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Eleven passages of 320 to 600 characters, which is two to four minutes at an
ordinary speed. Five are public domain openings that run long by nature; the
rest were written to run long rather than padded.
The floor in getRandomTextItem stops a test being too short. Nothing stopped
one being long, and the dataset simply had none: before this the longest
passage was 320 characters and there were three of them.
465 passages, longest now 500 characters.
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The dataset's median passage was 69 characters, about twelve words, which is
over in twelve seconds at an ordinary speed. Some packs were worse: shell had
a median of 46 and a shortest entry of 17. That is the reason packs felt
small. It was not the number of entries, which was 15 to 37 per pack, but the
length of each one.
Multiplayer had already hit this and worked around it: load_race_texts
filters to 120 characters or more. That filter left only 61 of 350 passages
eligible, 38 of them from two packs, so races repeated constantly and four
packs could never come up at all.
Both halves are fixed.
Content: 104 longer passages added across every pack. The command packs get
whole pipelines rather than single flags, which is how the tools are actually
used and what the explanations were always for. Prose packs get passages that
run 150 to 320 characters.
Selection: a floor of 120 characters. Prose packs draw from their long
entries where a pack holds at least five, so no pack is reduced to the same
few passages. The command packs chain consecutive entries into one drill,
which is the natural shape for them, and the explanations are collected so
each line is still described.
Measured over 400 draws per pack, every category now runs a median of 146 to
218 characters with a shortest draw of 120. The race pool went from 61 of 350
to 130 of 454.
Attribution: 24 passages had none and displayed nothing at all under the
text. They now say Unknown, which is the honest answer for a fact written for
the pack, and the pangram is credited as one. The results and typing screens
both fall back to Unknown rather than rendering an empty line, and the pack
name is shown beside the source.
Multiplayer results, three fixes:
- PB never appeared. A race has no mode of its own, so modeKey was undefined,
so recordResult never ran. Races share one key, because the passage is
whatever the server dealt and a per-passage best would never be beaten.
- Play Again started a solo test. A race carries standings and a solo run does
not, so the results screen can tell them apart and now queues for another
race. The end screen's own cleanup leaves the old room first.
- CONSISTENCY was the longest label on the screen and made the accuracy
column wider than the WPM column opposite it. It reads CON.
RaceText carries the pack name so the results can show it for a race the same
way single player does.
24 Rust tests and 3 browser tests pass.
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Dependencies
- The server build carried 37 known advisories, including RUSTSEC-2024-0363
in sqlx 0.7, which is the database layer. sqlx moved to 0.8 with
default-features off, which also drops the MySQL and SQLite drivers and
with them rsa and RUSTSEC-2023-0071. reqwest moved to 0.12, which brings
hyper 1.x and was the sole source of every remaining advisory: h2 0.3,
rustls-webpki 0.101, rustls-pemfile 1.0 and idna 0.3.
- The server build now reports no known vulnerabilities against OSV. cargo
audit itself would not compile, so the check queries OSV with the crate
versions cargo tree reports for the server binary.
- Cargo.lock is committed. This workspace produces binaries, so the lockfile
is what makes a deployed build reproducible and the audit above meaningful.
Headers
- The application sent no security headers at all. The static server now
sends a Content-Security-Policy, nosniff, frame options, a referrer policy
and a permissions policy; the API sends a policy of its own, since it
serves JSON and should load and frame nothing.
- The one inline script in index.html moved to a file so script-src needs no
unsafe-inline. WebAssembly needs wasm-unsafe-eval, without which nothing
types at all, so that is present and explained.
- Five style attributes moved to the CSSOM rather than adding unsafe-inline
for styles. A style attribute in markup is refused by the policy; the same
property set through element.style is not.
Production configuration
- With TYPERPUNK_ENV=production the server refuses to start if COOKIE_SECURE
is off, if DATABASE_URL is still the development default, or if
FRONTEND_ORIGIN is http on a non-local host. These were warnings, and a
warning in a log nobody reads is not a safeguard.
Administration
- Moderators were appointed with psql. There is now an admin role,
bootstrapped from TYPERPUNK_ADMIN_USERNAME at startup, and a UI to appoint
and remove moderators. An administrator's own role cannot be changed
through the API, so a mistake cannot lock everyone out of moderation.
Corpus
- scripts/export_approved.js writes approved submissions back into
data/packs/community-*.json. Approved passages are served from the database
and merged at startup, so without this the repository dataset and the live
corpus drift apart, and a fresh checkout or the TUI sees only what shipped.
Documentation
- README rewritten for the repository: what it does, how to run it, the pack
format, the server variables, deployment, and what the security posture
actually is. Plain English, no em dashes, no emoji.
Checked and found already correct: every private endpoint refuses anonymous
callers, session cookies are HttpOnly and SameSite=Lax, CORS names a single
origin, internal errors are logged rather than returned, and every query is
parameterised.
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The packs were not proper. An audit found 86 of 253 items (33%) carrying an
attribution that just restated the category - prose *about* a topic with an
invented source, which is the same fault the movies pack had. Six of thirteen
packs were mostly that: technology had 15 items and one distinct attribution.
- science, technology, history, nature and business are now sourced quotes
with real attributions: Feynman, Curie, Hopper, Dijkstra, Lincoln, Carson,
Drucker, Goodhart. 82 items, all attributed to a person or a work.
- general is original factual prose, so it now carries no attribution at all
rather than claiming "General knowledge" as a source. merge_packs no longer
invents one from the pack's filename.
- Four explanatory passages in philosophy lost their "Philosophy" attribution
for the same reason.
- One duplicated passage removed.
Generic attributions: 86/253 before, 0/349 now.
New technical packs
- shell: 24 awk, sed and pipeline drills, each explaining what the line does
- field splitting, associative arrays, !seen[$0]++, process substitution,
xargs -0, strict mode.
- sysadmin: 24 operational one-liners across systemd, disk, processes,
network, permissions, SSH, backup and containers.
- programming grew to 37 and hacking to 30, with git bisect, window
functions, EXPLAIN ANALYZE, certificate transparency and capability audits.
- All 115 technical drills carry an explanation.
Race passage length
- Multiplayer drew from the same pool as single player, so a race could land
on a 22-character quote and be over before anyone had their hands in
position. Races now require 120 characters; the filter is applied when the
pool is loaded, not to the packs, since a short quote is fine to type alone.
For reference, TypeRacer organises by difficulty and language rather than
topic: one default English pool of ~11,900 texts plus per-language universes
and specials (accuracy, repeat, easytexts, anime). Their scale comes from user
submission with moderation, which is still the feature this does not have.
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PostgreSQL
- sqlx switched from the sqlite feature to postgres; the server now runs on
Postgres 18 and the SQLite file is gone.
- 95 placeholders renumbered from ? to $N.
- REAL widened to DOUBLE PRECISION: Postgres REAL is float4 and will not
decode into the f64 the code reads.
- flagged and is_bot are real BOOLEANs rather than 0/1 integers, with the
decode side reading bool.
- The leaderboard's derived table gained the alias Postgres requires, its
flag comparisons became boolean predicates, and INSERT OR IGNORE became
ON CONFLICT DO NOTHING.
- u32 binds cast to i64; Postgres has no unsigned integer types.
- Integration tests run against a real database - Postgres has no in-memory
mode - each in a throwaway schema, with search_path set per connection
because it is session state and the pool opens more than one.
- Timestamps stay TEXT for now and LISTEN/NOTIFY is still unused; both are
recorded in TODO-postgres.md rather than left implied.
Custom text and lyrics, checked rather than assumed
- Custom files never reach the server: they are read in the browser through
the File API, so there is no upload, no path handling and no remote file
inclusion to have. Verified by driving a hostile file - markup in the body
and in the filename - all the way onto the typing screen: it renders as
literal characters, no nodes are created, nothing executes, and the
filename is escaped in the attribution too.
- That test found a real regression: picking Custom from the new mode picker
selected it without ever starting it, so the mode was unstartable.
- /api/lyrics fixes its upstream host, so it cannot be pointed elsewhere, but
it was an unbounded relay: now rate limited per IP, with length caps on
artist and track and a ceiling on the response body it will read.
Hacking mode
- 22 single-line drills across recon, web, memory safety, exploit
development, crypto, post-exploitation and defence, each syntax
highlighted and each explaining what the line actually does.
All 19 modes verified to start, render and be typable.
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Naming
- "Typing Test" removed from the browser tab, the crate description and the
READMEs. The scope outgrew it: solo practice, live races, code drills and
adaptive weak-key training.
Content
- Movies was prose *about* film, not film quotes - the same mistake the
programming pack had. Replaced with 28 attributed lines. New anime pack,
28 lines across 24 series.
- This follows the model TypeRacer states outright ("type quotes from popular
music, songs, anime, comic books and more"): short excerpts attributed to
the work they came from. The scalable half of their approach is user
submission with moderation, which is a feature this does not have yet.
Leaderboard
- An empty board tells a new player nobody is here. Bots now race the eight
fixed-length leaderboard modes, seeded with a fortnight of backdated results
on first run and one new result every 90 seconds after.
- They are ordinary users carrying is_bot, returned by the same query and
labelled "bot" in the UI. Seeding a board is reasonable; passing synthetic
scores off as human results is not, so the flag travels with the row.
- Seeding is checked per mode. A single result from the live ticker used to
satisfy an "any bot results" guard and leave every other mode empty forever.
Stats
- The per-key accuracy data Practice mode is built on was computed, used to
generate text, and never shown. The screen now ranks your weakest keys with
the error rate and pause length behind each one.
- Added recent form against your lifetime average, best accuracy, and tests
this week.
Multiplayer standings
- Now place, racer, WPM, accuracy and time, with column labels - the columns
TypeRacer and 10FastFingers both show.
Site furniture
- Share (Web Share where available, clipboard otherwise - no third-party
button, no tracking script), a GitHub link, and a real privacy page written
from what the code actually stores rather than from a template.
Button hierarchy
- Everything was an outlined box of roughly equal weight, so a screen's one
real action, a settings toggle and a filter chip looked alike. Three tiers
now: primary (filled, one per screen), default (outlined), quiet (toggles
and filters, bordered only when hovered or active).
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End screen
- Every figure is now a dim label directly over its value, the two centred on
each other, grouped by what they qualify: RAW and PB under WPM, ERR and
CONSISTENCY under ACC, KEYSTROKES and CHARACTERS either side of TIME. The
row is a grid so TIME sits on the graph's exact centre line rather than
drifting with its neighbours' widths.
- Errors go back onto the wpm line. Their own y axis implied a magnitude a
mistake does not have; what matters is when one happened.
- Graph hover reads "wpm ... raw ... time" - the figures first, the second
they happened in as the qualifier.
Mode picker
- Opens from the Single Player button itself, and choosing a mode starts it:
picking what to type and starting it are one action. The control has now
been a chevron notched into that button, a caption between the two buttons,
a pill above them and a chip row below them; as the button's own menu it
needs no separate real estate at all.
Corners
- Settings and Store move to the bottom-left. The top-left is the wordmark's
alone.
- The global racer count is gone from the home screen - it is not something
you can act on there. The Friends control carries "N online" instead, which
is.
- Presence: users gain a last_seen column, touched at most once a minute per
active user on any authenticated request, and the friends list reports who
has been seen inside a five-minute window.
Multiplayer race view
- The standings move to the middle of the screen, the space the end screen's
graph occupies, and now include your own row rather than opponents only.
Pinned to the top-left corner they put what you are racing against in your
peripheral vision and left out the one bar you most need to see.
Programming mode
- Snippets carry an explanation of what the code does. Shown under the passage
while you type in single player; in multiplayer that space belongs to the
standings, so it waits for the end screen, where it appears either way.
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Multiplayer
- Quick match: POST /api/multiplayer/quickmatch returns whichever room is
still filling, or opens one. Players never see a room code; joining by
code stays for racing specific people.
- Bots fill quick-match rooms after a short wait so a new game is never an
empty lobby. They only ever join quick-match rooms, never a room opened
by code. One or two per room, drawn from separate ~40 and ~80 WPM tiers so
two bots are never near each other's pace, and they stall to correct
mistakes rather than typing a clean straight line.
- Live player count via GET /api/multiplayer/online, shown on the
Multiplayer control and under the main menu's Multiplayer button.
- Per-racer colours: you are the theme accent, opponents take distinct hues
that stay the same from lobby to race.
- The countdown no longer holds the room lock for its full three seconds,
which is what reset clients mid-countdown.
Typing languages
- 16 languages for the generated-word modes, each with its own
high-frequency vocabulary rather than a translation of the English list.
- Picker in the top-right rail; non-English uses its own list at every
difficulty tier instead of falling back to English words.
Fix UTF-8 accuracy in the game core
- update_game_state mixed byte and character counts: total_characters_typed
accumulated byte-length deltas while total_correct_characters compared a
char index against that byte count. Equal on ASCII, so it went unnoticed;
a correctly typed Spanish passage scored 6%. The old byte slicing would
also have panicked if an index landed inside a multi-byte character.
Rewritten char-based, with regression tests.
Programming mode
- Replaced prose about programming with real code: 26 syntax-highlighted
snippets across JavaScript, Python, Rust, C/Go/Java and shell. Single-line
by necessity, since the typing input is a single-line field.
Layout and readability
- One icon rail arrangement on every screen: Settings/Store under the
wordmark, Language/Theme/Friends/Account top-right, Stats/Leaderboard/
Multiplayer bottom-right.
- Main menu: mode picker moved out of the Single Player button, which it was
notching a divider through and pushing the label off-centre.
- Escape returns to the menu, closing any open popover first, and confirms
before abandoning a live race.
- Split --text-color and --sub-color per theme; they shared one value that
measured 3.65:1 against the background, below the 4.5:1 body-text floor.
- Semantic colours used in exactly one place each: gold for a personal best,
amber for the race countdown and the mobile-result badge.
- Passage now sits in the same place on the typing and end screens, and its
column is a whole number of characters wide so wrapping cannot leave a
permanent gap on the right.
- End screen: keystrokes and a correct/wrong/extra/missed split, attribution
carried over from the typing screen, and a graph with a separate error
axis, axis titles including seconds, and smoothed lines.
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