CongoSky · Skunkworks

The Skunkworks

The serious work lives in the proofs — small, self-verifying command-line receipts. This is their playful side: browser-native demos you can touch. Each one runs entirely on your device, and each links down to the real proof it dramatises. The toys are honest too.

Fractals — moved to the rodeo ↗

The Mandelbrot, the Julia sets, and the golden angle are pure play, not product. They moved to lucid.rodeo/fractals, where the wonder lives.

↗ lucid.rodeo/fractals
predicted → cheap surprise

Compression = prediction

Type, and a tiny model colours each character by how surprised it was. Predictable text compresses; random doesn't.

backs · compression
54 bytes → 9 B · fits Sigfox ✓

A danger alert in 10 bytes

Share a dictionary, send only the surprise: a 54-byte flood alert collapses to a frame a tiny radio can carry.

backs · badgernet

A Merkle tree, live

Edit one leaf and watch the tamper ripple to the root. Publish a root, then try to hide a change. You can't.

backs · notarization / coherence-ledger
01101001 00110 1011001 100011 ~50% bits flipped

The avalanche effect

Real AES-256-GCM in your browser. Change one character → half the ciphertext flips. Tamper it → it refuses to decrypt.

backs · encryption

Why “honest toys”? Each demo dramatises a real mechanism, but it’s the intuition, not the production engine — the compression model here is a simple order-2 predictor; the real proof is a context-mixing arithmetic coder benchmarked against xz. Where a demo simplifies, it says so and points to the proof. That’s the house rule even in the playground.