I’m 2 episodes into the new Alien: Earth series. I’m finding it to be a bit of a mixed bag so far. Here are some scattered thoughts… I was expecting more from Noah Hawley, what with his excellent work on Fargo and Legion. My first impression is that it has all the parts of a good story, and a good Alien story at that, but they are thrown together in a less than satisfactory way.

Yesterday OpenAI announced GPT-5. Altman has claimed that it has reached PhD level reasoning. It turned up in my account this morning, so I thought I’d have a go. Interested as I am in Project 2025 I asked it a general question: A disappointing response. I doubt it’s censoring results; rather my guess is that it’s saving money by not doing any kind of search. For comparison, here is the response from a few months ago under version 4:

I hold positions in several solar power generation companies and funds in the UK. How do they make money? Clearly they sell electricity! But it turns out it’s more complicated than that. There isn’t a simple flat rate per kWh (even though that’s what I get for the electrity I sell back to the grid from my solar PV installation). Instead electricity is priced by the system of marginal pricing.