The other day I signed up for Muse (through a VPN) just to see what all the fuss was about and I have to say it’s a really nice implementation of a personal assistant. It genuinely feels great and makes me want to use it!
It has a simple surface but you can dig deep, from customizing personality, rules, communication style, avatar, etc. You can even install Tailscale onto its VM to SSH into it, but sadly once the machine shuts down, the overlay resets and that’s gone. Couldn’t figure a way to persist it out yet. Still very cool to dig around and explore all the CLIs Meta created for Muse to interact with stuff, like instagram or facebook (you can scp them off the VM)
If I had to rank them I would say: Grok Bot -> Muse -> Hermes -> dot -> OpenClaw
I would love to use Muse more but same as everyone else, there’s no way I’m giving Meta more access to my life. So for now, my Muse is jailed to only Meta owned services and general research, and for that it’s great.
Is that because you seem them as politically or socially aligned with your own values and interests? Or are there other factors that go into that judgement?
I was a big fan of SpaceX and Tesla and Musk's other endeavors as well, until he crossed the line from quirky to erratic and went completely off the far-right deep end. Today he's a champion of social-conservative politics and revanchism, but he could just as easily wake up tomorrow and decide he's a hyper-progressive One-Worlder kind of guy. Either way, no matter what, he still has your data.
Disregarding the politics because that’s always subjective, it’s central to Meta’s business model to harvest as much of your data to show you ads. And they have decades of track record of doing that. Same with Google. Their products are thoroughly corrupted by ads because that’s where they make their money.
xAI, OpenAI, Anthropic, may dabble in ads but they are nowhere near Meta and Google.
I don’t care about politics. I disagree with Musk on a lot of things but I don’t automatically boycott something just because he’s involved.
While as for Meta, there’s just way too much negative track record for me to ever trust them as a company or their products. I just assume everything it touches will be used to profile me and sell me ads
artdigital · · focus · HN ↗
It has a simple surface but you can dig deep, from customizing personality, rules, communication style, avatar, etc. You can even install Tailscale onto its VM to SSH into it, but sadly once the machine shuts down, the overlay resets and that’s gone. Couldn’t figure a way to persist it out yet. Still very cool to dig around and explore all the CLIs Meta created for Muse to interact with stuff, like instagram or facebook (you can scp them off the VM)
If I had to rank them I would say: Grok Bot -> Muse -> Hermes -> dot -> OpenClaw
I would love to use Muse more but same as everyone else, there’s no way I’m giving Meta more access to my life. So for now, my Muse is jailed to only Meta owned services and general research, and for that it’s great.
Craighead · · focus · HN ↗
phoghed · · focus · HN ↗
In general though yeah X is probably less competent in the execution of manipulating you through insights from your data.
artdigital · · focus · HN ↗
CamperBob2 · · focus · HN ↗
I was a big fan of SpaceX and Tesla and Musk's other endeavors as well, until he crossed the line from quirky to erratic and went completely off the far-right deep end. Today he's a champion of social-conservative politics and revanchism, but he could just as easily wake up tomorrow and decide he's a hyper-progressive One-Worlder kind of guy. Either way, no matter what, he still has your data.
qwerpy · · focus · HN ↗
xAI, OpenAI, Anthropic, may dabble in ads but they are nowhere near Meta and Google.
artdigital · · focus · HN ↗
While as for Meta, there’s just way too much negative track record for me to ever trust them as a company or their products. I just assume everything it touches will be used to profile me and sell me ads