Macs use .DS_Store files to store information about icons and file sorting and these files get created any time a folder is accessed through the Finder.

However, timetrace attempts to parse these files if they appear in the timetrace directory. Therefore, if Finder ever accesses the .timetrace directory, future timetrace calls will fail with a cryptic error:

❗ failed to list records: invalid character '\x00' looking for beginning of value

Timetrace should either ignore all files beginning with a . or ignore all files it doesn't know about.