Plutonic Rainbows

The Model That Debugged Its Own Birth

February 05, 2026 · uneasy.in/b24759e

OpenAI launched GPT-5.3-Codex today, and the headline feature is strange enough to sit with: early versions of the model helped debug its own training, manage its own deployment, and diagnose its own evaluations. OpenAI calls it "the first model instrumental in creating itself." Sam Altman says the team was "blown away" by how much it accelerated development.

I'm less blown away and more uneasy. A model that participates in its own creation isn't science fiction anymore — it's a shipping product, available to paid ChatGPT users right now. The benchmarks are strong. SWE-Bench Pro, Terminal-Bench, new highs. 25% faster than its predecessor. Fine. But the system card buries the more interesting detail: this is OpenAI's first model rated "High" for cybersecurity under their Preparedness Framework. They don't have definitive evidence it can automate end-to-end cyber attacks, but they can't rule it out either. That's the kind of sentence you read twice.

The self-development framing is doing a lot of rhetorical work. OpenAI presents it as efficiency — the model sped up its own shipping timeline. But the guardrails problem doesn't disappear just because the feedback loop is useful. A system that debugs its own training is a system whose training is partially opaque to the humans overseeing it. OpenAI says it doesn't reach "High" on self-improvement. I'd feel better about that claim if the cybersecurity rating weren't already there.

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Opus 4.6 Lands

February 05, 2026 · uneasy.in/a5fb87d

Anthropic released Opus 4.6 today. The headline numbers look impressive — 190 Elo points over its predecessor on knowledge work benchmarks, a million-token context window finally arriving to the Opus tier. The pricing stays flat at $5/$25 per million tokens, which surprised me.

What I'm actually curious about: the adaptive thinking feature. The model now decides how much to think based on contextual clues rather than explicit prompting. That's either brilliant or concerning, depending on whether you trust the machine to know when it needs to slow down.

The Brittle Sound of Early Japanese CDs

February 03, 2026 · uneasy.in/c602341

Those first Japanese CD pressings from 1983-84 — the CBS/Sony discs with "CSR COMPACT DISC" stamped around the hub — often sound harsh. Shrill highs, fatiguing to listen to. The culprit is pre-emphasis: a high-frequency boost baked into the mastering that CD players were supposed to reverse automatically.

The problem? Many of these discs have the emphasis applied but the flag telling players to compensate was never set. The cdHistory database tracks affected releases. Dark Side of the Moon, Thriller, Abbey Road — all the early Japanese pressings need de-emphasis applied manually or they'll forever sound wrong.

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