Field Notes

Field Notes

Occasional reports from the shop floor. Longer reads, real sources, no fluff.

AUG 2026 Field Report · Revolutionary FAR Overhaul · Status as of August 2026

There is no longer one FAR

All 53 parts were rewritten and pushed out as agency deviations before a single rule was final. The authoritative text is now the solicitation.

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AUG 2026 Field Report · USENIX Security 2026 · Hidden Text in Resumes

"Ignore all previous instructions" is the rare one

Researchers measured 196,682 real resumes. About 1% carry hidden injections, and over 90% aren't instructions at all. They're hidden data.

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AUG 2026 Field Report · Behavioral Testing · Customer-Facing AI

When a typo beats the guardrail

A production shopping assistant blocked one correctly spelled question and answered every misspelled version of it. The gap was in where the control sits.

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JUL 2026 Field Report · Bartz v. Anthropic · Final Approval

The learning was legal. The shortcut wasn't.

A federal judge just approved the largest copyright recovery in US history. The lesson isn't what you think: the AI training was legal. The shortcut wasn't.

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JUL 2026 Field Report · MIT NANDA "GenAI Divide" · State of AI in Business 2025

Everyone adopted AI. Almost nobody got paid.

MIT's Project NANDA studied 300+ enterprise AI deployments. The few who saw returns started in the back office.

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JUL 2026 Field Report · Market Consolidation · 2015–2026

The quiet death of small software

Independent software didn't lose on product. It lost to a playbook: subsidize, absorb, strip, extract.

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