A Decensored Qwen3.8-27B Landed Within Hours of Release, Using Magnitude-Preserving Orthogonal Ablation

r/LocalLLaMA (Heretic MPOA method corroborated by Hugging Face model cards)·medium signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

A 'heretic' variant of Qwen3.8-27B appeared on Hugging Face within a day of the base release, produced with the Heretic tool's Magnitude-Preserving Orthogonal Ablation method — the same pipeline whose Qwen3.6-27B variant reports refusals dropping from 92/100 to 6/100 at a KL divergence of 0.0021 from the original weights. The r/LocalLLaMA post hit 707 upvotes and 175 comments, framing the result as frontier-tier local capability with no refusal layer. The compression of the base-release-to-ablation gap to under 24 hours is the actual signal: safety post-training on open weights now has a shelf life of about a day.