AI model vendors usually ship their own desktop apps, and aside from coding agents, these tend to be the ways in which I interface with AIs the most. But these apps are sticky by design: each vendor wants you to stay with them and continue to use them. As a result, I tend to have very lumpy usage patterns, focusing on one model at a time to the detriment of the others. This leads to an incomplete understanding of the ever-shifting AI landscape, with models constantly leapfrogging one another on the leaderboards.

To remedy this, I built my own web-based desktop app which is model agnostic. Beyond easy access to Gemini, Grok, Claude, and GPT, I had a few additional goals in mind:

1. Local-first: all conversations are stored as plaintext
2. Build an orchestrator to gain intuition around agents, tools, skills, etc,
3. Play around with new interaction patterns beyond the usual chat-and-wait

The result of this is Alloy, which I began in December and have used daily since then. With it, I've been able to more easily see how good each model is at using tools, agent skills, etc. Alloy also serves as a personal playground for experimenting with new interaction patterns: freewriting with a quiet AI collaborator, delegating to sub-agents mid-conversation, and setting up triggers that monitor the world on your behalf.

Authoritarian governments have latched onto open-source LLMs like Llama to craft their own models, complete with censorship rules. In places like Russia and China, these censors manifest as an abrupt cutoff, where a stream of text is replaced with an uncanny canned response like "I'd better keep quiet". In this post I'm interested in probing for subtler, more insidious manipulations potentially present in language models controlled by authoritarian governments. How might these warped filters influence entire populations? Are they already shaping our collective understanding in ways we barely notice?

This is the first in a series of vignettes based on observations I captured while creating invention.cards, a visual chronology of science and discovery. In this series I hope to explore bits of the history of science and technology I found fascinating ("that's funny...") while reading and digesting Asimov's chronology and also examine the limitations of source material. First, let's take a really thin slice of human ingenuity: horse-related inventions and discoveries.