A heartbeat for the network.
PULSE documents a Human Liveness Signal: a continuous, multi-timescale posterior over independently acting humans — not a bot badge — and shows how a causal prior could sit inside ranking systems like X For You.
01
Account pulse
A posterior over how an account participates. Random jitter is cheap. Coherent independent drift, with a width, is not.
02
Interaction pulse
Edges, not nodes. Human–human debt versus agent–agent token exchange. Swarms leak here even when each sentence is original.
03
Network pulse
A streaming EKG of an event. Organic reaction is heavy-tailed. Synthetic injection is coupled after you condition on the stimulus actually shown.
The load-bearing sentence
A perfect engagement optimizer is more machine, not more human.
X already publishes For You as a weighted sum of predicted actions. PULSE does not replace that scorer. It changes which actions count as evidence, using only information that already exists at scoring time.
X Algorithm
Phoenix, Home Mixer, published weights, and a causal q_t that never sees the future reaction field.
Falsify
Formal objects, calibrated uncertainty, counterfactual independence, and the experiment an engineer could run.
Privacy
Longitudinal traces can become identifying. Network pulse over account EKG. Appeal without leaking the detector.
Simulation lab
Split reaction fields. Toggle pulse-aware ranking. Watch synthetic amplification leave the slate.