By-ear pass: real-world topics, and the clock as bearings [spec 13 §5, spec 04 §3.4]

[wine-fall]

What it is

The by-ear acceptance two prompt-side ships leave owed — neither is assertable in a test:

1. Real-world topics (spec 13). The host is now offered one real item on some talk batches — a title and a two-to-three-sentence gist in the listener's spoken language, from a pool the radio refreshes in the background over WebSearch. The mechanism is verified at the deterministic seam: the real fetch wrote 6 entries in ~105 s (gists in Chinese, weighted to the Asia timezone), and a make dev run logged rwt.offer <id> in .dev/dev.log for a batch whose beat then carried that entry's thread (evidence in the PR body). What only an ear can judge is whether it sounds like a friend mentioning something they read, whether the proportion is right (roll defaults: p 0.35, minGap 1, maxGap 4 batches — MURMUR_RWT_P / _MIN_GAP / _MAX_GAP are the knobs), and whether the gist language matches the persona.

   Redesigned in PR #208 (spec 13 §3.4 / §3.7): there is no rwt-policy.md any more — the per-listener taste is the profile's (About the listener) section, read at fetch time and handed to the search under "search for what they follow, never for them"; and a topic taken for a batch is a kind: "rwt" ledger row the fetch is told to avoid, so a story that outlives the pool's 48 h is not fetched and told again. Both are asserted at the seams (the prompt block, the ledger row, the avoid list); what only time and an ear can judge is whether the pool actually leans toward what the profile says, and whether a running story stays told-once across days.

2. The clock is bearings, not a line (spec 04, PR fix(prompts): the clock is bearings, not a line [spec 04] #201). The talk and reply prompts now tell the host what the clock is for; the profile block no longer carries the fading ledger's [seen …] / [stable] tags. The fix is asserted at the prompt; whether the host actually stops reciting the date, and still answers "what time is it" when asked, is by ear.

Spec

specs/spec13/13-real-world-topics.md §5 (criteria 11–15); specs/spec04/04-no-dead-air.md §3.4 (the clock cue).

Done when

• A mentioned topic is actually named — the title, who, where — and said the way a host says it, not a newsreader: one item, no "here is the news" frame, no list. (The first draft forbade naming; the measured result was the item scrubbed to mood.)
• The proportion feels right: present across a session, but not on every stretch.
• The gist language matches the persona's spoken language (title included).
• Typing "stop with the news" (or the equivalent) turns it off, and the host does not keep mentioning news afterwards.
• Over a week of sessions, the pool leans toward what the profile's (About the listener) section says — and never toward the listener themself (no item is about them or their circle).
• A story already told on air is not told again as new on a later day — grep '"kind":"rwt"' ~/.murmur/data/memory/ledger.jsonl is the record to check a repeat against.
• The host no longer recites the date/time on beats; it mentions the hour only where it lands in what it is saying.
• Asked "what time is it" outright, the host answers with the real clock.
• No [seen …] / [stable] bookkeeping is ever heard as content.

A "no" on any box becomes a follow-up eng issue with the observation, not a reopened contract. When this closes, #44 (the cozy-imagery attractor) closes with it if the first box holds — spec 13 is its durable fix.