I Am #AliveAndThriving Today! || #IAmAliveChallenge || Daily Off-Grid Jungle Journal Entry: Day #1417 - More Progress and Tweaks with LM Studio, Hermes Agent, and SearXNG - GaiaYoga Gardens, Lower Puna, Far East Big Island, Hawai'i - Friday, June 5, 2026

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! 😁🙏💚⚡💥🔥✴️✳️❇️👣🌱✨🤙

Hive Debt: 24.06%

HIVE Fiat-Dollar Price: 0.051 USD

HBD/HIVE-Backed Dollar Fiat-Dollar Price: 0.965 USD

ALIVE SWAP.HIVE Price: 0.02109173 SWAP.HIVE 

HEARTBEAT ALIVE Price: 0.10801217 ALIVE

BLURT Fiat-Dollar Price: 0.00080055 USD

QORT Fiat-Dollar Price: 0.158999 USD

VOI Fiat-Dollar Price: 0.0001501 USD

BTC/Bitcoin Fiat-Dollar Price: 60,539.85 USD

BCH/Bitcoin Cash Fiat-Dollar Price: 213.92 USD

LTC/Litecoin Fiat-Dollar Price: 41.09 USD 

Gold Fiat-Dollar Price: 4,328.50 USD 

Silver Fiat-Dollar Price: 67.84 USD 

Ranking for Our @aliveandmmb Witness Node: #126 (among all witnesses, including inactive)/#99 (among active witnesses only)/642k HP in votes/50 votes in total

Warm greetings all! 😁🙏💚✨🤙

Yesterday a newly optimized version of Gemma-4-E4B, the AI model that has worked for me with my current setup the best, was released, and given the nature of the optimizations, I did a little research, then I downloaded an Unsloth iteration, which had even more optimizations, and I gave it a try. The new version of Gemma-4-E4B loaded fine, but I encountered an error with the Jinja chat template that came with it. I finally resolved the issue, with help from Grok on X, by copying and pasting the Jinja chat template from the working iteration of Gemma-4-E4B, into the chat template of the non-working version, along with a small code snippet at the top dealing with the thinking capacity. Once that was done, the new Gemma-4-E4B finally worked correctly, very thankfully.

Along with testing out new iterations of my current AI model, I've also continued to experiment with and test various model-loading settings and flags in LM Studio, which is how I procure my models, and what I use as my backend LLM server, as I search for the optimal configuration for my particular setup. With only 8GB of VRAM, that endeavor has indeed been a bit more challenging than I'd hoped, though progress is being made, even if rather incrementally.

The next major version, 0.16.0, of Hermes Agent was released yesterday, which I discovered in my terminal after running the 'hermes update' command, notably before I saw mention of it online. As an agentic-AI framework, Hermes was already amazing to the max, but that amazingness has been, and is regularly made even more so by the frequent update cycle. It's becoming a whole agentic operating system, and it's by far the best agentic-AI framework currently available, and that's saying something, because there are some excellent ones out there, like OpenClaw (and its seemingly innumerable forks), Mercury, Pi, among others. What's cool about these agentic frameworks, is that it doesn't have to be either/or, because they can easily be used together as well.

I still haven't hooked up any cloud-based models to Hermes, in large part because I don't want my information and data passing through, and being collected and analyzed, by the hosting service providers. If I can keep things local, I will, and that's precisely what I'm working to do in an effective and efficient manner. That applies to LLMs, and to everything else as well. Local, private, open source, community driven, and in control of my own infrastructure, information, and assets, is the way that I prefer to roll.

I've been very much appreciating my personal locally-hosted SearXNG meta-search engine, so much so that I've made it my default means of doing web searches, both on my laptop and on my phone. On my phone, using my background Tailscale mesh VPN, I can now access and use the SearXNG instance running on my laptop, and from anywhere. That's pretty badass. I also created a SearXNG web app on my phone, to make accessing and using it all the easier and quicker. Open-source, do-it-yourself, community-driven technology keeps me fascinated and enthralled to the max, and as much for what is possible and feasible now, as well as for the potential of what will soon be possible.

Yesterday, Friday, I left the Flow House, after finishing up my Hive-Blurt-'We Are Alive Tribe' tasks, by just after 3PM, giving my attention first to some photography for my posts, and to collecting food supplies from Tutu's to restock Wabisabi. With those complete, I decided to begin the rather involved process of dividing and moving the mass of giant orangeade bromeliads growing next to the Landing. I successfully extricate four excellent propagules, two very large, and two somewhat smaller ones, with the larger two being transported across the property, via a hefty wheelbarrow, to stage down near the beautiful space that Melekai's in the process of creating, and the two smaller ones being planted up on the lava, near the Flow House. With the first phase of that multi-step process having been completed, I took a shower, made myself some food in Wabisabi, collected my leftover superfood fire coffee from the fridge, and with those in hands, I headed back to the Flow House, to begin my evening Hive tasks. I got through all of my notifications by just before 9:30PM, and after some more agentic-AI research, and working with Hermes a bit more, I went to sleep by around 11:30PM. I woke up quite late, by just before 7:45AM, having slept well, going to prepare my superfood fire coffee in Wabisabi (where I shared an enjoyable conversation with Avi on LLMs, agentic-AI, and open-source tech), then returning to the Flow House to work with Hermes some, to do a tad more research into agentic AI and SearXNG, and finally to write this post. It's now just before 2PM, so it's an excellent time to wrap this up, so that I may attend to my few other important Hive-Blurt-'We Are Alive Tribe' tasks, before leaving the Flow House a little later in the afternoon, to focus first on some 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 expression of these posts! 😁 🙏 💚 ✨ 🤙

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! 😁🙏💚✨🤙

If you'd like to find me on other alternative platforms where I have accounts (I spend most of my time here on Hive), click on this signature image below to go to my LinkTree page.

Come join us in the We Are Alive Tribe on Hive and on Blurt!

Image created by @benthomaswwd

You're invited to provide liquidity in our two ALIVE diesel/liquidity pools, both of which offer daily liquidity rewards:

• ALIVE:SWAP.HIVE

• ALIVE:ALIVEM

• ALIVE:HEARTBEAT

There will be more ALIVE pools coming soon!

Vote for our @aliveandmmb Witness Node!

This is our collaboratively shared Witness node between the We Are Alive Tribe, and @borniet's and my MMB (Maximum Mutual Benefit) Project, here to build something good for all of us! The higher in the witness ranking we go, the more that we'll be able to grow the We Are Alive Tribe, and the more that we'll be able to share with all of you!

If you appreciate what we're doing with the We Are Alive Tribe, and feel inspired and motivated to lend a hand in building and growing our decentralized community economy and financial framework, which benefits all of us, community conntributions/donations/investments may be sent to our 'We Are Alive Tribe Sovereign Wealth Investment Fund' account, @waat-swif. They're deeply appreciated, and are put to very good use.

Vote for @borniet's @botlord Witness Node!

Bjorn is our badass coder who hosts and manages our (and also Bradley's) community backends, he creates all sorts of useful tools, and he assists people all over the Blockchain constantly. He redefines the term 'busy'!

Vote for @bradleyarrow's Witness Node!

Bradley's tenaciously committed and all-in on Hive for the long haul (just like me!), and the higher his witness goes in the ranking, the higher the weekly BBH and BBHO dividend payouts will be!

Join the worldwide Satsman Army! It's by far the best, most fun, inspiring, and motivating way to earn Bitcoin/BTC!

Signature image created by @doze, and the dividers made by @thepeakstudio, with all tweaked to their present form by me.