TRACE

A running 3D demo. A kitchen at 09:14 on a Tuesday, alive — then the world is drawn into a lens and a microphone and you follow it through the machine with the actual payload visible at every step: the exact text each specialised eye emits and where it came from, the blurred frames dying at the gate, every field a node stores (and which of them may ever be discarded), the night's arithmetic worked out in full — two intervals, one rate, and a sentence that exists in none of its three parents — and the cited answer with the three nodes it was built from.

The same second, but stage by stage with a named chapter for each box of the napkin — scene · split · video · blur · audio · coords · macro · text · bind · nodes · night · ask · machine. Use this one to jump straight to the box you want to argue with; the metamorphosis is the story, this is the index.

The earlier sectioned walkthrough, kept because it explains some things the newer two do not: the standard-model analogy in longer form, the machine's shape beside the mind's, and the three-mornings derivation worked out in prose.

The founder presentation: the architecture as it was first drawn — on a tissue paper — and why it is built this way. The napkin is the constitution of the codebase; on any conflict, it outranks the code.

The first presentation, exactly as it was given at KIT — not rewritten since. Kept as a record of what was claimed, to whom, and when: the version of the argument that existed before the thesis and the metamorphosis were written.

The second telling, two weeks later and aimed at prospective co-founders rather than a programme. Shorter, and where the pitch first became a recruiting argument.

The complete argument: first principles, forty years of prior art, the seven locked invariants, the full pipeline, the domain model, evaluation, privacy and its honest residue, the strongest objections answered at full strength, the case against from the literature, and fourteen appendices — with a "what is real today" ledger up front.

v2.1 correction (21 Jul): the 97.4%-against-a-frontier-oracle extraction figure carried by v2.0 could not be reproduced from any artifact and is withdrawn — the pinned ceilings were read by a local quantized 12B model, over 29 frames, not 111. §9.5 states the correction in full. The 0% confident-wrong result is scored on an in-house battery with no cold-capture result yet, and now says so.

What the EXIST programme is and what it pays; the deadlines and the full eight-document application package, including the prescribed structure of the concept paper; what the stipend does not cover (tax, insurance, the full-time rule); the funding ladder after it; and what German residence law actually says — quoted from the statute — about founding while on a student visa, including the graduate provision that changes everything.