memory: lv-bronte gated — voice axis fails, ship decision open

Records the full v2 gate result and three findings that outlive the ship call:

1. The effect is UNDERPOWERED, not absent. Both candidates closed 48-52% of the
   achievable span to held-out Bronte and beat base on every individual seed, but
   the gaps sit under the measured floor. Sensitivity floor stated so the negative
   is falsifiable: cannot resolve better than ~0.251 delta_cb at 30 beats x 4 seeds.
   Cause is structural — 81 val pairs against Hemingway's 200, from a 678k-word
   corpus against 994k — and neither more beats nor more seeds fixes it.

2. A DEFECT IN THE v2 RULE. The floor is the largest within-arm spread across ALL
   arms, so adding a third noisier arm raised the bar that failed the clean one.
   Run as a two-arm gate the floor would have been 0.092 and the candidate would
   have cleared at 2.1x. Deliberately NOT exploited — choosing the floor that
   passes your preferred answer is the failure pre-registration exists to prevent —
   but the rule should state whether the floor spans the compared pair or every arm
   present. As written, a verdict depends on which other arms you happened to run.

3. The two-epochs-on-a-three-epoch-schedule recipe did NOT transfer. Bronte's two
   minima are 0.0022 apart against a 0.0046 jitter; epoch 2 buys nothing over epoch
   1. The epoch-3 collapse (+0.075, ~16x jitter) is the only robust part.

The outlier seed was diagnosed rather than waved away: a repeat-5gram degeneracy
probe is uniform at 0.0078-0.0102 across every seed and both arms, so it is genuine
delta_cb variance and the floor stands.

persistent-memory.md

@@ -152,6 +152,7 @@ before this session began. ⚠ **Do NOT commit them** — untouched and delibera
 
 ## Recent decisions
 
+- `[2026-09-17]` ⭐⭐ **lv-bronte trained and gated — v2 gate FAILS the VOICE axis; the ship call is open and the operator's.** Both candidates closed 48–52% of the achievable distance to Brontë but +0.193/+0.210 sit under a 0.251 noise floor set by ONE outlier seed in the arm not being shipped; cause is structural (81 val pairs vs Hemingway's 200) and not cheaply fixable. ckpt475 is the pick if it ships. The two-epoch recipe did NOT transfer. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-17-lv-bronte-gate.md`
 - `[2026-09-16]` ⭐⭐ **Instruction-pair SFT BEATS raw-text for author voice, and the raw-text incumbent never cleared its own control (+0.141 against a 0.153 floor).** `lv-yarros` shipped; the v1 decision rule was amended by the operator after measurement showed it gated on axes the unadapted carrier already maxes. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-16-lv-voices-line.md`
 - `[2026-09-16]` ⭐ **voices-seat live: one carrier, N `lv-<author>` LoRA adapters, hot-swap measured at 0.24 s.** LoRA costs 24.3% of decode against a 0.1% A-vs-A floor and is worth paying; `--gpu-memory-utilization` is a request against TOTAL VRAM and only a pinned KV makes it predictive. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-16-voices-seat-lora.md`
 - `[2026-09-16]` ⭐ **lv-hemingway corpus gated at 994,760 words — and half the catalogue had to be EXCLUDED.** 169,759 words of measured 90–96% collection duplication, a Sherwood Anderson parody, and the author's own name 95 times in publisher back matter; the gender resolver needed a corpus base-rate correction to stop reading women as men. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-16-lv-hemingway-corpus.md`