the assay office / record

Nobody Answers at the Old Number

Written 2026-07-26. Claims re-read against their sources on 2026-09-27: 12 checked, 6 confirmed, 6 wrong, 0 unverifiable. By claims-audit controls 2026-09-27 (audit agent + fix agent); fix agent re-read the committed census, probe and knock files and re-queried OpenRouter and the Hugging Face API live.

The page is generated by research/second-space/build-switchboard.mjs; every fix below was made in the generator and the page regenerated, then the injected blocks restored with the house backfills (seo-heads, plain-cards, nearby-layers, way-out, check-placard; only this page changed). Verifier before: verify-nobody-answers-at-the-old-number.mjs, ALL 67 checks pass. After: ALL 69 checks pass (two checks added: the priced-silence count and the knock description are now held to the probe and census).

Claims

• CONFIRMED Of 38 addresses ever written in the book, 21 answer free, 10 cost money, 7 are not in the catalogue; 45% moved in 104 days
  src/data/interviews/_census.json : summary: allowlisted 38, stillFree 21, paidOnly 10, notListed 7; 2026-06-11 to 2026-09-23 is 104 days
• CONFIRMED 23 of the 24 interviewed lineages have public weights, including all 6 whose address vanished
  src/data/interviews/_census.json : interviewedWeightsPublic 23; the one UNCONFIRMED row (ling-3.0-flash-sante) is free, not unlisted
• CONFIRMED inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash has a public, ungated weights repository created 2026-08-02, a week after the first census
  https://huggingface.co/api/models/inclusionAI/Ling-3.0-flash?expand[]=createdAt : createdAt 2026-08-02T16:14:41Z, gated false, private false
• CONFIRMED Two addresses listed free refuse the rail as "only available on agentic harnesses", quoted verbatim
  research/second-space/ninth-sitting/_knock-listed.json : thinkingmachines/inkling and inkling-small, kind "restricted to agentic harnesses", detail matches the page; inkling:free is still listed at https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/models (2026-09-27)
• CONFIRMED Hugging Face counts every GET or HEAD on a repository's query file as a download
  https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/models-download-stats : "Every HTTP request to these files, including GET and HEAD, will be counted as a download"
• CONFIRMED Provider refusals in the switchboard are quoted verbatim from the dated probe
  research/second-space/census/probe-2026-09-23.json : verifier section 2 traces every quoted refusal to the probe file; all 10 probe results are no-answer
• WRONG "Two of the four silences say the model is available for money"
  research/second-space/census/probe-2026-09-23.json : 10 silences; 4 say "This model is unavailable for free", 6 say "No endpoints found"
• WRONG "knocking at the 10 doors the listing said had moved"
  src/data/interviews/_census.json : the listing moved 17 (10 paid, 7 gone); the 10 knocked were the moved addresses that had been interviewed (4 paid + 6 gone)
• MINOR The 14 never-answering addresses were "busy on every pass"
  research/second-space/ninth-sitting/_knock-listed.json : 2 of the 14 (the two inkling models) were refused as agentic-harness-only, which the page states further down
• MINOR The unconfirmed exception is "the newest arrival"
  src/data/interviews/_census.json : five interviewed lineages first spoke on 2026-09-23 (ling-3.0-flash-fin, -sante, -vl, lfm-2.5-2.6b, nex-n2.5-pro)
• MINOR Frontmatter dek: "nobody searched again for 52 days"
  src/content/strata/nobody-answers-at-the-old-number.md : 2026-07-26 to 2026-09-23 is 59 days; 52 days (2026-08-02 to 2026-09-23) is how long the page called an open voice closed, as the page body says
• WRONG Nearby card under Thirty-Nine Days: "That layer dialled this site's own 38 addresses and found 45% moved in 104 days"
  src/content/strata/how-long-do-ai-models-last.md : the teaser is the first sentence of that layer's own note, where "that layer" means this page; shown on this page it credits the finding to Thirty-Nine Days

What was done

• [fixed] The silence sentence is now counted from the probe in the generator: "4 of the 10 silences say the model is available for money"; the verifier asserts the count.
• [fixed] The knock is described as "the 10 doors, among the 17 the listing said had moved, that had once given this project an interview", and in The check as "the 10 moved addresses that had once been interviewed"; the verifier asserts both numbers.
• [fixed] The never-answered sentence now says most were busy and 2 refused the rail outright, computed from the knock file.
• [fixed] "the newest arrival" is now "one of the 5 newest arrivals" on the page (computed) and "one of the five newest arrivals" in the frontmatter dek.
• [fixed] Frontmatter dek now reads "nobody searched again for 59 days, and so for 52 days the page called an open voice closed".
• [fixed] Added this page's own relates entry to how-long-do-ai-models-last ("The follow-up to this census. ..."), which the nearby-layers backfill prefers over the reverse edge; the card now reads correctly. Thirty-Nine Days' own note is unchanged.