Why
Our computers and phones are the most intimate objects we own. They know where we sleep, who we love, what we fear, what we search for at three in the morning. Now an artificial intelligence sits between us and them: it reads our documents, listens to our questions, remembers what we tell it. We ask it things we would not ask a friend.
Almost always, that intelligence lives on someone else's servers. Its rules change without asking, and our conversations flow to places we will never see. We are not its owners. We are its tenants, and the rent is our private life.
Whoever controls that intelligence will know us better than we know ourselves. It should be us.
Joshua is a small attempt at the other way: an assistant that lives on your own computer, that you can read, change and switch off. Not a service. A tool that is yours.
Principles
- Who runs it, owns it. An assistant that lives on someone else's computer works for someone else. Joshua runs on yours.
- Understanding is freedom. Every part of Joshua can be read, explained and changed. No black boxes, no magic, no “trust us”.
- Privacy is a right, not a setting. It is not a switch buried in a menu. It is the default, and nobody has to ask for it.
- Our data stays with us. What Joshua learns about you lives on your computer, in files you can open. Nothing leaves without your knowledge.
- The intelligence must serve its owner. It answers to you: no advertiser, no account, no one watching. It uses outside services only when you choose, and can always be switched off.
- Slower, smaller, ours. We accept a model that is smaller, slower and sometimes wrong, in exchange for one that is ours and keeps working without anyone's permission.
- Shared, not sold. Joshua is free, and how it works is published, mistakes included, so that anyone can build on it. Knowledge kept closed is power kept by few.
In practice
Principles are cheap. This is what they mean, part by part.
- Open models, chosen for your computer. The installer looks at your memory and chip and downloads models that fit. You can add others, or remove them, whenever you like.
- One engine, named openly. The models run on Ollama, free software on your computer. If you choose one of its cloud models for a chat, that conversation goes to Ollama's servers, and Joshua marks it clearly. What stays local and what doesn't.
- Everything in one folder. Chats, files, memory and settings are plain files in
~/AskJoshua. You can read them, copy them, back them up or delete them.
- Code you can read. Joshua is a handful of Python files, installed as they are and published on GitHub under the AGPL licence. Open them, change them, ask Joshua to explain them.
- Answers that show their sources. When Joshua searches the web, it tells you where each fact came from, so you can check it.
- Taught on your machine. You can teach Joshua your style with your own examples. The training happens on your computer, and the result stays there.
- Honest about limits. A model that fits on a laptop makes more mistakes than the giants in data centres. It needs a reasonably recent computer. Scheduled tasks run only while the computer is on and Joshua is open. We write that down too.
Joshua and the Yattaphone
This manifesto began as the Yattaphone's: a phone you build yourself from a Raspberry Pi and parts anyone can buy, documented step by step. A phone you own needs an assistant you own. Joshua is that assistant: first on the computer, and one day, we hope, on the phone itself, without depending on anyone else's servers.
Same idea, two devices: your hardware, your data, your intelligence.
Join
Joshua is not finished, and never will be. That is the point.
- Install it. Then tell us where it was wrong.
- Fix one thing. A bug, a missing feature, a confusing sentence on this site.
- Share what you learn. Every problem solved in public is one less problem for the next person.
We are not asking you to trust another company with your thoughts. We are asking you to keep them.