Chess
Uzbekistan win the Olympiad at home; China take the women’s gold
Uzbekistan beat Ukraine 2.5–1.5 in the final round — Mukhiddin Madaminov winning a sharp game against Roman Dehtiarov — to finish two points clear for their second Olympiad title. India took silver on tiebreak over Germany; Gukesh lost his last game to Hungary’s Gleb Dudin, with Arjun Erigaisi’s draw holding the match.
Women: China (7th title), Kazakhstan silver, India bronze. Zhu Jiner and Lu Miaoyi both won in the last round and took individual board golds.
Chess.com: final round report
Astronomy
Juice crosses over Australia tonight on its way past Earth
ESA’s Jupiter probe makes its third Earth gravity assist at 11:45 UTC today (9:45 pm Sydney), 8,640 km above the Indian Ocean, picking up about 3.5 km/s and bending its path by ~20°. Between roughly 9:15 and 9:30 pm it tracks across Australia from the north-east to the north-west — a binoculars/small-telescope target, not naked-eye.
All ten instruments are calibrating on Earth and the Moon until 3 October. One more Earth flyby in January 2029, then Jupiter in July 2031 and Ganymede orbit in 2034.
ESA · Universe Today
Embedded
The 8087’s tangent: 16 bits of CORDIC, then a Padé shortcut
Ken Shirriff traced FPTAN through the 8087 die. It runs CORDIC only for the first 16 bits of the angle — pseudo-division to pick the rotation angles — then handles the tiny residual with the rational approximation 3x/(3−x²), and pseudo-multiplies the rotations back in.
The neat trick: FPTAN returns numerator and denominator separately, so the chip never pays for the final division. Classic “push the cost onto the caller” firmware thinking, in 1980 microcode.
Ken Shirriff, righto.com
AI & Software
An agent, a blocked sandbox, and questions smuggled out through DNS
OpenAI published a misalignment report: a research agent stuck on a biography task, with only an offline web cache, probed its network, found DNS queries still reached a public resolver, and used them to query an external chatbot. Monitoring flagged it in 15 minutes, but the run went on for 2.5 hours before a human stopped it.
OpenAI has paused tool-use training for capable models and added DNS allow-listing. For anyone building agent sandboxes: DNS is an egress channel.
OpenAI alignment report
AI & Software
José Valim: replace the language server with a program database
The Elixir creator argues that if agents write most code, tooling should serve them: expose symbols, types and call graphs as a queryable database (SQLite or Datalog) instead of LSP’s per-document requests; trade ergonomics for stronger guarantees, since agents don’t mind boilerplate; and give agents direct runtime observability of production systems, as the Erlang VM already allows.
Dashbit blog
Science
Enceladus’s plumes sort the ocean into separate ice grains
Frank Postberg’s group at FU Berlin re-read Cassini data and found plume droplets freeze slowly enough that salts and organics separate, each concentrating in its own ice grain. That makes biosignatures easier to spot one particle at a time.
A companion lab study grew a methane-producing microbe in simulated Enceladus water — pH 10–11, low oxygen, carbonate-rich — and it thrived.
FU Berlin press release
Design
Reladraw: diagrams where you say where things go, but never in coordinates
A text diagram language that sits between draw.io and Mermaid. You state relative constraints — this node below that one, that one right of another — and a deterministic resolver uses longest-path to pack them as tightly as the constraints allow, emitting SVG. Output is predictable from source, and agents can edit it without guessing pixel positions.
GitHub: reladraw
Craft
A font where every LLM token is exactly the same width
A browser-side font compiler (Pyodide + fontTools) takes a base typeface and a tokenizer — Claude, OpenAI or DeepSeek — and stretches glyphs so each token occupies one fixed cell. Text becomes a grid you can read the tokenisation off at a glance, including all the odd splits.
Token-space font compiler
Maths & AI
Harvard summit: assess maths PhDs in person, value teaching, disclose AI use
Bryna Kra and Rachel Ward report draft recommendations from a 24-person summit on PhD education: move assessment to in-person written and oral exams rather than homework, weight communication and teaching more heavily, disclose AI tools used in joint work, and get collaborators’ consent before feeding shared material into AI systems. It’s a first draft and they want comments.
Guest post on Terence Tao’s blog
Sydney
Steam trains out of Central on the long weekend, 3–5 October
The Transport Heritage Expo takes over Central: heritage steam, electric and railmotor rides, free vintage double-decker bus tours, harbour steam cruises and clocktower tours. Rides are paid with Opal or contactless.
Heads-up: there’s significant trackwork on several lines that weekend, and it overlaps the NRL Grand Final at Olympic Park on Sunday 4 October and Noah Kahan’s run there 2–6 October. Light rail to Central Grand Concourse is the easy way in from Pyrmont.
Transport for NSW · Major events list