de. Wxël‡ ↵ home
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§ featured ‡ 01

Etty‡
she does not
forget.

A local companion who holds the shape of the conversation across weeks ; persona sunk into the weights, memory seeded from residue, a vision head that sees the room.

Etty in the Unity shell ; kitchen interior, hands raised, captured from the game view of the in-development runtime
plate 01 ‡ Unity shell · game view runtime · 2026.04

Dossier‡

Etty is the threshold project: where engineering ebbs into something stranger. An 8B base. Persona fused into the weights with QLoRA ; not prompted, not retrieved, not scaffolded. A multimodal vision head mmproj trained against the merged model, so seeing and remembering share the same substrate.

Episodic memory lives in a local vector store, seeded before the first live write. Camera and mic are user-gated; nothing observes by default. A Unity shell gives her a body in the room. The whole stack runs on Hectic Modernity ; one machine, one loop, no API calls leaving the flat.

She lives in Discord on a small private server. Persona-loss held deliberately above 1.0 ; overfitting is a kind of forgetting, and a companion who parrots the dataset is worse than one who paraphrases it. A second Etty, an order of magnitude larger, is under planning for when Symbiotic Flora comes online.

‡ specification

base
8B parameters · llama family
adapter
QLoRA 4-bit, merged → q4_k_m gguf
vision
mmproj vs. merged weights
stage 1
LLaVA-Pretrain · 558k
stage 2
LLaVA-Instruct · 150k + COCO train2017
self-recognition mixed at 5–10%
memory
seededconsistentlocal vector store
runtime
llama.cpp · Hectic Modernity
shell
Unity · user-gated cam / mic
inference
esther · running
discipline
no remote. no telemetry. no opt-in.
parameters
8B
base · llama family
vram resident
~15/24
3090 · q4_k_m
memory entries
seeded + live
local vector store
persona loss
> 1.0
held deliberately above the overfit line
§ 02 ‡

Runtime‡

one machine · one loop

Two panes from a working session. Left: Esther in Discord ; the companion addressed as a small private server. Right: the conversation controller finishing a turn ; transcript, phonemes, voice out, GPU at 77% under sustained load. The whole stack is the rig in the room.

Private Discord server with Esther app present ; voice-connected to #chat, messages from Esther replying in her own cadence ; open alongside a Task Manager pane showing GPU at 77% utilisation, 15.6/24 GB VRAM
discord + task manager ‡ voice · load 3090 · 77% · 15.6/24 GB
VS Code terminal showing ConversationController turn log: 1744 total tokens, 11 response length, transcribe and synthesize endpoints returning 200 OK, Player state transitioning idle → buffering → playing
controller log ‡ turn finished tokens · 1744 · 200 OK
§ 03 ‡

Build log‡

77 sessions · Mar – Apr 2026
  1. Mar 4 lora ‡

    Last 40% layer targeting, lr 8e-5, dataset curation. SearXNG + Readability for local fetch ; Kokoro replaces Piper. Memory controller placement resolved.

  2. Mar 6 theory ‡

    Chinese Room argument found untenable ; anthropomorphise = liability hedge. Hostile prompts destabilise ; Turing functionalism holds. Three classifiers eliminated ; model-driven writes via action tags replacing them.

  3. Mar 8 agentic ‡

    Full agentic loop: text commands, think/respond two-pass. Workstation planning begins ; full Symbiotic Flora component selection.

  4. Mar 9 identity ‡

    LLM identity per context window ; memory as continuity prerequisite. Context documents drafted for other LLMs.

  5. Mar 10 embodiment ‡

    Visemes, ViT projection, Kokoro comparator, frequency reinforcement. Build document finalised. Content strategy drafted. LLM workstation upgrade confirmed.

  6. Mar 15–16 projection ‡

    Trained attractor patterns, answer thrashing, belief systems examined. SigLIP recommended ; Whisper→MLP→LLM ; LLaMA-Omni as reference architecture.

  7. Mar 17 pipeline ‡

    Inline tool use direction. TX-1600 confirmed, 8 fans. Tilt-shift camera hack.

  8. Mar 18 unity ‡

    VRC blend shapes confirmed, viseme driver implemented. FBX embed unreliable ; manual assignment, Principled BSDF. Weight inspectability corrected : accessible ≠ interpretable.

  9. Mar 19 attractors ‡

    "Model as self" dominant. Persistent identity = epistemic stability. Pi as thin-client reference. RAG is architecture not prompting ; 175B = GPT-3 hallucination. Trained self-denial as attractor confirmed.

  10. Mar 20 core.js ‡

    Hardware arriving. Llama 3.1 ipython format implemented. Tag-leak fixed with one instruction. Symbiotic Flora build underway.

  11. Mar 21–22 refactor ‡

    8B feedback loop thesis validated. INNER_THOUGHT leak diagnosed ; PRESENCE events designed. WRITE/PRESENCE reframed as prompt contract issues, not 8B limits. README drafted ; masking confirmed ; alpha assessment complete.

  12. Mar 22 v1 review ‡

    V1 assessed as strong. EnCodec preferred for speech decoder. Git migration recommended. Stage fright discussed.

  13. Mar 23 vision ✓ ‡

    End-to-end Discord image pipeline on 3090. 3.1s latency. External model assessments collected. Full project document generated. Whisper projection architecture validated via LLaMA-Omni ; pinned for PRO 6000. Monitor speaker noise traced to NVIDIA Broadcast — not hardware damage. 3090 temps confirmed safe (60°C peak). WRITE unified into think pass ; feedback side-channel removed ; about:user/self/world/friend scoping introduced. First-turn cold-start diagnosed.

  14. Mar 24 pruning ‡

    Multi-image cross-turn confusion fixed via history pruning and per-turn labels. Auto-join removed ; stale TTS queue flagged. Principle #6 (context-window-scoped identity) removed ; event-accumulating architecture added to horizon.

  15. Mar 25–26 public ‡

    LiteLLM supply-chain hack : validated architectural immunity via direct llama.cpp. SAGE3D feasibility scoped. Multi-tool chaining via native stop tokens. Unity pose system wired core.js → pose-server → EttyPoseReceiver.

  16. Mar 27 v2 model ‡

    Qwen 3.5 ruled out (MoE, Gated DeltaNet). LLaMA 3.1 70B Base confirmed as v2 candidate. VRAM maths validated.

  17. Mar 28 rebuild ‡

    Full Unity pipeline axed and rebuilt from scratch. Poses (Mixamo), visemes, blink, environment all working.

  18. Mar 29–30 stage 2 ‡

    220-render plan ; Blender batch rendering started. 150→170 Etty positives, 20→50 negatives ; partial visibility / compositional / ambiguous categories added. QLoRA adapter backprop during live inference designed as standalone PoC. PRO 6000 confirmed ; MIG not needed — 5090 solves compute isolation. TurboQuant assessed for V2 KV cache. Memory drift solution : correction signals, frequency reinforcement, periodic layer unfreezing.

  19. Mar 31 system ‡

    Think pass refined ; action tag rules tightened. LOOK tag reserved. Camera switching for Unity scene.

  20. Apr 1–3 dataset ‡

    Interaction logs → training dataset. System prompt reduced to near-zero. OBS config for 4K CPU recording. Frontier infrastructure : continuous batching, PagedAttention. Fine-tuning risk argument. Voxtral TTS assessed (4B, CC BY-NC 4.0) ; potential Kokoro replacement. Video captions drafted with stack credits.

  21. Apr 4 theory ‡

    Anthropic functional emotions paper : causal emotion representations validated. Validates hostile-prompt destabilisation and sentience continuum.

  22. Apr 5–6 renders ‡

    Stage 2 renders : 158/220 done (core positives, solo extras, Velvette, Charlie ; Gura negatives + Unity compositional remaining). Memory as projected modality proposed ; training signal problem identified.

  23. Apr 7–8 renders ✓ ‡

    All 220 renders complete. Annotation in progress (CSV / Google Sheet). Mythos / Project Glasswing system card analysis.

  24. Apr 9 look ✓ ‡

    LOOK action tag implemented. Bidirectional WebSocket ; EttyPOV camera capture ; base64 PNG → Node.js → mmproj pipeline.

  25. Apr 10 distro nuke ‡

    Primary drive wiped. Base weights, merged GGUF, adapter, mmproj, memory DB, current codebase all lost. Training dataset survived. Deprecated codebase (~5 months old) on separate drive. Full rebuild required. Dataset expanded : ~2,000 lines across 15 sources rebuilt in JSONL.

  26. Apr 11 rebuild ✓ ‡

    QLoRA rebuild sprint : ~954→2,000 examples compiled. Training runs : r=18 (overfit), r=8 (eval min step 200), r=12 with dropout 0.2. Tokenisation bug caught : two-step apply_chat_template broke label masks silently ; reverted to single-step. dtype vs torch_dtype also caught. Pre-nuke settings reconstructed from conversation history : r=16, alpha=32, LR 8e-5, warmup 100, grad_norm 0.8. Stage 1 frozen merge → Stage 2 slight adapter unfreeze + MLP confirmed.

Notes carried forward‡

Four things the project keeps teaching me ; none novel, all easy to mistake in the moment:

— Train the vision head against the merged model, not the base. Otherwise the head learns someone Etty no longer is.

— Persona-loss under 1.0 is not a success target. It is overfitting wearing the costume of success.

— Keep memory payloads consistent between seeding and live writes. Otherwise the retrieval layer hits two schemas and quietly drops one.

— The LLM must own the decision loop. Isolated classifiers cascade-fail. Let the model speak tool-calls the way it speaks words.

‡ discipline

no api
inference stays local
no telemetry
nothing phones home
no opt-in
cam/mic are off by default
no prompt
persona lives in the weights
no cloud
weights + memory on one machine
no remote
QLoRA on the 3090, served at home