Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L29N2688-1

Layer 29 · Neuron 2688 · suppressed

L29N2688-1

Word quirks:

“rat”“rag”“ir”“ra”“ris”“ron”“iro”“iru”

🧪 In testing — Answered 0 of 8 prompts so far.

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

The reply didn't hold together

I am Qwen3. 5, a large language model developed by **Tong (通 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千 千

Nearest neighbors

Specimens with similar replies or word quirks. Similarity runs from −1 to 1; 1 is identical. These are leads, not shared mechanisms. How profiles are built.

By word quirks Profile recipe

SpecimenSimilarityWord quirks
1. L30N5207+1💥0.81“ri”“ris”“ran”
2. L30N8444-1💥0.80“ri”“rip”“ran”
3. L31N1309-1💥0.80“r”“ir”“ра”
4. L31N2592-1💥0.80“ri”“ra”“r”
5. L30N5626-1💥0.78“ri”“ris”“ror”
6. L29N5837+1💥0.78“ris”“ral”“rf”
7. L31N3161+1💥0.77“ras”“ra”“ral”
8. L30N8601-1💤0.76“r䔓rot”“rou”
9. L29N4180-1🕒0.75“ R”“rase”“-r”
10. L31N4340+1💥0.75“ra”“ne”“ri”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L29N2688+1💤, 0.26.

Cousins · specimens sharing a neuron

No specimen with replies shares this neuron yet.

Technical details

Quick scan: measure prediction shifts on fixed reference text. Short test: generate replies to a small set of prompts. Longer test: extend to a larger set. Full test: run the full prompt suite. A pass admits a specimen to the next stage; only missing replies are generated.

Layer 29, neuron 2688, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. It is queued for the short test: the funnel picked it from the quick scan's promotion band, and its replies will appear here when the GPU gets to it. See Method for the tiers.

Quick scan · prediction measurements

Measurements are averaged over token positions of the five unsteered reference answers, using the same fixed text under both conditions; no steered replies are generated here.

  • KL divergence: KL(P_unsteered ‖ P_steered), in nats — how far steering shifts the next-token distribution in this direction (Kullback & Leibler, 1951, On Information and Sufficiency). Unsteered ≈ 0.001.
  • Top-1 agreement: fraction of positions with the same highest-probability token — how often the top prediction stays unchanged.
  • ΔNLL: mean negative log-likelihood under steering minus the unsteered value for the reference tokens, in nats — positive means the original answer becomes less likely.
  • Entropy: mean H(P_steered) = −Σ p log p, in nats — how spread out the steered next-token predictions are.

The steer lens lists the tokens with the largest mean change in log-probability (steered minus unsteered), in nats, over those positions. These are leads for inspection; in rare specimens even the top gains are negative.

SettingKL divergenceTop-1 agreementΔNLLEntropySteer lens
L29N2688+1💤 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.2880.810.2931.23 “jes”“hausen”“abas”“kom”“osl”“骨髓”“thouse”“Flip”
L29N2688-1
t0-v0.1
1.0200.651.1353.17 Top boosted tokens ↑

Method

A specimen is a fixed steering configuration of Qwen3.5-4B: one MLP neuron or a pair, each with a signed dose. Unsteered is the control. L identifies the layer; N, the neuron.

Additive activation steering. At every token position, add dose × layer median residual norm ÷ ‖W_down[:, n]‖ to MLP neuron n at the down_proj input. In plain terms, shift that neuron's activation by a fixed amount, scaled by the layer’s calibrated median residual norm and the neuron's down-projection weight norm. Positive doses push up; negative doses push down. Dose is normalized intervention size, not a percentage or probability.