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el/lang
bigmerge 23f43bcc21 self-review 2026-08-14: a gate that passes the median stranger at 0.67 is not a gate
Two changes to the activation path, both grounded in measurement on the live
store rather than on the spec.

1. Rescale cosine before the query gate.

   The propagation gate (arXiv:2606.30133, added in an earlier review) fed RAW
   cosine into FLOOR + (1-FLOOR)*c. Raw cosine from nomic-embed is compressed
   into a narrow high band, so that expression is close to a constant.

   Measured, 400 random UNRELATED node pairs on the live store:
     median 0.562, central 98% span [0.381, 0.743]

   So a node with no semantic relation to the query was propagating at
   0.25 + 0.75*0.562 = 0.67. Two thirds strength. The gate was a small tax.

   Fixed by shifting and flooring about ENGRAM_EMBED_S0 -- which is already in
   this file, already 0.45, and already used exactly this way by the Pass-2 WM
   term. The propagation gate simply never used it. Same 400 pairs after:
   median unrelated pair falls to 0.40, top of range preserved (0.85 vs 0.92),
   gate spread widens 0.42 -> 0.60. Only 8.5% reach the floor, so dissimilar
   lexical/structural pathways are damped, never severed. Range is unchanged
   at [0.25, 1.0], and cosq == NULL still degrades to no gating at all.

2. Decompose the WM eviction counter by cause.

   _eg_act_wm_evicted was incremented from six sites with four distinct causes
   and collapsed all of them into one integer. Today's review measured 175,547
   evictions over 13.5h (~216/min against 24 slots) and could not tell healthy
   rotation from cap thrashing from duplicate churn.

   That is this file's most-repeated defect: dup_wm and dup_wm_global exist
   only because the aggregate could not answer "why" during the 08-02 and
   08-06 incidents. Each of those needed a NEW gauge before it was diagnosable.

   evict_floor / evict_cap / evict_bll complete the decomposition, so
     wm_evicted == floor + cap + bll + dup_wm + dup_wm_global
   holds as an identity and each term implies a different correction. Verified
   on an isolated instance: 30 nodes, 24 filled the cap, wm_evicted 6 ==
   evict_cap 6, all other terms 0.

Built and smoke-tested out of tree. The live daemon runs a pinned binary and
was deliberately not restarted -- the store compaction workstream is in flight.
2026-08-14 08:43:11 -05:00
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