Per-surface scanning is O(surfaces x copies x corpus). lv-mccarthy (108 surfaces,
36 copies) finished in 8 s; lv-hemingway (881 surfaces, 10 copies) was still running
at 5 minutes and had to be killed. A gate too slow to run is not a gate. Same trick
scan() already uses: build one alternation, map the matched string back to its
surface by stripping separators.
Regression: identical verdict and identical per-surface hit counts on the pre-fix
lv-mccarthy tree (5 surfaces, 78 hits) and on the fixed one (0). Re-derived on the
two shipped corpora with the committed instrument rather than a scratch probe:
lv-hemingway GATE FAILED Pasionaria, Primitivo, Chicote -- 6 hits each, all 6 copies
lv-bronte GATE PASSED 0
`leak_gate.py` scans `\b(Surface)\b`. Any character inserted inside a name defeats
that pattern outright, so a mangled occurrence is unrenameable by rename.py AND
unreportable by the gate. lv-mccarthy's 2026-09-17 tree passed at "0 of 75
renameable and 0 of 37 sub-threshold" while carrying 13 occurrences of Bell,
Chigurh, Moss, Toadvine and Glanton in all six copies:
B ell C higurh M oss T oadvine a small-caps drop cap kept as its own token
Toad-vine Glan-ton a print line-break hyphen kept by the extractor
Every visible occurrence HAD been renamed, which is what made the residue invisible
to a spot-read. Fixed at three levels, all three of which must stay:
build_corpus_mccarthy.py rules 4 and 5 repair the source text — 32 split initials
with a lowercase remainder, 5 hyphen-split names, each with an expected count so a
master change fails the build. Rule 4's letter class is consonants only: `I` opens
1,966 paragraphs, `A` 143 and `Y` 32 (Spanish `y`); folding any would corrupt 2,141
lines to fix 32.
leak_gate.py gains a separator-tolerant pass with its own positive and negative
controls, and it FAILS the gate. Validated against the pre-fix tree: reports all
five surfaces, exits 1. Its fragment filter is what makes it usable — a naive scan
returns 18 false positives on Hemingway (`God damn`, `I run`) against 3 real ones;
requiring one fragment to be a non-word of the corpus cleared all 18 and kept all 3.
The whole D1→D3 chain is reproduced byte-identically before and after, so the fix
is the only delta: 6 works, the entity map, the final map and all 36 copy files.
Cross-checked on the shipped corpora: lv-bronte is clean of this class, lv-hemingway
carries 3 (`Primi tivo`, `Pasionar ia`, `Chi cote`) and is live on fv-ml1.
Also in build_sft_pairs.py, both needed before lv-mccarthy's pairs:
DEFECT 4, hard-wrap reflow. Measured on the SHIPPED lv-bronte adapter, which emits
mid-sentence line breaks at 12.46 per 1k chars against 0.00 for its own base control
and 0.00 for every Hemingway arm. McCarthy is the mixed case — The Road is wrapped,
the other five works are not — so the corpus teaches the break as a coin flip. The
obvious fix (join every interior newline) corrupts 46 two-speaker exchanges whose
blank line was lost, and unmarked dialogue is the one thing this adapter exists to
learn; the rule splits on sentence-final punctuation instead and takes the cheaper
error. Self-targeting and off by default, so every shipped pair set is unchanged.
A `mccarthy` register, which names the punctuation deliberately: the eval drives the
base control arm with this same prompt, so tics left out of it are a surface trick
only the adapter can perform, and delta_cb is a character-bigram measure.
drop_leading_heading now also consumes Blood Meridian's dash-separated chapter
arguments — 131 paragraphs, 0 in every other work of all three corpora.
And a RUNBOOK, because the D1→D3 session recorded nothing and the chain had to be
recovered by rebuilding candidates and matching sha256 against the artifacts on disk.
~/lv-mccarthy on pfi-gx10: corpus-clean, corpus-renamed (6 copies, 1,002 records), scripts.
leak gate 0 of 75 renameable and 0 of 37 sub-threshold survive in any copy
positive control 108/108 surfaces found in the unrenamed source
negative control nonce absent from both trees
THREE McCARTHY-SPECIFIC DECISIONS, each forced by a measurement.
1. --scope corpus, NOT the default per-work map. The Border Trilogy shares characters
across books -- 9 surfaces appear in more than one work, including Parham (The
Crossing + Cities of the Plain), Grady and Cole (All the Pretty Horses + Cities of
the Plain), Socorro and Héctor. A per-work map would give John Grady a different
invented name in each novel, turning one character into two.
2. A NEW `mccarthy` rename preset rather than reusing `hemingway`. Both are
Spanish-inflected, but Hemingway's romance pool carries it_IT and fr_FR for his
Italian and French casts, and McCarthy writes neither language -- drawing from it
would drop Italian and French surnames into a Texas-Mexico border novel. en_GB goes
for the same reason. en_US + es_MX/es_ES at an even share.
3. --min-cap 5 to MATCH the entity map's floor. The first gate run FAILED with 45
survivors, and the diagnosis is the Brontë lesson exactly: entities.py admits
cap >= 5 while rename.py only renamed cap >= 8, so every entity between 5 and 7 sat
in the map, was never renamed, and was counted as a leak. Hemingway never hit it
because its map had sub_threshold_total 0.
⭐ --holdout-chapter NOW TAKES A LIST, and this is the change with the most downstream
effect. The val split is one chapter index per work, so its SIZE is set by how many
WORKS a corpus has, not how many words:
Hemingway 10 works -> 9 val units -> 36,563 words/copy -> gate DECISIVE
Brontë 4 works -> 4 val units -> 17,043 words/copy -> gate MARGINAL
McCarthy 6 works -> 6 val units -> ~18,000 would have been Brontë's end of that
Holding out chapters 7 AND 17 gives 11 units and 40,653 words per copy -- larger than
Hemingway's, at a cost of 7% of the corpus -- on a corpus 40% smaller than his. No
amount of corpus size fixes a val split that scales with work count.
THE HUMAN GENDER PASS IS NOW AN AUDITABLE FILE, not a hand edit. The honorific/window
resolver scored 21 correct / 3 held / 1 WRONG against a 26-name control; the base-rate
proximity resolver built for Hemingway scored 18/6/1 and its own guard correctly
REFUSED to write. So the incumbent stands and four entries are fixed by hand in
gender_overrides_mccarthy.json, each carrying its evidence.
⚠ All four are female and all four look male-dominated in raw pronoun counts, because
this corpus runs 29,144 male pronouns to 5,036 female -- a base rate of 85.3% male.
Carla Jean Moss at 31m/21f would be 44m/8f at that base rate, so 21 female against an
expected 8 is decisive. Same arithmetic that recovered Pilar and Brett on Hemingway.
Alfonsa was in my control set and is correctly absent from the map at 4 occurrences,
below the min-count floor -- an error in the control, not the pipeline.
apply_gender_overrides.py refuses two ways: a name absent from the map is an error
rather than a silent no-op, and overruling a gender the detector already holds needs
an explicit "correcting": true so it cannot look like filling a held entity in a diff.
Entity map at ~/mccarthy-corpus/entities.json. 123 surfaces after a 107-surface stoplist.
entities.py 27/27 controls -- 19 positive (Glanton, Toadvine, Rawlins, Blevins,
Alejandra, Chigurh, Moss, Bell, Boyd, Holden, Tobin, Magdalena,
Eduardo, Parham, Socorro, Webster, Redbo, Niño, Franklin) and 8 negative
audit_stoplist PASS -- no stoplisted surface is ever addressed as a person
audit_entity_map PASS -- positive `boy` 0.89, negative band tops out at Riddle 0.17,
all 5 remaining flags on the read-and-cleared list
⚠⚠ A DEFECT IN audit_stoplist.py ITSELF, latent for every corpus before this one. It built
its surface set from every list value in the stoplist JSON -- including `_why`, which by
convention is a LIST OF PROSE LINES. Every sentence of the rationale went into the matcher,
and the empty separator line matched the honorific pattern 139 times, printing a flag with no
surface name at the top of the report, above the one real catch. It now skips `_`-prefixed
metadata keys and empty strings.
THE ONE REAL CATCH WAS A CONTRADICTION INSIDE MY OWN FILE. `Franklin` sat in the geography
list because it is the old name for El Paso, while the same file's context note recorded
'I'm here to see Mr Franklin' -- a lawyer in All the Pretty Horses. The honorific audit found
the contradiction between the two halves of the file. Franklin is now renameable.
A SECOND SELF-INFLICTED ONE: the fragments list was a speculative A-Z, which stoplisted `I`
and `A` -- ordinary English words -- and `Sir I dont think I can do that` duly tripped the
honorific audit. It is now the four letters actually MEASURED as entities (E, H, T, K).
Stoplist what the entity map produced, not the alphabet.
Everything ambiguous was read in context before placement, and the reasoning is in the file:
Socorro is the ranch COOK in Cities of the Plain, not the New Mexico town -- renameable
Webster, Jackson, Harlan, Lamar are Glanton's men and lawmen, not places -- renameable
Niño, Keno, Redbo are HORSES, the author's inventions -- renameable, the `Inglés` precedent
Mangas, Travis, Venada, Moderno are genuinely dual-use -- renamed, the safe direction
Santa, Varas, Griffin, Eagle, Avenue, Calle, Terrell are real geography -- stoplisted
Yaqui and Gilenos are real peoples; Ford and Hashknives are a brand and a real outfit
Ed (Ed Tom Bell) and JC are short but are names, read and kept renameable
Sensitivity floor, stated because it is part of the result: the top 170 of 199 surfaces were
classified. The bottom 29 were not individually read, so a rare real-world referent may be
renamed -- the safe direction, an accepted cost, not an oversight.
D2's entity map returned `E`, `H`, `T` and `K` as renameable entities with 17-33 capitalised
occurrences each. A bare initial is never a name -- that is the `G` class from the Hemingway
build, where `G` was about to be renamed to a surname 248 times. Reading them in context
showed the McCarthy editions set section openings in small caps and the extractor mangled
them three different ways, none of which the D1 build repaired:
1. SPLIT INITIAL `T HE HOUSE was built` -> `The house was built` 32 cases
Hemingway's restore_smallcaps only fires on TWO or more split initials in a line, so it
is structurally blind to these single ones.
2. UNMARKED RUN `THEY STOOD in the doorway` -> `They stood in the ...` 88 cases
Concentrated in Cities of the Plain (49) and The Crossing (37).
3. LOST INITIAL `HE CANDLEFLAME` -> `THE CANDLEFLAME` 1 case
Rule 1 requires a FOLLOWING all-caps word, because `A TV was playing` and `A Mexican was
changing` are an article plus a capitalised word, not a drop cap. All four such probes
verified untouched. Rule 2's `[a-z]` lookahead is what makes it safe: lowercasing every
all-caps run at a block start would eat a genuine shout or a sign, and requiring the run to
be followed immediately by a lowercase word means it is a sentence continuing. All 23
distinct first words of the 88 were checked and are real words -- HE, WHEN, THE, THEY,
QUINQUAGESIMA -- except one, which was case 3.
⚠⚠ AND A SECOND LOST-INITIAL ENTRY WAS NEARLY SHIPPED THAT WOULD HAVE CORRUPTED THE TEXT.
`HEY RODE` -> `THEY RODE` looked right from a survey of the BUILT corpus. The raw master has
`THEY RODE` intact, twice: `HEY RODE` was matching as a SUBSTRING, and the unanchored replace
produced `TTHEY RODE`, which rule 2 then lowercased to `Tthey rode`. Two things caught it --
the count assertion (expected 1, replaced 2) and then reading the master. Rule 3 is now a
block-anchored regex rather than a string replace, so a substring cannot fire it.
⚠ My first corruption check also missed it, searching for `TTHEY` when the pipeline had
already lowercased it to `Tthey`. Check the shape the pipeline actually emits, not the shape
you imagined it would.
Totals move 584,756 -> 584,716 words, 167 units unchanged. Both guards still pass: quote
marks 0.0/10k, author's own name 26 -> 0. Entity map positive control is 14/14 on real
McCarthy characters (Glanton, Toadvine, Rawlins, Blevins, Alejandra, Chigurh, Moss, Bell,
Boyd, Holden, Tobin, Magdalena, Eduardo, Parham); `T` and `E` no longer appear as entities.
Operator ruling: "he's a great writer because of his research, not because he has a strong
identifiable voice."
That reason is about the AUTHOR rather than the data, and it is the better of the two on the
table -- the other being the unmeasurable fraction of quoted material. It also names a
selection criterion this line did not have: ask whether there IS a voice worth adapting
before investigating whether a clean corpus can be built. That question was never asked here.
I surveyed the holdings, built the corpus, measured all fifteen containment pairs, and fixed
three stripping defects the name guard caught -- all real work, none of it touching the thing
that decided it.
A voice adapter is worth its corpus-plus-training-plus-gate only when the target has a prose
signature a reader could pick out blind. McCarthy: 0.0 quote marks per 10k against Hemingway's
838. Hemingway: spare declaratives, heavy unattributed dialogue. Brontë: periodic sentences
built on semicolons and dashes. If that sentence is hard to write, the author is a park.
Nothing is deleted. The corpus (126 units, 422,880 words) and the builder stay committed and
re-runnable; the park entry records what exists, what was never started (D2), and what would
unpark it -- a re-extraction preserving indentation and italics, which would fix the quoted-
material problem but not the operator's objection. The builder's own docstring now carries a
stop notice so a future session finds the reason at the artifact rather than only in memory.
The first non-fiction corpus in this line. Builds clean and should not be trained on until
an operator scope call is made; the reason is in the module docstring and the manifest.
into-the-wild 25u 67,606w caps-title [smallcaps 21][back -1,015][epi -52]
missoula 32u 115,841w chapter-word [smallcaps 8][front -858][back -2,874]
under-the-banner-of-heaven 33u 118,171w caps-title
where-men-win-glory 36u 121,262w chapter-word [smallcaps 3][front -1,548][back -6,093]
⚠⚠ THE UNRESOLVED PROBLEM IS QUOTATION, AND IT IS NOT MEASURED BECAUSE IT CANNOT BE.
Krakauer quotes constantly and at length -- McCandless's journals and letters, Tillman's
diaries, court transcripts, depositions, Mormon historical documents, and whole paragraphs
of Jack London and Wallace Stegner at the chapter heads. In print those are indented or
italic; the extraction lost both, so inside the master they are ordinary paragraphs and no
signal this builder can read separates them from his own sentences.
Only 52 words were removable -- chapter-head epigraphs whose all-caps attribution line
survived. That is 0.01% and it is NOT the answer: the method would report 0.0% for a book
made entirely of undated block quotes. The stated floor rather than the number is what a
reader needs. This is the same error as excluding The Torrents of Spring from Hemingway --
another author's style under the target's name -- distributed rather than concentrated, and
the fraction is unknown. Scope is the operator's call, exactly as fiction-only was.
THREE DEFECTS THE NAME GUARD CAUGHT, none of which the build would have reported otherwise:
1. Back matter searched only the LAST unit. Where Men Win Glory's ACKNOWLEDGMENTS sits at
94.8% and the splitter made 41 units, so the apparatus landed in unit 37 with NOTES and
BIBLIOGRAPHY after it -- all past a strip that only looked at unit 41. Into the Wild
kept its acknowledgments AND a full-page advertisement for another of his books. Now
windowed to the last 25% and cut before the split.
2. Relying on the splitter to drop front matter did not work. Units begin at the first
heading mark, and in two works the ebook's table of contents sits above the author's
note -- giving the splitter a `Chapter Thirty-Two` to start on, so unit 1 swallowed the
apparatus and its signed `Jon Krakauer , February 2015`. Now cut at that signature,
windowed to the first 10%.
3. Zero was the wrong bar. 21 survivors became 2, and both were read: `Lewis Krakauer
loved his five children deeply` is Krakauer writing about his own father in the two
autobiographical chapters of Into the Wild, and the other is a reader's letter he
quotes calling him a kook. Hemingway's own name in his corpus was always publisher
apparatus, so 0 was right there; this author writes about himself. The allowance is
pinned at 2 and every survivor is printed with context, so a master change or a strip
that stops working fails loudly instead of widening in silence.
Both strips are windowed in OPPOSITE directions from McCarthy's, which is the point worth
carrying: McCarthy's apparatus is at the end and the earliest marker wins; Krakauer's is at
both ends and the same marker words appear in his front matter at 0.0-0.6% of the file.
Six complete novels from the licensed Kvasir masters. Same record schema as the Brontë,
Yarros and Hemingway builders, so entities.py, rename.py, leak_gate.py and the trainers run
unchanged. Splits via the new shared split_units module.
all-the-pretty-horses 33u 99,242w paragraph-blocks [back -1,768w] [drop cap restored]
blood-meridian 23u 116,651w roman-numeral [back -354w]
cities-of-the-plain 30u 90,166w paragraph-blocks
no-country-for-old-men 13u 69,841w roman-numeral [back -463w]
the-crossing 49u 149,985w paragraph-blocks [back -30w]
the-road 19u 58,871w paragraph-blocks
THE THING THIS BUILDER PROTECTS IS A VOICE THAT READS AS A DEFECT. McCarthy uses no
quotation marks and drops the apostrophe from most contractions -- dont, aint, wont, didnt.
Measured over the built corpus: 0.0 quote marks per 10k words against Hemingway's 838, and
123 apostrophes against his 241. repair_typography.py normalises "toward what the text
does" and would put the quotes back, deleting the single most identifiable thing about the
author before training starts. This builder runs NO typography normalisation and then
ASSERTS the quote density, so a future well-meaning change fails the build instead of
quietly undoing it.
⚠ That same property will make the voice gate easy to pass for the wrong reason.
voice_distance.py is Burrows's Delta over character bigrams; an adapter that learns only
"emit no quotation marks" moves delta_cb a long way without having learned a sentence. A
punctuation-normalised secondary read needs pre-registering before this one is gated.
Exclusions, measured rather than assumed:
- two truncated catalogue rows dropped for their complete mobi siblings (Blood Meridian
epub 1,167w, The Crossing epub 222w -- both real prose, both `accepted`)
- nothing else. All 15 cross-work 8-gram containment pairs measured on the Hemingway
precedent; worst is 0.10%. Six independent works, no subsumption.
Back matter rides inside the last unit in four of six works and the marker differs every
time -- THE END, a dumped Table of Contents, a Reader's Guide, an About-the-Author, press
blurbs, a CIP page. It carried the author's own name 26 times across the raw masters. Both
guards report and gate: name 26 -> 0, quotes 0.0/10k.
⚠⚠ The back-matter strip runs BEFORE the split here, inverting the Hemingway order. Blood
Meridian and The Crossing end with a dumped table of contents made of bare roman numerals on
their own lines -- the exact shape of a chapter marker. Splitting first feeds the TOC to the
splitter as two dozen extra chapters; only the 150-word floor accidentally saves it today.
One lost drop cap is patched by name, not by heuristic: the All the Pretty Horses epub opens
`HE CANDLEFLAME` because the decorative T was an image the extractor dropped. A general
restore-the-missing-initial rule would have to guess the letter, so this is asserted against
the known string and fails loudly if the master ever changes.
The alphabet is re-derived, not inherited: 1,411 non-ASCII letters across 14 forms
(á é í ñ ó ú ü). The Border Trilogy is half set in Mexico, so the Yarros ASCII-only
conclusion does not transfer -- same finding as Hemingway, same reason.
McCarthy and Krakauer both need this before a corpus can be built, so it is a shared module
rather than a third copy of the Hemingway splitter.
THE INHERITED RULE IS "MOST UNITS ABOVE A FLOOR" AND IT BREAKS ON PART MARKERS. Measured:
Cities of the Plain 4 roman marks -> 4 units, median 22,312w <- the book's PARTS
The Crossing 4 roman marks -> 4 units, median 37,310w <- same
"Most units" scores 4 over the 1 that finding-nothing gives, so it wins, and the existing
guard only fires at exactly one unit. A 37,000-word "chapter" sails through and every
downstream tool accepts it. Size is now the eligibility test: a mode qualifies only if its
median unit is inside [600, 12000] AND no single unit holds half the work.
TWO THINGS A CONTROL RUN CAUGHT, BOTH NOW FIXED IN THE RULE. The first version scored
eligible modes by "median closest to target". Run over Hemingway, whose markers are known
good, it chose caps-title over the book's own chapters on True at First Light:
bare-numeral 20 units median 5,337w max 11,155 <- the real chapters
caps-title 6 units median 777w max 113,886 <- median looked BETTER
caps-title matched five stray all-caps lines, so five tiny units sat beside one holding 97%
of the book. A median cannot see that distribution; a max bound can. And caps-title is the
weakest of the four signals, which is why the tiebreak among eligible modes is now PRIORITY
(contents > chapter-word > roman > bare-numeral > caps-title), not size.
CONTROLS, both green after the fix:
positive Hemingway's ten works, markers known good -> 8/10 reproduce the shipped mode and
unit count exactly. The two differences are explained, neither is a mode error:
short-stories used `contents`, which the harness does not supply, and The Old Man
and the Sea was deliberately kept whole as CONTINUOUS.
negative 40,000 words with no blank lines -> 1 unit. It refuses to fabricate divisions
out of unstructured text rather than returning a plausible section count.
Result on the two new authors: McCarthy 167 units / 587,233 words, Krakauer 135 / 431,938,
both median ~3,200-3,500w against Hemingway's 3,128.
⚠ CORRECTION TO AN EARLIER SURVEY. I reported that all four Krakauer works carry zero
chapter markers. That was wrong and it was my regex, not the books: the survey pattern
required "Chapter" followed by a numeral, and Krakauer writes "CHAPTER ONE". Missoula and
Where Men Win Glory split on chapter-word (33 and 41 units); Into the Wild and Under the
Banner of Heaven on caps-title (28 and 33). Only McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, Cities of
the Plain, The Crossing and The Road actually need the fallback.
The Hemingway builder is deliberately NOT repointed at this module. Its corpus is shipped and
its provenance sha is pinned by a live adapter; the one behavioural difference (The Old Man
and the Sea would section into 9 rather than stay whole) is an improvement nobody asked for
on a corpus nobody should churn.
Six beats through voices-base, lv-bronte, lv-yarros and lv-hemingway, all served from the
same process on fv-ml1 :8027 so only the adapter varies. Operator-requested side-by-side.
http://10.100.10.50:8090/b/lv-voices-four-arms/ (24h TTL; also on the link board)
THE PROMPT NAMES NO AUTHOR, deliberately. Each adapter trained under a prompt naming its
own, so driving all four with any one of those hands that arm a hint the others do not get
and the page would be measuring the prompt rather than the voice. The shared task skeleton
is kept and the author clause removed. One asymmetry is disclosed on the page: Brontë and
Hemingway trained on "a SHORT PASSAGE ... may run to several paragraphs" while Yarros
trained on "ONE paragraph", so the neutral prompt sits slightly off-distribution for all
three rather than for one.
THE CONTROL GETS A 4x LARGER TOKEN BUDGET, and publishing it any other way would have been
dishonest. Measured at the gate's 320-token budget:
voices-base median 26 prose words, 181-257 words of <think> planning first,
and 5 of 12 cells never reach the prose at all
the adapters 0 of 12 failures each, empty think block in 12 of 12, median 97-105 words
The adapters learned to skip the reasoning phase; the carrier has not. Showing the starved
control would conflate voice with budget discipline, so the control runs at 1200 tokens and
finishes every time, median 121 words. Both numbers are on the page.
Two seeds per cell behind a toggle, because one sample of a sampled process is an anecdote,
and a blind-mode toggle that hides which column is which. Sampler matches the gate harness
(temperature 0.9, top_p 0.95, "BEAT: " prefix).
Checked before publishing rather than after: all 36 adapter generations scored for verbatim
8-gram reuse, each arm against ITS OWN corpus. Brontë 0, Yarros 0, Hemingway 2 of 12 with a
longest run of 8 words, that run being "i don t know i don t know".
Layout verified by rendering it, not by reading the CSS: four equal 374px columns at 1600px
wide, no horizontal overflow, 24 cards, 48 panes. ⚠ nh3-dev's shared /opt/ms-playwright
tops out at chromium-1234, so playwright must be pinned to 1.61.0; a bare `npm i playwright`
pulls 1.63 and asks for a browser build that is not there.
Live on vllm-voices (fv-ml1 GPU0 :8027) beside voices-base, lv-yarros and lv-bronte.
Healthy 190 s after recreate, four models served, GPU0 96,092 -> 96,090 MiB. The adapter
was verified byte-identical to checkpoint-850 by sha256 across both transfer hops, and the
seat was verified by generating, not by reading its config: base emits 170 words of <think>
planning and never writes the passage, lv-hemingway writes the scene.
Gate design was pre-registered before any generation existed (0bb4938). Three arms, 60
held-out beats, 4 seeds, 240 generations per arm.
A. VOICE PASS 6.4x +0.413 delta_cb, pairwise floor 0.064 -- and it clears the OLD
all-arms floor (0.113) too, so this verdict does not lean on the
rule change. Closes 73.8% of the span between the unadapted
carrier and held-out Hemingway itself; lv-bronte closed 48%.
B. NOT COPIED see below
C. NO DAMAGE PASS ran-on +0.08, on-beat -0.14, both inside a 0.217 floor
AXIS B: THE NEGATIVE CONTROL WAS THE WRONG ONE, AND FIXING IT MADE THE RESULT WORSE, NOT
BETTER. memorization_check.py uses the base-unadapted arm as its control. Base writes
18,035 words of summary against the adapted arms' 27,413 of pastiche, and text that does
not imitate a register cannot collide with its n-grams -- so base's 0.00 measures "different
register", not "did not memorise". The comfortable reading was that Hemingway's plain
high-frequency prose makes collisions inevitable for any arm that learns it. That is
refutable, so it was tested: held-out Hemingway, the author himself, scored against the
train split at the generations' own median length.
HELD-OUT HEMINGWAY (never trained) 370 chunks 0.01 hit-rate mean-longest 0.1 max 10
base-unadapted 240 gens 0.00 0.0 0
ckpt850 (shipped) 240 gens 0.07 0.6 9
positive control (train vs train) 160
The hypothesis is false: the adapter reproduces train n-grams ~7x more often than the
author reproduces himself. That is real and is on the record. All 19 matched runs were then
READ rather than counted -- every one is stock dialogue ("came over and sat down at the
table", "how do you feel i feel very well"), capped at 9 words, with no plot, no imagery and
no proper noun; the one name-shaped hit is the RENAMED invented name. Nine is shorter than
the 10-word run unseen Hemingway shares with the train split by coincidence. Elevated rate,
zero protectable content. Hemingway is in copyright; lv-yarros is the in-line precedent,
also in copyright, shipped at 0.10 against a 0.07 control. Unload is 0.003 s.
The durable lesson is about the instrument: a negative control that differs from the
candidate in a way correlated with the metric is not a control. memorization_selfsim.py and
memorization_dump_matches.py are committed so the claim can be re-derived rather than taken
on faith.
SHIPPED ckpt850, NOT the loss minimum at step 1750. The two are indistinguishable on voice
-- 0.072 apart against a 0.113 pairwise floor -- so the pre-registered tiebreak fell to the
axes that resolve, and 850 wins all of them: 2.3x tighter seed spread (0.050 vs 0.113),
lower memorisation, less ran-on, half an epoch less overfit. ckpt1750's spread is one seed
(0.491, 0.449, 0.468, then 0.562), the same lone-outlier shape that lost ckpt925 the
lv-bronte tiebreak. The two-epoch recipe is now 0 for 2 and should stop being carried
forward; only the epoch-3 collapse is robust at 17.4x jitter.
servers/fv-ml1/ssh-target was a bare IP, so deploy-stack.sh connected as lkraven, could not
write the infra-ops-owned /opt/docker/compose, and could not escalate either because
lkraven's sudo on fv-ml1 wants a password. Now infra-ops@10.251.50.54; --validate-only stays
clean and the deploy works through the repo's own tool rather than around it. Other hosts
may carry the same gap -- a read-only refresh works as either user, so it only surfaces on a
deploy.
An already-built pair set cannot be repaired by build_sft_pairs.py --source-entities;
that flag only works at generation time. Hemingway's and Yarros's sets both predate it.
The contamination is in the BEAT, so dropping the row removes it outright. Measured on
the Hemingway train pairs: 7,094 -> 7,024, 70 dropped, 0.99% of the training data. That
is cheaper and cleaner than regenerating 70 beats against a second generator session,
which would leave the set mixed-provenance for the sake of 1% more data.
Verified by read-back rather than by the write succeeding: re-auditing the filtered file
reports 0 of 7,024 on both columns, controls green, GATE PASS.
Two refusals rather than a best-effort write:
- a contaminated RESPONSE column aborts. That is a different fault -- pairs built
against an unrenamed corpus -- and dropping rows would hide it instead of fixing it.
- more than one --pairs input aborts, because the output is a single file and would
silently merge train and val into one.
Also cross-validated the detector against the lv-bronte pair sets on real data, where the
answer is already on the record:
pairs-full + pairs-val (post-fix) 0 of 3,858 matches the recorded "0 leaks across
3,858 pairs" exactly
pairs-full.CONTAMINATED 15 of 792 = 1.89%, Rochester x6, Jane, Brocklehurst
x2, Beck, Fairfax, Burns, Helen, Eyre -- against a
record of "13 of the first 714 beats (1.8%)" with
the same names
An independently written instrument reproducing a documented finding at the right
magnitude, on the right names, is the control that says its zeroes mean absent and not
blind.
lv-bronte shipped 2026-09-17 with a FAILED voice axis written into its compose comment,
its NFS README and its gate record. That verdict no longer stands, and this records the
correction in all three places without deleting what they said.
The floor rule is now pairwise (commit 0bb4938, pre-registered for lv-hemingway before
any Hemingway number existed). Re-scoring the SAME 360 generations, no re-run, no changed
delta_cb:
ckpt475 (shipped) +0.193 vs pairwise floor 0.091 -> PASS, 2.1x
ckpt925 (not shipped) +0.210 vs its own spread 0.251 -> still fails
As run, the floor was 0.251 for every candidate, contributed entirely by ckpt925's single
outlier seed — a candidate nobody was shipping failed the one that was.
Why this is not a threshold chosen to produce a verdict: the previous session found the
defect, wrote it into this very file, and deliberately declined to act on it. The rule was
changed prospectively on an argument independent of the answer — the sampling variability
of a difference A-B depends on A and B, not on a third arm C. voice_distance.py now prints
both floors and flags disagreement so neither can be quoted without the other.
What changes for a reader: the sensitivity floor is 0.091 rather than 0.251, and "do not
cite lv-bronte as evidence pair-SFT works for this author" is withdrawn. What does not
change: NOT-COPIED and NO-DAMAGE as recorded, ckpt475 over ckpt925 for the same reasons,
and the two-epoch recipe still not transferring to Brontë.
Amendments are append-only in all three artifacts. The on-host compose is unchanged so far
— this edit is comment-only and will ride with the next real deploy rather than triggering
a model reload for a comment.
nh3-dev was reaching gitea over the public route from every repo on the box.
brokkr-smithy-dev flagged it while pushing a new repo: brokkr-smithy, sleipnir,
Galdrabok and kvasir all carried git@gitea.phasefinal.com remotes, and
brokkr-smithy is pushed several times a week, so the fail2ban trigger this doc
already warned about was live and recurring rather than dormant.
Measured before changing anything, because the plausible explanation was a
split-horizon rewrite making the public name internally correct:
getent hosts gitea.phasefinal.com -> 38.120.12.44 (public, ana-srv1)
grep -i gitea ~/.ssh/config -> nothing
ssh -G git@gitea.phasefinal.com -> hostname gitea.phasefinal.com, port 22
No rewrite, no alias, no per-repo exception. A `Host gitea.phasefinal.com` block
pointing at 10.250.50.70:222 now covers every repo on the box at once, which beats
rewriting N remotes: it also catches repos nobody audited and fresh clones that
copy the public URL out of a README, and nothing has to be remembered next time.
Verified as a route change and not just a config edit: both paths already
authenticated as `vh` with the same key, and `git ls-remote origin HEAD` succeeds
over the alias in brokkr-smithy and in this repo. Backup at
~/.ssh/config.bak-20260917-020929. The alias is per-host; the doc now says to
check `ssh -G` rather than assume another host inherits it.
audit_stoplist.py finds surfaces wrongly held OUT of the entity map -- a stoplisted
character is an undetectable leak. This is the mirror: surfaces wrongly held IN it.
leak_gate.py only ever asks whether the author's names are GONE, never whether
non-names were spared, so renaming `the Chinese` into an invented surname passes it
perfectly.
Found sideways on Hemingway. The pairs audit reported beats naming African, Chinese,
X-ray, Republican and Cezanne as leaks -- correctly, those surfaces really were removed
from the corpus. Reading why turned up the larger defect: they should never have been
renameable in the first place.
Measured on the Hemingway map, both controls green:
positive `other` 764/1356 article-preceded = 0.56
negative 100 honorific-confirmed people, highest Inglés at 0.26, bulk 0.00-0.06
FLAGGED 130 of 946 surfaces, 1,616 instances = 0.162% of corpus words
The signal is an article in front of the surface: you write `the Frenchman` and `a
Martini`, never `the Rinaldi`. It is a heuristic and every hit is reported FOR READING,
never auto-removed -- `the Widow` and `the Informer` are genuine Hemingway epithet-names
that SHOULD be renamed, and the band's own top entry makes the point, since Inglés at
0.26 is an in-world nickname deliberately kept renameable and sits just under the bar.
Initials are excluded from the negative-control band rather than admitted to it. `Mr. P.`
is an initial, not a person, so letting it in lets a map defect poison the control that
validates the detector -- on Hemingway `P` (0.32, every occurrence `the P. O. U. M.`) was
the one surface failing a band whose next highest was 0.26. Initials take no article and
are invisible to the scan anyway, so every surface of two characters or fewer is now
listed unconditionally. Sixteen of them are in this map, C at 274 occurrences; the same
class as the `G` that was caught by hand about to be renamed to a surname 248 times.
The unresolved count that drives the exit code is computed over every flagged surface,
not the --show slice. Tying a gate's verdict to a display flag is the same defect as a
log filter that turns a real event into a clean zero.
Also corrects a wrong claim in audit_pairs_sourcenames.py's docstring: the Hemingway
rename did not HOLD 591 surfaces. Paris, Madrid and Spain survive because the stoplist
keeps them out of the entity map before it is built, so the map is exactly the removed
set -- 941 surfaces, 941 removed, 0 kept. Measured per run rather than assumed, because
a pipeline that carried kept surfaces into the map would report every `Paris` as a leak.
The gate design is written before any generation exists, because lv-bronte's
verdict turned on a choice that was only visible after the numbers printed.
THE FLOOR RULE IS NOW PAIRWISE. lv-bronte computed the noise floor as the largest
within-arm seed spread across ALL arms present. Its ckpt475 shipped at +0.193
against a 0.251 floor set entirely by ckpt925 -- a third arm nobody was shipping,
on one outlier seed. Scored against the arm it was actually compared to, the floor
is 0.092 and the same gap clears at 2.1x. A candidate's verdict must not depend on
which other arms happened to be generated. voice_distance.py now prints both floors
and flags any disagreement, so the lv-bronte record stays comparable.
audit_pairs_sourcenames.py closes the blind spot leak_gate.py has by construction:
it reads the corpus and the renamed copies, never the generated beats, so it cannot
see a beat-writing model restoring the author's real character names. Run over the
Hemingway pairs, which predate build_sft_pairs.py --source-entities:
val 0 of 200 -- the eval fixture is clean, the gate is unconfounded
train 70 of 7,094 (0.96%) -- Santiago x16, Catherine x7, Rinaldi x3, Brett,
Harry, Jake, Pablo, Nick, Maria ...
responses 0 of 7,294 -- the lv-bronte beat-only signature exactly
A matched surface is only counted when the rename actually removed it, verified
against the renamed copies, so a beat naming a held real-world place is not a leak.
Controls run every time: 941/941 surfaces found in the unrenamed source, nonce
absent from both trees, and 6 planted canonical names detected 6/6.
voice_distance.py --author is now REQUIRED. It was hardcoded "Yarros" and printed
"reference: held-out Yarros" over Brontë's numbers into a committed artifact. A
default would have moved the silent-wrong-label failure rather than removed it. The
stale "one seed-pair per arm / corroborates Base < Instruct" footer is replaced with
what the run actually carries.
Gate design: three arms (base-unadapted, ckpt1750, ckpt850), 60 beats, 4 seeds.
ckpt850 is present because the loss curve cannot separate it from ckpt1750 -- +0.0040
against a 0.0044 median neighbour jitter, with three checkpoints inside one jitter of
the minimum. adapter/ is excluded: +0.0762 is 17.4x the jitter and is resolved without
a gate.
In-flight rewritten for the next goal. lv-hemingway is TRAINED and nothing else
has been done to it: ship candidate is checkpoint-1750 (ep 1.97, eval 2.2783),
the end-of-run adapter is 0.0763 worse, and the v2 gate has not been run. Every
instrument it needs was parameterised during the lv-bronte run tonight and the
in-flight section names all four with their traps.
New detail files:
2026-09-17-lv-bronte-gate.md shipped, voice axis failed, why anyway
2026-09-17-beat-contamination-leak.md the leak the corpus gate cannot see
2026-09-17-esh-fiber-outages.md two Cityside failures, rotation fragility
Also commits the memorization_check.py parameterisation, which was left
uncommitted: its hardcoded Yarros defaults would have compared a Hemingway arm
against the Yarros corpus and reported a meaningless clean zero.
Auto-archival: index was 415 lines pre-run, over the 300 cap. Only five entries
cleared the 14-day age guard, and three of those carry open deferred pointers
(fused MoE park 47, nconnect=8, AI-tab belayed) and are referenced by in-flight.
A fourth — every CI job on pfi-fleet runs as root on ana-docker — is a live
security property rather than settled history, so it is held back deliberately.
One entry archived. The file stays over cap, which is the guard working: an
over-cap file that keeps live decisions beats a scannable one that lost them.
lv-bronte is live on vllm-voices (fv-ml1 GPU0 :8027) alongside voices-base and
lv-yarros. The seat lists all three; container healthy; GPU0 96092 -> 96090 MiB,
so the adapter cost nothing measurable.
IT DID NOT PASS ITS VOICE GATE, and the artifact says so in three places — this
commit, a comment in the compose file, and a README beside the adapter on NFS —
because an adapter found without its provenance will otherwise be read as a pass.
VOICE FAIL +0.193 delta_cb vs base, against a 0.251 measured noise floor
NOT COPIED PASS 8-gram hit-rate 0.00, longest 0 - identical to the control
NO DAMAGE PASS ran-on +0.15 against a 0.400 floor
Shipped on three grounds, none of them that the number was nearly good enough:
it is additive (a named LoRA nobody reaches without asking for it), reversible
(one compose line; hot-unload measures 0.003 s), and clean on the axis that
carries actual risk - verbatim regurgitation of the source, on a public-domain
corpus, measured against a positive control that saturates at 160.
The voice result is UNDERPOWERED rather than absent: it closed 48% of the span
from base to the same-author target and beat the control on every individual
seed. The 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,
because the floor is a range statistic and ranges widen with n.
ckpt475 over ckpt925: indistinguishable on voice (0.017 apart), but ckpt925 has a
verbatim 8-gram hit where this has none, and is 2.7x less stable seed-to-seed
(0.251 vs 0.092) with a degeneracy probe showing no collapse to explain it.
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.
Stoplisting a surface removes it from the entity map, so rename never touches it
and the gate never scans for it. That is exactly what a stoplist is FOR when the
surface is a real-world referent — and exactly how a wrongly stoplisted CHARACTER
becomes an undetectable leak. The gate reports 0 of N surviving and is telling the
truth about the set it was given.
Found by luck on lv-bronte: a generated beat said "Mrs. Leaven", and Leaven had
been filed under scripture as the bread noun. Reading it back: "Robert Leaven,
the coachman" — Bessie's married surname in Jane Eyre.
Running the audit instead of trusting that luck caught two more:
Pierrot "Madame Pierrot: she comes from Lisle, in France" — a teacher in
The Professor, filed as the commedia dell'arte figure
Samuel "Mr. Samuel Wynne" — filed as scripture
and correctly CLEARED two:
Wellington "that Baal of a Lord Wellington" — the real Duke
Moses "the Rev. Moses Barraclough" — the documented dual-use
Signal is an honorific in front of the surface: real-world referents are not
addressed as Mr/Mrs/Miss/Madame/Lord. It is a heuristic and not a proof, which is
why every hit is REPORTED FOR READING and never auto-removed — Wellington and
Moses both trip it and both are correct. Exit 1 on anything not on --allow, so it
can gate a pipeline.
Blast radius of the three errors was 16 of 3781 train pairs and 3 of 80 val —
small, but they are the author's characters in training data, which is the one
thing this pipeline exists to prevent. Corpus rebuilt rather than dropping the
affected pairs: a corpus on disk that disagrees with its committed config is how
superseded claims get made. Gate re-passes at 0 of 368 (three more surfaces than
before, exactly the restored characters), both controls green.
Two harness defects that would each make a voice number uninterpretable.
build_beat_fixture.py — the fixture is now SAMPLED from the val split rather than
hand-written. The original BabyYarros fixture was five hand-written beats about a
stray dog and a kitten: wrong genre, so 'He licked her clean' came back as
explicit sex from a romantasy adapter, and n=5 had a noise floor of 0.800 that
manufactured a +0.45 result which collapsed to +0.08 at n=120. Sampling from val
makes it in-genre and held out by construction, spread across works so a naive
head(30) is not one novel. Refuses outright if the pairs carry any split but val,
because a fixture drawn from training data makes every downstream number a
memorisation measurement wearing a voice label.
gen_beats_chat_yarros.py --system-from — the SYS constant in this harness is
Yarros's. Driving a Bronte or Hemingway adapter with it measures the arm under a
system prompt it was never trained on and confounds the carrier change with a
prompt change. Rather than duplicate the register table and rely on whoever runs
it to pick the matching one, read the prompt out of the pair build's own
provenance, which is the artefact that records what the adapter actually saw.
Records the reproducible chain and, more usefully, why it diverges from the
Yarros/Hemingway pipeline in five places, each forced by a measurement rather
than a preference.
Includes the control post-mortem, which is worth keeping because in three of
four cases the CONTROL was wrong and the detector was right — the opposite of
the reflex. Adele vs Adele-with-a-grave, Hollow at a 0.235 lowercase ratio, and
Grace at 0.224 were all correct refusals. Blanche, at 0.0526 against a 0.05 bar,
was the one real detector miss.
A leak the corpus gate structurally cannot see, found on lv-bronte.
The rename strips the author's names from the prose and leak_gate.py proves
they are gone — 0 of 365 surviving on Brontë, both controls green. But the beat
is written by an LLM that READ THE PASSAGE, and if it recognises the book it
supplies the canonical names out of its own training. The beat is the
INSTRUCTION half of the pair, so training on it re-teaches exactly the
inventions the rename pipeline exists to remove, and the gate never looks at it:
the gate reads the corpus and the renamed copies, never the generated beats.
MEASURED on the first 714 Brontë pairs, before the filter existed:
13 beats (1.8%) named source characters — Rochester x6, Jane x3,
Brocklehurst x2, Beck, Fairfax, Helen, Burns, Eyre, Reed, Rivers
0 of 714 RESPONSES did. The rename was perfect; the instruction side was not.
One beat read "Saoirse confirms Rochester's flaws, then agrees in English to
marry him" — a renamed name and a canonical one in the same sentence, which is
the mechanism in miniature.
Exposure scales with how well the generator knows the book, so it is WORST for
public-domain classics and mildest for recent work. That is exactly why the
Yarros and Hemingway runs came up clean and Brontë did not — their clean runs
are NOT evidence this cannot happen to them, and both should be rebuilt with
--source-entities if they are ever regenerated.
Adds a `sourcename` reject to vet() plus --source-entities, which takes the
UNRENAMED entity map and refuses any beat naming a surface from it. Firing at
roughly 3% of attempts on Brontë.
Also adds a `bronte` register. Brontë is the far end of the same axis from
Hemingway and the register has to say so, or the beat-writer produces modern
summary prose the passages never match.
The Brontë corpus's "0 of 203" was a HAND COUNT made before leak_gate.py
existed. On Yarros the automated instrument read 212 surviving where a hand
count said 86, so the hand count was never evidence. This runs the real gate,
and getting it to pass required fixing four defects the hand count could not
have seen.
CORPUS DEFECTS (repair_corpus_bronte.py, both measured):
- 1,922 words of publisher back matter inside Shirley's last unit — a
T. Nelson & Sons catalogue advertising Ainsworth, Marryat, Verne, Kingsley
and Dickens, plus a Gutenberg transcriber's punctuation list. Not Brontë,
and the source of the entity CHARLES. Same structural cause as the
Hemingway run: a splitter cuts on headings, nothing follows the final one.
- 1,368 Gutenberg italic spans. Two harms: they teach the adapter to emit
underscores, and the underscore is a word character, so the gate's
word-boundary scan cannot match inside an italicised name. An entity in
italics is invisible to the gate — the same never-renamed-AND-never-
reported shape as Yarros's possessive-only Afendra.
DETECTOR GAPS (phrase_map_bronte.json):
- Blanche is 19 capitalised against ONE lowercase — ratio 0.0526, over the
0.05 bar by a single token, so a named character with 19 mentions is
dropped by a hair.
- Grace (0.224) and Hollow (0.235) are refused correctly — both are common
nouns — but Grace Poole and Hollow's Mill are Brontë's. Sampling all 21
bare capitalised Grace found 20 are the character in direct address and
exactly one is the theological noun.
- Five compounds whose every component is non-renameable survive verbatim:
Moor House, Marsh End, Vale Hall, Bigben Close, Royd Lane. The other 77
audited phrases do not, because each has a renameable component.
GENDER (pin_known_gender.py): the inherited resolver put Jane MALE across 336
occurrences. Hemingway's base-rate resolver is strictly better here (1 wrong vs
4) but still fails on Jane, and the failure is structural, not tuning — Brontë's
three narrators are first-person, so their names appear almost only in dialogue
surrounded by other characters' pronouns. Ground truth is pinned separately from
the resolver's evaluation so the two are never conflated.
Also: min-cap lowered 8 to 3, which pulled Bertha, Ferndean, Rochesters and
Creemsvort in from below the old floor; corpus-scope rename so a name below
threshold in one novel is not printed verbatim there while renamed in another.
Gate: 0 of 365 surviving, positive control 365/365, negative control clean,
phrase audit 0 of 82. Floor stated: 3 capitals per work, 5 recurrences.
Adds playbooks/update-stack-image.yaml — pull the newest image for one
compose stack service and recreate it, with a verify phase that asserts
the container's image id equals what the tag now resolves to rather than
trusting a 'Up' line from docker ps.
Scoped to a single service on purpose: the recreate is 'up -d <service>',
never a bare 'up -d', which would recreate every service in the project.
Go template format strings are written bare; elway's {{ identifier }}
substitution leaves them alone, but {{end}} / {{else}} would match and
die as undefined variables, so the health read uses {{json .State.Health}}
instead of an if/else.
First use: drawio on esh-docker-vm, 28.1.2 -> 31.4.6.
vh
Vuong Hoang