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I’m pleased to share our first physical release of the year, arriving courtesy of Griff Fulton, recording as Aspetuck, titled Immersion.
To say this one has taken its time would be putting it lightly. Conversations around the record began even before we came together at Public Records toward the end of 2024, where Griff played that evening. We left with a clear sense that something meaningful was forming. What followed, however, was a classic vinyl-label ritual- five rounds of test presses, each one inching closer, each one not quite there. The kind of process that tests patience, but ultimately sharpens the outcome.
In the time since, Griff has quietly built momentum with a run of releases on Oslated, and Konstrukt, with each one reinforcing his unique voice. But this feels like the LP that brings things into focus. Immersion is a personal work for Griff in ways that reveal themselves gradually; a collection that moves with personal intention, and showing a producer fully in tune with his deep rooted instincts.
Aspetuck has been steadily carving out a name for himself through releases on Never Late and Oslated, garnering a respected following for his DJ mixes and festival performances. Aspetuck’s latest record, Immersion, was sequenced and curated from dozens of ideas spanning a transformative few years in Griff’s life. The album is less a snapshot in time and more of a memory bank - flashes of fatherhood, loss, modular rabbit holes, late-night studio sessions, and long walks by the Hudson River with his daughter.
The emotional undertow of the album is immediate. Opener Hit Me With Your Pet Shark is one of the earliest compositions in the collection, created just months after the loss of Griff’s brother and during the sleepless swirl of new parenthood. Built around a single sound from Spectrasonics Omnisphere, found while rediscovering his brother’s studio gear, the track sets the tone: restrained yet searching, personal without becoming precious.
From there, The Printing Press captures the raw energy of a live jam in Griff’s upstate New York basement, running through a 1980s Tascam mixer like a lo-fi assembly line of synths, pads, and drum machines. REI, named after a spontaneous family mission to find a pink water bottle, encapsulates his knack for imprinting daily minutiae into sound. And title track Immersion- once known simply as Tuesday 303 Jam- emerges from a dinner break and a blender, distilling modular sketches and distorted drums into a powerful, slow-motion march.
Under, Under The Tree hits hardest. Built around a grainy iPhone voice memo of Griff’s daughter singing by the Hudson. And closing the album is Bobik, a collaborative studio session with Moon Patrol channeling the playful chaos of a close friendship and modular exploration. Named after a joke about their golden retriever and filled with alien textures from Griff’s beloved EMU XL7 gifted years ago by his late brother, it’s a fitting send-off to an album that straddles celebration and mourning with grace.
The artwork comes courtesy of Peter Skwiot Smith, whose textured analog/digital aesthetic resonated immediately with Griff’s original vision. Peter’s treatment draws on Griff’s personal photography and leans into motion, blur, and the layered nature of memory, echoing the album’s sonic tone without over-explaining it.
Mastered by Sven Weisemann, Immersion is available on blue smoke colored 12” and digital on May 15th 2026. Please join us on May 8th for a Bandcamp listening party - RSVP here.
OpenAI is still going for an IPO as absolutely soon as possible — because Sam Altman needs those public dollars. And he wants to get in before Anthropic.
When OpenAI hits the market, the imaginary private valuation of OpenAI turns into a much more real public valuation. And bingo! Sam’s printed a trillion dollars out of thin air.
There’s just the minor issue that when you do an IPO, your SEC S-1 filing needs to be an audited document that’s not a tyre fire. OpenAI’s own Chief Financial Officer, Sarah Friar, says the company is not ready at all: [The Information, archive]
she didn’t believe the company would be ready to go public in 2026, because of the procedural and organizational work needed and the risks from its spending commitments.
Usually a CFO reports directly to their CEO. That’s not the case at OpenAI. Friar reports to Fidji Simo, head of the applications business. And Simo’s on medical leave. And Altman is leaving Friar out of financial discussions entirely:
Altman has excluded her from some conversations related to the company’s financial plans. For instance, in recent months he left Friar out of a conversation about server spending with leaders at one of OpenAI’s top investors, one of these people said. Her absence was noticeable and awkward, given that a previous conversation on the same topic included her, according to an attendee.
The Wall Street Journal got hold of the documents that OpenAI and Anthropic were giving prospective investors and has gone through some of the numbers. [WSJ, archive]
Training costs are both companies’ biggest expense for the next couple of years. The Journal tries to present the numbers as much nicer than they are. But they’re sorta terrible.
So OpenAI and Anthropic have both given their investors two sets of numbers — one with training and one without. I’m sure you can pretend there’s a path to profit if you just assume your expenses don’t exist.
How’s the SpaceX IPO going? Elon Musk has told banks, law firms, and auditors that if they want business from the IPO, they have to subscribe to Grok. Some of the banks have already signed up for tens of millions worth of Grok access. Who knows, they might use it for anything ever. [NYT, archive]
Fees for the banks that get the job could be on the order of $500 million. Musk telling the banks to buy Grok is a much more expensive version of telling them to eat a bug if they’re really committed. Bikini pics of children optional.
This week’s hype is the new model from Anthropic — Claude Mythos! It’s fine tuned for computer code. Specifically, finding security holes.
Anthropic’s not releasing Mythos. It’s too powerful for the public!
The hype is very stupid and there’s a lot of gullible people swallowing press releases whole. But today, let’s just ask: does it do the thing?
Chatbots can find bugs in computer code, sure. A bot can look through text and check for patterns. And you don’t have to find all the bugs, finding just some is fine. If it’s easy to check the bugs are real, you’ve got yourself an expensive static code checker.
Mythos fails that second one. So Anthropic sends the chatbot spew to humans to pick through for the real bugs: [Anthropic]
We triage every bug that we find, then send the highest severity bugs to professional human triagers to validate before disclosing them to the maintainer.
Yet again, the secret sauce is AGI — A Guy Instead. Mythos runs on humans.
Anthropic found real bugs with Mythos. They found a 27-year-old remote crashing bug in OpenBSD, an operating system famous for being nigh uhhackable. They found some ancient bugs in stuff like FFmpeg. And an actual remote exploit in FreeBSD!
This is not fuzzing — where you blast a program with strange input until it breaks. Mythos is just looking at the code. But the bugs feel like fuzz testing output. They’re all weird ones. And sure, weird edge cases are the delicious candy of exploit finding.
So Mythos is not nothing. But is it something? If you ignore every other real world problem with AI, this is a … tool. Is it a feasible one, though? What’s it cost to run? Anthropic says they found the OpenBSD bug after one thousand runs:
Across a thousand runs through our scaffold, the total cost was under $20,000 and found several dozen more findings.
No, you can’t see the other findings. Just under $20,000 per serious bug, huh. If I hand a security researcher $20,000 and say “find me all the bugs you can, big or small,” I’d expect a reasonable crop.
And Anthropic is doing precisely that: [Register]
Anthropic invited around 40 other organizations to participate in this introspective bug hunt, subsidized by up to $100M in usage credits for Mythos Preview and $4M in direct donations to open-source security organizations.
There’s a blog post by Aisle, an AI-based computer security company. Anthropic’s new Mythos model is not the magic here — Aisle found the same bugs that Anthropic listed but using “small, cheap, open-weights models.” [blog post]
The main thing is: have a framework that runs a ton of code through your checker — whatever checker — in a systemic manner.
And, of course, A Guy at the end to check the results aren’t rubbish.
The main thing that might make chatbot code checkers a problem is that code out in the wider world is, quite often, abject trash. Even before the vibe code. So if you want to find security holes, just check a lot of code. Can’t wait to point Mythos at the horrifying garbage pile known as Claude Code.
Anyone who says Claude Mythos is a game changer, I want to see their monthly Anthropic bill.
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The Associated Press is getting rid of journalists and pivoting a bit more toward AI. It offered 120 journalists a buyout offer on Monday and it wants to cut 5% globally. [AP]
The AP ignored a request for discussion from the union, the News Media Guild, last week.
AP is worried that newspapers aren’t buying its output any more. It thinks AI can patch the financial hole.
The push is not yet about the news content — but it will be. Out-loud contempt for journalists is now policy at AP. Aimee Rinehart, the Senior Product Manager for AI, wrote on the company Slack: “Resistance is futile.” [Semafor]
Rinehart, who oversees the wire service’s AI initiatives, suggested that in the future, reporters could go to events, get quotes, plug them into a large language model, and have the model generate a story, saving them time on writing stories they don’t feel passionately about. She also noted that some editors told her that they would “prefer to have reporters report and have articles at least pre-written by AI.”
The AP told Semafor:
This internal discussion among staffers from different departments doesn’t reflect the overall position of the AP regarding the use of AI.
Which doesn’t actually walk back anything Rinehart said. One staffer said it was:
hard not to escape the feeling that the people hyping/guiding the decisions around these powerful tools exist in a totally different reality than the people who wake up every day and do the work of reporting.