Saturday, 26 September 2026

Antonelli clips the wall and starts 16th; Russell on pole, Piastri third

Kimi Antonelli touched the inside wall at Turn 1 on his first Q1 lap in Baku, damaging the front-left, and will start 16th — his own verdict: a “very unnecessary mistake” on a track whose grip changed between laps. Teammate George Russell took pole by nearly a second from Leclerc.

Piastri qualified a surprise P3 after McLaren looked slow all Friday; Norris starts 5th, Verstappen 8th. Antonelli led Russell by 81 points coming in, so a Russell win with Antonelli outside the points would cut that to 56 with eight rounds left. The race is later today (Saturday).

F1: Piastri P3 · F1: Russell pole · Antonelli’s mistake

Uzbekistan bounce straight back, beating the USA

A day after losing their perfect record to Germany, Uzbekistan beat the United States to retake the sole Olympiad lead on 16/18. Abdusattorov beat Caruana and Yakubboev beat Niemann; Wesley So won one back against Sindarov. India, Uzbekistan 2 and Armenia are a point behind with two rounds to go.

Women: China beat Armenia (wins for Zhu Jiner and Lu Miaoyi) and now lead by two points on 17, ahead of India, Kazakhstan and Mongolia on 15.

Chess.com round 9 report

Newton and Hartlib hid the same alchemical recipe the same way

Historian Benjamin Breen ran frontier models over early-modern manuscripts. Opus 5.5 noticed that Isaac Newton and Samuel Hartlib both anagram-encoded “Hungarian vitriol” in parallel — a hint Newton was working from Hartlib’s papers. GPT-6 Astra concluded John Dee’s “angelic” Liber Loagaeth is mostly noise, with one meaningful name in it.

The honest bit: a partial decipherment of Charles V’s cipher letters turned out to have been done already. Breen’s argument is that AI labs should fund historians with digitised, verifiable problems of exactly this shape.

Res Obscura

A fridge firmware update that fails halfway is a fridge that stops being cold

A Samsung SmartThings update left thousands of Bespoke AI refrigerators in Korea stuck mid-update — no lighting, no auto-open, and crucially no temperature control — right before the three-day Chuseok holiday. Samsung confirmed the faulty update and promised an emergency fix, but some repair visits have slipped to 7 October.

The firmware lesson writes itself: the thing a device exists to do shouldn’t depend on the update path succeeding. A/B images, a watchdog-backed rollback and a staged rollout would each have contained it.

Tom’s Hardware · TechSpot

The Dutch government is building its desktop on NixOS

DAWO is a Dutch government work environment — OS, office suite, collaboration, management tooling — built on NixOS and now piloting in eight municipalities. The pick is about reproducibility: a declarative config means 80–90% of a setup carries over between deployments, and it runs on laptops Windows 11 won’t support.

The trigger was sovereignty: when US sanctions cut the ICC prosecutor off from Microsoft services in 2025, Dutch officials took the dependency seriously. NixOS also originated in the Netherlands and has no corporate owner.

It’s FOSS · DAWO

A small planet orbiting its star backwards, with no obvious culprit

GJ 3090 b, a sub-Neptune 73 light-years away on a 2.9-day orbit, goes round its red dwarf at about 136° to the star’s spin. Geneva astronomers measured it with the Rossiter–McLaughlin effect: across five transits the planet crossed the star’s receding (redshifted) half first, the opposite of normal.

Retrograde orbits usually need a massive companion to flip them, and there isn’t one. The team’s proposal: a second disk of fresh interstellar gas fell in with opposite spin. It’s the smallest planet whose obliquity has been measured around an M dwarf.

Universe Today

A spacecraft that “dreams” its approach before flying it

Stanford’s Out-of-this-World-Model learns orbital dynamics from experience rather than being handed the equations, then rolls candidate docking trajectories forward in its head before committing. On ISS docking scenarios it succeeded about 53% of the time versus 29% for comparable RL agents, using 500k training iterations instead of 25M, and coped better with unseen ports and obstacles.

A useful pattern for any piloting game with drift and lag: plan by simulating the world forward, not by reacting to it.

Universe Today · arXiv 2609.03067

A browser foundry for deliberately cursed fonts

Bastardica mixes typefaces by abusing OpenType contextual ligatures: pick a base font and a mix-in, set a stride, scale and baseline offset, and glyphs swap between fonts in a programmable rhythm — the Times New Bastard effect, generalised. It runs fontTools under Pyodide entirely in the browser, so nothing is uploaded.

Bastardica

Mamma Mia! at the Concourse, Chatswood, 9–25 October

PACA, a non-profit independent Sydney company, stages Mamma Mia! with a 30-plus cast, a nine-piece band and 22 ABBA songs — 19 performances only. Saturday 1pm and Sunday 11am matinees make it an easy school-holiday-adjacent outing; tickets from $69 midweek, $79 weekends, with child and concession discounts.

PACA · sydneytheatre.com

School holidays around the harbour: a concert on Sunday, a free STEM fair next weekend

Sunday 27 Sep stacks a BINI concert at the TikTok Entertainment Centre on top of the evening half marathon through Pyrmont, so expect Darling Harbour to be busy into the night. Next weekend (3–4 Oct) the free Big Ideas Factory fills Tumbalong Park with robotics and build challenges, and Naruto: The Symphonic Experience plays ICC Sydney on the 3rd. The Moon Festival lanterns in Darling Square run until 4 Oct.

Darling Harbour school holidays · Transport NSW events