rega's contact sheet showed what no gate could: page 3 read as ONE SOLID GREEN BAR. 32 contiguous cells
fill most of row 1 of 52, so the page said "a big green block" where the Driver's intent is "32 boxes lost
in 5,200". Rarity is the whole message and a bar cannot carry it.
⚠ AND THE COMMENT I DELETED SAID THE OPPOSITE, WHICH IS THE PART WORTH KEEPING. It read: "Row-major, so the
shaded run reads as a contiguous block from the top — a scattered shading of the same COUNT would be honest
arithmetic and an unreadable picture." I wrote that reasoning about a picture I had never looked at, and it
was exactly backwards. Scattering is what makes the eye hunt for them, which IS the point.
DETERMINISTIC, NEVER Math.random(): a 32-bit FNV-1a hash of the ZONE ID feeds a mulberry32 PRNG, so the
same packet prints identically every time — two copies of one zone must not disagree — while different
zones get different constellations, so a print run is not 28 sheets wearing the same pattern. Verified: two
consecutive renders produce byte-identical files (md5 febafc1813c6 both times).
Partial Fisher-Yates over the index space rather than shuffling all 5,200, so a large share degrades into
an even spread rather than clumping.
★ AND THE NEW ASSERTION IS THE ONE THAT WOULD HAVE CAUGHT THIS. check-packet-render now measures the shaded
cells' VERTICAL SPREAD as a fraction of the grid height, at the RENDERED layer via getBoundingClientRect —
because a COUNT cannot tell a scatter from a bar. 32 shaded is 32 shaded either way, which is precisely why
every existing assertion stayed green on a broken page.
POISON-TESTED rather than trusted: rebuilding the same 32 cells as a contiguous run makes it FAIL with
"span only 0% of the grid height". The real packet measures 95% (32 cells across 26 distinct rows). The 50%
floor is deliberately loose — a genuine scatter spans nearly the whole page, a bar spans ~1%, and anything
between deserves a human look.
⚠ The poison test first ran on a copy in /tmp and the gate REFUSED it — "outside any checkout, so which
build produced it cannot be checked". A sensible guard, and it meant my first poison run proved nothing;
re-ran inside the tree.
en and ar both PASS at 9 sheets. Page 2 (the empty life grid reading as blank graph paper) is UNTOUCHED and
held for the Driver with the page-order question — shading a reader's life we do not know would be a guess
presented as a fact, which is a product decision, not mine.
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