Plutonic Rainbows

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.

Sources:

• OpenAI Launches GPT-5.3-Codex - WinBuzzer

• GPT-5.3-Codex System Card - OpenAI

• OpenAI Warns of Unprecedented Cybersecurity Risks - Fortune

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.

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.

Sources:

• Pre-emphasis Release List - cdHistory

• Early First-Pressing CDs from CBS/Sony Labels - Steve Hoffman Music Forums

There is a moment when an object stops being old and starts being unsettling. It is no longer simply outdated or nostalgic; it feels out of place, as though it has survived something it was never meant to outlive. This is not about decay or wear. In fact, the most disturbing objects are often perfectly intact. They work. They look right. And yet they belong nowhere.

The sinister quality emerges when an object outlives the world that once made sense of it. Objects are meant to age alongside the social, cultural, and emotional structures that surround them. A book, a record, a fragrance, a programme from a theatre — these things are not neutral. They are embedded in ways of living, patterns of expectation, and shared assumptions about time and the future. When those surrounding structures disappear, the object does not simply become historical. It becomes unmoored.

This unmooring produces unease because the object no longer explains itself. It becomes a fragment without a frame. A compact disc from 1990 still plays flawlessly, but it refers to a way of listening that no longer exists. A fragrance still smells as it always did, but it evokes a social world that has vanished completely. A theatre programme lists names and roles for a building that has been demolished. The object holds residue without context — traces of life without the life itself.

At this point, the object begins to behave differently. It acquires a strange autonomy. It no longer waits passively to be used; it intrudes. A smell opens a door you did not intend to open. A design detail floods you with a time you cannot inhabit. The object acts on you rather than the other way around. This reversal is subtle but powerful. Something inert has gained agency simply by surviving too long.

This is where the experience becomes sinister. Not because the object is threatening, but because it destabilises the normal relationship between past and present. We expect the past to stay behind us, safely contained. But these objects refuse that arrangement. They bring the past forward in fragments, stripped of continuity and purpose. They remind us that meaning does not guarantee persistence, and that survival does not equal belonging.

Objects from the pre-internet era intensify this effect. They were never designed to circulate endlessly. They assumed finitude. Events ended. People drifted out of view. Places closed and stayed closed. There was no expectation of digital afterlife, no archive accessible on demand. When such objects remain — intact, functional, unchanged — they feel like survivors from a collapsed ecosystem. Too complete for a world that no longer exists.

The unease is not fear in the conventional sense. It is ontological dislocation — the feeling that something is in the wrong time. The object becomes a reminder that worlds can end quietly, without ceremony, and that time does not preserve what mattered. It shows us that the present is built over layers of abandonment, and that we are standing on ground that once meant something else entirely.

This is why some people hide these objects away rather than display them. It is not embarrassment or sentimentality. It is self-preservation. To encounter such an object is to be reminded, viscerally, that time only moves in one direction, and that nothing — not memory, not care, not attention — can anchor an object once its world has gone.

And yet destroying these objects often feels worse. To destroy them would be to admit finality too clearly, to sever the last material thread connecting memory to reality. So they are kept, untouched, in drawers and boxes. Neither used nor discarded. Suspended, like the memories they carry.

The sinister power of these objects lies precisely here: they are not ghosts of the distant past, safely historic and inert. They are ghosts of the recent past — close enough to recognise, too far to return. They persist not as history, but as evidence that time does not negotiate, and that what once felt permanent can vanish while leaving its artefacts behind.

To live with such objects is to live with the knowledge that some things do not fade gently. They linger. And in lingering, they quietly remind us that the present is thinner than it once was, and that the past, though gone, has not entirely released its hold.