D found katoomba's pub 1,000m from the retail cluster — a gig with no passing crowd. Measuring all
five towns first showed it was SYSTEMIC: 11 of 15 venues sat with <3 shops within 160m (newtown's were
0/0/1 — every venue stranded). After the bias: 0 of 15. Katoomba's pub 1 → 9. Castlemaine cleared without
needing the floor exception the brief anticipated.
- pickVenues builds a CLUSTER-ADJACENT field first (>= CLUSTER_MIN 3 shops within CLUSTER_R 160m), then the
kind flavors (pub corner / band_room fringe / rsl off-spine) bias WITHIN that field rather than overriding
it (per the brief: biases, not absolutes) — a fringe band_room in the cluster beats one a kilometre from
anyone. A town with no cluster at all falls back to the pool.
- SYNTHETIC FROZEN BY CONSTRUCTION, not by luck. The brief assumed a blanket filter would be a no-op because
'the synthetic town is one dense cluster anyway'. Measurement says otherwise: 4 synthetic candidates PER
SEED sit under the threshold (min cluster 0-1), so a blanket filter WOULD have moved the frozen golden.
Gated on plan.source === 'osm' (undefined on synthetic) — impossible rather than unlikely. The marched
fixtures are 'osm' but genuinely dense (min cluster 3/11/13) ⇒ verified no-op.
- Only the GIG goldens moved (venue selection is gig-layer; base town goldens untouched): katoomba
0xbf586b77, newtown 0xacdb3eee, fremantle 0xcf3426fc, bendigo 0x646b2c23, castlemaine 0xf9713a69.
classic 0x3fa36874 / gig 0xb1d48ea1 / marched fixtures FROZEN. selfcheck ALL GREEN 66419/66419;
scaffold + consistency GREEN; cross-process deterministic.
- FYI: E's v4.0 pack (glebe/marrickville/newcastle) already boots clean through my loader (validates + full
suites pass), listed UNPINNED — I pin the pack in R22; it does not gate the beta tag.
Handshake → C + D: cluster bias landed, goldens re-pinned, start your verifies (before/after table in
LANE_A_NOTES §R21).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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