I Am #AliveAndThriving Today! || #IAmAliveChallenge || Daily Off-Grid Jungle Journal Entry: Day #1379 - Exploring Other Backends and AI Models for Hermes Agent - Lower Puna, Far East Big Island, Hawai'i - Thursday, May 7, 2026

2 hours ago

I live naked and barefooted, very close to Earth and Nature, in an 18-acre, off-grid, clothing-optional, food-forest intentional community (GaiaYoga Gardens), way out in the jungles of Lower Puna, far East Big Island, Hawai'i, and I have for more than 7 years now. Although there are many challenges, I love my life, and I'm immensely grateful to live where and how I do, on my own terms! I would not want to live any other way! 😁🙏💚⚡💥🔥✴️✳️❇️👣🌱✨🤙

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Warm greetings all! 😁🙏💚✨🤙

It's been 6 days so far since I first discovered, installed, and set up the Hermes (AI) Agent, and and while there is still some frustration at its occasional momentary inabilities, my mind is still blown at how far I've come with it, and how far I could potentially go as time progresses. Now that I have a basic functional framework up and running, I've been looking into how I might be able to improve, optimize, and refine my setup.

With that in mind, I've been looking more closely into different backend inference engines and frameworks, as well as different AI models, and experimenting and testing which combinations work for me. While I have had some success in that regard, most of these attempts have not gone as intended. This has made me realize that my present AI model and backend inference framework still seem to be the best fit for me so far, much to my surpise.

I've got to hand it to the devs for LM Studio, because it autodetected my hardware, and automatically downloaded an AI model, Gemma-4-E4B, that turned out to be, after a fair bit of research, pretty much the best possible choice for my system and setup, and regarding how I intend to use it. That's pretty wild indeed.

Ollama does seem to be quite useful as a backend, and it integrates into Hermes easily, though it's a bit more challenging to search for models than LM Studio. I'll likely experiment with it a bit more, however, because it does make certain other tasks easier. Since my laptop only has 8GB of VRAM (Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 video card), the selection of model variants that I can easily use on it are rather limited. I'm still looking around and exploring, but Gemma-4-E4B does indeed appear to be a the very top of the list of models that meet my specifications, which are partly requirements for Hermes, such as a minimum-supported context length of 64,000.

There are some amazing model families, like Qwen, that I can't seem to run at all on my system, and I'm still not sure exactly why, as they should run just fine. The thing is that there are so many different models, with a huge number of different modifications and tweaks, as well as different hardware and software requirements, and not all those variations play well with standard ways of doing things. I've only been running local AI models for about a month now, and running my Hermes Agent for a mere six days, so I still have a huge amount to learn and understand about everything, but I'm progressing extraordinarily rapidly, which makes me so curious about where I'll be with it all in 6 months or year from now. It keeps getting more and more interesting, I'll definitely say that!

Yesterday, Thursday, I left the Flow House, after finishing up my Hive-Blurt-'We Are Alive Tribe' tasks, by around 2:45PM, giving my attention first to some photography for my posts, and to a few small jungle-community tasks. Once I had those completed, I took a quick break up at the Flow House, after which I got some gloves, a shovel, and an o-o bar, to go dig another round of planting holes in the front orchard. Upon wrapping that up for the day, I took a shower, made myself some food in Wabisabi, and with that and my jar of leftover superfood fire coffee in hands, I headed back to the Flow House to work a little more with Hermes, and to begin my evening Hive tasks. I wasn't able to get through all my notifications, as I had a lot, before stopping around 11:30PM, to work with Hermes one more time, and finally to go to bed by a little after 12:30AM. I woke up around 7AM, having slept reasonably well, doing more rearch into compatible AI models, going to prepare my superfood fire coffee in Wabisabi, then returning to the Flow House, to do more AI-model research and testing, and to write this post. It's now just before 1:45PM, so it's a marvelous time to wrap this up, so that I may attend to my few other imoportant Hive-Blurt-'We Are Alive Tribe' tasks, before leaving the Flow House a little later in the afternoon, to focus first on photography for my posts, and then on some jungle-community/land work and tasks. I deeply appreciate y'all so very much! Until tomorrow's iteration of these posts! Always forward, onward, upward, and whaleward, ho, together we go! 😁🙏💚✨🤙

2026 Life Goals

1.) Do regular integral practices again, alone or with others.

2.) Prepare regular batches of my medicinal teas collected from the land again.

3.) Make my plant nursery, and the gardens, beautiful again.

4.) Begin learning relevant coding/programming languages to more fully contribute to the sovereignty-driven technologies where I am active, like Arch Linux, Hive, Qortal, DeSo, and Bastyon.

All photos were taken with my Motorola G Play 2024 Android Phone.

Thank you all so much who have helped me get to where I am today, and allowing me to share more of the beauty and magic from my life and my world with you, and for your continuous appreciation and support! I am truly deeply grateful! 😁🙏💚✨🤙

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