merlin vieira saar
🎧 prefer to listen?
ok, so today was wild. pulled out this ancient HP pavilion from god knows where — the thing has seen better days, let me tell you — and decided to set up a full Hermes agent on it. because why not. every laptop deserves a second life.
configured the whole thing with mimo 2.5 as the main driver, and honestly, it just works. the whole setup was smoother than I expected for a machine that was probably designed to run solitaire and nothing else (Okay I’m exagerating). gave the bot a name too. merlin vieira saar. yes, that’s my bot. yes, I’m proud of it. don’t judge me.
but here’s the thing that actually blew my mind — the mimo voice models. I’ve been playing with them all day and they are excellent. like, actually excellent. not “good for a free model” excellent. just. excellent. the voice design stuff lets you describe a voice and it generates it from scratch. I have been a xiaomi fan for the last 8 years, and I swear, nobody talks about them enough. these people are driving innovation like no other company on the planet and I will die on this hill.
the whole experience made me think about how weird and beautiful this moment is. I’m sitting here, talking to a bot named merlin, running on a laptop that’s older than some of my students, using voice tech from a company that most people in the west still associate with budget phones. meanwhile, the actual product is lightyears ahead of what the “premium” brands are shipping.
anyway. merlin is ready to work. I’m still figuring out the right balance of skills and workflow, but the foundation is there. feels like I gave an old machine a soul. kinda poetic, if you think about it.
Gonna sleep well tonight.