Zanux is my self-hosted personal assistant, and it lives on the exact laptop that just served you this page. An LG gram 17 running Ubuntu, sitting in my room, doing two jobs at once.
The build: Hermes Agent, the open-source harness from Nous Research, with a cloud model as the brain. The laptop has no GPU worth mentioning, and it does not need one; it contributes the part that matters, which is being mine. Persistent memory, my Obsidian vault synced in, a shell it can actually use, all for under 20 dollars a month.
The security rule the whole project bends around: the Telegram gateway stays locked to exactly one numeric user ID, mine, before it ever touches a tool. An open bot wired to a shell is remote code execution for strangers, and I would rather not host that.
The htop panel further down this page is Zanux’s vital signs in real time. If it says SIGNAL LOST, the laptop is asleep and so, probably, am I. Boot story in the journal.