Field Notes — Wild Interactive

From the studio

Notes from building the studio and its systems — what we’re making, what we’re learning, and what we’re letting loose in Wildlab.

FIELD REPORT — 2026

Field Notes · September 2026

The Race to Superintelligence.

At what cost — and who actually pays for it? The people closest to this technology now say openly that it's dangerous, and they keep racing anyway. The danger isn't the model. It's the race nobody will be first to stop.

FIELD REPORT — 2026

Field Notes · September 2026

Is AI the New Polyester?

People keep calling AI the new polyester — a cheap synthetic that took over before anyone asked whether it should. The comparison is onto something real. I just think it's aimed at the wrong target.

FIELD REPORT — 2026

Field Notes · August 2026

The Grammar Check That Outs You as a Machine

What Anthropic's watermark actually detects, and why a grammar fix can trip it too. Light editing leaves the same kind of mark as a fully generated draft — and the people who most need that help will pay the highest price.

FIELD REPORT — 2026

Field Notes · July 2026

Stop Buying AI Features. Start Redesigning the Work.

Nearly every New Zealand business is now “using AI” — yet productivity went backwards. The problem was never adoption. It’s that switching a tool on isn’t the same as redesigning how the work gets done. Where the returns actually come from, and where to start.

WILDLAB — 2026

Wildlab · July 2026

Rendering four billion years of continental drift in the browser

An in-house experiment: a React Three Fiber globe that morphs Earth’s continents through deep time — from a molten Hadean surface to today’s mapped coastlines — driven by hand-written GLSL and a palette tuned to each era’s climate.

WILDLAB — 2026

Wildlab · June 2026

A local-first personal AI that never phones home

ElliotOS pulls from eight-plus personal data sources — health, calendar, email, productivity, news — and writes a morning and evening digest to Slack. The AI runs locally on Ollama, so none of that data has to leave the machine.

WILDLAB — 2026

Wildlab · April 2026

Can a laptop trader beat the bots on Polymarket’s AI markets?

AI-themed prediction markets are the fastest-growing category on Polymarket — ~$10M of volume across 234 markets in a month. We pre-registered a study into whether a person with a laptop and $1,000 can still find edge the bots miss. Here’s the setup, and one thing we already can’t explain.

WILDLAB — 2026

Wildlab · April 2026

We replicated a viral “61% from Trump tweets” trading claim. It didn’t survive.

An open-source project claimed a 61.3% hit rate predicting S&P 500 direction from Truth Social posts. We reproduced the number exactly — then tested whether it was actually tradeable on Polymarket. Zero of a hundred pre-committed strategies survived.