Recognise the words in episodes no publisher transcript can describe

whisper.cpp, installed on tungsten and shelled out to per episode. The other
304 of 342 mirrored episodes -- the ones whose publisher's transcript was
declined because this copy carries inserted advertising the master does not
describe, which is both why it is unusable and why having words would be worth
most.

**Measured, and an order of magnitude cheaper than I told Peter.** base.en on
six threads does 10.3x realtime on this box: a 63-minute Darknet Diaries episode
took 6m11s at 793MB peak. The earlier "roughly realtime, days of backfill" was
wrong. The real backlog is 298 episodes, 266 hours of audio, about 26 hours of
CPU -- three days at 45 minutes per two-hour cycle, which is the default budget.

Bounded per cycle rather than exhaustive, and only on the timer: a wakeup is the
phone pushing a subscription list and wanting that show polled now, and
following it with three quarters of an hour of recognition would make a new
subscription feel broken. Newest first, because an episode about to be played is
worth having words for before one from the back of a catalogue.

**The first real run found two bugs the tests could not have.** The working
directory was never created, so ffmpeg could not write and every episode failed
-- and each failure was recorded as "do not try this one again". A misconfigured
deploy would have marked the whole backlog attempted in seconds and nothing
would ever have been transcribed, which is precisely the shape of the midroll
scan marking episodes checked forever after an OutOfMemoryError nobody saw.
transcribe.Breaker now abandons a pass after three consecutive failures and
gives those attempts back, since a run of failures is the engine rather than the
episodes -- while one bad file among good ones is still marked, because the same
bytes will fail the same way next time.

NeedsRecognising is deliberately not the negation of TranscriptExamined. A
declined transcript means examined, no words, and exactly the episode
recognition exists for.

**First validation against ground truth the detector did not produce.** Up First
"Democrats Lead In NPR Poll": the feed declares 788s, the file served 890s, so
102s of advertising was inserted -- and reading the recognised words found 100s
of it, in two pods, every line unmistakable ad copy. The sibling episode found
21s of 131s: a whole pod at 54-130s was missed because its copy carries only one
kind of marker. Reported rather than tuned around, on two episodes.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_018AwnALZL6bD4VBtATDVv3B

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