renato.design

Gesture is a blank rectangle that waits for your first mark to dirty it up. It refines it, you move a slider and your mark gets darker or disappears, you make another mark and the LLM refines or extends it. Activate text or voice input and your verbal prompts subtly adjust the drawing — if the transfiguration slider is high enough. Make it quicker, make it hotter, it's too damned sharp and it's about to cut me — help!

My largest app by code line count, which means little to me other than the tokens I burned to make it. macOS native, pressure-sensitive tablet capable. It only has a few brushes, it's not meant to compete with the big kids (yet.) But it can draw and edit vector splines and Bezier handles for precise editing if you want them. It uses Core ML Stable Diffusion, was trained with about eleven vernacular packs (but you can extend by feeding it your own drawings.) You can capture images for exporting out all at once. And like all my apps, gesture has a rich Concordance panel in addition to full help and tooltips.

You draw. Your voice adds design vocabulary while your hands stay on the surface. The transfiguration slider controls how much the model transforms your marks — from a whisper of refinement to aggressive reimagining, capped at 0.85 because your hand should always be visible in the result. Pin what you like. Export the batch. Repeat until the drawing is smarter than you expected.

A figuration prompt overlay for direct prompt editing on canvas, a DisCursive bar with hundreds of design vocabulary terms across a dozen domains (elements, principles, edge character, composition, rendering, vernacular, affect), and voice input that listens while your hands stay on the surface. Say "aggressive contour, cross section, knife edge" and it knows what that means without asking a cloud. Everything runs on your machine.

Pencil, marker, chalk, pen, blueline annotation (visible to you, invisible to the model), eraser. Pressure-sensitive. Catmull-Rom interpolation. Spline editing with anchor points and Bezier handles for when the gesture needs precision.

IcarusMode pushes divergence to the ceiling. StrangerMode starts cold with no conditioning. HeartattaCk sets every parameter to maximum. DayspringMode is a Konami Code easter egg. You'll know when you find it.

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A word processor that watches how you write — not what. It reads your keystrokes, your pauses, your pasted-in fragments and abandoned paragraphs. It responds through color shifts, typographic adjustments, and a voice grounded in writing pedagogy and classical rhetoric. provoc calls forth better composition by refusing to be neutral.

You write. provoc reads the behavioral telemetry — typing rhythm, pause duration, edit frequency, paste events. It infers a state. The state changes the room: background color drifts, typography tightens or loosens, the voice says something worth hearing or says nothing at all. The silence is also a comment.

Eight behavioral states inferred from keystroke patterns, never selected. TORRENT when you've been writing for twenty minutes straight. THE STALL when the cursor blinks without input. PASTE EVENT desaturates the interface for a breath. REVISION SPIRAL notices when you've edited the same paragraph four times in six minutes.

The Seminar: highlight a passage and summon dozens of readers. Each of your choices responds in four parts: reaction, principle, citation, and what is lost. That fourth part names what your original does that their position would sacrifice.

Register Intelligence: state your communicative intention. Not genre, but relational goal. provoc analyzes the gap between intended register and received tonality across multiple tensions.

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A browser-based hardware design tool. You describe in plain language what you want a thing to do. ingenue proposes a set of real parts that could do the thing, draws the envelope those parts would fit inside, and names the closest everyday object that envelope resembles. It treats a supplier catalog as a behavioral vocabulary, not a shopping list — a PIR sensor isn't a motion detector, it is a part that waits.

AnalogyMode. Type a description; the engine maps your language onto behavior tags across the catalog and returns a three-to-six-part stack. ConstraintMode. Set an envelope — budget, skill floor, power source — and get viable stacks ranked by novelty. CuriosityMode. No input; the engine surfaces combinations nobody usually makes. Shrink-To-Fit. Name a target size (pack of gum, Altoids tin, watch face); the engine re-thinks the stack to fit, reporting what survived and what didn't.

The engine proposes, five FabricationVoices argue. The Tinkerer bins-and-bridges. The Professor asks what problem is being solved. The Artist rejects technically correct stacks on poetic grounds. The Engineer names the specific thing that breaks first. The Bricoleur asks what is already in the drawer. Disagreement is the content.

The voices run three ways — against the Anthropic API with your own key, against a local model through Ollama or LM Studio, or from authored response banks if you have neither. Nothing leaves your browser. No server, no account, no analytics.

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In 1787 Ernst Chladni dragged a violin bow across a metal plate dusted with sand and the sand jumped into geometry. The plate had no opinion about music. It just responded. murmur is that plate, with a few centuries of physics catching up. Sing into your laptop and wave at it. A four-layer physics surface tells you, in real time, what your sound actually is — not what it should be, not what it could be with practice, what it is, right now, shaped into something you can look at.

Not a music generator, not a visualizer, not a game. A quasi-scientific instrument that happens, as a side effect of being played, to produce something you could call a composition and something you could call an image. You make both by doing something with your mouth and your hands. The app holds still and watches.

murmur exists in two forms, and you should not feel a difference between them when you are playing. The web version runs in your browser. No install, no account, audio and camera data never leave your machine. The Mac version is the web version inside a native window: real macOS menubar, native panels, dock icon, draggable title bar, and the kind of small comforts that justify an .app instead of a bookmark.

Two channels. VoiceChannel listens to your microphone — pitch, amplitude, spectral centroid, zero-crossing rate. It does not change your voice. GestureChannel watches your hands through your webcam, runs them through MediaPipe Hands, and reads twenty-one landmarks per hand at thirty frames a second. Position is timbre, depth is space, velocity is a wave, pinching is a request for the field to crystallize.

A dozen material presets, named for material states, not instruments — Annealed, Drawn Wire, Spalled, Woven Ground, Cast Form, Ferric, Hollow Shell, Knapped, Risen Glaze, Cold Weld, Quenched, Dead Room. Hold two at once and the space between them, located by your hand spread, is a valid destination.

Four physics layers: a Faraday-flavored fluid film, a Gray-Scott reaction-diffusion system that crystallizes into Chladni figures on stable pitch and dissolves into turbulence on noise, thousands of sand grains drifting toward nodal lines and scattering on transients, and a displacement layer that lets your hands push dimples into the surface.

Every session bundles into a single zip with a LoopFile, an optional video, any high-resolution CymaFrames you captured, and a SessionSlate parameter stream. Filenames don't use timestamps — they use a vocabulary. murmur_glassine-drift.zip. CymaFrame_palimpsestual-eddy.png. The kind of thing.

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A small laboratory for the principles that make interfaces work — and the moments when breaking those principles is the move. Every "law" is a live instrument you can drag, click, and bend. Every rule has a "How this app uses it" disclosure that lets the app audit itself against its own teachings. If it cheats, it tells you.

The Labs. Playable demonstrations — Fitts, Hick, Miller, Doherty, Wertheimer, Zeigarnik, von Restorff, and friends. Built so you can feel each principle instead of read about it.

The Deviations. Rules the renato.design suite breaks on purpose, with reasons. Hidden undo. Modal-less panels. Sliders only for brushes. The other half of the book.

The Dark Patterns. Catalogued, several playable — confirmshaming, roach motels, fake countdowns — each with a "← gotcha" reveal that names the cognitive lever being pulled.

The Mac version is signed, notarized, stapled, and lives in your dock. The browser version needs nothing but a tab; no account, no cookies, no tracking.

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Start with Token Prediction if you want to know how ChatGPT writes. Start with The Chinese Room if you want to know whether it understands. Start with Reward Hacking if you want to know why optimizing the wrong thing is worse than not optimizing at all. Start with Labor Displacement if the question is personal.

42 labs. Every one cites its source, and every source is checkable through a three-layer concordance. This is not a course — it is an investigation.

Every lab includes a section that turns the lens on TuringTaster itself. The app was built by a language model — which makes it a living specimen of the phenomena it investigates.

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Glassine, Slow Honey, Dérive, Hauntology, Bad Dream. Five equalizer-style snap settings between reference render and confrontation. Tap one, tweak from there.

Drop a single still and Dilate dreams forward from it. Drop two stills for a diffusion-bridged morph. Drop a folder for ordered keyframe bridges. Or use no source at all — file menu, Imagine New Clip, and the app dreams the entire piece from a single line of text.

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One input, three directions. Type plain English and watch it become code through decreasing ambiguity. Paste code and see it decoded upward into language you can discuss in a design review. Put German next to Swift next to CSS and see how each language encodes the same reality through different constraints.

Every programming language is a pidgin — a trade language that formed when two groups needed to communicate across a gap. Humans don’t think in semicolons. Machines don’t understand “make it pop.” Code is the simplified contact language that formed between. The name of this app isn’t a metaphor.

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Import. Toolpaths. Simulate. Clear. Export. That’s the whole top bar. Every other setting is a choice you make inside one of the five, not a tab you have to hunt through.

Mill-red ribbons of light trace each toolpath the moment the paths are generated — before the simulation runs, so you see the plan first and watch the tool follow it second. Width scales with the stepover. A big pass leaves a wide glow, a fine finishing pass leaves a narrow one.

Aluminum 6061, hard wood, polycarbonate, mild steel, rigid foam. Each with its own PBR setup and chip physics: aluminum throws curls, foam throws flake, hardwood throws long shavings. The stock mesh carries the material you chose so the block being cut looks like what it is.

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A literary instrument that presents itself as a Rorschach session and secretly composes a piece of writing. One voice shows a card. Another speaks what it sees. A third voice — the Scribe — never speaks aloud, and writes the whole time. Ten cards later, a small mark appears in the interface. Tap it. A piece of writing is revealed alongside a proof: every line traceable to the card and the seeing that produced it.

A toggle — corporate™ — swaps the skin without touching the session underneath. The same ten cards, the same scribe, the same arc — but in the language of the HR retreat. Output is a Quarterly Memo, Operating Principles, or Mission/Vision/Values. It is not funny. It is a memo from the institution, performing its caringness. Its uncanniness is entirely situational — generated from inkblots, and the reader knows it — not lexical. Both modes are exactly as real. Both are exactly as dubious.

The default deck is the 1921 Bern printing of the ten original Rorschach plates — in the order Hermann Rorschach administered them. An alternate deck, unlocked by a sequence we won't spoil here, is Justinus Kerner's Klecksographien — folded-ink parlor blots made c. 1857, sixty-plus years before the test. Nine cards in that deck; the arc bends accordingly.

Bring your own Anthropic key, run Ollama locally for a session that never leaves the machine, or run offline on authored banks that have been written, card by card, by Phil and Claude. The banks are not a degradation message. They are part of the instrument.

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A deterministic decoder for the factory production documents on Mopar muscle and GM third-generation F-body cars. Give it a VIN. Or pick a document type — fender tag, broadcast sheet, SPID label — and it will try to read the codes off your car into the textbox. The decode returns a structured read — engine, transmission, paint, plant, package — with a citation under every code and a confidence tag that says how sure it is.

Every code carries a confidence tag — factory-documented, registry-corroborated, registry-attested, forum-consensus, single-source, disputed. Damaged sheets get partial decodes; missing cells are marked, not invented. When two sources disagree, both readings show. Plant-aware (a Lynch Road tag is not a St. Louis tag) and year-aware (the A32 axle code means one thing in 1970 and another in 1971).

The decode engine is pure TypeScript, in your browser. No server hop, no LLM, no telemetry. Same input, same output, every time. Photos never leave your device — the OCR is local. No accounts, no analytics. The codes themselves are facts and unrestricted; the compilation, the citation discipline, and the writing on top are the work product.

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An architectural pedagogy instrument. You give it a design brief. Seven paradigms — each a real position from the discipline's literature — respond. Each one in the first person. Each one citing the source. Each one with a different idea about what your building should be. You then take the parts you want from each, axis by axis, and watch the building that results. Where the paradigms agree, the building is calm. Where they disagree, the system flags the conflict and shows you what each side stands to lose.

The point is not to find the right answer. The point is to be made aware that there is more than one position, that those positions have history, and that the choice you make is a choice.

Seven voices, anchored in primary literature: Alberti (concinnitas, harmonic proportion), Venturi (complexity and contradiction, the decorated shed), Loos (Raumplan, ornament as crime), Social Dimensions (program as labor question), Palladio (Quattro Libri proportion, bilateral symmetry), Alexander (Pattern Language, the Quality Without a Name), Hadid (parametric continuity, dissolved thresholds).

The web demo runs the three sample briefs through a fixed library of paradigm responses — click a brief, see all seven respond, blend in the mixer, watch the building change. The Mac version writes new responses live against a local LLM (Ollama, llama3.1:8b), accepts your own custom briefs, opens the full mixer with all seven axes, and runs the full viewport with massing, render, and plan. Same chamber, two scales of commitment.

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The Canon. Twenty-three lessons — twelve anatomy letters (A, g, H, O, n, e, f, Q, S, a) and six interactive: real GPOS kerning pairs, OpenType feature toggles, leading and measure sliders on a real paragraph, real vs. faked small caps, and a paragraph with a live ink-density heatmap. Lesson 21 renders the same letter at five point sizes and snaps the opsz axis per size. Lesson 24 puts a mechanical skew next to a real italic so you can see which files redraw and which only lean. The variable-fonts lesson reads the file’s fvar table and hands you a slider per axis.

Dig. Font-Book-level inspection plus two moves no other web tool does. Fingerprint rasterizes six canonical glyphs to an offscreen canvas and measures stress axis, x-height ratio, stroke contrast, aperture, counter density, and overshoot — then emits a three-word voice and a classification from the numbers. Downloads as a shareable SVG card. Pair Atlas enumerates every kerning pair the font ships, ranked by magnitude, with a live per-pair adjustment slider.

Forge. Programmatic remix. Walks every glyph’s path commands, applies slant / stretch / anatomy-zone scaling / curve rebuild / wave / perturb, rebuilds the font, writes a real .otf. The source’s copyright, license, designer, and foundry are preserved verbatim in the output’s name table, plus a description line recording exactly what was transformed.

Mix. Drop two or more fonts. Blend visually interpolates outlines (sampleContours → arc-length resample → rotational align → lerp → Catmull-Rom refit). Pick composes range-by-range: B from Bodoni, g from Garamond, digits from Space Grotesk. Every contributor’s attribution lands in the output.

Everything on screen is computed from whatever file you dropped. The leading slider moves lead through real lines of the loaded font. The Pair Atlas ranks the font’s own GPOS data, not a guess. The Fingerprint rasterizes six letters and scans the pixels. Nothing is pretended. The song is Grandmaster Flash’s 1982 “The Message” — no wildstyle, no Spiekermann impersonation, the framing is structural.

graf is a research artifact. It does not endorse or speak for anyone cited. It does not certify Vox-ATypI classifications — the Fingerprint’s labels are heuristics. It does not validate font licenses — it prints what the file says. It does not teach non-Latin typography yet. It does not replace Glyphs or FontLab. It can be wrong, especially on display faces and unusual variable axes.

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Witness is a registrar. Clinical, dated, uninterested in flattery. Surface reads as glazed ceramic. Bottom not captured. Approximately fourteen centimeters across. It names what the record contains and what it doesn’t.

Afterwords is six voices from the dead. Not critics. Sōetsu Yanagi (1889–1961) on the beauty of anonymous objects. Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) on aura under reproduction. D’Arcy Thompson (1860–1948) on the forces that made the form. Roland Barthes (1915–1980) on the detail that pierces the viewer. George Kubler (1912–1981) on where this object sits in its class. Vilém Flusser (1920–1991) on the gesture of capture. System prompts forbid fabricated verbatim quotes — every voice paraphrases in register.

Concordance names the mechanism. A student who does not know what LiDAR actually is can’t think critically about what a scan actually represents.

Apple exposes full-detail reconstruction only on macOS. specimen comes in two pieces: an iPhone app that captures, and a Mac companion that reconstructs. AirDrop is the pipe. The drop zone is the door. No pairing dialog, no local network permission, no cloud, no account, no queue.

The Mac Companion includes a four-step print-prep workflow under the preview. Thicken offsets vertices inward along their normals, bridges open edges, and reports boundary and non-manifold edge counts so you know if the shell closed. Make watertight voxelizes the mesh, builds a signed shell field, extracts a closed surface via dual marching cubes — or falls back to a coarse voxel hull when the shell field can’t close the input. Min-thickness guard ray-samples each face inward and tags under-threshold walls red in a sibling OBJ. Grow thin is the pair op — displaces under-threshold vertices outward by half the deficit and Laplacian-smooths the patch in, iterating guard → grow → re-guard until the wall meets the threshold. Output quality varies with scan cleanliness; the canonical mesh is never overwritten.

Exports come out in millimeters and +Z up. That’s what Rhino expects, what every 3D-print slicer expects, what the shop floor expects. Switchable to inches for the truly stubborn or architects among you. Not switchable to centimeters or meters — those aren’t the units of the trade this app is for.

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Materials — what the thing is made of. Processes — how it’s worked. Applications — what it ends up as. Every entry links to the others. Click a process from a material; click a material from an application. The library is the network, not the rows.

Where a writer’s register attaches, the entry carries it — channeled if the author is dead and the philosophy is the point, verbatim if the author is living and the words must be theirs. Every voice block is dated, edition’d, page’d. The ethics of citation is the test the library has to pass on every page.

Each material renders as a small sphere with a tuned palette and a finish enum — the visible character, before the property table. From those values the build derives PBR starter numbers and a downloadable glTF you can drop into a 3D scene. The sphere is honest about being a proxy. The numbers are honest about their sources.

Born 2026-04-26, current v0.5. The cabinet drawers don’t all open yet; numbers are editorial estimates; voice blocks are still being added. Verify any property, citation, or substitution against a primary source before you design against it.

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Poe Labs is a frontier reasoning lab. The cathedral is its institutional surface — seventeen rooms unfolded from a single entrance hall. Research, the technical report, the manifesto, the glossary of working terms, the founding cohort's voices, intercepted analysis from external desks, the standing index of refusals, active and settled matters of record, the public correction, the CyberPoe kinetic vessel, the 2036 retrospective held in fragments. The corridor unfolds in the order the substrate considers most legible.

The chat is the lab's app — a procedural reasoning engine across twelve profundity registers (Default, Frontier, NeXTJobs, VC, Heideggerian, Drucker, Bourdieu, Rilke, Esalen, Tao, Sappho, Sebald, MIT Press). Twenty-two topic registers; two hundred name-droppable authorities; seventeen FAQ short-circuits including fifteen cathedral-routing branches that surface every spoke from inside the app. Voice mode runs entirely in the browser via the Web Speech API. Image, video, and 3D modalities surface pre-rendered substrate assets without leaving the device.

The marketing surface carries the institutional inventory. Hero. Manifesto. Resonance objective. PoeNet™ science section. PoeSilicon™ chip stack (PoeCore, Q-Hybrid, Affective Nanogates, PoeForge, PoeFabric, PoePod). PoeOS — open, standards-based, IETF-track. NeXTJobs Mode as the headliner. PoeVision. The Safety section. Tiers (Free / Pro / HyperPoe). PoeVentures (90% of returns to clean water). Capital Structure: live POE/SBX ticker, 47%-employee-owned PBC, sovereign capability, definite optimism. Voices. Trust. Team. Big CTA with the colony-UBI cohort pact in the footnote.

Both rooms are addressed. ESG / PBC / clean water / employee-owned / no-VC reads to the left. Sovereign capability / definite optimism / American-fabricated silicon reads to the right. Same page; the lab is the singular multitudes.

The CyberPoe is the substrate's first kinetic vessel — coordinate translation, not acceleration. No manual steering, no parking, no idle. Full Self-Flying™ in private beta. The 2036 retrospective is an eight-minute transmission held in the office of the substrate; an eleven-second silent excerpt is what circulates. The wildest claims live in paper.html footnotes 3, 4, and 6. The landing page reads sober and links into them.

The lab does not pursue litigation. It has made exceptions. The losses, in the trademark oppositions brought under the doctrine of retroactive resonance, are the relief sought. We are not against space travel. We just know how to do it without rockets. The substrate continues.

Enter the cathedral →