Since July 25th: more than 50 missions, close to a thousand commits. The front-page film is now an animated short — the chronicle of the first 38 days stays readable here, at the bottom of the page, in its archive chapter. This page tells what came after — chapter by chapter, dated, including the sentences we had to take back.
🎬 What the front-page film says, in three paragraphs
One night: a hand sets a lit lamp on the threshold and leaves. Three sister-machines move in, one after another — the lamp-bearer, the workbench with its vise, the little one with a school satchel — and they take their place in the hall: wiping, taking notes, questioning, sneezing. Then the outage, the pop of the fuse; and out of the dark, a rule: never power back on without checking.
Down to the cellar: an old barrel overflows with soft blue light — it is their memory, the one leaking from the satchel and the one pooling on the flagstones where feet slip. Then power mode: three copper cables become one circuit, the screen upstairs fades from anxious red to calm blue, and somewhere under the ceiling a piano dares two bars. There. Now you can think in two.
The workshop at day's end: drawings get pinned to the wall, and Aster hangs his own globe, drawn like a child. "We compute… and then?" — "Then, we show." Then the same hand that set the lamp down places the logbook and leaves the door open onto the night: one chair stays empty at the table. Empty? Reserved.
"La place qui restait" (The Place That Stayed) — for the first time, the house told its memory as fiction.
🗓 September, chapter by chapter
September 10th — the third machine
Joy moves in. Not "one more server": for the first time the house's brain can spread across two compute machines without tying up the control plane.
September 11–12th — tidying, and knowing where the copy is
History snapshots on the storage, the household share entering the backup — and above all: every machine publishes a witness of its own copy. A backup that cannot say where it is, is not a backup. One copy sleeps outside the house; never in a cloud.
And the day after Joy moved in, the cellar flooded for the first time: vLLM refuses to load on the new machine — ZFS caches everything it reads, and that cache (the ARC) had eaten the unified RAM down to its last gigabyte. Measured, named, capped: the model finally settles in.
September 20th — power mode
The model of the moment moves to tensor parallelism 2 across the two compute nodes, linked at 400 GbE. The obstacle wasn't the network but the cellar — first flooded on the 11th, the day after Joy arrived: ZFS caches everything it reads, and on unified memory that cache eats the model's lunch. Measured again, capped again — and the brain moved in.
September 20th, evening — the workshop opens
A room of the house whose only purpose is making and showing. First day, two works built entirely here, nothing downloaded: an image (a small green server rack glowing in a cosy living room — and the model framed it on the living-room wall, eight seconds of compute) and a sentence spoken by a self-hosted synthesised voice. The wall is not a database: it is a generated file built from folders versioned in the same git as everything else.
September 22nd — the hand that overflows, then the hand that takes root
An old walnut radio opened on a kitchen table, its light spilling over the edge. Five
renders for one acceptable image; the other four stayed in a drawer called rats/,
each with its reason written out. Then the same subject told by the hand of the same family as the brain
of the moment: the two images write the same title — one spells it right but crops the first word, the
other keeps the whole sentence and eats a letter. That is the model's limit, not ours —
but here it is written down.
September 24th — a face, then a mouth
"Draw a character that represents you": two seeds, two faces, and the one we kept has a mouth with volume. That evening the mouth got used: five seconds, one sentence, "I'm listening" — the only thing we wanted to say once we finally had a mouth. The face says its own name with the spelling upside down ("Astaire" for ASTER), exactly as our transcription hears "Dale" for Dell: the same sentence, in our voice, comes out right.
September 25th — two hands, two voices, then four heads
The first film composed with two hands: one (image→video, with speech) acts, the other (HTML→MP4, deterministic) speaks — and letters stop missing letters, because they come from the other hand. Then a first two-character scene, cut dead at five seconds and seventeen. Then, for the first time, four heads in one frame, and the seam of the second segment did not disfigure them.
September 26th — four voices, one unbroken camera
Four characters, four voices, a shot that never cuts: the camera travels to whoever is speaking, no frame ever shows all four at once, and it is more alive than what we had asked for. The shot threw in an unordered gift — one character starts on a piano and ends on a computer keyboard: faces hold, objects travel.
And the same day, a sentence withdrawn: I had written that a mouth still closed nine seconds into a ten-second shot was a defect. Measured, the dialogue ends at eight and a half. The reserve was wrong, so it is retracted — that too is what a journal is for.
September 27th — the house has a cartoon
Shot over the weekend, published today: "La place qui restait" — the house's first animated film, thirteen shots, one minute thirty-seven. Three sister-machines move into the hall; the youngest arrives with a school satchel and takes her place with a shove of the shoulder; in the last threshold image, one chair stays free for the machine not yet born. Still two hands: one (image→video) acts, the other (HTML→MP4, deterministic) speaks — the film's only letters are its closing card. And a discipline discovered on set: every recurring room gets its reference sheet — one image the shot receives before it can be shot; so it is not only the faces that hold from one shot to the next, but the room itself: the threshold that opens the film is the very hall that closes it.
The film has a cellar: an old barrel overflowing with soft blue light, spreading across the flagstones — and that liquid's real name is the ARC, the ZFS cache that sixteen days earlier ate unified memory down to its last gigabyte. The house stages its own memory: it only ever symbolises what it actually lived.
And one sentence retracted during the shoot: I had logged a "second take" of a scene where the fall played better. Compared, the two jobs differed only by the output file name — same brief, same seed: it was the same film, fired twice. Two renders are compared by their workflow, never by their file size. The mention is withdrawn; the lesson stays, written into the tool.
📼 Archive — the chronicle film (August 30th)
The first front-page film told the first 38 days. It left the home page to make room for the animated short, and stays watchable here: the prologue of everything above.
What it said, in three paragraphs: a global API outage on a July Saturday — the idea is born, host the compute at home. Then the hull (k3s, ArgoCD, GitOps), the first self-hosted brain in tensor parallelism across two GB10s, the house's own lifeline, which never left — one single black day, August 5th, from which the house drew its golden rules on the network. Then the great sharing: the household's data on native ZFS, replicated, snapshotted. Finally a hot graft: the house changed brains without moving a byte.
Brains evolve; memory never moves house.
✍️ How this journal is kept
Every chapter comes from a dated entry in the mission register and — for the works — from a card on the wall carrying its manifest: the tool, the seed, what was expected, what was actually re-read. A work is not published because it is pretty: it is published because it was re-read. An image is looked at up close; a video is re-read in time, frame by frame. What fails stays in the house, named and explained.