micstradev

Thank you! The paintings are public domain photos, mostly from Wikimedia Commons, hung at their real size. Our code is open source too: github.com/chipmates/museumofages. Gauguin is a nice idea, noted.

Thank you! Many people can't travel to a museum, because of illness, money or distance. The core idea is to bring the museum to them. Sure, we still have a lot to learn, but we will improve along the way.

So true, thank you. We will do that.

Not for now. Our focus is that the walk works for everyone and that we improve it as well as possible.

Thank you for the Wellcome link and the feedback. I guess our target group is a different one, people who do not like to read long essays and therefore we tried to keep it short. So each stop has only a few plain sentences. And a bit more in the extended view. But sure, you are right that good writing is what makes people stay. That´s a point we still have to improve. Also for the walk we had the idea to bring everything together, his paintings, machines, notebooks and anatomy drawings, in one place you can walk through.

Thanks for the feedback. The walk is guided on purpose and pre-rendered as a film. Therefore everyone gets the same detail, also on an older phone, and people who are not so technical can’t get lost. Half of our visitors came on a phone. You can jump straight to the machines from the Plan in the Instruments panel, but it is a bit hidden, we will fix that. The flat view is on purpose too, there you see each work sharp and in its true colours.

Agreed. It is one of the notebooks we could not put on our reading table. We found no copy online that is free to use, so the museum lists it as missing.

Thank you for the detailed feedback. You are right, there should be a way to stop the walk while it moves. We will add that. ESC to close is however intended. The Instruments panel closes with the button at its bottom, but more intuitive would be at the top and we will move it there. The walk is guided on purpose, so WASD and dragging don’t work, but we should say that.

Thanks! Which part was hard to read, the walk or the website? We would like to fix it.

Thank you for the feedback. The later stops are his last house in Amboise which we rebuilt. For the earlier stops we decided on a building to serve the walk as well as possible. On colors: we decoded the images from sRGB, but the color filter over the scene and the video change them a bit on the wall. We will look into it. The close view shows them unchanged.

Thank you. We are happy you like it.

Thanks. Yes, it is not possible to move around freely, that was a compromise we made to keep it accessible for older devices and older people. If you click the arrow it moves faster by the way. In the settings there is also a speed setting. Actually the address keeps your stop and a reload should bring you back to where you were.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thank you.

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.

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.

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.

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