For the information based ideas there really isn't any tools that I am seeing, more like notifications email/SMS.  For commercial fleets there is a hodgepodge of regulations in the United States.  We have the federal, state and local laws to navigate. 

On the construction side I am thinking to just shoot them an email offering them a free month.  If they find the information useful then they could subscribe.  I think this could actually be a valuable service.  I've been going through my local government websites (city/county/schools) and they are all over the place when it comes to layout.  I am sure it's quite a pain for the typical contractor to navigate all that.  I am thinking weekly summaries and alerts when a new project goes live.

I have been doing a bit of digging on different models to try out. 

A couple of obvious ones are:

• site audit
• reputation management

Both would be fairly easy to deploy, with site audit being particularly easy and low cost.  The reputation monitoring/management would be a little harder because of unauthorized scraping  or having to pay to use someone else's scraped data.  What's turning me off to both of these is that they both have a lot of market saturation.  Though there are an endless amount of potential customers there is also an *almost* endless amount of companies trying to get their attention.

I have considered going ultra-niche and focusing on California school bus operators.  This is a space I currently now a lot about.  I would monitor the California Highway Patrol, California Department of Education, DMV, CARB, NHTSA, and the California Legislature and post any relevant/actionable news for the local industry.  The strengths here is that I am in that space and also that there isn't much being done in it.  The drawback is that news is slow, the market is small and there is potential liability if I and the bots get something wrong.  I think the liability part could be mitigated with disclaimers and with sighting links.  The potential customer base is also a lot of managers who work in public sector fleets, so there also may be obstetrical for them to subscribe to the service.

Two I am currently considering:

1: Broadening out the school bus monitoring service, but make it for all commercial vehicles. That makes the market 100 times larger and the potential audience is mostly private sector where spending for information that can save headache and money is a lot easier.

2: Scraping local government websites for municipal construction opportunities.  The upside here is pretty good.  Government websites are all over the place in the way they post information.  As far as I can see there is low liability if I give wrong information.  If the contractor misses a job posting that's bad for business, but I am not going to get sued over it.  It should be an easy purchase without much red tape.  I could start locally and expand -- repeating the model as I go.  Every city, county and school district posts bids and there are thousands of contractors (HVAC, electrical, fencing, paving, tree trimming, ect.).

I don't know about read access.  That might be a setting available in Gmail, but I haven't looked into it.  I did use it to send myself a test email.  When reaching out to the world I am going to have Hermes have it's own accounts so that there is a wall between it and my personal information.

I am setting up a dedicated "server", an old desktop I use to use for work.  I am going to be running it headless (no GUI interface) and use tmux to have a persistent session with Hermes that I can log in and out of while keeping Hermes running in the background. 

My goal is to build a low effort information based businesses with a subscription model.  I am still working out the plan, but it seems like an interesting experiment.  I want it to be 99% automated and I am going to document the process. 

It isn't going to be anything fancy, I will be using Hermes the way someone would be using a smart intern to get the bulk of the work done.

> "give it your messaging accounts"

I messed with email.  Google has a app token system where you can give an app a unique password and limited access.

>How are you using it and how are you sandboxing it?

Use Docker, a VM or a machine without any sensitive information.

https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/user-guide/docker
https://openclawlaunch.com/guides/hermes-agent-docker

You all should be looking into Hermes.  A couple of years ago we had a conversation about AI driven projects that can manage other AI systems and get actual work done.  I am just diving in now, but it looks quite capable.

https://hermes-agent.org/

https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/

That's interesting, it is like 'try' vs. 'will'. 

Example:
"I will try to lose weight" vs. "I will lose weight"

Saying "try" is giving you an out.

I have been reading about how the younger generation isn't drinking much in the USA either, but from what I am seeing with my 21 y.o.'s friends at UCB the drinking culture is very much alive and much worse than my group of friends at the same age.  One of her friends that also went to the same high school as her ended up in the emergency room and had his stomach pumped. Anecdotal, but I don't think the trend is universal.

I am hoping for more of a MS/Apple vs. Linux situation.

BMW is also the company that came up with the idea of a subscription for heated seats.

White is boring, but it is so practical.  White paint hides the dirt and it is never hot to the touch, even on the hottest days.  You would be surprised by how many people don't know about how cool they stay, but that's the main reason why work vehicles are mostly while.

That's a beautiful mountain lion.  Good thing ML attacks on humans are uncommon.  Honestly, I think you are lucky to be able to see one so clearly like that.  I saw one years back on the campus of UCSC.  I was hanging out with some friends on the grass in the evening and one just crossed right in front of us.  The closest distance was maybe 35-40 feet away.  There are deer all over that campus, so it would make sense that they would be hanging out there too. 

Opportunity was an amazing success.  I do think they set the bar low in the original mission outline though.  I wonder if they have come up with a solution for dust on the solar cells yet?  Seems there must be something they could do like windshield wipers or compressed air occasionally blowing on the cells to clear them off.

That Naomi Klein quote its hard.

Something like this could be very cool if widely adapted, otherwise it is pretty limited to the Bluetooth signal between two phones.  It could be useful for a bunch of people in a single compound who want private alternative to texting each other.

Meshtastic uses LoRa and can scale many miles.  It takes outside hardware, but you can go back and forth from cell phone to a LoRa device.  An off grid network can be as much as 2,800 miles wide and it can also tap into the internet or satellites to communicate globally if desired.

https://meshtastic.org/