Spaces OS dispatch #18

Week 21 - Sep 25

A steadier Hermes app and a round-up of the week's experiments

You can now add and sign in to a second assistant from the app's settings, for example one running on another machine. That setting used to be locked.
On machines that had used the app before, it would sometimes start its own separate assistant rather than connecting to yours. It now finds the right one every time.

Some people saw the setup screen in the app and the dashboard even though their assistant was already configured. That's fixed now.

Hermes and its desktop app are updated to the latest release.

The rest of the week went into experiments, most of which are written up on the personal.computer forum:

Project Zero: Meet Clanker (pinpox): a company setup that no human has touched since July, with a chat bot that deploys machines, opens PRs and pays Lightning invoices.
Nixplan: sharing vibe-coded software with friends (Qubasa): a prototyping tool that deploys your own software onto a friend's machine whatever its CPU or init system, with or without Nix.
What does a Space actually feel like? (amunsen): a browser prototype of a shared desktop for several people. The replies read it as one possible interface for a Space, with a real window manager as the next step.
Next generation distributed nix builds (Mic92): nix-grpc-store makes remote Nix builds fast over slow links, and its Farm mode spreads builds across available machines and caches the results in niks3.
DVT work in Clan GUI (amunsen): Clan GUI now shows a read-only view of a real Ethereum validator cluster. A separate simulation with example data lets you test outages, network splits and rolling maintenance.