AI & Software

An Enigma message nobody could break since 2005 fell in two days

MVUEH — 82 letters of German Army traffic from 10 July 1941 — has sat on the unbroken list for over two decades. Carter Leffer pointed OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra at it. The model wrote its own Enigma simulator and Bombe in Python and C++, picked the repeated place name ROSENOW ROSENOW as a crib, and ground through wheel orders until it landed.

Two details make it more than a compute story. The ciphertext contained transcription errors that had quietly poisoned earlier attempts, and the model spotted them. And when the key came out as wheel order 253 rather than the 512 every other 10 July message used, it went to Bundesarchiv records (RS 3–3/20a, RS 3–3/63b) to check the unit was where the plaintext implied. That’s archival corroboration, not just search.

CryptoCellar — The MVUEH Break

Embedded

AMD’s hardware RNG has never once given anyone a zero

Somebody on the flat assembler board ran rdrand16 for eleven hours and histogrammed the results. Every one of the 65,536 possible values came back roughly 15,000 times. Except 0x0000, which came back exactly never.

The chip does produce zero. It just clears the carry flag when it does — the signal for “no entropy available, try again” — so every retry loop ever written silently discards it. Reproduced on Zen 2 and Zen 3, not on a 7840U; 32- and 64-bit forms look clean. It smells like an overcorrection to the old Zen 2 microcode bug where rdrand returned all ones. A worthwhile lesson in how a defect survives for years when nothing in the system is built to make it visible: the value was there the whole time, and the error path ate it.

Hacker News discussion · flat assembler board

Software

gzip is a language model if you squint at it correctly

A compressor is a probability model wearing a disguise: it spends few bytes on what it expects and many on what it doesn’t. So prime gzip with Shakespeare, generate candidate continuations, score each by how small it compresses, and beam-search the winners. Nathan’s GziPT does exactly that — zero parameters, no training, no gradients, just the standard library.

The output is not coherent, but it is unmistakably Shakespeare-shaped, which is the point. The trick that stops it degenerating into verbatim quotation is keeping only recent context in the window.

nathan.rs — Can gzip be a language model?

Design

A typeface that reads the sentence before it sets it

Semfont scores every word on four axes — valence, salience, surprise, certainty — and maps them onto four typographic ones: colour, weight, highlight, slant. Rare words that keep recurring get heavier, because that’s what the passage is about. Hedges like “probably” tilt themselves and their neighbours at 55% strength.

The good bit is the second pass. A three-word negation window can’t handle “would not go so far as to call it great”, so it re-reads whole clauses, which also gets it sarcasm (“Great, another outage”) and comparatives (“fewer complaints”) for about the same cost as the first pass.

Rohan Adwankar — A font that reads what you wrote

Maths

Borrow the Bermuda Principles before the proofs get cheap

Antonio Auffinger, guest-posting on Tao’s blog, makes a structural argument rather than a philosophical one. If machine-generated proof becomes a commodity while credit still attaches to being first to post, the rational move for an early-career mathematician is to stop putting preprints on arXiv. The open culture dies not from malice but from everyone optimising locally.

His precedent is genomics: the Human Genome Project faced the same squeeze and answered it with the Bermuda Principles and the Fort Lauderdale Agreement — rules that made immediate data release safe by fixing who gets credited. He also points at biology as the place that needs new mathematics next, which is a nicer note than the usual replacement anxiety.

What’s new — Open problems, open mathematics

Astronomy

3I/ATLAS was made somewhere with the wrong ingredients

Kenji Furuya’s group at RIKEN measured isotope ratios in the interstellar comet and got numbers that aren’t close to anything local. Deuterium-to-hydrogen in its water sits near 1%; solar system comets run 0.015–0.03%. Its carbon-12 to carbon-13 ratio is 123–191 against our ~90.

Read together, that points to a low-metallicity stellar nursery — a star-forming region much poorer in heavy elements than the one that made us. A single object carrying a legible chemical fingerprint of a nursery we will never otherwise sample.

Universe Today

Formula 1

The earliest Antonelli can finish it is Singapore — but Baku is Saturday

After Madrid it’s Antonelli 292, Russell 211, Hamilton 191, with nine rounds and 233 points left. The clinch maths: Antonelli would have to win Azerbaijan, Bahrain, the Singapore sprint and the Singapore race while Russell scores nothing in any of them. Round 17, and vanishingly unlikely. On median results it’s Mexico, round 19.

Piastri is 7th on 120 and still mathematically alive as one of eight, which at this gap means arithmetic rather than hope. Baku first, and remember the 2026 calendar puts the race on Saturday. Hadjar returns for Red Bull.

Formula1.com — points permutations · F1 latest

Chess

Hawks and elephants: Chess.com runs a Seirawan championship

No new Olympiad round overnight — Uzbekistan still lead on 12 after six. Instead: Chess.com has announced a Seirawan Chess Championship for 30 September – 2 October, $2,500 prize fund.

Seirawan chess is the most restrained of the drop variants. Two extra pieces sit off-board — the hawk (bishop + knight) and the elephant (rook + knight) — and you may drop one onto the square a back-rank piece has just vacated, once per piece. Standard opening theory survives the first move and then quietly stops being useful, which is the appeal.

Chess.com — Seirawan Chess Championship

Musicals

Cheer meets fear at the Hayes from 9 October

We Are The Tigers — Preston Max Allen’s book, music and lyrics — runs at the Hayes Theatre Co, Elizabeth Bay, from 9 October to 8 November. A high-school cheer squad’s sleepover turns into a murder mystery; the Hayes are pitching it in the lineage of their Heathers.

Recommended 15+, and the warnings are real: depictions of murder, stage blood, strobe, haze, drug and alcohol references, coarse language. Cast includes Artemis Alfonzetti, Chelsea Dawson, Millie Seeto and Olivia Vásquez.

Hayes Theatre Co · BroadwayWorld Sydney

Sydney

Term 3 ends Friday — the shape of the trains changes from Monday

NSW Term 3 finishes Friday 25 September; Term 4 doesn’t start until Tuesday 13 October. So from Monday the peak thins out and the middle of the day fills up, and the CBD attractions carry the load for a fortnight.

Locally: the Opera House launches Wild Things, a new kids’ festival, from Saturday 26 September; Carriageworks has the Australian Native Food Festival that weekend; the Australian Museum runs Jurassic Lounge (adults) on the 26th. Sydney Olympic Park has a skate camp from the 28th, so expect Olympic Park line loading mid-morning rather than at peak.

NSW Dept of Education — 2026 term dates · What’s On Sydney