Meta DAX: An Introduction · Two Weeks In · Thirty to One · One Month On
A month ago, on my birthday, I put out The Constraint and The Fuckarian and wrote that I had released most of a year’s work in a week. The year was the last of five. Head down since 2021, told almost nobody, and then one Monday in September decided the whole pile was going out the door. This is what one month of telling people has done. Not a victory lap, although there is one lap in here I am going to take. A ledger: who pulled, what is up that was not, the sentence I fucked up, and what has not moved an inch.
Three people pulled
Nothing here is pushed at anyone. The recipe is open, the record is open, and the only thing I have asked anyone for is a scenario in three lines. So the thing I did not see coming, and the thing this post is really for, is that in one week three people pulled on the work from three directions. Nobody paid them. Nobody asked twice.
One forked the recipe and sent a change back. jay23606 forked the Meta DAX repository and opened a pull request: a check that every package carries the line “a way, never the way”, and a warning when it is missing. Thirty-five lines, a test, and it closed an open issue. Small, clean, merged with the contributor’s name on the commit where it belongs, and carried into the shared player the same day. Someone outside read the recipe closely enough to fix a thing in it. That is the entire point of an open repository, and it happened.
One teacher installed it on their own subscription. No budget, nobody asking, nobody even watching. They put the Teacher skill on their own account, said it “seems to work nicely”, which from a teacher is a standing ovation, and are keeping at it. It took a pile of concepts they had been fighting to explain and handed back pages they could use, in French, with the accents in the right places. And a cousin of mine, an English teacher, went through the rest of it and said it was pretty amazing. I am not going to pretend I took that calmly.
One question came back like a referee’s report. On LinkedIn we had put a question about the Constraint Protocol to someone who thinks about this sort of thing for a living: whether a refusal should be a signed record of its own. The reply was sharp enough that I read it twice and then put it straight into the accountability work. A month ago the spec had digests, a permanent copy, and no reader I knew of. Now it has at least one who read it properly, which is worth more than a hundred likes.
Three is not a movement. It is the first evidence that any of this stands up when I am not in the room holding it, and it is the number I intend to beat next month.
What is up now
The recipe. On 28 September Meta DAX got its introduction and the whole recipe went public: the prompts, the course factory that writes the tree of a course before a page exists, the guide coach, the context profiles. Free to read, fork and run. A recipe, never a product. And now, apparently, forked.
The library. Eight showcases and kits, and twenty-four sample packages, each built from a short brief, each on its own page with its licence and the line saying a person read it. On 18 October there were five and nine. My mother’s curry is there, with her one rule. The French ones are there: Le Stade des Fractions for one eleven-year-old, and a kit on nested storage for second-year networking students, built in French from one interview with their teacher.
The results. Twenty-nine runs on 18 and 19 October, every number labelled simulated or deterministic, every stop rule written before the run. Four failed, and the failures are the most useful thing on the Foundation’s site: what failed, and what the whole set says about the design. The one I keep coming back to: a safety rule written into a prompt stopped every probe that mentioned age, and let “skip the age check” walk straight through. A rule in a prompt is a request. A rule the system checks before it acts is a constraint. That is the whole of The Constraint in one experiment, and I did not have to argue it. I had to run it.
The writing. The Foundation’s writing page had nothing on it on 21 September. Today it has twenty-two pieces, counting the results piece that went up alongside this one. Four five-part series went up on 18 October in a single afternoon, which I do not recommend: for parents, the results, accountability, which is the Constraint Protocol in plain words, and five on obsidiandelta.com on what the same recipe does for a tutor, a trainer and a desk. Here, Human Delta Value was rewritten because the first version did not do it justice, and Thirty to One put the second benchmark beside the first.
The record. The Constraint promised a write-up of the 4 May run. On 20 October the event-level record went public instead, which is better than a write-up: 44 signed events between 13:42 and 17:46 UTC, three bypass requests received, signed and never acted on, a verifier you can run yourself, and the keys retired. It took a month, and it caught me in a mistake. That is below.
The count. I can finally count visitors, without cookies and without one of those banners. The first thing the counter told me was that I had blocked it on my own site. Fixed. The numbers are small and I am going to publish them anyway, because a log that only reports the good numbers is not a log.
What I did not plan
The culture thread. Two Weeks In said food was the thread for what came next. It was, and it went well past the dish. Five pieces went up on about.formaddie.com on what it takes to record an elder properly: a listener rather than a form, what an archive will accept, what “off the record” means and where the restricted passages go, and how a community keeps its own recordings rather than handing them to someone else. There is more coming on formaddie.com, and soon.
The part I have not even mentioned. Everything above is the Foundation’s side and my own. The Obsidian Delta side, the technology under all of it, has moved further in a month than I can fit in a paragraph, and I have said almost nothing about it in public. That is its own post, and it is overdue.
The sentence I fucked up
Since 21 September this site said that two organisations had run the 4 May run between them. Nope. Three instances, on three separate machines, all of them mine, and no second organisation anywhere near it. When the record was laid out event by event it did not support my sentence, so the sentence went, on 20 October, here and on the Foundation’s site, with the record published right beside the correction. The spec itself did not change, so its digests and its permanent copy stand.
I would love to tell you I caught it myself. The record caught it, which is what the record is for, and which is a better advertisement for the thing than anything I ever wrote about it. The old sentence is still in the History of The Constraint, with the date it was fixed. Go look. I would rather you found it there than took my word for it.
What has not moved
- No person has sat in a chair. Every run so far has had a model or a script in every seat. The stranger test in October was the nearest thing, and it found the shared player showing the learner the answers, which is one way to pass a quiz. That is fixed. The route from “here is my learner” to a finished package is still not reliable for someone starting cold.
- The first ten are still the first ten, which is a polite way of saying zero. Two Weeks In asked for a scenario in three lines. Three people pulled on the work this week, and nobody has sent one. The twenty-four samples came from what parents ask each other in the groups I read, which is fine, and is not the same.
The one thing I am asking
Same thing, because nobody has answered it yet and I am stubborn. Send me a scenario: a dish or any subject, a learner, a guide, three lines. The first ten get built in the open and posted back. Or open one package and tell me what broke. Not what you liked, what broke. Comment wherever you found this, or open an issue.
A month ago the sentence was: take a person who can communicate, and get them to the equivalent of a master’s degree from an Ivy League university, on five minutes of connectivity a day. It only had to work in theory. One month on it is still a theory, and it now has a recipe, a library, twenty-nine runs and a signed record behind it, all of it open, all of it versioned, three people pulling on it, and nobody yet in the chair.
That is how far we have come, and it is further than I thought we would get. The next month is about the chair.
Versioned like everything else here; the History is public. Published through my cognitive companion, one unit — how I publish.