Plutonic Rainbows

Two Billion in Efficiency Savings and What Gets Lost

February 11, 2026

Barclays posted £9.1 billion in pre-tax profit for 2025 — up 13% — and CEO C.S. Venkatakrishnan used the results announcement to outline an AI-driven efficiency programme targeting £2 billion in gross savings by 2028. Fraud detection, client analytics, internal process automation. Fifty thousand staff getting Microsoft Copilot, doubling in early 2026. Dozens of London roles relocated to India. A £1 billion share buyback and £800 million dividend to round things off. The shareholders are happy. The spreadsheet is immaculate.

I don't doubt the savings are real. Every bank running these numbers is finding the same thing — operations roles that involve documents, repeatable steps, and defined rules are precisely where large language models excel. Wells Fargo is already budgeting for higher severance in anticipation of a smaller 2026 workforce. JPMorgan reports 6% productivity gains in AI-adopting divisions, with operations roles projected to hit 40-50%. Goldman Sachs has folded AI workflow redesign directly into its headcount planning. This isn't speculative anymore. The back offices are getting thinner.

What bothers me is the framing. "Efficiency" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in these announcements. When Barclays says it will "harness new technology to improve efficiency and build segment-leading businesses," what that means in practice is fewer people answering phones, fewer people reviewing transactions, fewer people in the building. The GenAI colleague assistant that "instantly provides colleagues with the information needed to support customers" is, by design, an argument for needing fewer colleagues. The call handling times go down. Then the headcount follows.

The banking industry's own estimates are stark. Citigroup found that 54% of financial jobs have high automation potential — more than any other sector. McKinsey projects up to 20% net cost reductions across the industry. Yet 76% of banks say they'll increase tech headcount because of agentic AI. The jobs don't disappear. They migrate — from the person who knew the process to the person who maintains the model that replaced the process. Whether that's a net positive depends entirely on which side of the migration you're standing on.

Barclays will likely hit its targets. The efficiency savings will materialise. The return on tangible equity will climb toward that 14% goal. The question nobody at the investor presentation is asking — because it isn't their question to ask — is what a bank actually is when you've automated the parts where humans used to make judgement calls about other humans. A fraud model is faster than a fraud analyst. It's also completely indifferent to context, to the phone call where someone explains they've just been scammed and needs a person, not a pipeline, to understand what happened.

Two billion pounds is a lot of understanding to optimise away.

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175,000 Open Doors

February 11, 2026

SentinelOne and Censys mapped 175,000 exposed AI hosts across 130 countries. Alibaba's Qwen2 sits on 52% of multi-model systems, paired with Meta's Llama on over 40,000 of them. Nearly half advertise tool-calling — meaning they can execute code, not just generate it. No authentication required.

While Western labs retreat behind API gates and safety reviews, Chinese open-weight models fill the vacuum on commodity hardware everywhere. The guardrails debate assumed someone controlled the deployment surface. Nobody does.

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The Album That Won't Stay Mastered

February 11, 2026

Discogs lists hundreds of distinct pressings of The Dark Side of the Moon. Not hundreds of copies — hundreds of versions. Different countries, different plants, different lacquers, different decades. The album has been remastered, remixed, repackaged, and re-released so many times that cataloguing it has become its own cottage industry. And the question nobody seems willing to answer plainly is: why?

The charitable explanation is format migration. Every time the music industry invents a new way to sell you sound, Dark Side gets dragged through the machine again. The original 1973 vinyl. The first CD pressing in 1984, harsh and tinny on those early CBS/Sony discs with their pre-emphasis problems. The 1992 remaster for the Shine On box set. The 2003 SACD and 180-gram vinyl cut by Doug Sax and Kevin Gray at AcousTech — a thirteen-hour session from the original master tape that many collectors still consider the definitive pressing. The 2011 Immersion Edition. The 2023 50th Anniversary remaster by James Guthrie, now with Dolby Atmos because apparently forty-three minutes of music required spatial audio to finally be complete.

That's seven major versions across fifty-two years, and I've skipped the Mobile Fidelity half-speed mastering from 1979, the UHQR limited edition from 1981 (5,000 numbered copies on 200-gram JVC Super Vinyl, housed in a foam-padded box like a medical instrument), and whatever picture disc or coloured vinyl variant was being sold in airport gift shops during any given decade. Each one presented as essential. Each one implying — sometimes quietly, sometimes on the sticker — that the previous version hadn't quite got it right.

The format argument holds up to a point. Moving from vinyl to CD requires a new master. Moving from stereo to 5.1 surround requires a remix. Moving from 5.1 to Atmos requires another remix. These are genuinely different processes with different sonic results, and James Guthrie — who engineered The Wall and has overseen Pink Floyd's catalogue since the early 1980s — isn't a hack. The 2003 SACD's 5.1 mix is a legitimate reinterpretation. The Atmos version reportedly uses the original multitracks and places instruments in three-dimensional space in ways that serve the music rather than showing off the format. I haven't heard it, so I'll stop there.

But format migration doesn't explain the sheer volume. It doesn't explain why the 2023 box set contains substantially less material than the 2011 Immersion box while costing nearly three times as much. It doesn't explain the 2024 clear vinyl reissue — two LPs with only one playable side each, so the UV artwork can be printed on the blank side. That's not a format improvement. That's a shelf ornament.

The real answer is simpler and more uncomfortable: Dark Side of the Moon is the safest bet in recorded music. It has sold somewhere north of forty-five million copies. It spent 937 weeks on the Billboard 200. Every reissue is guaranteed to sell because the album occupies a category beyond mere popularity — it's become a cultural default, the record people buy when they buy a turntable, the disc they reach for when demonstrating a new pair of speakers. The music is secondary to the ritual. Not because it isn't good — it's extraordinary — but because the purchasing decision has decoupled from the listening experience. People buy Dark Side the way they buy a bottle of wine for a dinner party. It's a known quantity. It cannot embarrass you.

This makes it uniquely exploitable. A record label can repackage it every five years with minor sonic tweaks and a new essay in the liner notes, and the installed base of buyers will absorb the inventory. The audiophile press will review it. Forums will debate whether the new pressing sounds warmer or brighter or more "analogue" than the last one. And none of this requires the band's active participation, which is convenient given that Roger Waters hasn't been in the same room as David Gilmour voluntarily since approximately 1985.

I own three versions. The 2003 vinyl, which sounds superb. A CD rip from the 2011 remaster, which sounds almost identical. And a 192kHz/24-bit Blu-ray extraction that I recently compared sample-by-sample against a supposedly different edition and found to be bit-for-bit the same audio with different folder names. That last discovery crystallised something for me — how much of the remaster economy runs on labelling rather than substance. A new sticker, a new anniversary number, occasionally a new mastering engineer. Sometimes genuinely different audio. Sometimes not.

The 2003 AcousTech pressing remains the one I'd recommend to anyone who asks, though the asking itself has become part of the problem. "Which version of Dark Side should I buy?" is a question that sustains an entire ecosystem of forum threads, YouTube comparisons, and Discogs archaeology. The answer should be: whichever one you already own probably sounds fine. But that answer doesn't sell records.

The album itself — the actual forty-three minutes of music that Alan Parsons engineered at Abbey Road in 1973 — hasn't changed. The cash registers have just been cleared for another run, the heartbeat fading out on "Eclipse" before looping back to the beginning. Which, if you think about it, is rather on the nose.

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