015fb7d21e
Run 12, cheap probe with a bound pilot: 16 losses over 290 s and zero confirmed arrivals, making twelve runs without one. The persistence rule earned its place immediately -- an increase of 13 to 15 was surfaced and correctly not counted, since it does not start from zero. Under the previous rule it would have been invisible, and a similar flicker straddling zero was nearly written up last iteration as the first arrival. The stall witness, on the other hand, is unreliable. Thirteen samples were flagged GUEST STALLED while recording losses in those same samples, and a frozen guest cannot destroy craft, so they are false positives and the run was healthy. The cause is the selection rule: it took the first word in a 4 MB window whose rate fell in a plausible band, and plenty of counters advance intermittently without saying anything about whether frames are being rendered. timer_probe had already solved this properly -- 286 candidates, a rate histogram with a dominant cluster near 17/s -- and that lesson was not carried over when the witness was bolted onto the probe. Now fixed to a majority vote: collect every candidate, keep the modal-rate cluster, sample up to 32 of them, and report a stall only when fewer than half advance. It also prints RUN UNVALIDATED when no witness is found, because an earlier run printed "stalled samples=0" alongside "tick witness: NONE", and a witness that does not exist cannot report zero stalls. Not yet run. Consequence worth flagging: the "0 stalled samples" that validated the cheap probe last iteration came from this same unreliable witness and should be re-confirmed under the majority rule. The pilot-log speed analysis that established the stalls in the first place is unaffected. Also fixed: the entity bind now retries three times and aborts if it never takes, instead of silently flying an unattended craft -- one run was wasted that way this iteration, producing no kills and no information.