The runbook stopped at D4 pairs, so the two stages that actually produce the
shippable artifact were unrecorded -- the same gap that forced the 2026-09-17
D1->D3 chain to be recovered by rebuilding candidates and matching sha256.
D5 records the 1,380-step run, the loss curve read (median neighbour jitter
0.00393; ckpt900 the minimum, ckpt450 at +4.9x, adapter/ at +18.4x), the fact
that the epoch-3 collapse STEPS rather than drifts, and that adapter/ is the
epoch-3 weights so whatever ships is a checkpoint.
It also records the four provenance fields that look wrong and are not -- all
four reproduce on the yarros and hemingway runs -- and how to bind the run to
its pairs by RECORD COUNT rather than by the relative path it stored.
D6 records the gate invocation, the four deviations from the lv-hemingway gate
and what forced each, and the two instrument questions that had to be settled
before it could run: the punctuation confound on the voice axis (primary /
secondary / pre-registered trigger) and the defective base-unadapted control on
the memorisation axis.
Plus one thing that will otherwise be misread: gen_beats_chat_yarros.py prints
RAN-ON when it finds no paragraph break, a heuristic written for the Yarros
register. McCarthy's register asks for continuous scene prose, so an unbroken
block is the TARGET here and the tag fires on most generations without meaning
damage. The axis-C metric is a different definition and is unaffected.
The lv-hemingway gate established that memorization_check.py's negative control is
defective: base-unadapted writes SUMMARY while the adapted arms write PASTICHE, and
text that does not imitate a register cannot collide with that register's n-grams.
Base's 0.00 partly measures "different register", not "did not memorise". A negative
control that differs from the candidate in a way correlated with the metric is not a
control.
The correct innocent sample is the author himself -- held-out text no arm trained on,
in the same register by construction. That control was computed BY HAND during the
lv-hemingway gate and never committed, so the finding it produced was not
reproducible. This commits it as --heldout-reference, with --train-only to build the
n-gram set from split=="train" records only (the default includes val, so a collision
with held-out text was being counted as memorisation of training text -- an overcount
Bronte's and Hemingway's numbers both carry).
--heldout-reference without --train-only REFUSES, because the held-out text would be
scored against a gram set containing itself.
Instrument controls:
- default path reproduces the shipped lv-hemingway memorization.txt BYTE FOR BYTE
- the new held-out row reproduces the lv-hemingway record's hand-computed numbers
to the digit: 370 samples, hit-rate 0.01, mean-longest 0.1, max 10, at the same
101-word median chunk length -- an independently written instrument reproducing a
documented finding is what makes its zeroes mean absent rather than blind
GATE-PREREG.md AMENDMENT 1 adopts it for lv-mccarthy, appended rather than folded in
so the order of events stays legible. Written while the base arm was still generating
and before any McCarthy number had been read. It moves the reference a candidate is
compared against from a known-broken one to a known-correct one, in the direction
that makes the axis HARDER to pass, on an argument published four days before this
gate existed. Section 7's tiebreak is amended to match, and the amendment records
that an elevated rate is not by itself a no-ship -- rate and exposure are different
questions, every matched run gets READ, and McCarthy being in copyright with a living
estate makes a distinctive match disqualifying in a way a rate number alone is not.
Freezes the lv-mccarthy gate design while no McCarthy generation exists, per the
lv-hemingway precedent: a threshold chosen after seeing the numbers is not a
threshold. Three arms (base-unadapted, ckpt900, ckpt450), 60 beats, 4 seeds.
Settles the voice-axis question D1 deferred. McCarthy's corpus measures 0.0 quote
marks per 10k against Hemingway's 838, so "emit no quotation marks" is the cheapest
way to move a char-bigram Delta without learning a sentence. Three parts:
PRIMARY unchanged -- the mccarthy register names the punctuation and
--system-from drives the base control with the same prompt, so the
cheap win is handed to both sides.
SECONDARY voice_distance.py --secondary-normalised re-runs the whole analysis
with punctuation stripped from the reference and every arm. A
conservative lower bound; reported, never the verdict.
TRIGGER voice_distance.py --punct-report evaluates a pre-registered line --
base-unadapted quote density above 100 per 10k means the control did
not take the win it was handed, and the normalised read is promoted
to load-bearing. 100 is the order-of-magnitude line between this
corpus's 0.0 and Hemingway's 838, chosen now rather than after the
table prints.
ckpt450 is NOT tied with the minimum (+4.9x the 0.00393 median neighbour jitter)
and the pre-registration says so. It is generated to test a stated prior and to
price the memorisation headroom an earlier checkpoint buys on an in-copyright
author, with a decision rule that says exactly what result would let it displace
ckpt900.
Instrument controls, run before this landed:
- the voice_distance.py refactor reproduces the shipped lv-hemingway
voice_distance.txt BYTE FOR BYTE on the default path
- strip_punct drops a quote-bearing sample from 2500.0 to 0.0 marks per 10k
- the secondary read still resolves a gap on the Hemingway arms (+0.410 at
7.3x floor), so a null on McCarthy would be a finding, not a blind detector
Pre-flight re-run at gate time rather than quoted from 2026-09-17:
- leak gate: 0 of 75 renameable, 0 of 37 sub-threshold, 0 separator-split,
four controls green
- beat-contamination audit: 0 of 3942 beats AND 0 of 3942 responses, against
Hemingway's 70 of 7094 -- build_sft_pairs.py --source-entities earned its
mandatory flag
Also records three provenance defects found on first read of the run and their
disposition: the hardcoded "r49-babyyarros-pairs-pilot" run label (cosmetic, same
literal on all three runs), the empty harness_commit (all three runs), and a
pairs_sha256_16 that is not a sha256sum of the file (consistent across runs, so a
cache key rather than a fault). The run is bound to McCarthy's pairs by record
count, not by the label.
Vuong Hoang