Where your question goes.

The first promise: your visit stays between us

At the bottom of nearly every page here sits this sentence, lowercase and easy to miss:

this site makes no third-party requests — no fonts, no analytics, no CDN. your browser talks to our server, and no one else's.

Many websites are assembled from pieces stored on other companies' computers — a font fetched from here, a traffic counter from there. (That is all a “CDN” is.) It is a normal way to build a website, and it means each of those companies learns a little about every visit. We just don't build ours that way. Everything on our pages comes from our own server, so no other company is told you were here. And with no analytics, there is no marketing file about you to sell — it was never written.

The honest footnote: as web servers commonly do, ours keeps a plain notebook of visits — a line saying a page was asked for, when, from which internet address, and what kind of browser and device asked. The doorstep noticing a mail carrier, not a camera in your kitchen. The questions you ask our apps travel separately — typed into the app itself, not into the web address — so the notebook never sees them. One place is the exception — two, to be exact: the ready-made question links on our tours, and a search typed into the rules helper’s shelf page, both put your words into the web address, and the notebook copies web addresses. A question asked on a game’s own page does not: those words travel with the request, not in the address. That is part of what we fixed below.

Writing this page sent us to read our own notebook rules. We found them set to keep their lines for up to a hundred years, which is about a hundred years too many, and roughly a hundred lines holding things they shouldn't have — visit records that had caught a login code or a token in a web address.

On 15 August 2026 we removed them, and changed the rules that let them pile up. Every notebook on the server now keeps thirty days instead of a century — the tour guide's included, because the questions people ask are what we were ever after, and who asked them never was. We also closed it off at the source: web addresses are now written down with their question part replaced by the word REDACTED, which closes the door those lines came through. (One narrow corner remains — the field that records which page a visitor came from can still carry a stray address; the nightly sweep clears anything it catches there.) A sweep runs every night to hold the thirty days, because a rule that only applies when a notebook fills up is not a rule.

The receipts, if you want to check us: twenty-two notebooks — every visit log the server keeps — none of them holding more than thirty days, and a search across every one of them for the two things those hundred lines held now returns nothing. This page audited us before you read it.

Updated 19 August 2026: the count above now reads twenty-two, and here is why. An audit that morning found one notebook that a configuration rewrite had silently stopped writing a month earlier — the rules helper’s own visit log (the promise held the whole time, in the strange way of that failure: nothing was being kept at all) — and three doors keeping no notebook. All four write again, under the same thirty-day ceiling and the same REDACTED rule. We found it checking ourselves; this note is the correction.

As first published, the paragraph above read: “As this page goes up we are removing those lines and shortening the keeping to thirty days (the tour guide's own notebook keeps its year); when it lands, this paragraph will say so, with a date.” It landed 15 August 2026, the same day. This is what that looks like.

The rules helper itself — the page you ask your question on — keeps the same thirty-day notebook as the rest since 19 August 2026, with the address part after “?” replaced by REDACTED before it is written; before that date it kept none, as this page originally said.

Updated 27 August 2026: two corrections. The exception above now names a second place your words enter a web address — a search typed into the rules helper’s shelf page — which this page had left out since it was first published on 15 August; and the sentence saying the rules helper keeps no visit notebook, true when written, has read false since the 19 August repair and now says what that notebook keeps.

Counted again 10 September 2026: this is about the visit notebooks — the plain logs of page visits our machines keep, the ones the receipts paragraph above counts. From 19 August 2026 to 10 September 2026 (UTC) that count read twenty-two, on one server. Since 30 August 2026 a second server of ours has been serving public pages, and it keeps its own visit notebooks: twenty-one of them, counted on 10 September 2026 from its configuration the same way the twenty-two were, every one under the same REDACTED rule. Both machines now hold every notebook to thirty days with a nightly sweep — the first since 15 August 2026, the second from 10 September 2026 at 10:02 UTC, when its sweep was installed and its first dry run found nothing older than thirty days to remove. Against the earlier reading: one more server, twenty-one more notebooks, the same thirty days and the same rule over all forty-three.

A fourth place to ask, 13 September 2026: this note is about where on this workshop's sites a reader can type a question to us, and what each place keeps. From this page's publication on 15 August 2026 until 13 September 2026 (UTC) there were three: the rules helper, the walking-tour guide and the little game world. Since 13 September 2026 there is a fourth, a reading assistant that answers questions about one research page at a time from that page's own words, at its own address while it is tested, and linked from these pages once that testing is done. It keeps what you ask for thirty days so a person can read what people ask, and nothing that says who asked: no address, no browser string, no session, and the time only to the minute. If you press the one button that asks whether the answer was right, it keeps that one bit and nothing beside it. Your words reach it typed into the page itself and never in the web address, so the two exceptions named above are still the only two.

The second promise: the trip your question takes

When this page was published on 15 August 2026, our home page said this about the rules helper and the guide — and it has since been re-worded more than once, so read the words below as a quotation from that date rather than as today’s front page:

Everything they do runs locally on machines we operate: no cloud AI anywhere in their chain.

“Cloud AI” is the common arrangement where an app mails your words to a big AI company's computers and mails an answer back. It is how most AI apps work. Not ours — and the proof is one question, followed door to door. Say it is game night and your cousin is sure. You type your question into the rules helper. It travels to our server — a computer we rent in a datacenter — which finds the right pages of the actual rulebook. Then one more hop: to a real machine on a shelf in our house, with a graphics card we own, where the AI itself reads those pages and writes the answer, with the pages it used. Your screen, our server, a computer in our house, your screen again — nobody else's mailbox on the route, in every app we ship and run. The big commercial AI tools help us build our software; none of them run when you use it.

Two honest things about that trip:

The rules helper keeps the question — on purpose, on a shelf anyone can read. Every answered question joins its public shelf, so the next table with the same argument finds it already settled. The shelf keeps the question and the answer, never the asker: no account, no sign-in, nothing that ties a question to a person. But it is public, and it keeps what it is asked, for good — so ask the way you would ask across a shop counter, out loud.

The game and the tour guide ask almost nothing — and here is exactly what “almost” means. The game world opens, for now, with a shared code from a friend: it is a friends-and-family place, and the code is the door. Inside you can play as a guest, or pick a made-up name and a password if you want the world to remember you — no email, no phone number, no real name. That is on purpose: what we never took cannot leak or be sold. We have no way to reach you outside the game; no address exists — unless, since 19 August 2026, you choose to hand us one through the update list described below, which is its own section because it deserves one. A photo you turn into a pet is redrawn on the way in and never saved — camera and place details dropped with it. The tour guide answers your question and, since 8 September 2026, keeps the question and the answer it gave — with no address, no browser string and no session beside them (the addendum below says why we changed this). Its guest book keeps what you sign — the name and the line — because a guest book's whole job is keeping; the internet address a signature arrived from is no longer written down.

8 September 2026 — the tour guide now keeps what you ask it. This is about the walking-tour guide at amble.strata2signal.com, the little assistant that answers a question about the stop you are standing at. From 24 July 2026, when it opened, until 8 September 2026 it answered and then forgot: the question was never written anywhere, and this page said so. From 8 September 2026 it keeps each question and the answer it gave, with the time, the tour and the stop, on our own machine — and nothing that says who asked: no internet address, no browser string, no session. That notebook is held to the same thirty days as every other notebook on this page, by a sweep that runs every night. We changed this because the questions are how the guide gets better: reading what walkers actually ask is the only honest way to find the stops where it answers badly. The one-line note the guide's server prints for each question, which used to carry the asker's internet address, carries a dash in that place from the same day, and the guest book stops recording the address a signature arrived from. As before, the questions are answered on our own machines and leave for no service. Compared to the earlier reading of this page, which said the guide kept nothing of what you asked: more is kept, and less about you.

Will this ever change?

We keep building, so here is the law over all of it — the only promise about the future we trust ourselves to make: nothing of yours leaves for anyone else's computer. The AI that answers you runs on machines we own — we make them answer faster, and add to them as the workshop grows. When more people ask at once than they can take, you wait your turn for our machine, never someone else's. If that law ever had to change, we would ask you first, every time, showing you exactly what would be sent — and this page would be rewritten, dated, before a single question could take a different trip.

Amended 19 August 2026 — the update list. The game’s site now carries an optional form: leave an email address, get an occasional note about the game — a few a year, written and sent by a person. Here is exactly what that changes. Your address lands in one table in our own database, and it travels to exactly one other place: Proton, the mail service that carries our notes, at the moment a note is sent — never at signup, and never anywhere else. Nothing about your questions changes at all: they still never leave our machines. And one confession, because this page’s own rule is rewrite-first: the form went live this afternoon and this rewrite followed hours behind it. That is a miss against our own procedure — the first since this page was published — and this dated note is both the amendment and the admission.

That's the tour. Still no pop-up, ever — and as first published this sentence also said “no mailing list,” which stopped being true on 19 August 2026 when the game grew its opt-in update list (the amendment above tells that story in full). If anything here doesn't sit right, write to us: a person reads every message. Writing to us — or joining that list — are now the two times you hand us a way to reach you back, and both are your choice, made by you, on purpose. Your note sits in our inbox, envelope and all, until a person answers it.

What to take with you

• Our sites make two promises, and both are checkable. Your visit stays between us — no analytics, nothing in any page fetched from another company’s computers — and the AI that answers you runs on machines we operate: no cloud AI anywhere in the chain.
• The audit cut both ways — it caught our own notebook keeping too much. The server’s twenty-two visit logs now hold thirty days instead of a century, the lines that once carried question text end in the word REDACTED, and a search across every notebook for what those hundred lines held returns nothing.
• Nothing on these pages phones anywhere else. Before publishing we swept every page and file our sites serve for third-party loads and found none — and you can view any page’s source and run the same check yourself.
• The one script-shaped thing on the pages we write is a label, not a program. Since 16 August 2026 the exhibit and guide pages carry a small ld+json block — the title and date written in the format search engines read. A browser never runs it and never fetches anything for it. One wing of this address is built from a different repository and is the exception in both directions: the diffusion bench carries no such block on any of its pages, and carries real code on all of them — the dark/light switch described below.

How to check our work — and see it live

Ways to check us: scroll this page to its footer for the first promise, and our home page for the second. Walk the rules helper's public shelf yourself: what you see there is everything it kept about the asking. And view any page's source — nothing in it is fetched from another company's computers. Before publishing, we swept the pages and files our sites serve for third-party loads and found none, and read the rules helper's code and the shape of its records for anything that stores who-asked — nothing does. The audit cut both ways: it is what found our own notebook keeping too much.

One thing you will see in that source, so you hear it here first rather than wonder: since 16 August 2026 the exhibit and guide pages on this hub carry a small <script type="application/ld+json"> block. It is a label, not a program — the page's title and date written in the format search engines read, so that what we publish can be found. A browser never runs it and never fetches anything for it; it is a piece of the page, sitting still. On the pages of this hub that open without a password, nothing else is a script at all — the check that publishes them refuses any other kind, and it is that check rather than your browser that does the refusing. One wing of this address is not published that way and is not covered by that check: the diffusion bench, whose comparison pages are built from a different repository, and each of which carries two small inline blocks that are one feature — the switch between the dark and the light view. One applies the choice you made last time before the page paints, the other wires the button. It remembers that choice in your own browser and asks nothing of anybody; it is the only code you will meet here that a browser runs, it is ours, and it is counted rather than glossed in the correction below.

Corrected 2026-09-08 — the two absolute sentences above were too broad, and both stood for twenty-three days after our own machine-readable index dropped one of them and contradicted the other. For a reader who scrolled straight here: this note is about what runs, and what does not run, in your browser when you read this site — the bullet and the paragraph above it. From this page’s publication at 2026-08-15T00:00Z until 2026-09-08T10:00Z it said that every page here carries the ld+json label, and that nothing else on this site is a script. Both sentences were written about the pages this hub writes by hand, and neither was true of the whole address. Counted at 2026-09-08T09:45Z over every file this site serves at a path that opens without a password: the diffusion bench holds 4,350 built pages, none of them carrying an ld+json label and every one of them carrying the dark/light switch; the 71 pages this hub publishes itself hold 41 labels — the exhibits and the guides, plus the front page, the roster and the licence ledger; not the 27 data-kit file listings, the two design-scratch pages or the not-found page — and no other script of any kind. Set against the earlier reading: on 2026-08-16 the machine-readable /llms.txt retired the words every page as too broad and disclosed the wing’s switch, having censused the wing at 684 pages the day before — but it left its own version of the script sentence standing, so for those twenty-three days the two surfaces disagreed with each other as well as with the wing. Both are corrected in the same pour as this note, and the wing has grown roughly six-fold in between. It took an outside audit on 2026-09-07, the third in a row to raise it, to get either changed. The promise underneath did not move and did not need to: no page here, in either half, fetches anything from anybody else’s computer — re-checked the same day, and every off-site link in that wing points at one of our own sites.

The rest of the seminar

This walk is one road through the workshop’s field guide — the series that opens up one piece of the machinery at a time. Three librarians and a careful reader follows the same question’s other journey: how RuleSage finds the right rulebook page before a word of the answer exists. Reading is fast, writing is slow explains why the answer then arrives word by word — measured on the machines this page walked you past. And the whole shelf holds every bench behind every claim, failures included. If there’s a piece of the machinery you want opened next, say so — the suggestion box is read.

Benched, drafted, and audited by the workshop's own agents under a human operator's rulings, then revised with that operator — often across many rounds; nothing releases until they have read it and signed off. The same division of labor this whole hub practices — told in full here.

Licence: CC BY 4.0, the whole page — name the source and link to it.