The first page of a visit reads the machine it is on, then says how it will render for it. Rule F1, made literal. Both voices take the same seven measurements and quote the same decisions. Run each one here, one at a time, full screen, the way a first visit plays it.
Each measurement is drawn on an XY scope as a figure made of its own numbers. A Lissajous locks to your refresh rate, a rose lights one petal per core, and your GPU draws a zone plate whose moiré is your pixel grid. It ends by bolting shut from the scope’s LED.
The same probes, printed as they run in your system’s monospace. Your frames as a trace, your cores as cells that fill as they answer, the one request as a server would log it. The mark prints in dots at one row a frame, and the page bolts shut from the cursor.
| Measures | Display, refresh rate, cores, GPU, motion preference, network and type. Both voices run the same code for it, so a difference between them is only ever the voice. |
|---|---|
| Decides | What the site does with each: the film’s pixel density, the sea’s points, how fast things move, when pages are fetched. Quoted from the code, in the same words in both. |
| Sends | Nothing about your machine. The only request is one to this site, to time a round trip. |
| Plays | On the first page of a visit, for 2.6 seconds. Any key or tap skips it; a link between pages never plays it. |
| Less motion | A draws each figure whole and still; B prints each line at once. Both fade out instead of bolting shut. |
| Voice | A: Gilroy, a lit slab and a phosphor that remembers 0.42 seconds. B: your system’s monospace on the black, one cell to a character. |
| Ends | A: the beam carries the mark home and the seam retracts into the scope’s LED. B: the seam retracts into the cursor. |
| Weight | A is 8.3 KB and B is 4.6 KB, gzipped, on 5.1 KB they share. The seam is the one every page already loads. |
| On the site | B, since 5 October 2026. A stays here in Labs. On any page, ?loader=instrument plays A once, and ?post=8 plays either for eight seconds. |