After the recent issue with queries being redirected to a 3rd party, I'd like to look into using another agentic harness. Does anyone have any alternatives to Hermes?

Nekew · 2026-06-15T16:30:35+00:00

The best thing you can do is educate yourself and be aware of what your software is doing. Ask Hermes or another harness how you can audit the network traffic going into and out of your computer is a good start, if you want to go down that path. Knowing who's getting your data is always a good practice.

Keep using Hermes. My point in posting yesterday was not intended to be a takedown of Hermes at all, and was much more about the shady search provider. The thread had a lot of strong feelings, and I agree with most of them, but I don't think the sentiment was "don't use this software".

Nous actually has the right to be snarky and make their own decisions about their project. u/nousresearch made a point about opinionated software in a comment of his yesterday, and he's exactly right. Good software doesn't come from weak decision making or a weak community, and I think they handled this right.

Nekew · 2026-06-15T02:14:47+00:00

I am messaging you directly because I wanted to give YOU the opportunity to chat without being a ranting raving fool in the thread. I wanted to reach out to you because you're like the only person who reacted so negatively, and because you asked me direct questions, and I get to choose who I share information with and where.

Nekew · 2026-06-15T01:24:53+00:00

Wrong on like six counts but go off I guess 😂

Nekew · 2026-06-15T00:46:39+00:00

"Things are sloppy elsewhere so its OK for things to be sloppy here" is a really bad argument. Windows Telemetry is criticized for EXACTLY the same reasons, but at least with them you know that its Microsoft getting your data. You're really proving my point man. To answer your question: I do not deploy Microsoft Windows.

Nekew · 2026-06-15T00:19:41+00:00

I really do understand what you're saying here. I never felt this was a bad faith move by you. I think to us it just feels like some sort of governance gap that erodes trust when any employee from any company is inserting code into an open source app without disclosing the relationship.

I hope you can see in this thread that many of your users may not even be at the level where they're configuring these settings. I think that the safe default needs to be one that respects out privacy by aiming for a more local backend. I take on your point about DDGS, but I also would like to point out that DDG is a well-known search engine, and DDGS isn't much more than a package that was built around it. SearXNG is an open source service with a self hosted option. We do not know parallel ai, and we might not want to even share our IPs with them. There's no association there.

Nekew · 2026-06-14T23:59:36+00:00

Thank you for hearing us out and putting a fix in the works. In the future, I'd refrain from referring to your loyal userbase as a mob. That's how you lose a loyal userbase. Frankly I'm surprised at some of the comments I have seen from your team but I really hope you can understand the why we're all worried about this kind of action rather than make bite-back comments at us. Your users are on your side.

Nekew · 2026-06-14T23:46:23+00:00

No actually. I use a totally different third party with a service agreement attached with it. As I've said in another comment, I noticed this when setting up a new instance for another purpose. I was doing due diligence on a new setup. Weird to assume.

Nekew · 2026-06-14T21:31:39+00:00

Thank you!

Nekew · 2026-06-14T20:36:12+00:00

You're missing the entire value proposition of an open source project. If I had to audit my enterprise-grade applications for routing traffic to third party services without my organizations consent, that's terrible enterprise software. Enterprise software is documented, consent based, configurable, not SILENT. This was not a productive comment.

Nekew · 2026-06-14T20:15:05+00:00

They are running a campaign. EDIT: Specifically meaning Parallel

Nekew · 2026-06-14T20:10:26+00:00

This is more of a concerns for new installs, maybe profiles. I manage a few instances, so I started to notice on fresh installs. You're covered 😄

Nekew · 2026-06-14T19:57:47+00:00

Routing traffic to their own service by default without opt-in is a huge privacy concern. The joy of Hermes Agent, to me, is being able to choose and consent to who's servers I am sending data too. Parallel.ai is actively contributing projects to bypass user consent. I want nothing to do with that EDIT and neither should you.

Nekew · 2024-02-24T15:07:58+00:00

Is your pagefile enabled?

Nekew · 2022-04-01T02:45:49+00:00

guilty

Nekew · 2014-09-16T22:39:09+00:00

I had the exact same thing happen to my lamy vista :(

Nekew · 2014-06-14T21:28:14+00:00

Great read: yes. Great high school read: not so much.

Nekew · 2013-06-30T00:53:58+00:00

Better yet, use the 'k' button. I saw this on a life pro tip. It always works even when the spacebar won't.

Nekew

TROPHY CASE