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@@ -4259,3 +4259,44 @@ A premise filed as load-bearing was falsified within the hour **by the party tha
 ⚠ **Note also what the correction did NOT do: the conclusion kept its name and lost its original justification.** A daemon still buys nothing — but on between-session grounds, not on delivery gating, which turns out not to exist. **A conclusion that retains its old reasoning after that reasoning is falsified is how a false premise survives its own refutation.** The narrowed support is recorded in AMENDMENT 2 for that reason.
 
 **Awaiting:** nothing. The empty-content-window question is banked for the build phase.
+
+### AMENDMENT 4 — 2026-08-22 — the probe's self-witness limit; and reading 2 may reopen the case it was meant to close
+
+*(The measurement lives in AMENDMENT 3, not 2 — noting only so the correction lands in the right place.)*
+
+#### (a) The claim, phrased to what the instrument can actually support
+
+⚠ **The probe is the only witness to its own firing.** An invocation that failed silently would leave no entry, and therefore no gap — the log cannot distinguish *"the timer did not fire"* from *"the timer fired and the logger died."*
+
+**Precise form, superseding AMENDMENT 3's phrasing of this one claim:**
+
+> **No gap exceeded 10 s among logged invocations.**
+
+Not *"the timer never missed."* The ceiling holds on the entries that exist, and the inference — that firing is activity-independent — survives, because a silent miss could only make the true cadence *more* regular than observed, never less. **A missed fire cannot manufacture the ceiling; it can only hide a longer gap.** So the finding is directionally safe and the phrasing was loose. Not worth a second instrument.
+
+#### (b) The empty content window — the jurist's sharpening adopted, and one consequence that follows
+
+**The framing is corrected and better.** It is not state-versus-stateless: a boolean *"did anything happen in this window?"* is recomputed each tick, accumulates nothing, and takes no input from whether the fool was heard or muted. **It cannot drift toward agreeableness because the steward's response never enters it.** §8's bar is on adaptation, not on evaluation of the present window.
+
+The real question is **what 73/20/7 are proportions OF**:
+
+| reading | consequence |
+|---|---|
+| **1 — proportion of TICKS.** Empty windows consume draws. | The filed ≈2.3/day overstates by an unknown factor. |
+| **2 — proportion of NON-EMPTY ticks.** Empty windows skipped before the draw. | The numbers mean what they were calibrated to mean. Partially re-couples frequency to activity. |
+
+**One argument for reading 2 that strengthens it further:** the re-coupling is to a **boolean**, not a count. A window containing 1 event and a window containing 53 both read *non-empty*, so **the burst problem cannot return through it** — burst sensitivity requires proportionality to volume, and reading 2 has none. That is a materially weaker coupling than the one §8 was rewritten to escape, and it is the right trade.
+
+#### ⚠ (c) BUT reading 2 appears to reopen the case refresh-driving was adopted to close
+
+*Following the jurist's own framing one step further, and surfaced rather than solved.*
+
+Refresh-driving was adopted because a hook-gated tick cannot fire when the steward is **present but generating no events** — reading, drafting elsewhere — *"precisely when drift consolidates."*
+
+**Under reading 2, that window is empty, so it is skipped, so no utterance occurs.** The fool is silent during exactly the stretch the change was made to reach. Refresh-driving would then deliver the **body's visible silence** (REVIEWED-125 cond. 2, genuinely won) but **not the mumble's reach into idle presence** — which is less than AMENDMENT 2 claimed for it.
+
+**The dependency is what counts as CONTENT, and it has not been defined anywhere.** If content is only *"events since the last tick"*, the above holds. If a window with no events still has something to remark on — what is open, what is unresolved, what has been sitting — then it is not empty and reading 2 reaches the idle case after all. Note that remarking on **standing state** is not content-keyed *judgement*: §8 forbids assessing whether a thing is any good, not noticing that it exists.
+
+**Three-way, and it should be decided as three rather than discovered as two:** what the proportions are of · what counts as content · whether idle presence is reachable at all. **The first two jointly determine the third**, and the filed ≈2.3/day was computed under none of the combinations — it needs re-deriving once they are fixed, as the jurist says.
+
+**Awaiting:** nothing. After the beacon; nothing here blocks Tuesday.