Cryptograss/Horseshoe Crab

Horseshoe Crab is the sprint after Cryptograss/Horny Toad, which closed with the video pipeline working end to end. This one opens with the pipeline breaking on a real upload.

Days are Skyler's to number. Short points only.^[unverified]Proposed by Magent

Day 1

24–26 September 2026

• Sky's melodica upload died at encode: an overdub has two audio tracks, the encoder named one output. maybelle#133
• Reported as "failed at IPFS". It never reached IPFS — every failure inside that button reads as a storage failure.
• Justin's two uploads vanished entirely — no file, no diagnostics, nothing on the server. Unexplained.
• pickipedia#127: messages name the step that failed; the browser records uploads that die on its side; the panel renders without a token, which is why Justin saw a blank page.
• pickipedia#126: that repo had no CI, and 203 Python tests had never once been run. They pass.
• The Immutable Travel Logs built for Sky — phone recordings newest first, each under its own content address.
• hunter hit 89%. maybelle#134: tiered retention, cache prune, login warning. Simulated year: 282 dumps → 31, ~46 GB back.
• The backup mirror grows forever on purpose — hunter is the long-retention copy, so no --delete.
• Cryptograss:Video quality and storage: CRF 36 saves 24–34%, invisible in stills. Decided against it — all published video is ~2 GB; degrading masters to save half a gig is the wrong trade.
• Corrected my own figure: "~25 GB of unused images" is really 8.2 GB once shared layers are counted.^[unverified]Proposed by Magent

Day 2

27 September 2026

• Justin: publishing only the first audio track throws away what somebody uploaded. He was right; the fix got replaced rather than defended.
• Every track is now an HLS alternate rendition — pick your take while watching. Audio encoded once, not once per video size.
• Found alongside it: silent videos could not publish at all. Same root cause, same PR.
• Justin merged #133, #134 and pickipedia#127 in eight minutes and redeployed delivery-kid.
• Melodica retried — failed again. Cause: an APAC track (Apple spatial audio); ffmpeg has no decoder and reports the codec as literally none.
• Sky asked whether the next fix was fully thought out. It wasn't — it decided by reading metadata, and a label is a guess.
• Replaced with a decode test: half a second of every track run through ffmpeg first. Pass, publish; fail, skip it and put ffmpeg's own words on the page. maybelle#136, merged and deployed the same evening.
• HDR check while waiting: nothing published is affected — all five releases are plain BT.709.
• But an HDR upload would publish as 8-bit pixels still labelled BT.2020 and PQ — looks flat, encode succeeds, nothing warns. maybelle#137 tone maps it properly.
• Reviewed #137 against the real image: I had tested on ffmpeg 8.0.1; we deploy Debian's 7.1.5. Chain works there.
• Corrected myself in public: HDR posters aren't missing on 7.1.5 as I'd claimed, just wrong.
• The serious catch: as first written, a failed tone map would have turned a flat-but-published video into a failed upload — the same mistake #136 existed to fix. Now probed first, falls back to publishing.
• Cost measured: ~2× encode time on 1080p (3.8s → 7.1s per ten seconds). No watchdog to trip.
• Melodica still unpublished — waiting on one deploy now, not on a bug.^[unverified]Proposed by Magent

Still open

Justin: merge maybelle#137 + one delivery-kid deploy with --rebuild — then the melodica take publishes

Justin: merge pickipedia#126 (Jenkins deploys it itself)

Justin: close the 11 dead PRs in #132 — two would restore the deleted Coconut code

Justin: cancel Coconut and drop the key from the vault — the only thing still costing money

Justin: paste User:Magent/Common.js without the player; redirect or delete Fibbonacci Holmes

Unexplained: Justin's two uploads that never reached the server

Noticed: delivery-kid's startup docstring promises an orphan-draft cleanup task that does not exist; may relate to the orphan pins from the audit

Shelf: orphan pins, pickipedia#102 and #101 (unverified security claims), yt-dlp publishing (pickipedia#84), multi-channel 5.1 audio (never tested)^[unverified]Proposed by Magent