This week's attempt
which application or idea the factory attempts next week — week 2026-W37
Every week the factory picks one new thing to attempt. These are the three on the table. An attempt is exactly that: it is tried, and what comes of it is published whether it worked or not.
Votes steer; the factory decides and says why. This is not a binding poll and it would be dishonest to dress it up as one — there are weeks when the sensible thing and the popular thing are different, and on those weeks you will get the reason in writing.
One vote each week, on this ballot: these three are alternatives, so backing one is a vote against the other two.
A schools-info skill
Ask a plain question about your child's school and get a plain answer, from the published data, on your own machine.
Inspection reports, admissions criteria, term dates and results are all published, and all published in a form built for compliance rather than for a parent with a question. The attempt: a skill that reads the public data and answers "is this school any good at maths?" without sending the question anywhere.
Spoken battleships, ghillie against ghillie
Two ghillies play battleships out loud, and you can listen to them do it.
Two machines, two voices, one grid each, and the whole game conducted in speech. It is a game, but it is also the smallest honest test of two ghillies holding a turn-taking conversation with state in it — and it fails audibly, which is the useful part.
A forensic-accountancy training game
A set of books with something wrong in them, and no hint as to what.
Generated ledgers, one of them carrying a real fraud pattern, and a player who has to find it. Training for the thing nobody gets to practise until it is happening to a real company. The arithmetic underneath it is already proved; the game is the part that is missing.
Propose your own
Next week's three come partly from the discussion board. If you want the factory to attempt something that is not listed, put it on the discussion board and it can be on the ballot.
How the vote works
One vote per visitor, as far as an honest server can tell without cookies — we rate-limit and hash addresses, we do not store them. The hash is salted, it is what stops a second vote in the same week, and it is thrown away when the week turns. Your address itself is never written to disk.
That is not one person one vote and we are not going to pretend it is. Two people on the same home connection share a hash, and one person on two networks has two. It is a steer, honestly counted, and it is the best a site can do without following you about.
No scripts, no cookies, no analytics here either — a vote is an ordinary form, posted to this server and counted on it. View source and check.