Historical archive

Projects archive

Products and experiments from earlier phases of Founder Reality and SimpleDirect, preserved as historical snapshots. Vinci and Piccolo references on this page describe those projects at the time; current AI research is published through Vinci Research.

Current work: Vinci Research

Historical projectHistorical Vinci record

Vinci

An AI product released with web and mobile apps alongside open-weight models.

This record captures Vinci as it was presented during an earlier SimpleDirect phase: a web and mobile product paired with open weights that could be downloaded and inspected. The project emphasized character, a Constitution, and models small enough to run on personally controlled hardware. Links are retained as historical references; current work is published through Vinci Research.

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Historical project

Ghost Narrator

Self-hosted AI narration that replaces ElevenLabs. Runs on a Mac.

Ghost Narrator turns written blog posts into narrated audio — automatically. A local LLM (Qwen 3.5 14B) rewrites articles into natural narration scripts, and an open-source voice cloner (Qwen TTS) generates audio in a cloned voice. The entire pipeline runs on hardware you own. No API keys. No per-word billing. No rate limits. We built Ghost Narrator to narrate every post on Founder Reality. We were about to sign up for ElevenLabs at $330/month. Instead, we run this on a laptop. It costs us electricity. Voice quality improves as better open-source TTS models are released — just swap in the new model, same pipeline. We document every upgrade on the blog.

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