Changelog
What has changed
Fourteen dated entries, newest first. Written rather than generated: a commit log is a list of changes, and this is an argument about which of them mattered.
A lottery, a search box, two arguments and an embed
Every page here argued about fine-tuning and none of them measured it, so the lottery does: ten thousand universes drawn at random across all nine dials, run through the same engine the Tuner uses, and counted. About one in two thousand reaches observers, more than half of the rest die in the first three minutes, and the coupled model turns out to be roughly three times more forgiving than its own nine windows would predict — which is Stenger's objection to the fine-tuning argument arriving as a measurement.
Alongside it: a search box over every page on the site, essays on the Fermi paradox and the simulation argument — two subjects that had glossary entries and no page behind them — and an embed card, so a universe can live inside somebody else's post with a link home.
The anthropic principle gets a home
A search export said that 28% of everything this site is seen for is one subject, spread across questions the library answered only indirectly — the etymology, the weak-versus-strong distinction, and a long tail of coursework phrasings. So the subject got a pillar page: an answer block, fourteen perspectives, five historical moments, the two predictions the principle actually risked, five objections each with its strongest reply, and a twelve-item FAQ.
The navigation was rebuilt around it. Six flat links became three grouped panels, every link in the HTML on every page; /exist, /doomsday, the quiz hub, the graveyard and the educator materials were rewritten or extended; and four new quizzes shipped, chosen from what people actually search for rather than from taste.
Every galaxy its own shape
The galaxies had their own addresses and not their own shapes: the star field was seeded once and the shader gave every hub two arms, face-on, at one size, so a universe was seven copies of one picture moved around. Now eleven properties per galaxy — inclination, spin, size, a continuous arm count, winding, concentration, rotation rate, ellipticity, colour and arm strength — come from the dials the same way the positions already did.
Two bugs worth the trip: the two-dimensional projection foreshortens along the lean rather than across it, which the design spec had backwards, and an eased rotation rate multiplied by elapsed time retroactively rewrites every second a galaxy has already turned. Three minutes into a session, one drag spun the discs through half a revolution.
The cookie banner goes away
Google Analytics came with a Consent Mode bootstrap, a banner, a stored choice, a footer control to change it and three third-party origins in the content security policy. Vercel Web Analytics is cookieless and first-party, so all of that went: the dependency tree grew by one package and the site lost four components, one library and a permission prompt.
The same week, the renderer started summing light in linear space instead of in sRGB, which is the correct way to add two glows together and visibly changed what a crowded sky looks like.
Evidence, a timeline, and a classroom
Six stations connecting an observation to the model it constrains — the microwave background, a deep field, the bullet cluster, element abundances, expansion and the light-element ratios — each stating what was observed, how it was processed, what can be inferred and what cannot. Plus a shared cosmic timeline, a coupled-constants lab, and an educator hub with three printable classroom activities that need no account and no login.
Every page on the site also moved onto one page shell at that point, which sounds like housekeeping and was not: twenty-five files had hard-coded the same width for a card grid and for body text, so the essays read at 105 characters a line while the graveyard grid at the identical width read fine.
Six phases of audit fixes
A nine-dimension audit produced 98 verified findings. The ones that shipped were mostly bytes and frames: fewer polyfills for browsers nobody here uses, a message catalogue that stopped serialising the entire Polish tuner vocabulary into every English page, and a set of guards that fail the build if any of it comes back.
An RSS feed and an instrument panel
The library got a feed and a printable cheat sheet. The Tuner got a performance panel that measures GPU time through a timer query instead of guessing load from frame counts, which is the difference between knowing a machine is struggling and assuming it.
Citations, a quiz hub, and a real mark
Every essay ended with a 'Sources and further reading' heading followed by paragraphs. They were real sources, correctly attributed, and that is exactly why the problem was easy to miss: the pages looked cited, but nothing was linkable, nothing was machine-readable, and a new essay could ship with no sources at all. Citations are structured now, and a test fails the build if an essay carries fewer than three or if the same paper is cited two different ways in two languages.
The brand arrived the same week — one geometry, generated into a full icon pack — along with three accents that each have a job, and a reading width for prose.
WebGL2 becomes the renderer
Two weeks of work ending in a renderer that accumulates in high dynamic range, blooms, and tonemaps a composite, with a Canvas2D path kept whole underneath for machines and settings that cannot run it. Along the way: black holes that are voids with hot rims rather than dark circles, supernovae, ghost echoes for universes with four or more spatial dimensions, and a guard that fails if a dial stops producing a visible signature.
The most instructive bug of the whole project is in here. The shader had not compiled since the supernova commit, and everything still looked right, because the fallback was good enough that nobody noticed the fallback was what they were looking at.
Tuner 3.0: every regime gets its own lens
Fifteen world types stopped being fifteen tints of one scene. A starless universe, a universe of black holes and a universe that recollapses now get different pictures, different deaths and different amounts of time to die in — because a universe that fails in the first three minutes and one that fails after nine billion years should not fade out at the same speed.
A weekly challenge, and a way in for strangers
A goal that rotates every week, a leaderboard of the universes published during it, and a personal best that lives on your own device. Plus the hardening that any public write path needs before it deserves to exist: an origin guard, a per-address rate limit that fails closed, name moderation, and an admin view to see what it all caught.
The graveyard, and the first backend
Until this point every universe was private to the browser that made it. The graveyard made published ones public — and because everything shareable here is a pure function of an eighteen-character code, the database only ever had to store the code.
Tuner 2.0, and three more dials
The first version had six dials and thirteen fates. This added matter survival, dark matter and electromagnetism, two new ways to die, a classifier that names what kind of cosmos you built, and a time scrubber that replays the whole thing deterministically from the Big Bang to whichever epoch you stopped at. Codes grew from twelve characters to eighteen, and the old ones still decode.
Break the Universe goes live
Nine days from an empty repository to a site: the Universe Tuner with a live cosmos that reacts to every dial as you move it, shareable epitaph cards, 'You Shouldn't Exist', the first quiz, the first essays, and both languages from the first commit rather than bolted on later.
The design rule that came out of the first two rounds of feedback still governs everything since: no plateaus. Every dial position has to look different, including inside the safe window, or the controls feel dead no matter how correct the physics underneath them is.
Dates and claims here come from the repository, so anything on this page can be checked against it. Where a change was a mistake, the entry says so — the failures have taught more than the features.