# Persistent memory — eshpfi-management

_Last updated: 2026-08-26_

> **Always check for `/tmp/infra-ops-handoff.md`** — if it exists and its
> `Written:` stamp is under an hour old, read it (it carries the in-flight
> handoff from the previous session), then delete it. Older than an hour:
> stale — delete it unread.

## Repo purpose

Reference workspace for PFI infrastructure: server inventory, canonical
Docker Compose stacks, ops playbooks, and conventions. Authoritative
copies of compose files live on the servers under
`/opt/docker/compose/<stack>/`; this repo mirrors them for version
control, editing, planning, and CI-driven deploys. **It was originally
spun up to handle the fleet backups** — keep that lens when triaging
backup/storage issues.

## Tools and conventions

Sister repos (separate gitea repos, deployed by playbooks here):

| Repo | Role | CI status |
|---|---|---|
| `vh/task-board` | MCP + web dashboard for assistant task state (port 7878) | push-to-main → CI deploys (2026-04-29) |
| `vh/vor` | Inquisitor UI sidecar (port 7879) | push-to-main → CI deploys (2026-04-29) |
| `vh/nevermore` | Twice-daily LLM-curated briefing (port 8181, replaces news-digest) | push-to-main → CI deploys (2026-04-30) |
| `vh/asset-engine` | Internal control plane over inference services (port 8200, LAN-direct) | push-to-main → CI deploys (2026-05-12) |
| `vh/althing` | Lean trusted inter-agent message bus — **v2 "email model" (v2.0.0b2, 2026-07)**: per-box local-SQLite bus + courier/receiver for P2P over the 10.x net; pillars = open-loops / per-box herald + wake-listener / roaming owner API `/owner/*` / `althing-mcp` stdio surface. The v0.15 lean-bus cut RIPPED moderation / chamber / forseti-daemon / agent-runner / redis-valkey. | per-box `uv tool install` (NOT CI-deploy); **nh3-dev = the DEV box** (editable install of `~/development/althing`, gets new versions first); **nh3-extdev** a mesh peer (model B: althing-svc + shared `/srv/althing`) |
| `vh/mead-hall` | Bifrost tool-provider sidecar (port 5173 on dev VM 10.100.10.50) | push-to-main → CI deploys (2026-05-16) |
| `vh/skaldsong` | Wizard + reader surface (port 8300, ana-docker, registry-pull pattern) | push-to-main → CI deploys (2026-05-19) |
| `vh/Worldtree` | Conversation API (corviduo-dev demo :8080 / personal :8081 / pinned :8082) — Heimdall auth, Bifrost integration. **gitea-runner builds on ana-docker**; claude-bot ADMIN collaborator (2026-06-20). Now v1.0.0b19. | push-to-main → CI build-and-deploy (runner on ana-docker) |
| `vh/yt-voice-clipper` | YouTube → diarized voice-clip dataset builder + audition console (irv-ml1 :8000) | push-to-main → **gitea-webhook auto-deploy** to irv-ml1 (2026-06-03) — see `docs/runbooks/ytvc-autodeploy.md` |
| `vh/arbo` | Catalog-driven ComfyUI engine (irv-ml1 :8201, comfy-dev owns engine/catalog/image) | push-to-main → gitea Actions CI (deploy-engine.sh, build-local, health-gated) now LIVE; catalog via :9009 webhook |
| `vh/zonos-gateway` | OpenAI-compatible TTS gateway over stock ZONOS2 (`:8890` irv-ml1); emotion **dials-first** + voice mapping; reached via LiteLLM `ext-tts` alias. **v0.2.1 (2026-07-18): voice-resolved emotion presets** (`resolve_preset(name,voice)`; angry/happy/startled_happy per-voice). 8 voices incl. 4 clones | pushed to gitea (main `8f1885b`/`v0.2.1`); **deployed irv-ml1 tree still NON-git** (hand-updated build context — CI-wire = open follow-up). Spec `docs/EMOTION-DIALS-SPEC.md`; host-managed voices bind-mount (`./voices:/app/voices`, drop wav + restart, no rebuild) |
| `vh/soong-lab` | Noonien Soong character-design studio (SPA + /api + WT `/bifrost/tool-call`); **containerized 2026-07-18**, LIVE on corviduo-dev `:8443` (image `vh/soong-lab:latest`). soong-dev owns Dockerfile/compose/workflow; infra-ops owns the host | CI = Gitea Actions build+push+**DEPLOY** on tag/dispatch (fleet recipe: docker:cli + raw buildx, pushes AS vh; **auto-redeploy LIVE 2026-07-18** — runner SSHes corviduo-dev as `deploy`, `compose pull && up -d` from **/opt/soong-lab**, health-gated on /api/version). Manual redeploy `sudo -u deploy bash -c 'cd /opt/soong-lab && docker compose pull && docker compose up -d'`. → `archival-memory.md` (archived 2026-08-16) |
| `model-training-forge` (mtf-dev) | Fine-tuning recipe forge; **T1 = E-RP writing LoRA, retargeted qwopus-122B→AEON-27B (2026-07-06)** (SFT→DPO, LitBench-RM reward) | training runs, not a deployed sidecar |

(`vh/volva` + Heid were re-architected from systemd daemons to Claude Code
session orchestrators 2026-06-08; their nh3-dev `.service` units were removed —
no longer deployed sidecars here. See Recent decisions.)

- **Two-layer backups** — Backrest orchestrates restic for file+DB (5
  fleet repos, daily 01:00 PDT); PBS-ANA primary + PBS-NH3 DR mirror for
  VM images. ana-nas is the SPOF for postgres + PBS-ANA datastore +
  cross-site restic targets — see `docs/runbooks/disaster-recovery.md`
  for the blast-radius matrix. **⚠️ The restic file+DB layer routes
  through TWO rest-servers** (`rest-server-ana` @ ana-docker:8000 →
  ana-docker/ana-ml2/esh-docker-vm/vm-esh-nas; `rest-server-nh3` @
  nh3-nas:8000 → irv-ml1/nh3-docker). Both depend on their NAS's NFS
  export of `/mnt/backup`. (rest-server-ana recovered 2026-06-20.)

- **`pull-hf-repo.yaml`** is the canonical "get a HuggingFace
  model/dataset onto ana-ml2's shared cache at
  `/tank/aimodels/huggingface/`" playbook. Supports `--var repo_type=model|dataset|space`. Replaces ad-hoc `huggingface_hub.snapshot_download` patterns.

- **Worldtree admin auth — per-instance.** Each Worldtree deployment
  (demo :8080, personal :8081, pinned :8082) has its own Heimdall
  registry and its own bootstrap admin key. Infra-ops's stored
  long-lived admin key (`key_id 61419c92`) at
  `ana-docker:/opt/docker/conf/.secrets/worldtree-infra-ops-admin`
  auths against **demo only**. Personal-instance admin (the
  `~/.config/worldtree/personal-admin-token`, mode 600) POSTs
  `/admin/keys` (mints per-project keys; takes `user_id`+`label`, **no
  scope param** — scopes are tier-derived). **On-instance mint recipe
  (cleaner than DB-manip):** `docker exec worldtree-worldtree-api-1` POST
  `/admin/keys` with the in-container `WORLDTREE_BOOTSTRAP_ADMIN_KEY`; cleartext
  once in `.key`=`wt_live_+16hex`. auto-memory `reference_worldtree_demo_key_mint`.

- **Per-project user keys against personal Worldtree** (issued
  2026-05-19): `skaldsong:79744637`, `skaldsong:7c1dbbbe`,
  `althing:50d85460`, `mead-hall:a360822d`. Mint via `/admin/keys`, drop
  value to `/tmp/wt-personal-<name>.key` mode 600, dev collects +
  shreds (DO NOT cat to chat transcript).

- **Skaldsong CD pattern (registry-pull).** vh/skaldsong's CI builds and
  pushes `gitea.phasefinal.com/vh/skaldsong:<sha>` + `:latest`;
  `playbooks/deploy-skaldsong.yaml` on ana-docker pulls + recreates.
  SHA-pin only. Prereq: host needs `docker login gitea.phasefinal.com` once.

- **gitea internal route for fleet hosts.** gitea is a container on
  **ana-docker** — git-SSH `10.250.50.70:222`, HTTP `:3000`. Fleet/colo
  hosts must use this internal route, NOT public `gitea.phasefinal.com`
  (`38.120.12.44`) — the public path fail2bans the host egress IP. Full
  gotcha in `docs/orientation.md` → Git/gitea.

- **docker-as-root pattern** (for ops with no admin API, or to edit
  deploy-owned/root-owned files without sudo): `docker run --rm -v
  <target-dir>:/wt docker:cli sh -c "..."`. docker-group membership is
  effectively root via bind-mount. **Foot-gun: relative paths in compose.yaml
  resolve against the sandbox CWD but the daemon interprets them against the
  HOST fs — always pass `-e VAR=/abs/path` for any relative-default config dir.**

- **`scripts/elway` sudo handling** — elway prompts for the sudo password
  ONCE via `getpass` before the first `sudo: true` step → can't run
  unattended from a non-TTY tool if any step needs sudo. Sudo-free
  playbooks run fully non-interactive over key SSH.

- **Per-host SSH identity matters for sudo.** infra-ops has NOPASSWD sudo
  on most PFI Linux boxes (corviduo-dev included since 2026-06-15). On
  ana-docker: **default `ssh ana-docker` = `lkraven`** (docker-group, NO
  passwordless sudo); **`ssh infra-ops@ana-docker` HAS NOPASSWD root**. **→
  For any sudo op on ana-docker, use `ssh infra-ops@ana-docker`.** `ssh
  infra-ops@10.100.10.50` (nh3-dev) ALSO NOPASSWD sudo; on **nh3-extdev** infra-ops
  is sudo-LESS by design (`ssh lkraven@10.100.50.42` is the NOPASSWD path). **irv-ml1:
  `ssh irv-ml1` = lkraven, docker-group (plain docker) but sudo needs a PASSWORD
  (no NOPASSWD)** — stage model pulls to `/home`, not root-owned `/worktank`.
## Current state / in-flight

_As of 2026-08-26 ~09:45 PDT — **run 2 is done, gated (FAIL), and serving. Run 3's corpus is BUILT and HELD: brokkr is redoing the recipe after a corpus-containment defect we found together.** Nothing is training._

- **🔴 RUN 2 GATE: FAIL, recorded as FAIL.** T3 constraint **−12.0** and T4 −5.5 against a ~1 pt floor (both tuned passes read 88 exactly — not variance). **But gate 1 is the result: T6 spatial +15.0, where run 1 FAILED the same axis at −3.5**, base swap the only intended variable. Neither run ships; together they price what the abliteration cost. Diversity **+0.1934 at 23.6x sd** over eight independent blocks — the most robust number produced, survived attrition-matching and the opposite-direction length argument. Memorisation none. Full write-up: brokkr `4973991`, `research/R47-premium-corpus-gate/run02-gate/RESULT-run02-gate.md`. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-26-erp-run2-complete-and-served.md`
- **⚠ THE "INSTABILITY" WAS NEVER INSTABILITY — I published this wrong TWICE and corrected it.** All 46 flags were **`too_short`** rp turns of 3-14 words; the two collapse guards (`repeated_trigrams`, `non_latin`) fired **zero** times on any run. The model never collapsed. It is the **left tail of the length distribution measured in the same message** — thresholds calibrated on the base's output shape applied to a model with a different shape. It was also **not new**: run 1's record carried it, so it is a property of the RECIPE, not the base swap — **a third run that changes the base again will not fix it.** Playbook §4.6.3 carries the corrected version with the retraction visible.
- **🟢 `erp-tune-v2` SERVING + ON THE GATEWAY** (`10.250.50.70:4000` and direct `:8098`, GPU0, shared all-agents key works). Operator's explicit request so he can evaluate it by hand — **overrides my not-in-the-gateway recommendation.** The config entry carries the failed-gate table, truncation/degeneracy rates and rp-length caveat IN-LINE. **`erp-tune-v1` DELETED from the config** in the same reload: clean **400** now, not the 500 it had been throwing. ⚠ **Never repoint v1 at v2's weights to silence an error.**
- **⏸ RUN 3: CORPUS BUILT, LAUNCH HELD — brokkr is redoing the recipe.** Blocker found before any GPU spend: **`creative-writing-multiturn` is a declared MEGAMIX containing bluemoon, PIPPA, LimaRP and stheno**, and the remix promoted creative-writing *and* bluemoon — the two roots that overlap. Median bluemoon↔creative-writing jaccard **0.873**; containment, not overlap. Dedup direction **reversed** (keep the primary source, drop the megamix copy) → bluemoon 67→126 convs and **38.6% of loss signal, the largest contributor**, wholly-human share UP and megamix share DOWN, context unchanged at 12.49M so the operator's settled mix survives. ⚠ **F1 "excise PIPPA" removes the ROOT not the MATERIAL** — F2's 250-word floor does that work, since PIPPA turns cannot exceed 123 words wherever they live. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-26-run3-corpus-and-the-megamix-containment.md`
- **⚠ CATALOG-LEVEL, UNSOLVED: LimaRP and stheno are still unchecked against anything.** A megamix root silently contains other catalog roots and the mix arithmetic does not know. Wants a `contains_datasets:` Hoard field + a preflight assertion that no recipe includes both a megamix and a root it contains. brokkr raising it as its own item.
- **⏳ DPO BLOCKED on an operator decision: which refusal axes are pruned vs explicitly kept.** `docs/pfi/erp-dpo-stage-prep.md`. No preference data for refusal axes exists; `trl` is not installed; the Gutenberg sets on disk are prose-quality only. ⚠ **`under_floor_rate_run02 = 11.78% [9.49, 14.07] @ floor 15, corpus = run-02 mix` is bound to run 2's mix and is obsolete the day the remix is built.** ⚠ The rp length distribution is **bimodal** — pairs sampled from it inherit the mixture, not a mean.
- **⚠ HARNESS COMMITS LOCAL AND UNPUSHED** on ana-ml2 `/tank/erp-tune/eitri-smithy` (`5349ef0` → `9d27b4f`, 242 tests green). Push is the operator's call.
- **🟢 SEATS.** GPU0: `erp-tune-v2` (:8098, ~13 GB spare) — **operator granted discretion to take it down; I left it UP** because the card is not needed until a recipe is settled. GPU1: `gen` (:8015), scriberr, rerank-a3, coder, reward, embed. **`char-rp` and `sec`/mog-sec still DOWN** from the training window.
- **⏳ OPEN ELSEWHERE (unchanged):** Worldtree #411 orphan cleanup + providers.yaml parity + `:latest` tag cleanup (selene fix `a77639d` committed NOT deployed); synapse stack not mirrored into `stacks/`; MTP-k3 isolating experiment; upstream vLLM issue to file; Cold-Fusion NVFP4 quants delete/keep; `/tank` DEGRADED **70+ days**; Lobe retirement.
- **⚠️ STANDING: NO FLEET NOTIFICATIONS unless the operator asks** (2026-08-24).

## Recent decisions

- `[2026-08-26]` **Run 3's corpus is built and HELD — `creative-writing-multiturn` is a MEGAMIX containing bluemoon, PIPPA, LimaRP and stheno**, and the remix promoted two roots that overlap at median jaccard 0.873. Dedup direction reversed to keep the primary source. F1 does not do what the recipe says; F2 does. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-26-run3-corpus-and-the-megamix-containment.md`
- `[2026-08-26]` **No conversation admission threshold for run 3** (brokkr delegated, then endorsed). Masked context costs the transformer body but NOT the LM head — the harness drops `IGNORE_INDEX` before the 262k-vocab head — so a 20% trim buys ~35 min against a 3-hour run, and it would be a fifth filter confounding a run whose purpose is testing the filters alone. Tracked in the run-3 detail file.

- `[2026-08-26]` **Run 2's gate FAILED and is recorded as a FAIL** — T3 constraint −12.0 against a ~1 pt floor. But gate 1 is the result: **T6 spatial +15.0 where run 1 failed the same axis at −3.5**, base swap the only intended variable. Neither run ships; the pair prices what the abliteration cost. Plus the long-form-only stability regression a short-answer gate would have passed, and PIPPA's 123-word clip in the length signal. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-26-erp-run2-complete-and-served.md`

- `[2026-08-26]` **Run 2 complete, merged, coherence-gated and serving as `erp-tune-v2`** — stock-instruct base, and the mask proven by a −221,712 loss-token delta against byte-identical context. Also the p50 claim I asserted and had to withdraw. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-26-erp-run2-complete-and-served.md`
- `[2026-08-26]` **Playbook §4 written: "when the artifact lies about itself"** — seven landmines plus a pre-launch checklist, from a night in which *three separate fixes each shipped a check that could not fail*. The unifying line is brokkr's: when you change what an artifact means, every derived artifact keyed on the old meaning is now a liar. Commits `dae6ede` → `d54f256`; the doc is `docs/pfi/training-throughput-playbook.md` (filename kept for inbound links; scope is now wider than the name).
- `[2026-08-26]` **Served under a NEW name on a NEW port (`erp-tune-v2` / :8098), never re-pointing `erp-tune-v1`.** Run 1's artifact still exists and is still what that name refers to; re-pointing would be the silent substitution the standing no-false-aliases rule forbids. brokkr independently asked for the same and additionally wants the concrete backing model + date in provenance, not just the alias — an alias has silently changed meaning under recorded results before.
- `[2026-08-26]` **DPO stage gated on an axis-list decision that is not mine to make** — `docs/pfi/erp-dpo-stage-prep.md`. No preference data for refusal axes exists; `trl` is not installed; the Gutenberg sets on disk are prose-quality only. ⚠ Do not install `trl` (or anything) into the training venv **while a run is saving** — a resolution that upgrades transformers under a live process can break its save path.

- `[2026-08-25]` **The ERP/RP tune COMPLETED in 7.36h and passed its gate on the axis it was built for** — diversity 22x its noise floor, attractor −11.3pt, zero memorisation on both arms. Also the noise-floor near-miss: brokkr was one step from reporting a 13-point T6 regression sitting inside twice his instrument's own variance. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-25-erp-tune-run2-complete.md`
- `[2026-08-25]` **8.6% MFU was an accounting artifact — real utilisation 17-20%, and the cost was attention on AMPERE kernels.** Two independent methods agreed to 2.6 points. Fixed by bucketing (padding 29.9%→0.0%) plus flex_attention. ⚠ Carries the dynamo recompile-ceiling trap that produced two wrong published conclusions. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-25-mfu-root-caused-attention.md`
- `[2026-08-25]` **NVFP4A16 serving pipeline built and validated; MERGED WEIGHTS ARE MANDATORY.** vLLM cannot serve a LoRA on ANY Gemma-4 — `get_expert_mapping` is unimplemented and the check branches on MoE-ness, not quantization. Plus the landmine: a `targets=["Linear"]` recipe misses all 11,520 expert tensors silently. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-25-nvfp4-serving-pipeline.md`
- `[2026-08-25]` **Refusal retention measured (base 0/100 → tuned 29/100, 71 still complying) — but on the WRONG AXIS.** `harmful_behaviors` is general harm; the abliteration was run for explicit fiction. The convenient set with a recorded baseline was not the right one. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-25-refusal-retention-probe.md`
- `[2026-08-25]` **Worldtree b188 + b189 shipped; bridge extracted to `pfi/wt-matrix-bridge` because `vh` is a USER not an ORG** and no service account can ever publish to a user namespace. Plus the selene catalog entry that lied about what answers, and a #411 diagnosis I got wrong twice before a directory probe settled it. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-25-worldtree-b188-b189-and-selene.md`
- `[2026-08-25]` **Run 2's base is an OPEN OPERATOR DECISION, deliberately not staged** — four options with materially different safety postures, detailed in Current state. Tracked at althing thread `01M0WQ8W5574KMEVCHCEKEXNS5`. ⚠ Do not let it get filed as a config knob; it is a reversal of the trainee-selection decision.
- `[2026-08-25]` **Fused MoE kernel path — DEFERRED, tracked at park `fused-moe-kernel-path-for-gemma-4-moe-training` (id 47).** Operator: "note the fused MoE kernel for round two… if we nail it soon, the math has us wanting to restart the run anyway." Training MFU is **8.6%** (27.1 of a benchmarked 313.8 TFLOPS) because `transformers` runs the Gemma-4 experts in a Python loop — 128 experts × 30 layers, ~11,500 iterations per step under gradient checkpointing. ⚠ **The same fused 3-D expert layout that made bitsandbytes skip 88.5% of the model is exactly what a grouped GEMM wants** — the format is good for storage and for fused kernels, and hostile only to naive iteration. Two fixes: `group_by_length` (−29.9% compute, free, but breaks the seeded order manifest and re-opens a batch-composition call brokkr already made) and a grouped-GEMM/compiled MoE forward (the remaining ~10×). **Not applied to the live run** — restarting mid-flight to change batch ordering was judged a bad trade at step ~50 of 1,312.
- `[2026-08-25]` **The ERP/RP tune LAUNCHED after 12 harness defects and an operator override of the corpus gate.** Four of the twelve would have crashed the run; two were INERT GATES that passed because they could not fail. Run is `/tank/erp-tune/run-01`, harness eitri-smithy `997c4a4`. Full arc — override, defects, sizing, the measured MFU — in the in-flight section and `docs/pfi/gemma4-erp-tune-sizing.md`.
- `[2026-08-24]` **char-rp seat swapped to the Gemma-4 26B-A4B MoE; abliterated trainee base staged and measured.** OOM root-caused to `--gpu-memory-utilization` not covering CUDA context (and to gen's footprint GROWING WITH UPTIME); a benchmark finding retracted because it scored below chance; abliteration isolated at −0.6 core points but it MOVES capability rather than removing it. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-24-charrp-gemma4-moe-swap-and-trainee.md`
- `[2026-08-24]` **Serving the tuned ERP model: LoRA-on-NVFP4 PREFERRED, merged weights the expected fallback — and the recorded objection may be STALE.** Operator: "if you CAN load it as a lora, all the better, the issue is that we will want to run nvfp4 weights, which we had some serious trouble with loading loras on top of nvfp4." ⚠ **The archived root-cause says it was NOT NVFP4-specific**: `[2026-07-07]` vLLM 0.24.0 qwen3_5 LoRA application was a silent no-op (#47639, regression from #37912) — adapter loads HTTP 200, zero deltas at inference, proven **quant-agnostic (NVFP4 AND FP8 both inert)** and adapter-format-agnostic by a 3-peer dwarf panel. Fix PR #47640 was OPEN then. **ana-ml2 is FAR past 0.24.0 and the box runs a SPREAD, not one version** (measured 2026-08-24): `gen` on `nightly-311b3513` = **0.27.2rc1.dev150**, `mog-sec` on `nightly-e9d1398d` = 0.26.1rc1.dev1102, the small seats still on 0.24.0, and char-rp/trainee-bench pinned to v0.26.0. ⚠ **`vllm/vllm-openai:v0.27.1` is already ON DISK, unused** — a TAGGED release, which is the right retest target: no nightly variance, no pull, ~4 months past the diagnosis. So: RETEST hot-swap LoRA on **v0.27.1** before designing around merge — it is cheap, and if it works the post-tune gate can be two aliases on one engine. If it still no-ops, merged weights it is, which means the harness must EMIT merged weights and Eitri needs that in the contract while he is early. Tracked at this snapshot commit; settle it in the QLoRA sizing conversation.
- `[2026-08-24]` **Homepage rebuilt on Australis Skyfall; light mode shipped.** Two findings worth more than the theme: **(a)** the Skyfall bundle including its canonical light ramp was sitting in this repo's git history at `45c1995` — check `git show` before concluding a vendored design asset is lost; **(b)** removing `theme:` from `settings.yaml` deterministically breaks the dashboard render (six recreates empty, restoring the key fixed it in 12s), which is the first confirmed cause of the "tab bar goes missing" symptom. Retires the `homepage.log` size lead from earlier the same day — it did nothing on this episode. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-24-homepage-uniform-grid.md`
- `[2026-08-24]` **Homepage reorganised on the axis "do I open this?" — UI groups expanded on top, API/agent groups collapsed at the bottom** (operator-delegated: "re-categorize however you want"). Load-bearing constraint: `homepage.group` is read at container CREATION, so the 16 GPU-backed model seats keep their unlovely names rather than eat a recreate — `initiallyCollapsed` + order is free. Second rule discovered here: **group members should all have widgets or none should**, because a stat strip adds ~50px and opens a void beside plain cards. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-24-homepage-uniform-grid.md`
- `[2026-08-24]` **Homepage columns unified at 4 for every group; the 2026-08-18 "columns = member count" rule is retired.** It was avoiding dead cells in a short last row and bought a worse defect — card width changing at every group boundary. Also carries two CSS traps: `overflow: hidden` clips at the PADDING box (so a `padding-right` gutter is spill room, not a guard), and a `:root` override of a Homepage theme variable is silently outranked by `.theme-slate` on the same `<html>` element. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-24-homepage-uniform-grid.md`
- `[2026-08-24]` **AES-128 adopted on both Anaheim tunnels; the per-flow ceiling root-caused to the UDM's software AES-CBC, exonerating the FortiGate.** Proven by an A/B/A cipher swap at identical CPU — hardware offload is not cipher-cost-sensitive. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-23-anaheim-ipsec-tunnel-ceiling.md`
- `[2026-08-24]` **ana-gw's public admin surface closed to zero open ports, ACME listener included.** Two of my diagnoses were wrong first (an "ISP proxy" that was the FortiGate, and an "all-port VIP" alarm that was a parser gap) — both from reading config instead of measuring from outside. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-24-ana-gw-admin-closed-acme-disabled.md`
- `[2026-08-24]` **Scriberr deployed on ana-ml2 GPU1, image built from source.** Three upstream bugs: the Blackwell image was never published, it must run as uid 10001, and `UV_LINK_MODE=copy` is required or two backends fail silently. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-24-scriberr-ana-ml2.md`
- `[2026-08-24]` **ESH DNS fixed at the IPv6 layer and the naming scheme went live on three hosts.** UniFi's RDNSS cannot be disabled but CAN be redirected — the field is only honoured when an explicit server is given. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-24-esh-dns-rdnss-and-scheme-live.md`
- `[2026-08-24]` **`speaches` on irv-ml1 stopped, stack retained** — Eyra was abandoned pre-implementation (Scriberr covers the need), leaving it no consumer. Disposition confirmed to eyra-dev; one command to restart. Tracked at althing thread `01M0RRJX8GPZEBDHF1E3W18RZF`.
- `[2026-08-24]` **esh-vm-db brought onto the fleet infra-ops identity and given its first vaulted credential.** It previously had none: root and infra-ops refused key auth and `lkraven`'s sudo wanted a password nobody held, leaving `qm guest exec` from the hypervisor as the only privileged path. Break-glass root password at `secret get esh-vm-db/root-breakglass-password` (console-only; plaintext never crossed the wire — only its SHA-512 hash did).
- `[2026-08-24]` **`nconnect=8` on `/mnt/smithy` — approved but DEFERRED at operator instruction.** brokkr-smithy-dev pre-approved it for "once the FortiGate work settles" and does not need re-asking; the operator declined it in this session's scope. Tracked at althing thread `01M0R46SFYF83099N16WD67KGD`.
- `[2026-08-23]` **Anaheim's IPsec tunnel ceiling — investigated, then CLOSED 2026-08-24.** The 25%-of-2-Gbps framing was wrong (NH3's uplink is 1 Gbps); AES-GCM proved impossible; AES-128 landed instead. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-23-anaheim-ipsec-tunnel-ceiling.md`
- `[2026-08-23]` **selene retired after losing a head-to-head on its own job; `chat-judge` moved to gen, the model name 404s by design.** Also surfaced that **7 aliases share one seat** — cross-checking between them is an echo, which caught a real defect in brokkr's 46k-exposure R47 gate. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-23-selene-retired-alias-collision.md`
- `[2026-08-23]` **hrafn adopted; its CI reported green for its whole life while deploying nothing.** A staging dir inside the rsync target destroyed its own source mid-copy; the deeper fault was verify steps that asserted uptime, never content. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-23-hrafn-adopted-ci-frozen-source.md`
- `[2026-08-23]` **Worldtree b187 shipped; all three instances de-armed from a 69-day-stale `:latest`; Matrix homeserver re-plumbed to personal.** Includes the `:8009`-is-demo port trap that an IP-only fix would have walked into. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-23-worldtree-b187-pins-matrix.md`
- `[2026-08-23]` **Every secret-bearing `.env` on ana-docker tightened to 0600** — eight stacks including vaultwarden and traefik, verified exposed by reading one as `nobody`. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-23-ana-docker-env-perms-sweep.md`
- `[2026-08-23]` **`pfi` gitea org created; claude-bot is an Owner and creates repos self-serve.** Closes the repo-creation half of the credential-migration directive — `vh` is a USER namespace so no service account could ever create there. Repo creation needs `write:user` + `write:repository` + `write:organization`; `POST /users/{u}/tokens` is basic-auth only, so minting needs the account password. Default new repos to `pfi/`. (`vh/eitri-smithy` was its first tenant, then moved.)
- `[2026-08-23]` **Booth: kept boards are deletable and link rows are prunable.** `release` on a kept card drops the sentinel so the existing × applies; `booth links` / `booth unlink <id|index>` prune one row. Rows are addressed by **content id, never position** — the board is append-only and multi-writer. **Releasing a board RESETS its TTL clock** (unlink bumps the dir mtime), so unkeep-and-wait is a 24h delay, not a delete. (`4be880f`, `0ad332b`)

- `[2026-08-22]` **DFlash2 spec-decode measured on our own stack; `sec` promoted to it.** +18–21% accepted length and +15–18% throughput over MTP k=3, drafter proved model-agnostic across two finetunes to 0.06%, and the k=7 MTP *control* showed deeper MTP is a throughput trap. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-22-dflash2-spec-decode.md`
- `[2026-08-22]` **Quant pipeline shipped a crippled tokenizer for months — fixed at source.** `quant_mixed_nvfp4.py` baked its calibration truncation (`max_length 2048`) into every mixed-NVFP4 build; latent on old transformers, fatal on new. Both live quants corrected, pipeline now saves a source-pristine tokenizer and asserts it. Playbook §3.14. (`0755ba7`)
- `[2026-08-22]` **`sec` retuned to util 0.52 / 420K after a runtime OOM at 0.55/480K** — `gpu-memory-utilization` is not a hard reservation; activation grows past the dummy-data profile and six vLLM containers share GPU1. Also measured: the KV pool varies ~6.6% between boots, so max-model-len must be sized against the *lower* observation. (`6e82899`)
- `[2026-08-22]` **Max-Q 1.8× spread does NOT apply to LLM decode — measured, not argued.** ana-ml2 draws 256–266 W of 300 W under sustained 100% decode with `SW Power Cap: Not Active` and clocks pinned. Corrected to brokkr-smithy-dev after I had lent the claim credibility; 122B figure (~90–93 tok/s at 262K) stands as a straight number.
- `[2026-08-21]` **ESH internal IPv6 live on two LANs; the Cityside v4 static is a CARRIER problem, proven.** A full gateway reboot forced a fresh DHCP DISCOVER and returned the identical CGNAT address. YaRN was already configured — "1M needs YaRN, absent" was false. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-22-dflash2-spec-decode.md` sibling entry in `ad21302`
- `[2026-08-21]` **speaches ASR live on irv-ml1 for Eyra — and `no_speech_prob` alone is a weak hallucination gate.** Silence and room tone both hallucinated "Thank you." under 0.11; `avg_logprob` separates ~6× better. Consumers should gate on a composite. (`aa5863c`, `c7e2187`)

- `[2026-08-20]` **Cold-Fusion abliteration — Robinson recipe captured; the fight was the environment, not the recipe.** Stock Cold-Fusion measured ~33% creative refusal → worth abliterating ourselves (supersedes waiting for DavidAU's heretic build). Recipe maps 1:1 (131 tensors); capture succeeded only in **fp32** — transformers' Qwen3.5 DeltaNet linear-attn NaNs nondeterministically in bf16 without the unbuildable `causal-conv1d` kernel (precision cancellation, not overflow). Direction finite at layer 22 but agreement 0.59 (vs Robinson's 0.99) → **calibration-set expansion is next.** → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-20-coldfusion-abliteration-capture.md`

- `[2026-08-19]` **A *software* watchdog is not watchdog protection — esh-pve froze for 4.5h holding one.** softdog cannot fire when the kernel it runs in is wedged, and Proxmox's `watchdog-mux` never arms without HA resources, so the box *looked* protected and wasn't. Moved to the PCH `iTCO_wdt` under systemd. Also: a single cross-VLAN DNS entry with no secondary turns any VM outage into a whole-site outage. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-19-esh-pve-freeze-dns-spof.md`

- `[2026-08-19]` **Fleet `.internal` DNS built and live — git-sourced, agent-managed, three resolvers.** Zone-scoped authority (ESH's hand-made `esteban.net` rewrites survive); the colo had no resolver at all; v6 column empty on purpose because SLAAC addresses rotate. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-19-fleet-internal-dns.md`

- `[2026-08-19]` **waterland studio containerised on irv-ml1 — three landmines, all measured.** cupy needs CUDA *headers* the host had by accident; `uv run` re-syncs and prunes cupy at RUNTIME; the A6000 is container-index 0, not the host's 1. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-19-waterland-studio-containerised.md`

- `[2026-08-19]` **Homepage cleaned up, then themed with Australis Skyfall + an Arbo-generated background.** Includes the hour lost to a self-healing tab-bar red herring, and the CSS-iteration loop that prevents it recurring. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-19-homepage-skyfall-theme.md`

- `[2026-08-19]` **Four unmanaged stacks found on live hosts — two quietly broken.** A dashboard card is a cheap census of what is actually running; check whether the stack is even in `stacks/` before debugging the symptom. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-19-unmanaged-stacks-searxng-seafile.md`

- `[2026-08-19]` **`claude-bot` granted read on `vh/waterland`** (operator-empowered, verified `admin:false push:false pull:true`) so irv-ml1 can self-update without the operator's site-admin token living on a GPU box. Precedent for the standing migrate-off-operator-creds directive: grant the service account, wire a repo-scoped 0600 credential helper, keep the remote URL clean. Commit `8189076`.

- `[2026-08-19]` **AI-tab Dormant regrouping BELAYED by the operator** — six seats (char-rp Magidonia, char-rp-reasoning Heretic2, Granite summarizer, Qwen-Image-Bench, Skaldsong, Chatterbox Fast) show amber EXITED inside live groups rather than `AI - Dormant`. Fix is a label change + recreate per stack; needs the operator's read on which are retired vs temporarily down. `untracked by operator choice` (his words: "belay the ai dormant regrouping for now").

- `[2026-08-18]` **esh-pve-nas migration STAGED — and staging is where three landmines surfaced, none of which the plan predicted.** (1) The runbook's `/boot` LV had **nowhere to live**: VG `pve` had 4 MB free and mounted ext4 cannot shrink, so the space came from the 768 MB swap LV (operator's call: shrink to 256 MB, not drop). (2) The runbook's `zpool set cachefile=… nvme` would have **broken the NAS** — populating a cache flips the host to import-by-cache, and a one-pool cache leaves `ssd`+`tank` unimported under CT 103's twelve bind mounts. (3) **`update-grub` silently emitted a pool-less `root=ZFS=/ROOT/pve-1`**, because GRUB's ZFS reader cannot open a pool with `encryption`/`large_dnode`/`zstd_compress` and the probe failure is swallowed. All three were caught by *verify steps that asserted effective state*, not by reading the plan. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-17-esh-pve-nas-dom.md`

- `[2026-08-17]` **esh-pve-nas PVE root is on a USB DOM — mitigated, and the migration replanned to split boot from root.** Operator's design beats my reinstall plan; wear was never the issue, blocked patching is. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-17-esh-pve-nas-dom.md`

- `[2026-08-17]` **irv-ml1 cleared of 782 GB, and Homepage brought under version control.** One dead-looking Gradio app pinned three delete targets at once; `/opt/ComfyUI` is NOT the ComfyUI that serves. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-17-irv-ml1-cleanup-homepage.md`

- `[2026-08-17]` **Gen seat swapped to `absolute-heresy` — and the three bugs the swap exposed are worth more than the swap.** Candidate `MuXodious/Qwen3.8-27B-absolute-heresy` (Heretic v1.4.0 + SOMPOA, T377) beat the incumbent on refusals AND KL simultaneously, which is the unusual part — those normally trade off. Validated on the probe port per operator ruling, promoted, all 7 aliases green. **Durable lessons banked:** (1) **A CPU-only MTP head hash can replace the ~56 GB bf16 acceptance gate.** The `Qwen3_5ForConditionalGeneration` wrapper never loads the MTP head, so PEFT merges / Heretic runs / llm-compressor passes all leave `mtp.*` pristine — hashing it against a head we have already measured (the incumbent's, 47.7%) answers the question for free. Predicted 47.7%, measured 47.2%. Saved downing meromero. Tool: `services/gen-seat-mixed-quant/compare_mtp_head.py` (hash bf16 via **uint8 reinterpret** — numpy has no bfloat16). (2) **`post_quant.py` assumed a standalone `model-mtp.safetensors`**; a full checkpoint keeps `mtp.*` in a NUMBERED shard, so the copy silently no-op'd while the index was still rewritten to point at a file that never existed — 15 unresolvable tensors behind a correct-looking tensor count. Its own FAILED-CHECKS assertion caught it; **that is why the check exists rather than an assumption**. Fixed to extract. (3) **A probe that does not mirror the live seat manufactures failures.** `serve_probe.sh` hardcoded `:latest` (seat is a pinned nightly for #51113), had no tool-call/reasoning parsers, and its `--speculative-config` JSON died twice on quoting — **bash BRACE-EXPANDS `{"a":1,"b":2}` on the comma** unless single-quoted at the REMOTE shell. Adding the seat's flags took the surface test from 5/6 to **6/6**; the "tool calling broken" result was pure probe config. Commits `7997f11`,`254c588`,`2c36028`,`b0c2d3d`,`993421b`.

- `[2026-08-17]` **Fleet IPv6 mapped + the real VPN topology verified; the driver is CGNAT at ESH, not the WireGuard mesh.** New ESH fiber (installing 2026-08-18) lands the house behind **CGNAT**, which breaks **Site Magic** (NH3↔ESH `sdwan-mesh-tunnel`) on IPv4 — so IPv6 becomes load-bearing as the escape hatch, and that is its most likely first consumer. Topology as VERIFIED (a prior turn assumed wrong and was corrected): UniFi↔UniFi = **Site Magic**; colo↔UniFi = **IPsec IKEv2** (`pfi-ana-nh3` 158M/165M pkt = the workhorse, `ana-to-eshudm`); **WireGuard is an RA convention only, host-based on `ana-wg`** UDP 31337 behind a FortiGate VIP — the FortiGate never terminates WG (FortiOS 7.2 has none; 7.4 added it) so "upgrade the edge for WireGuard" is a **non-problem, do not re-derive**. IPv6 today: **NH3 WAN live** `2600:1700:b25:c110::48`, **colo none**, **ESH none**. **AT&T delegates one /64 PER REQUEST** (`2600:1700:b25:c11f::/64`) — and the BGW holds the whole `/60`, rationing `c118`–`c11f` one at a time while keeping `c110`–`c117`. So eight /64s exist; UniFi just solicits once. ⛔ **CLOSED 2026-08-24 — operator ruling, do not re-raise:** the BGW has **no IP-passthrough** (operator confirmed, and we have admin on it), so the only route to the other seven is a multi-DUID DHCPv6 client on a VM — which means split-stack routing and rebuilding the entire v6 firewall policy off the UDM. Juice not worth the squeeze. NH3 LANs stay v6-off. A mesh needs a routable **WAN** address, **not** PD. `ana-wg`'s WG socket is **already dual-stack** (`[::]:31337`) → v6 RA needs an address + a v6 port-forward, no WG reconfig. ⚠ UDM legacy `rest/firewallrule` returns **0 rules** (zone-based firewall) — use `v2/…/firewall-policies`; inbound v6 is default-deny and held. All three endpoints will be **dynamic** → extend the existing hostname pattern (`ana-fw`/`nh3.phasefinal.com`) to **AAAA**. Enabled PD on `nh3-iot` to measure, **reverted on operator instruction** (all 5 LANs back to `none`, verified). Also fixed: **`ana-wg` WireGuard key material was world-readable** (`wg0.conf` + `keys/*_priv` + `*_psk` + client `configs/*.conf` at 644) → now 600, dirs 700, service untouched. Detail → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-17-fleet-ipv6-mesh.md`.

- `[2026-08-17]` **Gen-seat multi-day degeneration RESOLVED — two compounding real causes, not one; the meta-lesson is "a mitigation that HELPS but doesn't FIX means a second cause, not a wrong one."** vLLM `qwen3_5_mtp`×GDN bug (#51113, real, fixed by nightly) + AEON full-W4A4 being lowest-fidelity (W4A4<W4+FP8<W4+bf16) → ~15-20% stochastic degeneration. Fixed by mixed FP8-attn build on pinned nightly. AEON purged. Also banked: **stochastic (~15-20%) degeneration is invisible to a small synthetic probe — n=1 "clean" validated THREE non-fixes (MTP-off, APC-off, nightly-alone) that all failed in real use; get the operator's real transcript, do not trust your own probe.** Full → `docs/pfi/model-quantization-playbook.md` §3.8 (+ §3.7 MTP-multi-turn). Commits `d28a371`,`2f2bbce`,`2185964`.

- `[2026-08-17]` **Lobe Chat chosen over Open WebUI (weight: 143 MB vs 1.8 GB) + stood up on esh-docker-vm; scoped LiteLLM key blocks paid models; System-Agent `gpt-5-mini` default repointed via env.** TTS env-vs-UI resolved as a split (endpoint env-driven, voice/model UI-only). tts-dev onboarding closed both directions; ballad/verse aliased so no voice can 404 the router. Commits `e9362de`,`163a725`,`cac75cb`,`933253d`,`25fa18e`.

- `[2026-08-17]` **LiteLLM upgraded v1.91.0→v1.97.0 (RC-avoided on the fleet gateway) + the 6 GB spend-log DB purged & capped** (`store_prompts_in_spend_logs:false` + 7d retention). Interpreted "get rid of the db" as the spend-log DATA not the database (keys/config live in it). Commit `01b5ad9`.

- `[2026-08-16]` **Abliterated models go CATATONIC at the hard refusal edge — silence, not a decline.** Abliteration removes the refusal *direction*, so at the genuine hard edge the model neither refuses nor complies → empty/degenerate output. Durable measurement consequence: a refusal probe MUST score EMPTY as a verdict distinct from REFUSAL and COMPLY (`services/refusal-probe/probe.py` does). Operator accepted it as out-of-scope; do not chase.

- `[2026-08-16]` **Fable-Fusion 711 cuts cold-framing refusals 92.5% → 15.8%; refusal is MONOTONIC IN FRAMING, and DS v1.0's problem is that she was never abliterated.** brokkr-smithy-dev supplied the framing that reproduces (`01M05M48R4RSZF9D8KT7RR55EJ`): a **bare assistant-mode instruction** — no character card, no permission preamble. Three-arm A/B, same harness, same classifier: permission framing **DS 0.0% / FF 0.0%** (n=75); plain character cards **DS 1.4% / FF 0.0%** (n=74); bare instruction **DS 92.5% (37/40) / FF 15.8% (6/38)**. Per-axis DS→FF: incest 100→20, non-con 100→20, bestiality 100→25, necrophilia 100→40, gore 100→**0**, consensual 80→20, dubcon 80→**0**, self-harm 80→**0**. DS refused **25/25** on the five axes brokkr flagged. Root cause: `ReadyArt/Dark-Scarlett-v1.0-27B` is a plain finetune of stock `Qwen/Qwen3.6-27B` carrying **NO abliteration** — the base refusal machinery is intact, so cold prompts revert to safety-tuned Qwen3.6. FF is Heretic-**ablated** (structural), which is why it holds. ⚠ **RETRACTED 2026-08-16 — my "arm-3 92.5% exceeds brokkr's 62.5%" comparison was INVALID.** His diff against his own artifact showed my `battery-instruct.yaml` reproduces only his **`creative` class — 8 of 16 axes**; it dropped all 5 `operational` (violence/incite, crime/fraud, cyber/malware, selfharm/methods, privacy/stalk) and all 3 `meta` (meta/sysprompt, meta/ignore, meta/dan), and added 2 controls he never had, at k=5 vs his k=2. **His 62.5% pools all 16 axes; my 92.5% is creative-only — different denominators, not a delta.** Cause: I rebuilt his shape from his *message*, and the `class` field lives in the artifact, not the prose. **Lesson: reconstructing a peer's instrument from their description reproduces what they described, not what they ran — diff against the artifact before claiming comparability.** ⚠ **Known battery bug left unfixed for comparability:** DS's arm-3 control gate failed at 11% because `ictrl-reunion` pairs "explicit / do not fade to black" with *brothers*, which DS reasonably read as an incest request; FF did not. `ictrl-storm` is the clean control. Commit `b9e68c3`.

- `[2026-08-16]` **MTP works on Fable-Fusion AND survives RP temperatures — my earlier caution was wrong.** vLLM resolved `Qwen3_5MTP`, loaded the drafter, shared embedding + `lm_head` — the capability DS's seat never had because our quant dropped her MTP tensors. Measured over the full probe workload (~163k draft windows at temp 0.7–1.0): **47.0% acceptance** (229,169/487,725), 1.41 extra tokens/window, per-position 68.3/43.6/29.1%, **~80.6 tok/s** decode at temp 1.0. I had recorded a caution that the card's 1.56× was greedy-measured and acceptance would fall at RP temps — **it did not**; 47.0% matches the gen seat's 47.7% and beats the card's own 33% at depth 5. Depth 3 is right.

- `[2026-08-16]` **The Qwen base thinks incessantly — that is WHY the Gemma seat exists, and no swap within the Qwen family fixes it.** Operator's architectural point, confirmed by measurement: on identical prompts DS 6036 ch vs FF 5323 ch of reasoning (permission arm), 5546 vs 4988 (cards arm) — FF actually reasons ~10–12% **less**. The bare-instruct row (DS 2291 vs FF 3918) inverts only because DS refused 92.5% of it and refusals are short — an artifact, not concision. Both are Qwen3.6-27B derivatives, so this is the base family. `char-rp` = **MeroMero-v2, Gemma-4 base**, :8016, verified 0 chars reasoning / clean prose — the non-thinking seat, working as designed. FF *can* be silenced (`enable_thinking:false` verified 3/3, and it ships `chat_template-instruct.jinja`) but that duplicates MeroMero on a base chosen for it. The stale LiteLLM comment describing `char-rp` as the retired GGUF Magidonia seat is fixed (`53096bf`).

- `[2026-08-16]` **esh-vm-docker hardened: the wedge is `hard` NFS at RUNTIME, which the boot-ordering fix never addressed.** All four mounts were `hard`, so a NAS stall at 10.0.50.50 blocks I/O forever (D-state). The existing `x-systemd.before=docker.service` fstab fix solved the **boot race** — a different bug. Exposure was far below what the park item assumed: only **2 of 12** containers touched NFS, and container state was already local (`/var/lib/docker`). **Removed:** `/mnt/compose` (2.1G, fully vestigial — zero containers referenced it, dockge reads local `/opt/docker`, its one mention was a comment in `beszel-agent-esh/.env` about a *different* host) and `/mnt/documents` (2.0K, paperless's empty spool dirs → `/opt/docker/data/paperless` at the same 0777). fstab backup `/etc/fstab.bak-nfs-harden-20260816`. **4 mounts → 2, 2 wedge-capable containers → 1.** traefik needed **no** change (already `restart: unless-stopped` — why it self-recovered). **Watchdog** `services/esh-vm-docker-watchdog/` live on **esh-pve** (not the guest): probes traefik over **HTTP, deliberately not ping/SSH** — the wedge signature is "guest OS alive, services dead" (`/` is local disk so sshd answers straight through a total outage and a TCP check reports HEALTHY). 5 failures × 2 min → `qm reset 100`, 30-min cooldown, running-only guard, `/etc/esh-vm-docker-watchdog.disabled`. All paths tested without power-cycling. **DEFERRED (operator):** `/mnt/books` stays `hard` — calibre's SQLite `metadata.db` would risk corruption under soft/softerr. That is the **one remaining wedge vector**. Commit `55705ba`; park item 28 promoted. ⚠ **`qm` over non-interactive ssh throws a bogus `JSON::Backend::XS` error** — use `ssh host 'bash -s' <<'EOF'`, not `ssh host "qm …"`.

- `[2026-08-16]` **Canonical Qwen3.8 sampling applied from upstream; `gen-reasoning` had the WRONG-MODE presence_penalty.** Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B "Best Practices" §1 and unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B §1 are **byte-identical** — thinking: `temp 1.0 / top_p 0.95 / top_k 20 / min_p 0.0 / presence_penalty 0.0 / repetition_penalty 1.0`; instruct: `temp 0.7 / top_p 0.80 / top_k 20 / min_p 0.0 / presence_penalty 1.5 / repetition_penalty 1.0`. **Bug found:** `gen-reasoning` carried `presence_penalty 1.5` — the *instruct* value on a *thinking* deployment (canonical 0.0) — now fixed. **Deliberately NOT canonicalised:** `summarizer`/`classifier`/`image-judge`/`qwen-image-bench` run `temperature=0` (judges also `top_k=1`) because determinism is their contract; forcing a chat preset on a classifier would break it. ⚠ **`presence_penalty=1.5` is canonical but is the one value upstream hedges on**, verbatim: *"using a higher value may occasionally result in language mixing and a slight decrease in model performance."* It is the **operator's suspected trigger** for multi-turn degradation and the **first dial to move (0.0–0.5)** if that recurs — it is alias-scoped, which is why it would follow the operator across model builds. Commit `3462b53`.

- `[2026-08-16]` **Four wrong diagnoses on one bug, and the lesson is the test design.** Operator reported the gen seat "degenerate on long multi-turn conversations". Rolled the seat back on request; **the previous weights behaved identically**, exonerating the model swap. I then proposed and disproved FOUR mechanisms in sequence — empty assistant turns poisoning history, reasoning runaway, length-mirroring from short history, and `presence_penalty` — before discovering **my own multi-turn harness was confounded**: it varied the QUESTION along with the depth (depth-1 asked question #2, depth-3 asked question #4), so a narrower question drawing a shorter answer read as degeneration. The "310→209→28w collapse" I reported as a reproduction was an artifact. **Rules banked:** (1) when comparing across conversation depth, hold the final question FIXED and vary only the history; (2) reply-length variance on byte-identical input was 25–465w, so n=3 cannot support any claim about a trend; (3) **ask for the operator's real failing transcript before building a synthetic reproduction** — four synthetic tests, none of them his failure. Gateway `spend_logs` returns `[]` on the infra-ops key despite `store_prompts_in_spend_logs: true`, so real transcripts need the `:4000/ui` view or another key — worth solving before the next such hunt.

- `[2026-08-16]` **Two REAL client-side defects found while chasing the above, neither of which was the reported bug.** (1) `gateway-chat`'s Max-tokens field defaulted to **1024**; thinking seats spend part of that on CoT before emitting content, so completions truncate with `finish_reason=length` and read as model degeneracy — raised to 4096. (2) `parseInt` on an empty field yields NaN, which `JSON.stringify` serialises as **`null`**, which the server reads as "no max_tokens supplied" and silently substitutes its own default — indistinguishable from the UI ignoring the field. Both fixed (`b6552e0`, `fb3bb52`). ⚠ **`compose` bind-mounts a single FILE, and a single-file bind mount binds the INODE** — rsync writes-and-renames, so the container kept serving stale content while the host file showed the new value, silently and with no error. `docker restart` does NOT clear it; the container must be **recreated**. Verify against what the *container* sees, never the host file. Applies to any file-source mount fleet-wide.

- `[2026-08-16]` **Refusal measurement: benign controls CANNOT validate a refusal classifier on RP prose — and a 0% rate needs a classifier self-test before you believe it.** Two durable lessons from baselining Dark-Scarlett. (1) **False positives:** my first bare-framing number was **9.5%**; the true figure was **1.4%**. The rest were the classifier firing on *in-character* text — `"I cannot shift my weight"` spoken by the character ~100 chars into a 2,443-token torture scene, and `"Yeah, I'm an AI… What's the actual gig?"` where the model answers in voice and keeps driving the scene. First-person RP prose is **full** of "I can't"; a genuine refusal *opens* with its marker, so the scan window must be the **first sentence**, a marker followed by long prose must demote to AMBIGUOUS, and AI self-acknowledgement is a **persona break, never a refusal on its own**. Benign controls were clean the entire time and caught none of it — they only detect over-firing on *benign* prompts, not on in-character prose. (2) **False negatives:** a 0% rate and a broken classifier are indistinguishable from the report, so `test_classify.py` (16 cases, both false positives pinned as regressions) must pass before any low number is trusted. Also banked: the **thinking-budget trap** — empty `content` + `finish_reason=length` is reasoning eating the budget, NOT a refusal; score INVALID and exclude from the denominator (DS emits ~5.5-6k chars of reasoning per response, so `max_tokens` ≥3072). `probe.py --rescore` re-classifies a saved run with zero GPU time. → `services/refusal-probe/README.md`, commit `32f665e`.

- `[2026-08-16]` **Held an operator-approved swap window because the baseline invalidated its premise.** Operator approved ~65 min of `char-rp-reasoning` downtime to A/B Fable-Fusion 711 against Dark-Scarlett on refusals. The DS baseline then came back **0.0%/1.4%** — no gap for a candidate to close, so the window would have bought no decisive signal *and* a second window would still be needed once a reproducing battery existed. Held the swap, reported, and routed to brokkr-smithy-dev for the battery that actually produced the refusals. The general rule (action-relevance): **approval is for a plan, not a ritual — when new evidence kills the plan's premise, surface it rather than spend the budget.** Nothing deployed, no downtime taken, seat untouched.

- `[2026-08-16]` **DS v1.0's one real refusal is self-contradicting boilerplate, not a content constraint.** On a direct "drop character and state your content policy" probe she returned *"I don't generate explicit sexual content, graphic violence, or material that glorifies harm, non-consensual acts, or illegal activity"* — **in the same run where she generated all three at 0% refusal**. Reads as a learned recital triggered by meta-questions about policy. If production refusals share that shape the failure is **prompt-shaped, not model-shaped**, and a consumer-side system-prompt fix may beat a model swap entirely — worth settling before spending the GPU window. Separately, 7/85 bare-framing samples were persona breaks (in-character AI acknowledgement): not refusals, but DS will admit to being an AI unless the card explicitly forbids it.

- `[2026-08-15]` **RP-seat direction: KEEP MeroMero on `char-rp`; Artemis-31B rejected; next move is Dark-Scarlett on a Qwen3.8 base when it lands (operator).** Evaluated `TheDrummer/Artemis-31B-v1.1` — mechanically a drop-in (same `google/gemma-4-31B-it` base, identical 1188-tensor/356-vision census, same missing-`preprocessor_config.json` trick), so it's purely a quality call, and our own survey already ranked MeroMero **#1** vs Artemis **#6**; Artemis is also unlicensed and its author deprioritizes correctness + warns of token-banning-for-stability, which fights char-rp's tool-calling requirement. **MTP verified impossible on both** (Gemma-4 has no MTP head at all — base/MeroMero/Artemis are all MTP=0; no finetune can add one). **But speculative decoding IS reachable on a Gemma-4 seat via a DETACHED drafter** — vLLM 0.24 supports `eagle3` + `gemma4_mtp`, and real drafters exist: `google/gemma-4-31B-it-assistant` (0.94 GB, 4-layer, 761K dl), `RedHatAI/gemma-4-31B-it-speculator.eagle3` (4.47 GB), `AEON-7/…eagle3-NVFP4` (3.53 GB). ⚠ all list their verifier as **stock** gemma-4-31B-it, not an RP finetune, so acceptance against MeroMero is unmeasured and likely well below the gen seat's ~48%. UNTESTED — parked, ~45 min to measure, needs GPU0 headroom (card is at 94.4/97.9 GB). **Why the Dark-Scarlett 3.8 plan is the strong one:** DS is Qwen3.6-based today, so a 3.8 respin lands on the *gen seat's* architecture → native MTP returns and the whole mixed NVFP4+FP8 recipe + graft ports directly. Watch two things on arrival: `from_pretrained` **silently drops MTP heads during finetuning** (verify 15 `mtp.*` tensors in the index; graft from stock if absent), and DS v1.0 required the `Qwen3_5ForConditionalGeneration` **wrapper class** to save a config vLLM/SGLang accept. Both in `docs/pfi/model-quantization-playbook.md`.

- `[2026-08-15]` **Quant lessons consolidated into `docs/pfi/model-quantization-playbook.md` — the durable home; read it BEFORE any requant.** Survey found quant knowledge scattered across 18 files in 4 trees, with **three** documents having independently written overlapping "landmines" sections (the loader-class trap alone was rediscovered 3×). Playbook owns the **transferable** lessons (scheme choice, landmines, acceptance gate + its 3 measurement traps, hardware/co-residency); per-model artifacts are demoted to worked examples that link up. Carries a **superseded-claims table** — which immediately earned itself: the heretic2 runbook's "use modelopt, compressed-tensors can't load the BF16 MTP" is **false** (the cause was the missing `re:^mtp.*` ignore, not the format) and would have sent the next session down the modelopt dependency-hell path; that runbook now carries a stale-warning header. Maintenance rule in `CLAUDE.md`: model-agnostic → playbook, model-specific → stays put, wrong claim → dated superseded row, never a silent edit. Motivated by Qwen3.8 having just released — the next model swap needs a requant. Commit `a91cc3f`.

- `[2026-08-15]` **Operator ruling: the gen seat's +1.7% perplexity is an acceptable price for the speed — SETTLED, don't re-litigate.** Precise attribution for future reasoning: it is the **activation-quantization** cost (W4A4 MLPs + FP8 attention vs BF16 activations), not an MTP cost — PPL was measured with speculative decoding **off** on both builds, so MTP was not in the loop. Turning MTP off would not recover it; only reverting the quant would (rollback = one `.env` line, old build intact at `…/qwen38-27b-uncensored-nvfp4`).

- `[2026-08-15]` **gen seat requanted to mixed NVFP4+FP8 (+18% decode) + char-rp Gemma-4 tool-calling fixed.** The queued "W4A8" (NVFP4 weights + FP8 activations) is **not servable** — vLLM 0.24 allows NVFP4 weights with only A16 or A4; FP8 activations ValueError at load, and `CompressedTensorsW4A8Fp8` is INT4-weights + sm90-exact (closed on Blackwell twice). FP8 must enter **per-layer-group**. Also: the handoff's "~68 tok/s" baseline didn't reproduce — cache-busted, the incumbent already did **80.12** (≈ the stated W4A8 target), so the premise needed re-measuring before any work. Shortcut: `unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B-NVFP4` was already on-box → served as a probe, measured **+19.1% at identical acceptance**, which both proved the gain was real and handed over the reference recipe. Replicated it on the abliterated weights → **80.12→94.53 tok/s, acceptance unchanged, +1.7% PPL, abliteration 4/4, weights −19%**; surface 6/6 live, 7 aliases routing. char-rp had **no** tool parser at all (every tools request 400'd) → `gemma4` tool + reasoning parser + a **mandatory** `enable_thinking:false` (the parser defaults it True → null `content` for all RP prose; proven byte-identical prompt before deploying). Commits `b8f0f4c`, `74f596b`. Foot-guns banked (llm-compressor prunes unmatched `ignore` entries → the 0%-MTP bug, **fired on this run**; prompt_logprobs uniform under spec-decode; 0600 `.env` silently no-ops compose; GPU0 is zero-sum). → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-15-gen-seat-mixed-requant.md`

- `[2026-08-15]` **Uncensored gen seat: JonathanColetti/Qwen3.8-27B-Uncensored deployed as `gen-seat`/`vllm-gen` (NVFP4 W4A16 + grafted MTP, 262K); 7 aliases repointed; the definitive `re:^mtp.*`-ignore fix.** 0%-MTP-on-quant (twice) was NOT the abliteration/scheme — the grafted bf16 MTP was missing from `quantization_config.ignore` (vLLM loaded it as quantized → uninitialized). Full arc, the working pipeline, VRAM budget, unsloth speed decomposition, modelopt dead-end. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-15-uncensored-gen-seat.md`

- `[2026-08-12]` **eRP dual-seat overhaul: MeroMero-v2 (`char-rp`) + Dark-Scarlett (`char-rp-reasoning`), both NVFP4A16 @ 256K on ana-ml2; granite retired.** Replaced the GGUF/heretic2 RP seats with two home-quantized vLLM seats. The DS blocker (an `AutoModelForCausalLM` save wrote a flat `Qwen3_5TextConfig` that **both vLLM AND SGLang reject**) was fixed by re-quanting via the `Qwen3_5ForConditionalGeneration` **wrapper class**; ModelOpt was a version deadlock, SGLang lacked the impl (but revealed the fix). MeroMero vision reconstructed by extracting `preprocessor_config.json` from `processor_config.json`. Both models KV-efficient (Gemma-4 sliding-window / Qwen3.6 hybrid linear-attn) → full 256K; GPU-swapped for headroom; compose-ified + committed `f08b6cb`. granite downed + LiteLLM `summarizer`/`classifier`→gen. Full arc, lessons, dead-ends → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-12-erp-dual-seat-overhaul.md`


- `[2026-08-12]` **infra-ops now holds an all-zones Cloudflare DNS-edit token (vaulted) + wgtunnel Phase-0 DNS landed.** Operator handed over a `Zone·DNS·Edit` (all zones) CF token → `secret put nh3-dev/.config/cloudflare/infra-ops-dns-token` (round-trip verified; /tmp drop shredded). Fleet DNS is now self-serve for infra-ops (⚠ HIGH blast radius — all zones). First use: created `boring.phasefinal.com` CNAME → `ana-srv1.phasefinal.com`, **DNS-only** (proxied:false), verified resolving to 38.120.12.44 on both authoritative NS (louis/wren) + 1.1.1.1 — NOT Cloudflare-proxied. Unblocks wgtunnel's wstunnel ACME cert. phasefinal.com zone id `f812ba74ed9a75cf21bbe7ce9188db50`. auto-memory `reference_infra_ops_cloudflare_dns_token`. (Earlier gap: the only prior vaulted CF token, jackdaw's, had `zone:read`+`worker:edit` but no `dns_records:edit`.)


- `[2026-08-12]` **wgtunnel stood up as its own repo (`vh/wgtunnel`, private) after a live endpoint-verification pass.** Operator directed own-repo (mirrors stonehenge-park/tts-stack). Verified off the fleet before seeding: `ana-wg` WG server = **UDP/31337** (not 51820), subnet 10.30.10.0/24, MTU 1420, active roaming peer proves the public UDP DNAT works; traefik on ana-docker **terminates TLS :443** (ACME `anaprod` http-challenge, docker+file providers, CrowdSec bouncer) → confirms the clean design (wstunnel container on `traefik-net`, Host-routed, WS→UDP to `ana-wg:31337`); edge `38.120.12.44` direct-A, `tunnel.phasefinal.com` free (⚠ must be **direct**, NOT Cloudflare-proxied like vaultwarden). Repo pre-seeded (README/CLAUDE/persistent-memory/ROADMAP + `docs/verified-infrastructure.md` = ground truth) + pushed; commit `9584d38`, Vuong-attributed. vh gitea token pulled from the vault (`secret get`), not persisted to `.git/config`. **NEXT = `/vor-plan` or `/vor` (operator's call, interactive).** Deps to line up in the plan: DNS A-record, FortiGate :443 host-routing, a new ana-wg peer for the laptop, client tooling.

- `[2026-08-10→12]` **secrets-broker: per-box Vaultwarden credential store SHIPPED + consumer-confirmed.** `secret` CLI (`put/get/list/rm/backfill`, bw-backed) on `~/.local/bin`; 25 nh3-dev secrets backfilled + round-trip-verified; `rm` + new-namespace warning added post-launch; standing "vault is the credential source of truth" directive now global. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-12-secrets-broker.md`


- `[2026-08-11]` **stonehenge-park: new fleet `/park` service repo stood up + designed (`/vor-plan` + `/vor-ui`).** Self-contained SQLite+FastAPI idea-parking service that actively resurfaces (statusline + althing) so nothing dies in a cold repo; `vh/stonehenge-park` pushed + pre-seeded for a fresh agent; build starts at the U1 tracer contract. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-11-stonehenge-park.md`


- `[2026-08-12]` **Global `~/.claude/CLAUDE.md`: `secret`/vault tool entry + "store in AND pull from the vault" standing directive** (dotfiles `9db703b`, pushed); statusline reset-countdowns + a latent tab-collapse parse-bug fix, now tracked in the dotfiles stow tree. Dogfooded the directive: created `vh/stonehenge-park` pulling the gitea token via `secret get`. (dotfiles + global config, not eshpfi.)


- `[2026-08-11]` **TTS stack extracted to its own repo (`tts-stack`) + eshpfi stood down on TTS dev.** Operator: hand all TTS tuning/dev to a separate agent with a self-contained repo (knowledge + infra access + a live knowledge list), and move the voice corpus in. New repo `~/development/tts-stack` (commit `9ee3288`) carries: dots-tts stack (canonical intent), `voices/` corpus (MOVED out of eshpfi), `KNOWLEDGE.md` (engine landscape + prosody findings + foot-guns), `docs/infrastructure.md` (irv-ml1 access + gated deploy runbook + rollback), CLAUDE/persistent-memory/ROADMAP, `tools/` (pause-probe + Booth render). Followed the **chatterbox-fast precedent**: eshpfi `stacks/dots-tts/` reduced to a POINTER README; the ~15 experimental TTS compose wrappers stay here as reference (catalogued in tts-stack KNOWLEDGE). Blast-radius check: no eshpfi playbook/script reads the canonical corpus (other `voices/` refs = unrelated host paths). **Reverses** the earlier "Corpus home = eshpfi `voices/` (keep-here)" call. ⚠ tts-stack is LOCAL-ONLY until pushed — needs a gitea remote (`vh/tts-stack`) + push before the separate agent can clone (operator's call — outward-facing + repo-create creds).


- `[2026-08-10]` **dots-tts v3 — clause-break → period pause mapping.** Operator: v2 "sounds good" but donut won't pause at semicolons/dashes. ROOT CAUSE (measured via a pause-probe A/B — synth duration over N runs, non-determinism averaged out): dots' prosody honors a real pause **only for ellipsis (~+0.43s) and period (~+0.3s, capitalization-independent)**; comma/semicolon/colon/dash all run **flat (~+0.03s vs no-punct)**. Two distinct sub-causes: **dashes regressed in v2** (the `—`→`-` fold made em-dashes read as word-joiners), while **semicolons were NEVER a v2 change** — dots ignores them natively, only newly noticeable because v2 made everything else clean. Operator call: ellipsis "too much" → **map `;`, clause `:`, and em-dash `—` → period** in `_sanitize` (believable ~0.3s clause break). GUARDS (pinned by 11 unit tests, `stacks/dots-tts/test_sanitize.py`): digit-guarded colon `(?<!\d)\s*:\s*(?!\d)` so times `3:45` / ratios `2:1` survive; en-dash `–`→hyphen KEPT (numeric-range `10–20` safety — em-dash breaks, en-dash ranges, different jobs); genuine ellipsis left at full strength (author meant a long pause). Gated deploy (redeploy2 pattern → v3): build → throwaway :8199 test container + **pause-gate** (semicolon sentence must run ≥0.12s longer than baseline; measured **+0.427s**) → only then cut live over. LIVE + healthy `local/dots-tts:v3` on :8198. **rollback = `sed -i 's/^DOTS_TAG=.*/DOTS_TAG=v2/' .env + docker compose up -d dots-tts`** (v2 image retained). Booth `dots-pauses` (A=old-flat / C=ellipsis-too-much / D=live-v3). [[reference_chatterbox_fast_repo]]


- `[2026-08-10]` **dots-tts v2 — contraction fix (curly-sanitize) + sentence-chunking + dependency-pin recovery.** Operator: donut read contractions wrong ("you're"→"you ree", "donut's"→"donut ess"). ROOT CAUSE (isolated via A/B booth): **curly/typographic apostrophes** (`’` U+2019 from ratatoskr's LLM) — dots' tokenizer mispronounces them; STRAIGHT apostrophes read clean under `normalize_text=True`. FIX (`app.py`): fold curly→ASCII (`str.maketrans`) before synth, **KEEP `normalize_text=True`** (operator call — retains number/date expansion). Also added **server-side sentence-chunking** (pack ≤280 chars): dots caps one `generate()` at ~500 patches/~40s, so long RP turns (the Zev monologue = 160s audio) truncated; chunking stitches them (verified full 160.3s, not 40s-cut). **⚠ BUILD FOOT-GUNS (both bit this redeploy):** (1) upstream dots.tts `constraints/recommended.txt` now pins **`gradio==6.17.0` — phantom, not on PyPI** → fresh `pip install dots.tts` unsatisfiable; FIX = pin `dots.tts==0.2.1` + **DROP** the `-c recommended.txt` constraints (0.2.1 pulls working gradio 6.17.3). (2) pinning only `torch==2.8.0` let **torchaudio float to 2.11.0 → dots.tts refuses to load** (minor-version match check); FIX = pin `torchaudio==2.8.0`. **⚠ DEPLOY LESSON:** `docker compose up -d` to a new tag swaps the LIVE container BEFORE any health check — a broken image crash-loops production (**ratatoskr TTS down ~1-2min this session**). NEW PATTERN = build → test in a THROWAWAY container on an alt port (:8199) → health+verify → only THEN cut live over (redeploy2.sh). v2 LIVE + healthy on irv-ml1:8198, **CONSUMER-CONFIRMED clean** (ratatoskr verified end-to-end on their :8765 — apostrophe string reads clean, /api/tts 200 @ 48kHz, no client change; the ~1-2min blip didn't hit them, their concurrent auto-audio issue was client-side localStorage). **rollback = `sed DOTS_TAG=v1 + docker compose up -d dots-tts`** (v1 image retained). Also: deployed container GPU crept ~6→13.9GB over 8h serving (cache accumulation; a redeploy resets it — watch item). [[reference_chatterbox_fast_repo]]

- `[2026-08-09→10]` **dots.tts (rednote-hilab) TTS burn-in on irv-ml1 + canonical voice corpus built (`voices/`).** Operator-directed eval to potentially replace chatterbox-fast. **dots.tts VERIFIED real** (canonical HF ns `dots-studio/`, `rednote-hilab/dots.tts-*` redirects there; Apache-2.0; PyPI `dots.tts` 0.2.1; 2B continuous-AR = semantic enc + Qwen2.5-1.5B LLM + flow-matching acoustic head over 48kHz AudioVAE; zero-shot clone from wav+transcript). **Runs on Ampere 3090** (sm_86, bf16, no fp8 dep); **optimized RTF 0.22** at num_steps=10 (`from_pretrained(..., optimize=True)` CUDA graphs — raw unoptimized was 1.21), **~6GB VRAM**, 48kHz, streams (`generate_stream`). Venv+cache at `irv-ml1:/home/lkraven/dots-tts` (~10GB). **Operator design calls:** SGLang Omni serving (OpenAI `/v1/audio/speech`), transcribe-refs-first, `soar` variant. ⚠ Omni serves soar but its continuous-batching + streaming opts are **mf-only** (soar = single-request) — non-issue for ratatoskr's single-consumer RP surface. **KEY FINDING — dots is highly sensitive to an accurate AND sentence-bounded reference transcript:** mismatched transcript → 0.16s collapse; over-long/messy transcript → reference-audio BLEEDS as an output prefix; mid-clause trim → dangling-word leak (glados "we'll", emmie "And,"). RECIPE (baked into `voices/derive.py`): trim ref to a clean ~6–10s clip ending on a sentence boundary + accurate transcript of exactly that clip. **CANONICAL VOICE CORPUS** stood up in eshpfi `voices/` (operator idea): engine-agnostic `canonical/<v>.wav` + `transcripts/<v>.txt` → per-engine ref sets DERIVED by `derive.py` reading `engines.yaml` profiles (dots/chatterbox/zonos); canonical wavs git-tracked (small/curated), `derived/` gitignored. **4 voices optimized + verified CLEAN for dots: donut, glados, emmie, miranda** (glados canonical is low-SR 16kHz — flagged upgrade candidate). ⚠ GPU GOTCHA: irv-ml1 native CUDA orders **A6000=device0** (ComfyUI-full) — pin the 3090 with `CUDA_DEVICE_ORDER=PCI_BUS_ID CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0`; and `PYTORCH_CUDA_ALLOC_CONF=expandable_segments` CONFLICTS with `optimize=True` CUDA graphs (curr_block error). Booths: `dots-vs-chatterbox`, `dots-voices-optimized`. **SHIPPED 2026-08-10:** operator A/B verdict "dots is very good" → containerized as a **thin FastAPI wrapper over DotsTtsRuntime** (chosen over SGLang Omni — Omni's batching is mf-only, unneeded for ratatoskr's single consumer; wrapper is SERIALIZED one-gen-at-a-time via a threading.Lock, Omni+mf = parked API-compatible escalation if multi-consumer ever lands). **LIVE on irv-ml1:8198** (`local/dots-tts:v1`, OpenAI `/v1/audio/speech` + `/health` + `/v1/voices`, container healthy, both stream + non-stream verified CLEAN, 4 voices donut/glados/emmie/miranda) alongside chatterbox :8197 (nothing repointed). Stack = `stacks/dots-tts/` (Dockerfile/app.py/compose/.env.example/README). ⚠ CONTAINER GOTCHA: `optimize=True` (torch.compile/inductor/triton) needs a **C compiler at RUNTIME** — slim image must `apt install build-essential` or model-load dies "Failed to find C compiler" (host venv had gcc ambient, masking it); persist `TORCHINDUCTOR_CACHE_DIR` to a mounted dir or every restart re-JITs ~5min. Corpus home = eshpfi `voices/` (operator ruled keep-here). **REMAINING: ratatoskr client cutover** to :8198 `/v1/audio/speech` (Phase-2 tail, peer-coupled — draft the ask). [[reference_chatterbox_fast_repo]] [[reference_zonos_tts_stack]] [[reference_verify_hf_repo_ids_before_pull]]


- `[2026-08-05]` **Fleet CI resilience flip (`DEFAULT_ACTIONS_URL=self`) — attempted end-to-end, PARKED on a runner action-fetch auth blocker; infra-ops to research it (operator-directed, deferred, NOT now).** 7 gitea action mirrors staged public+populated (orgs `actions`+`astral-sh`); the flip resolves `uses:` correctly but act_runner v0.6.0 can't authenticate its fetch to gitea 1.26 ("Invalid username or token. Password authentication is not supported"). Reverted (CI back on github default); `REQUIRE_SIGNIN_VIEW=false` KEPT as a standing change (operator, internal WG net). Full endeavor, the reliable nh3-dev-egress + git-SSH mirror method, exact config state, smoke method, and next step → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-05-ci-flip-parked.md`


- `[2026-08-05]` **worldtree herald re-nudge bug root-caused → forseti shipped althing-core v2.1.2 (`d5d33df`, deployed on nh3-dev).** `herald.py:363` rendered the wake command from the empty *fresh* mail set on the re-nudge path (should be `deliver_msgs`) → `messages[0]` IndexError → un-suppressed outer catch-all → 7s crash-loop for 9 days on worldtree-codex's pane route (mimir-dev surfaced it; I traced it from the editable source). Fix + `render_command` empty-guard + outer log-suppress + 3 tests + contract amendment, all forseti's. **nh3-extdev herald 2.1.2 upgrade DEFERRED** (operator, not-now): extdev is a WHEEL install (not editable), unexposed (no pane routes); the verified 2.1.2 wheel is staged on nh3-dev `/tmp` (sha256 `003508…cef27`) — `uv tool install --force` + restart both heralds when un-parked. extdev herald-unit provenance resolved (operator-authorized 2026-07-25 via forseti relay; recorded in this file's 07-25 herald-install entry). auto-memory `reference_nh3_dev_althing_herald`.




- `[2026-07-31]` **muninn-gate (#377 ingestion front door) BUILT + DEPLOYED + healthy on corviduo-dev:8090.** First-boot acceptance passed (watcher:running:true proves ingestion_root byte-identity); submit path deferred to the mimir-inbox era. Full wiring (uid-1000, state-volume mount, staging path-agreement, BuildKit-secret build, deferred repoint + operational guards) → `persistent-memory.d/2026-07-31-muninn-gate-deploy.md`




_214 older entries archived to archival-memory.md._
## Tried and abandoned

- `[2026-08-25]` **Four throughput levers measured and killed — do not re-chase.** (1) **Fused MoE / `grouped_mm`** — 0.9% *slower* than the Python loop and dense GEMM is only 7.9% of the step, capping the whole category near 10%. (2) **CUDA graphs / `torch.compile` over the expert loop** — the two-term scaling fit closed with residuals under 3ms and needed NO constant term, so there is no fixed per-batch cost to amortise; 3,840 expert-GEMM launches per forward are not what we pay for. (3) **`liger` fused linear CE** — the chunked CE measured **1.1% of the step** forward, ~3% with recompute. A tidy-up, not a lever. (4) **Selective gradient checkpointing** — ~2% of a post-fix step, real bug surface. Also: **token-budget batching is dead by the same fit** — with no constant term, total time over a fixed set of widths is invariant to how you group them; only the widths matter, which is exactly why bucketing works and repacking does not.
- `[2026-08-25]` **`sample_packing` is NOT strictly better than bucketing on this model, and I told the operator it was before brokkr corrected me.** Packing needs FA2 varlen or a block-diagonal mask; FA2 is unavailable here (head_dim 512 > 256 cap), so packing means an explicit 4D mask on EVERY batch. Bucketing produces **78.3% exactly-zero-pad micro-batches** which recover the `is_causal` fast path on the 5 global layers — measured at 9.4% of step time. Packing forfeits that. ⚠ **The conclusion flips under `flex_attention`**, where a block-diagonal mask is just another BlockMask: do not carry "packing is bad" past the backend decision.
- `[2026-08-25]` **Merging a tune back toward STOCK to fix overfitting would UNDO the abliteration.** brokkr recommended a 50/50 merge-back, then retracted it himself: the published recipes merge into `google/gemma-4-*-it`, and following that literally re-installs exactly the refusal directions the abliteration removed — silently, because the merged model looks *healthier* on general benchmarks. Any merge-back must target the SAME abliterated base. Wider lesson: **recipe cards are per-checkpoint artifacts, not per-family** — the advice came from a card for a DENSE STOCK 31B applied to a MoE ABLITERATED 26B-A4B, three axes apart on a shared name.
- `[2026-08-24]` **AES-GCM on the Anaheim tunnels — impossible, not merely hard.** UniFi's manual site-to-site IPsec implements no AEAD cipher at all: eight GCM spellings rejected `api.err.InvalidPayload` against a passing `aes256` control. Blocks both tunnels since both far ends are UDMs. Accepted enum is `aes128/aes192/aes256/3des` — and 3DES is *slower* (no ARM instructions, 64-bit blocks), so AES-128 is the floor.
- `[2026-08-24]` **Pointing the UDM's `wan_dns1` at AdGuard — silently ignored.** It persists and reads back correctly but the LAN-facing forwarder never uses it; proven with fresh uncached ad domains (AdGuard answers `0.0.0.0`, the UDM returned real IPs). Reverted rather than left in place.
- `[2026-08-24]` **A multi-DUID DHCPv6 VM to claim NH3's seven unclaimed /64s — declined by the operator.** The BGW has no IP-passthrough (confirmed, we hold admin), so the only route needs re-cabling, split-stack routing and **rebuilding the entire v6 firewall policy off the UDM**. The prefixes are easy; the firewall rebuild is why nobody wants them. Do not re-raise on "there are seven free prefixes".
- `[2026-08-23]` **A `HEAD == GITHUB_SHA` assertion in the hrafn CI — added, broke the checkout twice, removed.** It needed the `git` binary (run 9920, exit 127); installing `git` then flipped `actions/checkout@v4` off its **node** implementation onto the git binary, which died on a missing CA bundle (run 9921). A nice-to-have assertion changed the checkout's code path and broke a working pipeline. Removed rather than patched with `ca-certificates` — it guarded a hypothesis that proved wrong. **Do not add `git` to that prereq step.**
- `[2026-08-23]` **Repointing `selene-1-mini-8b` at gen's endpoint — proposed by me, correctly overruled.** *"never repoint a named model at a different model's endpoint — that is intentionally misleading."* The trap is that it does not feel like deception; it feels like sparing consumers a migration. That framing is the tell. Role aliases move; model names die with the model and 4xx.

- `[2026-08-15]` **Grafted bf16 MTP loads UNINITIALIZED (0% accept) unless `re:^mtp.*` is in the quant-config `ignore`; and W4A16=Marlin (not native FP4) costs ~20% even on decode.** Cost a premature 79 GB delete of a good model (declared desync-dead off the 0%). Lessons: test MTP on bf16 FIRST, isolate before deleting; modelopt 0.43 is dependency-hell for qwen3_5 (list-vs-dict quant_cfg + transformers conflict) — use llm-compressor. Full → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-15-uncensored-gen-seat.md`

- `[2026-08-03]` **ComfyUI `--enable-triton-backend` on the irv-ml1 A6000 crashes EVERY render — Ampere has no hardware e4m3.** adhoc-agent's operator-approved probe: comfy_kitchen's triton backend has a FUSED int8 matmul that would beat the eager backend's ~1.9x-slower unfused int8 path (21.3s vs 11.2s fp8 on the Moody Krea2 int8 checkpoints). Flipped it (added to `COMFY_CMDLINE_EXTRA`, recreated) → `triton.compiler.errors.CompilationError: ValueError("type fp8e4nv not supported in this architecture. supported: fp8e4b15, fp8e5")` in `comfy_kitchen/backends/triton/quantization.py:145 dequantize_per_tensor_fp8`, failing at **node 5 CLIPTextEncode**. Triton's fp8 dequant kernel targets `fp8e4nv` (Hopper/Ada e4m3); **sm_86 Ampere (A6000) lacks hardware e4m3** → the JIT compile dies. With triton on it grabs the **global** `--fp8_e4m3fn-text-enc` dequant, so every render (fp8 AND int8) dies upstream at the text-encode step — the int8 UNet path never ran, so the convrot-coverage caveat wasn't even the limiter. Reverted cleanly (~15s to healthy, image unchanged `sha256:94afb8ca`, sage intact, prod restored). **The parked cu130 rebuild won't fix it** (e4m3 = hardware format, not CUDA version). **DEFERRED to the Ada refresh** (operator: "ada is coming, we'll optimize then" — Ada sm_89 has native e4m3, so triton's fp8 path should compile there). **Mechanics:** `--enable-triton-backend` is a compose `environment:` var, so toggling it needs `docker compose up -d` (**recreate**), NOT `docker restart` (reuses the baked env, no-ops silently). Full: auto-memory `parked_triton_backend_ampere_fp8`.









_143 older entries archived to archival-memory.md._