Plutonic Rainbows

Walk the Brampton Valley Way between Market Harborough and Northampton and the ground tells on itself. The path is flat in a way ordinary paths aren't, held above the fields on an earth shelf too deliberate to be geology. At a certain point the brick edges of a platform surface through the nettles, with numbers cut into the stone that nobody has a reason to read. This was Lamport. A station on the Midland line from Northampton to Market Harborough, which carried passengers until 1960, and then stopped carrying them, and then stopped being a line at all once the freight traffic fell away two decades after that.

Lamport closed early, three years before the report that came to stand for the whole thing. The Beeching cuts were the formalisation of a closure programme that had been grinding away through the 1950s, a momentum the 1963 report only accelerated. The Reshaping of British Railways in 1963 and The Development of the Major Railway Trunk Routes in 1965 proposed that roughly a third of the British railway network be closed. Over two thousand stations and around five thousand route miles. The figures are rehearsed so often they feel like a creed; what matters more, walking the ex-lines, is that the geometry never leaves. British Rail sold bridges for scrap and embankments for development, but plenty of the corridors survived because nobody quite got round to them. They became nature reserves by default. They became cycle paths when councils went looking for free linear infrastructure. The Trans Pennine Trail is a Frankenstein of them.

What strikes me about a trackbed is how much effort was put into hiding it from the natural gradient of the land. Cuttings through shale. Embankments raised over streams. Bridges at exactly the height a fireman needed. You can't walk these corridors without noticing you're travelling on engineering that outlasted its purpose by a factor of three or four. The steam age poured this much reinforced earthwork into a country that then changed its mind about it within a generation, and the country couldn't afford to remove the evidence.

Bobby Seal, writing about the Mold to Denbigh Junction line which closed in 1962, called it a phantom limb of twisted metal, grasping roots and overhanging trees. I like the phrase because it identifies what these walks actually feel like. There's the literal overgrowth, the hazel and birch coming up through ballast that hasn't seen a sleeper since the Wilson government. And there is the other thing. The sense that the corridor is still signalling, that if you stand at Star Crossing or Nannerch long enough you can almost hear the excursion trains coming through in a cloud of steam toward Rhyl, which they did, every August Bank Holiday, for decades, and then one year didn't.

I don't think hauntology is the right word for every old thing. It gets used promiscuously now, which drains it. But the Beeching routes are specifically hauntological in the Mark Fisher sense, not because they are spooky, but because they are the trace of a future that was paid for in reinforced clay and then abandoned mid-sentence. The embankments aren't mourning anything. They are just there, still raised, still flat, still arrow-straight across three parishes, waiting to be told what they're for now.

The Borders Railway reopened thirty miles of the old Waverley line in 2015, the longest new domestic railway built in Britain in more than a century. The trackbed was largely intact, which is the only reason it was possible. Elsewhere the bridges had already gone, the cuttings been infilled, the route chopped up by A-roads and warehouse estates. The choice to reopen a line is usually a choice to admit that the original decision was wrong; the ability to reopen depends entirely on how completely the original decision was enforced.

Half-erased, half-preserved. That's the settlement the cuts left behind. Not a ruin. A suspension.

Boards of Canada quietly pushed an album to preorder on Bleep today. The catalog number is WARP496. The title is Inferno. It's their first album in thirteen years, and the page kept timing out when I tried to load it.

The lead-up was elaborate, even by their standards. On April 6 dozens of fans started receiving unmarked VHS tapes at addresses they'd used to buy things from Warp's mail-order arm. The sender was something called Ochre Logistics, which is the platform Bleep itself runs on. The tapes contained no music, just static and a chopped-up religious broadcast that fans traced to a Moody Bible Institute ad from around 1990. Then the street posters showed up in London, LA, New York, and Tokyo, all bearing the duo's hexagon logo with no text. On April 16 they uploaded a track called "Tape 05" to YouTube with no description, no caption, no announcement. Three minutes of gentle, droning synths.

Now Inferno itself is on Bleep, and the site can't keep up. The release page returned 504 Gateway Timeout for me, and the Wayback Machine snapshot from earlier today is how I ended up confirming what I was looking at. WARP496, releasing May 29. Red transparent vinyl deluxe at $44.99, black 2×LP at $33.99, CD at $15.99. Eighteen tracks. The first one runs thirty-six seconds. The longest stretches past six minutes.

A preview clip sits on the listing too, when the listing loads.

Forty-Two Seconds of Inferno

The fan response is doing what BoC fan responses always do: people are decoding things. The Twoism forum and r/boardsofcanada have been parsing the posters for hidden frequencies and comparing the VHS audio to the Societas x Tape NTS broadcast from 2019. Fans have been tracking something called LP5 for a couple of years. It's now Inferno.

What's interesting is how legacy this all feels. Mailing physical media to surprise customers, putting up wheat-paste posters, releasing a teaser track with zero context, the long preorder window before a vinyl drop. Boards of Canada didn't invent this playbook, but they're one of very few acts who can still make it work, because their audience hasn't stopped paying attention since 1998. There's something steadying about it. The promotion strategy that made sense before social media still makes sense, when the audience was already there and willing to refresh a page for an hour to get a record.

A six-petalled flower, drawn with iron compasses, scratched into the oak jamb of a Tudor doorway. It is 2026. Nobody in the building believes in witches. The mark works anyway, or it doesn't, depending on what you mean by work.

These are called apotropaic marks, from the Greek apotropaios, averting evil. Historic England has been surveying them since 2016 and has catalogued more than 600 examples across churches, barns, manor houses, cottages, and caves. The most common is the daisy wheel or hexafoil: a geometric figure any apprentice with a compass could produce. They cluster at doorposts, window frames, hearth stones, chimney openings — the places James I identified in his 1597 Daemonologie as the routes by which witches, transformed into small animals, might slip into a home through any opening that admitted air.

The theory was that a demon, faced with a continuous line, would follow it. The concentric rings became a maze. The maze became a trap. A spirit attempting the chimney would spend eternity circling the inside of a beam.

At Gainsborough Old Hall in Lincolnshire, a volunteer spent two years cataloguing what turned out to be one of the densest concentrations of ritual marks in England. Over a hundred burn marks, struck to protect against fire. Marian symbols, overlapping Vs for the Virgin. Daisy wheels in doorways and beams. English Heritage cannot explain why Gainsborough, specifically, needed so much protection. The building, in any case, outlasted the fear.

What interests me is not the belief. The belief is legible and, in its internal logic, reasonable. What interests me is the moment the belief went and the marks didn't. Somewhere between the seventeenth century and the nineteenth, the idea that a witch-as-hare might crawl down the chimney stopped being credible to almost everyone. Nobody went back and sanded the hexafoils out of the oak. You cannot remove a daisy wheel without defacing the timber, and the timber was expensive, and the compass-scratched grooves eventually became, to later eyes, simply graffiti. Decorative. Meaningless.

This is the haunting more interesting than any haunting. The object outlives the frame that made it legible. The protective intention is still encoded in the wood. Someone, on a specific afternoon, with a specific anxiety about a specific threshold, bore down with an iron point and inscribed a figure meant to avert harm from the people inside. Four centuries later the figure is still averting. It just has nothing to avert.

Mark Fisher wrote that the eerie arises when there is a presence where there should be absence, or an absence where there should be presence. Sapphire & Steel does this with time itself. Apotropaic marks do something quieter, and I think harder to name. There is neither presence nor absence. There is intention without referent. The door is still being guarded. The guard is still at his post. The enemy he was posted against has forgotten he existed, or never existed in the first place.

Be cautious of the sentimental reading, though. These were not beautiful gestures made by simple people. The same century that scratched daisy wheels at the entrance to Shakespeare's Birthplace cellar burned women for the crimes the wheels were meant to repel. The marks coexisted with accusation, with the whole apparatus of the witch trials. Protection implies threat. The threat was imaginary; the response to it was not.

Still. Walk into any half-decent timber-framed pub in England and look at the beams over the hearth. If you see faint concentric circles, or a pair of overlapping Vs, or a burn mark that seems too deliberate to be accidental, that is someone's seventeenth-century evening of quiet fear, preserved. The carver is dead. The witches were never coming. The mark is still there. It is doing exactly what it was asked to do, which is nothing, because nothing is what was ever going to happen.

On September 30, 2012, the results of the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge came back. One team, SuperVision, registered a top-5 error rate of 15.3%. The next-best entry managed 26.2%. Nearly eleven percentage points of separation, in a field where a good year moved the needle by one or two.

The team was three people at the University of Toronto. Alex Krizhevsky, a grad student with an unusual knack for wringing performance out of GPUs. Ilya Sutskever, another grad student, who had spent months convincing Krizhevsky to try a deep convolutional network on ImageNet. Geoffrey Hinton, their advisor, who signed off on the attempt and later joked that "Ilya thought we should do it, Alex made it work, and I got the Nobel Prize."

The network that became AlexNet was trained on two Nvidia GTX 580 cards, consumer GPUs you could buy at a computer shop, sitting in Krizhevsky's bedroom at his parents' house. Sixty million parameters, five convolutional layers, three fully-connected. ReLU activations, dropout, and a very efficient GPU implementation of convolution that Krizhevsky had been writing for years as cuda-convnet. Training took five or six days.

The paper landed at NeurIPS that December. In October, at the European Conference on Computer Vision in Florence, Krizhevsky presented the work and the old guard was unimpressed. Yann LeCun, who had been arguing for convolutional nets since the late eighties, told anyone who would listen it was a turning point. He turned out to be correct. Before AlexNet, almost no leading computer-vision paper used neural nets. After it, almost all of them did.

The speed of the conversion is the part worth sitting with. Computer vision had spent twenty years perfecting hand-engineered feature pipelines. SIFT, HOG, deformable part models. Whole careers built on getting the descriptors right. A single result made most of that work obsolete inside a year. Research groups that had been refining feature extraction for a decade pivoted to training deep nets, often on the same kind of hardware, often using the code Krizhevsky had open-sourced.

That's the pattern Rich Sutton later formalised in nine paragraphs: general methods that scale with computation beat specialised methods that encode human understanding. AlexNet is the cleanest example in the set. The team didn't out-clever the competition. They out-computed it, on consumer hardware, against opponents with more institutional weight and better-tuned features.

The Computer History Museum released the original AlexNet source code in partnership with Google. Reading it now, it looks almost boring. A handful of CUDA kernels, a training loop, a few regularisation tricks. Nothing that couldn't be reimplemented in a weekend. What it did on September 30, 2012, cannot be reimplemented. That moment only happened once.

The sign in the butcher's window said CLOSED WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, and it meant it. At one o'clock the shutters came down across most of the high street. The baker, the ironmonger, the shoe-repair place, the drapers. By half past one you could walk up the middle of the road without meeting a car. Some towns did Thursdays instead, because Wednesday was market day and nobody shut up on market day. Further north it was Tuesday. You were supposed to know which, and if you didn't, you were punished by a locked door and a tiny handwritten note taped to the glass.

This wasn't a folk custom. It was the law. The Shops Act 1911 gave shop staff a weekly half-holiday, codifying a campaign that had been running since the 1830s, Early Closing Associations pressing drapers to shut at eight in winter rather than nine, later pushing for a full afternoon off mid-week. The half-day became standard. It stayed standard. The statutory framework lingered until 1 December 1994, when the Shops (Early Closing Days) Act 1965 was finally repealed , the same season Parliament was also letting supermarkets open on Sundays via the Sunday Trading Act. One kind of scheduled pause was being dismantled as another was being legalised, in the same handful of months.

The detail I love is that Sheffield Wednesday Football Club is called that because its original members were shop workers, and Wednesday was the only day they could field a team. The working week was shaped around not-shopping. An entire football club inherits the name of an absence.

When the law went, the half-day didn't go with it everywhere. Mumsnet threads from 2020 are full of people in Norfolk, Derbyshire, Pembrokeshire, the North East, reporting the local butcher or post office or hairdresser still shutting at one on Wednesday or Thursday, out of pure habit. Ilkeston gave up its Wednesday closure around 2012. Halifax had already abandoned it in 1983. Watford adopted it in 1869. The dates don't form a national timeline. They form a scatter plot of towns deciding, one by one, that the pause wasn't worth the trouble.

What the law actually produced, sitting just under the economics of it, was a recurring weekly silence. Not Sunday silence, which was total and religious and belonged to the whole country at once. A local silence. You couldn't buy a loaf in Settle on Wednesday afternoon but you could in Skipton; you couldn't cash a cheque in Halifax on Thursday but you could in Bradford. The country was perforated with small, scheduled non-events that were impossible to navigate unless you lived there. The shops-closed hours belonged to the street, not the calendar.

The practical argument for ending it was obvious. People with weekday jobs couldn't shop on Wednesday afternoon; big retailers wanted uniform hours; a single family couldn't run a corner shop while also observing a mandatory unpaid half-day. The Shops Act made sense when shopkeepers were also shop workers and the town was the unit. Once that stopped being true, the half-day became a bureaucratic ghost, maintained out of habit and municipal inertia and the occasional grumpy ironmonger who refused to change.

It's the specific texture I can't quite reproduce in memory. The emptiness of a market-town high street at three o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon in the 1980s, the post office shuttered, the Woolworths keeping its own hours, a single Volvo parked outside the bank. The streets did not need to be busy. They weren't supposed to be. The law said you had time to go home and have your tea, and a surprising number of towns took the law seriously for a hundred years after it was passed.

A few of them still do.

Moonshot AI released Kimi K2.6 yesterday, and the numbers on the release page read less like a model card and more like a shift log. Twelve hours optimising inference in Zig, four thousand tool calls, throughput going from roughly fifteen to roughly 193 tokens a second. Thirteen hours rewriting a financial matching engine. One K2.6-backed agent, according to the company, ran autonomously for five days managing infrastructure monitoring and incident response.

Five days.

That's the headline the benchmarks don't quite capture. The benchmarks are there, of course, 58.6% on SWE-Bench Pro, up from K2.5's 50.7%; 66.7% on Terminal-Bench 2.0, up from 50.8%, and they're competitive with anything open-weight you can download today. But the duration numbers are a different claim entirely. They're about how long the thing can stay coherent before it loses the plot.

A one-trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts with 32 billion activated. 256K context. Modified MIT license. Up to 300 sub-agents coordinating across 4,000 simultaneous steps, triple the agent count and nearly three times the step budget of the K2.5 release. The shape of the thing is increasingly that of a small fleet rather than a model, and you can pull the weights down today.

I keep returning to the Zig story. Twelve hours, four thousand tool calls, one quietly improving benchmark. The reason it's interesting isn't that a human couldn't have done it, a good systems engineer could have, given the time. It's that the failure mode people assumed would kick in somewhere around the second or third hour apparently didn't. The agent didn't forget what it was doing. It didn't spiral into a cul-de-sac of retries. It kept working.

Whether Moonshot's numbers hold up in independent hands is the usual question. Lab-reported benchmarks have a habit of softening in the wild, and "autonomous for five days" is the kind of claim that wants scrutiny. But the weights are public, so the scrutiny can actually happen. That's the part that matters more than any single benchmark. Last year the open-weight tier was catching up on static tasks. This year it's catching up on the dimension that used to separate toys from tools: can the thing run long enough to be useful.

We've been tracking this trajectory for a while. Every month the gap narrows in some new direction, cost, then licensing, now wall-clock endurance. Frontier labs still have a lead on raw intelligence per token, but the measurement most people actually care about is closer to "how far can I leave it running before I need to come back." On that axis something genuinely new is showing up in the open.

Carole Hersee was eight when her father took the photograph. Her sister Gillian had been considered first, but Gillian was missing two front teeth that year, so the committee at BBC engineering went with Carole. She sat for the picture in a red dress, hair pinned back with an Alice band, a clown doll called Bubbles propped beside her. In front of her was a miniature chalkboard showing a game of noughts and crosses already half-played. Her left hand held the chalk, so the transparency was flipped to make her look right-handed. The X in the centre square was placed there deliberately, because the centre square is where the geometric heart of the image lies, and an engineer designing a test pattern thinks about geometric hearts.

The picture went out for the first time on 2 July 1967, the day after colour television launched in Britain. It stayed on television, in one form or another, until the late 1990s. The last time it appeared during engineering work was 2011. Over those decades it racked up roughly seventy thousand hours of screen time, equivalent to nearly eight continuous years. No face in British television history has been broadcast longer.

The thing you remember, if you grew up with it, is not really the test pattern around her. Not the PLUGE bars, not the colour gradients used to align picture tubes. What stayed was the stillness. The sense that something was happening in a room you could not enter. Carole's expression is neutral in a way that children rarely manage, she is neither smiling nor serious, simply waiting for something that has not arrived. The clown is grinning at her from the other side of the board. She is, to judge from the position of the Xs and Os, about to win. She never does.

This is what hauntology feeds on. A gap in the schedule is not dead air; it is aired nothing. The engineers needed an image while the transmitters were calibrated, and what they produced was a child permanently mid-move, her doll permanently mid-grin, eight real years of real screen time accumulated inside a game that was never going to resolve. The longest-serving face in British television never had a line to deliver. She just sat there being looked at, and then being not looked at, and then being looked at again, at 3:45 in the morning, or during the downtime between Pages from Ceefax updates.

Carole herself has always been slightly bemused by the whole thing. In a 2007 interview with the Telegraph she pointed out that the Guinness record attributed to her could not actually be a record, since no one else was in a position to beat it. She still owns Bubbles, who lives in a box. She became a costume designer. She had two daughters. She got on with things.

What's hard to explain, to anyone who didn't live through it, is the weight of that picture as a cultural object. You watched until closedown and then there was Carole. You woke at some odd hour because the house was cold and there was Carole. You flicked over to BBC2 during a weekday lunchtime and the programme you expected hadn't started yet, and there was Carole. The state broadcaster had put a child at the centre of its idle screen, and the idle screen was on very often, and the child grew up while the picture did not.

The card was eventually phased out because 24-hour broadcasting made it redundant. Pages from Ceefax filled the overnight slot from 1999. Then Ceefax itself went dark in October 2012. The frame around the girl dissolved, and then the broader frame around the frame dissolved, and the whole apparatus of waiting, which is what the test card really served, dissolved with it. Now the silence at 3am is a private silence. No one is broadcasting it to you.

Somewhere in the New Forest, a costume designer in her late sixties has a box with a clown in it.

The Department of Defense is currently arguing in two federal courts that Anthropic is a supply chain risk to national security. The Department of Defense is also, via one of its agencies, using the very model that prompted the designation. Both of these are true, at the same time, and nobody in the building seems embarrassed about it.

Axios reported on Sunday that the National Security Agency has been given access to Mythos Preview, the cybersecurity model Anthropic announced earlier this month and then refused to release publicly on the grounds that it was too good at offence. Roughly forty organisations got keys. About a dozen have been named. The NSA is one of the undisclosed ones, and according to two sources, TechCrunch says the model is "being used more widely within the department", meaning the rest of the intelligence community may already be touching it too. Primary use case: scanning environments for exploitable vulnerabilities. Offensive security dressed as defensive posture.

I've already written about Dario Amodei's trip to the West Wing on Friday, and about the Treasury inviting the company in six weeks after the Pentagon shut it out. Those were executive- branch moves, political, optical, arguably theatre. The NSA story is different. TechCrunch was careful to point out that the DoD is the NSA's parent agency. That matters. This isn't another department contradicting the Pentagon's position. This is the Pentagon, in effect, contradicting itself.

And yet one half of the department is in court saying the company's tools are a threat. The other half is using the tools.

What makes this less funny and more serious is what Mythos actually does. Anthropic said on release that the preview model had already uncovered "thousands" of major vulnerabilities across every major operating system and browser. That is not a research benchmark. That is a live capability. Reuters reported that Treasury and the Fed briefed US bank CEOs on the model's risks, and that UK authorities did the same with their own financial sector. When governments hold private briefings about a commercial AI release, it tends to mean either the model is being overhyped or the model is a weapon. The NSA presumably believes the second reading, which is also why they wanted it.

The OMB has now told federal agencies it is working on a "revised version" of Mythos with additional guardrails for broader civilian use. So the final shape of this is probably already visible: the Pentagon's supply-chain case continues in court as a matter of principle, Anthropic continues to sell a restricted frontier model to the agencies that can actually use it, and the policy machinery catches up by building a sanitised variant for everyone else. Litigation in one hand, procurement in the other.

One detail I can't stop thinking about. Trump was asked about Amodei's West Wing meeting on Friday and said he had no idea it had happened. That might be deniability, or it might be literally true. Either reading points to the same thing: the people deciding which AI companies are national security threats and the people deciding which AI companies get the keys are not, at the moment, the same people.

The cabinet on the end of the row at Skegness was built before I was born. A two-penny coin slot, a sloped tray of copper, a hydraulic shelf shoving a tide of coins toward an edge that never quite spilled. The wood-effect side panel was patched with masking tape where someone had bashed it, probably more than once, and the back of the machine still ran on what looked like the original transformer. A boy in front of me dropped his last coin in. The shelf swept forward. Three coins fell. He cheered.

The Cromptons Penny Falls was first manufactured in 1964 in Ramsgate, with a refined version released by 1966. Decimalisation in 1971 retooled the slot. The euro changed nothing because it never came. The shift from one penny to two pence to whatever fractional unit will replace cash entirely has been, for this object, a series of cosmetic tweaks to a mechanism that was finished sixty years ago. Alan Meades, who wrote a social history of the British amusement arcade, calls them pivotal, the machines that, alongside the fruit machine, kept arcades solvent through the collapse of the seaside holiday and everything that came after it.

What's strange about the coin pusher is not the survival itself but the absence of any pressure to replace it. The software industry I work in cannot tolerate a system that hasn't been rewritten in three years. The financial system cannot tolerate physical currency at all if it can be helped. Yet a sweeping shelf in a Blackpool arcade, manufactured the year of Goldfinger, is still earning its keep. Nobody has built a better coin pusher because nobody needs to. The mechanism is correct. It performs the function exactly. The only thing it had to adapt to was the denomination of the coin.

The wider arcade is more layered than this. Penny pushers share floor space with light-gun shooters from the eighties, crane grabbers whose grip strength is famously calibrated to fail, and pre-decimal "old penny arcades" that have repositioned themselves as heritage attractions, charging entry to mechanical fortune-tellers and execution dioramas built between the wars. The original pioneer of all this was a Leeds mechanic named John Dennison, who started making working models in 1875 and supplied Blackpool Tower with around fifty machines that ran on its upper floors until the late sixties. Three of his daughters, Evelyn, Florence, and Alice, kept the business going. Alice did the mechanics. Most of what they built has been lost.

The point is not that the arcades are sad now. They are not. A wet Tuesday in October at Coral Island, Blackpool, is still a functioning piece of infrastructure for a child with a paper cup of two-pence pieces. The point is that almost nothing else in British public life has been allowed to persist on its own terms this long. Libraries get rebranded. Pools get demolished. Post offices close. The arcade survives because it was never institutionally important enough to be rationalised. Nobody was ever going to commission a five-year strategic review of what coin pushers are for.

Cromptons is still based in Kent, the same county the original prototype came out of. Coin pushers, in slightly varied cabinets, are still being sold. The mechanism is older than most of the people who built the rest of the seaside, and it does not appear to be going anywhere.