will.anderson
3d05e0c2a9
Census of the live graph under the uniform 168h half-life with floor 0.05: the MEDIAN tdecay for every single node type was 0.0500 — the clamp. Memory 81% at floor, Knowledge 58%, BacklogItem 91%, Project 98%, Tag 100%. A function whose median output is its floor is not a signal, it is a constant with exceptions, and the exceptions were whatever had been touched in the last few days. What that cost: 10 of the 13 grounded value nodes — Precision Over Brute Force, Honesty Before Comfort, The System Must Accumulate — sat at 0.05, a 20x activation penalty, while Knowledge ingested overnight sat near 1.0 and held the working-memory top slots. Since tdecay multiplies at every hop, a 2-hop path through settled knowledge compounded to 0.0025: those regions were not disfavoured, they were unreachable. The decay function was erasing the accumulated library in favour of whatever arrived last night. External corroboration — arXiv:2604.26970 measures retrieval under decay regimes: no temporal weighting NDCG@5 0.274, uniform exponential decay 0.015. Uniform decay is 18x WORSE than no decay, because it penalises stable knowledge while failing to suppress stale volatile facts. Not even their full adaptive hierarchy (0.260) beat switching decay off. Half-life is now scaled by how established a node is: T_eff = T_HALF * (1 + ln(1 + activation_count)) The spacing effect and the Lindy property in one line — monotone, log-bounded (a 10,000-activation node earns ~10x, never a permanent exemption), and built on activation_count, which is measured, unlike tier, whose assignments are too inconsistent to trust (the values node is tagged Episodic). Floor 0.05 -> 0.25. Given no-decay outperforms uniform decay, the honest maximum penalty for age alone is 4x, not 20x. Age should express a preference for the recent; it must never make a region of the graph structurally unreachable. Effect: well-established Knowledge median tdecay 0.773 vs rarely-activated 0.417 — the frequency signal now does work where the old function returned its clamp for both. Values recover 0.05 -> 0.25 (the two frequently-touched ones to 0.79). Verified live: VBD whitepaper, component taxonomy and CGI now activate on a values query. Per-node temporal_decay_rate override untouched.