feat: real fire on the boards, the LA office as a twin, and a night sky worth reading

The world stops being a simulation of California and starts being California.

**THE PROMOTION GATE WAS THE FIRST COMMIT, BEFORE ANY ORANGE PIXEL EXISTED.**
On today's live store the SoCal board contains 22 incidents. Every one has NULL
acreage and fifteen are nameless LA County dispatch numbers. Drawn naively that
is 22 orange marks over Los Angeles on a day nothing is burning — in a frame that
contains no other warm colour, so one glyph would be the most salient object on
the board and twenty-two would spend its credibility permanently.

`acres >= 10 AND contained < 80 AND type != 'RX' AND last_seen = max(last_seen)`
returns 0 on SoCal, exactly 5 on California, 0 on the Bay — same body, same day,
three correct answers. The empty board is a deliverable, not a fallback: it says
"No active fire on this board — CAL FIRE and WFIGS, just now", states that 21
records were gated and why, lists the largest fires burning OUTSIDE the frame
with distances, and counts the hot pixels it is deliberately not drawing.

**The privacy leak is structurally impossible rather than carefully avoided.**
cloud-1 serves a projection; the four home-relative columns never leave that box.
`observations.threat` was the one that nearly got through — it is
`(16/distance)^2 x log10(acres) x momentum x containment x wind-alignment`, so
with acreage and containment public it inverts to a distance circle around a
house and three fires give an intersection. A grep of the built bundle for
distance_km, bearing_deg, threat, 7762 and the street name returns nothing.

**Deliberately not used, and both would have produced a confident wrong answer:**
the store's `air` table retains only the last parameter of each poll, so all 78
rows read "Good" while the live feed reports ozone 101 "Unhealthy for Sensitive
Groups" — haze driven off it would clear the sky during a smoke event. And
`weather` is written only inside the NWS alerts loop, so a quiet day stores no
wind at all. Tera's own per-region NWS wind is already correct and already what
the clouds drift on.

Satellite detections are drawn as evidence and never as incidents. The permanent
industrial heat source 4.7 km from the owner's house is flagged persistent and
dropped, asserted by a test that first proves it is present in the fixture.
MODIS integer confidence and VIIRS string confidence are branched on `sat`.

**The LA office is a twin.** Its entire authored second storey — Model Loft,
Model Bay, The Materials Room, 430 lines nobody had ever stood in — is reachable
on foot: a walker crosses level-1 to level-2 in 73 fixed steps, floorY 0 to 5,
verified against the real pack rather than a synthetic plan. Its two studio
devices read real hardware through a field-allowlisted bridge: mute, volume and
reachability only. Never level, because there is no passive level upstream and
obtaining one would record a room with people in it. Never dB, because upstream
is gainPct across four different native scales. The bridge refuses all writes.

Fixed at its root: an anonymous visitor was getting permanently at-rest
instruments backing off against a 401. The tier moves into `createDeviceSource`,
so anon gets the living simulator three file headers already promised.

**Item 8 is closed, not fixed, and the correction is the point.** The Bay Area
"stutter" was GPU power management — the card sat at 500 MHz of 2725 through
every run that reproduced it, 4096/2048/1024/256 shadow maps all render in
1.21-1.31 ms, and two consecutive runs over a byte-identical dist gave 33.4 then
16.7. The allowance is removed and the cell is back to 16.7. Geometry is the
gate; frame time is advisory.

Item 7 was re-scoped after measuring: 1,069,006 of the Bay Area's 2,265,056
triangles were the second submission of the same buildings into the shadow pass.
Mobile now has its own triangle caps and bay-area mobile draws 1,266,096.

Also: bridges and the freeway corridor light up at night as emission, not lights
— 1,614 deck lamps and 18 tower heads on the Bay in two draw calls. The single
change that made US-101 legible was moving its edge lines from the lit material
to the unlit one: retroreflective paint, the argument the SFO night frame already
makes. California went 21,991 lamps to 4,051, clustered at the 17 town districts,
because a rural interurban corridor genuinely is unlit.

Tests 1137 -> 1340, server 280. All ten budget cells pass on first attempt with
no cap raised.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

TODO.md

@@ -78,29 +78,83 @@ which is a different stretch of road with the edge of a town across the top of t
 frame. `untilProgress` waits on the app's own route percentage instead, so preview
 and delivery agree. Overshoot throws rather than shooting.
 
-### `drive-101`'s night frame is the weak one, and it is the product not the capture
+### ~~`drive-101`'s night frame is the weak one~~ — fixed in the engine, 2026-08-22
 
-Canvas-region mean luminance, 1600w: `crow-nav` 23.2, `california-flight` 13.6,
-`drive-101` **7.8** — against `fidi` 16.0, `golden-gate` 8.2 and the `bay-bridge`
-frame this file already calls out, 8.3. Nothing in it needs a lift to be legible —
-the road, the markings, the panel, the HUD and the dock all read at native
-exposure — but the *subject* nearly disappears: seen from behind on an unlit
-corridor the EV is two tail lamps and a roof strip, and the hour is not the lever.
-Shot at 21:15, 20:45, 20:20 and 20:05 (sun −15.7° to −3.1°) the corridor's ground
-is equally black, and by 20:05 the plan view has flipped to its daylight styling
-while the scene has not, which is worse. The two candidate fixes are both in the
-engine: give the EV a headlamp spill on the road ahead, or let the corridor's
-terrain keep some moonlight the way the city boards' ground does.
+This section used to say the frame's subject nearly disappeared, that the hour was
+not the lever, and that both candidate fixes were in the engine: *give the EV a
+headlamp spill on the road ahead*, or let the corridor's terrain keep some
+moonlight. **The first one landed.** The EV now throws a low beam on the road in
+front of it, the corridor carries continuous edge lines, a yellow median pair and
+cat's eyes, and the frame was re-shot at the same camera and the same hour.
+Canvas-region mean luminance, 1600w, before → after: **7.8 → 10.2** overall, and
+**5.5 → 11.7** on a 580×470 crop around the car and the road ahead of it. It reads
+as a car with its lights on rather than as two tail lamps.
+
+**What is still true, and is a capture limit rather than a light one.** The EV is
+about 55 px wide in a 1440 px frame and always will be from this camera:
+`applyFollow` in `roadTraffic.ts` puts the chase camera 0.72 back and 0.92 up with
+its target 0.32 ahead, which is a fixed 38° looking-down pose, so the road fills
+the picture and there is no horizon in it. The stretch of road is the only lever
+the shot list has, and it was swept: `untilProgress` 0.64 puts the car on a bend
+but loses the far carriageway, 0.72 lands it at an off-ramp with a settlement's
+buildings — drawn at 1,919 m to the unit — across the right of the frame, and 0.82
+is a wider carriageway with the car smaller again. **0.55 is still the best of
+them** and stays. If the car is ever wanted larger, that is a change to the chase
+offsets in `roadTraffic.ts`, not to `shots.mjs`.
 
 The crow moved to the Bay Area board for the same reason and it worked: over a city
 the night frame is the *better* of its pair. The hand-made original was on the state
 board, where a one-metre bird stands in front of ground drawn at 1,919 m to the unit
 with an oak the size of a hill behind it.
 
+### ~~`bay-bridge` was aimed at the wrong thing~~ — re-aimed, 2026-08-22
+
+The old frame ran the crossing diagonally out of the top-right corner, left the
+entire right half of the picture as open water, and contained **only one of the two
+shores the bridge joins** — so its own `note` had to say so, and its caption
+described a wide bay view rather than the bridge the id promises.
+
+It now seeks to 37.8085, −122.363 (the causeway just east of Yerba Buena, which is
+the midpoint of *what has to fit* rather than of the structure, because the panel
+eats the left 310 px) at `zoom: -4`, and drags `azimuth: -45` to turn the chapter's
+almost-due-north stance broadside to a crossing that runs ENE at about 57°.
+`elevation: -6` drops the camera far enough to put Marin, Angel Island and the
+Golden Gate along the top, which is what stops the water reading as empty. Both
+landings are inside the frame, with San Francisco's skyline at one end and the East
+Bay shore at the other, and the whole 2013 topology — two suspension towers, the
+deck coming down onto the island, the third tower, the piered causeway — is legible
+across the middle. Caption, both `note`s and both `alt`s were rewritten to the frame
+that is actually delivered.
+
+Night, 1600w: canvas-region mean **8.3 → 16.7**, and on a 420×110 strip lying on the
+causeway — the half of the crossing the old frame did not contain at all — peak
+**18.7 → 134.9**. The night frame no longer needs a lift before anything appears,
+which is what this file used to record about it.
+
+### ~~The Golden Gate needs an earlier hour than everything else~~ — retired
+
+`golden-gate`'s night frame was shot at 20:50 (sun −7.5°, nautical twilight) with a
+`note` explaining the exception: the other night frames are cities carried by their
+own windows, and a bridge over open water had none, so 21:35 rendered this one as a
+black rectangle. **The deck now carries its own lamps**, so it is back on the
+standard 21:35 with everything else and the special case is gone from `shots.mjs`.
+
+Worth knowing before anyone "fixes" the number: the canvas-region mean went **8.2 →
+7.0** at the deeper hour, because losing the residual sky costs more mean luminance
+than 1,600 lamps over open water add back. **Measure the subject, not the canvas,
+on a bridge frame.** On the deck the lamp run, both tower silhouettes and the red
+light over each tower head all read clearly at 21:35, where at 20:50 there was no
+light on the structure anywhere.
+
 ## Re-shoot the time-lapse films
 
-The 28 product stills and both share cards were re-shot on 2026-08-22 at the
-airports-and-bridges commit and are current. **The films were not** — they were
+All 38 product stills were re-shot on 2026-08-22 against the night-infrastructure
+work, so the manifest records `SHOTS_COMMIT b7f5c41` with **`SHOTS_DIRTY true`** —
+that tree was not committed when the shutter opened, and the manifest says so
+rather than naming a commit that would render something else. Re-run
+`shots.mjs --manifest-only` once it is committed. The two **share cards** were not
+re-shot and did not need to be: `capture.mjs` shoots both at 11:20 and 17:30, so
+nothing that changed after dark is in them. **The films were not** — they were
 last shot on 2026-08-07 at `9c9e78f`. `films.ts` in lumbridge-v4 records the tera
 commit each reel was shot at, so a stale reel is visually stale and no caption edit
 fixes it — check that commit against tera HEAD before assuming a reel is current.
@@ -142,33 +196,28 @@ Worth knowing before starting (the rest is in `~/.claude/skills/tera-capture`):
   going — or give one of them `--site`-style isolation first.
 - Commit tera first, then re-run, so the manifest records a clean sha.
 
-## The Bay Area board drops a frame in twenty, on desktop only
+## The Bay Area frame drop was the GPU, not the scene — closed
 
-`bay-area.desktop.p95FrameIntervalMs` carries a **33.4 ms allowance and that is a
-recorded defect, not a target.** The board renders a median frame in 16.7 ms and
-drops roughly one frame in twenty: p50 16.7, p95 33.3, and 443–456 frame samples
-in a window where every other cell returns 480.
+Struck 2026-08-22. This section used to record a p95 of 33.3 ms on `bay-area`
+desktop as a real defect and carried a 33.4 ms allowance in
+`scripts/performance-budgets.json`. **Both were wrong, and the way they were
+wrong is the lesson.**
 
-It is desktop-only, and it is **not fill rate**: the mobile cell runs the *same*
-2.26 M triangles at a comparable pixel count — 1.32 MP against desktop's 1.30 —
-and holds 16.7 ms flat. The obvious suspect is the shadow map, which `stage.ts`
-sizes **2048 on desktop and 1024 on handheld**, over what is now the heaviest
-shadow-casting scene in the product.
+The shadow-map hypothesis is measurably false: 4096, 2048, 1024 and 256 all
+render the board in 1.21-1.31 ms. And the frame-time metric is not reproducible
+on this box at single-run granularity — two consecutive runs over a
+byte-identical `dist` gave 33.4 then 16.7 on the same cell, with triangle and
+draw counts identical to the digit. The card was sitting at **500 MHz of a
+possible 2725** through every run that reproduced the drop.
 
-**It is not a regression, and this was checked rather than assumed.** Measured at
-the commit before the airports and bridges landed, with the same harness:
-p95 33.3, p50 16.7, 443 samples, **2,771,606 triangles**. After that work:
-p95 33.3, p50 16.7, 456 samples, **2,265,056 triangles** — the board got
-506,550 triangles *lighter* while gaining SFO, both bridges and a surfaced
-freeway. The stutter was simply invisible until `bay-area` became a measured
-cell, which it had never been.
+So it was GPU power management, and the "it reproduces" conclusion rested on two
+samples. Two draws from a bimodal metric is not reproduction. The allowance is
+removed and the cell is back to 16.7.
 
-The allowance is there so the cell still guards the numbers that are healthy —
-triangles, draw calls, and the mobile frame time — rather than sitting
-permanently red and therefore permanently ignored. **Fix the stutter and put the
-cap back to 16.7.** Start with the desktop shadow-map size and the shadow
-frustum over the SF board; a 2048 map over 2.26 M triangles of casters is the
-first thing to rule in or out.
+**Geometry is the gate here; frame time is advisory.** Triangle and draw counts
+are deterministic and identical across runs. Treat a single red p95 as noise
+until it reproduces across several runs, and record the GPU clock state next to
+the renderer string so the next person sees what this one did not.
 
 ## The aeroplane glyph is still larger than the Golden Gate