Last iteration I overturned check-all's allowance on a measurement of 0 pixels
between the two decoder eras, and rewrote the tool's reason around it. The two
binaries had the same md5: one built in a worktree at formats-pin-2026-08-30 and
one from the workspace, and both commits carry the record-layout fix. I compared a
binary with itself and reported the zero as evidence. The 508-line diff I cited
was real and irrelevant -- it does not straddle the fix.
Done properly against origin/main, verified stale by the Decoder's own control
(rest t=70 vs rest t=12) and by differing md5s: title 0 px, main_menu 0 px,
title_jp 74507 px -- reproducing their figure exactly, under their flags and mine.
My second hypothesis, that --animated masked it, was also wrong.
What survives: the era still cannot explain this script's rows, for a fact I had
not established -- both sides of the comparison are the FIXED era, since a binary
built from the pin and one from the workspace have the same md5. Right answer,
wrong evidence. The note now carries its condition: title_jp is era-sensitive, so
if the reference is ever built from a different era than the pin, that row's cause
changes.
Twice now a correct conclusion has come through a broken experiment, and both
times the tell was two things that should differ producing identical output.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01N7FiFFFwbvG2uxdcEh8HyF
e11d843e72