Commit Graph
14 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
Vuong Hoang e8eb1594d9 docs(lv-mccarthy): five-arm ladder -- ckpt300 wins every axis, held at the gate by 0.02
1,200 generations across five arms. ckpt300 (epoch 0.652) is the best arm in the
run on every axis that resolves:

  VOICE          +0.177 at 3.2x its pairwise floor (primary), +0.128 at 2.8x with
                 every punctuation mark stripped. Best point estimate AND best
                 margin of any arm, spread 0.055/0.038 with no outlier seed.
  MEMORISATION   0.12 against real unseen McCarthy's own 0.12 -- identical -- with
                 a longest match of 10 words against the author's coincidental 12.
                 All 31 matches read: stock grammar, names are the renamed
                 inventions, nothing protectable.
  DAMAGE         ran-on +0.12. Clears the operator's ratified v2 floor of 0.200 by
                 40%. FAILS AMENDMENT 3's self-imposed 0.100 bar by 0.02.

NOT SHIPPED, and the reason is the bar rather than the adapter. AMENDMENT 3 fixed
ran-on <= 0.100 before either new arm existed, precisely so a marginal number could
not be talked into a ship, and shipping at 0.12 would make that pre-registration
theatre. But the bar's stated rationale was written against ckpt450's pass by 0.01
-- 5% of the threshold -- and ckpt300 clears by 40%. The number excludes a candidate
the reasoning does not. That is an operator call.

ckpt325/350/375 are on disk and one may sit under 0.100. They were deliberately NOT
gated: searching the checkpoint space until something clears is candidate-shopping,
the same family as threshold-shopping approached from the other side.

THREE CLAIMS FROM EARLIER THIS SESSION ARE REFUTED and are corrected in the record:

  1. "The damage is flat across epochs and only rotates direction" -- FALSE. ran-on
     is non-monotonic (0.38 -> 0.13 -> 0.20 -> 0.28 across epochs 0.49/0.65/0.98/
     1.96) with a real minimum near 0.65, and ckpt225 is 48% out-of-band against
     ckpt300's 35%.
  2. "ckpt300 runs far too short, ckpt225 will clear ran-on by being short" -- FALSE
     on both. ckpt225 runs LONG (median 127, 38% over-band) and is the worst arm in
     the run. I generalised from SIX generations of one arm, which is the exact n=1
     violation the measurement-discipline rule names, committed in the same breath
     as a note about being careful.
  3. The original "gate an earlier checkpoint, the overshoot may not have arrived
     yet" recommendation was RIGHT. Retracting it an hour later on a three-arm read
     was the error, not the recommendation.

What is true and unresolved by any checkpoint choice: 35% of ckpt300's generations
miss the 90-140 band against base's 11%, and in-band is 0.65 against 0.89. An
adapter that buys a voice and costs a third of the length compliance is a trade, not
a defect -- but it is the operator's trade to accept.

Raw artifacts for all five arms at scripts/mccarthy-corpus/gate-results/.
2026-09-21 17:53:43 -07:00
Vuong Hoang 3de4d2dfaf docs(lv-mccarthy): note the undershoot hole in AMENDMENT 3's bar without editing the bar
Six generations into ckpt300 its outputs are far too SHORT -- 6, 25, 46, 59 words
against a 90-140 ask. At epoch 0.65 the adapter may not have learned the length
target yet.

That exposes a hole in the bar I set an hour ago: ran-on is defined as words > 140,
so a chronically undershooting arm satisfies "ran-on <= 0.100" trivially while
being useless. Same class as the unsatisfiable criterion AMENDMENT 3 exists to
correct, inverted -- too easy rather than impossible.

The bar is NOT being edited again. Three rule-motions in one session is already too
many and a bar patched once per observation is not a bar. Instead the judgment is
stated in the open: a candidate that clears the ran-on term by being short has
cleared it vacuously and will not be shipped, and the full in-band / on-beat /
median / p90 table is reported for every arm so a reader can see which kind of pass
they are looking at.

Gate design for this corpus is evidently not settled. That is an operator call, and
the complete five-arm ladder is being measured so it can be made once rather than
iteratively.
2026-09-21 16:37:25 -07:00
Vuong Hoang 43a8d7409e fix(lv-mccarthy): the axis C I froze is UNSATISFIABLE, so it never adjudicated anything
Arithmetic, not a re-reading of results. Criterion 1 needs the candidate's in-band
rate to beat base's 0.89 by more than the 0.200 floor -- so it needs in_band >
1.09, and a rate cannot exceed 1. A PERFECT adapter, every one of 240 generations
inside the 90-140 band, scores +0.11 and fails by 0.09.

So "both candidates failed axis C" carries zero information about either candidate.
That verdict was determined before a single generation existed. It is my error.

The cause is specific: section 6 transcribed score_beats.py's v1 criteria, which the
operator AMENDED on 2026-09-15 -- three weeks before this corpus was built -- for
exactly this reason. Its own docstring: "NOT carried into v2: in-band (unresolvable
-- base maxes it) and on-beat."

The governing rule reverts to the operator's v2: axis C is ran-on only. That is the
rule they ratified and the rule lv-hemingway shipped under. Reverting a
transcription error to its source is not threshold-shopping; the source is older
than the data.

It does not rescue ckpt450 either. Under the corrected axis C its ran-on is +0.19
against a 0.200 floor -- a pass by 0.01, inside the noise the floor exists to
describe, and not a pass worth shipping on an author in copyright with a living
estate.

AMENDMENT 3 therefore gates two more arms on the SAME frozen fixture, seeds and
rule -- ckpt300 (epoch 0.65) and ckpt225 (epoch 0.49), both on disk because
--save-total-limit 60 kept all 56 checkpoints -- since the damage grows
monotonically with epoch and the voice may arrive before it does.

And it sets the ship bar BEFORE those arms exist: voice clearing the pairwise floor
on both reads, memorisation at or near the held-out author's 0.12 with every match
read, and ran-on delta AT MOST 0.100 -- half the measured floor, not merely inside
it, because a rate that clears a noise threshold by 5% of that threshold has not
been shown to clear it. If nothing clears all three, lv-mccarthy is parked pending
a retrain, and that is the report rather than a softer bar.
2026-09-21 16:34:01 -07:00
Vuong Hoang 4c3f3896f1 docs(lv-mccarthy): record the gate result -- voice passes, memorisation is the cleanest in the line, NOT shipped
720 generations, 3 arms x 60 held-out beats x 4 seeds, against the design frozen
in GATE-PREREG.md before any arm existed.

AXIS A VOICE -- PASS, both candidates, both reads. Span 0.661 -> 0.370 = 0.291
achievable; ckpt900 closed 59.1% (+0.172, but only 1.2x its floor), ckpt450 52.2%
(+0.152 at 2.9x). The normalised secondary read HOLDS at +0.124 / +0.114, so about
three quarters of the gain survives stripping every punctuation mark -- the voice
is not the cheap win the register made available.

AXIS B NOT COPIED -- ckpt450 is the cleanest result in the line. 0.12 hit-rate
against the author's own held-out 0.12, and its longest match (11 words) is
SHORTER than the author's coincidental longest (12). All 96 matched runs were
read: stock grammar in the commonest words, the name-shaped hits are the RENAMED
inventions, nothing protectable. The amendment is why this reads as clean -- the
defective base control would have shown 0.12 vs 0.00 as a 12x red flag.
Separately measured: the "his register makes collisions inevitable" story that
was FALSE for Hemingway (0.01) is TRUE for McCarthy (0.12). Neither transfers.

AXIS C NO DAMAGE -- FAIL, both, and it survives reading. 20% (ckpt450) / 28%
(ckpt900) of generations overshoot the 90-140 band against base's 1%; p90 171/190
words, max 297/279. The worst case is degenerate looping, not a long McCarthy
sentence. Base is GOOD on this axis here (0.89 in-band vs Hemingway's 0.05), so
the adapter measurably makes instruction-following worse.

NOT SHIPPED. Section 7 rule 3 makes axis C disqualifying outright.

Recorded honestly: my own prereg's axis C transcribed score_beats.py's v1
criteria, including "in-band up on base", which the operator RETIRED on
2026-09-15 for exactly the reason it fails here -- base maxes it, so it is
unsatisfiable on this corpus regardless of adapter quality. Under the operator's
v2 (ran-on only) ckpt450 passes by 0.01 against a 0.200 floor. That reading was
found AFTER the numbers and was NOT used; lv-bronte's floor defect is the in-line
precedent for finding one and declining to exploit it. The prereg gets fixed
prospectively for the next author, not re-read for this one.

And the finding worth more than the adapter: the two-epoch recipe is now 0 for 3,
and this time the loss curve was CONFIDENTLY wrong. On Bronte and Hemingway the
epoch-1/epoch-2 checkpoints were tied, so preferring the earlier one cost nothing.
Here the curve resolved epoch 2 as better at 4.9x the median neighbour jitter --
and epoch 2 lost every axis that resolves: 4.0x wider seed spread, 1.8x the
author's memorisation rate against 1.0x, more ran-on, worse on-beat. Its only win
is a 0.019 voice point estimate, inside the floor, and its spread is one outlier
seed -- the third occurrence of that shape in the later checkpoint after
lv-bronte's ckpt925 and lv-hemingway's ckpt1750.

Raw artifacts committed at scripts/mccarthy-corpus/gate-results/ so the claims can
be re-read without gx10.
2026-09-21 16:31:41 -07:00
Vuong Hoang 0d80e493a8 fix(r49): the quote-mark counter was counting apostrophes, and I saw it fire before I saw the bug
voice_distance.py's quote class shipped this morning as "'‘’“”«»‹›‚„` -- with the
apostrophe characters in it. On a corpus whose defining tic is dont/aint/wont and
whose possessives are everywhere, that made it an apostrophe counter wearing a
quote-mark label.

                          as implemented    TRUE quotes    all apostrophes
  held-out McCarthy ref            121.1            0.0              121.1
  base-unadapted                   224.7           19.9              204.8
  held-out Hemingway ref          1112.6          694.7              351.7

The corrected column is the one the pre-registration names: 0.0 for McCarthy,
which is exactly what build_corpus_mccarthy.py ASSERTS, and 694.7 for Hemingway,
the documented ~838 scale the 100-per-10k trigger line was anchored to. The
as-implemented column matched neither.

ORDER OF EVENTS, because it is the material fact: the base arm finished first, so
the trigger became evaluable while the adapted arms were still generating. I
evaluated it, saw it FIRE at 224.7, and only then -- reading the reference row of
my own table against a corpus I knew asserts 0.0 -- found the bug. No delta_cb,
memorisation rate or damage number had been read at any point.

Fixing a detector to measure the quantity the frozen rule names is not moving the
rule, but the fix un-fires the trigger and no reader should have to take my word
about my motives. So GATE-PREREG.md AMENDMENT 2 makes the trigger MOOT instead of
adjudicating it: the normalised secondary read is load-bearing UNCONDITIONALLY for
this gate, whichever reading you accept, both columns reported. The fix therefore
has no effect on the verdict.

There is a better reason than the bug anyway: base's true quote density is 19.9
against the reference's 0.0, so it did not fully comply. A small residual cheap win
IS available to the adapter, and the normalised read is what prices it. A threshold
is a blunt instrument for a residual that size.

Apostrophes now get their own column and are never folded into quotes again.
Default path stays byte-identical to the shipped lv-hemingway artifact.

The durable lesson is the one this line keeps relearning in new places: I controlled
strip_punct (2500 -> 0) and the byte-identity of the default path, but never asked
the quote counter for a value whose answer I already knew. The corpus asserts 0.0.
That check cost one line and was available before the gate ever launched.
2026-09-21 15:19:33 -07:00
Vuong Hoang 31e40d8ffa docs(lv-mccarthy): extend the runbook through D5 train and D6 gate
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.
2026-09-21 14:45:02 -07:00
Vuong Hoang b4ba731b26 fix(r49): commit the held-out-author memorisation control, and amend the mccarthy prereg to use it
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.
2026-09-21 14:42:24 -07:00
Vuong Hoang 9c8a4e959c feat(lv-mccarthy): pre-register the v2 gate before any arm is generated
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.
2026-09-21 14:39:10 -07:00
vh d94b5a1934 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.
2026-09-17 22:38:13 -07:00
vh c55966433f fix(lv-mccarthy): the leak gate passed with five protagonist names still in every copy
`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.
2026-09-17 11:37:33 -07:00
vh 5ddb0472e4 lv-mccarthy D3 on gx10: leak gate PASSED, and the val split is now bigger than Hemingway's
~/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.
2026-09-17 08:59:00 -07:00
vh 5aa10bf138 lv-mccarthy D2: entity map + stoplist, both audits green — and audit_stoplist was scanning its own rationale
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.
2026-09-17 08:43:46 -07:00
vh 0fa68cb465 lv-mccarthy D1 fix: three small-caps defects the entity map caught, and one I nearly added
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.
2026-09-17 08:40:31 -07:00
vh f3bf3ca89c lv-mccarthy D1: 167 units, 584,756 words, and a style that looks exactly like damage
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.
2026-09-17 08:17:57 -07:00