Lesson 4: Long context, what it really buys you

Module 10 · Lesson 4 · About 45 minutes · Needs: Module 4, Lesson 3 (context extension, loss by position, needle tests); Module 6's base recipe

The situation

Sol 431 at Aurora Station. Tariq Haddad, the Comms Officer, reports that long transmissions from Earth are being split: a bulletin of 2,048 characters arrives in pieces, and base reads only 128 characters at a time. His proposal: "Teach the model to read a whole bulletin at once." Kofi Mensah agrees to the experiment but sets the bar: "A long window is a claim. Show me the model uses what is far back, on more than one test."

The running example is transmission 0: the first 512-character validation window, the start of a split bulletin. This lesson measures what a longer read really gives base, and what retrieval gives instead.