Ten stories from the last day or so.
Asked about the coming World Championship match, Carlsen called Javokhir Sindarov a “pretty significant favourite” against the reigning champion, and predicted it could “get a little bit ugly” if Gukesh goes behind early. He also ruled out a comeback of his own to the cycle.
Olympiad round two: India beat Indonesia, but Gukesh drew on board three and dropped below 2700 for the first time in four years — an awkward number to be carrying into a title match. El Salvador (94th seed) put out Cuba (44th), and Uzbekistan, the USA, the Netherlands and Hungary all came close to disasters of their own.
In the women's event 2nd-seed Georgia was held 2–2 by Montenegro, and Norway lost to Kenya. Round three is Friday.
Someone fine-tuned a 4B Qwen distill to emit pg_hint_plan hints, first by distilling 420 trajectories from a much larger teacher (1.16× geomean), then by GRPO with the reward being measured query latency, clipped and soft-thresholded to absorb timing noise. Result on the Join Order Benchmark: 1.45× geomean speedup single-shot with only two regressions, 1.81× best-of-three with none.
The interesting part for anyone shipping systems: the reward is the real thing you care about, measured on real hardware, not a proxy. The rig was four Docker Postgres containers on consumer hardware tunnelled to rented H100s.
Fugleramme: a Raspberry Pi with a mic runs BirdNET-Go for acoustic species ID, then renders whoever's been outside lately onto an Inky Impression panel using hand-picked public-domain natural-history illustrations. The lovely detail is the composition — birds are positioned by actual body mass from the AVONET dataset, so the heavy ones sit centrally.
Degrades gracefully to a web kiosk if you have no panel, and one bootstrap script does the whole Pi setup. Near 2,000 points on HN, deservedly.
“In Flight Simulator” strips out the flying: you pick a destination, and then you're just aboard, with progress accruing while you're away, collecting flags as routes complete. It's a joke premise carried far enough to become a real mood piece — and a useful provocation for anything about slow aerial travel: how much of the pleasure is the piloting, and how much is just being up there watching?
Hubble's OPAL programme plus Calar Alto imagery from 2023–2025 show a ten-sided jet-stream pattern forming around Saturn's south pole: ~250 mph winds, faster than the famous northern hexagon's 200–220. Unlike the hexagon — fixed for 40+ years — this one drifts eastward and oscillates on a 32-day period, a meandering wave through several atmospheric layers.
Amy Simon: it “appears to be strengthening, giving us the rare opportunity to watch a giant atmospheric pattern develop.” Why ten and not six is wide open.
A new paper had experts re-grade six physics benchmarks (HLE-Physics, CMT-Benchmark, CritPt, UGPhysics, PRISM-Physics, PHYBench) and found most “failures” were bad questions, bad answer keys or bad grading. Corrected, one frontier model went 47.3% → 78.7% on HLE-Physics, 61.0% → 87.2% on CMT-Benchmark, and 94.4% on CritPt.
Worth reading as a methodology cautionary tale rather than a scoreboard: near-saturation means these benchmarks have stopped measuring anything.
“Proofs and Prompts” launched via a guest post on Terence Tao's blog: a shared venue for mathematicians — PhD students through Fields medallists through hobbyists — to argue about what AI does to research and teaching. The editors are upfront that the current contributor mix is skewed, and are explicitly recruiting model developers, women and non-Western voices.
Wintory (Journey, Stray Gods, AC: Syndicate) is back for James Nunn's One Last Shot, completing the Scott Adkins single-take-ish action trilogy after One Shot and One More Shot. Digital and DVD from Tuesday 22 September via Sony. Not a prestige score, but Wintory scoring a one-take constraint is usually worth a listen for the structural problem alone.
Friday: AFL preliminary final, Swans v Fremantle at the SCG. Saturday: NRL semi-final Roosters v Sharks at Allianz, the Everest carnival's Surf to Turf day at Randwick, Jason Derulo at Afterpay Arena, and “One Last Roar” at Leichhardt Oval. Sunday: Cabramatta Moon Festival and Kings v Taipans.
Moore Park and the eastern suburbs will be the pinch point, and ferry industrial action still runs to 6 October — so light rail and buses will be carrying more than usual.