Movement

How it works out where I am, and what it refuses to look at.

A short film about this is coming.

For a week in Provincetown my planner kept prescribing a gym 250 miles away. Upper B — push, downstairs, every morning, while I was on Cape Cod. It had two ways to know I had left and both were blind: Provincetown sits inside my home timezone, and my calendar entry for the trip is one word, ptown. The old check scanned calendar titles for words like vacation, travel, flight, away, and that title had none of them. A line in my own notes had said where I was since August. Nothing read it. The fix was not a longer word list. Five sources each cast a vote now. The answer carries how sure it is. When they disagree, it asks me one question — and that is the only thing it is allowed to ask.

Five sources, one answer

Nothing is trusted alone. Each source votes with its own evidence, the votes are reconciled into one place, and the confidence that comes out of that decides what anything downstream is permitted to do with it.

Ranked strongest to weakest. A vote can name a place, or say only that I am away, or corroborate a place another source already named — the note about what I am up to carries no dates, so it can agree and never establish.

Three days

The same five sources, on three real shapes of day. Nothing here is live — these are worked examples.

A Tuesday at home

Nothing on any calendar. The ring is on the home timezone.

What I told the assistantsilentnothing on file
An all-day calendar eventsilentno multi-day event, no out-of-office word
A lodging or travel bookingsilentno booking covering today
The timezone my ring reportsno signalAmerica/New_York — home tz, recorded anyway, so its silence is legible
The note on what I’m up tosilentnothing about a trip

Home. high · 0.85

The clock: Nothing to override. The day runs on the timezone my ring reports.
The day’s plan: An ordinary day. The basement is right there.
The question: None. It never asks whether I am home.

The Provincetown week

Saturday 5 September 2026 — the verdict on the day this shipped.

What I told the assistantsilentI had not told it anything
An all-day calendar eventnames a placean all-day event, six days long, titled ptown — read by its shape, not its words
A lodging or travel bookingsilentthe next booking starts on the 8th, so it is evidence about the 8th and lives under what’s next
The timezone my ring reportsno signalAmerica/New_York — Provincetown is Eastern, so a domestic trip is invisible here
The note on what I’m up tocorroboratesa line saying Ptown over the Labor Day weekend — it agrees, and could never have named this alone

Provincetown, until Tuesday 8 September. high · 0.85

The clock: High enough to decide, but both say Eastern. Nothing moves.
The day’s plan: Reshaped around Provincetown, silently. No rack, no downstairs.
The question: None. Two sources agreed, so there is nothing an answer would change.

A flight day

Saturday 12 September 2026.

What I told the assistantsilentnothing on file
An all-day calendar eventsilentthe trip window has closed
A lodging or travel bookingaway, no placeFlight to New York (AA 4430) — its location field is the airport it leaves from, which is true of the runway and useless as an answer
The timezone my ring reportsno signalAmerica/New_York — home tz
The note on what I’m up tosilentnothing that fits today

Away, place unknown, until Saturday 12 September. medium · 0.60

The clock: Medium is under the bar. The clock does not move.
The day’s plan: Reshaped, with a line in every block telling me how to correct it.
The question: “Looks like you’re away until Sat 12 Sep — where are you?”

What it will never use

These are not a policy I wrote down. They are in the module, at the top, above the code that does the work.

GPS
Find My
Network beacons
The location buried in a photograph
Where my address appears to be on the internet
Somebody else’s calendar, read as my location

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

I share a calendar with my husband. An event on it that the owner check attributes to him is his trip, and it is dropped rather than read as where I am. An event it cannot settle is kept and flagged, never quietly discarded — dropping the ambiguous ones once cost me my own dance class.

It does not geocode either. The place names come from a short list inside the system, eight places so far, each with its coordinates and timezone; a new one is added before a trip. A geocoder that turns “Stay at a bed & breakfast” into a plausible wrong point is exactly the confident wrong answer this thing exists to stop. A miss is honest: it records that I am away, that it does not know where, and it asks.

Three things it will never ask. It never asks whether I am home — home is where I already am, and being wrong about that costs one line of text. It never asks about a trip more than a day out. And it asks once per trip: the question is stamped with the place and the dates, and a window that has been asked about is never asked about again.

The principles it keeps

The system has a constitution — a short list of constraints, each one recovered from something I actually said. A design that breaks one is wrong even if it works. Six of them decided the shape of this.

Tenet 1 “Infer, but verify across multiple sources; confidence travels WITH the data.”“One signal changes TONE; agreement changes ACTION.”
No source is trusted alone, and the confidence is written onto the answer at the moment it is made — so nothing downstream has to work out for itself how much to believe.
Tenet 15 “Judgment services may ASK, not guess.”“A cheap, well-timed question … beats confident wrongness; a guess written as fact is the failure mode.”
When two sources name two different places it does not pick the prettier one. It takes the majority, calls the answer low, and asks me.
Tenet 21 “Layered confirmation on inferred signals — inside a budget, in both directions.”“the unconfirmed fallback is informational only, never behavioral — words, not behavior.”
A low answer changes what the day says about itself. It never changes what the day asks me to do. A wrong away day costs me the session — go for a swim, in a New York February. A wrong home day costs one sentence. The cost runs one way, so the hedge does too.
Tenet 12 “Interruption budget is tiny and earned; detect disengagement.”
One question for a whole trip, and only when an answer would change what happens. Anything that is allowed to ask has to be stingy about it, or I stop reading.
Tenet 25 “Data-handling boundaries — a separate question from observation consent.”“only coarse derived fields cross the sync boundary”
What leaves the machine is a town and a pair of coordinates rounded to about a kilometre, and only when the answer is high or confirmed. Below that, the public feed says nothing at all.
Tenet 26 “Nothing ships without a detection story.”“a new inference with no way to watch it go wrong, is not finished”
It runs every hour and files a receipt each time, carrying the confidence and how many sources stood behind it. A failed feed is itself a source, so a dead calendar shows up as a dead calendar instead of quietly reading as a week at home.

Where it shows up

The line under the date on my home page: where we are, and what the weather is doing there. It stays blank unless the answer is high or confirmed.
The day’s plan, which reshapes itself around the place instead of skipping the day — one light block of deep work at most, and a session the place can actually give me.
The week of training, where the away days lose the home-gym rule and keep everything else.

This page does not say where I am. It is about how the answer gets made. The rest of the tools are on the home page.