memory: snapshot — lv-mccarthy training launched on gx10, and the next voice seat is measured rather than chosen

In-flight rewritten to the live training run (~150/1380, ETA ~00:45 PT) with the
--save-total-limit finding that would otherwise have deleted the epoch-1/epoch-2
checkpoints both prior gates were decided on.

Two decisions added: the next-seat ranking (Faulkner, Morrison, Chandler -- and the
finding that the corpus size ranking inverts the voice ranking, with King and Christie
as the two biggest non-candidates), and the romantasy register measured on the gate's
own char-bigram instrument (Yarros is the cluster outlier we already shipped; Maas is
the centroid and so the worst pick; Kenyon at 27 val units if the lane gets a seat).

Auto-archival: 4 entries moved to archival-memory.md; 4 held back by the open-deferred
guard.

persistent-memory.md

@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 # Persistent memory — eshpfi-management
 
-_Last updated: 2026-09-17 ~12:15 PT (lv-mccarthy: the leak gate had PASSED with five protagonist names still in every copy — hidden from `\bName\b` by a drop-cap space or a line-break hyphen. Corpus rebuilt, gate taught to see the class, D4 pairs generating on gx10. lv-hemingway keeps its 3 — operator ruled leave it, so the gate now exits 1 on a shipped tree BY DESIGN. ESH back on the Cityside static. lv-krakauer parked.)_
+_Last updated: 2026-09-17 ~23:20 PT (lv-mccarthy TRAINING on gx10, ~150/1380 steps. The leak gate had PASSED with five protagonist names still in every copy — corpus rebuilt, gate taught to see the class. lv-hemingway keeps its 3 by operator ruling, so the gate exits 1 on a shipped tree BY DESIGN. ESH back on the Cityside static; headscale split-DNSes nh3.phasefinal.com. Next voice seat measured, not guessed. lv-krakauer parked.)_
 
 > **Always check for `/tmp/infra-ops-handoff.md`** — if it exists and its
 > `Written:` stamp is under **8 hours** old, read it (it carries the in-flight
@@ -115,7 +115,30 @@ no longer deployed sidecars here. See Recent decisions.)
 
 ## Current state / in-flight
 
-_As of 2026-09-17 ~09:00 PT._
+_As of 2026-09-17 ~23:20 PT._
+
+### RUNNING — lv-mccarthy LoRA on pfi-gx10, launched 2026-09-17 ~23:05 PT
+
+`~/r49-runs/mccarthy-4b-pairs-3ep/`, launched by `~/lv-mccarthy/launch-train.sh` (committed at
+`scripts/mccarthy-corpus/launch-train.sh`). At the snapshot: **~150 of 1380 steps, ~4.2 s/it,
+ETA ~1h25m**, so it lands around **00:45 PT**. A deliberate mirror of the Hemingway recipe —
+Qwen3-4B-Instruct, seq-len 1536, rank 32 / alpha 64, lr 1e-4, 3 epochs, batch 1 x accum 8,
+seed 4919 — with pairs sha `6a04fcd21800d85c`, 3673 train / 269 val, 0 dropped.
+
+⚠⚠ **`--save-total-limit` defaults to 12 and that would have silently destroyed the gate.** At the
+25-step save cadence over 1380 steps that keeps only epochs ~2.35-3.0 and DELETES the epoch-1 and
+epoch-2 checkpoints — which is exactly what the last two gates were decided on (Hemingway's ckpt850
+at epoch 0.96 TIED his eval-loss minimum ckpt1750; on Brontë the earlier epoch-1 checkpoint won the
+tiebreak on the axes that resolve). Raised to 60 so all ~55 survive, ~42 GB against 442 GB free.
+Eval/save cadence is 25 rather than Hemingway's 50 because McCarthy has 460 steps/epoch against his
+887 — matching EPOCH resolution (0.054 vs 0.056), which is the unit the tiebreak is expressed in.
+
+**Next, in order:** checkpoint selection off the loss curve → the v2 gate (`eval-*.sh` shape) →
+ship-or-park. ⚠ Before the gate, settle how the VOICE axis is read: D1 pre-registered a
+punctuation-normalised secondary read, and the `mccarthy` register now states the punctuation tics
+explicitly, so `--system-from` hands them to the BASE control arm too. That was done deliberately to
+deny the adapter a cheap char-bigram win, but it changes what the primary number means and must be
+settled BEFORE a number exists.
 
 ### OPEN LOOP — `ravenpen.com`, and a reply hamr-dev is waiting on
 
@@ -234,6 +257,8 @@ fused MoE kernel path (**parked, id 47**), TTS-stack move to fv-ml1 (**parked, i
 
 ## Recent decisions
 
+- `[2026-09-17]` ⭐⭐ **The next voice seat was MEASURED, not chosen by taste — and the corpus size ranking INVERTS the voice ranking at the top.** Our two largest authors are Stephen King (76 works, 12.1M words) and Agatha Christie (72, 5.5M); neither should get a seat, Christie being the Krakauer failure mode exactly (genius in plot architecture, prose deliberately transparent, invisible to a char-bigram Delta). Picks, in order: **Faulkner** (~15 pure novels, ~1.6M words — highest voice signal in the catalogue, AND he is McCarthy's stylistic ancestor, so training him next supplies the **hard-negative sister the gate has lacked since the Brontë record named it missing**); **Morrison** (11 novels after pruning criticism/anthology, ~818k — 11 val units, beating Hemingway's 10); **Chandler** (7 novels + a 409k short-story omnibus — fills the first-person hardboiled gap, Hemingway-class corpus size). ⚠ Faulkner's catalogue rows carry a 446k-word Snopes omnibus that duplicates novels also present individually — the Hemingway 90-96% collection-duplication trap, needs the containment pass first. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-17-next-voice-seats.md`
+- `[2026-09-17]` ⭐⭐ **Romantasy IS a real register, we already trained its most distinctive member, and the obvious next pick is its worst.** Measured on the gate's own instrument (char-bigram Burrows's Delta, ~120k words/author from mid-work), with within-author floors and cross-genre positive controls. Cluster median pair **0.537 = 1.2x the worst floor** against controls at 1.4-1.9x — tighter than cross-genre but NOT collapsed. Two findings survive either floor reading: **Yarros is the cluster OUTLIER** (4 of the 5 largest pair distances involve her), so a second romantasy seat buys measurably less than the first did; and **Maas is the centroid** (the two smallest distances in the matrix are hers), so the obvious commercial pick is the least distinctive. If the lane gets a seat it is **Kenyon** — furthest from Yarros at 0.674 and **27 works = 27 val units, the best-powered gate the line could build** (Hemingway 10, McCarthy 6, Brontë 4). ⚠ Sensitivity floor stated: one sample per pair, no repeat draws; the rank ordering is indicative, fine gaps are not resolvable. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-17-romantasy-register-measured.md`
 - `[2026-09-17]` ⚠⚠ **`dragonfireacoustics.com` expires 2026-10-30 — six weeks — at eNom with NO transfer lock, and its sibling domain was already lost exactly this way.** RDAP: registrar **eNom, LLC** (IANA 48, Tucows; abuse@enom.com), created 2008-10-30, status `active` **only** — no `clientTransferProhibited`. Registrant redacted (Verisign RDAP is thin, eNom's own endpoint 404s). Meanwhile `dragonfirepro.com` was re-registered 2025-09-27 by a Hungarian registrar and is now **for sale on expireddomains.com** — the customer lapsed it and a drop-catcher took it. ⭐ **This also makes the cert fix mandatory rather than tidy: two of the three SANs name a domain a THIRD PARTY now owns, so that request can never validate, and our Virtualmin has been retrying it often enough to get the Let's Encrypt account PAUSED.** Nobody is minding this domain — 13-month-dead cert, 403 homepage, sibling already gone — so the six-week clock is a real risk to an 18-year-old .com with a live site. Customer-facing; nothing touched.
   ⚠ **If it is ever transferred, DNS does NOT come with the registration** — the nameservers are eNom's `name-services.com` and the zone must be recreated first or mail dies. The whole zone is two facts plus a landmine: `*` (WILDCARD) → 199.250.192.76 which is **dead** (no HTTP at all, and it is what the apex/mail/webmail/admin/ftp all answer with), `www` → 38.120.12.45 (us), and **7 Google Workspace MX records that must not be lost**. No DNSSEC (`delegationSigned: false`), so no transfer complication. ⚠ Also found: **no SPF and no DMARC** at the apex on a Google Workspace domain — a live deliverability problem independent of everything else. Transfer gate is the **TAC/EPP code from the eNom account**, not the lock; the missing lock is not authorization. 60-day rule is satisfied (last changed 2025-10-24).
 - `[2026-09-17]` **`dragonfireacoustics.com` IS configured on `pfi-ana-webhost`, and the whole thing is dead — a forgotten public-facing VM.** It is a ServerAlias on the `dragonfirepro.com` Virtualmin vhost (DocumentRoot `/home/dragonfirepro/public_html`, suexec 1001), which is the **only enabled site on the box**. State: `www.` → 38.120.12.45 → DNAT to 10.250.50.52 (**proven, not inferred — identical cert SHA-256 inside and out**), Apache answers **403**, and the Let's Encrypt cert (`CN=dragonfirepro.com`, SAN `www.dragonfireacoustics.com`) **expired 2025-08-17, 13 months ago**. The apex points to 199.250.192.76, not ours and not answering at all. ⚠ **CORRECTED — the customer did not migrate `dragonfirepro.com`, they LOST it.** RDAP: re-registered **2025-09-27** through Domain Science Kft (Hungary, IANA 3882) on `dns-redirect.com` nameservers, and it now redirects to **expireddomains.com listed FOR SALE** as an "established .com (6y)". It lapsed, dropped and was sniped. (The earlier "moved to a SaaS platform" read of its 6 foreign A records was wrong — that is parking infrastructure.) `/home/dragonfirepro` mtime 2025-04-12. ⚠ The VM is **Debian 11**, whose LTS window closed end of August 2026 — an unsupported OS exposed on public 80/443 for a site serving nothing. Retire / fix / tell-the-customer-to-repoint is an OPERATOR call: it is a customer relationship, not a technical one. Nothing touched.
@@ -491,13 +516,9 @@ fused MoE kernel path (**parked, id 47**), TTS-stack move to fv-ml1 (**parked, i
 
 - `[2026-09-03]` **Run 3c is STAGED on pfi-gx10 and deliberately NOT launched** — the launch is a 13.3 h commitment and the operator stood this port down once already. Base shards AND the encoded corpus sha256-verified identical to ana-ml2's, so the transformers 5.15.1→5.16.1 / x86-64→aarch64 delta is *measured* inert. ⚠ The encode-cache FILENAME differs by design (`base_model_path` is in the key) — input hash, not output. ⚠ Tripped the `pkill -f` ssh self-match again; the launcher guards on a pidfile because of it. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-03-gx10-run3c-staged.md`
 
-- `[2026-09-03]` **SearXNG returned ZERO results for every query while reporting `healthy` for 7 days — 4.5 months stale.** Moved to nh3-docker (residential egress beats the colo's CAPTCHA-gated 38.120.12.42), updated, and exposed to every CC session as the user-scope `web_search` MCP tool. ⚠ `/healthz` cannot tell you whether search works. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-03-searxng-nh3-move.md`
 
-- `[2026-09-03]` **pfi-gx10 racked: VLAN 50 via a DHCP RESERVATION on the UDM, not a host static — operator ruling, so the box stays portable.** ⚠ The racked port arrived on the NATIVE VLAN; ⚠ `port_overrides` is a whole-array PUT; ⚠ prove inter-VLAN routing with `ping -I <wired>` BEFORE downing the Wi-Fi escape hatch. Now single-path. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-03-gx10-rack-network.md`
 
-- `[2026-09-03]` **Three Macs onboarded (mini / Air / Studio) with infra-ops, NOPASSWD sudo, rotated+vaulted passwords and `dsh` on device-scoped keys — and the fourth is `scripts/provision-mac-dsh.sh`, not a fourth hand-run.** ⚠ `sudo -u` keeps the CALLER's `$HOME` and nearly wiped a working install; ⚠ a wrong USERNAME is indistinguishable from a wrong password. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-03-mac-fleet-dsh.md`
 
-- `[2026-09-03]` **nh3-dev wedged for ~40 min and it was the BACKUP, not the disk — a stalled cross-site vzdump holding ever** → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-03-nh3-dev-wedged-for-40-min.md`
 
 
 - `[2026-08-25]` **Fused MoE kernel path — DEFERRED, tracked at park `fused-moe-kernel-path-for-gemma-4-moe-training` (id 47).** Operator: "note the fused MoE kernel for round two… if we nail it soon, the math has us wanting to restart the run anyway." Training MFU is **8.6%** (27.1 of a benchmarked 313.8 TFLOPS) because `transformers` runs the Gemma-4 experts in a Python loop — 128 experts × 30 layers, ~11,500 iterations per step under gradient checkpointing. ⚠ **The same fused 3-D expert layout that made bitsandbytes skip 88.5% of the model is exactly what a grouped GEMM wants** — the format is good for storage and for fused kernels, and hostile only to naive iteration. Two fixes: `group_by_length` (−29.9% compute, free, but breaks the seeded order manifest and re-opens a batch-composition call brokkr already made) and a grouped-GEMM/compiled MoE forward (the remaining ~10×). **Not applied to the live run** — restarting mid-flight to change batch ordering was judged a bad trade at step ~50 of 1,312.
@@ -522,4 +543,4 @@ _5 older entries archived to archival-memory.md._
 
 - `[2026-09-04]` **Forcing 10G on the ESH-Media DAC — it linked, then degraded over hours, and I reported a plateau at two minutes.** ⚠ A clean zero-error link at 1G does NOT rule out a marginal cable; autoneg's fallback was protecting something real. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-04-dac-forced-10g-failed.md`
 
-_110 older entries archived to archival-memory.md._
+_114 older entries archived to archival-memory.md._