Every change, dated

• 16 October 2026

  • The site wears its own skin, "Plate": warm paper, ink and one plate green, with the human figure standing on the page between double rules like a plate in an anatomy book, light by default (dark kept for readers who ask for it), no starfield, no galaxy, no web font. Proposed with mock-ups in the Sentient Horizons design standard (`design/proposals/upgrade-tree-skin-2026-10-16.md`) and ruled by John on 2026-10-16 after the standard split into a shared skeleton and a skin per site. The stylesheet is now `skin.css` (this site's tokens) plus the shared `shell.css` 2.0.1 plus the site's own rules; the starfield component is gone; the favicon and the browser's theme colour take the paper and the green. The skeleton copy also fixes a bug the whole family had: in the light theme a solid button's text took the link colour and all but vanished. Pictures before and after in `docs/site-2026-10-16-*.jpg`.
  • Home page first screen redesigned to the tracker pattern's section 1.3 order in The Belt Equation's layout: the count in the largest type with its claim and the five-rung totals, then the question, one paragraph, the last-checked strip and two buttons ("What has been tried?", "Who is counting"), with the figure beside them; the whole first screen fits at 1280 by 720. Asked by John on 2026-10-16 so a new reader meets the answer before the question.
  • The real list written: thirty-five upgrades across the seven branches, from the first leaf list John ruled on 2026-10-16 (the charter calls it thirty-six, but names thirty-five; the count is the charter's to correct). The four example entries are gone, their three ids kept and rewritten (the sight implant, the ageing drug, the gene-edited child, the wireless brain chip). Every stage above idea only carries a date and a primary record (a paper, a regulator's database entry or notice, or the institution's own release naming the patient), each checked against the record itself on 2026-10-16; the six claims not yet checked against their record are in the entries' verify lists. The headline count is 28 of 35 at a first human or beyond: 4 idea only, 3 shown in animals, 19 first human, 6 in clinical use, 3 in wide use.
  • Six rungs differ from the charter's expectation, each explained in the entry's notes: the bone-anchored limb with nerve control sits at first human, not in clinical use (only the bone anchor is approved); the fear-memory treatment sits at first human, not shown in animals (a 2009 human study erased a conditioned fear); the artificial womb sits at idea only, not shown in animals (no mammal has gone from conception to birth outside a body, and the test says so); and three first humans are earlier than the charter had in mind (the visual cortex implant, 1968 not 2018; the wired cursor implant, 1998 not 2004; the memory implant, 2012 not 2018). The wireless brain chip's first human moved from Neuralink's 2024 implant to a fully implanted Dutch system reported in 2016.
  • The record layout gains a fourth horizon value, "top", for entries already in wide use, so the page does not say "longer than 20 years, if ever" about a finished thing; and a dating rule: an event the record itself dates (a birth, an operation) takes the event's date, a study takes its publication date.
  • The home page already showed the totals for all five rungs directly under the headline count, as John ruled on 2026-10-16; checked, not changed.
  • The brain-to-machine bandwidth series is still to come: the record layout has no place for it yet (it is to be its own data file, not a field on an upgrade), so the speech and cursor entries carry their figures in their notes as the series' first two points, in the units their papers use.
  • The top bar and footer renamed to the page names of the tracker pattern John ruled on 2026-10-16: the spine is Home, Branches and "The story so far"; the lighter tier is "How the numbers are worked out" (the method page, retitled to match, still mostly about how a stage is decided) and "Disagree with something". "This week's reading" is the name for the weekly scan page once one exists; there is none yet, so the home page's "Last checked" strip stays plain text and will link there when the page comes.
  • theupgradetree.com and upgradetree.com, registered by John on Cloudflare the same evening, attached to the site as custom domains, with www.theupgradetree.com, upgradetree.com and www.upgradetree.com forwarding to the same page at theupgradetree.com. A small Worker in front of the static files (`site/worker/redirect.js`, the Quiet Galaxy's way) does the forwarding; the workers.dev preview address keeps serving the site directly.
  • First version of the website built: a home page with the question, the human figure shaded by the furthest stage reached under each of the seven branches, and the headline count; a page per branch; a page per upgrade with its stage ladder; the Method, Story and Disagree pages. Deployed to the workers.dev preview address; the domains (theupgradetree.com and upgradetree.com) are John's to buy and attach.
  • The record layout written (docs/upgrade-schema.md): seven branches in data/branches.toml and one TOML file per branch, each upgrade carrying a stage from the five-rung ladder (idea only, shown in animals, first human, in clinical use, in wide use) with the date and public record that put it there. No probabilities, by John's ruling of 2026-10-16.
  • Four example upgrades seeded, one each under Senses, Lifespan and repair, Inheritance and The link to machines, marked "EXAMPLE ENTRY" in their notes. They show the record shape; the real list is being written from the project charter in TimeAssembler and replaces them. Every date in them written from memory is listed in the entry's `verify` field.
  • Repository created on GitHub (jfredson/upgrade-tree, public) with the MIT licence for code and CC BY 4.0 for the record.

This page is the repository's changelog as written: CHANGELOG.md.