Substantial quality pass on gemma_naming.py driven by user review of
the first real-mode smoke test output. The earlier run produced names
that read too sci-fi / epic-fantasy / same-y: Aureus, Aetheria,
Stellaris, Nexus, Elysium. Root cause analysis + fixes:
1. Runtime timestamps. The log prefix is now
`[HH:MM:SS +00h03m]` — clock time plus elapsed-since-start. Gives
the user an at-a-glance sense of how long the run has been going
without scrolling back to the banner.
2. System / body headers. When the loop enters a new system it prints
`── SYSTEM K/N GJ 71 — Tau Ceti (hop 0)`. Each body line now
shows `GJ71c (Threshold)` if the body has a proper_name in
systems.db, so the log reads like a tour of the reach rather than
a wall of body_id slugs. Preserved (already-named) bodies now log
a compact "(skip — N names already set)" line so progress is
visible even when no inference happened.
3. Prompt grounding overhaul. The old few-shot examples were all
classical/epic (Wolcott Beck, Nakamura Stream, Ribeiro do Sal,
Drayton Spine) which biased Gemma 2 2B toward Latin/Greek
coinages. New preambles use the shape:
"Settlers named X after themselves, after what they saw, or
after places back home. Most names are mundane, short, and
direct — a surname, a compass direction, a feature, a
practical description. Classical or epic names are rare."
Combined with grounded example pools, Gemma now produces names
like "Cooper's Creek", "Western Ridge", "The Highroad",
"Blackwood Creek", "Dustbowl".
4. Core corridor relabel. The "core" palette inflection was
"institutional Latin / pan-Anglo / Gateway-era", which pattern-
matched in Gemma's training data to "make up Latin-sounding
words" (→ Ardenia, Aurelia, Stellaris). Now it's
"administrative English / Gateway-era" and the outputs are
prosaic — Port Dundas, East Ridge, Meridian, Landing.
5. Rotating few-shot example pools. Each feature type now has 5-7
pools of 5-6 examples each. `_build_prompt()` picks a pool
deterministically per (body_id, local_id, attempt) so:
- Same feature always gets the same prompt (determinism preserved).
- Neighbouring features on the same body get different prompts
(output variance — the sampler doesn't collapse to a single
mode when you ask for 16 mountain names in a row).
- Retries rotate to a new pool, not just a bumped seed, giving
dedup failures a clean second attempt.
6. Cosmopolitan cultural variety in the examples. Earlier pools only
showed British/Australian, Korean/Japanese, Portuguese/Swahili,
German/Dutch/Nordic axes — the four reach corridors. Gemma learned
"names come in four flavours". New pools span Dutch, Nordic,
Italian, French, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Spanish, Russian,
Finnish, Greek, Irish, Japanese, and British — teaching the model
that names can be any real Earth cultural register, not just the
corridor label. The result: actual Dutch names (Egelantier,
Hochland, Van Damhoeve), actual Nordic (Lundstad, Brygga),
actual Italian (Borgo Marconi, Piazza Nuova), etc.
7. First-name possessive pools. Per user feedback, settler naming
includes both surnames ("Cooper's Creek") and first names
("Clifford's Bay", "Maura's Run", "Yuki's Pool"). Each feature
type now has a dedicated first-name-possessive pool in addition
to the existing surname pool — the two rotate alongside so both
patterns show up without either dominating.
8. One "classical/Latinate" pool per feature type (≈17% of calls
given 5-7 pools per type). Keeps occasional Latin flavour without
making it dominant — the user explicitly noted that replacing
one pattern with another "is never a clean fix for a randomizer."
9. Earth-name blocklist expansion. The Gemma 2 model reached for
real European names ("Weser", "Rhine", "Reykjavik") in the first
real run. Added 21 European rivers (Rhine, Weser, Elbe, Oder,
Vistula, Loire, Rhône, Douro, Tagus, Ebro, Po, Arno, Tiber, …)
and 25 Nordic/Eastern European cities (Reykjavik, Oslo, Gdansk,
Krakow, Prague, Warsaw, Budapest, Belgrade, …). Case-insensitive
"The <name>" stripping still applies so "The Great Divide" also
matches "Great Divide".
Combined smoke test after these changes (10 real-mode prompts across
core + west_reach):
- core: Port Dundas, The Backbone, Dustbowl, Blackwood Creek
- west_reach: Egelantier, Hochland, Der Rücken, Lundstad, Klipfjord
- no placeholder residue, no markdown, no 5+ word outputs.
--shard is gone (dead code since GPU contention killed parallelism).
Resume semantics are still free: re-run the same command and
already-named bodies skip via the preserved path.
jpmschweitzer
cbeadc3184