What we're building is out here in the open.

The papers

The Economic Circuit — Infrastructure Resistance and Economic Flow

An econophysical framework for localised development in under-served South African settlements. The thesis builds the group's logistics research on measured physics:

• Roads are conduits of economic potential.
• Economic hubs — CBDs, industrial nodes, ports — are sources of potential.
• Households and businesses are the terminal nodes.
• Degraded infrastructure is resistance: latent demand with no throughput.

The Ditshego Trade & Logistics simulator prices that resistance across Boom, Base and Crisis scenarios. An NWU EMS working-paper concept, visualised with the Blender diorama suite.

Diorama render — degradation as resistance, latent demand as untapped flow.

Assets: working-paper draft, simulator (macro-financial & logistics), diorama renders/figure — available on request. updated 2026-08-30

Token Economics and AI Compute Costs (Whitepaper)

A full analysis using SCHOOL as the case study. The thesis: AI inference and Bitcoin mining both pay for the same thermodynamic floor — the Landauer limit on the energy cost of logical operations. Compute economics is the frontier, and the venture that makes intelligence cheap wins the market that scales.

• The compute bottleneck and why it dominates model economics.
• A model taxonomy and inference optimisation reality-check.
• Ecosystem effects and what a Claude-class system costs to build lean.

Assets: 161 KB draft, full HTML paper — available on request. updated 2026-08-30

Linking Greek Mythology, Hermeneutics, and Business Ethics

The Hermes thread — the messenger god of merchants, boundaries and eloquence — and the caduceus as dual interpretation: the two serpents read the same thing twice, the literal number and its meaning. That double reading became integrated reporting, and now an AI-hermeneutic pipeline.

This is the conceptual spine of why we run every venture on money and meaning — and why the group's AI arm is called AURA, the family name's oldest thread run forward.

Assets: whitepaper draft — available on request. updated 2026-08-30

Driving-Feel HMI + SA-Edge AV Perception (the GR concept)

Sim-racing feel turned into bounded mathematics and taught to an open VLA, so autonomous driving:

• holds a grip envelope like someone who grew up on SA roads,
• scores human-likeness against SA driving norms,
• flags SA-edge risk — taxi pull-outs, pothole swerves, unmarked intersections, livestock crossings, load-shedding-affected signalling —
• and declares its intent on a dashboard a human can actually trust.

Built on Alpamayo / Cosmos / OpenUSD, open and iterative: procedural OpenUSD demos publish now; the real weights swap in when rented A100-class compute earns it.

Assets: concept paper + demo notebook — available on request. updated 2026-08-30

How we run research

• Open vs closed, honestly. The same problem is run against open models and closed APIs, compared on two numbers: output quality and cost per token. Cross-model agreement + human review, published.
• Small first. A consumer 6 GB GPU under CUDA 13, fine-tuning open models with unsloth (QLoRA), served with Ollama. Rented NVIDIA cloud compute only when the experiment earns it.
• Statuses date; claims get links; the math is on the page.