Worked out from what I already leave behind.
A short film about this is coming.
It builds a picture of what is going on from things I already leave behind. So it almost never has to ask me anything.
Four parts, and none of them tracks my phone.
One place everything lands: mail, chats, meetings, sleep, commits, what I read, coaching notes, and my Facebook and Instagram back to 2005.
One writer, so it is the record and not a copy. Nothing is ever edited: a change lands as a new row beside the old one, and the history stays. Nothing downstream goes back to the original — it reads what already landed.
I talk more than I type. Most of what I take on goes out as a voice note.
Those notes are transcribed and kept as text beside the message. Chats too. Before that, a spark said out loud on Tuesday evaporated on Tuesday. That text is what the miners read.
The same chat answers back. Ask what is on today, or when I last saw someone, and it reads the answer from what the store already holds. Ask it to build something and it builds it.
I wanted to know where I am without changing how I live. So it reads small clues instead of tracking me. Each clue is a vote, and each vote carries how sure it is. It asks one question, and only when the votes disagree.
For a week in Provincetown the planner kept prescribing a gym 250 miles away. Both ways it had to know I had left were blind: Provincetown is in my home timezone, and my calendar entry for the trip is one word, ptown. A line in my own notes had said where I was. Nothing read it.
what it looks at
one answer
A place, how long it holds, and how sure it is.
Two clues that agree carry it, and so does a booking in my name. One alone hedges. Two that disagree take the majority, and ask. A failed feed counts as a clue, so a dead calendar never reads as a week at home.
what it changes
Two lines of its constitution decided the shape.
The hedge rides the answer. Nothing downstream re-derives it.
NEVER inferred: GPS, Find My, network beacons, photo EXIF, IP geolocation, or another person’s calendar read as his location. the first lines of the module, above the code that does the work
GPS was never the easy option. Where I have been in a day is not where I will sleep, and sleeping is the question. A useful reading means a ping late at night, which wakes the phone and burns battery — and makes the whole thing depend on my phone.
It does not geocode either: a geocoder that turns “Stay at a bed & breakfast” into a plausible wrong point is the confident wrong answer this exists to stop. A place name has to match my own short list, or an offline atlas of cities and airports that answers only to an exact name. Anything else stays unknown, and it asks.
It never asks whether I am home, never about a trip more than a day out, never twice about the same trip.
One short page of what is true today: the meetings, the open slots, how rested I am, what I have already done. Rebuilt every five minutes, with no model in it.
Everything that plans or answers reads this page first, instead of each one finding its own way into the store. So the assistant knows what is on today at the moment I ask, not at six in the morning when a planner happened to run.
This page is not where I am. It is how the answer gets made. The other five ideas are on the home page.