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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Session captured: ESH cut over to Cityside 2Gb symmetric fiber and was
fully provisioned on it; esh-pve-nas completed its ZFS-root migration off
the USB DOM and took its 225-package security backlog with the reboot
deferred; ESH<->colo IPsec was rebuilt as a dialup tunnel with NAT-T after
CGNAT broke the statically-pinned one; IPv6 was mapped across all three
sites.
Auto-archival fired at the soft cap: 7 entries moved to
archival-memory.md (Recent decisions 3, Tried and abandoned 4), all
verified-complete arcs, with two detail files moved and removed. The
remaining pre-Aug-05 entries were held back by the open-deferred-work
guard, so the index stays slightly over cap at 313 lines rather than
losing a live pointer.
Also records the one self-inflicted outage of the session (missing
--make-rslave on a chroot rbind) and that three long-dead things
surfaced incidentally: pvestatd down 82 days, a vzdump hung 126 days,
and a VM sitting in prelaunch for four months.
Everything but the reboot. Two rerunnable elway playbooks; the host is
still running from the ext4 root and its boot path is byte-identical to
the last 140 days, because grub-install is deliberately held back to the
cutover window.
Phase 1 (esh-pve-nas-stage-zfs-root.yaml): carve a 512 MB /boot LV out
of the 768 MB swap LV, populate it, rsync the 4.3 GB ext4 root into
nvme/ROOT/pve-1, write the copy's fstab.
Phase 2 (esh-pve-nas-stage-bootloader.yaml): ZFS initramfs, grub.cfg,
explicit pve-zfs-root and pve-ext4-rollback entries with stable ids,
grubenv pinned to the rollback so cutover's grub-reboot is a one-shot.
Three landmines the plan did not predict, all caught by verify steps
asserting effective state rather than by reading the plan:
- The /boot LV had nowhere to live. VG pve had 4 MB free and mounted
ext4 cannot shrink; freeing space from root needs a rescue boot, which
costs the one-reboot property. Space came from swap (768M -> 256M).
- The runbook's `zpool set cachefile=... nvme` would have broken the
NAS. Populating a cachefile flips the host from import-by-scan to
import-by-cache, so a one-pool cache leaves ssd and tank unimported --
and CT 103 esh-nas has twelve bind mounts spanning all three pools.
Set on all three instead, verified in the resulting cache.
- update-grub silently emitted a pool-less root=ZFS=/ROOT/pve-1, which
boots to an initramfs prompt. Debian's 10_linux builds ${rpool}${bootfs}
and rpool comes from grub-probe --target=fs_label, which returns empty
because GRUB's ZFS reader cannot open a pool with encryption,
large_dnode and zstd_compress -- the same feature set that forced /boot
to stay ext4. The probe failure is swallowed by `2>/dev/null || true`.
Fixed with a /etc/default/grub.d drop-in plus explicit menu entries.
The transferable lesson: the original verify grepped for the correct
root= string appearing somewhere in grub.cfg, which passes while every
menu entry is still broken. Assert the effective value, not the presence
of a substring.
Durable capture ahead of the ESH fiber install (2026-08-18) that puts the
house behind CGNAT and breaks Site Magic on IPv4 -- IPv6 becomes the
escape hatch and the likely first consumer of fleet v6.
Topology verified rather than assumed: Site Magic between UniFi units,
IPsec IKEv2 colo<->UniFi, and WireGuard as a remote-access convention
only, host-based on ana-wg behind a FortiGate UDP VIP. The FortiGate
port-forwards and never terminates WireGuard, so FortiOS 7.2's lack of
native WG is a non-issue.
IPv6 today: NH3 WAN live, colo and ESH none. AT&T delegates exactly one
/64 at NH3 -- established by forcing the prefix ID from auto to 0 and
observing the subnet not move, since the c110/c11f pattern otherwise
reads as a /60. PD enabled on nh3-iot to measure, then reverted; all
five NH3 LANs are back to ipv6_interface_type=none.
Also fixed on ana-wg: wg0.conf, keys/*_priv, keys/*_psk and the client
configs were mode 644 with private key material in them. Now 600, with
keys/ and configs/ at 700. wg-quick@wg0 stayed active, three peers
intact.
Corrects two stale in-flight rows: the DS regeneration is retired, not
queued, and SPEC-ds-regeneration.md is deleted rather than untracked.
Current state rewritten to session-end: secrets-broker LIVE (secret CLI + 25-item
backfill + rm/warn), stonehenge-park /park service repo stood up (vor-plan+vor-ui),
dots-tts extracted to tts-stack; NEXT PROJECT = wgtunnel (WireGuard over a plane's
wifi). Two detail files added; 2 oldest T&A entries archived. Handoff written to
/tmp/infra-ops-handoff.md for the post-clear pickup.
Session (2026-08-05): 3 Booth features live+tagged (verbatim-wrap chip, .md/.txt
doc-viewer, image prev/next arrows); worldtree herald re-nudge bug -> forseti
althing-core v2.1.2; fleet-CI-resilience flip attempted end-to-end and PARKED on
an act_runner->gitea action-fetch auth blocker (infra-ops to research, deferred).
Archived the 2026-07-15/16 recent-decisions batch (8 entries) to keep the index
under the soft cap.
Collapsed the completed-arc bloat out of Current state / in-flight (line 125:
6487->1073 chars; runbooks moved to persistent-memory.d/2026-08-03-worldtree-b168-384-385-arc.md).
Added the 2026-08-03 arc Recent-decisions entry. Auto-archived 20 oldest
Recent-decisions entries (2026-07-08..07-14) to archival-memory.md (index 345->308
lines). Refreshed the b169-deploy watch, unpushed-count, and handoff.
A/B (5 pinned-seed neutral pairs) showed original single-clip seg000
(16.3s) beats the 52s 4-take concat on timbre fidelity — reverted live +
build-source to seg000-alone. Recorded two craft lessons: more reference
audio is not automatically better when takes vary; emotion steering pulls
output away from a cloned voice fast (keep clones emotion-neutral).
Folded the onyx-58 Booth bundle (seg101/seg110/seg148, all Princess Donut
per operator-confirmed misdiarization of seg148) into the Zonos gateway
donut voice reference alongside the original 65-frost seg000. New ref =
52.0s @ 44.1kHz mono s16, deployed to irv-ml1 live bind-mount +
build-source tree; old ref backed up. A/B audition in booth donut-onyx58.
WG-internal FastAPI+HTMX front end for large-document ingestion into the
Muninn KB, over the muninn-gate API (browser -> mimir-inbox -> staging ->
path-addressed POST /jobs). Co-located on corviduo-dev with the gate (:8090)
and the worldtree-personal muninn watcher per the operator's 2026-08-01
co-location ruling (reversing the earlier off-box/NFS plan; worldtree-dev
approved the box placement).
- Dockerfile: python:3.11-slim + uv sync --no-dev --frozen (--no-dev is
load-bearing; the dev group's muninn-dispatch path source is absent in-image
and INV-MI-7 forbids importing it). Single-stage by design — src/ stays in
the final image (uv installs the project editable-linked to src/).
- compose.yaml: uid 1000, host-net bind 10.250.50.152:8091, staging :rw,
TCP-liveness healthcheck (deliberately not coupled to gate reachability).
- Built from vh/mimir-inbox HEAD c8ab38f; deployed + healthy.
Records the open-in-place claim semantics (worldtree-dev, runner.py:362-367)
and the INV-MI-19 retention rule (staged files persist until job terminal;
gate retry returns a false-200 on a swept source) in persistent memory.
Centered on the resume task: build the infra-ops-owned Worldtree per-deployment
config repo + deploy tooling (operator-directed) with the one-time
worldtree-dev boundary agreement. Also records: The Booth shipped (v0.1.3), the
jackdaw-compose nh3-dev deploy, and the Worldtree #376 arc closed (per-instance
config ruled by-design). Two detail files + the /tmp handoff.
soong-lab: WT-style CI-deploy step live (SSH deploy@corviduo-dev, compose
pull && up -d from /opt/soong-lab, /api/version health-gate). Dir relocated
+ old retired; dedicated soong deploy key; run #5 green (container recreated,
v0.3.25 live). worldtree-sdk 1.0.0 Python published to vh Gitea PyPI +
acceptance-verified.
Deferred-work capture: Vuong approved wiring soong-lab auto-redeploy; operator
deferred execution to a fresh context. Recorded in Recent decisions with the
mechanism (WT-style CI-deploy step), the blocker (a vh-owned deploy SSH-key
secret), and next-session steps; handoff updated to make it the primary task.
The "5 AM clock" report was a hallucination in another window — clock verified
correct (US/Pacific, NTP-synced), no change.
Current state rewritten to the active build task: containerize the production
Zonos2 :1920 TTS engine as a self-contained image (config captured in 14a0004)
and prototype the operator's prosody-priming hypothesis (prime→generate-one-
utterance→parakeet-clip→deliver, adapter-level, engine stays stock). New detail
file + Recent-decisions pointer capture the full plan + the crux (does AR prosody
carry the sentence boundary — A/B the join). /tmp handoff written for the fresh session.
Split the 53 over-threshold dated log entries (Recent decisions, Tried
and abandoned) into per-entry persistent-memory.d/<slug>.md detail files,
leaving one-line pointers in the index; the 10 short entries stay inline.
Startup index drops 60,527 -> 25,256 bytes (492 -> 270 lines); entry
bodies move verbatim to on-demand detail files, so a fresh session loads
~25 KB instead of ~60 KB and pulls a detail file only when its pointer is
relevant. Top matter (Repo purpose, Tools & conventions, Current state)
is unchanged; both archival back-references preserved.
CLAUDE.md persistent-memory section now documents the index<->detail read
discipline (read the index, pull details on demand, never bulk-read the
dir, commit both together).
Auto-archival still held every dated entry back (all <30 days old); the
July burst begins aging past the 30-day guard ~2026-07-31.
vh