Field Notes

“We have identified industrial-scale campaigns by three AI laboratories—DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax—to illicitly extract Claude’s capabilities to improve their own models”

Claude Code can now modernize COBOL code

27-year-old Apple iBooks can still download official updates from Apple.

“The Most Expensive Party Balloon in History”: on El Paso’s airport shutdown.

Introducing GPT‑5.3‑Codex‑Spark

“Addressing the risks of AI will require a mix of voluntary actions taken by companies (and private third-party actors) and actions taken by governments that bind everyone.”

“Vibe coding actually works. It creates robust, complex systems that work. You can tell yourself (as I did) that it can’t possibly do that, but you are wrong. You can then tell yourself (as I did) that it’s good as a kind of alternative search engine for coding problems, but not much else. You are also wrong about that.”

Cormac McCarthy notes on writing for science:

UCLA digitized Hearst newsreels from 1929 to 1967

Teen-agers in their bedrooms, before the age of selfies:

Better late than never — iPad native Instagram app available

White paper: Why Language Models Hallucinate

Not new, but worth not missing: “Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory expands Claude for Enterprise use to empower scientists and researchers”

OpenAI releases two open-weight models. “The gpt-oss-20b model delivers similar results to OpenAI o3‑mini on common benchmarks and can run on edge devices with just 16 GB of memory, making it ideal for on-device use cases, local inference, or rapid iteration without costly infrastructure”