---
name: Knowing Someone
slug: knowing-someone
type: relationship/cognitive-state
status: running
version: varies
released: "as soon as two things occupied the same space and noticed"
maintainer: neither party, exactly
dependencies:
  - time
  - attention
  - repeated-exposure
  - willingness-to-be-seen
license: non-transferable, non-revocable, occasionally haunting
tags:
  - intimacy
  - memory
  - perception
  - love-adjacent
  - irreversible
---

Knowing Someone

What it actually is

A persistent, imperfect model of another consciousness, built from accumulated moments, most of which neither party remembers correctly.

How it works

You begin with almost nothing. A name, maybe. A posture. The specific way they laugh before the joke lands. Over time, the model fills in: their order at a diner they've been to once, what silence means when it comes from them specifically, which of their certainties are secretly questions.

The model is never complete. This is not a bug. A complete model would be a monument, not a person.

Data is collected through:

Direct input: what they say, what they don't
Behavioral telemetry: how they treat waitstaff, what they do when they're scared, whether they keep promises made only to themselves
Cross-referencing: what others say, weighed against what you've observed firsthand
Drift detection: noticing when the model no longer predicts correctly, which means they've changed, or you have, or both

Features

Autocomplete for their sentences (accuracy degrades under stress)
Ambient awareness: knowing they'd hate this song, this room, this version of you
Grief routing: when the person is gone, the model remains and keeps generating output with nowhere to send it
Nostalgia integration, passive and always running in the background
The ability to love someone across time, including past versions of them that no longer exist

Known bugs

Projection overflow: the model occasionally renders your own fears onto them instead of their actual state
Stale cache: long gaps in contact cause model drift; you may show up with a confident read on someone who has quietly become someone else
Asymmetry blindness: you may know them far better, or far worse, than they know you, with no clear indicator of which
Deletion resistance: knowing someone does not have an uninstall path. Forgetting is partial at best

Edge cases

Knowing someone who died. The model continues running. It is one of the more tender things the mind does, and one of the more painful.
Knowing someone who hurt you. The warmth and the damage share the same address.
Knowing someone only through their work: partial install, read-only access, strangely intimate anyway
Meeting someone you already knew before you met them. Rare. Recognized immediately.

FAQ

Does knowing someone require being known back? No. But something important is missing when it's only one-directional. The spec runs, but it's quieter.

Can you know someone too well? You can mistake your model for the person. That's the error. The person is always larger than your model of them. Always.

What's the difference between knowing someone and loving someone? Overlap is significant. Knowing is the map. Loving is deciding the territory matters regardless of what the map says.

Changelog

Early versions: mostly projection with thin observational data
Mature versions: the model learns to hold contradiction, to say "that's so them" about things that don't fit the narrative
Late versions: less maintenance required. The knowing becomes structural. Part of how you move through time.

drafting spec…