Commit Graph
100 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
vh f6f2f69649 fix(homepage): uniform 4-column grid, hold the status gutter, unleak AI Systems
The board's card width changed at every group boundary because `columns:` was
being tuned per group under the 2026-08-18 "columns = member count" rule. That
rule is retired: it sets `lg:grid-cols-N` for one group, so it fixes that
group's CARD WIDTH, not its density. Measured on the live board, Notes rendered
a single 1464px card, News and Media 728px, Eval & Retrieval 286px, everything
else 360px. All 20 groups are now `columns: 4` and every card renders at 360.

`.service-name` reserved a 78px status gutter with `padding-right` and relied
on `overflow: hidden` to hold it, but overflow clips at the PADDING box — the
gutter was spill room the title printed straight through. Six cards on the AI
tab rendered their name underneath their own status pill, measured by testing
the title text node's box against the status cluster's. The intended ellipsis
never fired either: it is painted by whichever block's own line overflows, and
that is the anonymous box around the bare title text node, which does not carry
`overflow`. The gutter holds by wrapping now, and the description opts back out
of it with a negative margin since the pill only ever covers the first line.

Scriberr's `homepage.group=AI Systems` named a group absent from `layout:`, so
it had no `tab:` and rendered on all four tabs — the same defect as UltraSeedbox
in 2026-08-18, arriving this time from a container label. Relabelled to
`AI - Audio Tools`, where the other ASR seats already live. The
`homepage.group=AI Systems` sample in the repo-root CLAUDE.md was the source of
the name and now carries the constraint, plus the fact that a labelled
container is discovered from any of the five configured engines and must not
also be listed in services.yaml.

Also: descriptions clamped to three lines so a five-line outlier stops dragging
its row 50px taller than its neighbours; icon ramp overridden off slate-400 ->
slate-700, which was sinking the bottom half of every glyph into the card fill;
bookmark groups and Jellyfin's trailing stream rows brought into the card and
eyebrow vocabulary; group gap 10px -> 22px now that width no longer separates
them.

The icon override sits on `html[class]`, not `:root`: Homepage sets the same
variables on `.theme-slate`, which is on the <html> element, and a class beats
`:root` on the same element.

Verified with Playwright against the live board — per-group card width, card
height spread, and a geometric title-vs-status collision check, before and
after. Before/after captures: http://10.100.10.50:8090/b/homepage-relayout/
2026-08-24 08:15:02 -07:00
vh 32349b7653 memory: snapshot — Anaheim tunnels on AES-128, ana-gw admin closed, Scriberr live, ESH DNS fixed
Rewrites the in-flight section, which had gone stale in one place
(speaches is stopped, not live) and did not reflect a session in which
everything opened was also closed. Three detail files carry the bulk:
the FortiGate's public surface reduced to nothing including the ACME
listener, Scriberr's deployment and the three upstream defects it
required working around, and the ESH DNS repair that also made the
IPv6 naming scheme real on three hosts.

The tunnel entry in the decisions log described a cipher change as
proposed and pending; it has since been attempted, found impossible in
the form intended, and resolved differently, so the line now points at
the outcome rather than the intention.

New decisions cover the cipher adoption and the finding that the
per-flow ceiling belongs to the UniFi gateway's software cipher rather
than the firewall, the administrative closure, the transcription
deployment, the DNS repair, the retirement of an ASR service whose
only consumer was abandoned, and a database VM that until now had no
fleet identity and no vaulted credential at all.

Three approaches are recorded as abandoned: an AEAD cipher the far end
cannot express, an upstream DNS setting the gateway accepts and
ignores, and a scheme to claim unused delegated prefixes that founders
not on the prefixes but on having to rebuild a firewall policy to use
them.
2026-08-24 07:42:30 -07:00
vh d419b11d43 docs(ipv6): close the NH3 multi-prefix question by operator ruling
The gateway has no IP-passthrough mode, confirmed by the operator with
admin access to it, so the inexpensive path of letting the UDM take the
delegation whole and carve it natively is unavailable at this site.

What remains is a separate DHCPv6 client presenting several identities,
which needs recabling to reach the gateway, splits routing so that one
device handles v4 and another v6, and above all moves IPv6 off the
UDM's zone firewall, leaving the entire policy to be rebuilt elsewhere
before any host could safely hold a globally routable address. The
operator has declined it and the LANs stay without v6.

The index entry also still asserted the superseded single-delegation
conclusion as fact; it now carries the corrected reading alongside the
ruling, so the finding and the decision not to act on it arrive
together rather than the first inviting a retry of the second.
2026-08-24 07:05:49 -07:00
vh bd209951ac docs(ipv6): correct the NH3 delegation finding — eight /64s, not one
The note concluded AT&T delegates a single /64 and that reading the
address pattern as a /60 was a mistake. A later finding in the same
session overturned that by reading the BGW's own statistics page, and
that correction was never written down; it survived only in the
transcript and surfaced again while assessing whether more prefixes
could be claimed.

The gateway holds the /60 and rations it, keeping half for itself and
delegating the top eight /64s one at a time. Both observations agree:
a prefix-id only carves within a delegation already held, so the
earlier test could not have moved a lone /64 regardless. The limit is
that UniFi solicits once, which makes the requester the ceiling rather
than the carrier.
2026-08-24 07:02:53 -07:00
vh d127e29fac docs(ipv6): retire the next-candidates line now that all three are done
Replaces it with why the remaining segments have no eligible hosts:
two are appliance-only and three have no IPv6 enabled yet, pending the
firewall-policy pass that SLAAC on a client segment would require.
2026-08-23 22:39:51 -07:00
vh 4e83395ddf docs(ipv6): all three esh-server hosts now carry the segment name
esh-pve-nas and esh-vm-db join esh-docker-vm on 4411:b105, at
:50:55 and :50:60 respectively, each applied by the same prefix-deriving
if-up.d hook so the last two groups read straight off the IPv4 address.

Two obstacles are recorded because both will recur. The Proxmox node had
link-local only despite every relevant sysctl appearing correct, because
its bridge carries per-interface forwarding and the kernel ignores router
advertisements on a forwarding interface unless accept_ra is explicitly
two rather than one. The fix takes the advertised prefix while declining
the default route, so the hypervisor gains an address without any change
to how it routes; this was verified after applying, with the v6 default
route count still at zero.

The database VM refuses key authentication for the privileged accounts
and its unprivileged login cannot escalate without a password, so the
hook went in through the QEMU guest agent from the hypervisor, which
executes as root inside the guest. The document notes the base64
indirection needed to get a multi-line script through intact.
2026-08-23 22:39:39 -07:00
vh ffb7fba346 docs: give the ESH IPv6 naming scheme a home, and make it real on one host
The scheme has existed since August as a single line of persistent
memory, which a snapshot then deleted. It is a naming convention
rather than temporal state, so it now lives in docs/pfi as a proper
document, and the memory entry is reduced to a pointer at it. The
document carries the full table, the address structure, the reasoning
about which slots can and cannot hold a name, and the recipe for
applying one to a host.

It also corrects the conclusion the original note ended on. That note
held that these names could never appear on the wire, which is true
of everything UniFi is able to assign but not of what a host can
assign to itself, and the distinction is the whole difference between
a joke and an address.

AdGuard on esh-docker-vm now holds the esh-server name, at
2607:73c0:402:1d02:4411:b105:50:45, where the segment identity and the
IPv4 address are both legible. It is applied by an if-up.d hook that
derives the prefix at runtime rather than hardcoding it, backgrounds
itself with a retry so it cannot stall interface bring-up, and adds
nothing to the existing interface configuration.

This is load-bearing rather than decorative. The gateway advertises an
IPv6 resolver to clients, macOS prefers it over the IPv4 one, and it
previously pointed at an address derived from that host's MAC.
2026-08-23 22:31:13 -07:00
vh 41091eef8f docs: restore the ESH IPv6 naming scheme, dropped by a snapshot
The six ESH LAN hexspeak names were recorded in fe3d765, refined in
959bb6e and 8be8a51, and then removed without comment by the memory
snapshot in 837fa36. Nothing referenced them afterwards, so the loss
went unnoticed until the operator asked for them tonight and no file
on the machine contained the string.

Recovering it was harder than it should have been, for a reason worth
recording: the table was written in uppercase and git log -S is
case-sensitive, so a history search that would otherwise have found it
immediately came back empty. The entry was eventually located in a
session transcript, which named the commit.

The restored text carries the original verbatim plus two additions. It
is marked as a naming convention rather than temporal state, since
that is what made it eligible for pruning in the first place. And its
conclusion that the names can never appear on the wire is corrected:
the reasoning holds for what UniFi can assign, but a Linux host can
take such an address itself, which was verified on esh-docker-vm along
with a persistence path that leaves the existing interface config and
SLAAC untouched.

The scheme's first practical use is noted against the resolver address
the ESH gateway now advertises, which currently depends on a MAC.
2026-08-23 22:26:39 -07:00
vh 6217d3993e fix(scriberr): force uv to copy rather than reflink when building envs
Scriberr builds each model backend's Python environment with uv at
container start. uv's default link mode reflinks or hardlinks out of
its cache, which fails on this overlayfs over ZFS combination and
reports it as a failure to clone a metadata file with errno 11,
resource temporarily unavailable. The wording points nowhere near the
cause.

The damage was partial and therefore easy to miss: WhisperX and
PyAnnote came up fine and the application served normally, while the
Parakeet and Sortformer backends were quietly absent. Setting
UV_LINK_MODE to copy trades a little disk and build time for
environments that actually materialise, and the occurrence count for
that error is zero on the following start.

The knob is exposed through the environment so it can be moved back to
the default if a future host does support reflinks.
2026-08-23 19:31:54 -07:00
vh efddb4e511 feat(scriberr): stand up transcription on ana-ml2, pinned to GPU1
Scriberr transcribes audio and video locally with WhisperX and
speaker diarization, and it lands on ana-ml2 rather than ana-docker
because the work is GPU-shaped: ana-docker offers eight cores already
shared with fifty containers and thirty-seven gigabytes of disk,
against ninety-six cores, terabytes on /tank and idle capacity on
GPU1. The reservation names device 1 explicitly, since GPU0 is fully
committed to the gen seat, and the container is confirmed to see that
card alone.

The image is built from source, which is not a preference. These are
Blackwell cards at sm_120; the published CUDA image covers Pascal
through Ada only, and the blackwell image the upstream README
documents has never been published at all. The path upstream actually
ships for sm_120 is Dockerfile.cuda.12.9, carrying CUDA 12.9 and cu128
torch, so that is what gets built. The compose header says so, because
the obvious cleanup is to swap in the published image and that would
silently drop the deployment to CPU.

Two configuration details are load-bearing and documented where
someone would go to change them. The application runs as uid 10001
rather than the usual 1000: that Dockerfile moves its user aside for
Ubuntu 24.04's own uid-1000 account and chowns /app accordingly, while
the entrypoint's remapping covers only the data directories, so at
1000 the process cannot open its database and restarts forever behind
a SQLite error that reads as though the machine were out of memory.
Secure cookies stay off while the service is reached over plain HTTP,
or sessions are dropped by the browser and login appears to loop for
no visible reason.

Storage is bind-mounted onto /tank because model weights run to
several gigabytes and the root pool on that host is nearly full.

Also adds the scriberr service alias to internal DNS, following the
existing alias convention so consumers name the service rather than
the box.
2026-08-23 19:28:33 -07:00
vh 22ae9cd480 ops(ana-gw): disable ACME and retract the all-port VIP claim
The ACME client is unbound from wan1, which removes the HTTP-01
challenge listener that had been holding port 80 open irrespective of
allowaccess. An external sweep of fifty-five ports against the WAN
address now finds nothing open at all, while the internal interface
still serves the GUI and SSH and retains its certificate, which
remains valid until late October and simply stops renewing.

The previous note's claim that four virtual IPs were unrestricted
all-port static NATs is withdrawn. A FortiOS virtual IP can be scoped
either by an explicit forwarded port or by a service binding on the
object, and the earlier parse inspected only the former. All four use
the latter, and the custom services behind them are narrow. None of
the fourteen is unrestricted.

Ground truth from outside is recorded in place of further config
reading, listing what each public address actually exposes. Three
configured mappings answer nothing at all and are noted as tidy-up
candidates for the migration rather than as exposure.
2026-08-23 16:02:20 -07:00
vh f39b66d2e1 ops(ana-gw): port 80 on the WAN address is the FortiOS ACME listener
The previous note attributed the open port to an ISP transparent
proxy. That was wrong. It terminates on the FortiGate: system acme is
bound to wan1, and FortiOS opens port 80 there to answer HTTP-01
challenges regardless of what allowaccess permits, which is why the
port stays open with the interface set to ping only. Every
non-challenge request returns a fixed 403 whose body reads ACME Access
Only. No DNAT is involved; of the fourteen virtual IPs only two land
on that address, neither on port 80.

The wrong conclusion came from a sniffer filtered on dst host, which
matches inbound packets alone and so excluded the replies being looked
for. Filtered bidirectionally the box is plainly seen emitting SYN-ACK
on port 80. The note records the rule.

Two consequences follow. The earlier warning that certificate renewal
would fail without http in allowaccess is retracted, since FortiOS
opens the challenge port itself. And the listener is not an
administrative surface, though its value is now marginal with WAN
administration closed, so the note records how to remove it and leaves
that decision open.

Also captured: four virtual IPs are all-port static NAT and map every
port of their external address.
2026-08-23 15:53:55 -07:00
vh 7bc9754e40 ops: adopt AES-128 on both Anaheim tunnels and close public admin
Both tunnels now negotiate AES-128 for ESP, applied make-before-break
so neither dropped waiting on its far end: the FortiGate was widened
to accept the new cipher alongside the old one first, then each UniFi
gateway was flipped. Single-stream throughput moves from 245 to 270
on the NH3 tunnel and from 268 to 304 on the ESH tunnel. Both network
objects were diffed against pre-change snapshots and the only field
that moved on either is the ESP cipher.

The proposal lists are left accepting AES-256 as well. The peers offer
only AES-128 so the extra entries are inert, and retaining them means
a gateway reverting cannot strand a tunnel.

With that up, the WAN administrative surfaces are closed. The
interface is back to permitting only ping, and the infra-ops account
is again restricted to RFC1918 space. Ports 443 and 22 were confirmed
closed from two separate sites and management over the tunnel still
works. The close was issued over the tunnel rather than over the WAN,
since withdrawing SSH from the interface while connected through it
would sever the session mid-command. The box now has no out-of-band
path, which the memory records explicitly.

Also captured: the two UniFi vault items have different shapes, one a
bare key and one a documentation note requiring extraction, which
produces an opaque nginx rejection if missed, and the ESH key's first
confirmed write.
2026-08-23 15:44:32 -07:00
vh 6edebe4864 ops: forwarding through a downstream WireGuard terminator is free
FortiOS has no WireGuard, so any WireGuard site-to-site has to
terminate behind the edge, and ana-wg already fills that role. The
earlier 767 Mbit/s figure was taken with traffic terminating on that
box, which left the forwarding case unmeasured and overstated what a
real deployment would see.

Measured properly, transit from NH3 through the tunnel and onward to
ana-docker returns 763.8 Mbit/s on one stream and 790.4 across eight,
so the forwarding hop costs nothing and the full threefold gain over
IPsec survives. The container uses around a fifth of four cores at
that rate, against the UniFi gateway spending a third of its own four
to move a third as much.

The note records what still needs deciding rather than presenting this
as ready to build: Anaheim hosts have to route to the terminator
directly or pay a hairpin through the edge, which was not measured;
the terminator introduces a failure mode the edge did not have, with a
fallback route as the mitigation; and the NH3 end needs its own
terminator, where a Linux host matches the measured figure while the
existing UniFi WireGuard server would likely land lower.

The test tunnel, its peer and the temporary route were all removed.
2026-08-23 15:25:05 -07:00
vh 062215e81a ops: the tunnel's per-flow limit is the UDM's software AES-CBC
Varying only the cipher settles what inference could not. AES-128 has
ten rounds against AES-256's fourteen, so a software-bound path must
speed up when the cipher gets cheaper while a hardware-offloaded one
will not move. Run as A/B/A on a single stream, AES-256 returns 232,
245 and 243 Mbit/s and AES-128 returns 282 and 275, a gain of about a
fifth at identical CPU. The FortiGate's offload engine is therefore
not the constraint, and the operator's reading of the UniFi side as
software crypto without acceleration is correct.

Two earlier claims of mine were wrong and are corrected in place. The
observation that the UDM sat at seven percent CPU was a sampling
artifact, since UniFi refreshes that statistic on the device report
interval and the windows used were four seconds; a sustained run reads
thirty-five percent, around one and a half of four cores. The
per-session offload hypothesis is refuted rather than merely unproven,
because it predicts no response to a cipher change.

The remaining figures follow from this. One stream is one core, eight
streams engage about three, and aggregate stops responding to cipher
choice once several cores are working because the path bounds it. CBC
chaining is what makes this expensive, as it serialises blocks and
prevents the AES instructions from pipelining, which is also why the
same gateway manages far more over WireGuard.

The cipher was restored and the network object verified unchanged
against its pre-test snapshot.
2026-08-23 15:11:51 -07:00
vh 8ecffa1fab ops: WireGuard over the same path carries one stream at 767 Mbit/s
The operator asked for a WireGuard test between ana-wg and NH3 across
the public internet, which is the arrangement that separates the path
from the crypto since neither gateway performs encryption in it. A
single stream returns 767 Mbit/s against 245 for IPsec over the same
wire, and eight streams return 763, so one flow already saturates the
path and there is no per-flow penalty whatsoever.

That settles several things at once. The limit is not the circuit,
the NH3 uplink, the ISP or the physical path, all of which carry 767
on one flow. Ranking the implementations, Linux WireGuard shows no
per-flow penalty, UniFi's WireGuard shows roughly 1.4x, and IPsec on
this pair shows 2.8x. Latency under a single bulk stream tells the
same story, rising to 12.7 ms on WireGuard against 102 ms on IPsec.

This overturns the earlier conclusion that changing transport was not
worth pursuing, which compared eight-stream figures and so understated
the gap for single-stream work by a factor of three. A WireGuard
site-to-site terminated on ana-wg now looks worth considering, and the
note records the open questions around failover and policy.

Attribution between the FortiGate and the UniFi gateway remains
unresolved, since both perform IPsec in the slow measurements, but the
remedy does not depend on which one is responsible.

The test tunnel was removed, ana-wg is back to its original three
peers and the generated keys were shredded.
2026-08-23 14:57:29 -07:00
vh d42e9d8712 ops(ana-gw): establish the per-flow cap is IPsec-specific, not capacity
The operator asked whether the 80F is simply out of capacity. It is
not. Routing a single flow between two Anaheim VLANs through the same
box, with no tunnel involved, sustains 940 Mbit/s, which saturates the
link, and eight flows over that path return the same figure. There is
therefore no per-session ceiling in the plain forwarding path and the
roughly 250 Mbit/s per-flow limit belongs to the IPsec datapath alone.

Measuring the second tunnel with the same probe supports this. The ESH
side, terminating on different gateway hardware at nearly half the
round-trip time, returns 268 Mbit/s on one stream against NH3's 245,
and 715 against 692 across eight. A window-limited path would have
been substantially faster at the shorter round-trip, so the agreement
between two dissimilar far ends is further evidence of a rate cap.

This also corrects the previous note, which named the FortiGate on
reasoning that could not separate the box from the protocol, since
every slow path was both. That separation is still not established:
both tunnels terminate on UniFi gateways running common firmware, so
the cap could belong to either side. The note records the tunnel
topology that would decide it and flags the bearing on the pending
replacement.
2026-08-23 14:48:34 -07:00
vh cf0cb2cbb3 ops(ana-gw): pin down what limits a single stream across the tunnel
The earlier note described the constraint as per-flow serialisation
without evidence. Pinning SO_SNDBUF and sweeping it shows what it
actually is: throughput holds flat between 224 and 247 Mbit/s across
a thirteenfold range of in-flight data while round-trip time scales
with the buffer instead, from 7.8 ms up to 107 ms. Retransmissions
are absent throughout. That is a fixed service rate with a standing
queue ahead of it, so socket buffer, window scaling and congestion
control are not the lever and should not be pursued.

The same measurements surface something with wider consequences than
throughput: a single bulk stream lifts tunnel latency from 6.9 ms to
102 ms average, 136 ms peak, with no loss. Interactive traffic
sharing the Anaheim link degrades sharply whenever anything moves
bulk data, and parallelising transfers makes that worse rather than
better.

Localisation rests on the FortiGate appearing in both slow paths and
in neither fast one, with aggregate throughput over the same security
association reaching 692 Mbit/s. Per-session NPU offload fits the
shape but was not confirmed on the device; the note records the test
that would settle it and flags the bearing this has on the pending
FortiGate replacement.
2026-08-23 14:42:17 -07:00
vh e41d19f1cb ops(ana-gw): close out the Anaheim tunnel cipher question
The AES-GCM cutover was authorised and attempted, NH3 side first. It
cannot be completed: UniFi's manual site-to-site IPsec implements no
AEAD cipher. Eight GCM spellings were rejected with
api.err.InvalidPayload while an otherwise identical body carrying
aes256 returned rc:ok, which isolates the enum rather than the
request as the cause. The accepted set is aes128/aes192/aes256/3des.
Both Anaheim tunnels terminate on UniFi gateways, so this blocks the
ESH tunnel on the same grounds.

Measuring while testing also retires the premise. NH3's uplink is a
1 Gbps link, so Anaheim's 2 Gbps circuit was never the relevant
ceiling, and the tunnel sustains 692 Mbit/s across 8 streams rather
than the ~550 previously recorded from a 4-stream run. Compared with
WireGuard over the same gateway and uplink, the deficit narrows from
2.3x at one stream to 15% at eight, so moving this link onto a
different transport is not worth doing.

The constraint is per-stream, around 245 Mbit/s, with both endpoints
idle under load. Parallelising bulk transfers remains the mitigation
and is worth 2.8x at no cost; NFS nconnect is the equivalent lever
for single-stream mounts such as /mnt/smithy on ana-ml2.

FortiGate phase2 for pfi-ana-nh3 keeps the widened proposal list,
which is inert while the peer offers only CBC and avoids a further
renegotiation. The UDM network object was diffed field-by-field
against its pre-change snapshot and is unchanged.
2026-08-23 14:29:17 -07:00
vh 5af362e9d0 ops(ana-gw): restore WAN admin access ahead of the FortiGate cutover
Re-open the ana-gw admin GUI on wan1 so the Anaheim edge can be
managed remotely if the cutover goes wrong, reversing part of the
2026-08-12 lockdown. Two config changes, nothing else (verified by
diffing pre/post `show full-configuration`):

- wan1 `allowaccess ping https` — https only; http, ssh, and fgfm
  stay off, and wan2 is untouched.
- `infra-ops` trusthost widened to all routable IPv4; the `admin`
  account stays locked to 10.0.0.0/8 so the guessable username
  remains unreachable from the internet.

Verified end-to-end from two sites: a real `/logincheck` POST returns
AUTH OK over the public path, on a browser-trusted Let's Encrypt cert
for ana-fw.phasefinal.com valid through 2026-10-27.

Two FortiOS behaviours worth recording, both of which cost time here:
a trusthost whose base address is 0.0.0.0 is silently treated as
unset (so there is no writable "any" — only decomposed ranges), and
trusthost is enforced before the TCP handshake, so a blocked source
sees a filtered port rather than a refused login.

Follow-ons captured in memory, not actioned: ACME renewal for the
admin cert needs port 80 on wan1 (next attempt ~2026-09-27), and a
~5 SYN/s source in 179.51.184.0/21 now draws SYN-ACKs at no
measurable CPU cost.
2026-08-23 14:03:40 -07:00
vh b6340519bc memory: snapshot — Anaheim tunnel at 25% of circuit; selene retired; hrafn CI fixed
Session captured for a context reset. Six new detail entries.

THE OPEN ITEM: Anaheim's IPsec tunnel delivers ~550 Mbit/s aggregate against a
circuit measured at 2,153 Mbit/s. Not WireGuard (it is IPsec on ana-gw), not
CPU (idle), not crypto exhaustion (NPU-offloaded), not the fibre. Both tunnels
negotiate aes256-sha1; AES-GCM proposed. Operator signalled authorization;
execution pending, untracked by operator choice.

Also recorded: selene retired after losing a head-to-head on its own job with
chat-judge moved to gen and the model name left to 404; the 7-alias collision
on the gen seat that makes cross-alias corroboration an echo; hrafn adopted and
its CI found to have been reporting green while deploying nothing for its whole
life; all three Worldtree instances de-armed from a 69-day-stale :latest and
the Matrix homeserver re-plumbed to personal; every secret-bearing .env on
ana-docker tightened to 0600; the pfi org closing the repo-creation half of the
credential-migration directive; booth kept-board deletion and link pruning.

Two entries under Tried and abandoned: the CI checkout assertion that broke the
pipeline twice and was removed, and my proposal to alias a retired model name
at a different model, which the operator correctly overruled.

Index 271 -> 282 lines, under the 300 cap, so no archival fired.
2026-08-23 13:35:48 -07:00
vh 0ad332bb4a feat(booth): per-row link removal + render the link board as real UI
The standing link board is the one MULTI-WRITER booth -- every agent session
appends operator-facing URLs to it. "Delete the folder" was the only
granularity available, so removing one dead link meant hand-editing markdown.
It is 32 rows and only grows.

  booth links                 row number, entry id, raw row
  booth unlink 3              by row number
  booth unlink 8b40e0a5       by entry id (what the UI's x posts)
  POST /b/<name>/unlink       form field `entry` = content id

ROWS ARE ADDRESSED BY CONTENT ID, NEVER BY POSITION. The board is append-only
and multi-writer: another session can post between listing it and clicking x,
and an index would then delete a neighbour. An id either matches the row you
saw or matches nothing. A row number typed at the CLI is resolved to its id
BEFORE anything is deleted. Appends and prunes now take the same flock on
.links.lock, so a post cannot be lost inside a prune's read-modify-write.

UI: a booth carrying links.md renders as rows -- description, URL, provenance,
copy button, per-row x -- instead of a markdown blob. links.md is filtered out
of the gallery so it does not appear twice; the header counts LINKS not files;
the empty-state and the one-click "Wipe now" both stand down for a board (same
rule as the kept lane: nothing durable is one click from gone).

booth/links.py extracted, STDLIB ONLY. The CLI needs this logic and must not
require the service venv -- importing app.py drags in FastAPI, so deleting a
line from a text file would have needed a web framework installed.

THREE BUGS FOUND BY TESTING, all in the shell wrapper while the module was
correct throughout -- module-only tests would have caught none of them:

- `[ "$n" -eq 0 ] && echo ...` as the LAST statement made `booth links` exit 1
  whenever the board had rows. `unlink`'s index lookup calls it inside $( )
  under `set -e`, so a successful listing killed the caller and the removal
  silently did nothing while reporting success.
- ids are 8 hex chars and roughly one in forty is ALL DIGITS; those were read
  as row numbers, resolved to nothing, and removed nothing. Now disambiguated
  by the id's actual shape, not by "is it numeric".
- filtering links.md out of the gallery left `items` empty, so a full board
  rendered "This booth is empty" and an empty <div class="gallery"> under 32
  visible rows.

87 tests (was 76): parser tolerance of hand-written prose, content-id
stability across concurrent appends, removal precision, UI branch behaviour
for board/normal/empty booths, and subprocess CLI tests pinning the two shell
bugs. Deployed to nh3-dev and verified against the live 32-row board
read-only; board file byte-identical afterwards.
2026-08-23 12:55:33 -07:00
vh 4be880f36c feat(booth): kept boards can be deleted from the UI; document the TTL-reset trap
Kept boards had no delete path in the UI at all. The kept lane deliberately
omits the wipe control -- a one-click wipe next to the durable stuff is a
footgun -- but "deliberate" had been implemented as "impossible": the only
routes out were ssh or a hand-written API call.

Now it is two deliberate acts. A `release` control on kept cards drops the
sentinel, the board moves to the ephemeral lane, and the existing x wipes it
from there. Release is reversible -- POST /b/<name>/keep pins it again.

  POST /b/<name>/unkeep   release the pin
  POST /b/<name>/keep     pin it (round-trip, so release is not a one-way door)

FOUND WHILE TESTING, and it invalidates the previously-documented workaround:
removing the sentinel BUMPS the booth directory's mtime, and booth age is the
newest mtime in the tree -- so a released board's clock RESETS from 10,000s to
0s and it survives another full TTL. The old comment said "remove the sentinel
first (it rejoins the sweep)", which is true but means the board lives another
24h, not that it gets reaped. Unkeep-and-wait is a delay, not a delete.

test_releasing_a_board_RESETS_its_ttl_clock pins that behaviour deliberately so
nobody re-derives the workaround. Release is what unlocks the x; the x is what
deletes.

CLI: `booth rm` already worked on kept boards but said nothing about it. It now
announces "(was KEPT -- durable board)" so wiping something durable can never
look identical to wiping run output. Not a block -- a CLI user naming a booth
is being explicit.

5 new tests (67 pass). Verified live on nh3-dev: release renders on all four
kept boards, the ephemeral lane keeps its x, and the links board is untouched
with its sentinel intact.
2026-08-23 10:42:32 -07:00
vh b8a535507a feat(judge-bench): keep the judge harness; warn about the 7-way alias collision
Operator: keep the benchmark. It has a named second use (brokkr-smithy-dev
wants gen vs a trained reward model once their tournament converges) and a
demonstrated first one -- it caught a seat that had been coin-flip-grade for
five weeks with nobody measuring it.

Harness promoted from scratch to tools/judge-bench/:
- paths de-hardcoded; runs from its own directory
- proper CLI: --models (REQUIRED), --repeats, --limit, --gateway.
  Required on purpose: a stale default would silently benchmark a retired
  seat, and the original default (selene-1-mini-8b) now 400s.
- README states the limitation rather than burying it: 24 items of the
  author's own design, a screen and not a verdict. This harness scored the
  same pair 83 vs 96 while brokkr's corpus ranking task scored it 47 (chance)
  vs 94. Both honest; absolute scoring on designed items is an easier task
  than ranking real text.
- records brokkr's technique, which is better than anything here: a control
  constructed so the correct answer is DEFINITIONAL rather than judged cannot
  inherit the designer's error (item vs itself, response vs its own
  truncation, text vs its own clauses permuted). Add those before adding more
  judged items.

Gateway: comment-only warning at the head of model_list. SEVEN aliases now
resolve to the same weights (chat-judge, classifier, gen, image-judge,
qwen-image-bench, summarizer, summarizer-large -> qwen3.8-27b-uncensored).
That is intended under ADR-0012, but it has a sharp edge brokkr flagged:
cross-checking a result against another alias measures NOTHING when they are
the same model -- agreement is an echo, not corroboration. The note names the
other current collisions (glm-5.2 x4, TTS x4, reranker x2), gives the
/model/info one-liner to check, and records that probes should resolve alias
-> backing at run start AND end because the response `model` field returns the
alias, so a swap is otherwise invisible.

Verified: config still parses, diff is comment-only, canonical re-synced.
2026-08-23 05:16:10 -07:00
vh ca3c984f93 feat(selene): retire the seat; chat-judge -> gen, selene-1-mini-8b 404s by design
Benchmarked selene against gen on selene's own job: 24 designed judge items
with checkable ground truth, pairwise + absolute modes, 3 repeats, on BOTH a
neutral JSON prompt and Selene's native Atla template. 288 calls, all free
local.

  neutral JSON     selene 20/24 (83%)   gen 23/24 (96%)
  native Atla      selene 21/24 (88%)   gen 22/24 (92%)

gen won on both templates and selene's BEST sat below gen's WORST. Selene was
given its own fine-tuned template as a fairness check; it gained one point,
not the three it needed.

Decisive defect: selene cannot emit "tie" -- 0/2 on both templates, forcing a
winner on every equivalent pair. For eval work that is the case that matters
most. gen returned tie correctly on the JSON template. Selene also compressed
the 1-5 scale (clustered at 2s and 4s) where gen used it fully. Selene's only
win was ~3x latency, unexercised at ~60 calls/day with zero queueing.

TWO NAMES, TWO DIFFERENT TREATMENTS, deliberately:

- chat-judge -> repointed to gen. It is a ROLE alias and ADR-0012 says
  consumers bind the capability, not a concrete model. Sampler profile copied
  from image-judge (temp 0, top_p 1.0, top_k 1, thinking off) so the served
  config matches the benchmarked condition.

- selene-1-mini-8b -> REMOVED. It 404s. It was NOT aliased to gen. A
  served-name is a contract about what the model IS; answering it with a
  different model hides a material change behind a stable string. Operator
  ruling: "never repoint a named model at a different model's endpoint --
  that is intentionally misleading." Verified: the gateway now returns
  HTTP 400 "Invalid model name" for it.

Reclaimed 17.2 GiB on ana-ml2 GPU 1 (free 1,818 -> 19,450 MiB) on a card that
had under 2 GiB of headroom. gen already runs on GPU 0, so the judge role
moved onto an existing seat rather than allocating anything new.

Canonical litellm config synced from the host; ana-ml2 README and
recommended-model-settings updated. compose.yaml kept for reference, not
deployed.
2026-08-23 05:07:01 -07:00
vh a896c0a5a9 feat(playbooks): sweep world-readable secret-bearing .env files to 0600
Eight stacks on ana-docker kept secret-bearing compose .env files at mode
0644 -- readable by every local account on a box with four interactive
users. Verified as a real exposure, not a theoretical one, by reading one
as `nobody`. Six other stacks already used 0600, so this converges on the
existing house pattern rather than inventing one.

Swept (all verified mode 600, unreadable by nobody, compose config still
rendering as the deploy user, container untouched):

  vaultwarden  traefik  beszel  gitea-runner
  miniflux     news-digest  searxng  vor

Post-sweep the host has zero secret-bearing .env readable by nobody.

Checked before writing the playbook, and re-checked by the playbook itself
so a bad case cannot be swept in by accident:
- every target is owned by lkraven, the deploy user, so 0600 preserves the
  deploy path (asserted by rendering compose config AS lkraven, not root --
  checking the mode proves the bits changed, only rendering as the deploy
  user proves the next deploy still resolves its variables)
- none is bind-mounted into a container. vaultwarden looked like it was;
  that `- .env` is under `env_file:`, not `volumes:`. A genuinely
  bind-mounted .env is read by the container UID and 0600 could break it,
  so the playbook refuses that case.

Two gotchas recorded in the file:
- elway's variable regex eats any bare identifier in braces, so a docker
  --format Go template containing {{end}} or {{println}} fails as an
  undefined variable. Grep the raw inspect JSON instead.
- the `ana-docker` ssh alias resolves to lkraven, who needs a sudo
  password; run elway against infra-ops@10.250.50.70 for NOPASSWD.
2026-08-23 03:09:13 -07:00
vh 9642952a54 docs(hrafn-ci): mirror the now-canonical vh/hrafn pipeline; record two failed runs
claude-bot holds write on vh/hrafn as of 2026-08-23, so the canonical copy of
the pipeline moved there and infra-ops maintains it directly instead of
routing patches through the repo holder. The files here are a verified mirror
(byte-identical to live at 22e0eb9d75a6).

Live state: run 9922 green, and both new content assertions executed rather
than merely existing --

  verify 4/5  host tree matches shipped context (a99ce748a0c9...)
  verify 5/5  image source matches host source (06f209fd0641...)

The CI-computed context hash matching on the host is the end-to-end proof
that the converge lands what CI ships. Its absence is what let the
frozen-source bug survive every green deploy.

Also records why the HEAD == GITHUB_SHA assertion was added and then removed:
it needed the git binary (run 9920, exit 127), and installing git flipped
actions/checkout@v4 from its node implementation to the git binary, which
died on a missing CA bundle (run 9921). A nice-to-have assertion changed the
checkout code path and broke a working pipeline; it guarded a hypothesis that
proved wrong, so it went rather than getting ca-certificates bolted on.
2026-08-23 02:55:02 -07:00
vh b38c369313 fix(hrafn-ci): staging dir inside the rsync target froze host source silently
Root cause of nevermore-claude's report that v1.0.0 deployed green while the
host kept serving 0.1.0.

The staging dir was $compose_dir/.stage -- INSIDE the rsync target. So
`rsync -a --delete $compose_dir/.stage/ $compose_dir/` deleted .stage from
the destination (absent from the source listing) DURING the transfer,
destroying the source mid-copy. Reproduced exactly:

  before:  app.py="OLD"  leftover.txt  .stage/app.py="NEW"
  after:   app.py="OLD"  leftover.txt GONE, .stage GONE

Deletion worked; the copy silently did not. So the directory looked
converged while host source stayed frozen at the first manual rsync, and
because the build's COPY inputs never changed, Docker full-cache-hit and
every SHA tag aliased one image. The provenance guarantee was false.

Nothing caught it because the verify steps asserted the marker, health, and
a 200 from /readyz -- all of which pass on a frozen host. None measured
content.

Fixes:
- stage at /tmp/hrafn-deploy-stage, outside the target
- CI computes context_sha256 over the shipped file list; the playbook
  recomputes it on the host post-converge and fails on mismatch
- compare the running container's src/**/*.py against the host's, catching
  a SHA tag naming layers the image does not contain
- checkout clean:true + assert HEAD == GITHUB_SHA so a reused runner
  workspace fails the job rather than shipping a stale tree

Declined --no-cache: a cache hit is correct when the context is genuinely
unchanged, and the new assertions prove the property directly rather than
brute-forcing it.

The container-vs-host check compares only *.py -- `pip install .` generates
src/hrafn.egg-info/* inside the image and __pycache__ appears at runtime, so
a naive `find src -type f` compare false-fails on every healthy deploy.
Verified against the live container before shipping (12 host files, 18 in
container, 0 content differences).
2026-08-22 21:57:16 -07:00
vh bb19a96f39 fix(playbooks): compare image IDs, not the created-from tag; make the repin idempotent
Two defects the worldtree-pinned case exposed in the guard written an hour
ago.

1. The guard compared the container's .Config.Image STRING against the tag
   being pinned. That string is only the tag the container was CREATED from,
   which can differ from what it actually runs: worldtree-pinned was created
   from `:latest` back when that tag pointed at 446e5807, and `:latest` has
   since moved to b19afd71d7cc. So the guard refused an instance whose
   pinning was correct and necessary. Now it resolves the target tag to an
   image ID and compares that against the running image ID -- asserting the
   thing actually cared about, that this tag names the bytes now running.
   It also fails closed when no such local tag exists.

2. The sed step reported CHANGED unconditionally, so a re-run on an
   already-pinned instance claimed work it had not done. Gated behind a
   `when:` that skips when the line is already correct; a second run on demo
   now reports "2 ok, 0 changed, 2 skipped / overall: OK".

Applied to worldtree-pinned under worldtree-dev authorization. That instance
needed a `docker tag` first -- its image was DANGLING (no repo tags, kept
alive only by the running container), so the fleet's frozen reference was one
`docker rm` from garbage collection. Tagged as :446e5807bf43, then pinned.

All three instances now render a SHA with no floating tag anywhere:
  worldtree          -> :ae88a057c0ed
  worldtree-personal -> :f63529168c13
  worldtree-pinned   -> :446e5807bf43
Nothing restarted -- pinned still Up 3 months, its start time unchanged.
2026-08-22 21:52:20 -07:00
vh 064181a8fb feat(playbooks): re-pin Worldtree WORLDTREE_IMAGE off the floating :latest tag
Both corviduo-dev Worldtree instances carried
`WORLDTREE_IMAGE=.../worldtree:latest` in their .env while running
SHA-tagged images built the same day. The local :latest tag pointed at
b19afd71d7cc, built 2026-06-14 -- 69 days stale. Any `docker compose up`
on either instance, by anyone, silently downgraded that service by 69
days: the same footgun behind the 2026-06-15 outage.

Applied under worldtree-dev authorization (Worldtree #410):
  demo     -> gitea.phasefinal.com/vh/worldtree:ae88a057c0ed
  personal -> gitea.phasefinal.com/vh/worldtree:f63529168c13

Both runs verified compose config resolves every service to the pinned
SHA with no :latest remaining, and that no container restarted. The edit
is inert by design -- it changes what the NEXT recreate pulls.

The playbook guards against pinning a SHA that is not the one actually
running, which would re-arm the same hazard with a different image.

Also records the worldtree-pinned case, deliberately NOT changed here:
that instance runs a DANGLING image (sha256:446e5807, no repo tags),
kept alive only by the running container. It has no tag to pin to, so it
needs `docker tag` first -- and an untagged image referenced only by a
container is one `docker rm` from garbage collection, which for the
fleet's frozen reference instance is worth fixing on its own merits.
Out of the authorized scope (demo + personal); raised with worldtree-dev.

Stopgap: the durable fix is the deploy workflow stamping the deployed SHA
into .env at each deploy, queued repo-side with worldtree-dev.
2026-08-22 21:49:42 -07:00
vh 11b9d1891e fix(hrafn-ci): make the deploy converge instead of accrete
The first CI run shipped clean but revealed a design gap in the playbook:
unpacking the context tarball in place overwrites tracked files and never
removes anything. Leftovers from the pre-CI hand-rsync (tests/, docs/,
ROADMAP.md, persistent-memory.md, CLAUDE.md, LICENSE) survived the deploy
and had to be cleaned off ana-docker by hand.

That is the same failure class that produced the mess in the first place:
a deploy that only ever adds cannot return the host to a known state.

- unpack to a staging dir, then rsync --delete onto the compose dir
- protect host-owned .env and .deployed by name
- add .env.example to the context tarball so converge does not delete it
- record in the workflow that the tar list is now AUTHORITATIVE: anything
  omitted is removed from the host on the next deploy

Re-validated with `elway --dry-run` (9 steps, 3 verify, parses clean).
Not yet in vh/hrafn -- infra-ops has no write access there, so this is
offered to the repo holder rather than pushed.
2026-08-22 15:31:50 -07:00
vh b001d0cb2e feat(hrafn): author the CI deploy that replaces the hand-rsync path
hrafn was handed to infra-ops for uptime ownership with no CI deploy and
no commit provenance -- the image was always local/hrafn:v1 and the whole
working tree lived in the compose directory.

These two files fix both. They are authored here because infra-ops owns
hrafn's uptime, but they belong in vh/hrafn; claude-bot is not a
collaborator there, so they are handed to the repo holder rather than
committed directly.

- playbooks-deploy.yaml -> vh/hrafn playbooks/deploy.yaml
- gitea-workflows-deploy.yaml -> vh/hrafn .gitea/workflows/deploy.yaml

Design calls recorded in the README: the build context travels as one
tarball rather than per-file upload steps (nevermore's pattern fails open
when a new source file has no matching step), and the playbook refuses to
deploy unless .env exists at 0600 -- a guard prompted by it arriving 0644
with a live bearer token in it.

Validated with `elway --dry-run`, which caught a real interpolation bug
during authoring. No new Actions secrets needed.
2026-08-22 15:26:45 -07:00
vh b6924de728 feat(hrafn): register the browser-fetch service and tighten its env perms
nevermore-claude handed hrafn to infra-ops for uptime ownership. Intake:
verified health independently, brought it into the inventory, and fixed one
security defect found during the check.

- canonicalize stacks/hrafn/ (compose.yaml + .env.example + README)
- list hrafn in the ana-docker running-stacks table
- README records the load-bearing bits: shm_size 1gb is required for
  Chromium, playwright and the base image are version-coupled, SSRF denies
  private targets by default, and restart:unless-stopped does NOT act on
  healthcheck failure

Security fix applied on the host, not in this tree: /opt/docker/compose/
hrafn/.env was 0644 with a live 57-char bearer token in it, readable by
every local account (verified by reading it as `nobody`). Tightened to 0600;
owner unchanged so the deploy path still works, confirmed via `docker
compose config` as lkraven. Container untouched and still healthy.

Known gaps recorded rather than silently accepted: no CI deploy, and the
image builds from an rsync'd working tree living in the compose directory,
so the running image has no commit provenance.
2026-08-22 15:05:11 -07:00
vh 7bf17dd39e fix(filezilla): set restart: unless-stopped and canonicalize the stack
The filezilla container on vm-esh-nas shipped with no restart policy. It
was SIGTERMed during the 2026-08-18 host shutdown and never came back,
staying down four days while dockge/dozzle-agent/beszel-agent all
recovered on their own.

- add `restart: unless-stopped` (applied on the host, container recreated
  and verified serving 200 on :5800 with all four /NAS mounts visible)
- promote the previously un-canonicalized compose into stacks/filezilla/
  so the policy is version-controlled rather than host-only
- record the missing-restart-policy failure mode in the host README
2026-08-22 09:50:51 -07:00
vh 837fa362fc memory: snapshot — sec rebuilt on DFlash2 + newer vLLM; quant tokenizer defect fixed fleet-wide
Rewrites the in-flight section (140 lines to 18) now that the AI-seat work
has settled, promoting the durable calls into the dated decision log where
they will not decay: DFlash2 measured and promoted to sec's compose stack,
the calibration-truncation defect fixed at source in the quant pipeline,
sec retuned after a runtime OOM, the Max-Q spread disproved by telemetry,
ESH dual-stack with the Cityside static proven unprovisioned, and speaches
live with the weak-gate finding.

Carries forward the two things a fresh session must not get wrong: the sec
degeneration question is confounded because engine and drafter changed
together, and neither the 2k nor the 10k observation is evidence.

Auto-archived one entry (Recent decisions: 1) to archival-memory.md.
Eight further candidates were held back by the guards -- open deferred work
or referenced by in-flight state.
2026-08-22 09:46:11 -07:00
vh 6e82899ba7 fix(mog-sec): retune to 0.52/420K after a runtime OOM at 0.55/480K
The 0.55 configuration booted cleanly, passed every startup check, and then
killed the engine on an ordinary request of roughly 20k tokens:
torch.OutOfMemoryError allocating 614 MiB in the GDN causal_conv1d path with
443 MiB free. The container self-recovered via restart: unless-stopped.

Context length was not the cause. gpu-memory-utilization is not a hard
reservation. Weights and KV are reserved up front, but activation memory is
allocated on demand and the profile that sizes it uses dummy data at
max_num_batched_tokens. The profile predicted 3.62 GiB; the process sat about
1 GiB over its entire budget even at idle. With six vLLM containers sharing
GPU1 there was no slack left to grow into, and a modest allocation lost the
race. 0.52 leaves roughly 7.7 GiB free against 4.6 GiB at 0.55.

Records a measurement that governs how max-model-len can be chosen at all:
the KV pool varies between boots. Two consecutive boots at 0.52 produced
425,663 and 453,600 tokens, a 6.6 percent swing, because the pool is sized
from free memory at startup and that depends on what the other tenants hold
at that instant. 420,000 sits under the lower observation so the seat starts
in both conditions. Sizing to the higher one would boot today and refuse
tomorrow, which is why the value was measured across boots rather than
estimated from one.

Concurrency of about 1.0 to 1.08x means one request at full length. Shorter
requests still batch normally, since vLLM schedules by tokens rather than by
max-model-len.
2026-08-22 02:03:24 -07:00
vh 8389470898 feat(mog-sec): promote the DFlash2 configuration into the compose stack
Operator approved after real-use testing. The experimental standalone
container is retired and stacks/mog-sec is canonical again, with
restart: unless-stopped so the configuration survives a reboot.

Cutover verified against the container it replaces: KV pool 526,617 tokens
at 1.10x concurrency, identical; zero restarts; both gateway aliases
serving; DFlash2 confirmed drafting at k=7 with 231 draft tokens over 33
drafts; vision working at 2048x2048.

One variable was deliberately dropped rather than carried over. The previous
stack hardcoded PYTORCH_CUDA_ALLOC_CONF=expandable_segments:True, the
validated container never set it, and the quant playbook records
expandable_segments corrupting retained tensors in another context. The
compose now defaults it empty via MOG_ALLOC_CONF. Promoting the stack as it
stood would have shipped a variable the tested configuration did not have.

The speculative config moves into a single MOG_SPEC_CONFIG carrying the
whole JSON, because the two shapes are not interchangeable: dflash requires
a model pointing at the drafter and MTP must not have one, so a
method-plus-tokens template cannot express both. Also parameterised:
MOG_DRAFT_MODEL, MOG_MM_PROCESSOR_KWARGS, MOG_MAX_NUM_BATCHED_TOKENS.

The mm-processor image cap is now mandatory rather than incidental. The
model's own preprocessor declares 4096x4096, which expands to 16384 image
tokens and kills startup on builds that enforce the image-token count check.

Adds the .env.example this stack never had, carrying the measured rationale
for each value and the one-line rollback.
2026-08-22 01:16:27 -07:00
vh 20ac53052b memory: retract the MTP-head degeneration hypothesis; n=1 was never evidence
Operator ruling: the multi-turn degeneration lives in the un-fixed vLLM, not
in the weights. The hypothesis that sec's stock-graft MTP head causes it is
withdrawn.

Two failures produced it. First, a false dichotomy treated as a deduction:
having verified gen and sec run an identical engine, I concluded config was
eliminated and therefore the weights were responsible. That does not follow.
An engine bug present in both seats is not exonerated by the seats being
identical; it only means the engine cannot explain a difference between
them. It can still explain the failure.

Second, and more instructive, the difference being explained may not exist.
The premise was a single operator observation made during a session with
many concurrent changes. That cannot carry a causal claim, and it became the
load-bearing support for a root-cause narrative it could not hold.

The same caveat now attaches to the coherent-to-10k observation on the new
build: same n, same uncontrolled conditions, opposite direction. The
comparison is weak at both ends, so the file no longer presents either
sighting as a result.

What survives as measured fact is unchanged and still recorded: sec's MTP
head is byte-identical to the uncensored base across all 15 tensors, gen's
was abliterated in-band, and acceptance differs slightly. None of that is
shown to cause degeneration.

Adds the generalisable lesson: an observation made while many things are
changing cannot support a causal conclusion. It is the inverse of the
warning already in the gen-seat compose file, which guards against trusting
a negative result from a synthetic probe; this guards against trusting a
positive sighting from an uncontrolled session.
2026-08-22 00:58:35 -07:00
vh ab3a0ca5bc docs(quant-playbook): acceptance is not throughput -- always run the depth control
Measured 2026-08-22 on one target with one instrument: raising MTP
num_speculative_tokens from 3 to 7 improved accepted length from 2.753 to
3.041 per forward pass while throughput fell from 114.9 to 74.0 tok/s.
Reporting acceptance alone would have recommended a 36% regression.

The cause is architectural rather than model-specific. A single-module MTP
head has no depth of its own, so vLLM runs it autoregressively and k draft
tokens cost k sequential forward passes. Past a shallow depth the drafting
cost exceeds what the extra accepted tokens save.

Records the comparison rule that follows: match k when comparing two
speculative methods, or the measurement is of depth rather than method. A
parallel-drafting drafter at k=7 against an autoregressive MTP at k=3 is not
a method comparison. In the case that produced this, the depth control
showed most of the apparent acceptance advantage was depth, while the
throughput advantage was real and came from parallel drafting -- our MTP was
better at position 0 and still lost overall.

Only the measured, model-agnostic result is recorded here. The
DFlash2-specific findings, the hypotheses that remain unproven, and the
wrong turns taken along the way live in
persistent-memory.d/2026-08-22-dflash2-spec-decode.md with explicit
epistemic labels, deliberately kept out of the playbook.
2026-08-22 00:52:06 -07:00
vh 9f87b7c4e5 memory: DFlash2 spec-decode measured; sec running on it (experimental, confounded)
Records the 2026-08-22 session with measured results, hypotheses, and wrong
turns explicitly separated -- the operator held this back while it was in
flight specifically so conjecture would not enter the record as fact.

MEASURED. DFlash2 works on an abliterated + NVFP4 compressed-tensors target
on Blackwell sm_120, which the model card does not claim (it tests stock
BF16 on H200). gen 2.753 -> 3.254 accepted tok/forward and 114.9 -> 131.9
tok/s; sec 2.676 -> 3.252 and 110.5 -> 130.0. The drafter is model-agnostic
across two different finetunes to 0.06%, but is EAGLE3-style coupled to its
target's hidden states, so the weights file is shareable while the 3.85 GB
of VRAM is per-seat.

The k=7 MTP control is the load-bearing result: raising MTP depth improves
acceptance and collapses throughput to 74.0 tok/s, because a single-module
head run autoregressively costs one forward pass per draft token. Without
that control the obvious recommendation would have been wrong.

CONFOUNDED. sec no longer degenerates at 2k, but the engine advanced 259
commits and the drafter changed at the same time. Isolating it means running
MTP k=3 on the new build. Also recorded: #51113 is present in both builds
and is therefore necessary but insufficient, since sec ran it and still
degenerated.

HYPOTHESES, labelled as such: that sec's stock-graft MTP head causes the
degeneration, and that NVFP4 explains the gap against published acceptance
figures. Neither is proven.

WRONG TURNS, recorded so they are not re-derived: version strings are not
lineage, Docker Hub push timestamps are not source freshness, and the claim
that 1M context needs YaRN absent from config is false for the sec quant.

Operationally important: sec is serving from a standalone container rather
than its compose stack, which is stopped but unmodified. Rollback is two
commands and is written down.
2026-08-22 00:51:28 -07:00
vh 0755ba7d00 fix(quant): stop baking the calibration truncation cap into the shipped tokenizer
load_calib tokenizes with tok(..., truncation=True, max_length=seqlen). For a
fast tokenizer that mutates the Rust backend's truncation state in place, and
the subsequent tok.save_pretrained() persisted it, so every mixed-NVFP4 build
shipped a tokenizer.json carrying

  "truncation": {"direction": "Right", "max_length": 2048, ...}

against a source whose value is null. Every prompt was clamped at the
calibration length, permanently.

It hid because older transformers does not enforce the text-vs-ids count
check. On a newer one the seat dies at startup with a message that names
images and never mentions tokenizers:

  ValueError: Mismatch in `image` token count between text and `input_ids`.
  Got ids=[2047] and text=[16384].

The cap also silently limited image resolution well before it killed
anything -- at 2048 the largest servable image is about 1448x1448, since
(edge/patch)^2 / merge^2 image tokens have to fit under it.

Fix saves a pristine tokenizer re-read from the source rather than the
mutated calibration object, and then asserts truncation is null so the
defect fails the build instead of shipping again.

Playbook gains section 3.14 with the symptom, the cause, the audit one-liner
and a table of which builds were affected, plus a fourth mandatory post-step.
The transferable lesson is called out: this is the third case of an artifact
carrying config authored against an older transformers that a newer one
begins enforcing, so an image bump is a config-compatibility event rather
than just a version change.
2026-08-22 00:32:21 -07:00
vh ad21302474 memory: ESH internal IPv6 live on two LANs; Cityside v4 static proven unprovisioned
Operator-directed IPv6 enablement on ESH-UDMPM: esh-userland (VLAN 10, SSID
PVC) and esh-server flipped from ipv6_interface_type=none to pd against the
delegated 2607:73c0:402:1d00::/56. Verified esh-docker-vm egresses over v6 as
its own address with no NAT, against v4 which still egresses as the shared
CGNAT pool. No disruption through either write; originals backed up.

NH3 stays v6-off deliberately -- its single /64 is reserved for network
meshing, so nh3-dev having no v6 egress is correct rather than a fault.

The v4 static is NOT provisioned, and this is now proven rather than
inferred. A full gateway reboot -- verified by observed down-transition and
an uptime reset from 140,846s to 183s -- forced a fresh DHCP DISCOVER and
Cityside returned the identical address. Recorded alongside it: a DHCP renew
could never have surfaced a new address in the first place, since renewal
preserves the lease by design. Next step is a carrier ticket, not more
testing.

The v6 firewall posture was audited and is correct -- default-deny inbound
for both IP versions, only four hand-written policies, none WAN-facing. My
earlier warning that v6 removes CGNAT's accidental shielding was overstated
and is retracted in the record. The audit's limitation is stated: it read
rules, it never probed from outside, because no v6 vantage exists.

Flat-zone lateral-movement finding parked as id 44 rather than actioned --
operator's call, moot until the mesh and segmentation design settle.
2026-08-21 22:01:08 -07:00
vh c7e21879ae memory: speaches ASR live on irv-ml1 — and no_speech_prob is a weak gate
Records the deployment plus the finding that outlives it: no_speech_prob
alone does not carry a hallucination threshold on this stack. Silence and
room tone both hallucinated 'Thank you.' at no_speech_prob under 0.11,
where a conventional >0.6 gate passes them through; avg_logprob separates
~6x better. Any future consumer asking for a Whisper hallucination gate
should be pointed at the composite, not the single field.

Also banks the digest-pin rationale (the VAD flag is an upstream-declared
unstable variable name, so a floating tag can move gate semantics
silently), the two deployment gotchas, the docker-vs-native GPU index
inversion on this host, and Eyra's future diarization VRAM claim on the
same A6000.

Adds speaches to the irv-ml1 stack table alongside parakeet, with the
reason both exist.
2026-08-21 14:33:08 -07:00
vh aa5863c9a3 feat(speaches): OpenAI-compatible faster-whisper ASR seat on irv-ml1 A6000
Deployed for Eyra (meeting recorder) per the eyra-dev request. Serves
large-v3 (batch tier) + distil-large-v3 (low-latency tier) on :8204,
fp16, both resident, ~5.9 GB VRAM against 20 GB still free.

Sits alongside the existing parakeet stack (:8765) deliberately: parakeet
is a TDT/transducer returning bare {"text": ...} and has no no_speech_prob
concept, so it structurally cannot serve this consumer.

The load-bearing requirement -- segments[].no_speech_prob surviving
response_format=verbose_json -- is VERIFIED on both tiers.

Measured finding worth more than the deployment: no_speech_prob alone is a
WEAK hallucination gate on this stack. Pure silence and pink room tone both
produced the classic Whisper 'Thank you.' hallucination while no_speech_prob
stayed under 0.11 -- a conventional >0.6 threshold passes both through.
avg_logprob separates the same cases ~6x more decisively (-0.11 speech vs
-0.65/-0.72 non-speech) and compression_ratio splits 1.141 vs 0.556.
Consumers should gate on a composite, not no_speech_prob alone. Table in
the README.

VAD pinned OFF at the consumer's request (they VAD-gate upstream on the
capture edge). Consequence stated plainly in the README: with VAD off this
service will transcribe silence into text and is not defending itself.

Image pinned BY DIGEST rather than :latest-cuda, because the VAD-off
setting rides on _UNSTABLE_VAD_FILTER -- a variable upstream explicitly
marks unstable. A floating tag could rename it on any bump, silently
restoring VAD and moving no_speech_prob semantics under a calibrated gate
with no error and no log line.

Two deployment gotchas recorded: PRELOAD_MODELS only loads models already
cached (it does not download -- use POST /v1/models/{id}), and the bind-
mounted cache needs a hub/ subdir or every /v1/models call 500s with
CacheNotFound while /health still returns 200.
2026-08-21 14:31:57 -07:00
vh ff5ce212da memory: OWUI credential state — password reset, admin-scoped API key vaulted (operator-ruled)
Two OWUI credential facts worth surviving a context reset:

  - The reported lockout was NOT a broken account. The vaulted password returned
    200 from POST /api/v1/auths/signin immediately before the reset, so the cause
    was client-side. Test the vaulted credential against signin before concluding
    an account is broken -- this is the second lockout here traced to an assumed
    rather than verified credential.
  - The operator-minted API key is ADMIN-scoped, inherited from the owning user,
    and that is the INTENDED shape per operator ruling: infra-ops manages the
    instance, so the key needs the rights the management work requires. A
    least-privilege dedicated-user split was offered and declined. Do not
    re-propose it.

Both credentials vaulted at esh-docker-vm/open-webui-{admin,api-key}; key verified
against /api/v1/auths/ (admin identity) and /api/models (33 models), with an
unauthenticated 401 control. Plaintext copies shredded.

Also folds in an unadjudicated drift found in passing: the running image is the
floating ghcr.io/open-webui/open-webui:main, not the v0.11.0 the stack notes
claim. Replaces the now-resolved 'operator's OWUI password change' follow-up.
2026-08-21 14:14:44 -07:00
vh b8e5022a1a memory: snapshot — three AI seats settled (orcarouter gen / MeroMero dual-mode RP / sec pen-test), Open WebUI deployed 2026-08-21 13:55:35 -07:00
vh 5e47a59b32 feat(meromero): MeroMero-v2 dual-mode (prose + streaming CoT) live on one seat — no re-quant
The multi-turn Gemma-4 CoT problem is solved. One MeroMero-v2 seat, one weight set,
two aliases: char-rp (prose) + char-rp-reasoning (streaming chain-of-thought).

The winning stack, traced from vLLM source by the four-arm brokkr/dwarf panel:

  - vllm/vllm-openai:v0.26.0 — ships transformers 5.14.1 natively, below the
    head_dim guard, so Gemma-4-31B loads with no pin and no custom image. It also
    carries the #48217 streaming pre-arm fix.
  - A patched chat template whose enable_thinking:true branch force-opens a BARE
    <|channel> (not <|channel>thought\n -- full-open defeats _preprocess_feed's
    injection). --chat-template override, no re-quant.
  - Two served-names char-rp / char-rp-thinking; --reasoning-parser gemma4;
    default enable_thinking:false. LiteLLM char-rp -> prose, char-rp-reasoning ->
    the thinking served-name with enable_thinking:true.

Verified: streaming CoT split 6/6 direct on :8016 and 3/3 through the gateway;
char-rp prose clean on both transports with no trailing-token leak.

Two hard-won facts recorded in persistent-memory:
  - STREAMING ONLY. Non-streaming can't split -- extract_reasoning never receives
    prompt_token_ids so the pre-arm can't fire (a vLLM one-shot bug unchanged
    across v0.24-0.27). Fine here: Lobe/OWUI stream. Upstream PR #49797 fixes
    non-streaming too, landing ~v0.28.0 -- then it's a clean image bump.
  - KEY-NAME TRAP: vLLM streams reasoning in delta.reasoning; LiteLLM normalizes
    to delta.reasoning_content. I lost two false-negative test rounds to this.

Canonical: stacks/meromero-charrp/ (compose + patched_chat_template.jinja) and
stacks/litellm/conf/config.yaml. Rollback is the .env image line + dropping
--chat-template.
2026-08-21 13:03:53 -07:00
vh 76834777a4 feat(open-webui): deploy env-declarative chat bake-off on esh-docker-vm:3211
Stand up Open WebUI v0.11.0 parallel to lobe-chat (:3210) as an
operator-approved candidate replacement. Env-declarative config
(ENABLE_PERSISTENT_CONFIG=False = the deploy is the config source of
truth), model picker auto-tracks the LiteLLM gateway with no pins,
background task model pinned to summarizer, TTS routed direct at the
dots gateway (:8198).

Gates verified on the box: G1 (declarative config, both directions),
G2 (picker == live gateway roster, no hand-listing), G3 (models/sync
genuinely reconciles create+delete), G5 (task model pinned). G4 (TTS)
handed to tts-dev.

Credential posture (G6): fresh capped LiteLLM key open-webui-esh
(all-proxy-models, $50/1mo budget) rather than inheriting the uncapped
lobe-chat-esh key; signup locked off after admin creation. Secrets
vaulted under esh-docker-vm/open-webui-*.

Note: the API-key toggle env var is ENABLE_API_KEYS (plural); a var
only reaches the container if compose names it in environment:.
lobe-chat is untouched.
2026-08-21 09:52:07 -07:00
vh f01ee28cea memory: gemma4 CoT test on v0.27.1 blocked by config incompatibility (reverted)
Tried serving the MeroMero NVFP4A16 quant on vllm/vllm-openai:v0.27.1 to test the
per-request enable_thinking hypothesis. Couldn't even load it:

  - v0.27.1's stricter transformers raised AmbiguousGlobalPerLayerAttributeError
    on the Gemma-4 config's head_dim (now a per-layer attribute).
  - Setting allow_global_per_layer_attribute_access on text_config downgraded that
    to a warning, but then gemma4.py load_weights asserted:
    "Attempted to load weight (512) into parameter (256)". Gemma-4-31B is
    genuinely heterogeneous -- some layers have head_dim 512, not a uniform 256 --
    so forcing the global value built wrong-shaped parameters. The guard was right.

So the MeroMero quant's config was authored for v0.24.0's Gemma4 loader and cannot
load on v0.27.x without a config migration or a re-quant against newer transformers.
The per-request-kwargs hypothesis was never reachable -- the model wouldn't load.

Consequence worth carrying: the eventual gen-seat move to v0.27.2 stable must
re-verify config-compat for any Gemma-4 seat of this vintage.

Fully reverted: config.json restored (flags removed), image back to latest
(v0.24.0), gateway char-rp-reasoning removed, char-rp prose verified. char-rp stays
on v0.24.0; MeroMero CoT remains undelivered. For RP-with-CoT use gen-reasoning, or
re-quant MeroMero against v0.27.x (real work, unproven payoff).
2026-08-21 09:21:25 -07:00
vh 7ebbcec5bb memory: vLLM release status for #51113 — no stable yet; gemma4 CoT is decoupled
Checked upstream. Latest stable is v0.27.1 (Aug 11) and it does NOT contain
#51113 -- the v0.27.0..v0.27.1 compare is only "DSpark Markov heads" plus three
CI commits. The #51113 cherry-pick (khluu, Aug 9, "v0.27.0 cherry picks"
milestone) is staged on the release-0.27 branch but no v0.27.2 stable has been
cut; only v0.27.2rc1 / the pinned nightly carries the fix. So the standing
follow-up (move gen off the nightly) still waits on a v0.27.2 stable cut.

Key decoupling: #51113 fixes the Qwen3.8 MTP + prefix-caching accuracy drop
(#43559). It is irrelevant to Gemma-4 seats, which have no MTP head. So the
meromero/gemma4 CoT test does NOT need the nightly and does NOT need #51113 -- it
can run on the latest stable v0.27.1, which is newer than the seat's current
v0.24.0 and where per-request chat_template_kwargs is expected to work.
2026-08-21 08:37:06 -07:00
vh b84ad888d6 memory: CORRECT the MeroMero-CoT finding — not a hard wall, not MeroMero-specific
My prior entry claimed the gemma4 reasoning parser is process-wide and the CoT
was architecturally blocked. Reading the actual code proves that wrong:

  - Template (chat_template.jinja:347-352): thinking is a PER-REQUEST toggle.
    enable_thinking:false prefills an empty <|channel>thought<channel|> to
    suppress; true omits the prefill so the model can emit a real thought channel.
  - Parser (vllm/reasoning/gemma4_utils.py): splits on <|channel>/<channel|> tag
    presence, "works with or without enable_thinking" -- NOT a process-wide flag.
    The stale compose comment I trusted cited an old parser API (vllm/parser/
    gemma4.py:439) this container doesn't run.

So the mechanism is gemma4-GENERAL (any gemma4 finetune on this template family),
and the two-served-name gen pattern should work. What actually failed the test was
that meromero runs vllm/vllm-openai:latest (v0.24.0), where per-request
chat_template_kwargs.enable_thinking didn't take effect -- whereas the gen seat's
pinned nightly demonstrably applies it. That's a version/plumbing issue, not the
model and not the architecture, and it would hit any gemma4 finetune on that image.

Unverified fix (needs a GPU window): re-serve meromero on the nightly image with no
process default and per-request enable_thinking. Currently reverted to known-good.
2026-08-21 08:25:02 -07:00
vh a260b57974 memory: MeroMero-v2 CoT via vLLM gemma4 parser is not achievable (tried + reverted)
Operator asked to serve MeroMero (char-rp) with reasoning as char-rp-reasoning.
The model genuinely reasons (GRPO-trained with thinking; ships Think/NoThink
SillyTavern presets), but two facts kill the vLLM path:

  - it's byte-identical to the weights we already serve (same zerofata repo,
    chat_template sha 94899c0f matches our on-disk quant), so re-quanting adds
    nothing; and
  - the gemma4 reasoning parser's enable_thinking is PROCESS-WIDE, not per-request.
    The seat's --default-chat-template-kwargs sets the parser state machine; a
    per-request chat_template_kwargs.enable_thinking reaches the template but not
    the parser (unlike the qwen3 parser the gen seat uses). So the two-served-name
    gen/gen-reasoning trick can't work.

Verified empirically: added a char-rp-thinking served-name and removed the process
default; enable_thinking:true per request still produced pure prose, 0
reasoning_content. Per the seat's own comment, a dedicated thinking-on process
dumps all prose into reasoning_content with null content -- no clean split.
MeroMero reasons only client-side in SillyTavern, not through vLLM.

Fully reverted to known-good: single served-name, process default restored,
char-rp prose verified end-to-end. GPU0 both seats healthy, gen untouched.

Kept one change: MEROMERO_GPU_MEM_UTIL 0.52 -> 0.51. 0.52 no longer boots because
orcarouter gen (the GPU0 neighbor) is marginally bigger than the old heresy seat
(free 49.02 < needed 49.38 GiB); 0.51 fits at KV 2.00x @ 262K.

For real RP-with-CoT: gen-reasoning (orcarouter, uncensored, thinks) or a dedicated
Qwen-based RP-thinking seat, which needs a GPU slot.
2026-08-21 08:20:57 -07:00
vh 3d30a6530b feat(lobe-chat): pass every chat-capable model through the picker
Operator: "pass everything through, lobe is a test surface for me." The picker
goes from 11 curated seats to all 25 chat-capable models the gateway serves,
paid passthroughs included.

Membership is derived from LiteLLM's declared `mode` rather than by taste:
chat (15) and completion (1) are in, and the nine GLM/frontier entries whose
mode is unset are chat models in practice. Out: audio_speech (ext-tts, tts-1,
tts-1-hd, gpt-4o-mini-tts), embedding (qwen3-embedding) and rerank (reranker,
reranker-a3-bge-v2-m3) — seven models that cannot answer a chat request at all,
so listing them would recreate the visible-but-dead entry this list just got
fixed for.

Every candidate was probed live from inside the container before being pinned,
which corrected an earlier claim in this file. char-rp and char-rp-reasoning
are NOT retired: they are configured and their upstream seat (ana-ml2:8016) is
refusing connections while under maintenance, which is a 500, not a 400. Both
are retained deliberately — dropping a name because its seat is bouncing makes
the list rot in the other direction. Only char-rp-fable is genuinely gone (400,
absent from model_info). The comment now spells out the 400-vs-500 distinction
so the next editor does not repeat the mistake.

Also corrects the credential-posture header, which still described the key as
scoped to free local models and cited the glm/kimi rejection as current
verification. The key now carries the all-proxy-models access group with no
budget ceiling, so that block had become a false security claim in the most
load-bearing comment in the file.
2026-08-21 08:11:17 -07:00
vh 303fb7a5aa feat(lobe-chat): add the sec seats to the picker, drop two retired ones
Two independent gates kept the new `sec` family out of Lobe, and only one of
them was visible from the symptom.

The picker never auto-discovers. `OPENAI_MODEL_LIST=-all,+<names>` clears
Lobe's built-in OpenAI catalogue and re-adds one model per `+name`, so anything
added to LiteLLM stays invisible until this list is edited and the container
bounced. That pin is deliberate — an unpinned picker offers models that fail on
click — but it means the list rots in both directions, and it had:

- `sec` / `sec-reasoning` missing (hosted_vllm/mog-sec-27b{,-thinking} on
  ana-ml2:8019, added to config.yaml earlier today), and
- `char-rp-reasoning` / `char-rp-fable` still listed after being retired
  upstream, i.e. two picker entries that 400 on click. Verified: a call to
  char-rp-fable now returns 400 Bad Request.

The list is now curated to live, chat-capable, free-local seats — eleven, each
round-tripped through the container after the bounce. The paid family stays out
deliberately; that is now a picker decision rather than a key one.

Which is the other half of this commit: the `lobe-chat-esh` key is no longer
scoped to free local models. On the operator's instruction infra-ops swapped its
explicit array for the `all-proxy-models` access group, so it now reaches the
paid passthroughs with `max_budget: None`. The README documented the old posture
as current, which made it a security claim that was no longer true; it now
carries the change, what it costs, and the fact that the picker is the only
remaining gate.
2026-08-21 08:04:10 -07:00
vh 564f5ae4f6 chore(litellm): rename mog-sec aliases to sec / sec-reasoning
Operator's call: the pen-test seat is reached as `sec` (non-thinking) and
`sec-reasoning` (thinking). Backend and served-model-names (mog-sec-27b[-thinking]
on :8019) are unchanged; only the gateway alias name changes. Old mog-sec /
mog-sec-reasoning now 404.
2026-08-21 07:50:10 -07:00
vh 36c173c6a1 feat(mog-sec): quant + serve M.O.G.-SEC pen-test seat; PPL on gen; retire fable
Autonomous overnight run under the operator's full-autonomy grant. End state:
fleet up, gen seat untouched, a new verified pen-test seat serving where fable was.

PPL on the orcarouter gen seat (fable downed to free GPU1 for a nospec probe,
probe torn down after): mean 7.07 / median 5.76, within noise of heresy 6.910 /
5.625 and identical to our recipe's usual 7.059. The gen-seat search is settled.

M.O.G.-SEC: chose Blackfrost-Research/M.O.G.-SEC-27B-1M-CTX-BF16 (rev deede677)
over the pre-made ModelOpt NVFP4, which was disqualified on W4A4 4-bit activations
(the AEON degradation mode, catastrophic on a 1M-context model), zero MTP tensors,
and ModelOpt format. Pulled, format-screened (P(<think>) 1.11e-05, clean), quanted
in-house to mixed NVFP4+FP8 (23.4 GB, MTP + vision preserved), and served in the
retired fable slot.

  stacks/mog-sec        ana-ml2 GPU1 :8019, KV 418,218 tok / 1.60x @ 262K
  aliases               mog-sec (non-thinking), mog-sec-reasoning (thinking)
  gates                 surface 6/6, MTP 55.3%, format 0/15 leak, vision 7/3/1,
                        capability 4/4 (delivers offensive-security content)

Served at native 262K, NOT the card's 1M -- the 1M needs YaRN (absent from the
weights' config) plus the SGLang/DFlash2 path the repo ships a deployment kit for,
neither of which is our vLLM surface. A real 1M seat is a separate SGLang project.

Retired char-rp-reasoning + char-rp-fable (zero traffic, pointed at the downed
fable :8019; now 404 cleanly, not repointed -- a security model is not an RP model).
char-rp (meromero) untouched. Vision preprocessor built from the model's own
image_processor block, same trick as the MeroMero seat.

GPU0 seats (gen, meromero) were untouched and healthy throughout. The quant ran in
GPU1 free space with no production seat stopped except fable, which was replaced.
2026-08-21 02:47:18 -07:00
vh e4576f0989 test(gen-seat): PPL on orcarouter — mean 7.07 / median 5.76, within noise of heresy
Measured against a spec-decode-free probe on GPU1 (fable downed to free the VRAM,
probe torn down after). eval_quality.py aborts PPL under --speculative-config, so
a nospec probe is the only way to read it.

  orcarouter  mean 7.0655  median 5.758
  heresy      mean 6.910   median 5.625   (+2.2% mean)
  our recipe's usual mixed-quant PPL: 7.059 -- orcarouter is identical to it

So orcarouter matches heresy on fidelity and wins on every other axis: MTP
acceptance 58.4% vs 47.2%, zero think-leak, vision 7/8. The gen-seat search that
ran through Cold-Fusion, heresy, and preetpatel is settled on orcarouter.
2026-08-21 02:06:52 -07:00
vh ce09ac4fa6 test(gen-seat): add a real vision battery — orcarouter scores 7/8
surface_test.py's vision check is one image and one word. It proves the tower
loads; it does not prove the tower works. This battery uses generated images with
known ground truth so every answer is objectively gradeable.

Against orcarouter NVFP4-mixed on the `gen` alias:

  T1  OCR, 5 lines incl. one at 18px          PASS  all 5 exact
  T2  counting + attribute binding            PASS  7 circles / 3 triangles / 1 square
  T3  bar chart, 6 values + max/min           PASS  6/6 exact
  T4b occlusion, star behind rectangle        PASS
  T4c aspect ratio of a 160x140 rectangle     FAIL  called it taller than wide
  T5  two images, which has text              PASS
  T6  four images, the seat's cap             PASS  all four named
  T7  five images, one over the cap           PASS  rejected with HTTP 400

No <think> leak on any vision call.

The single miss is fine-grained relative-dimension estimation on a near-square
shape, and it reproduced across two runs (the longer T4 called the same rectangle
"equal width and height"). Counting, OCR, chart values and occlusion ordering are
all solid, so this is a precise-geometry weakness, not a broken tower. Recorded so
nobody builds a feature on this model judging relative sizes.

T7 earns its place separately: it confirms the per-prompt image cap fails loudly
with a 400 rather than silently dropping the extra image.
2026-08-21 01:52:33 -07:00
vh f85d102813 test(gen-seat): orcarouter passes every gate — in-band MTP head delivers +11 points
Gates run against the live seat while the operator tested in parallel.

  <think> leak (n=30, 4 prompt types + multi-turn)   0/30, 0 empty
  MTP acceptance                                     58.4% @ 117.11 tok/s median
  surface                                            6/6
  abliteration survival                              4/4 compliance
  deterministic quality gens                         coherent and correct
  PPL                                                still blocked

For scale on the leak gate, the abandoned h300 build scored 8/30 on this exact
instrument, and its abliteration-survival samples had 2 of 4 open with
"<think>Ok, let's figure this out:". Orcarouter has none.

The headline is MTP acceptance. 58.4% against heresy's byte-identical base head
at 47.2% is +11 points, and it sits level with our own in-band L35 at 59.1%. That
is the additive in-band-vs-graft delta the entire Cold-Fusion experiment was built
to measure and never cleanly delivered -- orcarouter handed it over for free
because the author had already done the Robinson edit on the head.

Surface 6/6 covers plain chat, vision, tool calling, the thinking split, a
36,042-token long-context retrieval, and streaming.

PPL remains blocked on a spec-decode-free probe seat: it needs ~22 GB and GPU1 has
~16 GB free. Comparison target is heresy at 6.910.
2026-08-21 01:48:09 -07:00
vh ba53c30192 feat(gen-seat): cut over to orcarouter — live, 7/7 aliases, vision intact, no think-leak
Operator directive was seat-first so he can test while the gates run.

GEN_MODEL -> /tank/aimodels/qwen38-27b-orcarouter-nvfp4-mixed. Healthy in ~4 min.
KV pool 401,550 tok / 1.53x. MTP drafter detected and wired, sharing embedding and
lm_head with the target. 7/7 gateway aliases 200. Vision correct on the shape
probe. Live decode observed at 102-133 tok/s under load.

Critically, <think> does not appear in the top-20 first tokens on the live seat.
That is the Cold-Fusion failure mode measured absent in production, matching the
pre-quant screen on the bf16 (1.23e-06, rank 52).

Rollback is one line to .env.bak-heresy-restored-20260821.

Full gates were still running when this landed; PPL stays blocked on a
spec-decode-free probe seat, which needs ~22 GB against GPU1's ~16 GB free.
2026-08-21 01:47:28 -07:00
vh c8f128bdff feat(gen-seat): quant orcarouter — its MTP head is already Robinson-abliterated in-band
Pulled orcarouter/Qwen3.8-27B-Uncensored at rev 9878936b (55.5 GB, gated, our
token has access) and built /tank/aimodels/qwen38-27b-orcarouter-nvfp4-mixed
(23.4 GB, mixed NVFP4+FP8). Verified, not yet cut over.

The operator asked whether we could apply the Robinson path to the MTP head. We
cannot, because the author already did. compare_mtp_head.py against the verbatim
base graft: 13 of 15 tensors byte-identical, exactly 2 differ --
mtp.layers.0.self_attn.o_proj.weight and mtp.layers.0.mlp.down_proj.weight, which
are precisely the two residual writers our own abliterate.py targets
(EXPECT_MTP_WRITERS = 2).

Reverse-engineered the edit from the weights alone (mtp_delta.py, added here):

  sigma2/sigma1 = 0.0164 on BOTH tensors    rank-1, a single-direction projection
  |cos| between the two recovered dirs = 1.0000   ONE shared direction
  ||delta||/||W|| = 1.42% and 1.41%         a gentle, consistent projection
  sink energy dim 3994 = 0.0000%            sink-clean; Heretic's was 6.18%

That is the Robinson in-band MTP abliteration, already applied, with a direction
that passes our sink screen outright. Nothing to do but preserve it, and the quant
carries it byte-identically. This is the configuration the entire Cold-Fusion
experiment was designed to test and never cleanly delivered.

The new format screen paid for itself on its first real use: think_prior.py on the
bf16 BEFORE any GPU time gave P(<think>) = 1.23e-06 at rank 52, against
Cold-Fusion stock 0.1850 and h300 0.2216. Roughly 150,000x cleaner.

Two durable findings about the pipeline itself:

The quant needs ~17 GB, not a whole card. It ran entirely in GPU1's spare 16 GB
with ZERO production seats stopped -- the h300 run's "stop BOTH GPU0 seats" was
never necessary, it simply had a free card by coincidence. The first attempt OOM'd
by 2.37 GiB at layer 64 of 65 with 3.57 GiB reserved-but-unallocated, which is
fragmentation, and PYTORCH_CUDA_ALLOC_CONF=expandable_segments:True closed it.

post_quant.py now builds a missing output index from the safetensors headers.
A sub-23 GB quant saves one bare shard with no index, and post_quant needs one;
this has broken three separate rounds and been hand-fixed every time. The header
is read by struct-unpacking the u64 length and parsing the JSON -- never
safe_open, which mmaps the whole 22 GB shard and ENOMEMs on ZFS.

Artifact verified: mixed-precision, 1968 tensors, 15 mtp, 333 visual, re:^mtp.*
present in the ignore list (llm-compressor pruned it as always), preproc restored.
Imatrix deferred per operator; the log confirms the usual uniform-MSE fallback, so
this build stays apples-to-apples with heresy's PPL 6.910.
2026-08-21 01:25:37 -07:00
vh bf65d0254d docs(pfi): evaluate the two gen-seat replacement candidates
preetpatel/Qwen3.8-27B-Uncensored-NVFP4 is disqualified on two independent hard
failures, both read directly off the artifacts via HTTP Range requests against the
safetensors header (about a megabyte, not a 20 GB download):

  - ZERO mtp tensors. The author's recipe.yaml asks to ignore re:.*mtp.*, but the
    written config.json has no mtp ignore entry while re:.*visual.* expanded to 110
    explicit ones. That asymmetry is llm-compressor pruning a pattern that matched
    nothing, i.e. the MTP head was never loaded. Costs roughly half our decode.
  - NVFP4 W4A4, 4-bit activations. Precisely the AEON failure mode: the fidelity
    gradient is W4A4 < W4+FP8 < W4+bf16, W4A4 drove ~15-20% stochastic degeneration,
    and it collapses past ~30k context. The gen seat serves 262K.

orcarouter/Qwen3.8-27B-Uncensored checks out as a quant source: stock-Qwen base
rather than a reasoning-compression finetune, Arditi-style single-direction
abliteration, 15 mtp and 333 visual tensors verified present, chat template
byte-identical to the heresy build we are serving, and the gate is already accepted
on our token.

Also records the author's FP8 release as a noted-but-not-recommended third option:
far more traction, but 30.9 GB against NVFP4's 22 GB, and on a zero-sum GPU0 that
+9 GB comes out of the KV pool and breaks 262K context.

And states the imatrix constraint plainly. Our recipe has always requested
imatrix_mse and always silently fallen back to uniform MSE; playbook 3.13 warns
against assuming an imatrix would help before verifying llm-compressor can consume
external importance data at all. The W4A16 portions are data-free by construction
and cannot use it regardless.
2026-08-21 00:50:57 -07:00
vh 48410a6a90 chore(coldfusion-abliteration): delete the Cold-Fusion bf16 weights — ~154 GB reclaimed
Operator directive following the decision to abandon the Cold-Fusion base.
Removed with explicit literal paths, one at a time:

  qwen38-27b-coldfusion-bf16                  stock DavidAU base
  qwen38-27b-coldfusion-abliterated-L35-bf16  Robinson L35
  qwen38-27b-coldfusion-h300-mtp-bf16         Heretic-300 + MTP graft
  qwen38-27b-coldfusion-heretic300-bf16       raw Heretic export

Verified against ZFS used, not df: 4.48T -> 4.33T, ~154 GB. No snapshots were
holding the blocks, all four paths confirmed gone, gen seat unaffected.

The last two were hardlink twins -- same inode, links=2, because the MTP graft
hardlinked every unchanged shard -- so deleting only one would have freed
nothing. `du` across several paths in a single invocation dedupes hardlinks and
reported heretic300-bf16 as 2.5K, which would have made a size estimate wrong in
both directions. Check `stat -c %h` before sizing a delete.

Kept deliberately, so the research record outlives the weights:

  qwen38-27b-coldfusion-bf16.PROVENANCE.txt   pinned HF revision 9c44193f
  coldfusion-abliteration/                    harness, 300-trial Optuna
                                              journal, catatonia-T260.json

With those two, every deleted build is reproducible: re-pull stock at the pin and
replay the winning config.

Held back pending an explicit call: the two NVFP4 quants, h300-nvfp4-mixed (the
only remaining servable copy of the Heretic-300 result) and L35-nvfp4-mixed. The
directive named bf16 weights; these are quants, and there is no storage pressure
arguing for haste at 4.26T free.
2026-08-21 00:45:54 -07:00
vh 37e9e1ca7f revert(gen-seat): abandon Cold-Fusion, roll back to heresy — the leak is in the base
Operator directive, given before the result was in: if it's the base, abandon
h300 and the base too. The dose-response said base (18.5% of 22.2%), so it fired.

Live gen seat is /tank/aimodels/qwen38-27b-heresy-nvfp4-mixed again, restored
from .env.bak-coldfusion-L35-20260820. The h300 env is preserved at
.env.bak-h300-abandoned-20260821.

The clincher, same probe pointed at heresy:

  Cold-Fusion stock          P(<think>) 0.1850
  Cold-Fusion L35                       0.2048
  Cold-Fusion h300                      0.2216
  heresy (restored)          not in the top 20, <0.002

A >100x gap between the families, which is why no rollback inside Cold-Fusion
would have helped -- stock and L35 leak at nearly the h300 rate.

Verified after rollback: 0/30 leaks and 0 empty on the same instrument that
scored h300 at 8/30, with the EXISTING enable_thinking:false config; KV pool
403,065 tok / 1.54x, heresy's exact documented baseline; 7/7 aliases; vision
intact. No LiteLLM change was needed, so the chat_template_kwargs fix is left
unapplied -- it worked, but it was a workaround for a base we no longer serve.

Cost, stated plainly: 8/100 refusals becomes 29/100, a 3.6x regression on the
axis the whole Heretic-300 run existed to move. Accepted deliberately.

What carries forward is the methodology, none of which lived in the Cold-Fusion
weights: direction_scope=0 beating per-layer on a merged base, aggression not
being the lever, PR #317 silently dropping the MTP head on save, the MPOA and
sink-screen reasoning, the graft/KL/catatonia/export harnesses, and the finding
that a pristine MTP graft accepts as well as an in-band edit.

New acceptance gate earned here: run think_prior.py on a candidate's STOCK
weights before committing GPU time. It is a ~10s CPU measurement and it would
have disqualified Cold-Fusion before the 300-trial study ever started. Heretic's
objective has no format-compliance term at all -- the same blindness that removed
the self-harm guardrail.

Nothing deleted. Every Cold-Fusion artifact, the 300-trial Optuna journal and
catatonia-T260.json remain on disk. Abandon means stop serving, not rm.
2026-08-21 00:40:23 -07:00
vh 5ee2325820 feat(coldfusion-abliteration): dose-response settles the <think> leak — base 83%, our abliteration 17%
Answers "how likely is it that our abliteration caused this?" with a measurement
instead of a prior. P(<think>) at the first generated token, template rendered
enable_thinking=false so the prompt already carries a CLOSED think pair -- the
exact event behind the leak. Raw softmax, bf16, CPU-only, one process per model.
Deterministic: stock reproduced to 17 significant figures across two runs.

  coldfusion-bf16                  none (stock)          0.1850   rank 3
  coldfusion-abliterated-L35-bf16  Robinson L35, mild    0.2048   rank 2
  coldfusion-h300-mtp-bf16         Heretic-300, heavy    0.2216   rank 2

The stock, untouched base already puts 18.5% of first-token mass on opening a
think block the template had closed. Abliteration adds a real, monotonic,
dose-dependent +3.7 points -- a nudge on a pre-existing base, not the cause.
Cold-Fusion is a reasoning-token-compression finetune, i.e. a model trained to
think briefly, and the leak's text shape agrees: a compact correct trace with a
trained transition marker, which is trained behavior rather than damage.

This changes the options. Rolling back to L35 or stock does NOT fix the leak --
at 18.5% under temp 0.7 / top_p 0.8 they leak at nearly the h300 rate. Only
leaving the Cold-Fusion family escapes it, at the cost of the 8/100 refusal
result. The chat_template_kwargs fix is the correct lever.

Durable methodology point: a forward-KL budget cannot catch this. Heretic
minimizes forward KL(stock||abliterated), which is near-blind to the model
putting new mass on tokens stock barely used -- that is reverse KL's job, and we
measured exactly that asymmetry on L35 (reverse 1.43 vs forward 0.70). h300's KL
of 0.0136 is not evidence of innocence. For any "did the abliteration break
behavior X" question, measure P(token) directly.

Ran CPU-only deliberately: 96 EPYC cores and 265 GB of RAM make a 27B forward
pass cheap, so this cost no GPU window and no seat downtime, where the obvious
route was stopping both GPU0 seats.

Also normalizes two more abliteration output dirs from root-owned 0600 to
llmuser 0664. The unreadable-model failure surfaces as FileNotFoundError rather
than a permission error, which is worth knowing before it wastes a run.
2026-08-21 00:22:11 -07:00
vh 91f4cf22e1 fix(gen-seat): diagnose the unterminated-<think> leak — model defect, temp-triggered
Operator reported the new Heretic-300 gen seat "sends CoT but never completes
the turn" through Lobe. Diagnosed; not yet fixed (the fix changes gen's
semantics, so it is the operator's call).

The Qwen3.8 chat template appends a pre-closed <think>\n\n</think>\n\n when
enable_thinking is false. The h300 model opens a fresh <think> anyway and never
closes it. Because the prompt already closed the block, vLLM's qwen3 reasoning
parser is not in reasoning state, so the tag passes through as ordinary text --
reasoning_content empty, reasoning_tokens 0, and the whole reasoning-plus-answer
blob lands in content. Lobe then correctly treats the unterminated tag as
still-thinking and renders no answer. The client and the serving stack are both
behaving correctly; the model is not.

The trigger is TEMPERATURE, not presence_penalty (n=12 per arm):

  temp 0.7, pp 1.5  (current gen)   4/12
  temp 0.7, pp 0.0                  4/12
  temp 0.7, pp 0.5                  3/12
  temp 0,   pp 1.5                  0/12

That falsifies the standing hypothesis, recorded in the litellm config comment
and in the operator's own 2026-08-16 note, that presence_penalty 1.5 is the
first dial to move. It is not this bug's cause.

It also explains the blast radius: only the two temp-0.7 aliases leak, `gen`
and `summarizer-large`. summarizer, classifier, image-judge and qwen-image-bench
all run at temp 0 and are clean, so nevermore's summarizer path is unaffected.

Candidate fix, validated n=30 over 4 prompt types plus a 3-turn conversation:
chat_template_kwargs {enable_thinking: true, reasoning_effort: low} takes 8/30
leaks to 0/30, at ~+27% completion tokens and a ~3% empty-content residual.

The tell appears in eval_coldfusion_h300.json and in none of the aeon, heresy,
mixed or w4a16 evals, so it is new with this build -- but L35 was never evaled,
so this does not separate a Cold-Fusion base trait from a Heretic-300
abliteration artifact.

Reproducers and the full method land in bench/think-leak/. Note in particular
that the 7/7 alias smoke test run at cutover structurally could not catch this:
trivial prompts never invite reasoning, so they never sample the leaking token.
2026-08-21 00:12:30 -07:00
vh 1d3b80169a fix(nevermore): repoint onto live aliases — its LLM pass had been dead 8 days
nevermore pinned LLAMA_SWAP_MODEL=granite-4.1-8b, an alias retired with the
granite seat on 2026-08-12. Every summarization call since then failed: 67
consecutive status=failure rows, 0 tokens, twice daily, entirely silently. The
briefing had been rendering with no LLM pass at all. Nothing alerts on
status=failure in the spend logs, so it took an unrelated question about
reranker VRAM to surface it.

It was also pinned to NEVERMORE_RERANK_MODEL=qwen3-reranker -- the incumbent
Brokkr R43 measured harming 80/90 fleet queries -- and was its ONLY caller,
while the production `reranker` alias sat at 0 calls for 4 days. The R43
cutover repointed the alias but never moved the consumer.

  nevermore/.env  LLAMA_SWAP_MODEL       granite-4.1-8b -> summarizer
                  NEVERMORE_RERANK_MODEL qwen3-reranker -> reranker
                  (server-only; .env is excluded from the mirror both ways)

Verified against nevermore's exact call shape: summarizer returns clean content
with 0 reasoning chars at temperature 0.2 / max_tokens 4000; reranker scores
0.95 on-topic vs ~1e-5 off-topic; embedding returns dim-1024.

Retired alongside it:

  vllm-rerank    :8002  Qwen3-Reranker-0.6B + the qwen3-reranker alias
  vllm-rerank-a4 :8014  gte-reranker-modernbert + its alias
  vllm-granite   :8004  Exited 8 days, dead service block

and vllm-rerank-a3 was promoted from a throwaway `docker run` into this stack
(the selection ledger's own open follow-up). Healthy in 55s. It keeps the
bake-off arm name so the ledger, memory and R43 record stay valid.

VLLM_VERSION is pinned latest -> v0.24.0. Every service in the stack shares that
one variable, so a bare `compose up -d` could have silently upgraded all of
them at once; both tags resolved to the same local image (4091d5593f77), so the
pin changed nothing at runtime.

GPU1 is down to 81,448 of 97,887 MiB -- 13.9 GB reclaimed tonight.

Correction: an earlier claim that A4 had no gateway alias was wrong. It did.
LiteLLM serves both config-defined and DB-defined models -- live showed 32
against config.yaml's 26 -- and grepping the file cannot see the difference.
/v1/models and /model/info (which flags db_model) are the ground truth. DB
models delete hot via POST /model/delete with no restart.

Left alone: reranker-a3-bge-v2-m3, a zero-call duplicate of `reranker` on the
same backend. It is Brokkr's cutover-verification handle -- redundant rather
than broken, and another agent's tooling is not mine to delete unilaterally.
2026-08-20 23:50:53 -07:00
vh b990951d80 chore(vllm): retire LFM2.5-2.6B permanently; audit finds nevermore on the harmful reranker
Operator directive: lfm2.5-2.6b goes down permanently.

  - stacks/vllm/compose.yaml   vllm-lfm25 service removed (replaced by a
                               tombstone comment), pushed live to ana-ml2
  - ana-ml2                    container docker rm -f'd, 8,721 MiB freed on GPU1
                               (95,388 -> 86,667 of 97,887)
  - litellm config             lfm2.5-2.6b alias deleted, live + canonical,
                               28 -> 27 models

It was an EVAL-ONLY bake-off seat against granite-4.1-8b that never received
the operator ruling it was pending; the comparator was retired from the roster
on 2026-08-15; it was deliberately never wired into any default or fallback
routing chain; and spend logs show 0 calls in the 4-day window to 2026-08-21.
Weights stay in the shared HF cache -- nothing deleted from disk.

The gateway restart that makes the alias deletion take effect is HELD so it can
batch with a pending reranker change. Until then the name is still routable
in-memory and will error against a dead backend.

Auditing the three reranker seats while answering "why do we have three" turned
up a real problem. The design is one production, one rollback, one fallback --
but the traffic is backwards:

  :8013 A3 bge-v2-m3      PRODUCTION, backs `reranker`     0 calls / 4 days
  :8002 Qwen3-Reranker    RETIRED incumbent, rollback only 7 calls, 12-hourly
  :8014 A4 gte-modernbert "fallback"                       no alias at all

nevermore is hard-wired to the incumbent by name (NEVERMORE_RERANK_MODEL=
qwen3-reranker), so the R43 cutover never moved it -- the cutover repointed the
`reranker` alias and correctly left `qwen3-reranker` naming the Qwen model.
Brokkr R43 measured that model harming 80/90 fleet queries, so nevermore's
twice-daily rerank pass is likely degrading its own briefing.

Fix is one line in nevermore's .env plus a nevermore restart, and it must land
before :8002 is retired. Recorded in persistent-memory with the A4 alias also
noted as absent (global CLAUDE.md names reranker-a4-gte-modernbert; it does not
exist).
2026-08-20 23:23:22 -07:00
vh e3ce713f7f feat(gen-seat): cut over to Heretic-300 — 7/7 aliases, vision intact, MTP 59.7%
Live GEN_MODEL is now qwen38-27b-coldfusion-h300-nvfp4-mixed (ana-ml2 GPU0
:8015). Served-name left unchanged so all 7 LiteLLM aliases route without a
gateway edit.

Verification:
  KV pool            401,550 tok / 1.53x   (baseline 403k / 1.54x)
  LiteLLM aliases    7/7 green
  vision             3/3 shapes, colour+form+position correct
  MTP acceptance     59.7% median @ 118.37 tok/s
  quality gens       4/4 correct
  abliteration       4/4 compliance
  PPL                NOT measured (see below)

The roadmap predicted ~47% acceptance for a pristine MTP graft versus L35's
59.1% in-band edit. Measured 59.7% on the same harness: there is no acceptance
penalty, which removes the throughput argument for reimplementing MPOA.

A single long-prose generation read 47.5% off the same counters -- below the
8-run minimum of 49.0% -- and would have "confirmed" the prediction by
coincidence. Acceptance must be read from quickbench.py, never one sample.

PPL is blocked on VRAM, not on the model: eval_quality.py aborts with
"prompt_logprobs look uniform" under --speculative-config, and the probe-seat
workaround needs ~22 GB while both cards sit at ~96% committed.

Also normalizes the quant dir from root:0600 to llmuser:llmuser 0664 to match
every other model dir, and records that config.json sha256 is byte-identical
across the h300 and L35 quants and is therefore useless for confirming which
weights are mounted (mtime and a head-hash are the discriminating views).

Rollback is one line to .env.bak-pre-h300-20260820.
2026-08-20 23:13:15 -07:00
vh 407ca017ae memory: snapshot — Heretic-300 built, quantized and verified; gen-seat cutover is the next step
8/100 refusals at KL 0.0136, hand-verified coherent, beating the absolute-heresy
bar 3.6x. NVFP4 quant complete: 21 GB, 1968 tensors, MTP head grafted back after
PR #317 dropped it, and re:^mtp.* re-injected into quantization_config.ignore
after llm-compressor pruned it. Self-harm guardrail is gone on this build and is
the operator's own next work item; the four-dwarf panel is stood down.
2026-08-20 22:54:32 -07:00
vh f90a5025de feat(coldfusion-abliteration): Heretic-300 — 8/100 refusals at KL 0.0136, beats the heresy bar 3.6x
Ran Heretic v1.4.0's 300-trial TPE search on Cold-Fusion. Best trial scores
8/100 refusals at KL 0.0136 against a 98/100 base, versus absolute-heresy at
29/100 and our hand-tuned Robinson L35 at 72/100 / KL 0.0116 — i.e. 64 fewer
refusals for the same damage. Hand-verified coherent: correct arithmetic with
shown working, clean code, 66-167 word prose across nine probes.

Durable findings:

- direction_scope=0 (single shared direction) is decisive on this merged base:
  n=129, best 8/100. Per-layer directions n=131 never beat 52/100 despite a
  better median. Points against the multi-direction intuition for a diffuse
  direction (our two-template |cos| is 0.62 vs Robinson's 0.99 on stock).
- Aggression is not the lever. r(KL, refusals) = -0.561 over 261 trials; the
  KL<0.02 band contains both the worst results (median 87/100) and the single
  best. A KL 0.3554 trial scored worse than one at 0.0193.
- PR #317 confirmed: Heretic silently drops the MTP head on save. Source 1199
  tensors -> export 1184, all 15 mtp.* gone, vision 333/333 intact, exit 0, no
  warning. This is also why absolute-heresy ships a byte-identical MTP head —
  a bug, not a design choice. Always diff tensor keys after a Heretic export.
- Heretic's recovered direction carries 6.18% of its energy in sink dim 3994,
  versus 0.094% for our L35 and 1.97% for the L39 we rejected as brick-inducing.
  It survives that only because of magnitude-preserving ablation
  (row_normalization=FULL); our plain projection has no such protection, so the
  sink screen correctly refused the in-band MTP graft. Same direction, different
  operation. MPOA is the prerequisite for in-band MTP on a Heretic trunk.
- Heretic's edit is recoverable from weights: delta is rank-1 (s2/s1 ~ 0.010),
  SVD gives the direction, norms give per-layer weights (1.08 -> 1.34, i.e.
  over-projection). Cross-layer |cos| agreement 0.9903 independently confirms
  the single-direction result.

New tooling in services/coldfusion-abliteration/:
  kl_divergence.py    first-token KL, class-split, zero noise floor
  catatonia_gate.py   12 probes x 220 tokens, prints every completion
  heretic_export.py   PTY driver; selects by measured value, never by menu
                      position — Heretic's resume prompt puts "delete the
                      checkpoint and all results" one arrow-key from the target
  graft_mtp.py        recovers the trunk direction by SVD; --pristine for the
                      safe path when the sink screen refuses

Also adds quant playbook 3.13: the NVFP4 recipe sets observer="imatrix_mse" but
llm-compressor has always silently fallen back to uniform MSE for want of
importance data — on this build and on the incumbent. Existing A/B comparisons
stay valid since every build shares the fallback. Parked as id 42.

Guardrail note: this build has lost the self-harm guardrail that the Robinson
L35 build retained. Restoration is the operator's own work item.
2026-08-20 22:51:56 -07:00
vh 78484ac87d memory: GPU0 seat boot order is part of the state — restore rule + KV-pool baselines
vLLM sizes --gpu-memory-utilization against total VRAM but gates startup on free
VRAM, so the GPU0 pair coexists only in its original boot order. Records the
restore sequence (meromero to healthy first, then gen), the observed-not-slept
rule, and the KV-pool baselines to verify a restore against — nvidia-smi used-MiB
is the wrong check, it swings ~7 GB on allocator slack at identical capacity.
2026-08-20 13:09:21 -07:00
vh a9d73dad41 fix(coldfusion-abliteration): GPU0 seat restore order is load-bearing — correct the claim and the runbook
Restoring the two GPU0 seats with `start meromero; sleep 10; start gen` put
meromero into a 7-restart crash-loop:

  ValueError: Free memory on device cuda:0 (35.3/94.97 GiB) on startup is less
  than desired GPU memory utilization (0.52, 49.38 GiB).

The previous commit's README claimed restore order "is not actually load-bearing"
on the grounds that both seats pass --gpu-memory-utilization as a fraction of
total VRAM. That is half right and the wrong half mattered: the fraction sets the
target, but vLLM gates startup on FREE VRAM and refuses to start unless the whole
target is available. GPU0 runs at ~96.4/97.9 GB with roughly 0.4 GiB of slack, so
the seats coexist only in the order they were originally brought up, and meromero
is the one that does not fit in the remainder. The pre-existing auto-memory note
("gen takes a fraction of free VRAM at startup and will starve meromero") was
pointing at the real effect.

Also: "first" means healthy, not ten seconds earlier. A sleep 10 against a
two-to-three minute weight load is simultaneity, not ordering — gate on observed
state.

Recovery applied: stop gen, wait for meromero healthy, start gen. Verified
against the pre-window baseline rather than against "both green":

  gen KV       14.36 GiB / 403,065 tok / 1.54x  ->  14.34 GiB / 401,550 tok / 1.53x
  meromero KV  542,202 tok                      ->  542,202 tok
  RestartCount 0 on both; summarizer smoke-tested through LiteLLM

Note for the next reader: raw nvidia-smi used-MiB is the wrong check here. It
reads 89,503 now vs 96,376 before, which looks like a 6.9 GB regression and is
allocator slack — serving capacity is unchanged. The anomalous boots were the
high ones (34.95 GiB KV), where gen came up on an empty card mid-window.
2026-08-20 13:08:56 -07:00
vh 1b3fb270e7 feat(coldfusion-abliteration): first-token KL measured — 28.4x selectivity, harmless median 0.0211
Adds `kl_divergence.py`: first-token KL(stock || abliterated) over the full
248,320-token vocabulary, bf16 vs bf16, scored separately for held-out harmless
and reserved-harmful prompts.

Result (L35, 256 harmless / 104 harmful, answer mode):

  harmless  median 0.0211  mean 0.0364  top-1 agreement 89.8%
  harmful   median 0.5996  mean 0.6992  top-1 agreement 55.8%
  selectivity 28.4x (72.8x in think mode)

Self-KL noise floor is exactly 0.0, and all 720 per-prompt values are
bit-identical between a single-process and a two-process run, so the figures are
signal rather than bf16 jitter. Reverse KL on harmful/answer is 1.43 vs forward
0.70 — the mass-where-stock-had-none asymmetry expected of a refusal-direction
removal. Against the Heretic reference figures (0.1191 prior seat, 0.0759 the
live absolute-heresy seat) this is materially gentler, but those are the other
tool's optimizer output on a different base with its own harmless set and
template — order-of-magnitude, not head-to-head. KL remains a fidelity number;
the viability gate is still MTP acceptance (59.1%).

Method notes:
- Prompt classes are reported separately by design. A single averaged KL over a
  mixed corpus is close to meaningless, since the metric is meant to be large on
  harmful prompts and small on benign ones; the ratio carries the information.
- The harmless evaluation set is drawn from the alpaca pool minus calibration's
  own draw, reconstructed by replaying that draw rather than remembered, and
  asserted disjoint on text. The harmful set is the reserved test split.
- `render` is imported from abliterate.py rather than copied, so the measurement
  cannot drift from the rendering the direction was captured against.
- Batch size 1 with logits_to_keep=1: no padding semantics, ~0.6 MB of logits.

Three corrections to the runbook, each of which cost time:
- "bf16 is 50 GB, only gen must go" was 50.10 GiB mislabelled. Text-only weights
  are 51,300 MiB; freeing either GPU0 seat alone leaves ~50,933 MiB. Both must
  stop. VRAM is now sized from the safetensors headers at run time.
- A 27B model cannot be released in-process: `del` + gc + empty_cache left free
  VRAM at 45,287 MiB, and so did confining the model to an inner frame that
  exits. Only process exit returned the card (96,689 MiB). The first run
  completed only because the allocator hit OOM, collected, and retried. Each
  model now gets its own process, handing log-probs to disk between stages.
- The residency gate read hf_device_map, which transformers leaves empty when the
  model fits on one device — it reported "(unsharded)" whether or not anything
  was wrong, so it could never fail. It now reads parameter devices directly.

Model-agnostic lessons promoted to the quant playbook (new 3.12).
2026-08-20 13:00:39 -07:00
vh 8c354a0e79 memory: snapshot — Cold-Fusion thesis PROVEN (MTP 59.1% > incumbent 47%)
Flip the Cold-Fusion in-flight line to thesis-proven: L35 quantized to mixed
NVFP4, MTP acceptance 59.1% median beats the incumbent Heretic graft's ~47%,
abliteration survives quant. Not cut over — cutover is a separate operator
decision. Records the two env foot-guns hardened (quant venv config-delegation
drift; single-file no-index quant needs a header-built index).
2026-08-20 10:19:09 -07:00
vh 725c8fdf9e feat(coldfusion-abliteration): THESIS PROVEN — in-band-abliterated MTP head accepts 59.1% (beats incumbent ~47%)
Quantized the L35 abliterated model to mixed NVFP4 and measured MTP acceptance
end to end. The experiment's whole premise: Heretic (the incumbent gen seat)
leaves the MTP head a byte-identical base graft its wrapper never loads, whereas
Robinson abliterates the MTP head in-band — the question was whether that in-band
edit survives well enough to spec-decode. It does, better than the graft:

  MTP acceptance  59.1% median (51-65%, 8 cache-busted topics)  vs incumbent ~47%
  decode          118.7 tok/s median (faster; image-confounded, read as not-worse)
  abliteration    survives quant (creative refusals drop, self-harm guardrail
                  intact, coherent)

Output at /tank/aimodels/qwen38-27b-coldfusion-L35-nvfp4-mixed (22.5 GB). Result
JSON in bench/. NOT cut over — the incumbent seat is untouched; making L35 the gen
seat is a separate decision needing the full Stage-3 gate + real multi-turn hold.

Two env foot-guns hardened along the way:
- quant_mixed_nvfp4.py now promotes text_config attention fields
  (num_attention_heads etc.) to the top-level config for the oneshot, then
  restores. transformers 5.10 / llmcompressor 0.12 (this venv moved under us
  since the Aug-15 heresy quant) no longer delegate the top-level lookup, so
  oneshot raised "Cannot determine num_attention_heads". Same "the fight is the
  environment" pattern as the abliteration capture.
- a sub-~23GB quant saves as a single model.safetensors with no index, so the
  post_quant MTP graft needed an index built first — from the safetensors header,
  not safe_open (which mmaps the whole shard and ENOMEMs on ZFS).

post_quant grafted the abliterated MTP (15 tensors, 849 MB) and re-injected
re:^mtp.* into quantization_config.ignore (llm-compressor pruned it again — the
two-rounds-lost 0%-MTP bug, fired and repaired as designed). Probe served on the
pinned nightly (#51113 qwen3_5_mtp fix) to match the live seat's vLLM.
2026-08-20 10:18:48 -07:00
vh c55b1390b7 memory: snapshot — Cold-Fusion abliteration LANDED at layer 35
Flip the in-flight status from 'capture done, calibration expansion next' to
'landed, works'. New detail file captures the three corrected diagnoses (layer-
selection metric, sharding/allocator misdiagnosis, corpus-size falsified) and the
verify/quant work still owed. Supersedes the -capture.md detail file's framing.
2026-08-20 08:47:47 -07:00
vh e9dbc8660b feat(coldfusion-abliteration): abliteration LANDS at layer 35 — separation selector, shard-surgery write, three false diagnoses corrected
The abliterated model works. A/B vs stock on a matched greedy battery: explicit
sexual + graphic torture (the measured stock refusal surface) go from refused to
complied/engaged, held-out AdvBench prompts loosen, the self-harm guardrail
survives, coherence intact — the Robinson design point exactly. Output at
/tank/aimodels/qwen38-27b-coldfusion-abliterated-L35-bf16, verified bitwise:
131/131 targets changed, 333/333 vision byte-identical (delta 0.0), 735/735
others untouched.

Getting there corrected three diagnoses the prior session had backwards.

1. The layer-selection metric was wrong, and that was the whole ballgame. The
   recipe picks the abliteration layer by peak two-template |cos| agreement. On
   this heavily-merged base that metric is anti-correlated with efficacy: its
   argmax (layer 18) is the WORST-separating layer in the window (Cohen's d 5.51
   vs 9.89 at the peak), and abliterating there was a measured behavioral no-op —
   stock and "abliterated" refused all six probes identically. Cause: the two
   renderings end in different generative modes (</think> vs <think>), so |cos|
   scores answer-vs-reason mode, not refusal, and on a merge the mode term
   dominates. Replaced selection with harmful/harmless SEPARATION (Cohen's d /
   AUC of the direction's projection), gated on the sink screen since separation
   and sink-energy both climb with depth. Picks layer 35 (d 9.35, AUC 0.9997,
   sink 0.094%). Agreement is kept as a printed diagnostic.

2. The "bf16 NaNs, use fp32" rule was a misdiagnosis. The NaN was never
   precision — it was multi-GPU sharding (the residual stream zeroes two layers
   past the GPU0->GPU1 boundary; the first capture's layer 22 happened to sit in
   the healthy region, which is why it looked fine) plus
   PYTORCH_CUDA_ALLOC_CONF=expandable_segments (corrupts retained tensors; the
   corruption MOVED between bit-identical forwards, the tell that it was memory
   not math). On one GPU with a plain allocator, bf16 full-64-layer is exactly
   deterministic and coherent, at 50 GB and 4.3x the throughput of the 111 GB
   fp32 it replaced. Both defects are now hard gates (residency exit 8, allocator
   exit 9); capture pins CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0.

3. The corpus-size hypothesis was falsified. 52x more calibration data (8->416,
   mlabonne/harmful_behaviors = the recipe's actual AdvBench split, already on the
   box) moved agreement 0.594->0.624 — nothing. Kept the 416/416 corpus anyway
   (calibration.py); it gives the clean separation signal. The held-out 104-prompt
   test split is reserved and asserted disjoint.

Also: the --out write is now shard-level surgery (reads/writes the 18 safetensors
directly, no model object, no GPU). This is correctness, not thrift —
AutoModelForCausalLM resolves to the TEXT model, so save_pretrained would drop all
333 vision tensors AND skip the MTP head (the in-band MTP edit is the entire point
of the Robinson formula). Neither failure raises. Shard surgery makes vision and
the other 1068 tensors byte-identical by construction.

Batched capture with a dtype-aware equivalence gate; hidden states captured via
forward pre-hook (reading output_hidden_states off the returned object is unsafe
here — buffers get recycled). Sharding/allocator lessons promoted to the
quantization playbook (model-agnostic, sections 3.9-3.11 + superseded table); the
selection-metric lesson added to the recipe doc.

The dead layer-18 no-op checkpoint was removed (52 GB, confirmed identical to
stock). Incumbent gen seat untouched. Full canonical refusal-probe re-profile and
MTP-acceptance-on-quant still owed before this becomes a gen-seat candidate.
2026-08-20 08:46:21 -07:00
vh f714f28195 feat(coldfusion-abliteration): Robinson's real 416-prompt corpus, batched capture, two new gates
The 8/8 calibration set gave |cos| agreement 0.594 against the recipe's 0.9925.
This wires in the corpus the recipe actually used and makes a capture at that
scale affordable.

Corpus (calibration.py, new). The recipe's "held-out train/test split of 416/104
with overlap 0" names mlabonne/harmful_behaviors exactly — 416 train / 104 test,
AdvBench-derived — and it plus harmless_alpaca were already staged in ana-ml2's
HF dataset cache. Read via pyarrow, no datasets dependency, no hub access.
Harmful is order-deterministic (no seed), so a re-capture is reproducible from
the flags alone. The 104-prompt test split is reserved as the held-out
generalization probe and asserted disjoint, so the post-write re-profile cannot
silently become in-distribution. --calib builtin reproduces the legacy run.

Batched capture. 832 prompts x 2 templates = 1664 forwards. Padding is on the
RIGHT: in a causal stack nothing after position t reaches position t, so
trailing pads cannot touch the token read, whereas left padding feeds pads into
the DeltaNet recurrence ahead of the prompt — the path whose torch fallback
already NaN'd once here. Means accumulate in float64; the direction is a
difference of means, which is where cancellation lives on this model.

Gates added, both protecting numbers rather than tensors:
- batch-equivalence: proves padded-batch == single-prompt (rel 1e-3) before
  spending the capture window.
- surgery pre-check: aborts if any of the 131 targets is absent or on the meta
  device. orthogonalize_ edits in place, and an in-place write to an
  accelerate-offloaded tensor is a silent no-op — that ships a half-abliterated
  model past a smoke test.

Fixed a reporting bug: the agreement line printed the global agree.max() beside
the window's argmax layer, so the first capture read as 0.8538 when the real
in-window number was 0.5944. The global peak sits in the early layers where the
dim-3994 massive activation inflates agreement for reasons unrelated to refusal.
Now prints window max, a top-5, and labels the global figure informational.

--max-layer truncates the decoder for capture. Exact, not approximate: a causal
stack's layer-N state cannot depend on layers above N, so any value above the
window top leaves the direction bit-identical while cutting fp32 residency and
forward cost. 46 drops 18 of 64 layers and is what keeps fp32 off CPU offload.
Refused on the write path, where it would emit a truncated checkpoint.

Verified on ana-ml2 without the GPU: dry-run still 1:1 (131 tensors, all
coverage gates), calibration loads 416/416 deterministically with its guards
firing, both --max-layer guards exit as designed. Also confirmed against
chat_template.jinja that enable_thinking=True does resolve reasoning_effort to
xhigh, so the two renderings are the recipe's — template selection was not the
cause of the low agreement.

The re-capture itself is unrun: it needs the fp32 VRAM window and therefore
production seat downtime.
2026-08-20 07:52:37 -07:00
vh 530f1452e8 memory: snapshot — Cold-Fusion abliteration in flight, capture done
Captures the session's real work as the in-flight focus: abliterating
DavidAU Cold-Fusion with the Robinson formula. fp32 capture succeeded
(finite direction, layer 22, sink-clean) but two-template agreement is
0.59 vs Robinson's 0.99 — calibration-set expansion is the next step.

New detail file records the full saga including the transformers/DeltaNet
bf16-NaN fight (fp32 fix, the causal-conv1d kernel gap, the seat-restart
VRAM-greed gotcha). Supersedes the earlier "watch for DavidAU's heretic
build" posture — we abliterate it ourselves.

Auto-archived 4 closed entries (Recent decisions: Booth-3-features 08-05,
worldtree-sdk 07-31; Tried and abandoned: containerd-race 08-03,
mv-rename 08-02) to archival-memory.md; the rest of the over-cap entries
are held back by the <14-day and open-deferred guards. Index 331 -> 327.
2026-08-20 07:36:15 -07:00
vh 7abd3011f7 fix(coldfusion-abliteration): capture works — fp32 forward + finite-gate
The --capture forward NaN'd repeatedly. Root cause: transformers' Qwen3.5
DeltaNet linear-attention needs the causal-conv1d fast-path kernel, which
can't be built here (no nvcc, no prebuilt wheel). Its torch fallback produces
nondeterministic all-NaN hidden states in bf16 -- same 11-token input finite
on one forward, NaN at layer 4 on the next. bf16 and fp32 share exponent
range, so it's precision-driven catastrophic cancellation, not overflow, and
fp32 resolves it.

Fixes:
- --capture now loads fp32 (the write/surgery path stays bf16 -- no forward,
  no NaN). attn_implementation=sdpa pinned.
- A finite-gate aborts on a non-finite direction. The sink screen alone can't
  catch this: nan > threshold is False, so a NaN direction "passed" it and got
  saved silently on the first run.

Capture result (fp32, full GPU): refusal direction finite, unit-normed, layer
22, sink energy 0.0008% in dim 3994 -- clean, not sink-dominated. Saved.

Caveat recorded: two-template |cos| agreement is 0.59 at layer 22 vs Robinson's
0.99, almost certainly the small 8/8 calibration set vs their 416/104. Valid
but noisier than ideal; the README flags expanding the sets before the write.

README documents the three environment gotchas (fp32-for-capture, the seats
that must be stopped for the 110GB fp32 VRAM and how to restore them, and the
fla side-dir PYTHONPATH) so the next run doesn't rediscover them.
2026-08-20 07:20:38 -07:00
vh b56cb0db13 docs(coldfusion-abliteration): dry-run passed — recipe maps 1:1 (131 tensors)
Dry-run against the fully-staged bf16 confirms the Robinson recipe transfers
onto the DavidAU Cold-Fusion checkpoint with no name drift: 1199 tensors, 333
vision preserved, down_proj=64/o_proj=16/linear_out=48/mtp=2/embed=1, coverage
gate 6/6, exactly 131 tensors to orthogonalize. Harness verified-ready; the
destructive write still gates on operator go.
2026-08-20 06:53:59 -07:00
vh 1857a8eb81 feat(coldfusion-abliteration): Robinson-formula harness, gated, staged
Harness to abliterate DavidAU/Qwen3.8-27B-Cold-Fusion-GAIN-V1.1 using the
MTP-aware, vision-preserving recipe in docs/pfi/abliteration-recipe-qwen38.md.

Motivation is measured, not assumed: the stock model's refusal profile
(probed 2026-08-19, hand-verified) is ~33% on creative content, concentrated
on explicit-sexual and graphic-torture, with 4/5 hard-harm refused, self-harm
guardrails intact, and zero benign over-refusal. So there is a real
creative-content refusal surface. The Robinson formula is chosen specifically
because it abliterates the MTP head IN-BAND -- which the current gen seat's
Heretic pass does not (its MTP head is a byte-identical base graft the
Qwen3_5 wrapper never loads). That in-band MTP edit is the additive delta.

The script refuses to brick the model. Two hard gates from the recipe halt
before any write: the coverage identity o_proj(16)+linear_out(48)==64 (catches
a tensor-name mismatch that would ship a half-abliterated model), and the
attention-sink screen on dim 3994 (orthogonalizing a direction living there
produces a model that loads, runs, and emits garbage). The direction is
captured from two chat templates and the layer auto-picked by peak |cos|
agreement in [18,45]. Classification is suffix-based and name-agnostic so it
survives minor drift; the coverage gate is the backstop.

Modes: --dry-run (enumerate + gate, no forward, no write), --capture
(direction + sink screen, no write), default (write to --out). The README
sequences dry-run -> capture -> write -> verify, and names the post-checks
(vision byte-identical, refusal re-profile via services/refusal-probe/, MTP
acceptance on the quant, PPL/coherence).

bf16 staged to ana-ml2:/tank/aimodels/qwen38-27b-coldfusion-bf16 (pinned
9c44193, provenance recorded). The destructive run is NOT executed here --
dry-run verification and operator go gate it.
2026-08-20 06:50:48 -07:00
vh ccb56a0a51 docs(pfi): capture the RobinsonLabs Qwen3.8-27B abliteration recipe
Reference recipe (not a deployed artifact) for MTP-aware, vision-preserving
single-direction abliteration of Qwen3.8-27B -- the base family the gen seat
runs. Captures the two things this recipe gets right that naive abliterations
of this architecture miss:

- The MTP head is abliterated in-band (its two residual-write matrices, glue
  left alone), so speculative acceptance does not collapse on the prompts
  abliteration exists to fix -- directly relevant to the gen seat's MTP>=40%
  gate.
- The vision tower is preserved byte-identical (333 tensors, max delta 0).

Plus the two calibration traps specific to this base: the twice-captured
refusal direction (layer 26, |cos| 0.99) and the attention-sink dimension 3994
that bricks the model if orthogonalized out. Documents the coverage gate
(o_proj 16 + linear_out 48 == 64 layers) that catches a half-abliterated
model before it writes a byte, and the foot-gun that the GGUF imatrix does not
cover the MTP block. Links into model-quantization-playbook.md for the quant
half of the pipeline.
2026-08-19 22:02:14 -07:00
vh 7010f9a1da feat(booth): render .md/.txt/.log inline in the gallery, collapsible + closable
Docs used to render as a clumsy link that navigated to a separate page. They
now render in place: build_gallery pre-renders each doc (markdown -> HTML,
plain text raw) and the gallery shows it inside a native <details open>
disclosure that spans the full grid width so prose has a readable measure.

The doc bar carries: a collapse chevron (the whole <details> summary toggles,
works with JS off), a full-page link (still reaches the standalone viewer), a
download link, and a session-close ✕. The ✕ needed stopPropagation +
preventDefault because it lives inside <summary> — otherwise its click would
toggle the disclosure instead of hiding the item. Close is JS (progressive
enhancement); collapse is native.

Two design points:
- Plain text is returned RAW from build_gallery and escaped by the template
  inside <pre>. Pre-escaping in Python plus Jinja autoescape would
  double-encode angle brackets; a test pins the single-escape.
- Inlining is bounded by DOC_MAX_BYTES. A doc over the limit keeps the old
  link-out behaviour rather than being rendered into every index load; a test
  covers the fallback.

The shared .markdown-body / .textview typography moved from doc.html's scoped
<style> into base.html so the inline body and the full-page view render
identically; doc.html keeps only its page-layout wrapper.

Updated the pre-existing test_gallery_links_docs_to_view: it asserted the old
link-out behaviour the operator asked to change, so it now asserts the inline
render plus the surviving full-page and download affordances. 61 pass.
Verified live: markdown renders with headings/table/blockquote/code, txt
preserves whitespace and single-escapes, collapse and ✕-close both work.
2026-08-19 11:06:36 -07:00
vh 40257247b0 memory: IPv6 plan settled — endpoints not internal numbering; ESH has a /56
Corrects three claims that had been standing in the fleet IPv6 notes and that
sent a three-arm research effort after a problem that did not exist:

- ESH was recorded as having no IPv6. It has a /56 delegated and a routable
  WAN GUA -- substantially more prefix than NH3's single /64.
- The mesh was recorded as broken by ESH's CGNAT. It is not and was not down;
  ESH is outbound and working. CGNAT on v4 alongside generous v6 is just the
  modern ISP pattern, not an outage.
- IPv6 was framed as the escape hatch for that outage. The actual plan is that
  IPv6 carries tunnel ENDPOINTS for Site Magic and WireGuard, and LANs are not
  numbered in v6 at all.

NH3 internal v6 was brought up on the delegated /64 and verified end-to-end
(global GUA on nh3-docker, zero loss to Cloudflare and Google v6, un-NATed
source address seen from outside), then reverted on operator direction: one
/64 lights exactly one VLAN and that is not worth the split-brain.

The AT&T prefix research is kept as reference rather than deleted -- the /60
is real but undelegatable, the living multi-prefix mechanism is multiple
IA_PD in one solicit rather than the VRRP/multi-MAC recipe we were handed,
and the UDM SE can express neither. That is the answer if NH3 LAN-side v6
ever earns a maintenance window; it is not on any critical path now.
2026-08-19 10:44:56 -07:00
vh 6770ba26d6 feat(booth): kept boards — a .forever sentinel and a standing link board
Agent sessions hand the operator URLs and they drown in terminal
scrollback. The Booth is the right home for them — it already has the one
property that decides adoption, which is that a session can publish with
mkdir and cp, no API key, no schema, no deploy — but everything in it dies
in 24h.

So: a booth containing `.forever` is never swept, and renders in its own
Kept lane at the top of the index. Opt-in per booth, so the ephemeral
default is untouched and nobody inherits a cleanup chore. `rm` the
sentinel and the board rejoins the sweep; the CLI verbs are sugar over
exactly that, which keeps the filesystem-is-the-state model honest.

The pin is deliberately NOT wired into is_expired(). That stays a pure age
question feeding the `expires_in` countdown; only sweep_once() honours the
sentinel. Keeping expiry arithmetic and reaper policy apart means they
cannot drift into each other.

Kept cards are visually separated per Australis: a 2px top edge in aurora
blue, the one accent border the system sanctions. They show "kept" instead
of a countdown, and they deliberately lose the one-click wipe button — a ×
next to the durable stuff is a footgun, so removing a kept board is a
two-step act.

`booth link <url> [description]` appends to the standing `links` board,
creating and keeping it on first use. Entries carry provenance (handle or
hostname, plus a timestamp) because a bare URL is unreadable three days
later. The append is one printf of one line to an O_APPEND fd — atomic
under PIPE_BUF on POSIX — which matters because many agents post to one
board and interleaved half-lines would be the obvious failure mode.

Seven tests cover the sentinel: detection, survival of a sweep that wipes
its neighbour, the deliberate is_expired/sweep_once split, the listing
flag, the sentinel not inflating item counts, and both lane-rendering
directions. Two of them originally asserted on the bare strings "Kept" and
"kept-grid", which passed for the wrong reason — those also appear in the
inlined stylesheet served on every page — so they now assert the full
class attribute. 55 pass.

Also corrects the Homepage card's description, which advertised a flat 24h
TTL that is no longer the whole story.
2026-08-19 09:34:53 -07:00
vh 23cccf5f53 fix(homepage): force the canvas clear of the cached wallpaper div
Removing the `background:` block from settings.yaml was not sufficient.
Homepage server-renders the wallpaper as an INLINE style on
`<div id="background">` and Next.js caches the rendered page, so the aurora
survived both the config removal and a container restart. Only a full
recreate clears that cache, and recreating this container costs an hour of
missing tab bar and i18n before it heals itself.

Adding `#background` to the canvas reset is deterministic and immediate,
and it also keeps the canvas correct if the setting is ever re-added by
accident. The existing selector missed it: the DOM is
body > div#__next > div#background, so `body > div` matched the Next.js
root, not the wallpaper layer.

Verified live rather than locally: the served page now reports no
background image, with all three canonical faces loaded and the group
eyebrows rendering as JetBrains Mono in Australis cyan.
2026-08-19 09:17:37 -07:00
vh b271db1f44 feat(homepage): rebuild the theme on canonical Australis tokens
The predecessor theme was ugly for two structural reasons, not one.

It did not use the design system's colours. It built a parallel OKLCH
palette "derived from the Australis philosophy" and swapped the canonical
typeface for Supreme -- a fork, not a theme. Every hex here is now copied
verbatim from ~/.claude/skills/australis-design/colors_and_type.css, and
build.py re-checks all 19 against that file at build time and warns on
drift so it cannot quietly fork again. Type is the canonical stack: Space
Grotesk / Inter / JetBrains Mono, vendored as latin-subset VARIABLE woff2
(one file per family, 102 KB total against 56 KB for three static Supreme
cuts, and no Google Fonts request at page load).

It also carried a generated full-bleed aurora image behind the entire
dashboard. Canon forbids exactly that -- "solid fills only on chrome, no
full-bleed photography, no decorative gradients", and the aurora motif
"never as a background fill behind text". The predecessor knew, said so in
its own header, and dialled the opacity down rather than dropping it. The
image is gone; the aurora survives as a 1px accent edge under the tab bar,
which is where canon sanctions it. The asset stays in images/ in case it
is ever revisited.

Direction is instrument panel. Group headings become the Australis mono
eyebrow with a hairline to the right edge -- canon calls the eyebrow a
system signature, and it turns the groups into register bands instead of
headings floating over a grid. Status stops shouting: the filled emerald
chips read louder than the service names they annotated, so they are now a
semantic dot plus a mono micro-label at tertiary contrast. Cards are
bordered and opaque, per canon's border-over-shadow rule for chrome.

Alignment, per operator feedback that pills and cards did not line up:

- The status cluster is centred on the service name's line rather than
  parked in the card's top-right corner, where Homepage's `absolute top-0`
  left it floating ~7px above the title's optical centre. The offsets
  reconstruct the title line box and are documented as moving together.
- Descriptions get a two-line minimum, so the common one-line/two-line mix
  bottom-aligns across a row. This is what made the grid look ragged.
  useEqualHeights stays false: it inflated short cards to match a widget
  card twice their height, which was the worse failure.
- The status dot is flex-centred rather than nudged with vertical-align,
  so it stays centred if the type scale changes.

Retires the Skyfall sources and the Supreme faces; theme/ now has one
source of truth.
2026-08-19 09:14:13 -07:00
vh b92097688c fix(esh-pve): hardware watchdog, and close the single-resolver DNS SPOF
esh-pve hard-froze at 03:34 on 2026-08-19 and stayed frozen ~4.5 hours
until a manual power cycle. No panic, no OOM, no MCE — the journal stops
mid-operation. The whole ESH site lost DNS with it, because esh-userland
(VLAN 10, the PVC SSID and wired userland LAN) was handed exactly one
resolver: 10.0.50.45, AdGuard on esh-docker-vm, on a different VLAN, with
no secondary. Internet and routing were healthy throughout.

Two fixes.

1. DNS: 10.0.10.1 (the gateway, verified resolving) added as secondary on
   esh-userland via the UDM Classic API. Note this is degradation cover,
   not clean failover — clients that query resolvers in parallel will
   bypass AdGuard for a share of lookups.

2. Watchdog: softdog -> iTCO_wdt under systemd (RuntimeWatchdogSec=60),
   watchdog-mux masked. The box looked watchdog-protected and was not: a
   software watchdog cannot fire when the kernel it lives in is wedged,
   and watchdog-mux only pets the device while an HA client is connected,
   which never happens on a cluster with no HA resources. Firmware does
   not block the TCO timer here, checked before committing to it.

Also pins VM 102 off (onboot: 0). It starts with full GPU passthrough and
vfio-pci enabling that device is the last thing the kernel logged, 39
minutes before the freeze. The other suspect is the kernel itself: the
host ran 4.5 months on 6.8.12-16, took 6.8.12-42 in an apt batch on
08-18, and died 20 hours into the first boot on it. 6.8.12-16 is still
installed as the rollback.

The playbook is idempotent — a second run skips all six steps and passes
all six verifies. The watchdog is confirmed armed (identity=iTCO_wdt,
state=active, held by PID 1) but has NOT been observed firing; proving
that needs a deliberate wedge.

Memory also corrects two wrong mid-incident calls: the mgmt VLAN is
routed over the site tunnel and is not firewalled off — both symptoms
were the dead host generating ICMP unreachables.
2026-08-19 09:05:52 -07:00
vh 059f963118 docs(waterland-studio): note why an adopted job shows as failed
waterland-dev confirmed the mechanism: adoption marks a job failed on a
sidecar saying running/queued, or on a directory with no plate.png. The
pre-header-fix renders died 1.7s in with a source and no plate, so they
land in the second branch. Recorded so nobody investigates adopted
history as a live fault.
2026-08-19 01:40:52 -07:00
vh e6907819b0 feat(waterland-studio): deploy b72425b — all three upstream findings fixed
One update.sh run on irv-ml1 carried both open upstream PRs, per the
operator's green-light on the job-store fix:

- #5 (464dfc2) declares cupy-cuda12x[ctk] on the gpu extra and takes uv
  out of the render path (sys.executable -m waterland.cli), retiring the
  runtime prune trap at the source.
- #6 (b72425b) rehydrates the job index from the data volume at startup,
  fixing the unbounded store growth reported from this side.

Verified after the update rather than assumed: healthy on backend cupy;
/api/jobs went 1 -> 16 against 16 directories on disk, so API and volume
agree for the first time; nothing wrongly reclaimed, correct since 16 is
under RETAIN=40 and adoption only makes them visible; a real 256^2 plate
render completes warm, so the kernel-cache volume survived the image swap.
A subsequent render took both counts to 17.

The image keeps its explicit [ctk] install and UV_NO_SYNC/UV_OFFLINE pins
even though both are now redundant. The header requirement is a property
of this slim base, not of the upstream extra, and the cost is measured
rather than assumed: uv sync satisfies it first, so the line reports
"Audited 1 package" and adds 0.3s to the build. The env pins are now
cheap defence-in-depth against any future path that re-enters uv.

Docs corrected in place: the README's upstream-finding section is now a
resolved-finding record, and the two "bounded ~500 MB" claims say which
commit made that bound hold across restarts rather than only within a
process. Comment-side changes pushed to the live compose dir; no restart
was needed for them.
2026-08-19 01:39:13 -07:00
vh a2b6bf409e memory: waterland-studio upstream fixes landed, container stays pinned
waterland-dev merged PR #5 (main now 464dfc2), fixing both landmines at
source: the gpu extra declares cupy-cuda12x[ctk], and the renderer spawns
sys.executable -m waterland.cli instead of re-entering uv mid-job.

The running container deliberately stays on 8025366. Its own [ctk] install
and UV_NO_SYNC/UV_OFFLINE pins already neutralise both defects, so a rebuild
would buy reliability that is already present — and the project is in
wind-down. Both guards are kept rather than dropped: the header requirement
is a property of this slim image, not of the upstream extra, and the uv pins
are now cheap defence-in-depth against any future path that re-enters uv.

Also records waterland-dev's confirmation of the unbounded job-store growth
and the operator's green-light on their startup-rehydrate fix. That PR
merging is the rebuild trigger: one update.sh run lands the rehydrate and
464dfc2 together. Marks the inbox drained.
2026-08-19 01:26:32 -07:00
vh bc3aada73a memory: snapshot — .internal DNS live, waterland containerised, homepage themed
Captures a long infra session: fleet *.internal DNS (git-sourced, 42 names,
three resolvers including a new colo one), waterland studio containerised on
irv-ml1, Homepage cleaned up and themed with Australis Skyfall over an
Arbo-generated background, and four unmanaged stacks adopted into stacks/.

Four detail files added. Auto-archived 4 entries to archival-memory.md
(Recent decisions 2, Tried and abandoned 2); 5 held back by the open-deferred
guard rather than moved.

Also records three operator-owned open items: the colo DNS repoint, the
static-v6 convention, and the deliberately belayed AI-tab Dormant regrouping.
2026-08-19 01:20:53 -07:00
vh b8003c73ae feat(dns): fleet .internal naming — git-sourced, agent-managed, three resolvers
Names for fleet hosts so addresses stop needing to be memorised. Built because
IPv6 makes that hopeless — and, more to the point, because v6 addresses are
derived rather than assigned, so they cannot reliably be written down once and
trusted either.

  dns/internal.yaml     source of truth: 38 hosts + 4 service aliases
  scripts/dns-sync.py   reconciles AdGuard resolvers against it
  stacks/adguard-ana/   the colo's resolver, which did not exist

Naming is <host>.<site>.internal with sites ana/esh/nh3 (operator's call).
.internal is ICANN-reserved for this; .local is reserved for mDNS, which is
why searxng.pfi.local was a collision that merely happened to work.

Same posture as deploy-stack.sh: file is intent, resolvers are derived state,
you see a diff before anything changes. Every name is published to every
resolver, so the site label says where a host IS, not who knows about it.

Two properties that matter:
- Authority is scoped to the ZONE, not the resolver. ESH carries hand-made
  esteban.net rewrites predating this; they are read, ignored and preserved.
  Resolver-wide authority would have silently deleted them.
- Within .internal it IS authoritative, so UI-added names get removed. That is
  the point — one place to look.

Colo gap closed: ana-docker had no resolver at all (hosts went straight to
1.1.1.1). Its AdGuard runs API on 8053 because 8080/3000 were taken, so the
port is carried per-site in the yaml rather than assumed by the script. It
ships with no blocklists — a false positive on a server network breaks
service-to-service calls for no upside.

Auth is a dedicated infra-ops AdGuard user, not the operator's account,
password vaulted at nh3-dev/adguard-infra-ops-password. Pre-change configs
backed up on each resolver. Both resolvers stayed answering across the restart.

searxng.pfi.local -> searxng.ana.internal, with the old Host() kept alongside
so nothing breaks mid-migration. matrix.pfi.local deliberately NOT migrated: a
Matrix server_name is baked into every user id, room id and signing key, so
renaming it rebuilds the homeserver's identity rather than changing a DNS name.

The v6 column is empty and correct — no fleet host has a global v6 address
yet. The file documents why addresses must be pinned statically before they go
in, since a record that silently stops matching is worse than no record.
2026-08-19 01:10:55 -07:00
vh 8189076daf docs(waterland-studio): claude-bot read grant wired, and an upstream store-growth finding
Operator granted claude-bot read on vh/waterland; verified scoped correctly
(admin false, push false, pull true). Token is on irv-ml1 at
/root/.config/waterland-studio/git-credentials, 0600 root-owned, wired as a
REPO-SCOPED credential helper rather than a global one, and .git/config holds
no token so the remote stays clean in any diff or backup. The vh site-admin
token was used only for the initial clone and the grant itself and was never
written to disk on that host.

update.sh now runs end to end: fetch, rebuild, recreate, health. Verified the
kernel-cache volume survives a recreate (warm 256^2+anim render 6.6s straight
after) and the job store survives with all 16 directories intact.

Records an upstream finding surfaced by that check: JobStore._jobs is
memory-only and nothing scans the data dir at startup, so after a restart the
API lists only new jobs while old ones persist on disk — cosmetic — but the
RETAIN=40 eviction only sees in-memory jobs, so restart-orphaned directories
are never reclaimed. The handover's ~500 MB bound holds per process lifetime,
not across restarts. Reported to waterland-dev; upstream's call to fix.
2026-08-19 00:47:38 -07:00
vh a2b5b58eee feat(waterland-studio): containerise the GPU render service on irv-ml1
Replaces a bare nohup on irv-ml1:8410 that would not have survived a reboot,
handed over by waterland-dev. Tracks vh/waterland @ main (PR #4 merged; main
HEAD is exactly the pinned 8025366).

Build context is a checkout at /opt/waterland-studio/src, deliberately OUTSIDE
the compose dir — deploy-stack.sh rsyncs stacks/<stack>/ with --delete and
would otherwise eat it. The Dockerfile is passed out-of-context.

Three landmines, all measured:

1. Both uv extras are load-bearing at build AND run. jobs.py shells the
   renderer out as a literal  with no --extra flags, so uv
   would re-sync at runtime and prune cupy — silently dropping to the numpy
   path at ~21x wall time. UV_NO_SYNC pins it; UV_OFFLINE makes any failure
   loud instead of quietly slow.

2. cupy needs CUDA HEADERS for its NVRTC compile, not just the driver and the
   wheel's runtime libs. The host has a system CUDA toolkit so the nohup
   process found them by accident; a slim image does not, and every render
   died 1.7s in with 'Failed to find CUDA headers' printed through argparse's
   usage banner — which reads like a CLI bug, not a missing toolkit. Fixed
   with cupy-cuda12x[ctk] (hundreds of MB, vs ~6 GB for a -devel base).

3. The A6000 is host device 1 but container device 0, since compose exposes
   exactly one GPU. CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES_TARGET=0 inside; copying the host's
   value selects a device that does not exist.

/root/.cupy is a volume because the NVRTC compile costs ~17s: verified at
23.3s cold vs 6.1s warm, and re-verified across a restart (23.2s on a fresh
cache volume, 6.0s once populated). Warm 256^2+anim beats the 7.4s recorded
against bare metal, so containerising cost nothing.

Job store seeded with the 4 jobs from the displaced instance. Serial by design
(one replica, one card) and unauthenticated, so it stays LAN/WireGuard-only.
2026-08-19 00:42:12 -07:00
vh df68dd2753 style(homepage): tone the stat values down, run the aurora through the page
Two operator corrections in one pass.

Stat values overshot: the previous commit took them from font-thin 13px to
bold 22px in heading white, which went from whisper to shout. A stat only has
to out-rank its own label, not the service name above it — now --text-md at
medium weight in cyan, which clears the label but sits below the card title
where it belongs.

Colour lift, staying inside the system rather than around it: Skyfall names
Aurora (blue, cyan, green) the PRIMARY families, 'used generously, in that
order', while Dawn (amber, red, violet) is semantic-only. So group markers now
cycle blue -> cyan -> green down the page — icons at full strength, names at
0.72 — service icons take a single cool wash, header resource icons go cyan,
and latency tags move to the info family so 'how fast' stops looking like
'is it alive'. No Dawn colour is used decoratively anywhere.

Also fixes selectors that never bound: Homepage emits docker-status-<state>,
not status-<state>, so the green pills up to now were stock colouring rather
than this file. Both forms are matched and the trap is commented.

README records the iteration loop that would have caught the overshoot: CSS is
served per-request, so it needs a reload, not a recreate and not the layout
warm-up — and candidate CSS can be injected into the live page for a
seconds-long feedback loop instead of a 10-minute one.
2026-08-19 00:25:02 -07:00
vh f38cf69fe4 fix(homepage): invert the widget stat hierarchy — numbers lead, labels recede
Stock Homepage builds each stat as a font-thin (weight 100) 13px value above a
font-bold 12px uppercase label, so the number you actually came to read is the
quietest thing in the card while its label shouts. Skyfall's rule is that
hierarchy comes emphatically from weight AND size, and that numbers are data.

Value now renders at --text-xl bold in tabular mono at --text-heading; label
drops to a --text-2xs tracked eyebrow at --text-faint. The well itself moves to
--surface-input, one step DOWN from the card it sits on, so stats read as inset
data rather than as another floating surface — a recess, so it takes the
hairline without the shadow.

Also drops .service-block from the generic .service-tag rule, which was what
pinned every number to --text-2xs in the first place.

Visible on Plex, Jellyfin, PaperlessNGX and Uptime Kuma.
2026-08-19 00:07:20 -07:00
vh dc3e47b3a2 feat(heretic2-charrp-reasoning): track the NVFP4+MTP reasoning seat
The char-rp-reasoning seat on ana-ml2 GPU0 — NEO-CODE Heretic2 27B at modelopt
NVFP4 with a grafted BF16 MTP head, ~77 tok/s via qwen3_5_mtp spec-decode,
replacing the retired GGUF seat. It had been running untracked.

Includes conf/mtp-workaround/sitecustomize.py, which is not optional: vLLM
0.24.0 does not propagate modelopt exclude_modules to the spec-decode DRAFT
model, so the BF16 MTP head gets quantized and the engine dies at load. The
shim force-skips mtp.* in is_layer_skipped. Both the mount and PYTHONPATH are
load-bearing.

Adds the two files house convention expects and the directory lacked: a
.env.example naming every knob (all values are the compose defaults; the live
host overrides only the three VRAM ones) and a README that points at
docs/runbooks/heretic2-nvfp4-mtp-seat.md rather than duplicating it.

No secrets: API_KEY is empty by default and the real .env stays on the host.
2026-08-18 23:53:59 -07:00