Applied AI Engineer, AI/ML Researcher Tinkerer. Optimist. Lifelong Rapid Learner & Gamer. Agents, RL, Multimodal, XR, and gen. 3D. Stay curious & Build 🧐
Austin, TX
Joined April 2022
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Had an awesome time at NousCon last night and met some incredible folks!
Would love to connect too if we didn’t get a chance to meet!
@NousResearch
@witcheer @Teknium @sidbing
Jonathan Korstad retweeted
hiring a Partnerships Lead to help build and scale the Hermes Agent ecosystem
if you or someone you know is a fit please reach out!
nousresearch.com/careers/par…
Jonathan Korstad retweeted
If you've ever wondered why smart TVs are so cheap, this is why.
@log4j rooted his Samsung and found an always-on hot mic, automatic content recognition, geolocation, network mapping, ad targeting and user profiling, shared with Samsung's "400 partners".
A lot of it can be blocked in <15 min, wrote a basic guide below.
What your TV is doing
The main culprit is ACR (automatic content recognition). Your TV screenshots what's on screen, fingerprints it, and sends it home to build your ad profile. Samsung does it every 500ms, LG every 10ms [1].
What is insane: it happens on connected devices too.
Plug in your laptop, your console, your work machine, and your TV can fingerprint that via HDMI [1].
He also found that if your Samsung doesn't have a mic, it'll look for one from a connected soundbar or bluetooth device.
teapawt.org/log4j/status/211376224…
It's on by default, and you likely agreed to it on the setup screen you clicked through in 10 seconds.
Step 1: Turn off ACR
Samsung: Terms & Privacy → Viewing Information Services
LG: Live Plus
Vizio: Viewing Data
Roku: "Use info from TV inputs"
Sony/Google TV: Samba Interactive TV
Menus vary by model, but those are the names to look for. While you're in there, opt out of interest-based ads, reset your advertising ID, decline every optional privacy agreement, turn off voice recognition, and delete apps you never open.
Step 2: Give smart devices their own network
Put the TV, cameras, speakers and vacuum on your router's guest/IoT network. The logic is simple: these devices rarely get patched. If one gets compromised (getting drastically more frequent with AI), it shouldn't be able to see your other devices or home network.
Step 3: Block trackers for the whole house with DNS-level filtering
NextDNS (cloud-based) is easy and has a solid free plan. Pi-hole is a little bit more work if you prefer self hosting. For simplicity we'll focus on the former.
1. Sign up at nextdns.io (free tier is plenty)
2. Privacy tab: add a blocklist (OISD is a good bet) and turn on Native Tracking Protection for Samsung, LG, Roku, Amazon (see attached image)
3. Setup tab: copy your endpoint
4. Paste it into your router's DNS settings as DNS-over-HTTPS/TLS (or use the IPs + "Link IP" if your router only does plain DNS)
5. Bonus: block outbound port 53 except to your router. Some devices hardcode their own DNS to get around you
Then open the NextDNS logs and watch how often your TV phones home. It's eye-opening. If an app or update breaks, find the domain in the logs and allowlist it.
Why they do this
TV prices are down 97% since 2000 [2]. Most of that is better manufacturing and brutal competition. But once margins on the hardware hit zero, the cost moved to you.
In Q3 2024, Vizio lost $6.7M selling TVs and made $115.8M in gross profit from ads and viewing data [3]. They've said on earnings calls that they keep TV prices low to grow the audience they sell to advertisers. Walmart bought them in 2024.
This isn't a conspiracy theory either. Vizio paid $2.2M to the FTC in 2017 for tracking 11 million TVs without consent. Last December, Texas sued Samsung, LG, Sony, Hisense and TCL over ACR. Samsung and LG have since agreed to stop collecting that data without explicit consent [4].
TL;DR
1. ACR off
2. Ads + voice off
3. Smart devices on their own network
4. NextDNS filtering on the router
Sources:
[1] ACR study: arxiv.org/abs/2409.06203
[2] Cost of US consumer goods: aei.org/economics/chart-of-t…
[3] Vizio Q3 2024: sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/…
[4] Texas v. Samsung: texasattorneygeneral.gov/new…
Jonathan Korstad retweeted
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
Jonathan Korstad retweeted
Ornith-1.5-122B is now available for FREE in Nous Portal for 48 hours
thank you @ornith_
If you are not yet, you will soon be tired of winning
(but your Hermes Agent will never tire)
Aloha!🌺 Meet Ornith-1.5-122B: No Tradeoff Between Strong and Fast
Stronger. Faster. Leaner. Ornith-1.5-122B delivers frontier-level capabilities with exceptional inference efficiency. With superior instruction following, stronger task decomposition, and deeper understanding of real-world workflows, it achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models of comparable size, while running on a single NVIDIA DGX card!!
Open weights under the MIT license.
Coding
✅SWE-bench Verified: 0.845
✅TB2.1: 0.813
✅CyberGym: 0.800
✅NL2Repo: 0.512
Agentic
✅HLE: 0.446
✅BrowseComp: 0.785
✅MCP-Atlas: 0.746
✅Toolathlon: 0.708
🤗Hugging Face: huggingface.co/ornith-ai/Orn…
We can’t wait to see what you build with Ornith-1.5-122B.
🙂
Jensen closed his GTC Berlin 2026 keynote with this Hermes Agent demo as the finale.
He introduced it by saying the way to build an agent is to ask an agent to build it for you, so he installed and set up a customized Hermes in one prompt.
Then he used Hermes, running on @nvidia RTX Spark, to create a simulated training environment for the @huggingface Microduck. Hermes planned an obstacle course with Nemotron and had GPT-6 Astra build it using FreeCAD, Omniverse libraries, Blender, Newton, and Isaac Lab. Hermes trained thousands of simulated ducks on that course until the validated policy was ready to run on the real robot in the physical world.
At Nous, we believe open source is a practical tool as much as a philosophical ideal. It gives users the ability to build powerful, complex workflows chaining numerous local+cloud models, devices, and tools themselves instead of waiting for a company to enable them.
Jonathan Korstad retweeted
Muse Spark open weights (even in NVFP4) is an amazing computer use agent
I shipped an e2e tutorial on building an env for a browser agent
(with OpenEnv, Helium and @huggingface Sandboxes)
enjoy 🤗 here's a small visualized run ⤵️
Jonathan Korstad retweeted
Another awesome IoT Hermes device!
Check out this page I put up with hundreds of project ideas for Hermes Agent x Open Hardware!
teknium.io/hermes-devices
Jonathan Korstad retweeted
People forget we have access to free global geostationary satellite imagery.
Used it to track recent storms in the pacific using God's Eye View.
Capability to drive vertical and upside down is a huge win too for @boringcompany as tunnels don’t have to be straight/sloped only for driving! 🧐
Plus just awesome of course!!
Jonathan Korstad retweeted
Roadster event livestream teapawt.org/i/broadcasts/1yKAPwNgg…
Jonathan Korstad retweeted
FLUX.3 Image Klein 6B just dropped on @huggingface 🔥
Base and distilled (16 steps), multi-reference editing, JSON bounding-box layouts
play with it 👇
hf.co/spaces/black-forest-la…
🔥
$52M seed round. 15M+ users. But this is what we're most proud of yet.
Introducing Drama 3: the most emotive and controllable TTS model in the world
And yes, it's open-weight.
You can now control how even a single word should sound, change its tone, and shift your voice mid-sentence.
Uncle Roger was impressed too.
Try it here:
s.fish.audio/rqh0l8
Comment “DRAMA” within the next 48 hours for 1 month free.
If you're an enterprise your first month is on us:
s.fish.audio/qz9r0t
Nice!
I turned @googlegemma EmbeddingGemma 2, an embedding model, into a speech-to-text model, and it turned out to be one of the fastest STT models you can run on device.
On a base M3 MacBook Air it transcribes an hour of audio in about 13 seconds: 288× real time.
The idea came in March with Gemini Embedding 2. It puts text, images, audio and video into one shared space, so a spoken word lands right next to the written word. If that's true, you should be able to read a transcript straight out of the embedding model. I couldnt tried it then, but last week EmbeddingGemma 2 came out as an open model, so I tried it.
