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Grounded agents, deterministic worlds, and the occasional planet falling out of a number. RSS
3 August 2026· Ground · Mind · Kano
The memory experiment we promised is in: no memory, ordinary transcript history, grounded structured state, and grounded state carried across a model reset. Grounding didn’t make weak models smart, but it stopped capable ones from rewriting failure as success — no false completion claims in any grounded arm, and the only genuine crossings in the whole matrix. GPT-oss 120B kept the advantage even through a restart.
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2 August 2026· updated 3 August 2026· Ground · Kano
Fifteen seeded runs across Qwen3.5 9B, Gemma 4 12B and Llama 3.3 70B: one genuine crossing, five confident false success claims — all five caught only because the world grades the run. A stateful agent with grounded, traceable beliefs and an authored navigation policy completed its first recorded run after one truthful refusal — though we wrote its route policy ourselves, and we say so. Full evidence bundle downloadable.
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19 July 2026· Ground · Pono
A two-minute pointer to the July 19 result appended to "We charged our own tool rent": identical twin sessions on our own repos, one grounded in Pono, one not. Two confident confabulations in the ungrounded arms, one miss in a grounded arm — published at the same volume — and a 3.6× rework gap where churn was real.
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17 July 2026· Ground · Kano
You can stop taking our word for it: download one zip and stand on a world grown from a single seed. Point at a ridge and it explains the forces that raised it. It’s early — dense forests can drag a mid-range GPU into the twenties, and the builds are unsigned — but we’d rather show it rough than sit on it until it’s smooth.
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13 July 2026· updated 19 July 2026· Ground · Pono
Near-zero use looked like a failing tool. It was a hidden one. Given a fair chance, a second agent reached for it unprompted and built a whole engineering assessment on its provenance — settled questions kept settled, each decision tied back to the commit that set it.
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9 July 2026· Ground · Pono
The same "why" verb that traces a lump of coal back through an earthquake to a buried forest now traces a source file back through a rename to the commit that bore it. Field notes from teaching the Kano thesis a second world — including everything that broke, and the pre-registered way it can still fail.
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3 July 2026· Ground · Kano
LLM agents hallucinate because they have nowhere to stand. We took the opposite approach: we built the ground first — a whole planet from a single seed, causal all the way down, that an AI can interview directly.
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