Section
AI and engineering
The main line — the section the newsletter carries.
Evaluations, task books and pipelines — plus the numbers worth keeping, from model prices to page weight.
- The Chinese open-weights release timeline, dated 2026-10-09·12 min read
Sixty-seven open-weight releases from Chinese labs, each with a date I could trace to a primary source — plus the eleven candidates I dropped, and why.
- Measuring error in support AI, and what accuracy hides 2026-10-09·11 min read
Five kinds of error, three ways one accuracy figure misleads, and what a routing test on 3,894 public complaints actually returned.
- How an eval set is built, and why it rots 2026-10-09·10 min read
An eval set is an instrument with a purpose, a scoring rule, a calibration record and an expiry date. Where the samples come from, what counts as correct, and what makes the set expire.
- From token prices to task prices: three jobs, seven APIs 2026-10-09·12 min read
I priced three concrete jobs on seven model APIs using each vendor's own pricing page, and wrote down every assumption the conversion rests on.
- Why there is no Western mini program 2026-10-09·11 min read
A mini program inherits its identity and its payment rail from the app hosting it. Here is that mechanism, and what the four Western equivalents do instead.
- Twenty hot lists, no API keys 2026-10-08·5 min read
An aggregator that collects 20 trending lists every night. Six sources broke in ways worth keeping a record of, and one of them is gone for good.
- Verifying an email signup end to end 2026-10-08·4 min read
The form returned success. The subscriber appeared in the right group. The one thing that failed was in an inbox I do not control.
- What this site actually ships, and the widget I can't remove 2026-10-08·4 min read
2,130 bytes of HTML, 1 KB of my own JavaScript, no framework. Then the newsletter form loads jQuery, and the number stops being funny.
- What goes on this site, and what does not 2026-10-07·1 min read
The scope of Field Notes, how often it updates, and why the numbers here have to come from a script.