AI Took the Chart, Not the Compass

An anonymous practitioner of about twenty years posted in a Hong Kong layoff-watch group that he had no clients at all: none coming for fortune-telling, none coming for a feng shui consultation. He named free AI tools as the cause, said the readings they produce are unreliable, and urged readers not to economize on a consultation of roughly HK$3,000. Sing Tao Headline picked the post up on October 20 and unwire.hk the following day. The replies were close to unanimously hostile, and the line that kept coming back was whether he had foreseen his own situation.

What followed was an argument about accuracy, conducted entirely in those terms. His side: the machine gets it wrong. His critics' side: it is free, it is detailed, and one commenter made the sharper version — the formulas and the texts are learnable, so a user who knows a little of the Four Pillars can check the output themselves. Both sides are arguing about one of the two services he listed. Nobody separated them, and they are not exposed to the same substitute.

Two services, one of them a file transfer

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Don't go scrimping on a small sum like 3,000 dollars.

A fortune-telling reading begins with a birth date and, where the client knows it, a birth hour. That is the whole input. Everything built on top of it — the year pillar, the day pillar, the animal, the sound element, a Kua number — is arithmetic over calendars, and it copies down a wire without loss. Whether a machine or a person does that arithmetic better is a real question, and not the one we want to press here; what matters for his business is that the input can be typed into a box from a thousand miles away.

A feng shui consultation cannot. Not because tradition requires a visit, and not because the practitioner is protecting a ritual — because the central input of the chart is a number that only exists once somebody has stood in the building and measured it.

What the compass produces, and why it cannot be sent

A Flying Stars chart is built from the building's facing, expressed in degrees. The compass ring is divided into 24 mountains of 15° each, so the boundaries fall at 7.5°, 22.5°, 37.5° and so on around to 352.5°. A facing is not a direction word. It is a reading on an instrument, and which side of a boundary it lands on decides which mountain the chart is drawn from.

It is worth seeing how little that margin is. Running this site's own flying star chart for Period 9, which is the period 2026 falls in: a facing of 172.4° sits in S1 (Bing) and a facing of 172.6° sits in S2 (Wu). Two tenths of a degree. Both are, in plain words, a house facing south — and the two charts that come out are not neighbors; they are inversions of each other. Outside the center palace, every single position swaps its mountain and water stars for a different pair.

So when commenters report that they uploaded a floor plan and got a useful answer, the step being skipped is visible. A plan carries a bearing only when somebody has taken one and written it on the drawing. The drawing is not itself a measurement, and a north arrow added by eye to a sketch is not one either. Whatever the model then produced, it did not produce that number — it either used one it was given, or it proceeded without one. For a Four Pillars reading the equivalent input arrives in the message. For a flying star chart it does not arrive at all.

That is the part of his trade with a real moat around it, and it is not the part he defended. His post argued that the machine's readings are inaccurate — a claim about the interpretive half, where neither he nor the machine can show a reader anything checkable. The half that genuinely cannot be sent over a connection went unmentioned.

We are on the side he is complaining about

Worth stating plainly, since this site is exactly the development he is describing. The calculations here are done by code and given away: the Eight Mansions reading, both flying star tools, the branch relations, today's almanac sheet. If his fortune-telling clients stopped arriving because the arithmetic is now free and instant, we are part of that and have no complaint to make about it.

And we are subject to the same limit. This site cannot measure your doorway. The facing is an input you supply, typed in as a number, and the tool says so — it warns rather than guessing when a facing lands near a 24-mountain boundary, because at that point a chart drawn from an approximate reading is a confidently wrong chart. That warning is not modesty. It is the figure above: on the wrong side of 172.5°, every palace but one is telling you about a different building.

The crowd's joke was a cheap shot, and it still landed on something. Across the whole exchange — his post, the mockery, the testimonials from people who found the machine good — not one person offered a claim that could have come back wrong. He could have said which service fell off and by how much. His critics could have said what the machine got right that was checkable. Instead both sides asserted accuracy at each other, which is the one argument in this field that never resolves, and the one the compass does not need to have.