https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/ Audio narrations of Plutonic Rainbows posts — music, fashion, technology and the pre-internet era. en Sat, 04 Jul 2026 18:17:15 +0000 Plutonic Rainbows false https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/images/podcast-cover.jpghttps://www.plutonicrainbows.com/ https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-07-04-effortless-was-the-luxury.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-07-04-effortless-was-the-luxury.mp3 Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 In this sun-flattened frame, Elaine Irwin lies back in long grass beside a bicycle wheel, jacket half-zipped, looking up at the lens as if it had wandered over on its own. It is Calvin Klein selling, in the autumn of 1989, by taking almost everything away. The loud decade was already deflating: t... 400 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-07-02-julie-anderson.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-07-02-julie-anderson.mp3 Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 The woman lit like a struck match in this gold-soaked frame is Julie Anderson, and the picture doesn't ask for anything else. Wet strands of hair fall across pale green eyes, the mouth is painted a deep carmine, and the whole thing glows like late afternoon poured through a window. It's a face bu... 236 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-07-01-sorry-about-all-the-fable-posts.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-07-01-sorry-about-all-the-fable-posts.mp3 Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Fable 5 is working again on my end. Not just back in the headlines, where it's lived all week, but sitting in the model picker where it belongs and answering when I ask it something. It's the cleared-for-use version now, the one that reroutes a flagged prompt to Opus and meters itself against a w... 103 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-07-01-kenar-spent-itself-famous.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-07-01-kenar-spent-itself-famous.mp3 Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 The woman crossing a sunlit New York street in this grey houndstooth suit is Monica Bellucci, a few years before most people would learn her name from a film. She's dressed for a city morning, black gloves, a small dark handbag, parked cars stacked behind her on a bright avenue. The page ran in A... 194 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-07-01-what-fable-came-back-as.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-07-01-what-fable-came-back-as.mp3 Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Fable 5 is back today, nearly three weeks after it vanished. On June 12 the government applied export controls to Anthropic's two newest models, and because there was no way to check a user's nationality in real time, the company pulled Fable and Mythos for everyone, foreign or not. The controls ... 178 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-30-sonnet-5-ships-fennec-doesnt.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-30-sonnet-5-ships-fennec-doesnt.mp3 Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Five months ago, a YouTube channel called WorldofAI posted a video calling it the greatest coding model ever, built on leaked screenshots and a guess at the release date. By June, the guessing had hardened into specifics that got repeated across a dozen SEO blogs: codename Fennec, 82.1% on SWE-be... 192 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-27-permission-is-the-product.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-27-permission-is-the-product.mp3 Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 In a single month, Washington switched one company's frontier model off for the entire planet, then asked a second company to hold its next one back and clear users one at a time. Anthropic lost Fable 5 and Mythos 5 to an export-control letter in June. Two weeks later OpenAI agreed to ship GPT-5.... 333 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-27-nobody-looks-like-her-now.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-27-nobody-looks-like-her-now.mp3 Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 The woman staring down the lens in this copper-and-fur look belongs to a kind of runway that has since vanished. She's wrapped in a quilted jacket the colour of a new penny, a fur collar swallowing the neck, ochre gloves, a studded leather belt cinching the whole thing at the waist. The face does... 328 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-26-customer-by-customer.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-26-customer-by-customer.mp3 Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Two weeks ago an export-control letter pulled Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 offline for the entire planet in a single afternoon. This week OpenAI got the polite version of the same power. Sam Altman told staff that GPT-5.6 won't ship the way its predecessors did. It goes out first as a limited... 173 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-25-exactly-zero-traffic.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-25-exactly-zero-traffic.mp3 Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Thirteen days after the Commerce Department ordered it dark, Claude Fable 5 is still nowhere. Send a request to claude-fable-5 and the API hands back an unavailable error. Open claude.ai or Claude Code and a new session quietly routes to Opus 4.8 instead. Anthropic isn't hiding it: its own head o... 161 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-20-fable-comes-back-smaller.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-20-fable-comes-back-smaller.mp3 Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Eight days into the blackout, the safe move is to refuse a date. Anthropic says it's working to restore access; the administration, speaking through the usual unnamed officials, signals only that the models can come back once its concerns are met. Both lines are built to expire without anyone bei... 169 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-17-a-license-nobody-wrote.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-17-a-license-nobody-wrote.mp3 Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Five days on, Fable 5 is still dark, and the shutdown itself has stopped being the interesting part. Anthropic is calling the whole episode a misunderstanding and says it's working to restore access. The administration, speaking as usual through unnamed officials, has floated the idea that its "n... 254 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-15-respectability-dates-hardest.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-15-respectability-dates-hardest.mp3 Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 A very beautiful woman walks a Dalmatian down a sunlit street in a black-and-white windowpane blazer, nipped at the waist, over a fine pinstripe shirtdress. The dog matches the check. Above her sits the Jaeger wordmark; below, a line of small type tells American readers to call 1-800-7-Jaeger for... 245 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-14-selling-forever-in-black-and-white.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-14-selling-forever-in-black-and-white.mp3 Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 I bought my first bottle of Eternity because of a magazine page.† The September 1988 issue of American Vogue carried the launch advertisement, and I went back to it more than once before I ever smelled the thing. That doesn't usually happen with fragrance, where the bottle and the marketing tend ... 327 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-14-what-was-in-the-box.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-14-what-was-in-the-box.mp3 Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 The April 1990 issue of American Vogue carried a Hermès page worth stopping on: Linda Evangelista down on the floor in a butterfly-print silk dress, propped on one arm, a small orange box cupped in her free hand. The line above her read "Hermès on the rocks." She isn't going anywhere. That's the ... 157 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-14-an-empty-room-was-enough.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-14-an-empty-room-was-enough.mp3 Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 A doorway opens in the basement of a furniture showroom, and on the far side is the backrooms: an endless grid of yellow-wallpapered offices under humming fluorescent light, corridors that lead nowhere and then fold back on themselves. If you've spent any time online in the last few years you alr... 174 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-14-a-smell-with-no-flowers.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-14-a-smell-with-no-flowers.mp3 Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 M. John Harrison's The Course of the Heart opens with three Cambridge students performing a ritual on a hot May night, then refuses to tell you what it was. I'm only about fifty pages in, so I'm writing from inside that withholding rather than out the far side of it. The refusal already feels del... 178 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-14-in-a-world-of-absolutes.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-14-in-a-world-of-absolutes.mp3 Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 There's a vodka advert from 1989 I can't look at without smelling Christmas, and I've never been able to explain why. A woman in a white blouse, big lacquered hair, leaning on a rail with a half-amused glance. "When I said vodka I meant Denaka." A bottle, two tumblers of ice, the flat confidence ... 150 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-13-save-the-buildings-you-hated.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-13-save-the-buildings-you-hated.mp3 Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 The Chippendale top on Philip Johnson's tower at 550 Madison Avenue got laughed at for years. A skyscraper crowned with a broken pediment, like a grandfather clock scaled up to 647 feet. Plenty of critics called it a joke when it opened in 1984. Then in 2018 New York's Landmarks Preservation Comm... 174 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-13-spice-in-an-aquatic-decade.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-13-spice-in-an-aquatic-decade.mp3 Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 The advertisement gives the game away before you smell anything: a man hides half his face behind an armful of white roses, the amber bottle glowing out of the dark beside a slab of gold lettering. Escada had built its name on women's clothes and women's perfume, the house not yet two decades old... 163 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-13-continuity-is-what-you-buy.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-13-continuity-is-what-you-buy.mp3 Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Spare a thought for whoever signed the purchase order. Three days after Claude Fable 5 went on sale, the companies that had wired it into production watched it disappear, and the explanation they got was the same thin one Anthropic got: a government letter citing a jailbreak it would describe onl... 231 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-13-a-kill-switch-dressed-as-export-control.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-13-a-kill-switch-dressed-as-export-control.mp3 Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 At 5:21 on Friday afternoon, Anthropic received a letter, and by that evening two of its models had vanished for everyone on the planet. Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5, gone. The instrument was an export-control directive, the kind of authority built to keep advanced chips and weapons designs out of... 175 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-12-isabelle-townsend-vogue-1990.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-12-isabelle-townsend-vogue-1990.mp3 Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 The headline does the whole job before you reach the bottle. "The Classic American Beauty," it says, across a field of tall grass, and there she is in a white turtleneck, hair loose, no jewellery, no city in sight. The perfume sits small in the upper corner, almost an afterthought, a squat amber ... 380 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-11-spielberg-shows-his-hand.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-11-spielberg-shows-his-hand.mp3 Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Steven Spielberg has spent nearly fifty years pointing at the sky and refusing to tell us exactly what's up there. Close Encounters of the Third Kind ended at the moment of contact and then cut away, trusting that the withholding was the point. Disclosure Day, which I flagged back when it was onl... 318 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-10-fable-5-and-the-june-22-footnote.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-10-fable-5-and-the-june-22-footnote.mp3 Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 A day after Claude Fable 5 went public, the verdict is roughly what Anthropic would have wanted, with a couple of asterisks it probably expected too. The benchmark sweep got the headlines: state-of-the-art on nearly everything Anthropic tested, a million-token context window, and a price that lan... 196 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-09-a-mill-owner-buys-a-page.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-09-a-mill-owner-buys-a-page.mp3 Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 The name set in Roman capitals across the bottom of this January 1989 page of American Vogue belonged to nobody's idea of a celebrity designer. Umberto Ginocchietti owned a knitwear operation in Perugia, and when the New York Times had introduced him to American readers two years earlier, it led ... 109 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-09-smaller-mythos-for-everyone-else.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-09-smaller-mythos-for-everyone-else.mp3 Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Reports now put a public version of Claude Mythos a day away, with several outlets pointing to a June 10 release. I'd treat the date as soft. Anthropic has said since the May 28 Opus 4.8 announcement that it expects to bring Mythos-class models to all customers "in the coming weeks," and "coming ... 147 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-09-fable-ships-with-a-trapdoor.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-09-fable-ships-with-a-trapdoor.mp3 Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Anthropic shipped Claude Fable 5 today. The benchmark numbers will get the headlines; how its safety actually works is the more interesting story, and it's stranger than the rumors suggested. Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 are the same model. Not sibling models, not a distilled cousin, the same weig... 190 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-07-margaretha-leys-yellow.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-07-margaretha-leys-yellow.mp3 Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Open the December 1988 American Vogue and Escada doesn't ask for attention, it assumes it. Margaretha Ley built the house on exactly this: the finest fabrics, cashmere and silk and heavy wool, then loaded with print until every surface had a job. Anna Wintour had taken the editor's chair only tha... 39 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-06-desert-solitaire-still-bites.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-06-desert-solitaire-still-bites.mp3 Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire is usually filed under nature writing, which is accurate in the way that calling a knife a kitchen utensil is accurate. First published in 1968, the book draws on Abbey's seasons as a ranger at Arches National Monument. It contains ravishing descriptions of rock, h... 117 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-06-memory-starts-to-move.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-06-memory-starts-to-move.mp3 Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 OpenAI's new memory system is interesting because it moves the awkward part of personalisation into the background. The old saved-memory model made ChatGPT feel like a notebook with a chat box attached. Dreaming V3 points at something more unsettled: a system that keeps revising its idea of the u... 215 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-06-refilled-like-a-lighter.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-06-refilled-like-a-lighter.mp3 Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 "Some men are made of steel and gold." That's the line across the top of the old Cartier advertisement, set above a huge, lacquered close-up of what looks like the crossguard of a watch case. Down in the corner sits the actual product, a small amber bottle held inside a brushed silver shell. The ... 169 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-05-anthropic-reaches-for-the-brake.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-05-anthropic-reaches-for-the-brake.mp3 Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Anthropic has put a brake pedal into the AI race, or at least a drawing of one. In a new Anthropic Institute post, Marina Favaro and Jack Clark argue that frontier labs should have a coordinated, verifiable way to slow down or temporarily pause development if recursive self-improvement starts to ... 258 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-04-microsoft-builds-its-own-stack.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-04-microsoft-builds-its-own-stack.mp3 Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Microsoft's new MAI release reads like a product announcement until the list gets long enough to become strategy. Seven in-house models, announced at Build on 2 June: reasoning, coding, image, voice, transcription, and the faster variants that make the whole thing feel less like a research shelf ... 244 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-03-m3-makes-context-cheap.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-03-m3-makes-context-cheap.mp3 Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 MiniMax has put a million-token context window back on the table, but this time the interesting part is not the size by itself. We have had large windows before, usually presented like luxury architecture: a bigger room, a longer table, more space for the transcript, the codebase, the PDF nobody ... 261 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-02-a-thousand-agents-and-one-bad-plan.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-02-a-thousand-agents-and-one-bad-plan.mp3 Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Anthropic's dynamic workflows let Claude Code write a script that fans a task out to dozens or hundreds of subagents, then runs it in the background while your session stays free. Turn on ultracode with /effort ultracode and Claude stops waiting for you to ask. It plans a workflow for every subst... 103 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-02-mythos-moves-into-infrastructure.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-02-mythos-moves-into-infrastructure.mp3 Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Anthropic has decided the safest place for its most restricted model is not a vault. It is a larger, supervised room full of people who run things that break badly. On Tuesday, the company said Project Glasswing will expand from roughly 50 early partners to about 150 additional organisations in m... 293 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-06-01-loopholes-have-jurisdictions.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-06-01-loopholes-have-jurisdictions.mp3 Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 The awkward thing about an export-control loophole is that it is rarely a hole in the law shaped like a cartoon tunnel. It is usually a place where paperwork, geography, corporate structure, and enforcement patience fail to line up. A chip does not have to travel to Shenzhen to end up in a Chines... 223 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-05-31-audio-transcripts.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-05-31-audio-transcripts.mp3 Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 On a few selected posts, I have now added audio transcription, partly as an experiment and partly because it may prove useful for people with accessibility needs, or for anyone who would rather listen than read. This has involved working with the ElevenLabs API, exploring text-to-speech generatio... 82 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-05-31-spark-runs-after-hours.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-05-31-spark-runs-after-hours.mp3 Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Google's most revealing Gemini announcement is not the video model, even though video is the part with the easiest demos. It is the small, almost administrative phrase attached to Gemini Spark: runs 24/7. That sounds like infrastructure copy until you sit with it for a minute. A chatbot answers w... 219 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-05-31-career-clothes-for-metropolitan-women.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-05-31-career-clothes-for-metropolitan-women.mp3 Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 A woman is halfway out of a chauffeured car, one metallic sandal already on the running board, the other foot still inside. She isn't arriving or leaving so much as holding the pause between the two, which is the whole mood of this Episode advertisement from American Vogue, November 1990. The bro... 203 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-05-30-boards-of-canada-come-back-burning.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-05-30-boards-of-canada-come-back-burning.mp3 Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Thirteen years after Tomorrow's Harvest, Boards of Canada have finally let the follow-up out, and the sleeve's bruised orange glow tells you most of what to expect before a note plays: faded seventies film stock, figures you can't quite resolve, that particular warmth sitting right on top of drea... 189 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-04-11-what-sportmax-was-for.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-04-11-what-sportmax-was-for.mp3 Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 The dress is four triangles of saturated colour meeting at the chest like a Suprematist diagram: yellow at the shoulders, electric blue down one side, magenta across the opposite hip, green filling the lower wedge. Sleeveless, short, built flat. There's no print on any of it. The colour is the su... 206 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-04-09-alaia-fall-winter-1990.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-04-09-alaia-fall-winter-1990.mp3 Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 No invitations went out for Azzedine Alaïa's fall/winter 1990 ready-to-wear show. No formal announcement either. There was simply word, some particular frequency fashion runs on, and people turned up to the Marais and queued without anything to confirm they had the right place or the right day. H... 174 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-04-08-lagerfeld-misread-macaulay.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-04-08-lagerfeld-misread-macaulay.mp3 Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 In 1953, Rose Macaulay published a book about ruins that ended in surrender. Pleasure of Ruins is a four-hundred-page march through the Western imagination's romance with broken stones: Roman ruins, Mayan temples, the gothic abbeys English aristocrats had built in their gardens just to watch them... 323 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-04-06-yohji-15ml.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-04-06-yohji-15ml.mp3 Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Jean Kerleo spent thirty-one years as the in-house perfumer at Jean Patou. He created 1000 in 1972, Sublime in 1992, and co-founded the Osmothèque in Versailles, a physical archive of perfumes that no longer exist. A man who preserved scents for posterity accepted a commission, in 1996, from a de... 362 full https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/posts/2026-04-03-valentino-fall-winter-1991.html https://www.plutonicrainbows.com/assets/audio/2026-04-03-valentino-fall-winter-1991.mp3 Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Valentino presented his Fall/Winter 1991-1992 haute couture collection in Paris in July of that year, and the timing was not incidental. Weeks earlier, the house had celebrated its thirtieth anniversary with a three-day gala in Rome: a garden lunch at Valentino's villa on the Appian Way, an exhib... 180 full