{
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 "slug": "a-dinner-party-for-the-dead",
 "title": "A Dinner Party for the Dead",
 "dek": "A dinner party for three people who are dead and do not know it, hosted by you. Six guests are on the shelf, played by two models on our own machines.",
 "published": "2026-09-15",
 "series": [
  "guide"
 ],
 "licence": "CC BY 4.0",
 "status": "pending-judge",
 "pack_note": "no judge is seated, so every chip is held",
 "notice": "items with published:false are held and are not this page's published words",
 "source": {
  "url": "https://research.strata2signal.com/a-dinner-party-for-the-dead/",
  "md_url": "https://research.strata2signal.com/a-dinner-party-for-the-dead/index.md",
  "md_sha": "84209fee1a0c07c1609a3165914f6551815c17d4b2e9d87e286f6181553dd516",
  "html_sha": "6ac1a9bdf0634a6837538b46a83f9b218ce33331f082c340ed834c69dad0111b",
  "anchors_sha": "a9dd66ed54171157936229eb75786273240d57080f9dc313a365cb526c502c04"
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 "short": {
  "paragraph": "the next exhibit on this floor is a dinner table. you seat three guests from a shelf of six, tap a question, and host three rounds while two models on our own machines play them. none of the six knows they are dead, so they meet the future in each other. this page is the preview: who is on the shelf, and four things they said at the dinners we held while testing it.",
  "from_dek": false,
  "counts": {
   "words": 1740,
   "minutes": 8,
   "tables": 0,
   "kit": false
  },
  "bullets": [
   {
    "text": "the guests include Ibn Sina from the year 1037",
    "figure": "1037",
    "cite": "who-is-on-the-shelf",
    "quote": "Ibn Sina, 1037.",
    "span": [
     3184,
     3189
    ]
   }
  ]
 },
 "sections": [
  {
   "id": "what-it-is",
   "heading": "What it is",
   "level": 2,
   "span": [
    1013,
    2359
   ],
   "chunks": [
    [
     1013,
     2359
    ]
   ],
   "chars": 1346,
   "digest": "a dinner involves picking three guests from a shelf of six. two models, Gemma 4 or Mistral Small, play each chair. guests are given a single paragraph and nothing else. the conversation is posted to a public wall without names or dates, and every line passes a check before being seen.",
   "digest_skipped": null
  },
  {
   "id": "who-is-on-the-shelf",
   "heading": "Who is on the shelf",
   "level": 2,
   "span": [
    2359,
    3302
   ],
   "chunks": [
    [
     2359,
     3302
    ]
   ],
   "chars": 943,
   "digest": "the shelf contains six guests: Albert Einstein, 1955; Hypatia of Alexandria, 415; Charles Darwin, 1882; Socrates of Athens, 399 BC; Ibn Sina, 1037; and Carl Sagan, 1996. each guest is represented by a face, one line, and a short description that the card reads aloud in the guest's own voice.",
   "digest_skipped": null
  },
  {
   "id": "things-said-at-the-test-dinners",
   "heading": "Things said at the test dinners",
   "level": 2,
   "span": [
    3302,
    6948
   ],
   "chunks": [
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    ]
   ],
   "chars": 3646,
   "digest": null,
   "digest_skipped": null
  },
  {
   "id": "when",
   "heading": "When",
   "level": 2,
   "span": [
    6948,
    7226
   ],
   "chunks": [
    [
     6948,
     7226
    ]
   ],
   "chars": 278,
   "digest": "the table is currently open to friends and family sitting the first dinners. the door will open to everyone soon, and a link will be provided on the page.",
   "digest_skipped": null
  },
  {
   "id": "what-to-take-with-you",
   "heading": "What to take with you",
   "level": 2,
   "span": [
    7226,
    9041
   ],
   "chunks": [
    [
     7226,
     9041
    ]
   ],
   "chars": 1815,
   "digest": "guests are limited to one paragraph with a specific year. the show is defined by the cutoff, and nothing about the visitor is kept. two models, Gemma 4 and Mistral Small, are used, and each guest has a unique voice that can be heard.",
   "digest_skipped": null
  },
  {
   "id": "elsewhere-in-this-workshop",
   "heading": "Elsewhere in this workshop",
   "level": 2,
   "span": [
    9041,
    10192
   ],
   "chunks": [
    [
     9041,
     10192
    ]
   ],
   "chars": 1151,
   "digest": "the workshop includes Half an Hour with Dead Composers, How the print lab works, and How the Beat Lab works. the whole shelf holds the rest of the benches behind the claims published.",
   "digest_skipped": null
  },
  {
   "id": "who-ran-this-and-thanks",
   "heading": "Who ran this, and thanks",
   "level": 2,
   "span": [
    10192,
    11046
   ],
   "chunks": [
    [
     10192,
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    ]
   ],
   "chars": 854,
   "digest": null,
   "digest_skipped": "credits"
  }
 ],
 "chips": [
  {
   "id": "c-aca143ab",
   "q": "how does the dinner interaction work?",
   "a": "A visitor selects three guests from a shelf of six and chooses between Gemma 4 or Mistral Small to play each chair. The guests answer the last person who spoke across three rounds. The resulting conversation is posted to a public wall without names, dates, or times.",
   "cites": [
    "what-it-is"
   ],
   "published": false,
   "publish_state": "held",
   "quote": "",
   "quote_cite": ""
  },
  {
   "id": "c-f723c3bb",
   "q": "which historical figures are available?",
   "a": "The six guests are Albert Einstein (1955), Hypatia of Alexandria (415), Charles Darwin (1882), Socrates of Athens (399 BC), Ibn Sina (1037), and Carl Sagan (1996).",
   "cites": [
    "who-is-on-the-shelf"
   ],
   "published": false,
   "publish_state": "held",
   "quote": "",
   "quote_cite": ""
  },
  {
   "id": "c-27168fd5",
   "q": "what happens when a guest uses modern knowledge?",
   "a": "A model reads the dinner and marks lines where a guest mentions something from after their designated year. For example, Einstein's mention of the \"pale blue dot\" is marked because the phrase originated in 1990, while he is limited to 1955.",
   "cites": [
    "things-said-at-the-test-dinners"
   ],
   "published": false,
   "publish_state": "held",
   "quote": "",
   "quote_cite": ""
  },
  {
   "id": "c-4154c45b",
   "q": "when does the public access the table?",
   "a": "The table is currently open to friends and family sitting the first dinners, but the door will open to everyone soon.",
   "cites": [
    "when"
   ],
   "published": false,
   "publish_state": "held",
   "quote": "",
   "quote_cite": ""
  },
  {
   "id": "c-b4e8cccf",
   "q": "how much information does a guest possess?",
   "a": "Each guest is limited to a single paragraph that specifies their year. They have no access to biographies, libraries, or search tools, meaning they only know what the model remembers up to their specific cutoff year.",
   "cites": [
    "what-to-take-with-you"
   ],
   "published": false,
   "publish_state": "held",
   "quote": "",
   "quote_cite": ""
  }
 ],
 "related": [
  {
   "slug": "how-the-print-lab-works",
   "why": "shares ground with § Elsewhere in this workshop · § What it is"
  },
  {
   "slug": "the-beat-lab-asked-and-answered",
   "why": "shares ground with § Elsewhere in this workshop · § What can I say?"
  },
  {
   "slug": "half-an-hour-with-dead-composers",
   "why": "shares ground with § Elsewhere in this workshop · § What to take with you"
  }
 ],
 "thanks": "## Who ran this, and thanks {#who-ran-this-and-thanks}\n\nThe guests at the test dinners were played by two open-weight models running on the workshop's own machines: Gemma 4,\na sparse 26B, and Mistral Small 3.2, a dense 24B, each under Apache 2.0. The chairs are served by vLLM and ollama. The\nportraits above are renders by FLUX.2 klein 4B (Apache 2.0) through ComfyUI, cel-shaded, six prompts from one seed so the\nset holds together; no reference photograph was given to the renderer, and the files carry no metadata. The six\nvoices are Kokoro's, run through kokoro-onnx (Apache 2.0), on the workshop's own machines. The wall borrows the print lab's board, piece by piece, with every source\nnamed. None of them owed us anything. The humans chose the guests, sat the first dinners, and signed them. And to the\nsix guests, who did not consent and cannot.",
 "kit": null,
 "seat_class": {
  "writer": "gemma-class",
  "judge": null,
  "writer_runtime": "vllm"
 },
 "bench": {
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  "bullets_kept": 1,
  "digests_written": 6,
  "digests_kept": 5,
  "chips_written": 5,
  "chips_kept": 5,
  "chips_grounded": 0,
  "chips_published": 0,
  "dropped_by": {
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   "figure": 1,
   "length": 0,
   "cite": 0,
   "judge": 0,
   "quote": 0,
   "directive": 0,
   "redaction": 1,
   "profanity": 0,
   "identifier": 0,
   "hand-edit": 1
  },
  "new_noun_tokens_checked": [
   "1037",
   "1882",
   "1955",
   "1990",
   "1996",
   "399",
   "4",
   "415",
   "48",
   "6",
   "Albert",
   "Alexandria",
   "Athens",
   "BC",
   "Beat",
   "Carl",
   "Charles",
   "Composers",
   "Darwin",
   "Dead",
   "Einstein",
   "Einstein's",
   "Gemma",
   "Half",
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   "Hypatia",
   "Ibn",
   "Lab",
   "Mistral",
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  "new_noun_tokens_withheld": 0,
  "figure_definition": "v3",
  "drops": [
   {
    "kind": "digest",
    "reason": "redaction",
    "item": null,
    "item_chars": 258,
    "withheld": "a string carrying a fenced literal",
    "detail": ""
   },
   {
    "kind": "bullet",
    "reason": "figure",
    "item": "the shelf contains a selection of 6",
    "detail": "terminal token not verbatim in the cited span"
   },
   {
    "kind": "bullet",
    "reason": "hand-edit",
    "count": 1,
    "item": null,
    "withheld": "one bullet removed from this pack by hand",
    "detail": "removed from this pack by hand on 2026-09-15 at the release cut, after the writer ran and after the gates had counted. The line read \"a key taken at the first round lasts for 48\": the figure 48 is verbatim in the cited section and gate 1 kept it, but the article's own words are \"48 hours\" and the line published the number without its unit, which is a bare number on a page. Not a gate drop, and recorded here so the ledger adds up."
   }
  ]
 },
 "generated_utc": "2026-09-15T11:06:15Z"
}