alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Learn from 30 historical figures, open source, nonprofit, self-hosted
Hello HN, I am the founder of Agora Cosmica.
This started about three years ago. On a walk I asked a chatbot to interpret the cave dream from Cormac McCarthy's book "The Road" as C.G. Jung. It gave me a perspective I had not thought of. But for my own dreams the policies of the big providers felt wrong for so personal conversations, as zero data retention is not available. So I started building.
The project evolved to a German nonprofit and we published the code (AGPL-3.0) last month. The content is still copyright, but will be opened to CC-BY 4.0 in the next 6 to 12 months.
Agora Cosmica is a library to learn from 30 historical figures. Each one has 12 narrated stories about their teachings / life wisdom, speech to speech conversation. Four learning modes and a council where you can gather the figures to discuss or reflect on a topic. Each figure is an AI Echo, an interpretation grounded in primary works, historical context, with a factcheck per figure to show what's verified versus recreated. On privacy: The speech is self hosted on Hetzner GPU servers, Qwen3-TTS for German, Kokoro TTS for English, Faster-Whisper for transcription. 30 free messages per day (EU-hosted for GDPR), BYOK, or you can run it in a full local self-hosted mode.
No conversation is stored, no tracking cookies, no profiling, no signup.
The app is slow on purpose. Cosmic, no dopamine rush.
The mission is to be a doorway, a first step, an introduction to get people interested and outgrow the app to move to primary texts and human teachers.
Live at: https://agoracosmica.org
Comments
This is an interesting project and in some ways similar to an idea I had. My idea was actually just to aggregate primary texts (whatever public domain versions are available) for a wide range of philosophical and spiritual work and provide an easy way to include it as context in straight-forward LLM calls.
I've skimmed this announcement, your github repo and your site and it isn't clear to me, are these custom models? Are they fine-tuned from some base model? e.g. do you have 30 separate models?
This is interesting way of presenting content and I do feel like engaging educational content is a valuable thing to work on. For the historical figures, how are you handling grounding the facts/reducing hallucinations that may conflict with historical accuracy? Also do you plan on making it possible for people to add their own historical figures like a registry of sorts?
Really like this. The mission stands out the most, you've built something that's honest about being a starting point and is actually designed to send people on to the primary texts and real teachers, which is the opposite of what most apps optimize for. The per-figure factcheck showing what's verified versus recreated is a thoughtful honesty touch too. Lovely project.
Very interesting idea. Is this an experiment or something you’re looking to grow as a business? I’m curious about how this thing will evolve.
I would totally use a version of this for Swift programming
I like it. Is there any chance you could add Hermann Hesse?
Interesting idea. But why audio? I can't be the only one who prefers to read text.
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> AI Echo
I don't think it's fair to these very real humans to try and distill their essence from what they presented publicly. Real humans are messy and complicated.
This feels really, really disrespectful. Just because someone died a long time ago doesn't mean it's any less weird to do digital necromancy.