trying to
Chris: stay on top for the shows, the ones that have been in my audio briefing that
Chris: I listened to on the drive to the studio are marked red for me now.
Chris: Little things like that. Or when a sponsor emails me and I'm trying to get a
Chris: sponsor going, I have that surface, that alert to me using GWS.
Chris: So GWS CLI lets me check in on these things without going crazy with permissions in my inbox.
Chris: And these are little tasks that I have it do, but I think the stuff that I would
Chris: find if you're asking what's the use case, it's for giving you an easy interface
Chris: to manage all the crap you've set up.
Chris: There's a lot of, you know, Home Assistant's a great example.
Chris: It really can be a great accelerator to your setup there. So at home, I have the Frigate DVR.
Chris: The Frigate DVR, when it notices an event or a face via MQTT,
Chris: sends an alert to Home Assistant.
Chris: Home Assistant has an automation that wakes up my agent Uhura.
Chris: Uhura analyzes the image from Frigate and then sends me a report with the faces,
Chris: the people identified, and a description of the situation.
Chris: And it's estimate if it's the severity level of the situation.
Chris: I just have a telegram chat. And whenever I'm away, because home assistant automatically
Chris: activates this detection system, home assistant's doing the lift here.
Chris: But my open claw agent is doing the final analysis and report.
Chris: The wiring, the hard stuff, is the infrastructure with Frigate,
Chris: MQTT, and Home Assistant.
Chris: Then OpenClaw just sits on top of that as a layer to give me access to all these APIs and features.
Chris: So when I wanted to start getting these alerts, I tasked the OpenClaw agent
Chris: to finish up the YAML in Home Assistant to add the sensor for face detection,
Chris: and then to expand its reports that come back to me with image analysis.
Chris: But I didn't have it build the entire system from WholeCloth.
Chris: I had it do the last 10%. And it's working great. I've been sending West the results all week.
Wes: It's been a lot of fun.
Chris: It's a lot of fun to have it analyze and learn the family and pass silent LM
Chris: judgment on like a room being cluttered.
Wes: It likes to think you're, I mean, does it not get that you're in an RV? No, it does.
Chris: That's what's also interesting is it does recognize, it's figured out that it's an RV.
Wes: Oh.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: That's great.
Chris: Yeah. So that's probably one of a million use cases. But again, I wouldn't do it.
Chris: Unless you could find a way to economically get access to the AI,
Chris: which we're going to talk about more about in a moment.
Chris: But I'm curious if you want to share
Chris: any of the things that you're kind of routinely using these things for.
Wes: Well, yeah, you're just making me think like, well, I mean, any anything you
Wes: do want to orchestrate that you don't want to have to go sit at a computer to do.
Wes: So it could be stuff that's routine is like monitoring your systems or reporting
Wes: on, you know, you don't need it to go collect the metrics necessarily.
Wes: But you can have something that's collecting metrics and it can look at it and
Wes: give you an assessment about things or look at anomalies.
Wes: Or you could have it, if it has permissions and you're willing to do this,
Wes: go run updates on some of your servers and report back on how that goes.
Wes: And it also is just useful to have it flip the script. And I think many of us
Wes: recognize that if you leverage web search with LLMs, they can be very useful researchers.
Wes: If you just rely on what's in their pre-trained data set, then you can get much
Wes: different results. But if it has access to fresh, good, you know,
Wes: reg style sort of data and information, it can be quite useful.
Wes: And so instead of having to go sit at your computer and pull up some web interface
Wes: to go do all that, you know, I can just like I spent a while making sure that
Wes: my bot had really good access to whisper transcription so that,
Wes: you know, I could just send it.
Wes: I could record voice in Telegram and shoot that over and then it could go spin
Wes: up and have sub agents that go use search engines to go pull a bunch of stuff
Wes: and then sort of recursively analyze that and then at the end produce a markdown report.
Wes: And then, you know, kind of like you've been doing, I can have that then spit
Wes: back out into sort of like a podcast form with a pocket TTS voice.
Chris: Which is open source, runs on your CPU.
Wes: And that's all stuff I could do myself or sit at a thing and task an element to do.
Wes: And I might not even bother if it's like, oh, I got to go interrupt what I'm doing.
Wes: But if all I have to do is fire off a quick voice request, but you can also
Wes: burn a lot of time if you're trying to set that up fresh every time,
Wes: or if you haven't properly sort of ossified it and tested it and made sure that it works reliably.
Wes: And this is where you're talking about being a good operator is understanding
Wes: because by default, the LLM that's sort of operating within this harness doesn't
Wes: necessarily, and this varies per harness, but OpenClaw's not great at this,
Wes: doesn't necessarily have a very good understanding of how it works.
Wes: Like how, and it's a moan model of what it, how it functions.
Wes: And so if you don't have that model and aren't sort of infer,
Wes: you know, passing some of that info or haven't spent time doing that,
Wes: then it can get really confused.
Wes: And you have situations where it works great a couple of times.
Wes: And then a week later, you're like, oh, it has no idea that it was ever able to even do that.
Chris: Yeah. I think one of the benefits of playing with this now is I've learned how
Chris: both capable and dumb LLMs are, right?
Chris: They're starting with a fresh world every single time.
Chris: And when you experience them without an agent harness around them
Chris: that's always your primary interface and so once
Chris: once you have an agent harness and it starts to become a little
Chris: more personalized i'll give you one more use case example that happened on
Chris: saturday yesterday uh the boy and
Chris: i were sitting there and we went to go to tunar which i talked about
Chris: recently to watch some streaming tv and we went to the regular show channel
Chris: and it's one of those dad moments you hate where you hit the button and you
Chris: get stream failed all right oh i've just been telling him i just set up a regular
Chris: show channel stream failed oh i'm sorry dylan i don't know why this isn't oh wait a minute.
Chris: Lore go see why tunar says there's uh no
Chris: episodes for a regular show i've got the entire series there's eight seasons
Chris: there's plenty of episodes fix it right and what lore identified was is that
Chris: ersatz apparently didn't care but tunar does care how the files are organized
Chris: on disk even though it's getting the information from jellyfin it's still tunar
Chris: is still sensitive to how the files,
Chris: are organized and if you don't have them in individual season folders it doesn't see any episodes,
Chris: So there's eight seasons and they're all, it's all, you know, season one.
Chris: And there's some of these are, there's like 36 episodes a season and they're
Chris: all just in the root directory.
Chris: So Laura identified that and he said, well, here's the problem.
Chris: Do you want me to SSH into custodian, create the season folders and move them
Chris: all for you and organize them and then ping the TUNAR API and have it rescan? Yeah, do it.
Chris: And then five minutes later, we go back to the channel, hit play and it works.
Chris: And I never had to get off the couch. I never had to stop interacting with my
Chris: son. I just sat there and tasked the machine to go fix it for me because that
Chris: harness tells it all the information it needs to know to go do those things.
Chris: And, of course, it can execute tools.
Wes: It's so useful as an organizer and sort of default sysadmin interface for a
Wes: lot of stuff like that, where it's like, I know what needs to be done.
Wes: I just don't really want to do the tedium of doing it.
Wes: And it can present me like a plan that I can audit and approve and then tell it to go do that.
Chris: So I think the reason why it kind of shifts this week is Gemma 4 has landed.
Chris: This is from Google DeepMind. It's their open source Apache 2 licensed model.
Chris: And so it's based on their bigger commercial Gemini model, but this is their open source play.
Chris: So they have a high end commercial play and now they're trying to have a high end open source play.
Chris: And it does seem to have pretty advanced reasoning. It's been trained with agentic
Chris: workflows and people have been running it on their iPhones.
Chris: And it seems to be performing more than 20 X models, its own size.
Chris: It's, you know, competitor models. And you can try it out right now in LM studio.
Chris: I downloaded it on my 2016 era Nick station upstairs, which is it's got like
Chris: an AMD Radeon, maybe from 2018 at best.
Chris: I think I upgraded it once from like an old NVIDIA card to a Radeon just for compatibility.
Chris: Maybe. And it's got a, you know, an i7 from 2016.
Chris: And it's got 32 gigs of RAM. Oh, maybe 64.
Chris: And I was able to load Gemma 4 on that 2016 era system and actually have it
Chris: do accurate image analysis in, you know, under a couple of minutes.
Chris: It's slow on that old system.
Chris: But people on iPhones and even newer boxes are seeing incredible results with
Chris: tool call capability, reasoning, and you can run the entire thing on your local machine.
Chris: PJ, you were trying it out earlier on your machine. What are the specs for the
Chris: computer that you were running it on?
Mumble: The machine I have is a, we'll see, AM4 5700, I think.
Mumble: The nicer one, the one with 3D cache. And it's got a 1070, GTX 1070. So another older GPU.
Chris: Could you tell if it was using GPU acceleration?
Mumble: Yeah, it was. I loaded up NVTOP and I know that the Olama Web UI that i've got
Mumble: loaded up is it's all set up for gpu use and i just threw a picture of my dog
Mumble: put it in the chat and then it described my dog within just a few seconds.
Chris: Oh really that fast yeah.
Mumble: I'm even using a the 12b model which is probably too big for the amount of eram
Mumble: i have but tends to work fine when i when i throw stuff like that at it.
Chris: Yeah this is i think beginning to be at a
Chris: model scale where you could play with his agentic stuff and not
Chris: blow a bunch of money money on big tech cloud tokens then
Chris: something else that landed this week which we
Chris: haven't had a chance to try it because we want to give it a proper try if you
Chris: guys are interested is mesh llm and
Chris: it lets you pool your spare gpu capacity across your lan and then expose it
Chris: as one open ai compatible api this is from block and it's a peer-to-peer system
Chris: that lets anyone pool spare gpu compute and what it does is the system loads an LLM,
Chris: and when it consumes the VRAM of the local host,
Chris: it goes out to the mesh, and it distributes across the mesh,
Chris: and then continues loading the model.
Wes: I really want to try this.
Chris: You know I have been saying this is coming, and I am so excited to try this
Chris: because it really opens it up for folks like us that have spare hardware.
Chris: They're not great, but if you really pull it all together, I don't know,
Chris: or maybe even just a couple of cheaper VPSs, we'll see. We'll see how much it
Chris: really needs a great GPU or whatever.
Chris: But I'm really excited about Mesh LM, and it's open-sourced by Block,
Chris: and I think it's going to be really great. They also have an agent harness they've open-sourced.
Chris: So if this we've talked a lot about open claw uh loeb
Chris: hub is another one i've played with i think it's out of china it is
Chris: open source and it's a lot more user-friendly it's
Chris: it is the chat interface itself it's also the skill
Chris: store the mcp store eight different agent personality stores and it connects
Chris: to every freaking kind of provider that i ones i've never even heard of i had
Chris: no idea there were that many plus all the local stuff and all the free stuff
Chris: it's crazy and it's just a built-in agent orchestration platform in one UI, it's called LoebHub.
Chris: Goose is another one that's out there.
Chris: And then there's the Hermes agent, which is being described as a self-improving
Chris: AI agent built by newest research.
Chris: And they say it has a built-in learning loop, which I've also created for my
Chris: own. I call it the reflection loop, which I recommend.
Chris: It's a nightly job that scours the JSON chat sessions and looks for mistakes
Chris: and corrections that the agent made and then documents those in the memory.
Chris: And they've built that in.
Chris: So it self-improves, it nudges itself for persistent knowledge,
Chris: it searches its own past conversations, and it builds a deepening model of who
Chris: you are across sessions, and you can run on a $5 VPS.
Wes: Love it. Yeah, there's so many cool options. I put two in here that are sort
Wes: of on opposite ends of the spectrum.
Wes: So one is called LibreFangs. This is like a Rust one.
Wes: It's an agent operating system, a full platform for running autonomous agents,
Wes: built from scratch in Rust, not a chatbot framework, not a Python wrapper.
Wes: And as they put it, traditional agent frameworks wait for you to type something.
Wes: This thing runs stuff that just is supposed to work for you 24-7.
Wes: So it comes with a researcher, a collector, a predictor, a strategist,
Wes: a trader, a Twitter personality, LinkedIn, browser, API tester, DevOps personalities.
Wes: And so you can spawn all these things they can persistently run.
Wes: You've seen similar things with Gastown. There's a bunch of it.
Wes: But then on the other side is something called OpenHarness, which is a lightweight
Wes: agent infrastructure, sort of
Wes: tool use, skills, memory, multi-agent coordination, but that's kind of it.
Wes: It can connect to other things too, but it's intentionally built to be an open
Wes: source Python implementation designed for researchers, builders,
Wes: and the community to help you understand how it works, experiment, extend.
Wes: So rather than something that's like a product or a crazy fast open source moving
Wes: thing, here's something maybe you could get more comfortable with and actually
Wes: play with and like build understanding.
Chris: Okay, nice finds I think a couple other trends I also I have like my biggest
Chris: takeaway for both the haters and and the hypers that I want to get to but,
Chris: I think we're about to see this massive enterprise shift towards agents.
Chris: And Microsoft's leading here, I predict, here on the show. You're also going
Chris: to see Red Hat make a big deal about this at Summit this year.
Wes: You're already seeing it sort of in, like, job postings and stuff.
Wes: You know, way more stuff like MCP tool mentioning and just, like, agent pipelines.
Chris: That's what I'm—yeah, you and I—that's one of the things we watch for the show, and it's clear.
Chris: So Microsoft has released the Agents Governance Toolkit.
Chris: Really the takeaway here isn't this particular product
Chris: it's that this is a thing that these companies are going to make
Chris: now and it's their new open source project it's a toolkit that has identified
Chris: all kinds of different types of risks and tried to create essentially a sandbox
Chris: an os system around it that does governance monitoring communications monitoring
Chris: all that kind of stuff around imagine right.
Wes: Like when these things have access to various tools and various implementations
Wes: of them and you're going to want to have some person over here in sales be able to do certain things.
Chris: And another person.
Wes: In IT do more things and you're going to need to want to tie it into all your
Wes: existing ancient enterprise tools.
Chris: It ties into your policy engine. It intercepts every agent action before execution.
Chris: There you go. And also interestingly enough includes a mesh network component
Chris: so you can have agent to agent communication.
Wes: But presumably with policies.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: That's interesting.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. I think you're going to see other companies lean into this a lot.
Chris: And then there are, I think, probably two big takeaways that we should probably talk about.
Chris: But first, thank you to our members for making this possible.
Chris: You can support the show at linuxunplugged.com slash membership.
Chris: We just have to find networking right now. We could really use the support to keep us going.
Chris: And if you like where we're going, where the direction we're going and how we
Chris: go about it, your support's one of the best ways to keep it that way,
Chris: linuxunplugged.com slash membership or jupyter.party.
Chris: And a big thank you to our members for supporting the Unplugged program.
Brent: Now we've seen a lot of open source projects recently describe how they want
Brent: AI to be used in their projects. We've even seen some projects just outright try to block AI.
Brent: But the real question is, is that a futile gesture?
Brent: Or are they just going to have to find a way to play nice with these AI agents
Brent: who are trying to make our worlds a better place?
Wes: Yeah, I mean, there's a few different ways to think about that.
Wes: And, you know, sort of the game theory or strategy side and the real,
Wes: you know, sort of whatever happens in the market and where things go.
Wes: But I think it's interesting that like the downsides and sort of like,
Wes: who are you fighting and who are you trying to serve maybe changes.
Wes: Like there's one version where like it's a bunch of scrapers sucking down the
Wes: entire internet to train things and, you know, is making it hard for you to run your website.
Chris: And like, we see that and that's a real problem.
Wes: Yeah, for sure. Um, and the other version is like, I'm trying to compare some
Wes: open source projects for the show, and I want my bot to go clone each of them
Wes: so we can write a report about how to, you know, make me a table to think about
Wes: the different ones and see which ones I want to actually try.
Wes: And, you know, I want it to respect rules and rate limits and all those things, but it's also sort of,
Wes: doing what I would do myself. And so having it blocked just sort of feels like
Wes: it's limiting the stuff that I want to do, which is probably to go on and like
Wes: highlight an open source project that I've tried and I'm excited about or maybe
Wes: contribute to or, you know, engage with in some way.
Chris: Yeah. And so I think what we're seeing, and this is going to be a tough one
Chris: for the community to wrap their noodles around because it's a big transition
Chris: because for as long as I've been on the internet, bots are bad.
Chris: And, you know, maybe you, maybe
Chris: you want your site indexed for Google or something, but that's about it.
Chris: Otherwise bots are just traffic and putting load on your system that you don't
Chris: want, but we're shifting from mass web scraping bots, which still exist and
Chris: maybe are even worse than they've ever been in some regard to something that's a lot more personal,
Chris: something that's an extension of the user's hand acting on the direct intent of the user.
Chris: And so if you block that, you're blocking new users to open source software.
Chris: You're, you're kind of saying, well, we want users, but we don't want the users
Chris: that are asking the machine to do it for them.
Chris: Which is kind of a moral call there. And I don't think we've really thought through that as much.
Chris: And I think by just saying what we're going to do is we're going to just put
Chris: a proof of work, you know, anime bot thing up first.
Chris: And then you look at the cute little anime thing and you do proof of work and
Chris: then you get to, you know, view the source code.
Chris: And while that is quaint, it's easily defeatable. I mean, there are so many projects now.
Chris: Even a lot of these aren't harnesses are just coming with things that just defeat it built in.
Chris: And so you're just creating more load and more work and burning more CPU cycles
Chris: and using more electricity for no result.
Chris: And I'm not saying that that's a good thing. I'm saying the way to solve it
Chris: is instead of burying your head in the sand, it's to engage with the process.
Chris: You know, free software didn't get as far as it did because we never engaged
Chris: with licensing debates and legal actions.
Chris: We had organizations that sprung up around free software to protect and fight
Chris: for it in the legal system to give it a legal space where it had to be respected.
Chris: And now you have organizations that are ginormous the size of countries all
Chris: around the world that are following free software licenses for the most part.
Chris: It didn't happen because we
Chris: just ignored commercial software in the legal system and buried our head.
Chris: That happened because parts of the community intelligently engaged and advocated.
Chris: And that's what has to happen here. You're not going to get away from these bots.
Chris: They're going to just walk right around your cute little anime proof of work splash page.
Chris: And they're just going to get the information they want. Or they'll go to a
Chris: project that makes it available via an API JSON markdown file or just doesn't block them.
Chris: And because software is going to be easier to create, easier to extend,
Chris: and easier to patch, it's going to be easier to make the projects that block that more irrelevant.
Chris: And because it's going to be the new generations coming on board that are going
Chris: to be using these tools, you're going to block new adoption.
Chris: And we sure hear a lot of lip service about trying to draw in new users to free
Chris: software, but when the opportunity actually comes along, we're actually gatekeeping,
Chris: and we're blocking them and preventing them because we don't like the tools they're using.
Wes: I think it's you know there are there are certainly valid concerns and
Wes: arguments around sort of impacts to and risks to sort
Wes: of the commons from some of these developments but i
Wes: think what we don't talk about enough is the extent that these same tools can
Wes: enable that like i'm making and publishing more open source these days with
Wes: some of the help of these tools than i ever have before now if anyone wants
Wes: to run it that's up to them but uh like i think there's a version of this where
Wes: we can sort of embrace the good parts and use that to build more of the open
Wes: source stuff that we need.
Chris: But I think, you know, your story is a good one and you really have like leveled up. It's incredible.
Chris: But my story, I think, is maybe more what the community should think about is
Chris: I have been using computers for 40 years.
Chris: I'm getting to be an old man and I've been using computers since like that you
Chris: hooked them up to TVs and you know, like, like a long time I used cartridges
Chris: and like, it's been a while.
Chris: And, um, in 43 ish years of using computers, cause I'm getting old.
Chris: Um, I never once wrote anything more than a line of bash code that I use myself.
Chris: Now you can go to my GitHub repository and I'm releasing software like crazy.
Chris: Now, a lot of it's for myself.
Chris: Some of it are upstream patches. Some of it's for the JB infrastructure or something like that.
Chris: But I am now writing open source code that people are using.
Chris: And it's good. It works for me.
Chris: And it's been a lot of it's been running for months in production.
Chris: So I never created software for 40 years until these tools came along.
Chris: And now I'm creating GPL software.
Wes: And like, we just see like, okay, there are proprietary things,
Wes: right? Like, you know, cloud code and et cetera.
Wes: But there's just, as you expect in our wonderful community,
Wes: like immediately you see all of these various open source harnesses and,
Wes: you know, whatever you think of GitHub itself, like if you just go look at activity
Wes: and various things on GitHub, it's clear that there's just a lot of people excited
Wes: to work on and tweak and share ideas and get inspired.
Wes: It's like, there is a sub aspect of this that is all of the great things we love about open source.
Chris: And I think that probably doesn't get enough attention. But so that's,
Chris: I think, one aspect of this I want to talk about with you guys before we move on.
Chris: And the last one is I really want to stress this point.
Chris: The agent is not the magic part.
Chris: The real reward in this is the infrastructure you build along the way.
Chris: And the more I work on these AI agents like OpenClaw, the more I think the really
Chris: valuable part is the infrastructure I'm setting up around it.
Chris: Because you got to remember these things are often starting with a blank brain for the most part.
Chris: You can't trust them with complete tasks or jobs. You can come.
Chris: Actually, that's the breakdown.
Chris: I don't think you can come. You can trust them with a complete job,
Chris: but you can trust them with a complete task if you give them the skills and
Chris: the guardrails. And what is that when I say that it's generally.
Chris: A Python script that they call with certain flags, depending on the task.
Chris: It's maybe a CLI wrapper.
Chris: So, like, for example, I use GWS. And GWS is a command line client that Google
Chris: has put out to interact with Google Workspace in an agentic safe way.
Chris: And I have like six GWS inboxes. And I have created a wrapper for GWS Unplugged.
Chris: GWS, you know, X, Y, Z. And so when the agent goes to check the inbox,
Chris: there's no ambiguity of what inbox they're checking because they're calling
Chris: the unplugged wrapped GWS client.
Chris: And then there's a skill, which is a markdown file that just says to check the
Chris: inbox, do these steps. I wrote that once.
Chris: And then I can, for the rest of eternity, just ask the agent to go execute that task.
Chris: And that's kind of when I say you need to build the infrastructure around it. Maybe it's a script.
Chris: Maybe it's a CLI. It's probably a skill, something that gives the agent some
Chris: instructions from a completely blank brain.
Chris: And when you build this little bit of scaffolding around it,
Chris: you get incredible results.
Wes: This can also be where it's helpful to say maybe you start in the browser talking
Wes: to something like Cloud or your favorite assistant and you build the spec.
Wes: And then you use something like OpenCode to actually implement and test it and get it ironed out.
Wes: And then you can load it in and run it in your open. There's a lot of ways to
Wes: sort of combine these and not just shove it all through the claw as well.
Chris: I think actually, you know, for you, most of your work isn't in a claw,
Chris: right? you're generally interacting
Chris: through some other application or your app or some interface. It's,
Chris: It's really just what you're trying to get out of it. I mean,
Chris: I think that's interesting. Like, my primary interface is probably the OpenClaw
Chris: agent, but I don't think yours is.
Wes: No, I mean, I usually have OpenCode going on a couple of things, and then I'll have Yap.
Wes: I especially like using Yap for, like, getting skills going because it's a very
Wes: clean environment, so it's just what I've put into the prompts and the history
Wes: that it has, but it has full access to a lot of tools, especially now that it
Wes: has, like, direct search built into it.
Wes: So that helped a lot. And then, yeah, right, and then once I've sort of,
Wes: often I'll build a lot of services,
Wes: maybe it's a new mcp server maybe it's some new scripts like
Wes: i just worked on something to better as a fallback to
Wes: sort of the public convert sites to markdown stuff like markdown.new i wanted
Wes: a mechanism i could run on the command line just as a fallback um and so that
Wes: was useful for the agent as a fallback it's built into one of the search mcp
Wes: servers i'm using now uh and i have it as a tool that i can just also run so
Wes: yeah you can kind of like you know shop them all around.
Chris: I think another thing to remember is they're they're probably going to disappoint
Chris: you the first couple of times you task them to do something because there's
Chris: going to be little bits that you've missed in your scale or in your script.
Chris: And so I when I when I designed to do something new that's going to do routinely,
Chris: I expect the first couple of times it's going to screw it up.
Chris: Because I think of it as a new hire that I've just trained to do something for the first time.
Chris: And you got to expect the new hire is going to need a little handholding a few times they do the task.
Chris: So the first time the agent runs to the task and they screw it up,
Chris: I then use something like open code to go review the logs and figure out where
Chris: the agent went wrong and then go harden up the skill, quote unquote,
Chris: to address that. And then I have the agent run through the cycle again.
Chris: And one of the tricks I do here is I reset the session.
Chris: So it's always a fresh context. so it's not using memory because you always
Chris: want to plan for a fresh context.
Chris: So I'll reset the context and then I'll run through the process again.
Chris: And if it makes a mistake, I'll have OpenCode analyze the session logs,
Chris: figure out where it went wrong and harden the skill again.
Chris: And I iterate on that a few times and usually by the third pass,
Chris: I've caught all that stuff.
Chris: And from that point forward, the thing just runs on its own forever until I want to modify it.
Chris: Or OpenClaw screws something up with some massive update. That could always happen.
Wes: You know, it did strike me. It was very slow, but I was playing around with
Wes: Gemma 4. And even just on the CPU, I could get it to run.
Wes: Not super fast. But, like, I've been doing this parallel work,
Wes: and you're talking about the infrastructure.
Wes: And something that was really clicking for me was just this,
Wes: like, I've been using, searching, SearchXNG more.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, that's really handy. It's a great example of building on something
Chris: that's open source and self-hostable.
Wes: And so at first I was just using it, right? But then I needed to search.
Wes: I didn't want to sign up for a Brave API key, which is the one built into OpenClaw.
Wes: You know, there's various mechanisms to do it.
Wes: I was like, but I have this infrastructure. And so I got OpenCode to help me
Wes: develop an MCP server for it, and that's baked into my injector setup.
Wes: And so now anything, any LLM that makes a call that uses the injector has access
Wes: to search automatically that's routed through my local infrastructure.
Wes: And then so I hooked the Gemma 4 model up to that.
Wes: And so then I was able to have this local model doing direct calls to my local
Wes: search engine provider to then go prepare the report for me or whatever I had to do as a test desk.
Wes: Now, it took four minutes because it was running on the CPU to do a handful of tool calls. But-
Wes: That's just going to get better.
Chris: That was all local using local self-hosted search.
Wes: Now, of course, that search reaches out to DuckDuckGo and various libraries.
Chris: But like, yeah. Yeah, but you're controlling that aspect of it, right?
Wes: I get to set all of that. That's configured declaratively in NixOS, right?
Chris: And that's what I'm trying to come back to. It's like, oh, yeah,
Chris: you have a search XNG, whatever it is, instance. Well, guess what?
Chris: It just got a lot more useful.
Chris: You got Home Assistant. Guess what? It just got a lot more useful.
Chris: You got Frigate DVR. Guess what? You got Tunar. You got Jellyfin.
Chris: You got anything that has an API or a config file just got more useful.
Wes: Yep.
Chris: That's how it works. And so that's the exciting part. But it is very early days.
Chris: And I think you should wait if you can. And things like Gemma 4 are going to
Chris: make it a lot more possible.
Wes: And then just because I can't not, but I think NixOS or some kind of declarative
Wes: infrastructure is ways and keeping everything in Git that you can all very useful
Wes: for this stuff because they can mess things up.
Wes: You can mess things up. config files change a lot or new things happen and just
Wes: having having a lot of snapshots you can roll back a reference is great.
Chris: The way i the way i try to do it with a budget is uh
Chris: i did subscribe to the minimax token plan which is
Chris: a one-time annual charge and then it's so much capacity that i've been throwing
Chris: everything i can at it to try to use it up like audio generation image analysis
Chris: everything and i just i cannot use up the tokens so it's a great problem to
Chris: have because it lets me really experiment but it's not the most advanced model
Chris: it's good minimax it's an open source model. It's very good.
Chris: I would love to run it locally. It's not there yet, though.
Chris: Um, but it's, it's good, but it's not great. And it will often mess up Nix config.
Chris: And the great thing is, is the Nix config has to build and verify.
Chris: And so then the agent sees the build fails, goes and fixes its syntax and runs the build again.
Chris: And I often think if I was on a Debian system or a Red Hat system,
Chris: would it have just injected a bogus config option?
Chris: And then I would have restarted the service and the service would have just failed or whatever,
Chris: or the OS wouldn't have booted and so what wes
Chris: is saying is the reason why it's nice to have it in a declarative environment
Chris: maybe it's even just a container i don't know that you are you know you can
Chris: take image snapshots up or github backups of config files whatever you're doing
Chris: so you can iterate uh is really useful because they're not great yet and of
Chris: course the fancier models are but if you're trying to do this on a budge yeah.
Wes: And having having some kind of feedback mechanism whether it's a linter a format
Wes: or something they can just tell you you know or do a smoke test of any kind
Wes: as a just a fast feedback mechanism.
Chris: Too so.
Wes: You catch mistakes before you're like way down six steps and it's moved on and that helps a lot too.
Brent: We're starting off our boost this week with a space ball boost from kangaroo
Brent: paradox one two three four five six satoshis,
Brent: Thank you, Kangaroo. Here's the message. Fell behind on the shows.
Brent: I'm slowly catching up, though.
Brent: Your pre-show rant on open source projects versus AI really resonated with me,
Brent: so I had to give it some value back.
Brent: I was mostly on board with open source software maintainers and their approach
Brent: to block big tech AI bots, and it seemed reasonable to me.
Brent: But as usual, your words and passion, Chris, made me feel that I should only
Brent: be at most a short-term solution because letting OpenAI and others hammer your
Brent: forge doesn't really seem viable.
Brent: However, on the long term, you're absolutely correct.
Chris: Yeah, that is, it's a tricky thing, right? Because there is a real problem of
Chris: resources and open source projects are limited in resources.
Wes: For sure.
Chris: They don't have time to be chasing server infrastructure problems.
Chris: But again, I don't think you fix that by blocking them because they just go right around you.
Chris: Thank you very much, Kangaroo, for being our baller booster.
Chris: Appreciate you very much.
Chris: Hybrid Sarcasm comes in with a row of McDucks 22,222 sats.
Chris: Having set up my own clanker with OpenClaw, I concur that what I want to find
Chris: is APIs for all the things, starting with LubeLogger.
Chris: Did you see that also Tunar has an API?
Chris: LubeLogger is the one I need to set up. Hey, add the oil change.
Wes: That's another really nice workflow of the thing in your chat app is,
Wes: you know, adding to the grocery cart, adding to something, tracking this and
Wes: writing it up nicely for me, whatever.
Chris: Unbelievably, both Wes and I have grocery stores that have APIs. and
Chris: so we both have wired up our clause to talk
Chris: to the api and i find this very useful actually the
Chris: most when i come home from the grocery store i come home and i'm unloading the
Chris: groceries and i go oh crap i forgot to get and then i open up telegram and i
Chris: go add this add this add this add this add this to my shopping cart and then
Chris: the next time i go it's just there in my shopping ready to go or like dylan
Chris: comes in and he's like dad i i'd like to get some more bottled water i'm like
Chris: bottled water dylan i don't really want some bottled all right let me all right
Chris: add bottled water the shopping cart, fine. And now it's in the shopping cart, right?
Chris: So because if it has an API, that's what I'm doing.
Wes: But don't get the expensive stuff.
Chris: Yeah, right, yeah. Well, and so what I set up is a preferences file.
Chris: So the first time I choose a brand, it remembers that that's my preferred preference.
Chris: And then, you know, size and flavors and stuff like that too.
Chris: But you're absolutely right. Tunar does have an API and it's glorious hybrid
Chris: because it'll let me fix a problem this weekend.
Chris: He also sent us a row of duckies to say happy Easter.
Chris: Happy Easter to you. The show is here on Easter Sunday and we appreciate the value.
Wes: Nyquist comes in with 5,000 cents.
Wes: No message, just value.
Chris: Thank you, sir.
Wes: Appreciate that. And then emasy01 comes in with 4,096 cents.
Wes: For a few years, I've been using Secure Boot with my own keys on my laptop with
Wes: Arch Linux, Windows, and Mac OS.
Chris: Ah, excellent. Okay.
Wes: I generated my init RAMFS with DrawCut, then generated a UKI and signed it with SBCTL.
Wes: I used OpenCore as my boot manager, and I signed that and the Windows boot manager
Wes: as well. After each kernel update, I would regenerate and re-sign the UKI,
Wes: and after every Windows update, I would re-sign the Windows Boot Manager.
Wes: I also encrypted all three operating systems with BcacheFS, encryption,
Wes: BitLocker, and then it kind of gets cut off.
Chris: Interesting.
Wes: This is incredible. Thank you for the experience report.
Chris: Yeah, that's exactly what we wanted. I'm wondering why. I'm wondering what the
Chris: motivation was. Is there a corporate requirement? Because that's a work.
Wes: It is a lot of work.
Chris: Every kernel update? That guy's not messing around. Emacy, let us know.
Chris: Why? I mean, other than just because it's cool to be secure,
Chris: which I agree with. And then come over and set up all our bootloaders for us.
Wes: There we go.
Chris: Thank you, sir, for the boost. Appreciate it.
Brent: Well, our dear Gene being boosted in a series of boosts here.
Brent: There's a couple rows of ducks, some elite boosts for a total of 9,340 sats.
Brent: A little comment on Linux Unplugged 658 saying, I too am thankful for your scale coverage.
Chris: Oh, thanks. We missed you, Gene.
Wes: We sure did.
Brent: At home, I'm using SystemdBoot most places because it's the default in Nix OS.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Brent: And the more I think about it, the more I feel that I'm very against any age
Brent: verification that is done off device.
Brent: I'm not a fan of the idea in general, but can live with something that isn't
Brent: sending me to a third party for that verification.
Chris: These.
Brent: Inherently won't work as well but it's okay considering the alternative is to
Brent: give up any semblance of privacy if i have to prove myself to my computer i've
Brent: just effectively registered it and everything it does with the governments.
Chris: Yeah i guess if you're thinking it's gonna happen one way or the other and if
Chris: it doesn't happen the way it's been talked about now it's probably going to
Chris: happen through some sort of third-party verification that does seem kind of
Chris: a bad direction good point gene i.
Brent: Read a really neat uh contrast to this saying hey the content should tell us
Brent: what age it's appropriate for not us telling them we are and what our age is.
Chris: That's what's always made me think it's really just about waving the hands on
Chris: like the advertisers side well we we checked right we did something if they
Chris: really were trying to prevent it they probably would do it at the content side
Chris: but maybe that gets more legally murky i don't know.
Brent: Gene continues here with Elite Boost. Do you know of any podcast clients or
Brent: other clients that will show the video version that you mentioned being in your feed?
Chris: Podverse and fountain yeah fountain um i know there's a couple of others but
Chris: i don't have direct experience with them recently but they will let you see
Chris: the video version of the show gene thank you for asking gene.
Brent: Also wants to make sure we saw an article here about the euro office launching
Brent: uh europe's open source office rival and links to uh a nice little source here.
Chris: Yeah there's also been quite a nasty breakup between collabra and libre office it's not good it's.
Wes: Never been a better time to be a markdown user.
Chris: And not.
Wes: Need an office.
Chris: Which is a privileged position agree completely that is true thank you gene
Chris: appreciate you very much it's always good to hear from you theo mal comes in with 6 000 sets,
Chris: Oh, he's a long-time listener. First time, Booster.
Wes: Hey-o.
Chris: Love the show, as so does my son, 15. That's great. Fully running Linux and loving every minute.
Chris: I'm wanting to migrate away from Google Workspace and was leaning towards Proton.
Chris: Now I'm thinking maybe Nextcloud might be a good way to go.
Chris: Hosted on a local server. What are your thoughts?
Chris: Well, I think if it's only a handful of users, Nextcloud, well, hmm.
Brent: Depends on what kind of work you want to do on the long term, I would say.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. I do like this idea. I was going to maybe suggest,
Chris: what's the one that you like? Zoho.
Chris: Zoho. You know, I know it's not self-hosted, but it's a nice alternative to Google Workspace.
Chris: I think you should try it, to be honest with you, Theo, because it's good for
Chris: most people, but it really comes down to users and how they interact with web
Chris: apps and how they take to the performance of NextCloud.
Wes: True. Well, exactly what you're doing with it. Yeah.
Chris: I wish it could be a solid yes. I really want to be able to say that,
Chris: but I just don't think it is if I'm being honest with you, but I think it's
Chris: a worth trying. Is that fair?
Wes: Yeah. I mean, different people have different standards, different needs,
Wes: different performance characteristics that they're okay with.
Chris: And honestly, we'd love to hear feedback from people that have it out there
Chris: working successfully as a Google workspace alternative.
Chris: No, not just talking file sync or your darn photos, talking full Google workspace
Chris: sync alternative or workspace alternative.
Wes: It's also hard. Cause I don't know. Maybe there are, there probably are some,
Wes: but like i don't love even google workspace or the microsoft offering so i don't
Wes: know what the best version even is uh forward humor boosts in with 4444 sets,
Wes: Hey guys, I'm enjoying hearing the compliance conversation with Determinant Systems in episode 657.
Wes: Have you heard of anyone running NixOS in a CMMC or ITAR environment?
Wes: I'm not sure if it's even possible to meet FIPS requirements on NixOS and would love any input.
Chris: I imagine these are the exact kind of problems Determinant Systems and Phlox
Chris: are trying to solve, right? This
Chris: is the value add that they can bring to enterprises that are using Nix.
Wes: Yeah, I would probably go ask around maybe on the NixOS discourse could be one
Wes: spot, maybe also see, and you may have done these things already, so, you know.
Wes: Maybe go troll some recent NICS conferences. There might be folks talking about
Wes: that kind of thing, because there definitely are people exploring this space.
Wes: It's exactly where the progress is and the exact things I don't necessarily know.
Wes: And then, yeah, third, maybe go reach out to folks like Detsys or Phlox or various
Wes: folks who are more interfaced with people who might be in those environments.
Wes: And you might be able to find some people who would be willing to have a talk.
Chris: Yeah, it is an area that Red Hat has focused on and SUSE has focused on for
Chris: a very long time, just trying to get each one of those checked off over the years.
Chris: And I think you're seeing the same process start with Nix, but I'm not sure.
Wes: It might also depend too, right? Like, are you trying to run something that
Wes: ultimately builds a container that has an S-bomb that runs on whatever?
Wes: Or are you trying to run like full fat Nix OS?
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. All right. Well, thank you everybody who supported
Chris: the show with a boost. We really do very, very much appreciate it.
Chris: Thank you everybody who also streamed. Sats 18 of you did that.
Chris: And collectively, you stacked 33,366 Sats.
Chris: Not too bad. Not too bad. You combine that with our boosters, 208,174 sats.
Chris: Thank you very much for supporting episode 661 of your unplugged program.
Chris: If you'd like to send us a boost, I think Fountain makes it probably the easiest.
Chris: There is a whole self-hosted route you can go with AlbiHub and a bunch of apps, which is a lot of fun.
Chris: We talked some of that in a recent episode of This Week in Bitcoin,
Chris: if you want to check that out. And thank you also to our members.
Chris: One pick this week. That's a rarity. Which is technically the rule of the pick
Chris: segment. It's only supposed to be one.
Wes: Yeah, well, we...
Chris: It's been almost a year, I think. But we wanted to talk about single-file CLI
Chris: because it solves a pretty, pretty handy problem. Or whatever.
Chris: It's a CLI tool that solves a problem that I've had probably,
Chris: I don't know, forever. Because I used to solve it with something built into Netscape, to Firefox.
Chris: Is a complete copy of a web page in a single HTML file based on single file.
Chris: And this is single file CLI.
Wes: Yeah, that's right. A CLI tool for saving a faithful copy of a complete web page.
Wes: And crucially, right, like you can do that in a variety of ways.
Wes: And there are probably better or different tools.
Wes: So, you know, boost in, write in if you have a preferred version of getting
Wes: this task accomplished or archiving websites.
Wes: But I liked sort of the idea that maybe for your own archive,
Wes: for processing somehow, whatever you're trying to do of just like a single html
Wes: file per per site instead of having stuff that's like vendored a bunch of images
Wes: into a folder which is better for some use cases for sure but not for this not for simplicity.
Chris: And this could be good or bad depending on your opinion but i like that
Chris: it uses chrome or chromium and then it uses dino
Chris: as a standalone script injected into the web page using the
Chris: chrome dev tools protocol to actually render it through chrome so if it's a
Chris: website chrome can render you're going to be able to capture it with this which
Chris: means everything right so i use firefox as my daily driver but that's absolutely
Chris: for me valuable you just have to have chrome or chromium installed or a chromium
Chris: based browser and then uh you know be able to support that remote.
Wes: Yeah the dev tools.
Chris: Protocol which is pretty.
Wes: Easy these days.
Chris: It is it's very easy these days with the current version so single file cli
Chris: and it is agpl 3.0 thank you wes agpl 3.0 So you could always use your suggestions on some picks, too.
Chris: If there's something that you find very handy that you run on your Linux box
Chris: that we haven't covered or makes your server more useful, send it in to us.
Chris: We'd love to cover it because we're always looking for great,
Chris: useful tools. And I feel a little bad that we only had one pick for you,
Chris: even though that's technically a rule.
Wes: Yeah, here I got a bonus pick.
Chris: What? No way.
Wes: Okay. It's called HTML2Markdown.
Chris: Okay.
Wes: And it's just a single, it's a Go project. This was one of the inspirations
Wes: for me making my own tool, which you can use that, too, if you want.
Wes: I'll throw a link in there. but it's really more meant I just wanted it more
Wes: as a library so this is a sneaky double pick yeah it is and this was one of
Wes: the inspirations along with the Mozilla readability like for their reader mode stuff you.
Chris: Know what Wes you make me want to be a better man,
Chris: Impressive.
Wes: A robust HTML to Markdown converter that transforms HTML, even entire websites
Wes: into clean, readable Markdown.
Wes: Supports complex formatting, customizable options, and plugins for full control.
Wes: But it can handle, you know, tables and complicated nesting and a lot of nice stuff.
Chris: So you're saying I can take like those Libre documents and I can rage quit Libre
Chris: Office because they got beef with Calabra and I like Calabra a lot.
Chris: And now I can just convert them all to Markdown and have beautiful Markdown-rated
Chris: versions of documents even if they have tables in them?
Wes: You know, I don't know about it. It depends on how dynamic. If it's all JavaScript
Wes: rendered, then maybe not.
Chris: I think you just should have said no. Wait a minute. Hold on.
Chris: There's JavaScript and LibreOffice documents?
Wes: Well, if you're talking about a website.
Chris: Oh, no, I'm talking LibreOffice. Okay.
Wes: Yeah, you're in Office world.
Chris: HTML? Because I thought they could save them as HTMLs. I don't know.
Wes: Oh, probably. Yeah, well, then that should work. Okay. I thought you were thinking
Wes: like some sort of online interface. I don't know.
Chris: I'm trying to rage quit LibreOffice because I got beef with my boys at Calabra,
Chris: and I thought you maybe bring me a tool to make that easier and you're just shutting me down.
Wes: No, I'm trying to help your claw read stuff on the internet.
Chris: That's useful and relevant and on theme for the show. Or make your archive.
Wes: You know, instead of some stuff you want full HTML, some stuff you just want
Wes: markdown because do you need the full HTML of the Pharonix article?
Chris: He's doing it again, Brent, where he's bringing a show relevant thing. It's on theme.
Brent: I'm kind of with Wes on this one.
Chris: You probably should be. All right, links to that are in the show notes over
Chris: at linuxunplugged.com slash 661. You can find all of that and our contact information,
Chris: RSS feed, the mumble room. But you know what?
Chris: If their claw does want more information, more metadata, or maybe they're just their own...
Chris: Hooks we got some for them don't we wes.
Wes: Oh we got a data structure data rich rss feed it's an xml file don't you know.
Chris: I like xml well i don't but the machines do well.
Wes: And you can have namespaces which is pretty cool because then you can put the
Wes: podcast namespace in there and that's got all kinds of fancy goodies.
Chris: You could just ask your claw to expose the mp4 that snuck in there that your
Chris: podcast client doesn't show you yeah that's right what about like uh information
Chris: that was in the for the content of the show wes there's got to be something
Chris: i can like the description tag No, I mean, yeah, I guess that's a starter.
Wes: Or like the iTunes keywords?
Chris: No, that seems old. No, I want to know all the brilliant things Brent said.
Wes: Oh, for that, you want cloud chapters?
Chris: Well, I mean, that would get me close.
Wes: That gives you the Brent section of the show.
Chris: Okay, okay, okay. I thought maybe you'd have a transcript for me or something.
Wes: Oh, yeah.
Chris: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Wes: Yeah, no, we do, actually.
Chris: Oh, we do.
Wes: Yeah, VTT and SRT.
Chris: You might even say we've had it for a couple of years now, but it is handy more so than ever.
Chris: All right, and then last but not least, a little bit of metadata for you.
Chris: We are live every single Sunday over at jblive.tv.
Chris: Yeah, we do it at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern, and of course we gots it over at,
Chris: jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. Say it like that, jupiter. Jup.
Chris: And if you go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar, the script will just
Chris: convert it to your local time zone so you don't even have to do the math.
Chris: You can come hang out in our mumble room, our chat room.
Chris: Tell us we're a bunch of goofballs we love it and help title the show as well,
Chris: shout out to our members for supporting this episode and for everybody tuning
Chris: in that shares it we always appreciate that as well word of mouth is the number
Chris: one way to promote a podcast also.
Wes: Brent better leave soon because Linux Fest Northwest is coming up.
Chris: And the schedule is.
Wes: Actually live now.
Chris: Linux Fest Northwest go check it out schedules live and we'll see you there
Chris: it's going to be great we're going to do a live show thanks so much for joining us see you next Sunday.