LeWorldModel trains a latent world model with a prediction loss and a single anti-collapse regulariser, and reports approximately 87% of goals reached on TwoRoom, its simplest diagnostic environment. We reproduce that result by independent reimplementation on roughly $25 of rented compute, with all evaluation on one laptop CPU. We reach 94.0% at the repository's evaluation goal offset, against 84.0% for the authors' own released checkpoint measured under our protocol on identical episodes, and we reproduce the reported representation result directly (position probe Pearson r = 0.9988 against a reported 0.996). Reaching that point required four conventions that determine the outcome and appear in no released configuration file: dense action gathering across a frameskip block, a programmatically-set action-encoder width, ImageNet pixel normalisation, and action z-scoring. A reproducer following the released configurations alone obtains a model whose predictor cannot converge. The evaluation protocol is itself contested by the released material. The paper's appendix and the repository's configuration specify different goal offsets and step budgets; on the authors' own weights these yield 14.0% and 84.0%, and only the configuration's values reproduce the reported figure. On fifty identical episodes, changing nothing but how the goal is constructed moves that checkpoint from 84.0% to 8.0%. Two findings generalise. One-step prediction accuracy does not predict long-horizon planning success: across three checkpoints spanning a sevenfold range in prediction error, including the authors' own, it orders short-horizon success monotonically and fails to order long-horizon success at all. And a batch normalisation layer inflated our reported validation loss by up to a factor of 300, concealing a training loss that was flat throughout.
Latent medical image generators usually treat the tokenizer as fixed preprocessing. We test whether this separation is valid in a controlled ChestMNIST study at 64x64, crossing discrete tokenizers, generator families, and sampler settings under a shared latent grid, with continuous-latent reference cells. In this controlled setting, rankings depend jointly on the tokenizer, generator, and sampler: the best quantizer changes with the generator, and validation-based sampler selection changes the apparent generator ranking. We retrain the vocabulary-1024 interaction block at three seeds and the interaction survives (6 of 9 pairwise quantizer comparisons exceed three seed standard deviations), and we scope the wider single-seed grid accordingly. Reconstruction PSNR alone is not a reliable selection criterion; we instead introduce a generator-free statistic, neighbour-conditional predictive gain, that separates the quantizer families by downstream generation quality (rank-AUC 1.00) where reconstruction PSNR and marginal token entropy do not. On LFQ-1024, retuning D3PM and SE-D3PM (selected on a held-out validation split) moves them from default FID-192 0.44/0.41 to 0.09/0.10 at lower NFE, replicated across seeds; the continuous references were not given an equivalent sampler sweep. We report FID-192 as an internal ranking metric; it ranks consistently with standard FID-2048 (Spearman 0.80) and with a label-free classifier two-sample test (0.78). We interpret these results through a rate-distortion-modelability framing, where modelability is conditional on the generator, sampler, and inference budget. All experiments are at 64x64 on low-resolution medical-style images, unconditional, and evaluated with non-clinical FID-based metrics, and we scope every claim to that setting. Code: https://github.com/liamchalcroft/medtokenizers and https://github.com/liamchalcroft/medlatents.