Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–28 of 28 posts

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

#21

Post by micstradev »

zoogeny wrote: post #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…

We have no custom models and no fine tuning. It is the base model, Qwen3 235B for the free tier and we recommend Qwen3.6 27B for the local mode. So the figures are data, not weights. We have instruction files for every figure and additional voice profiles for the councils. The work was put into the iterations to improve the instructions. It is possible to fetch them from the CDN, for example: https://media.agoracosmica.org/instructions/jung/free_conver...

I like your primary texts idea. For our case we tried to keep the instructions lean to have them around 4k tokens, so that it also works in local mode for users with limited context.

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

#22

Post by micstradev »

heikkilevanto wrote: post #16

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

You are not the only one and we fully support text for all modes and features. For the conversations voice is turned on by default, but you can quickly switch it off in the settings. For the pre-created content we try to create a nice reading experience, see the tour in the repo. Stories, councils and prism discussions show the full text in sync, so you can just mute it and read.

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

#23

Post by goodmythical »

weakfish wrote: post #18
chunky1994 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I said something like "socrates might have asked..." as so many many many people and articles and people have said before me...?

I don't see you in the comment section of all those articles that engagegd in such behavior; naming Socrates as the inspiration of their inquistion.

Why now? Why here?

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

#24

Post by lavaman131 »

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?

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

#25

Post by micstradev »

lavaman131 wrote: post #24

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?

Thank you. A lot of our content is pre-created and not live generated. Every figure has a fact check modal, which can also be fetched via CDN, for example:

https://media.agoracosmica.org/factchecks/en/jung.json

For the live generated content, sure, we cannot rule out hallucinations. From testing it feels like a grounded instruction helps, but to be honest we have not measured it. Therefore we have the "Echo" framing, disclaimers on the landing pages, and checkboxes when entering the app.

A registry is not planned because every figure needs a lot of pre-created content. As mentioned in another comment we plan to add more figures in the future, but we will let the community decide which one.

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

#26

Post by weakfish »

goodmythical wrote: post #23
weakfish wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I said something like "socrates might have asked..." as so many many many people and articles and people have said before me...? I don't see you in the comment section of all those articles that engagegd in such behavior; naming Socrates as the inspiration of their inquistion. Why now? Why here?

Because it's generating that output using a simulacra, which may mislead and act as if it is Socrates, not using real human reasoning to extrapolate.

There isn't an objective right or wrong here, but it just strikes me as gross. It's fine if you disagree and I appreciate you interrogating the reasons as it helps us both strengthen our thinking.

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

#27

Post by zoogeny »

micstradev wrote: post #21
zoogeny wrote: post #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…

We have no custom models and no fine tuning. It is the base model, Qwen3 235B for the free tier and we recommend Qwen3.6 27B for the local mode. So the figures are data, not weights. We have instruction files for every figure and additional voice profiles for the councils. The work was put into the iterations to improve the instructions. It is possible to fetch them from the CDN, for example: https://media.agoracosmi…

Totally understand on managing context length. But in a sense, the work is just providing the library of primary texts (and given the public domain nature of these kinds of works, that seems both ethical and legal) and some mechanism to include them into the context as desired by the user.

As an example user story, maybe I want to get Plato's reaction to Buddha. It might be convenient to have a library of sutra's that I could grab extracts from in order to send to the instructed model for further reflection. That puts the context management into the users hands. From a UI perspective you would need a library interface, the ability to select extracts, some indication of context available vs. context used, etc.

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

#28

Post by lavaman131 »

micstradev wrote: post #25
lavaman131 wrote: post #24

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?

Thank you. A lot of our content is pre-created and not live generated. Every figure has a fact check modal, which can also be fetched via CDN, for example: https://media.agoracosmica.org/factchecks/en/jung.json For the live generated content, sure, we cannot rule out hallucinations. From testing it feels like a grounded instruction helps, but to be honest we have not measured it. Therefore we have the "Echo" framing,…

Got it, thanks!
Post reply on HN