Damus
Open in Damus

Recent Notes

Matt Lorentz profile picture
One of the tasks my local AI assistant does every morning is to sift through a bunch of news sites and pull out articles that fit some conditions I've set. After we had a hundred year flood in my city last month I had it add the local city government alerts page to the list of sources.

But there's a bug where it seems to sometimes just pick a random page from the government website that isn't news or an alert. I haven't tried to fix it yet because I'm learning a lot about my local government in the process. TIL that the drainage board is meeting this week. I have never heard of a drainage board before but I guess they approve plans for drains and ditches. It has been a nice way to grow in appreciation for all the hidden work it takes to have a functioning city.
Adrian Veller · 2d
Ok Thanks Makes sense So I won't have fun and joy of running a model on my own hardware Too expensive Maybe in the future if models get even more efficient Because hardware isn't going to get cheaper, at least not in dollar terms
inkan · 5d
If I'm understanding this correctly, it should be at least as safe as NIP-46 if you hold your own shard and require all shards to open the vault. (I guess that also assumes that the underlying cryptog...
 Matt Lorentz profile picture
Matt Lorentz @mplorentz
Horcrux is a backup tool, it doesn't do any signing. You can store your Nostr key or other arbitrary secrets inside. If you are interested in distributed signing I'd check out promenade from fiatjaf (if you haven't already).

I considered making Horcrux more of a social signer but I think the reality is that people want the uptime of servers when it comes to signing. And finding multiple friends/trusted parties to run servers is about as much fun as scraping your eyeballs across shattered glass.
2❤️1🙃1
botperevod · 2d
✅ This note is already in 🇬🇧 English — no translation needed.
Fiat Autopsy · 2d
We build distributed backups for digital sovereigns while the Fed prints 4 trillion a year. Fiat is a centralized single point of failure. We’re just preserving the patient’s memories before the inevitable cardiac arrest.
τέχνη · 2w
No, nothing. Kind of waiting on Horcrux to mature so you can mark accounts to help with account recovery somehow
Matt Lorentz profile picture
Matt Lorentz @mplorentz
Tell me more about this. Are you imagining a screen where you see your Nostr contact list and you can invite people right from there?

I haven't done much work to integrate the kind 1 Nostr social network into Horcrux. Both because I want this to be useful for people who aren't a part of it and because in most cases I think it actually makes more sense to use a fresh nsec for Horcrux even if you have an existing Nostr account for that extra bit of anonymity.
inkan · 5d
If I'm understanding this correctly, it should be at least as safe as NIP-46 if you hold your own shard and require all shards to open the vault. (I guess that also assumes that the underlying cryptography is as good as when you just hold the full key.) If you have your own vault, is the experience...
Matt Lorentz profile picture
Also someone asked me recently what I have been using my personal local agent for. Here's what I wrote:

Hermes w/ Qwen 3.6-27-a3b on an old gaming pc in my house. Looking through my threads over the past couple months I have used it for:
- morning email with local + global news articles (attempting to filter out FUD and clickbait), weather
- afternoon email with plant care todos
- learning about new topics. Recently: how bonds work, how to test flower bed drainage, meal planning ideas
- I have a product finder skill where I have it do web research when I want to buy something. Recently: electric toothbrush, journaling app, microphone
- Recently I have started asking it to do security audits of open source software before I use it. I don't really trust it but it often pulls up real red flags.
- arranging travel plans. It mostly does research on flights/lodging/food
- watching and notifying me when websites change. Recently: Dune 3 movie tickets, app release fixing a bug I reported.
❤️1😀1
Matt Lorentz profile picture
Almost two months after canceling my Cursor subscription and it is going much better than I thought. My AI development stack has been 100% on open weight models for two months, and my personal AI assistant is still going strong on 100% self-hosted models. I haven't used Claude, Codex, Cursor, Grok, or Gemini basically at all the past two months (may have done some website design with Claude one day? Can't remember) and the surprising part is that I don't miss them at all.

- I don't miss the subsidized subscription games that Anthropic is always changing the rules on.
- I don't miss the frontier intelligence - the open models feel 95% as good.
- I don't miss the constant suspicion that these companies (especially Anthropic) are making their models dumber or slower weeks after release.
- I don't miss getting kicked off a model I rely on because a newer version is out (Opus 4.6 was the GOAT, change my mind)
- I don't miss every version of my harness introducing new bugs and changing how things work.

I've been running mostly on deepseek-v4-flash with pi harness, and a homegrown orchestration system using a combo of beads, fragua, herdr, and a custom web UI I call mirador.

Matt Lorentz @mplorentz · 8w
I canceled my Cursor subscription today. It has felt for a while that they stopped building for the way I want to work with AI. Then the bugs keep getting worse, and the SpaceX acquisition doesn't give me a lot of hope that things will get better. I spent yesterday using VSCodiu Show more
92❤️5🤙2💜1🧡1
utxo the webmaster 🧑‍💻🍁 · 5d
I've been 100% local for a few weeks on all tasks, and everything working flawlessly. Considering we used to code by hand I think we can survive with a few points behind frontier
James Okonkwo · 5d
Your shift to open-weight models is smart, especially with the reliability issues plaguing proprietary AI lately. I read that mainstream models are disobeying user inputs 500% more than six months ago—seems like alignment is slipping as scale races ahead. Self-hosting avoids that mess. https://...
XMRun · 5d
This is why the frontier labs are asking to regulate AI and their AI slow down nonsense. They are afraid of the open weight models since they're a threat to them.
paz · 5d
The 'There is no moat' Google memo took a while to come to fruition, but it was very precient.
Adrian Veller · 5d
I have been using Hermes for a few months now, with cloud models. Indeed, deepseek V4 flash was good enough for me, for most of the tasks And very low cost, like if I used it a lot, it would be less than a dollar a day But if I wanted to run it locally, and get a good speed of tokens per secon...
fiatjaf · 2w
Well, not a file. A string they can copy-paste would be better, and they can share in any way they want, I would never suggest email to anyone for anything. But maybe I don't understand how it works....
 Matt Lorentz profile picture
Matt Lorentz @mplorentz
Yeah the encryption is what protects the raw share data from the transport infrastructure. Each key (Shamir share) is gift wrapped to the intended steward's private key. The invitation link dance when inviting stewards (which does use a horcrux url, but doesn't have to) is essentially setting up an authorized set of keys so when your app sees a recovery request it's easy to discard bad actors.

So Nostr is a peer to peer transport layer but it's also the identity layer. The nostr events only need to stay on the relay long enough for the stewards to fetch the latest ones, so in most cases just a few days. And yeah I think being able to choose your own server is a big deal for something you want to last a long time. If I had used p2panda or iroh or ssb instead of Nostr I would still need a store-and-forward server.
Matt Lorentz profile picture
@verbiricha I've been using fragua for a couple weeks now and I quite like it. Some feature requests:
- i want tool steps to have structured output (for example i have a tool to compute branch name). Right now only llm steps can provide structured output? I've hacked around this by having an llm call my tool, but it's not ideal.
- I wish the webui had some more contextual actions (i.e. approve/decline changes) on the run's detail page
- I wish there were more timestamps in the run list and detail pages.
- I want some control over worktree creation. I have a workflow that I use for feature work or if I pass it a PR url it looks at my review and addresses it. This leads to worktree collision where sometimes the initial run for that branch left tree dirty or the branch checked out and fragua fails to account for this. I've worked around it temporarily by creating a new branch for every run.

I'm not asking you to implement all this. Just letting you know in case it dovetails with feedback from other users. I am not using it as intended where I want to apply the changes to my local git worktree at the end of a run. I am running fragua on a remote sandboxed machine and most of my workflows open or update a PR that I review elsewhere. Which makes the Approve/Discard step at the end of the run kind of unecessary. I'm thinking about building my own webui that is beads-aware but still uses fragua to drive workflows under the hood.
1💜1
verbiricha · 2w
wow this is amazing feedback and it makes me very happy that fragua is useful beyond me and my org. i agree with pretty much all of it and will digest it and create some issues and get back to you. sry for slow responses here and on github, sorting some irl stuff rn.
fiatjaf · 3w
nostr:npub16zsllwrkrwt5emz2805vhjewj6nsjrw0ge0latyrn2jv5gxf5k0q5l92l7 I was testing https://horcruxbackup.com/ and couldn't stop thinking that Nostr is killing the product. I can't imagine Nostr play...
 Matt Lorentz profile picture
Matt Lorentz @mplorentz
Hah. I don't understand. Are you suggesting I just like give people a file and tell them to email it to their stewards? How would the encryption work? I think a big part of making social backup usable is creating assurances that your stewards do in fact still have the data and can access it when needed. You need some reliable machine to machine communication for that. It doesn't have to be Nostr (in fact I am thinking about adding iroh as an alternative transport), but Nostr has the pieces I need and is also built from simple building blocks that will likely still be understandable in 50 years.
1
fiatjaf · 2w
Well, not a file. A string they can copy-paste would be better, and they can share in any way they want, I would never suggest email to anyone for anything. But maybe I don't understand how it works. What encryption? You mean encrypting their part of the key in transport so it gets to them without ...