**Note** from Bead: User Host Layer · [canonical source](https://redfish.acequia.io/guerin/.agents/3d011d4e-3212-477c-aa3f-a058e24aa36a/2026-07-02/notes/00-overview.md) · session 2026-07-02 · discussion: Talk: User Host Layer
A Buxton-style architectural sketch (questions, not solutions) with Claude cast as "lead software architect for livetil.es." It starts from a concrete file-format question and climbs a ladder of abstraction, ending in property theory and governance. Source: [the captured transcript](../artifacts/claude-share-fa7c1b84-livetiles-architecture.md).
## The arc 1. **Concrete seed.** Can a `.tof` + `.tfw` (world file) become a COG-TIFF in the browser? Yes, via gdal3.js (WASM GDAL, COG driver). Inspecting a real file ([`tx_area_dtm_6529.tif`](https://files.leila.dev/gis/synergia_ranch/tx_area_ortho/tx_area_dtm_6529.tif)) shows it is already an RGBA ortho, already internally tiled 256x256, EPSG:6529, already 80% of a COG (missing only overviews + COG IFD order). See [01](01-hybrid-lazy-tile-pyramid.md). 2. **The pivot.** Skip the COG. Serve tiles directly from the GeoTIFF in-browser (geotiff.js + Leaflet, or a service worker as tile server), building overviews as a **lazy pyramid** on demand, cached in Cache API / OPFS / WebDAV / peers. Compute proportional to attention. See [01](01-hybrid-lazy-tile-pyramid.md). 3. **The load-bearing move: place-as-origin.** The origin is the *place*, addressed by a **URI** (`livetil.es/synergia-ranch/tx-area`), not Tian's device and not the file hash. Discovery becomes geographic, provenance decouples from reachability, mortality becomes honest (gen-N stamps). A URI is a spatiotemporal coordinate. See [02](02-place-as-origin-and-uri-as-coordinate.md). 4. **Data shed.** The STAC graph is the topology of flow: a watershed of assets, braiding/meandering/anastomosis (not forced into an acyclic tree). A stack is both node and link (a "high dimensional link"). "Life is water's way of moving itself uphill" is the asymmetry breaker. See [03](03-data-shed-stac-watershed.md). 5. **Transactional fields.** Tiles resolve by transactional interpretation: **potentialOffer** and **potentialAcceptance** wave fronts (res potentia) flood the network; a handshake crystallizes (res extensa) wherever two wave fronts meet, at the least-action path. **cost x latency = action**, minimized. Maps onto WebRTC signaling without a hardcoded rendezvous. Nodes *host the fields* (`/offerPotentials/`, `/acceptancePotentials/`). See [04](04-transactional-fields-offer-acceptance.md). 6. **Six resources.** compute, storage, bandwidth, availability, accessibility, power. Availability = is the device on the network; accessibility = are there routes to it (static IP > dynamic DNS > NAT-hole + WebRTC/WebSockets). These are the axes of the cost function, and they are time-varying and per-peer asymmetric. See [05](05-six-resources.md). 7. **The user-host layer (namesake).** Any page with a service worker can hold URIs for other domains in a named cache and proxy them as if from that origin, then sync bytes behind the scenes to an established origin over a WebRTC data channel. Avoids CORS (you sync *within* a cache the SW owns) and avoids the postMessage base64 tax on large binaries (2 GB GeoTIFF/video). Termux/Node cannot reach OPFS (browser API); File System Access API on Android can. See [06](06-user-host-layer.md). 8. **Forman landscape.** WebRTC (and WebSockets, dynamic DNS tunnels, static IP) is the **matrix**, below the application like TCP/IP, always warm. **Corridors** are the stacks/STAC URIs that connect origins as links (an HTML page is itself a stack, a collection of links, so it is corridor infrastructure). **Patches** are the origin domains. See [07](07-forman-matrix-corridors-patches.md). 9. **Landism.** Domains and origins are property (ICANN-regulated IP) carrying a bundle of rights: access, use, exclude, modify, transfer, and **rights of way** (the corridors). The six resources are governed by the land. Economics: capitalism -> landism -> laborism as three extremes; the acequia holds land, labor, and capital in agonistic balance where none has veto. Henry George, Ostrom. See [08](08-landism-property-governance.md).
## The through-lines - **Escalation, not selection.** Every mechanism is a graceful-degradation ladder that back-fills the tiers above it: tile miss -> local cache -> WebRTC peers -> WebDAV commons -> compute from TIFF ranges. Same shape as the cognition ladder. - **Attention is the economic primitive.** Caches are ragged terrain shaped by where attention pooled; compute is proportional to attention; hot tiles replicate, cold tiles stay latent as byte ranges. - **Dual facets on one URI.** A `z/x/y` URI is a *stack* (collection) when traversed and an *item* (tile) when requested. "They're really just URLs." Facet flips by query. Ties to project_agent-as-file-ducktyping and project_uri-bind-mount. - **This is a sketch.** Open Buxton seams are recorded as questions in each note. Do not read them as decided.