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

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11–20 of 28 posts

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

#11
post #10

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

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.

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

#12
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.

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

#13

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.

Thank you.

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

#14
post #8
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Wording aside, I think the concept is icky.

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?

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

#15
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?

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

#18
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wording aside, I think the concept is icky.

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?

Because this is placing words in their mouth and pretending it’s something they’d say, not just analyzing it. It pretends in knows their inner world and mind when we only have public artifacts.

Historians also generally adhere to a standard when making a claim, not throwing it to the math machine for regurgitating.

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

#20
post #17

How do you apply the Kolb cycle?

Good question. For Kolb it is loosely, not strictly. We have 4 modes. Story is the experience part in which the user lives through the life as a narrated episode. Wisdom is the reflection, you talk about the teaching with the figure. Then prism, the same teaching from the perspective of 4 figures, is the conceptualization. Quest is the experimentation. We tried to implement the experimentation best possible but that is also the limit of an app, as this can only truly happen in life and therefore, we like the user to outgrow the app. We have in the modal in which the teachings are presented in detail also a practice part, in which we give some exercises, but we see it as not in the scope of the app, as it would be too much. Maybe something we can implement in a better way in the future.
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