round mode, inspo is hackclub mail!!!!
you type a topic and start guessing. five rounds, each one takes away more of the help: two options, four options, a sentence with the word missing, the same sentence in pieces you have to put back together, then nothing on screen at all and you just say it. the ladder runs recognise -> produce bcuz thats the direction the research points, retrieval beats rereading and producing beats picking

anyway that part was already built. today was worse

the scores were fake
correct answers kept turning up in the first slot. felt wrong, so i wrote a script that generates questions thru the real route and counts where the answer actually lands

warm up came back 5 of 5 at index 0. round 1 was 7 / 5 / 3 / 0

which means every score this app has ever shown anybody was inflated. you could do well without reading the question

it was my own prompt doing it. every JSON example i handed the model had “answerIndex”: 0 sitting in it, so of course it learned that. placement happens on the server after generation now, for every format with ordered options, and that includes the chip tray, which had been shuffling in the browser where nothing could measure it

197 questions across four topics. chi-square under the 5% critical value on every format

repeated questions are gone too. the dedupe compares what a question asks for rather than how its worded, so a rephrasing doesnt sneak past. when a topic runs dry the generator gets told to ask abt distinctions and consequences instead of drawing from the same pool twice

three things a diff would never show
drove headless chrome over all 21 presentations, cuz none of this is visible in code

constellation’s stars stacked into a column. tailwind emits .relative after .absolute, and Pick set relative, so it beat the absolute that was being passed in

doors swung 72 degrees, which turns the correct answer edge on at the exact moment you need to read it

and a burst balloon faded to 0.25 opacity. so a wrong answer got softened by becoming unreadable. that one still bugs me, the marking is the one part that has to stay honest and it was quietly making the bad news harder to look at

audio
the generated pad sounded like fan noise. gone. its “8bit Dungeon Level” by Kevin MacLeod now, CC BY 4.0, credited in the app and in the repo

on by default, the feel is half of why the mode works, and theres a mute for anyone sitting in a library

autoplay turned into its own afternoon. no browser lets a page make noise before you touch it, so the track asks to play on mount, the rejection arms a listener, and your first click or keypress is what starts it

testing that turned up a bug i had already talked myself out of. react batches state, so if the first thing you touched was the mute button, the listener fired while the value still read on, started the track, then paused it a frame later. a blip of music played at exactly the person switching it off. set synchronously now

Two things from the test rig mattered more than the thing it was testing. element.click() doesnt grant user activation in chrome, so my first run looked like the whole feature was broken and was just the harness lying to me. and running chrome with a permissive autoplay flag meant the gesture fallback never fired once, so i was measuring nothing at all

not done
nobody has played the full ladder in a real browser yet. the presentations render, thats genuinely all i know. tomorrow