“It’s hard to be an influencer via a newspaper.” That one line from James Marriott explains more about politics in 2026 than most of the punditry I have heard this year. The New York Times podcast Interesting Times has handed its microphone to a series of guest hosts, and Mary Harrington’s turn is a cracker. She talks with Marriott, a Times of London columnist and author of The New Dark Ages.
NetFlix vs YouTube
Further signs of a changing media landscape.
via Rory Sutherland Vice Chairman, Ogilvy Group
Australia has more than 70 car brands fighting over about 1.2 million sales a year. Another one has just been announced. Trying to keep track of the models and manufacturers is becoming like trying to spot the floating ingredients in a Sichuan hotpot.
Progress?
We’ve progressed from fighting people we know, to fighting people we’ve never met, over things that may never have happened.
“If Kathy calls, tell her I’ll be there at two.”
Of everything in Apple’s 1987 Knowledge Navigator video - the tablet, the video calls, the bow-tied agent - that throwaway line is the one nobody has delivered. Siri AI and ChatGPT both understand the sentence perfectly. Neither can do it properly.
This post started with a question. SmartFriend™ Peter Marks asked it back in January on marxy.org: Apple’s Knowledge Navigator - are we there yet? His verdict was close, with long-term memory and autonomous multi-step tasks still missing. “Not quite there, but it is within reach.”
The test. Haiku 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 each wrote nine research drafts from identical source packs, using one fixed template. Two AI judges compared them blind, 27 verdicts in all.
The result. Sonnet won 16 verdicts and Haiku 11. Sonnet is better at insight, accuracy and readability. Coverage is tied. Neither model invented a quote.
The twist. It depends on the sources. Sonnet won 15 of 18 verdicts on messy news-style packs by cross-checking and catching errors. Haiku won 8 of 9 on a dense documentation pack, where breadth is the job.
The price. About one US cent a draft for Haiku and nine cents for Sonnet.
My take. Haiku for first-pass drafts on well-organised sources. Sonnet when the sources disagree or might be wrong.
Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 overnight, and the pace has not eased. Last year’s small model, Haiku 4.5, cost US$1 in and US$5 out per million tokens. Haiku 5.5 is US$0.10 and US$0.50, a tenth of the price, and Anthropic calls it its cheapest, fastest and most capable small model yet.
That is the pattern across the whole industry this year. Often each release is cheaper and quicker than the last, and every lab is pushing the others. OpenAI’s GPT-6 Luna sits at exactly the same price and appears in Anthropic’s own comparison table. Competition is working, and we are the ones collecting the winnings.
Rubber Soul has been lopsided for 61 years. On the 1965 stereo mix the voices are parked on one side and the instruments are scattered across the rest. On headphones it is like eavesdropping on two different rooms. On 2 October that changed. Giles Martin and engineer Sam Okell released a new stereo mix on Apple Music, rebuilt from the original four-track tapes. It is also on Spotify. I haven’t done my proper listen yet.
I ran the same seven hard coding tasks through five models. Every current model passed every test. The only things that differed were the bill and the stopwatch.
Update, 6 October, 4 pm. Hours after I published, OpenAI made GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol about 50% faster by default for people signed in with ChatGPT. I re-ran the Sol suite this afternoon and have corrected the numbers below. Old figures are struck through. Cost, token use, pass rate and quota burn did not change. I have not re-tested Astra.
“China’s many new car brands can build a combined 40 million vehicles per year, far exceeding domestic demand of under 20 million and exports of around 10 million. A consolidation process seems inevitable.” - spotted via the weekly valuable Dense Discovery newsletter