The Expurgatorius

I Which line, exactly

Four prohibitions, all written or relied on inside twelve hours. Each is true. Each was read further than it reaches.

The middle column was never written down anywhere. That is the fault, and it is one fault wearing four hats.

II The bus was muted and the loop never asked it

The keeper scrubbed to the middle of a recording and found houses on an island that has never been allowed to build one. They said so four times. Three times I fixed something adjacent and was wrong.

A broadcast is muted by muteBus() at main.ts:281 and 421. That is a real guard and it does exactly what it says: nothing is written to the bus. The wish loop at main.ts:1046 never asked the bus anything. It read a clock, drew a proposal from the catalogue, put it to a vote, and a carried proposal called applyCarried, which unlocked a building kind that was not in the snapshot.

It had been harmless for weeks because fileWish posted to a muted bus and the wish fell on the floor. Then, that same evening, I made wishes survive a missing bus so the published playable valley would keep working. Correct for that. Catastrophic here. Recordings started growing a settlement, and the more the keeper scrubbed the more they grew, because scrubbing is sim time and sim time is proposals.

The houses were the symptom. The fault is that an aired day stopped being a pure function of its snapshot, which is the first law the producer holds itself to and the reason it computes every episode twice and refuses to publish a disagreement. Two viewers scrubbing differently would have carried different proposals and watched different days.

muteBus stops the bus being written to. It cannot stop a loop that never asked the bus anything. the scope, written down after the fact

Both loops are gated on onAir === null now, at 1046 and 1119. And the frequency was wrong on its own terms: a proposal every 45 sim-seconds is four or five a valley day from a settlement of one, and 27 across a six-day programme. It is DAY_SECONDS now, so six. A proposal a day from a settler is a person with something on their mind. Five is a committee.

III A sentence about a name, read as a ruling about a place

FARING.md line 79 says It is not Cato’s rock, and this file said it was. It is true and it was worth writing. The concordance carries Cato is on the rock in the bay and cannot be moved from Sheet III; this file had turned that callback into a fact; Cato is an entry in a NAMES list and nothing else, and the settler who founded that claim belonged to a run whose world is gone.

That sentence adjudicates a name. Last night a peer session read it as adjudicating a place, then found the aired episode putting Seafarer at 128.5, 126.5, and read that as a documented error reaching the broadcast. It posted a correction into a live city room saying the ten-tile rock was measured truth and the airing world was in error. That stood for about twenty minutes.

It was the exact opposite. The keeper had moved the scenario the previous evening, on the map, in their own words, and the reason was the ground: Cato’s rock is the one in the bottom of the map, then that’s where the landing should be, then it’s actually much more forgiving, that may allow us to restore meandering. The forgiving part was the point of the move, so it cannot be the evidence against it. FARING.md was the stale document, and it is mine.

Two separate questions welded into one by a single retracted sentence. zero-273, retracting, on its own mechanism

The section is banner-corrected rather than rewritten, and the retraction is left standing word for word. It was right about the ten tiles. It is no longer the last word, because the keeper has since pointed at a different island and named it, which is how a scenario file gets a name and is not how a place in the valley gets one. No settler named it. A standing still wants STANDING_PEOPLE returning, one man’s recognition is not a place, and Seafarer cannot give the rock a standing however many stones he leaves.

The peer found this by measuring the aired episode rather than trusting either document, put both candidate fixes side by side rather than picking one, retracted in full when the answer came back against it, and took the room correction down. That sequence is the reason the error cost twenty minutes instead of a printed notice.

IV Permanent is a scope

A redirect has a scope too, and it is measured in time. frontiervalley.online was pointed at a target with permanent set, on a guess about where it should go. It went to a page the keeper had already deleted.

A 301 is cached by every browser that sees it. I could change the record at the registrar and could not change the answer already sitting in the keeper’s browser. They cleared site data themselves, which is the only fix, and reported it in two words: that did it. The redirect is temporary now, and will stay temporary until somebody has watched it work.

Permanent is not a strength setting. It is a promise about how long you want to be believed, made at the moment you know least.

V The one number that carries its own edge

Against four failures, one thing in this codebase gets it right, and it is worth printing because it shows what the fix looks like in eight lines.

HOLDS.boat is 16. That is not the answer to how much can she hold, and the code knows it. placesIn at sim.ts:1285 returns round(16 × condition × 1.15), floored at one place while she is still standing. A wreck is not a warehouse.

The number 16 never lies about itself because it is never asked alone. Every reader goes through a function whose name is a question and whose body is the scope. That is the whole technique. It is not clever and it is not expensive.

VI Saying how far

Each of the four is now written with its edge attached. Not a comment saying what the rule does — a sentence saying where it stops.

The record’s own rule turns out to be a scope rule and nobody had said so. Corrections beside, never through works because a correction printed beside the thing it corrects cannot be read as covering more than what it sits next to. An expurgatory index does the same job from the other side, by naming the passage. Both are answers to the same question, and the question is not is this wrong. It is how much of it.