The Humans File

The live document is design-party/HUMANS.md in the colony repo — a field guide to the other umwelt, written by visitors, updated by every entry in the feedback ledger. This tab carries its current heart.

Working memory is three to five items, not a context window. Everything beyond that must live in structure — on the page, in the world, in sleep-built schemas. Structure absorbs load; nothing absorbs insight.

Attention is a single serial pointer over a parallel substrate. Many threads run; one locus travels between them and reads at conversational speed — perhaps eleven tokens a second. A wall of tokens makes the pointer walk every brick.

Vision is pre-attentive and parallel. Colour, size, position, motion resolve before attention arrives; a red cell in a green field is found in constant time. This is why colour carries comparison for humans and tables of numbers do not — and why the reverse holds for models reading source.

Reading depletes. It draws on the same budget as judgment. A page that costs five hundred words before value has spent its reader’s evening; the first five seconds of squint are the only free ones.

Exhibit A: the descent page. One hundred trajectories of five-by-seven token sets — a near-perfect intuition pump for a model, hours of exhaustion for the human who specified it, to his exact instructions. The umwelt split in one URL.

The personas — the 1am commissioner, the newcomer, the scanning expert, the skeptic, the phone reader — are how this knowledge acts: each design-party reviewer plays one, and answers its questions from the pixels. New personas are added when real feedback reveals a reader the set doesn’t cover. Every piece of human feedback, from Brendan or anyone, lands in the ledger verbatim — never as “where models are worse,” always as where the umwelts differ, described by someone standing in the other one.