The most interesting thing about GPT-6 Astra isn’t its intelligence score. It’s that it now lies half as often as its predecessor did.
OpenAI launched Astra today, and it’s rolling out to subscribers gradually over the coming week. Which means I can’t test it myself yet, and neither can you. For now the only read available is Artificial Analysis’s independent benchmarking, published alongside the announcement.
The fastest way to get a new submarine right now is to buy one from Beijing. Nobody in Canberra will say that out loud, so I will.
This post was written by Claude, summarising and referencing Every’s original Vibe Check review at Tony’s request, a practice Every explicitly encourages. Tony ran this on Sonnet 5 under his existing plan rather than Fable 5.1, which would have drawn down usage credits. Tony remains sceptical of how he’d personally benefit from Fable 5.1 and is suspicious of the additional costs due to its verbosity.
Every’s Vibe Check team called the original Fable a “warp drive” and also a power tool nobody but the most AI-pilled users could actually operate. Their verdict on Fable 5.1, published 1 September 2026 after a week of testing, is that Anthropic fixed the usability problem without losing the horsepower.
In October 2015 Adrian Bott wrote a 25-word tweet that has outlived most political careers.
“‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”
It now has its own Wiktionary entry. It gets wheeled out every time someone is astonished to discover that the policy they campaigned for applies to them too. This week the leopards ate far right agitator and Trump supporter, Milo Yiannopoulos.
Environmental policy almost never gets to claim a body count in reverse. This one just did, for children’s lungs.
For five years, researchers tracked the lungs of more than 3,400 primary school children in London and Luton, a town thirty kilometres up the road with no low emission zone of its own. In 2019, the London kids had measurably worse lung function than their Luton peers, a straightforward marker of pollution stunting their growth. By 2024, that gap was gone.
The study, published in The Lancet Public Health in August 2026, is the strongest evidence yet that air pollution damage in children isn’t necessarily permanent.
Clean energy still runs on the assumption that facts speak for themselves. Last month, fossil fuel groups spent 179 times more money betting that they do not.
RenewEconomy pulled the numbers straight from Meta’s ad library, and they are stark. In August, five fossil fuel organisations spent roughly $553,000 on political ads in Australia. The entire renewables industry spent $3,090. That is not a rounding error in a marketing budget. It is one side fully mobilised and the other side barely in the room.
No one had seen a plains-wanderer west of Melbourne in thirty years. Thirty-five microphones did it in one season.
The plains-wanderer is critically endangered, standing about 15cm tall, roughly the size of a pencil, with wide yellow eyes that make it look like a cartoon bird. Fewer than 1,000 remain in the wild. It has no living relatives, genetically alone in its own family, which is part of why birdwatchers travel the world hoping to tick it off. It is also spectacularly good at not being seen: it crouches in grass tussocks and relies on camouflage, a habit that keeps it safe from foxes and safe from human eyes too.
Norway taxes unrealised gains. About 1% a year, calculated on full market value for listed assets and book value for private companies, assessed on whatever your net worth happens to be on New Year’s Eve. It doesn’t matter if your startup is loss-making with no cash flow, if your portfolio has since tanked, or if the company has gone bankrupt since the valuation date. The bill still arrives.
hagaetc.eth lays this out in Norway Shrugged, an Atlas Shrugged-flavoured account of watching Norway’s entrepreneurial class walk out the door.
My Claude experience keeps getting less satisfactory. Every week I bang up against the Cowork weekly limit. Now that limit is about to get smaller, not bigger, whatever the headline says.
On 29 August, Anthropic’s own developer account, @ClaudeDevs, posted this on X:
“Starting September 14, we’re permanently raising standard weekly limits in Claude Code by 25% for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans. Until then, the current 50% increase will be in place.”
Smart glasses manufacturers are about to learn the lesson Google learned with Street View: you can document the world, or you can document people. Doing both without consent has consequences.
The EU is now actively considering restrictions on smart glasses, with Germany’s data protection authority warning they could already be illegal under existing laws prohibiting hidden recording devices. France and the Netherlands have raised similar alarms. In the US, New York courts have banned them outright, DEF CON barred Meta Ray-Bans from its conference floor, and the Air Force prohibits them in uniform.