Kenneth Ballenegger

A little preview of a work in progress…

Should Apple have an App Store rule that transactional and advertising push notifications must have separate opt-ins?

@nikunj In what world is $100m a bad valuation for a company making only $3m annually. Ridiculous to be complaining about it, it's more than fair imo

@krunkosaurus @sdhilip Do I need to open source my Klaw keyboard? I've reimplemented WisprFlow mobile and it works pretty well

@sdhilip MacParakeet also open source and free for Mac OS (I’ve contributed a few commits to it) but what about iOS?

I've dictated almost everything for 6 months with Wispr Flow. 44,414 words, 161 wpm, top 0.1% of users. Last week I tried FluidVoice. Open source, runs local on my Mac, corrects as I speak with no API key, and handles slang better than I expected. Cancelled my paid plan. If you're on a Mac, this one's for you: altic.dev/fluid @ALTIC_DEV

@sudoingX If someone has been using Hermes since before this existed; how does one enable this blank slate? Disable all the features and tools I don't use it need without breaking anything @NousResearch @Teknium

hermes agent just shipped a setup mode called blank slate and it's the most i've liked a feature decision in a while. instead of an agent that comes with everything bolted on, you start with almost nothing, a provider, a model, file operations, and a terminal, and you opt into the rest yourself. that's the whole agent to start. then you add the tools and skills you actually use, one at a time, and nothing else is sitting in your config or eating your context. the flow is stupid simple, install with one line: curl -fsSL hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bash then run hermes setup, pick blank slate, and a couple minutes later you've got a working agent carrying exactly what you told it to carry, nothing more. hermes itself runs on 18 dependencies and the agent loop is a single file you can actually read, so there's not much hiding in there to begin with. i keep coming back to this because it's the opposite of how most tools think. the default everywhere is more, more skills, more integrations, more surface. blank slate bets that you know what your agent needs better than a defaults menu does, and on hardware you own that bet is almost always right, you're the one who has to live with whatever's loaded. if you've been meaning to run an agent well and the all in one setups felt like too much, this is the one to start on. one model, one terminal, build up from there. the install's one line anon, go see for yourself.

How much KoolAid have you been drinking? Even if we limit it to the USA, Austin has better food than SFO, and SF is pretty much a downgrade from any destination connected to its airport. Soulless city stress, homeless everywhere, and nobody can talk about anything else than the agentic future.

SFO is the only airport where I’ve considered eating at after landing.

@krunkosaurus @creativespeak2 There's also Superset from YCombinator

@creativespeak2 Dang, backed by Ycombinator. Checking it out! Thx

Telling my friends and also telling you. Terminal / iTerm2 is out. Cmux is in.

@krunkosaurus I've been using iTerm + tmux for decades… do I really need to learn something new?

@aymanalabdul Found them…

S-Tier C-Suite: CEO: Square jaw behind a gray beard. Runs the company off an iPad and hasn't opened a laptop in a decade. CFO: Lenovo ThinkPad, three monitors, has cried over a spreadsheet and will absolutely cry over one again. Twitches over $14 salads on company card. CTO: Banned from 3 countries. Carries an Android phone they cracked themselves. Blurry in every photograph. Knows where the bodies are buried. Never online during the day. Always online at night. COO: Former valedictorian who once flagged the CTO for not updating a footer from 2025 to 2026. Always 10 minutes early. The CTO's natural enemy. CMO: Part time influencer who hasn't paid for a meal since 2016. Gets recognized at airport lounges by people who can't explain what they do either. CRO: Great Gatsby energy. Doesn't need the money, works for the thrill. Drives a vintage Aston Martin and is always late. The COO has filed complaints.

@tankots @WisprFlow To that effect I built my own Klaw keyboard that runs everything through my local inference box, and even supports richer drafting/lookup/generation via my full agent.

@tankots @WisprFlow Wispr flow is a great product but I want to roll out my own backend and not give you everything I ever say no matter how private

2 days ago I asked what you hate about @WisprFlow. thought i'd get about 50 strongly worded opinions. i was wrong. over 700 of you, and still counting, have shared with immaculate detail what has worked best and what hasn't we've collated all the info and my team is currently on this thanks to everyone who shared, this is how we make products that people can't live without ❤️ P.S. if you didn't share your concerns yet, please do comment - we're updating our database every 12 hours.

@datarade I mean as much as I would love to run everything on grok, turns out anthropic and OpenAI still have the best models and are the only ones that can be trusted in terms of output quality. Grok and my local Qwen are only backups for when the frontier models refuse the work

OpenAI is run by a gay man with a husband who has adopted a boy via surrogacy, put a former NSA chief on the board, and has a sister who does OnlyFans and pornography and claims he raped her when they were young, and as well he declared OpenAI would enable the creation of erotic material. Get off your OpenAI/ChatGPT subscription and switch to perplexity or claude if you don't want to associate with the guy.

A few uncomfortable truths that need to be said: 1. Everyone is so afraid of being accused of being a luddite (or, god-forbid, left behind) that the vast majority of people are too afraid to question the dominant tech market narratives.

I’ve been building Klaw to be available wherever the intent appears. The keyboard is the clearest version. If I’m in any app on my phone, I can call Klaw from a native keyboard extension without switching contexts. The request starts inside the thing I’m already doing: replying to a message, writing an email, saving a note, fixing some text, looking something up. That changes the feel of the agent quite a lot. In chat, I’m usually going to the agent with a task. With the keyboard, the agent is sitting inside the task already. It can see the sentence I’m writing, the app I’m in, the thing I’m trying to do, and the context is much less lossy. The same idea shows up in other places too: - an iPad in the kitchen that acts as a voice assistant - native share sheets, so I can send Klaw anything from any iPhone app - email forwards, so messages can become agent tasks - chat, when chat is the right surface Chat is still great. It’s just one surface. The powerful thing is making the agent callable from the places where life and work already happen.

@cobi_bean The GBs aren't the issue, it's scary having software you don't need on your main device. Every dependency adds risk, and I don't need another copy of node and python and whatever else is in the 3gb of code sitting there

@kob u literally have contrarian in your bio lol I think you can spare 3gb

Hermes Desktop dropped today, so i hooked my cloud agent into it. setup: > Settings → Gateway > Remote gateway > paste URL + session token > save + reconnect now my Telegram-first agent has a desktop home: sessions, skills, tools, memory, MCP, settings. walkthrough below:

@UOSJoe @cobi_bean I trust it will, I switched to Hermes two days after release and the pace of updates has been mind-blowing since. But on this, I'd rather wait a bit @NousResearch

@kob @cobi_bean With the rate they ship updates im sure it will be fixed in no time, they are already aware 👍

In my main Mac, I try to install as few dependencies as possible for security and hygiene. If I want the app as just a client to my Hermes running remote, having to install a runtime and 3gb of dependencies is a huge smell. I'm not mistrusting @NousResearch - but it's definitely a deal breaker on principle

@ThomasLawDeep @kob why? genuinely curious about the reason why this is so bad