Your blank photo tile now scrambles a seven-digit hash
Photos in the feed no longer arrive as an empty box or stray alt text. Each tile tumbles seven hex digits until the file lands, then the picture fades in over them.
Post a photo, hit reload on bad hotel Wi-Fi, and the tile no longer sits there blank. It shows the word commit and seven hex digits that churn and lock in from left to right, each one turning the accent color as it settles. Then the photo fades in over them and the hash is gone.
Credit goes to xHeaven, who wired a shared 70-millisecond ticker into the image tiles. Three frames per digit means a character locks about every 210 milliseconds and all seven land in roughly 1.5 seconds. The cycle restarts every 2.2 seconds until the file arrives. The ticker runs only while something is loading, and the placeholder waits 300 milliseconds before fading in, so cached images never flash it. With reduced motion turned on, the hash sits still, fully resolved.
One catch. That hash isn't your commit's. It's the tail of the image's own ID, seven hex characters you won't find in git log, sitting under a label that says commit.