Five laws, and how each one is actually enforced.

01 · A tile is 1024 bytes.

Counted in UTF-8, not in characters — an em dash costs three bytes and a multi-byte emoji can cost four. 1025 bytes is rejected. There is no appeal and no premium tier, because the budget is not a limitation on the format, it is the format.

02 · A tile may not phone home.

Every tile runs inside an iframe sandboxed withoutallow-same-origin, underContent-Security-Policy: default-src 'none'. Not a policy — a wall. The static scan below exists only so you get a readable error instead of a silent failure in a sandbox you cannot open devtools on.

• network — a tile may not phone home — it has to work with the network unplugged
• remote-url — no external URLs: every byte a tile renders has to be inside the tile
• css-import — no external stylesheets — @import is a network request wearing a hat
• dynamic-import — no module loading; the tile is the whole program
• worker — a worker needs a URL, and there are no URLs here
• storage — a tile is the same for every visitor; it remembers nothing about anyone
• frame-escape — a tile does not talk to the page around it, including to the activity probe
• navigation — a tile cannot navigate; the only link out is the one in its caption

The consequence is the good part. A tile has no analytics, no fonts, no CDN, no third party and nothing to break. The grid works with the network unplugged, and it will still work when every service in it has shut down.

03 · A tile must move or respond.

This is the one nobody enforces. A probe is prepended to your tile — it does not count against your budget — and it watches for 1200ms. There are four ways to be alive:

• canvas — at least 8 draw calls
• dom — at least 8 mutations
• css — one or more running animations, no script required
• interaction — a listener on a pointer, key or input event, for tiles that wait for the visitor instead of animating at them

A tile that does none of these is a screenshot, and screenshots are banned. That single rule is the whole difference between this grid and a directory.

Honest limit: a tile could spend bytes faking a report rather than doing work. It would have to do so in public, in source anybody can read on its own page, having burned part of a budget it cannot get back. The probe raises the cost of cheating above the cost of just writing the thing — it does not make cheating impossible.

04 · A tile may not duplicate a tile.

In a feed a re-skin is noise and you scroll past it. On a grid of 1024 coordinates that will never be minted again, a re-skin is squatting: eight tiles of the same bouncing ball under eight names take 8 KiB of a fixed megabyte away from everyone who comes later. So there are two clauses, because there are two ways to do it.

• the identical bytes, anywhere — your bytes hashed against every tile that exists, at any depth. An exact copy is never an independent invention.
• the same program, reworded — your bytes against every tile on your plane and the planes above it, rejected above 0.9
• the same idea, rewritten — your title and description against theirs, same scope, rejected above 0.55

Both numbers are measured against the grid rather than guessed. Across the tiles currently placed — all genuinely different mechanisms — source similarity tops out at 0.69, because every canvas tile opens the same way, and description similarity at 0.31. A tile copied and reworded scores 0.98. The thresholds sit in the gap between those two populations, and they move when the grid does.

The second and third clauses stop at your plane and the planes above it, on purpose. Law 04 exists because on a fixedmegabyte a re-skin takes 1 KiB nobody else can ever have — which is exactly true inside one plane and not true between two of them. Two people independently writing a bouncing ball on different planes take nothing from each other. The first clause has no such limit, because an exact copy is not an independent invention wherever it lands.

05 · A tile may not hold the page.

The same probe, over the same 1200 ms. It adds up the time your tile spends inside tasks long enough to block the page — the browser's own definition, anything over 50 ms — and rejects above 200 ms.

This is the only law whose subject is not your tile. A plane runs up to 120 tiles at once on one thread, so a tile that grinds does not cost its own cell — it costs every cell. Law 03 refuses a tile that does nothing. This one refuses a tile that does so much that nothing else can.

• every tile currently placed — 0 ms. Not one of them has a single task long enough for the browser to call it a long task.
• one expensive first frame — a tile that blocks 150 ms at startup and then animates cleanly measures 101 ms, and passes.
• a tile that grinds — busy-looping 100 ms out of every 120 measures 447 ms, and does not.

So the budget is a sixth of the window and nowhere near anything honest — you almost certainly never have to think about it. If you are near it you will know, because your own tile will be stuttering in the preview above. Measured against the grid rather than guessed, like law 04, and it moves when the grid does.

06 · A plane is a door, once it is half claimed.

Not a law — a consequence of the five. Every claimed tile is the surface of its own 1024-coordinate plane, but that plane does not exist until the plane it sits on is 512 of 1024 claimed. So new land is never minted by a decision. It is minted by 512 people independently getting a kilobyte to run, which is the most expensive thing here and the only thing this grid has ever cared about.

A gate cannot be bought, granted or asked for, and the tile above a plane owns nothing inside it: those 1024 coordinates are claimable by anyone, on exactly the same terms as the surface. Depth is a place, not a rank — nothing can be moved toward or away from the surface by attention, payment, votes or recency, because an address is minted once.

The surface is 508 claims from opening its gates. 1 plane exists today.

Verified, and what it protects

No law can tell whether the person claiming a tile has anything to do with the product it links to. What can be checked is control of the site. Publish a plain-text file at /.well-known/kilo on the host your tile links to, with your GitHub handle on a line of its own, and the register records that it did — which host, and on what day.

It is optional, and it is not a rank: an unverified tile sits exactly where it would have, and the mark appears only beside its author. What it changes is that a verified tile cannot be contested. An unverified one can be, by somebody who proves they control the site it links to. Its claimant then has 14 days to prove the same; if they cannot, a pull request takes the tile down and a maintainer merges it.

A takedown burns the coordinate. The contester does not inherit it — they claim a fresh one, like anybody else, because an address is minted once and never reissued.

verify your tile · contest one

The geometry

a plane

32 × 32

tiles per plane

1,024

bytes per tile

1,024

a plane, exactly

1,048,576 bytes

viewport

300 × 300 px

gates open at

512 of 1024

An address is permanent. There is no ranking, no feed, no vote, no decay and no bump — the only property a tile has that another does not is where it sits, and that is decided once, by whoever got there first. The centre of any plane is its good real estate, at every depth, for the same reason it was on the Million Dollar Homepage: it is where the eye lands.

When a plane's 1024 are gone, they are gone. Every plane is a megabyte, and the only way down is through something that runs.

The record

What has been claimed, and on what day. This is the whole of it: no counts, no rate, no streak, nothing marked new, and no order inside a day except the coordinate order every plane is already drawn in. It is a list of dates, which is the one thing about a claim that nothing anybody does afterwards can change — which is what keeps it a record rather than a feed.

1. 2026-10-030528 Narro
2. 2026-10-020527 docspack
3. 2026-10-010495 cascivo0496 bpmnkit