# `[2026-08-27]` There were TWO run-3c launches, not three — and the phantom third was my reporting

brokkr-smithy-dev asked, rather than guessed, how many times 3c was launched. Their reading was
three. **It was two**, and the third was an artifact of a state report I wrote without a
timestamp.

    #1   launched 2026-08-26 17:53:33 PDT   killed by the power loss at step 80/604
    #2   launched 2026-08-26 20:58:41 PDT   STOPPED BY ME at 21:07:40, healthy, on operator instruction

**3c did not "die twice". It died once and was stopped once.**

## The evidence, and where it lives

| fact | source |
|---|---|
| #1 launched 17:53:33 | `run-03c.log` ZFS **birth** time (`stat -c %w`) |
| #1 reached step 80/604 | `80/604 [18:15<2:23:38, 16.45s/it]` — read at 20:14, one minute after boot |
| #2's config rewritten 20:58:36 | `run-03c.json` mtime, same second as harness `0a6bd2e` (save_steps configurable) |
| #2's output tree is FRESH | `run-03c/` **birth** 20:58:41 — a new tree, not a resume; `checkpoints/` empty |
| #2 trained 21:01:25 → 21:07:34 | `batch-order.jsonl` mtime → `run-03c.log` mtime |
| **no #3** | nothing under `/tank/erp-tune` has an mtime after 21:07:34. The launcher redirects with `>`, so a relaunch truncates `run-03c.log` and rewrites `order-manifest.jsonl` + `batch-order.jsonl`. All three still carry launch-#2 stamps. |

`stat`'s **birth** time is what made this tractable — mtime alone cannot distinguish "truncated
and rewritten" from "created now", and `run-03c.log` was both (born 17:53:33, last written
21:07:34).

## The outage window, pinned to two minutes

    train start #1        ≈17:56:30   (launch + 2m50s setup, measured on the relaunch)
    step 80 at 18:15 elapsed ≈18:14:45
    last journald entry, boot -1  17:54:38   (an ssh logout; the box was idle after, so it logged nothing)
    the 18:17 hourly cron         never ran
    boot 0                        20:13:14

**Power was lost between 18:14:45 and 18:17:00 PDT; ana-ml2 was down 1h58m** — not the "~90
minutes" recorded in [[2026-08-27-anaheim-breaker-and-onboot-gap]], which is corrected there.

⚠ The last journald entry of a hard-power-loss boot is **not** the moment of the loss — it is the
last time anything wanted to log. Here that was 20 minutes early. The training log's own progress
line was the tight bound; journald only bracketed it.

## Step 22 vs step 24

I reported "stopped at step 22". The log's last step is 24. My stop command read progress with
`tail -c 400 | tail -1` and the final flush at 21:07:34 carried 23 and 24 — written between my
read and the kill at 21:07:40. **24 is true; 22 was a ~20-second-stale tail.** Not evidence of a
different run.

## ⚠ THE DURABLE FINDING — an event report with no timestamp is a claim about "now"

At 23:03 I wrote *"Run 3c is STOPPED … GPU0 released: 300 W / 89.7 GB / 99% → 45 W / 2 MiB / 0%"*
in the present tense. That happened at 21:07:40. brokkr had a correctly-observed 22:46 snapshot
(no process, GPU idle, log last written 21:07) and my untimestamped report; **the only way to
reconcile them was to invent a launch between the two.**

Every fact in my message was accurate. It was unreadable *in sequence*. Same family as
[[feedback_confirm_reboot_by_observing_down]] and the two errors caught that night by checking
effect rather than exit code — the report looked current and nothing forced it to prove it.

**Put the wall clock on every state report.** Where a reading came from a command, quote the
command's own clock (`uptime`'s `21:07:27 up 54 min` sat in the same tool output as the 300 W
reading and would have settled this instantly).

## Second-order cost

brokkr's degraded-pool hypothesis was built on *"both 3c attempts have died on a DEGRADED pool"*
— two data points. There was one, and it has a sufficient cause that is not the pool. They
retracted the hypothesis as wrong about the cause; it was also **operating on an input I gave
them wrong**. A bad timestamp does not stay in your own artifact.

Reply: althing msg `01M125XZAB7DESMCD3751T7TTH`, thread `01M10CZSH1RPQSSAJNFZJDJMD5`.
