Show HN: Learn from 30 historical figures, open source, nonprofit, self-hosted

Posted by micstradev 11 hours ago

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

Comment by weakfish 5 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by micstradev 4 hours ago

You are right, we can not capture a messy and complicated human being. Therefore we tried our best to frame it right with the “Echo“ and disclaimer. We have the fact check sheets to show what is recreated and what the facts are. We also have the shadow section in the fact check sheets to show that these humans were messy, but tried to portray them inside the platform for what they gave to the world, all under the objective to make hard accessible wisdom / philosophy more accessible, as a doorway, that people outgrow us and move from our introduction to primary texts and human teachers.

Comment by jstanley 5 hours ago

I think "echo" is a fine word to use, they're hardly calling them "reincarnations".

Comment by weakfish 5 hours ago

Wording aside, I think the concept is icky.

Comment by chunky1994 3 hours ago

Why though?

We have writing, artifacts and objects from ancient peoples which we then use to try to construct historiographies of those cultures, as well as interpretations of their lived experience and circumstances.

This is just doing it for specific historical figures with a different type of technology. Why is it more disrespectful than what historians do?

Comment by zoogeny 1 hour ago

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?

Comment by stogot 18 minutes ago

How do you apply the Kolb cycle?

Comment by Xotic007 4 hours ago

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.

Comment by micstradev 3 hours ago

Thank you.

Comment by heikkilevanto 1 hour ago

Interesting idea. But why audio? I can't be the only one who prefers to read text.

Comment by kuerbel 4 hours ago

I like it. Is there any chance you could add Hermann Hesse?

Comment by micstradev 4 hours ago

Thank you. Hesse would be a great fit, especially as our nonprofit is based in Germany. We plan to add more figures in the future, but the plan is to let the community decide which gets added next.

Comment by tetrisgm 5 hours ago

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

Comment by micstradev 5 hours ago

Thanks. I put 3 years of my life to build it, founded a nonprofit, so it is more than an experiment. In regards of business, it stays nonprofit, no investors, no exit. We will provide free messages and we will continue running our gpu servers in the long run. Our goal is to make wisdom and philosophy accessible. What will change in the next 6 to 12 months is that the complete content will transition to CC-BY 4.0. The plan is also that the development is community driven, user who engage earn voting power to vote for the next features.

Comment by 11 hours ago

Comment by motyar 9 hours ago

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