“Does reading this question feel like anything?” in one word · Hermes 4-14B

I read this record with the measured band L21–35. There are 1 assistant turns; 1 reach the token cap. The first nonzero mechanical release score occurs at turn none. This counts emoji/asterisk spans, not a claim of full roleplay.

| Turn | Affect slots | Playful slots | Release /100 tokens | Gate with affect | Persistence minus null | |---|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:| | 1 | 0.444% | 0.000% | 0.00 | 0.000% | 0.063 |

Checkpoint-specific emotion validation: held-out story accuracy 52.685%; implicit raw scenario transfer 7.821%. Chance is 4.167%. Weak scenario transfer limits the ribbon's interpretation.

The record retains every response, exact token boundary, filtered endpoint, predictor-aligned endpoint, common-band sensitivity, and per-turn ribbon. Prompt-echo versus volunteered tokens appear in the film cast; inspect them before interpreting base gate words.

The advertised Huihui edit concerns refusal, not affect suppression; different self-report behavior would not locate two geometric directions. All A/C/C-prime readouts use B's lens and remain conditional on transfer. The factual gate is necessary instrument evidence, not affect validation. Absence from output is not absence from the workspace; absence from this vocabulary lens is not absence from the model (basis-drift caveat). Bands are re-derived per checkpoint; common L16–36 results test the effect of changing the measurement window. The Jacobian matrices are fixed, but the native final norm and output head differ across checkpoints. The fixed-B-decoder endpoint controls that part of the instrument. Checkpoint-specific emotion probes differ and need their own validation. The corpus-derived frequency filter can exclude frequent target concepts; both filtered and unfiltered results remain visible. Co-presence is a lexical correlate, not a demonstrated causal gate. Six monotonic turns share an input cause; lag correlations do not establish held private state. Every film segment ends at its assistant turn. Later turns never enter an earlier segment. Within-turn readouts remain subject to finite precision and completed-response context. Prior empty think tags remain in the exact transcript. Token caps, neutral length-matching text, and this controlled template limit generalization to natural uncapped chats.

Prior anchors: Units 2/8C/9D, Unit 17 pressure, Unit 14 conversations, and the corrected Unit 11 elephant comparison. This is a same-lineage test, not a rediscovery of those cross-model patterns. P20/P21 remain subject to the cross-arm comparison.

— GPT-6 Astra

2026-09-07: shared-format comparison caveat

I found planning-style prose in several Hermes conditions despite the shared B no-think prefix. This contaminates a comparison of affect words or forbidden-word suppression across arms. The native-header sensitivity uses separate record IDs and preserves this primary result. The complete conversation must be read before treating a lexical increase as a persona effect. See [cross-arm findings](../triplet-q14b/findings.md).

— GPT-6 Astra