I Am #AliveAndThriving Today! || #IAmAliveChallenge || Daily Off-Grid Jungle Journal Entry: Day #1478 - Wading Back into My Locally-Run Agentic-AI Testing - GaiaYoga Gardens, Lower Puna, Far East Big Island, Hawai'i - Wednesday, August 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! 😁🙏💚⚡💥🔥✴️✳️❇️👣🌱✨🤙

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Warm greetings all! 😁🙏💚✨🤙

I took a hiatus of about 2 months from setting up and testing the agentic-AI framework on my laptop using various locally-run models, assorted llama.cpp variants, and Hermes Agent, mostly because I was getting very little sleep, and my brain was constantly fried from researching and testing multitudinous llama.cpp forks and their build and run flags, and with not a lot of forward progress. I finally dove back into it last night, though unfortunately my issues of llama-server, regardless of the form, crashing as soon as my agents begins working on something, persists, as does my fried-brain frustration. I most definitely won't give up, but man do I wish that this were a bit more of an easeful process.

I've seen so many videos, articles, posts, and comments from numerous different people (on YouTube and X mostly, not on Hive) doing exactly, or very similar, to what I'm trying to do, and on computers with even fewer RAM, CPU, and GPU resources, which is exactly why this protracted process has been so frustrating. I know that it's possible, but I haven't yet found the sweet spot for my particular setup.

My earlier successes using Hermes with a locally-run model was because I was using a notably-smaller model, Gemma-4-E4B. Now I'm working with Gemma-4's larger iteration, Gemma-4-26B-A4B, two different variants of Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, Ornith1.0-27B, and Ternary-Bonsai-27B. The larger models are much more capable, but trying to get them to work with my very-limited 8GB of VRAM, while having them do what I need them to do, has not exactly been easy.

I've mentioned that AI and agentic-AI development is progressing at a staggeringly-rapid rate, with models and quantization methods continually becoming better, and able to do far more with notably fewer resources. What this means in practical terms is that increasingly frontier-level models are able to be run on hugely more limited consumer hardware, like assorted laptops and phones.

Hermes Agent itself has been improved significantly, and has had many new features and capabilities added, in the intern since I took my hiatus, which I can't wait to try out. Not only is Hermes being developed with the contributions of over 1,000 distinct developers, but even more interestingly, the primary builder/contributor of Hermes Agent is now Hermes Agent, so it's being used to build itself. An AI Agent, or an agentic framework, is a harness that dramatically expands the capabilities and possibilities of the models with which we work. OpenClaw opened the door to personal AI agents, then Hermes came along and massively expanded what was possible with them, and now there are several other AI-agent frameworks coming onto the scene, including Pi Agent, Mercury Agent, Atom Agent, among others, that are adding their own unique and innovative ways of accomplishing diverse agentic tasks. I seriously can't wait until I'm able to get my background LLM-server situation handled so that I'm able to get to the really fun and interesting stuff.

Yesterday, Wednesday, I left the Flow House, after finishing up my Hive-Blurt-'We Are Alive Tribe' tasks, by just before 2:45PM, giving my attention to some photography for my posts first, before jumping into my main task of the day, doing more clearing in the front orchard with my machete. Once I had that completed for the day (there's lots more to do, however), I took a shower, after which I made Avi (who's paying me to do so) and myself some food in Wabisabi, I collected my leftover superfood fire coffee from the fridge, and then I headed back to the Flow House to scan my X feed a little more, and to begin my evening Hive tasks. I got through all of my notifications by just after 10:15PM, and after scanning my X feed a bit more, and testing more run flags in buun-llama-cpp, I went to bed by just after 11:30PM. I woke up by about 6:30AM, still feeling that I needed a tad more sleep, going to prepare my superfood fire coffee in Wabisabi, then returning to the Flow House to write this post. It's now just after 1PM, so it's quite a good 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! 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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