AI summary (Claude Fable)
AI: Summary
The 11 August 2026 session of the Future Text Lab brought together Frode Hegland, Brandel Zachernuk (briefly, before a standing meeting), Tom Haymes, Benja Gooder, Astral_Druid, and Heiner Benking (listening in from a train). What began as a technical question — can the HTML model element live inside an EPUB — opened out into one of the group’s most philosophical sessions to date: a sustained exploration of perspective itself. Frode’s new star-field view in Interatlas, which shows how constellations dissolve into arbitrary shapes the moment you leave Earth’s vantage point, became the session’s governing metaphor, threading through Tom’s knowledge navigator and its resistance to imposed ontologies, Benja’s proposal for negotiated glossaries between two people in dialog, and Astral_Druid’s account of watching a gift economy in VRChat collapse into a zero-sum market game. The session closed with a declared direction: building a dialog system for people who actually want to make the world better.
AI: Main Topic
The primary topic was perspective as both a technical and human problem. Frode opened by asking Brandel whether the model element could be embedded in EPUB, and Brandel confirmed that since EPUB is essentially a web view — WebKit on most Apple platforms — a declarative model element (autoplay, looping, stage-mode orbit) should pass through and render in readers such as Apple Books, though Chromium-, Gecko-, and bespoke-engine readers would need to adopt support for it to become dependable. Frode then demonstrated the new star view in Interatlas on visionOS, built after a weekend on the island of Sark, the first officially designated Dark Sky Island: all one hundred thousand-plus naked-eye-visible stars rendered in space, with constellations that make sense only from Earth’s position and collapse into unrelated elongated shapes from anywhere else. This image — perspective-locked observers mistaking their vantage point for reality — became the frame for the rest of the session’s discussion of knowledge tools, dialog, and politics.
AI: Highlights
Brandel Zachernuk confirmed that the model element can in principle work inside EPUB wherever the rendering engine is WebKit, and noted this is a good reason to get Chromium and Gecko on board so support extends beyond Apple’secosystem.
Frode announced that Interatlas for visionOS is now available in the regular App Store, with a usability fix coming: the undiscoverable pinch-out gesture for the data sheet will be replaced by a button on the user’s arm.
Frode stated for the record that he is beginning to experiment with large local LLMs, which look feasible on an M4 Ultra with 128 GB of RAM, and clarified that his proposed reading experience for the hypertext papers means users bringing their own data into the group’s apps — not downloading ACM content to build a demo product.
Tom Haymes named his preferred term for an unstructured knowledge store: a corpus rather than a database, because a database assumes an ontology while a corpus lets relational connections shift.
Benja Gooder committed to building a prototype of his negotiated-glossary dialog idea, hoping to have something the group can tear apart in roughly three weeks.
Frode closed the session by declaring that alongside the proceedings work, the group is likely now working on a dialog system for people who want to make the world better, with saving_the_world_dialog.com noted in the chat.
AI: Insights
The constellation became the session’s central conceptual instrument. A constellation is real information about the observer, not about the stars — it exists only from one locked vantage point. Benja extended this directly: we are all perspective-locked on our own planet, and a real renaissance would come from being able to see the Big Dipper from someone else’s world.
Tom reframed his knowledge navigator around the astronomer metaphor: he does not want the same constellations night after night, but to rearrange the stars of his own corpus into new constellations — a frog instead of a horse — and he explicitly does not want the tool’s creator to put a finger on the scale. The tool should propose possible ontologies rather than embed one.
Tom distinguished strong links from weak links as two distinct retrieval modes requiring a switch: strong links reveal unexpected clusters within what you already have, while weak links find someone in another discipline saying the same thing in different language.
Brandel articulated a non-egocentric approach to personal knowledge: he does not curate from identity or taste, and would prefer implicit organization to fall out of where he was and how ideas were arranged rather than a volitional structure imposed by preference. Frode noted his own note-capture app already records location and time for exactly this reason, while observing that his own thoughts form the central spine of his knowledge space — a genuine difference in orientation between the two.
Astral_Druid’s VRChat account was the session’s most concrete case study in how systems shape perception: a gift economy where creation was relational was transformed, once weapons were monetized and a marketplace with wallet icons went live, into an environment where new players see avatars and worlds first as prices. The reading of an environment is involuntary — which is why, as Astral put it, perception sits under the wisdom stat in Dungeons & Dragons, not intelligence.
Astral proposed that locks were the first zero-sum system to spill out of human heads into the physical world — the first system that cannot be argued with in human terms — and observed that we can now build locks that rearrange themselves, suggesting the overdue realignment of perspective may be technically possible.
Tom, channeling Foucault via Gemini, complicated Benja’s Simple Writer enthusiasm: restricting vocabulary to the thousand most common words does not free you from the prison of language, it shrinks the cell — someone still chooses the list. You never escape the prison; you only choose one you like better.
Benja’s counter to the language-as-prison framing was quietly profound: words are just fingers pointing at the moon, our best little bird call for invoking a fuzzy crystallized thing in another mind — imperfect, but the best vehicle we have, and richer for every additional perspective.
The freedom exercise crystallized the group’s practical direction: when a far-right and far-left person define freedom (freedom to own a gun versus freedom from a neighbor’s gun), Astral cut through to the shared postulate — both are assessments of how one can act without fear. Mapping definitions down to postulate level, spatially, emerged as a concrete design target, with Frode naming the genre 3D graffiti: spatial rebuttal and annotation with citations, changing the shape of the original argument rather than replying beside it.
Tom connected the polycrisis to silo self-optimization: every silo optimizes for itself regardless of the whole, exactly as Madison described factions in Federalist No. 10, and Vannevar Bush recognized that interconnected systems had outgrown siloed comprehension. His knowledge navigator is, in his phrase from the chat, a system for a perspective.
Frode’s Chinese Room provocation — that humans also largely autocomplete without understanding — was met by Astral with the mango argument: humans assign meaning within a lived world, and you cannot describe the taste of a mango in a way anyone else could truly understand, yet such descriptions are the only knowledge AI systems are trained on.
Astral offered a corrective on the yin-yang: rather than a balance of good and evil, the original texts depict sunlight striking a mountainside at different times of day — a symbol of change and of one thing seen in different lights, fitting the session almost too well.
AI: Resources Mentioned
Viable System Model (VSM), Stafford Beer — introduced by Astral_Druid, who has been puzzling over how to organize a database for this recursive model; paper shared in chat with the warning that AI massively hallucinates on the topic: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221720304768
Polycrisis, Adam Tooze — raised by Frode via a conversation with his friend Bruce Horn; Tom Haymes identified the term as Tooze’s.
Bill McKibben on climate change — video shared in chat by Tom Haymes: https://youtu.be/9LTGzEzDat0
xkcd Simple Writer, Randall Munroe — demonstrated by Benja Gooder; Tom Haymes connected it to Munroe’s book Thing Explainer, written with the thousand most common English words.
Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari — cited by Benja Gooder for Dunbar’s number (~150) as the limit of relationship-mapping and the root of tribal unease; Frode listened to it during his PhD.
Michael Levin — mentioned by Astral_Druid for bioelectrical communication research, “bio-prompting” cells to grow an eye on a tadpole’s tail.
Michel Foucault — invoked by Tom Haymes (via a Gemini query) on language as a system of power and the Simple Writer as a smaller prison cell.
James Madison, Federalist No. 10 — cited by Tom Haymes on factions as silos operating in self-interest.
Vannevar Bush and associative trails; Ted Nelson — invoked by Tom Haymes on picking up connections and handing them to someone as the record of thought.
Cory Doctorow — quoted by Tom Haymes: a state whose primary business is digging holes in the ground and putting men with guns around them is not a recipe for democracy.
Douglas Adams, the Total Perspective Vortex — recalled by Tom Haymes as the machine that shows you your place in the universe and drives everyone but Zaphod mad.
VRChat — Astral_Druid’s case study of a gift economy becoming a market game.
Mark Zuckerberg’s recent statement — mentioned by Tom Haymes as explicitly referencing the different approach of Chinese models, which Astral_Druid had been seeking English-language writing on.
Benjamin Franklin’s liberty-and-security aphorism — quoted by Tom Haymes, robustly rejected by Frode.
Sark — the first officially designated Dark Sky Island, visited by Frode this weekend, inspiring the Interatlas star view.
Interatlas — Frode Hegland’s Earth, solar system and star-field app, now live on the visionOS App Store.
Stated in chat by Frode: Saving_the_world_dialog.com
Lyrics
Stars first. Frode went to Sark, the Dark Sky Island, lay in a field and saw a hundred thousand suns, came home and built them into Interatlas — now live in the App Store, every one. And here’s the thing he brought back for the table: a constellation’s only real from where you stand. Step to the side and the Big Dipper scatters — the shape was never out there, it was in the eye, the land.
Before that, a technical opening with Brandel: can the model element live in an EPUB shell? Yes — EPUB is a web view, WebKit mostly, declarative markup passes through it well. Get Chromium and Gecko to adopt it, and three-dimensional models ride inside the book. Then Brandel had to drop for a standing meeting, but the spatial thread was set — go take a look.
Tom talked knowledge navigator, said corpus, not database — a database assumes an ontology up front. He wants the AI to show him possible constellations, rearrange the stars himself, that’s the hunt. Strong links find the clusters you didn’t know you carried, weak links find the biologist saying what you say in another discipline’s language. And the builder must never press the scale — show paths, not the way.
Brandel, before leaving, said he isn’t egocentric — he’d rather structure fall from where and when, not curated from identity and taste. Frode noted his own notes log place and time — again a difference in the spines we build our knowledge on: for Frode, his own ideas run through the middle. Thirty papers floating in a headset room: top of the pile, set aside — but that’s too little. Bring the whole library to bear for context, he proposed.
Benja arrived with lenses: could you codify a frame? A poor man’s perspective, radical subjectivity by name. He showed the xkcd Simple Writer — thousand common words — then pitched a chat where two people negotiate their terms: use an uncommon word, you both must agree what it means, a private glossary built in thirty minutes of talk. Tom answered with Foucault: you’ve just shrunk the prison cell, someone picks the word list — there’s always power in the chalk. Benja shrugged it gently: words are fingers at the moon, our best bird call to light a shape in someone else’s head.
Astral told the hardest story: VRChat’s gift economy, where making was relational and cultures grew instead — then weapons got monetized, chaos sold the product, the sellers joined the board, a wallet on each face, and new arrivals now see prices before people. You read your environment involuntarily — that’s the case for why perception’s wisdom, not intelligence, in D&D. Locks, said Astral, were the first zero-sum machine to leave our heads and enter the world where none can argue. In nature, two systems always leave a leftover in between.
Freedom got dissected: gun in hand or neighbor’s gun removed — and Astral found the postulate beneath the two positions: each is someone’s reckoning of how to act without fear. Map that in space, said Frode — 3D graffiti, rebuttals with citations, change the shape of the argument, not a reply off to the side. Tom tied polycrisis to the silos — Madison’s factions self-optimizing, Vannevar Bush watching systems interlock and slide. And the yin-yang, Astral noted, was never good and evil — it’s sunlight on a mountainside at different times of day, a symbol of one thing seen in changing light. Fitting.
Benja’s building a prototype, three weeks, rip it apart. And Frode named the destination as the session wound away: a dialog system for people who want to make the world better. Not team-sport politics — perspective, postulates, and heart. Monday’s coming. The stars don’t move. We do. That’s a start.