Last night's nostr:npub17tyke9lkgxd98ruyeul6wt3pj3s9uxzgp9hxu5tsenjmweue6sqq4y3mgl experimental coding results: FASTER(?) QR code transfers back to the coordinator?

(shot from the exciting confines of my covid-induced hotel room isolation in Nashville! Basically a whole lost week reduced to napping and some coding when my energy held up)

https://video.nostr.build/957946b09f316e161ac8727f19aa2e80044a0f6ced993b0cfaea49d3a2d0ed78.mp4

And I think I was wrong when I called the abrupt Specter scanning exit a "crash". The fountain encoding used by these animated QRs is complicated; it's possible that Specter really was finished scanning, despite the percent readout only being ~30%.

The fountain encoding first figures out how many frames it takes to convey all the info. Call that `n`.

So, trivially, it starts by showing those `n` frames.

But after `n`, it starts merging random numbers of random frames (technically XOR).

e.g. `frame #5 + #13 + #22`

IF the decoder already has, say, frame #5 and frame #22, then it can use this merged/XORed frame to reconstruct frame #13.

So while Specter can accumulate a lot of these XOR frames but seemingly not make much decoding progress.

It's like setting up dominoes; the scene is being set for lots of cascading effects to happen, a whole sequence waiting to be unlocked if it can just get the starting point to trigger.

As soon as it finally sees #22, now it knows #13. And that then unlocks #4... which unlocks...

And so when I pressed the button to restart the fountain encoding, I started supplying it with those first n complete frames and the unlocks could then cascade like crazy.

So not a crash, just a non-intuitive, sudden domino cascade that's hard to convey in a percent status.

You almost need a sort of potential energy meter: "I don't know the answers yet, but this dam 'bout to burst, y'all!!"

Anyway, I still have a lot more to learn here and more testing to try out.

But I think the inherent design of fountain encoding plus a well-applied restart to the sequence could make a lot of sense for this use case.