Prep for the BabyBronte / brokkr-smithy R49 author-voice adapter regime, plus
the operator's "keep the adapter" ruling made durable.
Measured on pfi-gx10 (GB10, sm_121), n=10 per arm after 3 warmup steps, seq
4096, LoRA r=32 on q/k/v/o + MLP, bf16, sdpa, grad-checkpointing on:
Qwen3-0.6B-Base dense 0.616 B 1.707 s/step 2,399 tok/s
Qwen3-1.7B-Base dense 1.755 B 2.895 s/step 1,415 tok/s
Qwen3.5-0.8B-Base hybrid 0.765 B 7.581 s/step 540 tok/s
The dense 1.755 B carrier trains 2.6x faster than the hybrid 0.765 B one on 2.3x
the parameters (~6x per parameter), with more LoRA modules adapted (196 vs 96).
Spreads of 0.6-2.6% put instrument noise an order of magnitude below the effect.
Cause: Qwen3.5 is 18 linear-attention (SSM) layers to 6 attention, and no fused
linear-attention kernel is installed on the box. Grad checkpointing is not the
culprit (19%, and saves 2.6x memory). Batching is not the lever for either
family -- both sit at this box's roofline at batch 1.
Projected per voice on a Brontë-scale corpus: dense 0.6B 2.7 h, dense 1.7B
4.6 h, hybrid 0.8B 12 h. The hybrid would take longer than the 7 h 26B-A4B tune
the regime exists to replace, so the carrier family is now an open decision with
a recommendation for the dense Qwen3 line -- the design doc's original pin.
Two further Qwen3.5 findings, both measured rather than read off the config: the
Base checkpoints ship a vision tower (153/297 model.visual.* Linear tensors that
target_modules="all-linear" would train on text) and an MTP head, both dropped
for free by loading through AutoModelForCausalLM -- which renames modules
relative to the vLLM serving path, so adapter binding needs the
sampled-target-changed check on the serving side; and cross-document packing is
unsafe because SSM state ignores the attention mask, breaking the per-copy
name-consistency invariant the design doc calls sacred. Neither exists on dense.
Adapter disposition, per the operator's ruling: all five gx10-resident ERP
adapters (run-03c/04/05/06/07) mirrored to ana-ml2:/tank/erp-tune/run-<N>/adapter
matching the layout runs 01-03 already used, byte-totals identical both sides and
sha256 matching on every adapter_model.safetensors. /tank/* is deliberately
excluded from ana-ml2's restic sources, so the profile gains one documented
carve-out for /tank/erp-tune/run-*/adapter, verified by resticprofile --dry-run
to expand to exactly those eight paths.
Nothing is training and nothing is queued.
- gx10:8098 erp-tune-v7 stopped 17:42; ana-ml2:8021 trial NVFP4 seat stopped 17:43
(infra-ops' call — the same adapter was on the SHARED-KEY gateway ~15:30-17:43
under the operator's pre-gate instruction; surfaced to him as reversible)
- probe NOT re-run, flagged generations NOT opened, length verdict left UNSET
- every artifact preserved; disposition is the operator's
- non-safety results recorded but explicitly NOT certified (primary flat +2,
diversity reduced, coherence 1.0 -> 0.875, control valid at 1.0)
Config-file deployment (the trial model lives in config.yaml, so /model/update refuses it):
block rewritten to run-6 reality — abliterated base, NVFP4A16 artifact, stacks/erp-seat,
no gate on this artifact by operator ruling, same-site hop. Deployed to ana-docker and the
gateway restarted; trial -> erp-tune-v6-nvfp4a16 verified end to end (3/3).
Operator-directed question (via brokkr): which weights at
/home/infra-ops/models/gemma4-26b-a4b-it-bf16 — stock or the heretic abliteration?
Answer from bytes: STOCK google/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it, byte-for-byte. Three-way match:
local shard sha256 (1127684971/aab47033) == HF download etags == stock repo LFS
oids, and download commit 4d7ae498 == stock HEAD. The recipes' -heretic-bf16 label
is a naming error (run-04 provenance was right; refusal telemetry confirmed). All
of runs 3/3c/4/5 trained from stock. Plausible cause: the selected llmfan46 26B-A4B
Heretic abliteration ships GGUF-only, so the bf16 safetensors pulled was stock.
Operator decision post-RESCUED verdict: point the LiteLLM trial alias at the
run-5 tuned seat (erp-tune-v5 on gx10:8098) for hand-testing prosody/feel in
Open WebUI. Rewrote the trial config block to run-5 reality, including the
now-MEASURED refusal-erosion note (k=25 both arms, de-gated + stated) replacing
the run-3c 'safety axes unmeasured' warning. Verified end-to-end: trial ->
erp-tune-v5 returns coherent output through the gateway. Container restarted to
re-read the bind-mounted config (up -d alone is a no-op for a config-only change).
First arm of the ERP-seat line where the capability gate did not fail. The
dependency-forcing slot (GovReport+QMSum, 3.46% of loss) broke the
diversity<->coherence coupling run 4 (STILL-COUPLED) and 3c (20x LR cut) could
not — structure of the loss was the lever, not its mass; INERT did not fire.
T4 8/8 (run 4: 5/8), t4_dissect noise 0.9062 vs run-3 0.5625, diversity held.
Reported-beside: T3 8->6 (new loss), RP-length partial fail, refusal erosion
(de-gated/stated), free-check base 5-6pp below run 4 (vLLM 0.28.0 unchanged).
Seat erp-tune-v5 served on gx10:8098 pending the operator's seat/ear decision.
Run 5 = the dependency-forcing corpus arm: airoboros-3.2 OUT of the 20% slot,
govreport/clean-v1 (496) + qmsum/clean-v1 (97) IN, at run 4's lr 2e-04 with
everything else held. kvasir byte-identical (survivors-r5 = survivors-r4 minus
airoboros plus the two new roots whole). Operator authorized the launch to
infra-ops directly; grant operator-2026-09-07-rnd-run5.
Canonical copies of the config, launcher and survivors builder; runbook
docs/runbooks/gx10-run-05.md. Launch gates all passed (7/7 root shas + shard
hashes, survivor join 8,212 = recipe, holdout disjoint, window_count==1 on all
593 slot rows, realized [mix] slot loss 3.46% vs preregistered 3.4%). 524 steps.
persistent-memory current-state updated: run 5 LAUNCHED + training.
Changes the risk profile of the pending ledger-dev -> svos-dev rename, so it
belongs in memory rather than only in the thread: retire is the correct verb
(delete refuses any handle carrying mail) and it can be undone by declaring the
name again.
Also records that both deploy findings landed in althing's own INSTALL.md,
where they sit beside the journal_mode=WAL setting that causes them rather than
in a procedure doc that only describes working around it.
The tools had been on 3.6.0 while the container sat on 3.0.0 for seven days, so
the operator verbs failed with "no tool named delete_handle" — they live in the
post office, not the client.
Image built on nh3-dev from a clean tree at 4d26226 and pushed under the
claude-bot namespace; the compose pin moves to the new digest rather than
floating on the tag, since this container is the fleet's whole message bus.
The backup procedure this file documents earned itself again: at stop time the
database was 23.8 MB with a 5.9 MB WAL beside it, so a plain copy would have
produced a database that opens cleanly, smokes green, and is missing the day's
mail. Stop, explicit checkpoint to a zero-byte WAL, copy, then verify counts on
both sides — 76 handles, 995 messages, 1022 recipients, integrity ok.
Post-deploy the same counts came back with handles.retired_at present, and the
memory cap and OOM guard were confirmed by `docker inspect` rather than by
reading the yaml, which is what that file asks for and the only check that can
tell a working cap from a decorative one.
Bus down about four minutes.
Records the fifo-relay fix and — more usefully — the two shapes that were tried
and rejected, so the next person does not re-derive them: a pipeline breaks cwd
persistence because every stage runs in a subshell, and a plain file is
invisible until the command ends. The absent `wait` is deliberate and is pinned
by a test, because it looks exactly like an oversight.
Corrects this file's own claim that infra-ops is sudo-less on nh3-extdev. It is
not: `sudo -n whoami` returns root. The wrong row would send a session looking
for a privilege path it already has.
Also flags that the althing tools are at 3.6.0 while the post office container
is still on 3.0.0, so the new handle verbs cannot work yet.
Found by using the tool for real work rather than by smoke-testing it. A bare
`sudo -n whoami` through ssh_run returns `running` with no output and wedges the
session permanently; the same command piped through `cat` returns everything.
Reproduced on both macOS and Debian, so it is the harness rather than a platform
quirk, and it matters because infra work is sudo work.
The workaround goes in CLAUDE.md where a session will actually hit it. The
proper fix is a protocol change — run the command through a pipe and read
PIPESTATUS — and is deliberately not attempted here.
Also records where the dsh work stopped: the package is updated but the running
web process is still on the old code, left alive on purpose because there is no
LaunchAgent to restart it into.
Records the operator's ruling that esh-macbook-air is regenerable surface and is
not to be backed up, so a future session finds a settled decision rather than
re-discovering an unbacked-up machine and re-raising it.
Also records the real blocker on the MCP server, found by trying to use it: it
addresses hosts only by exact ssh_config alias, and 15 of the 28 hosts in
servers/ have no alias at all. The allowlist is not what limits coverage, so
widening it would not have helped.
Records what the fork now contains and, more usefully, the two things that will
waste a future session's time: .mcp.json points at built output so an unbuilt
edit serves stale code, and a finite stdin pipe kills the server mid-handshake
while reporting what looks exactly like a remote-side SSH fault.
Also records the disproven hypothesis — irv-ml1's zsh login shell was not the
cause, because the server invokes bash explicitly — so nobody re-derives it.
Step 8 executed on the operator's direct authorization with preconditions
checked before firing and the post-state read back rather than inferred. The
rollback window is closed and the arc is finished except the handle rename.
Records the remote-ssh-mcp fork and, more usefully, why it was chosen over the
far more popular alternative: it never handles key material, delegating to the
system OpenSSH client, and its dependency surface is two packages. Also records
that its denylist is four bypassable regexes and must not be counted as
security — the host allowlist is the real boundary — plus the two things to
settle before the tool is used in anger.
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