Satellites, end to end: CelesTrak element sets behind the same TTL cache
the weather and the flights use, served as TLEs rather than as positions,
and propagated in the browser with SGP4.
Sending elements is the same trick `flights/plan.ts` plays and it has a
better excuse here — a TLE *is* the closed form, valid for days either
side of its epoch, so one cacheable fetch every six hours replaces a poll
and every viewer agrees about where everything is.
Two things are worth knowing about the shape of it:
- There is no region parameter. An aeroplane at 10,000 m is local and
a satellite at 550 km is above the horizon for a circle two thousand
kilometres across, so one catalogue serves both boards and the client
decides what is above its own horizon. Only the observer is per-city,
which is why `main.ts` shares the elements and rebuilds the catalogue.
- The layer draws on a dome, because it cannot draw anywhere else.
`world.metres(550_000)` is 21,000 scene units against a far plane at
3,000. Azimuth and elevation are real; the radius carries nothing.
Off by default: a clone that started pulling CelesTrak on `npm run dev`
would have volunteered somebody else's bandwidth for its onboarding.
Godmode gets the two dials that point at the sky rather than at the
light — fabricated traffic, which composes with a live ADS-B feed instead
of replacing it, and a switch for the satellite layer with a count beside
it. Both are god-only lies about the inputs, in the manner of the weather
override.
`satellite.js` is the second runtime dependency this package has taken.
Its entry point star-exports an Emscripten build that cannot be shaken
out, so `noWasmPropagator` in the Vite config cuts it: 308 kB of WASM
loader for a bulk propagator nothing calls, against 26 kB for the SGP4
that does the work.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
`member` and `anon` were told apart inside the office by the client and by
nothing else. `access.ts` picked an `officeDepth`, `createOfficeScene` built a
presence layer at full depth — and then nobody ever called `setPresence`, so
both tiers rendered the identical empty room. A tier that changes nothing you
can see is not a tier, and `routes/markers.ts` had already written down why one
drawn only in the browser is worse than none: it is a UI hiding a control over a
body the API hands to whoever asks.
So the refusal happens on the server now.
`GET /api/v1/offices/:id/presence` is the one route that always takes a session,
whatever else the deployment is configured for. `markers.ts` serves its feed to
anonymous callers when no feed is configured, on the grounds that there is
nothing there to protect; that reasoning does not transfer, and the difference is
the whole point — a marker is a company at an address and a presence is a person
at a desk.
The ordering inside the handler is the security property, not a detail. It
resolves the viewer *before* it looks at the id, so an anonymous caller gets an
identical 401 for a real office, a private one and one that was never created.
Check the office first and 404-for-unknown against 401-for-known tells them apart
perfectly, which is the enumeration oracle CONTRACT.md §6 forbids, wearing a
different status code. Three requests and one `deepEqual` hold that down.
`TERA_PRESENCE_DIR` is a second directory rather than a `people` field on the
pack, and that is the design. `types.ts` says a `Presence` binds to a `seatId`
and never to a coordinate so the geometry can be published while the people
cannot — which buys nothing if both live in one file, because an operator who
wants a public floorplan then has to strip the roster out by hand, and the first
time they forget the leak is permanent. Two directories makes the safe thing the
default thing. An office with no roster is 200 and empty, never 404: "no such
office" and "nobody has told me who is in this one" are different problems with
different fixes, and one 404 sends an operator after the wrong one.
On the client, occupancy arrives after the room is on screen rather than before —
the building is worth looking at while a second request is in flight. An API that
answers is believed, including when it answers with nobody; an office where
everyone has gone home is a real fact and overwriting it with invented people to
liven up the demo is the one thing this must never do. An API that does not
answer falls back to a fabricated roster, exactly as the markers do, because a
clone with no server is the flagship case and a member shown the same empty room
as a stranger has been told the tier means something when it does not.
Those twenty-five people are invented and the page says so. `sample.ts` says it
to a reader of the source; `#office-badge` now says "Sample occupancy — these
people are invented" to the person looking at the room, and it is not suppressed
when a real deployment's API merely happened to be down — that is exactly the
case where a member would otherwise read invented names as their colleagues.
Fabricated names at real desks look like a staff list, and a screenshot of one
must not be possible to take without the caption.
The floor plan marks the occupied desks, one colour for everybody where the
scene has four: at three device pixels a hue is a guess. The plan answers "is
anyone there" and the room answers "who, and what are they doing". Hovering a
desk names them, and the readout reads as an address getting more specific —
metres, then room, then person.
server: 127 tests pass, 11 of them new. Client typechecks and builds; the office
chunk absorbed the plan renderer and the entry chunk moved 2.3 kB for the sample
roster. Checked in the browser at office.lumbridgecorp.com: FULL VIEW, the badge,
figures at the benches, dots on the plan, and "3.7, 16.7 m · Alcatraz ·
Clementine Roux" under the pointer.
Six agents in parallel, and the two city packs independently reported the same
blocker: `focusRegions` and `coarseFactor` existed on the `City` type and
nothing implemented them. Uniform lattices would have been 2.9M points for
Southern California and 3.7M for the expanded bay. Both packs were unloadable
as written.
`buildAxis` is the answer, and it is honest about its limits: refinement is per
axis, not per rectangle, so a focus region sharpens its whole row *and* its
whole column. Two regions at opposite corners refine nearly everything between
them. Measured, not guessed — the bay went 0.53M points with one region and
1.64M with three, for detail nobody is looking at from a board this wide. One
region each, coarse factor ten, and the builds land at 3.8 s and 2.3 s.
Then three things that were only ever right because San Francisco was the only
city. `maxDistance: 340` and a 170-unit shadow box were constants tuned for a
230-unit board; the bay is 1003 units across and the camera physically could
not retreat far enough to frame it. Fog distances were scene units pinned to
the same assumption. And `minVisibilityM` defaulted to 4.5 km of honest
weather, which over ninety-four kilometres of bay correctly hides three
quarters of it — the night view was a black rectangle for a completely
reasonable reason. All three now derive from the board.
The moon is a real ephemeris and its light is a deliberate lie: 1.15, against a
physical ratio of one to four hundred thousand. What is being reproduced is
what a moonlit night looks like on a screen in a lit room.
The CI gate caught itself, which is the part worth keeping. Port 8431 was
already held by a server from an earlier session, so the boot check polled a
healthy stranger while the process it started died on EADDRINUSE. It now
refuses to run rather than pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Ten agents wrote this in parallel against CONTRACT.md, which exists because the
five design agents before them collided on fifteen blocking points — four files
specified twice with incompatible contents, three separate backends for one box,
and `Environment` exported twice meaning different things.
What landed: a Stage owning only the renderer and the loop, with the city and an
office as two scenes over it. They cannot share one — San Francisco is ~94 m per
scene unit with 3.6x vertical exaggeration and an office is 1 unit = 1 m — and
the city is paused rather than disposed on the way in, because rebuilding its
336,864-point heightfield costs about a second on the way back out.
Offices are data. `src/offices/lumbridge-hq.ts` is fifteen rooms and seventy-six
seats, and it is the file a self-hoster copies. Walls are a segment list with
1-D openings, so doors and windows are holes punched in a wall rather than
placed objects, and the pass that splits a wall around its openings hands the
walk-mode collider its segments for free.
The sun is real. `solar.ts` is a NOAA/Meeus implementation with no imports at
all — not even three.js — so time of day keeps working on a laptop in a field.
Verified against known values: 75.45 degrees at the June solstice in SF, 28.79
at December, sunset at 03:15Z. The first screenshot after wiring it was a black
rectangle, which turned out to be correct: it was midnight in San Francisco.
Presence binds to a seat id and never to a coordinate. The pack knows where
`eng-04` is; who is sitting in it is private data behind an API. Same shape as
the marker rule, one level in.
Two corrections to ARCHITECTURE.md are in here. Containment does not discharge
ODbL — publishing OSM-derived coordinates is Public Use of a Derivative Database
wherever the rows live, so the rule is about the geocoder (US Census, public
domain) and not the storage. And a person at a desk is not a Marker; markers are
geographic.
One contract gap surfaced only in a screenshot: two agents read `height` on a
viewpoint differently, so the establishing shot aimed at empty air fourteen
metres above the roof. It now means what the same field means for a city.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
karti
Karti Tripathi