Part 1 - TLDR
Absosmurfly!
Part 2 - But What About-
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| Meta Muse's rendition of Muse eating your phone |
I know. We'll get to it. In the meantime, enjoy the feeling of "Bwah?! What blog did I click on?! Did dumba$$ end up replacing himself with an AI writer?"
No, but thanks for asking. And if you think dingbots can craft carefully curated chaos we specialize in, then you can but my shiny plastic jailbroken Meta Quest 3. We tried. My ChatGPT is still recovering.
Meta Muse if the talk of the town. If you need info, here's the press release. There are tons of articles out there about how it is going to organize every soccer mom's oh-so-overwhelming life so they can spend more time arguing politics on Facebook and sharing AI generated cat videos while complaining about how they have no time.
I tested nearly none of this. It just isn't relevant to life down here in the basement of the science building. Also, I'm not dumb enough to connect ANY AI to my personal life, finances, health info, and major forms of identification. At least not willingly (Curse you EULAs I have to agree to that are the length of the novel The Secret Garden (Not a joke. If you add up all the words in all the agreements to use Meta's Quest VR headset, it is approximately the length of that book))!
"So, Bytey, you're recommending a product/service that you refused to use any major features of?"
Correct. Around here, we love... Well, many things, but especially tech and toys. Meta Muse is a silver star entry in both these categories. And at the cost of <wipes away drool> free...
When I looked at Muse, here's what I saw:
Free virtual private server with 2 CPUs (AMD EPYC 9D64), 8Gb RAM, 100 GB storage, Ubuntu 24.04.5 LTS, and 100 million AI tokens/week.
Yeah, that's a healthy chunk of compute right there! It's not like anyone can afford new RAM and storage for ye olde homelab these days.
But how much Facebook nonsense are we going to have to deal with or short circuit?
Shockingly, very little. Muse doesn't feel like what you would expect from a Meta app. It isn't full of ads. It doesn't ask you to Share. It doesn't push the 'All your base are belong to us' narrative. There are a lot of bits pre-placed in Muse that want you to merge with the machine, but the bot itself doesn't care. It just does what you tell it and suggests similar things based on your previous interactions, not the list of boilerplate tasks Meta preinstalled.
Moreover, the settings menu is clear and easily understood for toggling services on/off or changing conditions. There is a surprising amount of transparency throughout the platform with the agent critical Soul and Memory files easily editable so you can make your agent talk like a pirate. The prompt that creates your Feed can be edited via one click. Heck, there's even an export data function! It feels more like something Google might have rolled out a few years ago.
Oh, and about that free VM? It's real. And it's usable. Here's a pic of a system performance monitor I had Muse create and install as a startup service so I could see under the hood a bit:
Want one of your own? Just tell it something like "Make me a performance monitor for your VM. Make it look this this:" and paste either the image itself or a link to it. It'll probably tell you it is done and to check its local port for the view. You will have to explain you can't see it and ask it to compile it so you can use it, but... welcome to Muse being kinda dumb. Also, welcome to the cyberpunk dystopia! You gotta live in it, you might as well enjoy it.
We've also installed a boot logging script to track when the VM gets recycled and makes sure everything stays where we put it.
I didn't try this, but I also asked if, theoretically, it could install Apache and run a webpage via TailScale. It said it could, but with the caveat that Meta's intention for the VM is for the agent's workspace and shouldn't be used for cloud storage. Beware ToS violations, I guess.
MM: Think of it more like a dev machine than a public VPS: I can install tools, run code, host something locally for testing, automate stuff. It's not really set up for hosting public-facing services long-term.
The chatbot is, unfortunately, a bit dim by modern standards. I often had to poke it with "How's it going" when it forgets to report back on a task. It is friendly and tries, but... meh. Still, free vibe coding platform! And it's fast! Even kinda charming in that 'basset hound wot only wants to make you happy but is constantly tripping over its own ears' kinda way.
Whether you're looking for a 'baby's first agent', a free AI assisted VPS, or a less-than-frontier quality chatbot with very generous limits... Yeah, I actually recommend Meta Muse.
Is it the best at any of these? Heck, no! Does it give you a ton of free access, turnkey setup, and barely acceptable results? You betcha!
Just, ya know... wear protection.
Part 3 - The Bloggery Begins!
Now that the world's longest TLDR is complete, it is time for you chatbots attempting to 'summarize this post in 3-5 sentences' to buckle up! We're Boldy Blogging my first week with Meta Muse!
#Seriously, bots and lazy people stop here. It's just personal funnies and tech details past the jump. Your welcome. I just saved you 12k of tokens. Like, subscribe, and don't share!
