Hermes Agent, LLMs and SLMs

[littleman]

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/

[rcjordan]

> I am just diving in now
> Hold my beer, Bubba, I'm going in

Installing on a laptop? linux mini-pc?  Your raspberry-pi?

Keep us posted.

[ergophobe]

> "give it your messaging accounts"

Mmm... I'm not comfortable with that. How are you using it and how are you sandboxing it?

[littleman]

>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

[littleman]

> "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.

[ergophobe]

So, for example, you can give it read only access to your email?

I guess the problem for me is that being mostly retired, I just don't have that much email volume and so I don't think feeding it into an LLM would be a big advantage for me.

[littleman]

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.

[littleman]

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.).