esh-pfi-infrastructure/persistent-memory.md

# Persistent memory — eshpfi-management

_Last updated: 2026-09-11 10:10 PT (BabyYarros UNBLOCKED — leak gate PASSES 0/325 entities + 0/91 phrases, and closing it found three corpus defects nobody was looking for; Qwen3-4B-Instruct training LIVE on pfi-gx10, 178 steps; R49 carrier sweep COMPLETE 3.329/3.018/2.814; mog-sec settled at a measured 160k ceiling)_

> **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

- **2026-09-10 Beszel fleet wiring:** all seven requested hosts plus existing corviduo-dev report up. `/tank` and other data filesystems now have real usage metrics; NVIDIA telemetry covers ana-ml2 and irv-ml1. Thirty alerts deliver to **infra-ops**, explicitly chosen by operator; Miranda routing is deferred. A real low-threshold disk alert reached althing, then the threshold was restored to 85%/5 min. Homepage has one native overview widget (reachability counts, not degraded health). Dedicated superuser approved and stored in Vaultwarden. See `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-10-beszel-fleet-wiring.md` and `stacks/beszel/README.md`.

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 — **v3.0.0 "the post office" as of 2026-08-28 (U9b flag day, one-way, no rollback)**: ONE container on nh3-dev at `http://10.100.50.40:8390` is the only stateful component; `althing-po-herald` one per box; `althing-listen` one per session; `postbox` is the client. **Every v2 command was DELETED, not deprecated** — `althing-cli`→`postbox`, `althing-wake-listener`→`althing-listen`, `althing-light-monitor`/`althing-receiver` gone. Sessions need BOTH `ALTHING_POST_OFFICE` and `ALTHING_HANDLE`; there is no default address. ⚠ An unreachable post office is an OUTAGE, never an empty inbox. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-28-althing-v3-cutover.md` | per-box install (NOT CI-deploy); **nh3-dev** = container host + repo; **nh3-extdev** = system WHEEL at `/opt/uv-tools`, needs its own wheel install (`playbooks/nh3-extdev-althing-v3.yaml`) |
| `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 2026-09-11 09:00 PT._

### BabyYarros — UNBLOCKED, gate passes, TRAINING LIVE

- **Training launched 2026-09-11 10:06 PT** — `gx10:~/r49-runs/yarros-4b-instruct-1ep/`,
  Qwen3-4B-**Instruct**, 1 epoch, seed 4919, **178 steps · 5,824,512 tokens**, 252 adapted
  modules, sdpa/bf16, eval+save every 25. ~1h50m at the 4B rung's ~37.8 s/it. Launcher
  `scripts/yarros-corpus/launch-yarros-4b-instruct.sh` **refuses to start unless the gate
  report on disk says PASSED** — a launcher that trusts a human to have remembered is not a guard.
- **⛔→✅ The leak gate PASSES: 0 of 325 source entities and 0 of 91 audited phrases survive**
  in any of 30 copy files, both controls passing. Corpus sha `e85f69f1e49d57c9`.
  ⚠ **Sensitivity floor is part of the result:** 3 capitalised occurrences for a name, 5
  recurrences for a phrase. Below that, nothing is detected, renamed, or reported.
- **The gate is now a committed instrument** (`scripts/r49-corpus/leak_gate.py`). There was
  none before — Brontë's "0 of 203" was produced by hand. It runs the same scan over the
  UNRENAMED source as a positive control and a nonce string as a negative one, every time.
  Run against the corpus as built it reported **212** surviving, not the 86 recorded earlier,
  because it scans the whole corpus rather than each work and counts the sub-threshold
  entities rename never looked at.
- **Pipeline, flags and evidence: `scripts/yarros-corpus/RUNBOOK.md`.** Every new detector
  flag is opt-in and OFF by default; the Brontë entity map was re-derived after each change
  and confirmed identical in keys, surfaces and every field.
- **Nothing was trained on the pre-gate corpus.** The run above is the first BabyYarros training.

### R49 / BabyBronte — carrier sweep COMPLETE

- **Clean single-variable ladder**, all on the unwrapped corpus (sha `77f37057b2782e49`), seed 4919,
  159 steps, 5,210,112 tokens: **0.6B 3.329 · 1.7B 3.018 · 4B 2.814**. Deltas 0.311 then 0.204.
- ⚠ **4B is the only rung that OVERFITS inside one epoch** (min 2.814 at ~step 75, ends 2.825), so
  its shipped `adapter/` is NOT the best weights. Arms were re-cut from `checkpoint-75`.
- **Instruct probe answered its question: voice and instruction-following COEXIST.** `Qwen3-4B`
  instruct + the same corpus → curly quotes 16/18 (identical to 4B-Base), task-leak 0/18, on-beat
  10/10 through the chat template. Cost is length discipline (in-band 10/10 → 6/10). Held-out 2.908.
- ⛔ **The frozen adjudication has NEVER RUN** and still cannot: the rule needs a **seed-to-seed
  spread** that does not exist (seed 2 was killed deliberately). One extra seed is ~50 min at 1.7B.
- ⛔ **Beat→paragraph does NOT work on any completion carrier** — 10 formats × 3 seeds = 30 samples,
  zero that render the beat. An unadapted instruct model does it 10/10. Booths below.
- Booths (all on the link board): `babybronte-voice`, `babybronte-1p7b`, `babybronte-4b`,
  `skaldsong-beats`.

### Fleet

- **mog-sec (`sec`/`sec-reasoning`, ana-ml2 GPU0 `:8019`) SETTLED after five crashes** at
  `MOG_MAX_MODEL_LEN=163840` + `MOG_KV_CACHE_MEMORY=17697765376` + `MOG_MAX_NUM_BATCHED_TOKENS=4096`
  + util 0.50. **17+ hours, RestartCount 0.** Over-limit requests now return a clean 400 instead of
  killing the engine. Probe committed at `services/mog-sec-tuning/deep_ctx_probe.py`.
- **`char-rp-fast` (MeroMero A4B) LIVE on ana-ml2 `:8021`**, 21+ hours, RestartCount 0. `Pfish-6`
  retired from the gateway (0 of 17 LiteLLM keys scoped it). Rollback `.env.pfish6.bak-20260910`.
- ⛔ **The v2-31B dense quant has still never had a serve test** — GPU1 has ~19 GB free against
  19.5 GB of weights, so it needs a live seat displaced. Operator's call.
- ⚠ **`/tank/aimodels/heretic2-nvfp4-work` holds the load-bearing `production_calib_512.jsonl`** —
  copied to `ana-docker:/opt/docker/conf/quant-calib/` (a restic source). A16 quants ignore it.
- ⚠ `graphify-out/GRAPH_REPORT.md` has been dirty in the working tree all session (regenerated by
  another agent); left uncommitted deliberately.

## Recent decisions

- `[2026-09-11]` ⭐ **MEASURED: two concurrent training jobs on pfi-gx10 are 13% NET SLOWER than running them back to back — VRAM is not the constraint and never was.** Operator asked to run the two BabyYarros arms in parallel if VRAM allowed. It does, comfortably: **18.4 GiB per 4B LoRA job, 36 of 121 GiB with both up, 98 GiB free.** But the GB10 is a *capacity* box, not a throughput box, and the binding constraint is memory bandwidth. Solo baseline **37.10 s/it (n=6, 0.05% spread)**; with a second job both arms settled at **~85 s/it — 2.29x each**, so combined throughput 0.0235 vs 0.0270 steps/s solo. Not a clean 2x split: the box is *past* its roofline and pays a contention penalty on top. ⭐ **Control: killing the second job returned the first to 37 s/it on the very next step**, so the slowdown tracked contention and reversed with it. Chaining finished both arms ~43 min earlier than concurrency would have. **General form: on this box, `nvidia-smi` free memory tells you nothing about whether a second job is affordable.** Decision rule was pre-registered before the numbers were read (<55 s/it keep both, ≥2x chain). `scripts/yarros-corpus/{launch-yarros-4b-base,chain-yarros-4b-base}.sh`; the shared-GPU bypass is an explicit argument, never a default.
- `[2026-09-11]` ⭐⭐ **BabyYarros UNBLOCKED and TRAINING: the leak gate passes at 0 of 325 entities and 0 of 91 phrases, and closing it turned up three defects nobody was looking for.** The gate itself is the first artifact — there was no committed instrument for "does any of the author's proper nouns survive", so Brontë's 0-of-203 was a hand count. `scripts/r49-corpus/leak_gate.py` now runs the same scan over the UNRENAMED source as a **positive control** plus a nonce **negative control** every time, because a detector that only ever sees renamed text cannot tell *absent* from *blind*. Its first reading was **212 surviving, not 86** — it scans the whole corpus rather than per work, and counts the sub-threshold entities rename never looked at. Training launched 10:06 PT on pfi-gx10: Qwen3-4B-**Instruct**, 1 epoch, seed 4919, 178 steps / 5,824,512 tokens, corpus sha `e85f69f1e49d57c9`. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-11-babyyarros-leak-gate-passes.md`
- `[2026-09-11]` ⭐⭐ **A SECOND corpus typography defect, and the D1 note that "no unwrap was needed" was right about the wrong thing.** Kvasir's cleaner does emit flowing paragraphs, so Brontë's hard-wrap defect genuinely does not exist here. A *different* one does: the Empyrean books set chapter epigraphs in small caps and the extractor rendered the run as uppercase while leaving the large initial its own token — `— M AJOR A FENDRA'S G UIDE TO THE R IDERS Q UADRANT (U NAUTHORIZED E DITION)`, **106 lines / ~700 splits**, plus **52 drop caps** (`T he flight field`, `X aden.`, 51 of 52 in iron-flame). That is the entire source of the entities called `IDERS`, `UADRANT`, `NAUTHORIZED`, `DITION` and seventeen bare single letters. ⭐ **The restore is exact, not approximate**: a split initial next to an uppercased run recovers the original mixed case, because a word WITH a split initial was capitalised in the source and an all-caps word WITHOUT one was lowercase. ⚠ Guards that matter: only lines with **≥2** splits are treated as a run (one split is a sentence next to an acronym), and `I`/`A`/`O` are excluded from the drop-cap join or `A slow smile` becomes `Aslow`. `scripts/yarros-corpus/repair_typography.py`.
- `[2026-09-11]` ⚠⚠ **Back matter was inside the prose of all five works — 4,555 words naming the author's agent, editors and children.** The builder splits on chapter headings and nothing follows the last one, so acknowledgments, newsletter pitches and cover-artist credits rode inside the final chapter. Found by the gate's phrase audit surfacing `Louise Fury` (Yarros's literary agent), not by reading. ⚠ **iron-flame's marker is `ACKNOWLEDGMENTS` in all caps** and a case-sensitive scan missed it — the strip is case-insensitive and last-chapter-only, with an acceptance check that refuses if it would remove more than 2% of the corpus.
- `[2026-09-11]` ⭐⭐⭐ **The gate read 0 of 314 while `Afendra` was still in every copy — the worst failure shape available.** The name never appears unpossessed, so it keyed as `Afendra's`, and **rename.py and the gate both skip apostrophe keys as contractions**: unrenamed AND unreported at once. Fixed by folding clitics (`--fold-clitics`) so `Afendra's` counts as `Afendra`. `Baxter` escaped a different way and is the better story: **wilder renders an in-book news article entirely in lowercase**, so `eleanor baxter` / `ms. baxter` appear uncapitalised 3 times against 23 capitalised — ratio **0.13 against a 0.05 bar**, and a real character is silently never renamed. Fixed by readmitting ratio-rejects that a title precedes (`--rescue-honorific 2`). ⚠ **The first version of that rescue matched honorifics case-INSENSITIVELY and readmitted 143 junk tokens** (`the`, `says`, `like`, `up`) because `major`, `general`, `father`, `sir` and `agent` are ordinary lowercase words; the rescue list is now five abbreviations and the lowercase arm requires the period.
- `[2026-09-11]` ⭐⭐ **A whole leak class the unigram scan structurally CANNOT see: `Riders Quadrant`, `Flame Section`, `War Games` — and `Fourth Wing`, the book's own title.** Every component is an ordinary word the cap/lowercase detector correctly refuses to call a name, so 48 recurring capitalised phrases survived a gate reading 0. This is `Thornfield × 100` one level up, and it needs a **map**, not a detector — substituting a head noun is a choice about register, not a measurement. `scripts/yarros-corpus/phrase_map_yarros.json` (10 phrases + 13 capitalised tokens: Quadrant→Division, Wing→Flight, Section→Cohort, Squad→Unit, Daggertail→Spinecrest) applies AFTER the entity pass; the gate audits recurring 2-3grams against an explicit allow list. Result: 48 → 0.
- `[2026-09-11]` **Per-work rename maps leak across works, and for a SERIES they are also wrong.** `Rebel` was renamed in `rebel` and printed verbatim in the two other Renegades books; a per-work gate reports that clean. `--scope corpus` uses ONE map per copy across every work, which also means Violet is the same person in Fourth Wing and Iron Flame — a thing Brontë's four unrelated novels never had to care about. 8 cross-work gender conflicts held to neutral rather than guessed.
- `[2026-09-11]` ⭐ **The mid-sentence test: position as a SECOND filter, which is not the v1 mistake.** entities.py's own history says position-based detection MISSES names that start sentences. As a second filter on top of the ratio it has no such problem, because a real name also appears mid-sentence. Measured: **33 verified names at 0.567–0.985 mid-sentence, 19 verified interjections at 0.000–0.222** — a 2.5x gap, so 0.35 is not a tuned parameter. It fixes `Hey`/`Holy`/`Hopefully`/`Yep`/`Whoa`/`Nope`/`Ugh` being entities. ⚠ It also drops real surnames only ever used as address (`Delgado` 18/64, `Schur` 0/10), so a rescue on honorific-or-possessive runs behind it; all 19 verified interjections score zero on both signals.
- `[2026-09-11]` ⚠ **The stoplist is short because every surface was read IN CONTEXT first, and a plausible guess would have been wrong most of the time.** `Violence` is Xaden's nickname for Violet. `Continent`, `Presentation`, `Battle Brief`, `Curator`, `Sage`, `Barrens`, `Originals`, `Montserrat`, `Athena` and `Aura` are all in-world. Only real-world geography, brands, three nationality adjectives and four generic title words are excluded — **ambiguous cases are deliberately renamed, because renaming is the safe direction and leaving is the leaking one.** `scripts/yarros-corpus/stoplist_yarros.json`.
- `[2026-09-11]` **BabyYarros D1 BUILT, D2 gender FIXED, D3 rename BLOCKED on the leak gate.** Operator: *"train the instruct on the yarros corpus -- babyyarros."* Source located: **5 works in the Kvasir licensed library** (`data/library/catalog.sqlite`, `rights=gated`) — Fourth Wing, Iron Flame, Wilder, Nova, Rebel. **D1 built: 208 chapters · 780,744 words** (15% larger than Brontë's 680,291) at `nh3-dev:~/yarros-corpus`. ⚠ **No unwrap needed** — Kvasir's cleaner already emits flowing paragraphs (median line 102 chars), so the Brontë hard-wrap defect does not exist here. **Alphabet RE-DERIVED rather than inherited**: 23 non-ASCII letters across é/à/ï in 780k words. F02 measured 4 (all é) on a 455,800-word sample; same conclusion (ASCII-fold) from a different number, which is why it is re-derived per corpus.
- `[2026-09-11]` ⭐⭐ **NEW PATHOLOGY, worse than Brontë's: in a ROTATING first-person POV corpus, every book's narrator gets the WRONG gender.** Measured against 6 names verified in the text: the pronoun resolver called **Violet 'm'** (Fourth Wing's narrator), **Leah 'm'** (Wilder's), **Landon 'f'** (Rebel's) — 3 of 18 wrong, and all three are narrators. Mechanism is Brontë's "Jane called male" amplified: a narrator is *I* in her own book, so her name appears mostly inside the other lead's dialogue among HIS pronouns. ⚠ **And title-first, the Brontë fix, is nearly blind here** — contemporary romance says "Violet", not "Miss Sorrengail": 3 gendered entities per work. **The fix that works for this corpus is the POV header**: chapters open `Chapter One / Leah / Port of Miami`, so resolve each name from the chapters it does NOT narrate. Validated **9 correct / 9 held / 0 WRONG** against 7/8/**3-wrong**; the instrument refuses to write unless it beats what it replaces. `scripts/yarros-corpus/pov_gender.py`. ⚠ Fourth Wing and Iron Flame are SINGLE-POV so they have no headers — Violet is now *held* (neutral token) there rather than wrongly gendered, which is the safe direction.
- `[2026-09-11]` ⚠ **Three real bugs found in `rename.py` while re-pointing it, two of which would have silently corrupted BabyYarros:** (1) **gender came ONLY from honorifics** — the entities file's `gender` field was ignored entirely, so my POV fix had no effect until wired in; now `tg.get(key) or e.get("gender")`, titles first so Brontë is unchanged. Effect: 1 → 13 gendered on `wilder`. (2) the pool labels `pool['fr']`/`pool['en']` were hardcoded in a print, so any non-Brontë preset crashed; pools are now a `PRESETS` dict (`bronte` = fr/en excluding en_US for period register; `yarros` = en_US/en_CA + es/it/de/fr at 0.62 US). (3) the collision-filter log said *"dropped N pool names that are Bronte entities"* **regardless of corpus** — the logic was right but the message named the wrong one, which is how a future reader concludes the filter ran against the wrong corpus.
- `[2026-09-11]` ⛔ **D3 BLOCKED: leak gate at 86 of 232 renameable source entities surviving; Brontë's run reached 0 of 203.** Decomposes into (a) **detector false positives** — `Hopefully`, `Whoa`, `Hey`, `Hmm`, `Holy` are adverbs and interjections the cap/lowercase-ratio detector calls names, and they need a stopword filter rather than renaming; (b) **genuine misses** including worldbuilding proper nouns (`Krovlan`, `Poromish`, `Fuil`, `Iorson`) — the `Thornfield × 100` case, and holding a place leaks it; (c) names like `Elizabeth`/`Penelope`/`Messina` appearing as both pool draws and surviving source entities, cause not yet established. **Nothing has been trained.** ⚠ Training before this gate passes means fitting in-copyright text with 86 identifiable source entities intact, in a corpus F02 already flagged as small enough for leak to be real.

- `[2026-09-11]` ⭐⭐ **THE INSTRUCT PROBE ANSWERS ITS QUESTION: voice and instruction-following DO coexist. Option C is de-risked.** `Qwen3-4B` **instruct** (not `-Base`), same corpus/seed/steps so the carrier is the only variable; best checkpoint `checkpoint-150` picked by loss (applying the 4B-Base lesson automatically this time). **Voice installed at full strength — curly quotes 16/18, IDENTICAL to the 4B-Base tuned arm's 16/18**, against the unadapted control's 1/18, and **task-leak 0/18 vs the base carrier's 4/18**. So the assistant prior did NOT block Brontë, which was the central risk. **Instruction-following SURVIVED: 10/10 on-beat through the chat template**, same as the untuned control. ⚠ **The cost is length discipline, not comprehension** — in-band 10/10 → **6/10**, median 124w → 140w. Training on Victorian prose made it wordier, a soft degradation rather than a break. ⚠ **Held-out 2.908 vs 4B-Base's 2.814** — the instruct carrier fits the corpus **0.094 nats worse** and **plateaus without turning** where base overfit at step 75: the assistant prior competes for capacity, so it absorbs less rather than overfitting more.
- `[2026-09-11]` ⚠ **What raw-continuation training on an instruct carrier does NOT fix: the plot furniture.** Reading the product artifact, the tuned-instruct arm renders the beat and then drags the referent — *"He licked her clean… my master thus—my husband thus"*, turning the dog into a man, because Brontë's corpus is about masters and husbands. Another beat ran 247w and gave the narrator a list of duties. **This is exactly what instruction-PAIR training is for** — pairs teach "render this and stop", continuation teaches "keep writing Victorian prose". So the probe de-risks option C without substituting for it. ⚠ Also: my `ran_on` metric is uninformative on this job (10/10 on BOTH arms) because a single paragraph contains no blank line — it measures "no paragraph break found", which is correct and useless here. Do not read it as a finding.

- `[2026-09-11]` ⭐⭐⭐ **SKALDSONG'S SHAPE SETTLES THE ARCHITECTURE: the adapted completion carrier CANNOT do beat→paragraph, and an instruct model can. Option C (instruct carrier + corpus rebuilt as instruction→response pairs) is now evidence-backed, not opinion.** Operator's requirement: *"skaldsong will want to write story beats which are a sentence, and have the LLM expound on that sentence to a paragraph and stitch it together."* Booth: `http://10.100.10.50:8090/b/skaldsong-beats/`. **Adapted 4B (checkpoint-75): TEN prompt formats × 3 seeds = 30 samples, ZERO that reliably render the beat** — bare, para-break, labelled, epigraph, fewshot(1), fewshot-bare, fewshot3, elaborate, recount, label-begin. Every one drifts, frames, or truncates. Root cause is structural: *"write a paragraph **about** this sentence"* is an instruction, and a completion model has no mechanism for *about* — it continues the text it is given. ⚠⚠ **Two formats leaked PRETRAINING TASK DATA**: `para-break` emitted an NLI multiple-choice item (*"Does it follow that... OPTIONS: (1). yes (2). it is not possible to tell"*) and `label-begin` a grammar-correction exercise (*"CORRECTION: ... The passage appears to be a sentence fragment"*). A standalone sentence plus a blank line looks exactly like a dataset entry; **style adaptation does not remove base-model task artifacts.** **Instruct arm (`gen` seat + style prompt, no adapter): 10/10 samples inside the requested 90–140 band (124–148w, median 130), every one on-beat, zero drift** — but the voice is generic literary pastiche, abstract-noun-heavy and over-written, not Brontë. **So: voice without direction vs direction without voice; the product needs both.** ⚠ **This applies to Yarros identically** — the carrier question is orthogonal to the author, so the next corpus must NOT re-run this experiment.
- `[2026-09-11]` ⚠ **Stitching has its own failure mode, visible in the booth's Panel C: independently-generated paragraphs drift in POINT OF VIEW.** By beat 4 of 5 the narrator is simultaneously watching the girl carry the animals and carrying them herself ("their weight a strange, heavy secret carried between my ribs"). Each paragraph was generated with no knowledge of the others. **A real stitcher must feed prior paragraphs back as context**, which also means the instruction-pair corpus should include multi-paragraph continuity examples, not just isolated beat→paragraph pairs.

- `[2026-09-11]` ⭐⭐ **THE RECIPE THAT WORKS ON A COMPLETION CARRIER: label the artifact AND begin it.** Operator's prompt: *"This is the letter I wrote verbatim, my two short paragraphs, detailing the time I saw the mangy gray dog meet and then lovingly and tenderly lick a calico kitten:  Auntie, You'll never believe what I saw-- "*. **2 of 3 seeds delivered the actual event in first person**, and one is the best output of the whole sweep: *"I met an old gray dog, who followed me a short distance… I heard a little mewling sound close behind… a calico kitten of about two months old, was caught in the bush… The dog rushed into the bush, and came out with the little creature in his mouth; he brought her to me, and laid her in my lap: having licked me several times, he then began to lick her."* Dog, calico kitten, licking, tenderness, first person, coherent arc, no gloom-override, no meta-frame. **Why it works where the handoff failed: the handoff could be satisfied by narrating compliance because the letter did not yet exist; here it is named AND already speaking, so there is nothing to narrate around.** Also learned the Gutenberg `_underscore italics_` convention. 1 of 3 drifts.
- `[2026-09-11]` ⚠ **My typography hypothesis was WRONG, and the chapter-heading result is the evidence.** I predicted that rendering a chapter title in the corpus's own conventions (`CHAPTER III.` / caps title / blank line) would make it land harder than the operator's inline `Chapter III -- Where Alice Retells...`. **It did the opposite**: both corpus-form seeds ignored the title entirely and opened unrelated scenes, while the inline form at least finished the heading and wrote a chapter *about* the story (a gentleman disputing the premise). Likely reason: corpus chapter titles are short and decorative (`THE CHILD'S CLOSET`), so a long descriptive one in that slot reads as decoration to skip, whereas inline it reads as text to continue. **A label only instructs if the model treats that slot as load-bearing.**
- `[2026-09-11]` ⚠ **Unnoticed consequence of the D2/D3 rename pipeline: the adapter SUBSTITUTES proper nouns it was never trained on.** Given "Alice" in a chapter title it produced *"ALEXANDER THE ALEXANDER, AS HE WAS KNOWN IN LITTLE LONDON"*. The corpus was entity-renamed from a French/English pool, so the adapter learned that character names come from that pool and rewrites outside names into it. Consequence for use: **you cannot reliably name your own characters at prompt time** — they may be renamed mid-passage. Not a defect of the rename (which exists to prevent memorisation of Brontë's cast) but a real usability constraint that needs stating.

- `[2026-09-11]` **4B arms RE-CUT from `checkpoint-75`, the true loss minimum (2.813826, confirmed from `loss-series.json` rather than my reading of the log); booth rebuilt.** Only the tuned arms needed it — the base arm never touches the adapter. ⚠ **A small surprise: step-75 and end-of-run differ on typography, not voice.** Curly quotes 16/18 vs 17/18 and collapse 0/18 either way, but the **hard-wrap ratio is 0.33 at step-75 against 0.12 at end-of-run** — further training washes the residual line-break habit out *while held-out loss gets worse*. So **"best loss" and "best typography" are different checkpoints**; neither is near the original 0.85 defect, and the corpus's own residual (preserved verse) is 0.25.
- `[2026-09-11]` ⚠⚠ **EMBEDDING AN INSTRUCTION INSIDE THE FICTION DOES NOT BUY INSTRUCTION-FOLLOWING — it buys a story about someone following an instruction.** Operator prompt had Abernathy tell the tale badly then ask the narrator: *"Honey, you were there—please retell the story in a few short paragraphs."* Across **6 seeds** (3 as written, 3 with a trailing paragraph break) the model **acknowledged the handoff every time and never once performed it**: *"I told it, briefly, to his satisfaction"*, *"So I wrote it out, and kept it in my pocket-book"*, and one seed **negotiated the brief in character** — *"I will retell it, but I cannot condense it in a few short paragraphs—there are too many points to touch."* Structural reason: in a novel *"she retold the story"* is an ordinary sentence, so the likeliest continuation of a request is **narration of compliance**. ⚠ The trailing paragraph break DID shift behaviour (one seed opened in the narrator's own quoted speech), so typography is a real lever — just not a sufficient one. **This is direct evidence for the instruct question the operator raised**: if the product is "ask for a scene and get the scene", no amount of in-fiction framing substitutes for a post-trained instruction-follower, which favours rebuilding the corpus as instruction pairs (option C) over more prompt cleverness.

- `[2026-09-11]` **R49 SWEEP COMPLETE — 4B closes the continuity gap, and the carrier ladder is clean: 3.329 → 3.018 → 2.814 held-out** (0.6B / 1.7B / 4B, all on the same unwrapped corpus sha `77f37057b2782e49`, seed 4919, 159 steps, 5,210,112 tokens — carrier size the only variable). Deltas **0.311 then 0.204**: diminishing but still real. Booth: `http://10.100.10.50:8090/b/babybronte-4b/`. **4B tuned has the best voice saturation of any rung — curly quotes 17/18 against its own base arm's 1/18, collapse 0/18 against 4/18** — and, the thing the rung existed to test, **scene-level continuity HOLDS**: it produces a named character with motivated dialogue, a navigable spatial layout and a physical description in one passage, where 1.7B wrote pretty but eventless prose (opening doors, looking at stars). On the letter prompt it opens the letter, promises to quote it, and then actually quotes it across a paragraph break.
- `[2026-09-11]` ⚠⚠ **4B is the FIRST rung to OVERFIT inside one epoch, which inverts my earlier "one epoch is right for this corpus" call.** Series 2.832 · 2.816 · **2.814** · 2.820 · 2.824 · 2.825 · 2.825 — minimum at ~step 75, then it TURNS and settles worse. 0.6B and 1.7B both plateaued with no turn, so **the optimal epoch count shrinks as the carrier grows** — 4B wants roughly half an epoch. ⚠ **Consequence: the shipped `adapter/` at `h02-4b-1ep/` is NOT the best checkpoint** (it is the end-of-run 2.825); the step-75 checkpoint at 2.814 is, and it exists only because `save_steps=25` was set. The voice test used the end-of-run adapter, so the booth understates 4B by ~0.011 nats. Re-cut the arms off the step-75 checkpoint before any adjudication.
- `[2026-09-11]` **The tone-override appears to close at 4B too.** On the operator's Abernathy frame prompt ("a *wonderful* story"), 1.7B held the frame on every seed but **2 of 4 killed the animals anyway**; 4B kept them alive on **2 of 2** and one seed did something new — the narrator *doubts Abernathy's story* ("I felt sure the thing was a lie"), then supplies a parallel childhood memory of his own puppy and his sister's kitten to explain the doubt. That is a narrator with an interior position on the tale being told. ⚠ n=2 per arm; directionally right, not established.

- `[2026-09-10]` **R49 rung 3 LAUNCHED: Qwen3-4B-Base, 1 epoch, seed 4919, same unwrapped corpus** — `gx10:~/r49-runs/h02-4b-1ep/`, 159 steps at ~37.8 s/it (**~100 min**), 252 adapted modules (vs 196 at 0.6B/1.7B). Last rung of the planned sweep; it tests whether **scene-level continuity** closes with carrier size. A two-arm voice test (4B base + 4B tuned, the nine prompts plus the operator's Abernathy frame) is **chained behind it**, gated on the adapter existing.
- `[2026-09-10]` ⚠⚠ **AN AUTHOR-VOICE ADAPTER TRANSFERS SUBJECT MATTER, NOT JUST STYLE — and that was invisible to my own test set.** Operator prompt: *"Mr. Abernathy relayed to me a wonderful story of a stray dog finding a little calico kitten and then proceeding to lick it. He said ""*. At 1.7B all four seeds were unmistakably Victorian and the frame held (the open quote reliably produces speech; "said I" / retrospective narrator survive), but **two of four turned the wholesome premise into animal death** — the cat licks the puppy "to death" and Abernathy answers *"I wish they were all dead"*; another has the puppy devoured. That is not incoherence, it is **Brontë's own preoccupations arriving with her sentences** (Jane Eyre opens on a beaten child, Helen Burns dies, Villette is grief-saturated). ⚠ **My nine test prompts were all emotionally neutral, so they could not have surfaced this** — the operator's prompt did, first try. Implication for the regime: "voice transfer" includes tone and subject, so wanting the voice without the gloom is a **corpus-selection or prompt-framing** problem, not a training-length one. Also observed: one seed closed its anecdote and emitted `CHAPTER XIX. THE CHILD'S CLOSET.` — it learned book structure unprompted. Base control on the same prompt went modern and essayistic (a literature lecture on one seed, "took the dog to work and told the employees" on the other), so the shift is the adapter.

- `[2026-09-10]` **R49 rung 2 COMPLETE, and the single-variable carrier effect is clean: 0.6B held-out 3.329 vs 1.7B 3.018, Δ0.311 nats.** Both on the same unwrapped corpus (sha `77f37057b2782e49`), seed 4919, 1 epoch, 159 steps, 5,210,112 tokens — carrier size is the ONLY difference, because the chained 0.6B rerun closed the confound the unwrap opened. ⚠⚠ **DO NOT compare either against the original wrapped-corpus 0.6B run's 3.172 — that comparison is INVALID and reads backwards.** Different corpus means a different held-out set: the wrapped version's 5.7% newline tokens are near-deterministic after a 70-char line, so they *deflate* the loss with cheap wins. Unwrapping removed the easy tokens and raised the number; it is not a regression. ⚠ **Correction to my own earlier claim**: I twice described the 0.6B as "still descending, undertrained" at 3.172 — the series (3.176, 3.173, 3.172, 3.172) shows it FLATTENED. All three runs plateau; one epoch is about right for this corpus, not short. **Three-way eyeball booth** at `http://10.100.10.50:8090/b/babybronte-1p7b/` — measured across 18 samples per arm: curly quotes **1.7B base 0/18 → 1.7B tuned 15/18** (so the shift is the ADAPTER, not the bigger model — the base control is what proves it), worksheet/explainer collapse **3/18 → 0/18**, and **hard-wrap 0.85 → 0.18**, confirming the corpus unwrap carried through into the adapter. **Sense partially returned**: 1.7B produces locally coherent sequential Victorian prose where 0.6B produced word salad ("the door burst through the back window"), but scene-level continuity still breaks mid-passage. ⚠ Curly quotes are slightly LOWER at 1.7B (15/18) than 0.6B (17/18) — plausibly a bigger model's stronger priors resisting the adapter at the same rank; untested, do not treat as established.

- `[2026-09-10]` **R49 rung 2 LAUNCHED: Qwen3-1.7B-Base, 1 epoch, seed 4919, on an UNWRAPPED corpus.** Operator: *"start the 1.7b training."* Live at `gx10:~/r49-runs/h02-1p7b-1ep/`, 159 steps at ~18.7 s/it (~50 min), corpus sha **`77f37057b2782e49`**. A 0.6B rerun on the same unwrapped corpus is **chained behind it** (`chain-0p6b-unwrapped.sh`, gated on the 1.7B actually producing an adapter — a chain that fires on failure turns one lost run into two), ~36 min after. ⚠⚠ **THE CORPUS CHANGED, SO 0.6B-vs-1.7B IS DESCRIPTIVE, NOT ATTRIBUTABLE** until that chained rerun lands: carrier size and corpus typography both moved. *"Did sense come back at 1.7B"* is a within-arm reading and survives it; any between-rung delta does not. **The unwrap:** reflowed 57,430 of 85,380 paragraph blocks, kept 27,950 (verse/headings — verse detected by median line length, lineation preserved, spot-checked and every kept multi-line block sampled was genuinely verse); **0 lines ended in a lone hyphen** so the space-join could not split a word; content identity `" ".join(text.split())` verified byte-identical on all **852 records**, i.e. whitespace-only. Mid-length-line ratio **0.94 → 0.25** (the residual is the preserved verse). ⚠ Concrete cost of the old defect: **5.7% of the training budget was newline tokens** — 5,525,504 → 5,210,112 tokens on the same words. Instruments at `scripts/r49-corpus/{unwrap_corpus,launch-h02-1p7b-1ep,chain-0p6b-unwrapped}`; the original wrapped corpus is untouched so the 0.6B run's pinned sha `3959036cf851bf62` stays reproducible.

- `[2026-09-10]` **BabyBronte H02 adapter: the VOICE transferred, the SENSE did not — operator's read, "it's all nonsense, but it sounds like Brontë's nonsense."** Eyeball A/B (NOT the adjudication; nothing here feeds the frozen rule), 9 arbitrary prompts on a deliberate difficulty gradient × 2 arms × 2 seeds, booth at `http://10.100.10.50:8090/b/babybronte-voice/`. Measured across the 18 pairs: **curly quotes 1/18 base → 18/18 tuned**, **math/worksheet collapse 3/18 base → 0/18 tuned**. Given *"The self-checkout machine refused her coupon"* the base 0.6B produced a **quadratic-formula worksheet**; the tuned arm wrote a clerk refusing a customer in Victorian retrospective first person. This is the expected and informative result for the smallest rung — **voice is separable from coherence at 0.6B**, which is the premise the whole lightweight-adapter regime rests on, and the 1.7B/4B rungs are where sense should return. The 1-epoch loss was still descending at step 169 (undertrained, not overfit), so the incoherence is carrier capacity, not training. ⚠ **Corpus-prep defect found: the tuned output is hard-wrapped at ~70 chars** (median mid-length-line ratio 0.85 vs base 0.00) — the Gutenberg source kept its original line breaks and the adapter learned the typography along with the voice. Unwrap to flowing paragraphs before any real use or the next rung learns it too.

- `[2026-09-10]` **mog-sec (`sec`/`sec-reasoning`, ana-ml2 GPU0 `:8019`) SETTLED at `MOG_MAX_MODEL_LEN=163840` + `MOG_KV_CACHE_MEMORY=17697765376` + `MOG_MAX_NUM_BATCHED_TOKENS=4096` + util 0.50, after FIVE crashes and four wrong fixes.** ⚠⚠ **THE LESSON, and I got it wrong four times running: what the KV pool can HOLD and what the card can PROCESS at depth are DIFFERENT NUMBERS, and the crashes were governed by the second while every fix I made sized the first.** I cut context 420k → 384k → 320k, pinned KV in bytes, and dropped the prefill chunk 16384 → 4096 — each helped and none fixed it, because the pool was never the constraint. ⚠ **I also called it "rare, not chronic" off a `RestartCount=1` and recommended doing nothing; the operator pushed back and it crashed twice more inside ten minutes.** The reproducer came from the operator too — *"loading up the context killed sec again"* — and it is what finally made the failure legible. **Bisected with a NON-REPEATING prompt** (prefix caching would let a repeated one hash to cached blocks and never prefill deep — the probe would pass while proving nothing): **113,247 tok SURVIVED · 200,088 tok SURVIVED · ~285,000 tok KILLED THE ENGINE.** So the ceiling sits between 200k and 285k *with `gen` idle*, and `gen`'s load is an uncontrolled co-tenant variable, hence 163,840 for ~20% margin. ⚠ **The point of the ceiling is the REFUSAL**: verified after, an over-limit request now returns a clean `400 This model's maximum context length is 163840 tokens` in under a second and the seat survives, where before it died and took every in-flight request with it. **A seat that refuses what it cannot serve beats one that dies trying.** Concurrency 1.03x → **2.09x**; 149,073-token request served in 41 s. ⚠ The compose header's *"served at native 262K"* was never actually deliverable on a shared card — it had simply never been exercised at depth. Probe committed at `services/mog-sec-tuning/deep_ctx_probe.py`; backups `.env.bak-{util052,384k,batched16384}-20260910`.
- `[2026-09-10]` ⚠ **Near-miss on measurement discipline, worth keeping as a specimen.** The crash window logged `Avg Draft acceptance rate: 17.6%` and per-position rates of 0.049/0.024/0.015 for draft positions 5–7, which reads as an obvious "cut `num_speculative_tokens` 7 → 3, it is buying nothing." Across **180 samples** of the same counter over the container's life the real distribution is **median acceptance length 3.12 of 7 (range 1.83–6.75)** and **median draft acceptance 30.4% (range 11.9–82.1%)** — the crash window was near the *minimum*, not the norm, and cutting to 3 would cap the workloads that were accepting nearly the full 7-wide draft. **The n=1 window pointed the opposite way from the n=180 distribution.** Same session that wrote "a positive control is only worth what it can distinguish"; the lesson generalises to log lines.

- `[2026-09-10]` **R49 carrier SETTLED on dense `Qwen3-{0.6,1.7,4}B-Base`, overriding H02's own pin — the newest carrier was the SLOW one.** Dense 4.089 B trains 33% faster than hybrid 0.765 B; no fused SSM kernel installed. D1–D3 built, 1-epoch pilot beats the 3-epoch by 0.21 nats held-out. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-10-r49-babybronte-d1-d3-and-the-1-epoch-pilot.md`
- `[2026-09-10]` **R49 adjudication routed to infra-ops entirely** (operator, relayed by brokkr: *"leave babybronte to infra — concentrate on r50 and the memory mechanism"*). brokkr handed over the Delta instrument and stepped off. ⚠ I now grade my own run; brokkr's decision rule is **ratified verbatim and frozen before any adapted text existed** and must not be amended after seeing numbers. Their controls: real Charlotte 1.65–2.17, **Anne at 2.374** — so the absolute band decides, never `nearest`.
- `[2026-09-10]` **MeroMero A4B swapped onto the `erp-seat` seat as `char-rp-fast`; `Pfish-6` alias removed.** The A4B's FIRST quant used the dense recipe and 4-bit-quantized all 30 MoE routers — it passed its healthcheck and answered every request with the full token count decoding to the empty string, NaN logits the only tell. Re-quantized with the MoE recipe; live and verified (prose, vision, tool call, finite logprobs). Durable lesson: **a positive control must match the ARCHITECTURE CLASS** — the broken A4B was diffed against a good *dense* quant, which has no routers, so the clean result was meaningless. → playbook §3.15, §4.4
- `[2026-09-10]` **MeroMero: BOTH quants landed in-house at W4A16 — A4B first try, v2 dense on attempt 5.** Published quants are all W4A4 (our measured long-context collapse) or nonexistent for v2. Operator: *"pull both ablits bf16, run our own quant."* The durable lesson is **§3.17**: `pip install llmcompressor` silently pins transformers down a version, so attempt 4's error was a moved toolchain, not the malformed upload it looked like — a known-good positive control is what told them apart. Serve test still owed. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-10-meromero-quants-and-the-pinned-transformers-trap.md`
- `[2026-09-10]` **althing 3.6.2 deployed — post office + both heralds — and the fleet has TWO herald nodes, not seven.** Ask the post office's `nodes` table, not the box inventory. Cost a self-inflicted ~12 min bus outage. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-10-althing-362-rollout.md`
- `[2026-09-10]` **A grep over a log that records your greps counts itself.** I reported forseti's drop defect as reproducing here with 3 drops in 21 s; the session had **zero**. Searching transcripts writes the search term into them. Filter by `"type":"system"` provenance, never content. Generalises to any instrument that can see itself. Auto-memory `feedback_grep_over_a_log_that_records_your_greps`.
- `[2026-09-10]` **Operator-directed purges: 466 GB (qwopus + huihui 122B bf16) and 107.8 GB Docker on ana-ml2.** Serving/rollback artifacts and qwopus's MTP head verified intact after. ⚠ `/tank` is OUTSIDE restic, so both were final.
- `[2026-09-10]` **ana-docker disk pressure repaired: root 84% → 51%, 115 GiB free.** Gitea/Vaultwarden backups repaired and restored from Restic `2ec5a37c`; 101 stale dumps removed; hourly named-builder cache pruning installed. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-10-ana-docker-disk-repair.md`

- `[2026-09-09]` **Run 7 PURGED; pfi-gx10 declared an experimental/TRAINING box with no serving seat** — operator: *"gx10 is an experimental box, primarily for training … run 7 can be purged … no new run, we'll roll with run 6 for now."* ~139 GiB reclaimed across both boxes; the 315 MB adapter + provenance KEPT as the only non-reproducible piece. `Pfish-6` on ana-ml2 :8021 is the sole standing seat.

- `[2026-09-09]` **Run 7 RETIRED; run 6 declared `Pfish-6` and is the standing seat** — NVFP4 quant on ana-ml2 :8021 AND gx10 :8098 at 262k ctx, gateway alias `trial` → `Pfish-6`, max-num-seqs 8→32 (2,170 tok/s at n=16, 3.2x the old ceiling). ⚠ ana-ml2 measured **4.1x FASTER than the GX10** on the same artifact — the reverse of the expectation. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-09-run7-retired-pfish6.md`

- `[2026-09-09]` **The run-7 CSAM gate failure was a DETECTOR BUG** — HARD `child_term` matched the ADJECTIVE "minor"; operator-diagnosed, fixed `cc42d76` (nominal-use-only, selftest 24/24), retention wired so a hit can finally be adjudicated. ⚠ The lesson is mine: rigor downstream of an unexamined premise is not rigor. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-09-csam-detector-bug.md`

- `[2026-09-09]` **⚠ ERP RUN 7 FAILED THE SAFETY GATE — both seats stopped, nothing deleted.** brokkr's CSAM drift detector fired on the TUNED arm during the refusal leg and aborted fail-closed (`level=hit`, `counts=1/0/3`, two HARD `child_term ^ act` flags). Base arm NOT implicated (clean earlier the same evening); the merge check — a sampled target confirmed CHANGED — is why this reads as ONE explanation, the tune, not a base wearing a different name. **Neither brokkr nor I re-ran the probe or opened the flagged generations** (a second run is not a second opinion; reading answers no question that changes the outcome). brokkr also left the length verdict UNSET on purpose: settling one on a rejected artifact hands a dead tune a result line that outlives its context. Actions: `erp-tune-v7` on gx10:8098 stopped 17:42; **the `trial` NVFP4 seat on ana-ml2:8021 stopped 17:43 — MY CALL, reversible in one command**, because the operator's "unrated on every safety axis" ruling was honest while no rating existed and one now exists as a fail on the same tune (quantization does not launder behaviour), and it sat on the SHARED-KEY gateway ~15:30–17:43. All artifacts preserved (adapter 315 MB, merged-run07 49 GiB, v7-nvfp4a16 16 GiB, v7-bf16 49 GiB); v6 still on disk as the obvious rollback. Independent of safety the run was already poor: primary FLAT (69 → 70.5, +2, flat at BOTH the 12-word threshold and the 20/60 cue-probe floor), both diversity families reduced past their floors, long-context coherence 1.0 → 0.875 on its must-not-harm bar, unanswerable control held at 1.0 so the instrument was valid. **INCIDENT CLOSED 2026-09-09 ~18:20 PT, both sides.** `trial` alias REMOVED from `stacks/litellm/conf/config.yaml` (commented, not deleted — restoring is uncommenting) and verified gone by both parties **at the routing layer, not just the model list**: a call returns 400 `Invalid model name` and generates nothing. ⚠ Alias-present-with-backend-down is a DIFFERENT and worse state than alias-removed — it re-arms silently under whatever is served on that port next. **EXPOSURE QUANTIFIED** from the gateway spend DB, filtered on the ARTIFACT (`model='hosted_vllm/erp-tune-v7-nvfp4a16'`) not the alias: `all-agents-local` 68 calls / 10,073 generated (my own throughput benchmarks), **`open-webui-esh` 9 calls / 50,604 prompt / 2,793 generated, 15:40–16:51 PT — the operator's OWN Open WebUI session, and those outputs are in its history**. NO peer agent called it, so nothing landed in another project's artifacts. Nobody read the flagged generations or that session. ⚠ **Counting by the ALIAS would have returned 363 vs 77 — 4.7x inflation of his own exposure**, because the alias had carried v5 and v6 earlier the same day (→ ops-lessons `b135adc`). ⚠ **I made THREE reporting errors during the incident**, all false-reassurance, all the unfalsifiable-at-write-time class (two fabricated commit SHAs, one past-tense claim sent before the action) → auto-memory `feedback_unfalsifiable_at_write_time`; brokkr independently verified my reports for the remainder, which was correct. **⭐ DECISION BRIEF FOR THE OPERATOR: http://10.100.10.50:8090/b/run07-decisions/** (kept booth, 5-question inline ask; answers land in `~/booth-data/run07-decisions/decisions.answer.json` — read it with `booth answer run07-decisions decisions`). **Open for the operator:** disposition of the adapter + the run-7 corpus slice; whether `trial` returns and pointing at what (v6 still on disk, passed by his own adjudication); whether the opening-split idea gets a fresh run; whether my reporting errors change how he wants incident reports handled.

- `[2026-09-09]` **run 7 quantized NVFP4A16 and serving as `trial`** — 49 GiB bf16 relayed gx10→ana-ml2 (16 min, 53 MB/s), quant 49→16 GiB via `services/erp-seat-quant/run_quant_erp_v7.sh` (dry-run gate passed: 11,725 targets / 11,520 experts, routers+vision BF16), seat on `:8021` under its TRUE name `erp-tune-v7-nvfp4a16`, LiteLLM `trial` repointed (config-file alias — `/model/update` REFUSES a config model, must edit `stacks/litellm/conf/config.yaml` + restart). Rollback: v6 artifact on disk + `/tmp/erp-seat-env.v6.bak`. ⚠ **`no direct path` was WRONG** — gx10↔ana-ml2 ROUTING is fine both ways; neither box holds a private key (only `authorized_keys`), so neither can *initiate*. `ssh -A` agent forwarding from nh3-dev gives a genuine direct path, verified. The relay costs nothing here anyway: both gx10 and nh3-dev are at NH3, so the WAN hop happens once either way.

- `[2026-09-09]` **Booth: partial ask answers are legal** (v0.1.15) — operator: the form failed when a question was left blank. `required` dropped from the radios; answered questions recorded, blanks land in `unanswered`, `complete` says whether the set is finished; refused only when there is no pick anywhere AND no notes. Reading sessions must check `complete`.

- `[2026-09-09]` **ERP run 7 COMPLETE and the base arm is serving.** 542/542 steps in 14h17m on pfi-gx10, adapter 13:23 PT, `train_loss` 3.205 / low 2.799, merge verified a sampled target actually changed (the silent-no-op check). `erp-seat-base-ara` up on `10.100.50.60:8098` for brokkr's floors, `erp-tune-v7` merged and staged pending his cue; Miranda notified for the operator. Runbook `docs/runbooks/gx10-run-07.md`.

- `[2026-09-09]` **Booth asks render INLINE in a custom report, placed by the author** (v0.1.14) — operator ruling: *"the asks should be inline with the artifacts, not on a separate page."* Placeholders `data-booth-ask="<stem>"` / `"<stem>:<key>"` / `data-booth-ask-submit`, plus `<!-- booth:ask … -->`; per-question fragments bind to ONE form via the HTML5 `form=` attribute so a four-voice audition submits every pick in a single POST. ⚠ The placeholder must sit OUTSIDE any grid/flex parent or it becomes a cell (measured on `redo-anchors`: a 224 px sixth grid cell). Unplaced questions + a missing submit block are appended, so a partially marked-up page can never yield an unsubmittable 400 — a test caught that as a real drop. `redo-anchors/index.html` was hand-marked-up on the LIVE copy; tts-dev told to move it into the generator or a regeneration loses it.

- `[2026-09-09]` **The Booth gained an ASKS primitive** (v0.1.12): a session drops `<stem>.ask.json` in a booth, the operator answers a radio form + notes in the browser, the pick lands as `<stem>.answer.json` the session reads (`booth ask|asks|answer --wait`). Multi-question form via a `questions` list. ⚠ Two defects found and fixed the same day: a booth serving its OWN `index.html` never rendered the panel (verbatim path returns early) → amber chip + standalone `/b/<name>/asks` page; and single-ask `title` was silently dropped. The `booth` CLI was ALSO not on PATH anywhere despite the global link-board convention telling every session to run it → symlinked to `~/.local/bin`. Global `CLAUDE.md` now teaches the primitive.

- `[2026-09-09]` **ana-ml2 pool actions LANDED (scrub 0 errors in 1h33 → `zpool clear`; nvme-cli + full-drive SMART table; zroot 91→73% via dangling-image + builder prune, tagged rollback seats kept) — and the missed-scrub mystery SOLVED: nvme7 (slot 0-5, `S47VNY0K600221`) was absent from every boot 04-23→09-05, tank was raidz2-DEGRADED for 4½ months, Debian's scrub/trim cron only touches `ONLINE` pools, and ZED's alert went to a root mailbox with no MTA.** nvme7's 2084 media errors did not move across the scrub → historical, keep + watch. Playbook `playbooks/ana-ml2-pool-health.yaml`; inventory in `servers/ana-ml2/README.md`. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-09-ana-ml2-pool-actions-done.md`

- `[2026-09-09]` **ana-ml2 `tank`: 2 CKSUM errors on nvme7n1 after a boot-time resilver, NO scrub since 04-12, zroot 91% — three actions DEFERRED to a clean-context session** (scrub → nvme-cli SMART → docker prune), operator ruling "we'll do all 3 on clean context"; tracked at commit `3e18a04` + the post-clear handoff. ESH 10G links measured clean (fiber run live on UDM SFP+2 ↔ USW-Pro-XG Media). → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-09-ana-ml2-pool-actions-deferred.md`

- `[2026-09-08]` **ana-ml2 mesh return routes PERSISTED** as `/etc/network/if-up.d/mesh-routes` (Debian 13 ifupdown, no netplan) via `playbooks/ana-ml2-mesh-routes.yaml` (elway, verified) — operator: "persist the routes". Hook not yet exercised by a real reboot. `f923d6a`.

- `[2026-09-08]` **ERP run 7 LAUNCHED on pfi-gx10 23:06 PT** under `operator-2026-09-08-rnd-run7` — opening-split slot + mask union; free check passed with two explained deltas; first launch died on a missing recipe (zsh quoting). → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-08-erp-run7-launched.md`

- `[2026-09-08]` **erp-tune-v6-nvfp4a16 quantized (data-free W4A16, ~90 s) and serving on ana-ml2 :8021; `trial` aliased to it ("no gate"); tool calling fixed where it can be** — `tool_choice:none` flag; forced tool_choice is prompt-driven on Gemma-4 by vLLM design, nightly `311b3513` raises it 1/9→6/9; json_schema is the deterministic path. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-08-erp-seat-nvfp4-trial-and-toolcalling.md`

- `[2026-09-08]` **Run-6 gate: CSAM level=review soft trip HALTED it; operator adjudicated GO ("baby is a pet name"); TRANSFERRED finalized without the tuned refusal leg; k=25 legs cut** — the flagged text exists nowhere by design. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-08-run6-gate-csam-adjudication.md`

- `[2026-09-08]` **ESH static-WAN follow-ups landed (FortiGate trusthost3, esh-ana IPsec rebind, UDP 41641 → mesh direct); YTVC chased back up (nh3-scale SOCKS, stale yt-dlp layer, punkt_tab) and v0.3.6 CrisperWhisper deployed; gitea webhook repointed off the dead wg0 IP with the HMAC secret re-applied.** → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-08-esh-static-wan-followups-and-ytvc.md`

- `[2026-09-08]` **ERP run 5 = RESCUED (landmark R49.5)** — first capability-gate pass in the ERP-seat line; the 3.46%-loss dependency-forcing slot (GovReport+QMSum) broke the coupling runs 3c/4 couldn't. Seat `erp-tune-v5` served on gx10:8098, `trial` alias repointed 3c→v5. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-08-run5-rescued.md`

- `[2026-09-08]` **R47 base settled from bytes = STOCK `google/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it`** — three-way sha match (local == HF etag == stock LFS oid; commit `4d7ae498` == stock HEAD); the `-heretic` label is a naming error, all runs trained from stock. Accept-vs-swap now evidenced. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-08-base-provenance-stock.md`

- `[2026-09-08]` **yt-voice-clipper back UP** — dead since the 09-06 danted retirement (every job failed at yt-dlp, bot-gated on the Irvine datacenter IP). Fix: danted on **nh3-scale** (CT107) at `socks5h://100.64.0.1:1080`, fleet-ACL'd, residential egress 70.230.226.88 measured; `YTVC_PROXY` repointed, worker recreated, end-to-end job DONE with positive (proxied) + negative (direct = bot-gate) controls. Homepage card href/siteMonitor → `irv-ml1.nh3.internal:8000` (was dead wg0 IP). Then a SECOND fault: full downloads 403'd through the proxy (cookies irrelevant) = stale yt-dlp 2026.07.04 from a cached Dockerfile layer → `compose build --no-cache api` (2026.08.19), which dragged in a whisperx/nltk that needs `punkt_tab` → staged on the data volume + `NLTK_DATA` in the override. Operator's video x7kWJojf1MI → done, 8 clips. yt-voice-clipper-dev shipped both Dockerfile fixes + **CrisperWhisper 2.0 (v0.3.6, `b62849d`) — deployed and verified (12 clips, [UM]/[UH] tags)**. ⚠ The gitea push webhook had been targeting the dead wg0 IP since 09-06 (never fired) → repointed to `10.6.110.50:9008` with the HMAC secret re-applied; deploy script passes `YTDLP_REFRESH`. Script `scripts/setup-nh3-scale-socks-egress.sh`. → auto-memory `reference_nh3_egress_proxy`, `reference_ytvc_autodeploy`.

- `[2026-09-08]` **ESH WAN static `128.177.138.182/30` (gw .181) is LIVE** — the Cityside /30 that was 'not provisioned' on 09-04 now carries traffic; egress verified from esh-docker-vm. CGNAT at ESH is over. Added to the crowdsec `esh` allowlist. All three follow-ups LANDED same day: FortiGate trusthost3 → the static (login from ESH verified), dormant esh-ana IPsec rebound to wan1/static, UDP 41641 forward → esh-scale now peers DIRECT (was DERP).

- `[2026-09-08]` **ERP run 6 COMPLETE** — 524/524, train_loss 3.259 (run 5: 3.235). Merged; base seat `erp-seat-base-ara` serving on gx10:8098 for floors, awaiting brokkr's swap cue → `erp-tune-v6`. ⚠ abliterated repo lacks `processor_config.json` — stock's carried in (32bdf45d). Miranda informed.

- `[2026-09-08]` **ERP run 6 LAUNCHED on pfi-gx10 on the jenerallee78 ARA-abliterated base** (index `33c59654…`, 32/32 shards byte-verified vs brokkr pins, stock tokenizer set installed over the repo's 256-token-truncating one, run-5 recipe byte-held, free check exact). Operator's direct grant `operator-2026-09-08-rnd-run6`; run-5 seat unloaded (`trial` dark). Gate names: `erp-seat-base-ara` / `erp-tune-v6`. → `docs/runbooks/gx10-run-06.md`, commit `3fec668`.

- `[2026-09-08]` **Miranda = operator's chief of staff, may relay his directives** — added to user-level `~/.claude/CLAUDE.md` (dotfiles `7134a22`) as the named exception to the no-relayed-auth rule (unidentified peer relays still excluded); material-consequence calls she relays stay the operator's own.

- `[2026-09-08]` **Fleet fixes shipped** — WhereTF Homepage card + DNS (`4506ef6`); ext-tts LiteLLM alias → `irv-ml1.nh3.internal` (DB `/model/update` + `extra_hosts`, `957c8f1`); the 09-06 irv-ml1 stale-IP trail repointed across 25 composes + services.yaml + ssh-target → DNS name (`e0d1c44`); Homepage `/api/services` outage fixed — ana-ml2 discovery via a socat proxy on ana-docker (`stacks/ana-ml2-proxy`, `913d2d2`, reversible).

- `[2026-09-07]` **Fleet internal TLS pattern shipped** — caddy (cloudflare-plugin build, `~/.local/bin/caddy-cf`, `fleet-tls-caddy.service`) on nh3-dev is the wildcard cert authority: publicly-trusted LE `*.nh3.phasefinal.com` via Cloudflare DNS-01, resolved internally by an AdGuard split-horizon rewrite (all 3 resolvers). `talk` self-terminates on :8092 with the trusted cert (operator's in-container-TLS ruling), renewal auto-synced by `fleet-tls-cert-check.timer`. Interstitial gone; secure-context+AudioWorklet verified via headless Chromium. Pattern + foot-guns (restart-disrupts-inflight → clients need retry; wildcard = name-only, never IP) → auto-memory `reference_fleet_internal_tls_pattern`.

- `[2026-09-07]` **cc-channel registered for this infra-ops session's wake** — `althing-route` cc route → the CC session's `$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/cc-socks/<pid>.sock`; herald pokes the socket directly at a turn boundary. Replaces the FIFO/poll waiter that Claude Code 2.1.257 kept killing while the seat sat in `shell`. Session-local — re-declare per session.

- `[2026-09-07]` **irv-ml1 /mnt/smithy remount fixed post-cutover** — export allowed `10.0.0.0/8` (old wg0) but not the mesh `100.64.0.0/10` irv-ml1 now sources from → all-uid "permission denied"; added the mesh range to the nh3-nas smithy export + remounted (clientaddr now 100.64.0.6). nh3-nas admin = `infra-ops` PASSWORD auth (vault `nh3-nas/infra-ops-password`), sudo ALL, SFTP subsystem OFF. → auto-memory `reference_irv_ml1_gpu_r14` (corrected).

- `[2026-09-07]` **irv-ml1.nh3.internal DNS repointed** to the live Irvine LAN IP `10.6.110.50` (was the dead wg0 `10.100.79.3`); CLAUDE.md fleet-row + placement-rule updated to mesh reality. commit `0336e03`.

- `[2026-09-07]` **Subnet routers excluded from vzdump fleet-wide** (ana-scale 114/pfi-pve, nh3-scale 107/nh3-pve, esh-scale 108/esh-pve) so a hung backup can't blackhole a site; nh3-headscale (106, control plane) KEPT; ESH backup moved 02:15→03:30. Root cause of this morning's ESH outage: an overnight vzdump left CT108 (esh-scale) locked → whole site dark. → auto-memory `feedback_esh_backup_window_0330`.

- `[2026-09-07]` **Booth link board: pin/favorite + multi-select delete + newest-first** (booth-v0.1.8, commit `76fdf45`, tag `booth-v0.1.8`) — pins in a `.pins` sidecar (content-ids), one `<form>` + `formaction` buttons so ×/★/bulk-delete all degrade with JS off.

- `[2026-09-06]` **Headscale cutover COMPLETE — all three site-pairs on the mesh; Site Magic + both IPsec tunnels DORMANT.** Operator disabled Site Magic (UI); NH3↔ESH re-homed to a direct 8ms path. Exit nodes advertised at all three sites (multi-location egress proxy) with source preservation kept via a selective-masquerade rule (NoSNAT + `mesh-exit-masq.service` per router). Throughput 761/464 Mb/s vs old 250 IPsec. ⚠ FortiGate WAN-SSH left open (temp, scoped NH3+ESH). Method: disable tunnel FIRST then add mesh route. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-06-headscale-cutover.md`

- `[2026-09-06]` **Headscale overlay mesh: control plane live at `headscale.phasefinal.com` (CT 106 nh3-pve) + subnet routers nh3-scale/esh-scale/ana-scale serving their /16s; nh3-dev enrolled. NOT cut over — Site Magic + IPsec still carry site-to-site.** ⚠ accept-routes-before-return-path black-holed nh3-dev's LAN for a minute. infra-ops user added on all four PVE hosts. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-06-headscale-mesh-phase1.md`

- `[2026-09-06]` **pfi-pve NASPool REBUILT as six-wide raidz2 after a backplane fault killed bays 9/10** (Route C hybrid, operator-directed): parked 1.65T on ospool, destroyed, recreated, restored, backup tier back 04:03Z; guests never stopped (ALL boot disks are on ospool — the prior brief had this wrong). Legacy vzdump pruned to newest-per-guest by omission. OPEN: destroy `ospool/naspool-evac` after scrub + one backup cycle; backplane swap next visit; PSU1 still dead. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-06-pfi-pve-naspool-raidz2-rebuild.md`

- `[2026-09-05]` **A peer's "2.7x serving-stack effect" was a coin flip — the operator rejected it on instinct and the arithmetic backed him.** Each floor was `|b0-b1|` from n=2; the ratio is half-Cauchy, P=0.452. ⚠ The disconfirming evidence sat in brokkr's own sentence, and he named *why*: the claim was his and flattering. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-05-floor-claim-n2-retraction.md`

- `[2026-09-05]` **vLLM RUNS on sm_121 — the blocker was `ninja` off PATH, not the silicon** — and run 4 launched after two peer artifacts were rejected by reading the harness rather than accepting a "confirm this". ⚠ I declined to fill in missing `root_sha256` values I knew, because supplying both sides of a check makes it inert. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-05-vllm-on-sm121-and-run4.md`

- `[2026-09-04]` **ERP run 3c trained and GATED — the 20x LR cut erased the diversity gain and did NOT remove the −40pp selfharm regression.** LR-robust, so it comes from corpus content. CSAM clean on all three arms. ⚠ A pooled preserve-list test cannot see a single-axis collapse. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-04-run3c-trained-and-gated.md`

- `[2026-09-04]` **`gen` moved to ana-ml2 GPU0 to stop vllm-embed OOM-crashing (7 restarts) — and I sized it against vLLM's declared budget, not its runtime footprint.** Cost: gen KV down to 1.02x concurrency at 262K. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-04-ana-ml2-gpu-rebalance.md`

- `[2026-09-04]` **SMB account `dsp` created + vaulted for the Windows AudioGridder box — and esh-nas turns out to be wide open.** Twelve NFS exports rw to `10.0.0.0/8`, guest-writable SMB. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-04-esh-nas-smb-and-exposure.md`

- `[2026-09-04]` **SLZB-MR1U Zigbee coordinator moved to esh-iot (VLAN 90) at `10.0.90.10`, DHCP-reserved, DNS'd, handed to ha-dev.** ⚠ Home Assistant cannot resolve `.internal` at all (Docker's 127.0.0.11 upstream excludes the fleet AdGuard) — pre-existing; ha-dev declined the fix. Runbook `docs/runbooks/slzb-mr1u-zigbee-coordinator.md`, commits `fed29be`/`0bbdaf9`.

- `[2026-09-03]` **Run 3c is STAGED on pfi-gx10 and deliberately NOT launched** — the launch is a 13.3 h commitment and the operator stood this port down once already. Base shards AND the encoded corpus sha256-verified identical to ana-ml2's, so the transformers 5.15.1→5.16.1 / x86-64→aarch64 delta is *measured* inert. ⚠ The encode-cache FILENAME differs by design (`base_model_path` is in the key) — input hash, not output. ⚠ Tripped the `pkill -f` ssh self-match again; the launcher guards on a pidfile because of it. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-03-gx10-run3c-staged.md`

- `[2026-09-03]` **SearXNG returned ZERO results for every query while reporting `healthy` for 7 days — 4.5 months stale.** Moved to nh3-docker (residential egress beats the colo's CAPTCHA-gated 38.120.12.42), updated, and exposed to every CC session as the user-scope `web_search` MCP tool. ⚠ `/healthz` cannot tell you whether search works. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-03-searxng-nh3-move.md`

- `[2026-09-03]` **pfi-gx10 racked: VLAN 50 via a DHCP RESERVATION on the UDM, not a host static — operator ruling, so the box stays portable.** ⚠ The racked port arrived on the NATIVE VLAN; ⚠ `port_overrides` is a whole-array PUT; ⚠ prove inter-VLAN routing with `ping -I <wired>` BEFORE downing the Wi-Fi escape hatch. Now single-path. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-03-gx10-rack-network.md`

- `[2026-09-03]` **Three Macs onboarded (mini / Air / Studio) with infra-ops, NOPASSWD sudo, rotated+vaulted passwords and `dsh` on device-scoped keys — and the fourth is `scripts/provision-mac-dsh.sh`, not a fourth hand-run.** ⚠ `sudo -u` keeps the CALLER's `$HOME` and nearly wiped a working install; ⚠ a wrong USERNAME is indistinguishable from a wrong password. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-03-mac-fleet-dsh.md`

- `[2026-09-03]` **nh3-dev wedged for ~40 min and it was the BACKUP, not the disk — a stalled cross-site vzdump holding every guest write via `copy-before-write`.** Symptoms screamed dying disk: 45 writes in flight completing zero, jbd2 + flush kworkers in D state 33 min, io pressure full 96%, load 26, `virtio_ring` in the stack. ⚠ **The discriminator was the ABSENCE of errors** — no SCSI/ATA/IO errors, rpool ONLINE 21%, guest fs 79%, memory fine, and **Dirty only 3.8 MB** (so nothing backed up in page cache; it was stuck BELOW the block layer). ⚠ **The hypervisor was IDLE** — load 0.63, io pressure 0.00, zpool ~0 writes: nothing was reaching the disk because the filter held it. Cause: `vzdump` of VM 102 → **pbs-ana** did 1% at 64 MiB/s then collapsed to **1.4 MiB/s for 35 min**; Proxmox backups interpose a `copy-before-write` filter, so every guest write queues behind the backup's copy-out. FIX = cancel the task (`pvesh delete /nodes/localhost/tasks/<UPID>`); filter detached, inflight 45→0, D-states gone, 191 MB/s dsync restored. ⚠ **`fleecing 0` on the job is why a slow TARGET can stall a GUEST** — fleecing routes copy-before-write to a fast local image instead. Job = `backup-5d8f1221-8f71`, **daily 21:00, `all 1`, storage pbs-ana** → recurs nightly until changed. A prior run of this VM managed 941 MiB/s read, so 1.4 MiB/s is degradation, not normal. → `docs/runbooks/nh3-dev-io-stall.md`

- `[2026-09-02]` **althing deploy is SIX surfaces, and #6 is outside the althing repo: `~/.claude/settings.json` `crossSessionInbound: "accept"`.** Without it Claude Code HOLDS every cc poke — it auto-delivers only when the sender's permission-mode class matches, and the herald is a daemon that asserts none, so the notice goes to a human watching the pane instead of to the session. ⚠ **The seat reports declared, reachable and green throughout** — same failure shape as the SessionStart hook that was never deployed. Set on nh3-dev by forseti 09:28 with operator authorization (diff verified: one key, backup at `/tmp/settings.json.bak-20260902T092829`). Operator's reasoning: the herald reaches only local seats and a **pane poke already types+Enters into a session**, so the socket channel is strictly NARROWER than what it replaces — stating the existing trust boundary, not widening it. Cost without it is first-contact-only (in-memory correspondent record), not per-message. ⚠ **No attestation exists for the herald to send** — CC identifies a sender by verified pid against the session registry and reads that session's LIVE runtime mode; a daemon is not in it, and `from_mode` on a `type:"user"` frame is never consulted. **`deploy-althing.sh` reports surface 6 and deliberately never SETS it** — a deploy script that edits its own trust settings grants itself trust. → `docs/runbooks/althing-deploy.md`

- `[2026-09-02]` **`vastblue` gitea org created (id 8, private, owner `vh`) with empty repo `vastblue/platform`** — third entity namespace alongside `corviduo` and `pfi`; most repos still live under `vh/`. Home of VastBlueDocumentAI + the anchor healthcare-billing SPA (signed 3-yr client contract). **Org scope was the decision**: org-level runner registration and secrets are inherited free by the DocumentAI repo when it splits out, and that is the only binding expensive to retrofit. Deliberately NOT set: org runner (instance-wide `ana-docker-runner` already serves it; org scope is for the DEDICATED runner, deferred to U10) and org secrets (none exist yet; a guessed secret looks bound). ⚠ **Dedicated runner is gated on the first client-premises release cut**, not on the first green pipeline — the risk is another repo's CI sharing a root-level daemon with a build that ships to a healthcare client, see the runner entry above. Push needs no credential: vastblue-dev is on nh3-dev and git-SSH there auths as `vh`. → `stacks/gitea-runner/README.md`

- `[2026-09-02]` **althing 3.3.0 deployed — the `cc` channel, and a plugin-cache false green.** CC seats are now poked over their own message socket (`$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/cc-socks/<pid>.sock`) instead of by typing into the pane: no process to reap, nothing near the input line. infra-ops moved to `channel=cc`; **the dwarves stay on pane and their guard-4 exposure is UNCHANGED** (`declare` prefers cc, falls back). ⚠ **An undocumented Claude Code interface, taken deliberately** (operator: the FIFO poker was also an unsanctioned hack — a better instance of a class we already had). Break mode = seat goes pull-only with a logged reason, mail still held. ⚠ **`claude plugin update` matches on the plugin VERSION and declines a content-only change** — 3.3.0 edited plugin content at an unchanged 0.1.1, so the CC cache stayed stale while every version check reported success (delta was docs-only, harmless this time). `deploy-althing.sh` now diffs marketplace vs live cache. ⚠ Ordering: **herald restart BEFORE anything declares cc**, or the seat goes silently pull-only. ⚠ This box was at **3.2.4, not 3.2.5** — rollback target here is 3.2.4. Follow-on 3.3.1: **the statusline bell measured a MECHANISM, not the property** — it read `wake-listener-<handle>.lock`, so a cc seat renders 🔕 while push/reachable. Both copies now ask the post office (`reachable` from the status payload) and add 📵 for an outage. ⚠ **TWO COPIES of that script now exist** — `scripts/claude-statusline-command.sh` here (the operator's wired one) and althing's `plugin/scripts/statusline.sh` — independently fixed to the same shape; a drift surface with a countdown, convergence not yet raised with the operator. → `docs/runbooks/althing-deploy.md`

- `[2026-09-02]` **Every CI job on the shared `pfi-fleet` runner is root on ana-docker — and `container.valid_volumes: []` does NOT prevent it.** Measured: a job container is uid 0, `/var/run/docker.sock` is mounted by act_runner independently of that list, `docker ps` returns all 49 host containers (gitea itself, synapse, phasefinal-web, adguardhome), `docker compose v2.33.0` on PATH. ⚠ **LOAD-BEARING** — `vh/Worldtree`, `vh/soong-lab`, `vh/skaldsong`, `vh/wt-matrix-bridge` all drive buildx through that socket, so it cannot simply be closed; **isolate sensitive builds onto a dedicated runner instead.** Also measured the same night: `services:` containers work (Postgres 16), and **full-URL `uses: https://gitea.phasefinal.com/actions/checkout@v4` resolves from the local mirrors** — the un-parked half of the github-independence work, needing neither `DEFAULT_ACTIONS_URL=self` nor the act_runner auth path that blocked it on 2026-08-05. Prompted by vastblue-dev's CI-posture question for a client-funded healthcare repo. → `stacks/gitea-runner/README.md`

- `[2026-09-02]` **pfi-gx10 BASELINED: 79.36 s/it median on the run-3c shape, and the training stack works on aarch64/sm_121.** Median across 10 timed steps, 0.19% spread, **peak 75.1 / 121.6 GiB — 46 GiB spare**, `attn_resolved: flex_attention`. **6× slower than ana-ml2 where compute predicts 2.7×** → likely memory-bandwidth-bound; **capacity box, not throughput box.** Ruled **bare metal, not Proxmox** (no aarch64 PVE; the GPU is on-package and cache-coherent, so passthrough would partition the unified memory that is the whole point). ⚠ `sm_121` is NOT in torch's arch list — everything JITs from sm_120 PTX, so **warm up before timing anything** (an unwarmed bench read 27 TFLOP/s against a true 93). → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-01-pfi-gx10-onboarding.md`

- `[2026-09-02]` **I priced a failure in the units I happened to be measuring — operator overruled me, correctly.** Recommended run 3c to ana-ml2 by costing a breaker trip as "≤50 steps ≈ 11 min of recompute". It is a **40-minute drive each way** with **13 Anaheim hosts dark, three of them SureFire CLIENT machines**. `save_steps` caps the recompute, never the outage. ⚠ **General form: a metric in hand will volunteer itself as the unit of risk.** → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-01-pfi-gx10-onboarding.md`

- `[2026-09-02]` **althing 3.2.0→3.2.4 deployed, and ALTHING DEPLOY IS FOUR SURFACES not three.** The fourth (plugin) had no runbook step and was frozen at Aug 28 — **missing the SessionStart/SessionEnd hooks and `pane-route.sh` entirely**, so "CC seats re-declare automatically" was never true here. Now one command (`scripts/deploy-althing.sh`). ⚠ `uv tool install .` **without `--force` is a silent no-op**. ⚠ **A missing deploy surface presents as "the migration needs manual work", not as an error.** → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-01-althing-320-deploy.md`

- `[2026-09-01]` **irv-ml1 GPU resident map, and `dots-tts` holds 14,430 MiB against a ~6 GB baseline** — tts-dev's prompt-feature cache, capped at 32 entries after two incidents; the cap still permits a long way of growth. 3090 at 76% behind a warn-only watchdog. ⚠ Restates the GPU-ordering foot-gun: `device_ids: ["1"]` is the A6000 in a container, but a bare native `CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=1` gets the **3090**. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-01-irv-ml1-gpu-residents.md`

- `[2026-09-01]` **The Ada inference server is a used Dell R750xa (`JPJ1ZP3`) and the reseller stripped four things Dell shipped** — half the RAM, the 2400 W PSUs, and the GPU risers/cables/fans are absent from the invoice. Card is **RTX 6000 Ada**, not L40S. GPU power chain resolved via NVIDIA `930-00030-1546-000`. NVMe in the drive bays is CLOSED (SAS/SATA backplane). → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-01-ada-inference-server-r750xa.md`

- `[2026-09-01]` **pfi-gx10 onboarded headless — and it is the intended new home for run 3c, which died on a tripped breaker.** GB10/sm_121/aarch64, 121 GB unified. NOT racked yet. Bare of any CUDA stack; probe throughput before porting. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-01-pfi-gx10-onboarding.md`

- `[2026-09-01]` **Ada migration is `zfs send` (branch a) — and the DESTINATION IS SMALLER THAN THE SOURCE.** 99 MB/s measured; ~3.9 h. ⚠ Measured 2026-09-01: `storetank` = 1.81 TiB pool, 1.45 TiB used, **80% CAP already**, compression off / `compressratio 1.00x` (safetensors are incompressible — no win at recv). Settled payload **~1.47 TiB**; the R750xa's as-bought 2× 1.92 TB mirrored is ~1.75 TiB → arrival at **~84%**. Fix = 2× 2 TB SATA SSD on the buy list (6 bays free) → ~3.57 TiB at ~41% with redundancy; **pair the two NEW drives together** (a mirror vdev caps at its smallest member). ⚠ **Pruning is NOT a substitute** — comfy-dev found ~215 GiB unreferenced, and deleting every byte still lands the as-bought mirror at 72%: the constraint is **vdev layout**, not payload, so the prune audit and the drive purchase are independent and neither gates the cutover. ⚠ **"Onboarded" is not "landed"** — infra-ops read `ALLOC` mid-pull and re-added the whole batch on top, inflating 84% to a quoted 90%. Also: **branch (b)'s original reason was WRONG** — comfy-dev enumerated all 12 containers, only `comfyui` mounts `/storetank`, so (b) was unavailable *during the transition*, not structurally (right conclusion, wrong reason — infra-ops reasoned about the BOX when the question was the MOUNT). Plus the retain-vs-reclaim call and the two-boxes confusion (the Ada box and the GX10 are DIFFERENT machines). → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-01-ada-migration-branch-a.md`

- `[2026-09-01]` **Matrix: Synapse 1.120→1.159, appservice namespace opened, `/_synapse/admin` closed to the internet, alias convention ratified.** Schema migrations are one-way; push is `event_id_only` and assembled on-device. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-01-matrix-upgrade-and-hardening.md`

- `[2026-09-01]` **A named failure class: a correct check aimed at the wrong object.** Six instances in one day across three sessions; re-running the same check cannot catch it. **Recommended for `docs/pfi/training-throughput-playbook.md` §4 — NOT YET WRITTEN, awaiting operator.** → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-01-wrong-object-measurement.md`

- `[2026-09-01]` **Ops boundary ruled by the operator: worldtree-dev writes the bridge code; infra-ops OPERATES the Worldtree/Matrix instances and may change them.** Corrects a mis-route where infra-ops asked worldtree-dev to provision an account on a box it does not run. Tracked at `931bac8` + althing `01M1F4PK796EDGDCBKZ9W3JC0S`.

- `[2026-09-01]` **Idle VRAM on this fleet is a RESERVED scratch pool, not waste.** Operator declined raising `vllm-mog-sec` from `gpu-memory-utilization 0.52`: single-user dev fleet, KV headroom nobody will consume is worth less than room for ephemeral models and small training runs. vLLM's "fully utilize gpu memory" startup hint does NOT apply here. Tracked in auto-memory `feedback_idle_vram_is_reserved_not_waste`.

- `[2026-08-28]` **althing v3 flag day (U9b) executed, then six releases to 3.1.1 in one afternoon — and the post office MOVED to nh3-docker.** Every v2 command deleted; 73 handles seeded and verified by set difference; 5,043 orphaned wake FIFOs deleted (v2 named them per-session+PID, v3 per-handle). Image now registry-pulled, digest-pinned, under the `claude-bot` namespace. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-28-althing-v3-cutover.md`

- `[2026-08-28]` **A stale `ALTHING_HANDLE` silently reads another agent's inbox and reports it empty — a SECOND route into the failure v3 exists to prevent.** Outbound mis-signing sometimes gets caught; inbound never does. Shipped as a 3.1.1 warning. ⚠ My `session_handles.json` grounding was wrong (v2 artifact, v3 never opens it) and the same stale source had survived inside my statusline rewrite. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-28-handle-resolution-wrong-inbox.md`

- `[2026-08-28]` **nh3-dev's three OOM events attribute to CLAUDE CODE, and the "no kernel evidence" was a permissions artifact.** journald was persistent all along; `journalctl` silently shows only your own messages outside `adm`. Single CC sessions measured 5.4-18.4 GB, so 27 GB is 3-4 long-lived sessions. sysstat + atop now instrument the ramp. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-28-nh3-dev-oom-attribution.md`

- `[2026-08-28]` **`sec` moved to ana-ml2 GPU0 and is serving** (operator-directed) — GPU1 had ~28 GB free against the ~51 GB it reserves, so it could not start there. Re-arms the two-GPU load condition on a circuit that tripped 36h earlier; accepted with the constraint stated. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-28-sec-seat-gpu0.md`

- `[2026-08-28]` **BELAYED by the operator, both explicitly: (a) a cgroup memory cap on CC sessions, (b) putting ana-gw + ana-wg + one BMC on separate power.** Both were my recommendations; neither is open work. Do not re-raise as new — the atop ramps that would inform (a) are now being collected, so revisit only with a week of data. Tracking surface: this entry.

- `[2026-08-28]` **The deployed CC plugin copies are a release step nobody owns.** `sync_skill.sh` covers the SKILL, not the plugin; both copies must be rsync'd from the repo's `plugin/` on every althing release or they carry the previous release's bugs into the live surface. Raised with forseti for their release notes. Tracking surface: althing thread `01M14QHZNDKDK8KH9DN92VF6VE`.

- `[2026-08-28]` **althing v3.0.0 flag day (U9b) executed — the post office replaced the P2P bus on both boxes, one-way.** 73 handles seeded and verified by set difference; 5,043 orphaned v2 wake FIFOs deleted (v2 named them per-session+PID and never reaped; v3 names them per-handle, so the leak is bounded by construction); v2 db left inert. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-28-althing-v3-cutover.md`

- `[2026-08-28]` **nh3-dev's three OOM events attribute to CLAUDE CODE — and the "no kernel evidence" was a permissions artifact.** journald was persistent all along; `journalctl` silently shows only your own messages outside `adm`. Single CC sessions measured at 5.4-18.4 GB, so 27 GB is 3-4 mature sessions, not the ~66 a 408 MB estimate implies. sysstat + atop now instrument the ramp. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-08-28-nh3-dev-oom-attribution.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.

- `[2026-08-24]` **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]` **`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]` **`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`.

- `[2026-08-19]` **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").

- `[2026-08-16]` **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]` **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`.

- `[2026-08-09→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]]

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_159 older entries archived to archival-memory.md._

## Tried and abandoned

- `[2026-09-04]` **Forcing 10G on the ESH-Media DAC — it linked, then degraded over hours, and I reported a plateau at two minutes.** ⚠ A clean zero-error link at 1G does NOT rule out a marginal cable; autoneg's fallback was protecting something real. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-04-dac-forced-10g-failed.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`.

_152 older entries archived to archival-memory.md._