Tuesday, 29 September 2026

Starship reaches orbit on its 14th flight

Flight 14 lifted off from Starbase at 8:48 am EDT yesterday (10:48 pm Sydney). One upper-stage Raptor failed at liftoff and controllers briefly weighed an abort, then carried on. About 25 minutes in, Ship 41 relit a Raptor to go orbital for the first time, deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites, and splashed down off Chile about 9 h 50 min after launch, the longest Starship flight yet. The booster lost several engines on descent but still made its controlled Gulf splashdown.

Still ahead: catching the ship at the tower, propellant transfer in orbit, and life support for Artemis.

Space.com · CNN live updates

An $80 motel room, two new species, and a replay of photosynthesis being acquired

With federal grants frozen, University of Maryland biologist Julia Van Etten and Andrew Willoughby turned a Nags Head, North Carolina motel room into a field lab full of brackish water and marsh grass. They came out with two new species of Paulinella, scaly, grenade-shaped amoebae.

What makes Paulinella special: it swallowed a cyanobacterium and turned it into a photosynthetic organelle only about 100 million years ago. Every other plant and alga comes from a similar merger 1.5 billion years ago, so this is the only recent case of that event available to study. The paper is in the Journal of Phycology.

New York Times · Summary

A neural guitar amp running on a stock ESP32-S3

CoyoPedal runs full-size WaveNet Neural Amp Modeler captures in real time at 48 kHz on a Waveshare ESP32-S3 AMOLED board, with no NPU. It uses block floating point and hand-written Xtensa kernels, splits the work across both cores in 64-frame blocks, and uses 91% and 94% of the 1,333 µs block budget with no missed deadlines.

The TSX touchscreen UI is compiled to native C++, audio I/O goes through a USB-host class-compliant interface, and Wi-Fi/BLE are switched off completely while it's playing. The same firmware also builds to WebAssembly, so you can try it in a browser.

GitHub: coyopedal

GPT-6 gets explicit cache breakpoints and a cache-miss debugger

OpenAI extended the prompt-cache discount window to 30 minutes and added a dashboard that tracks hit rates. There's also a diagnostics tool that tells you why a request missed the cache (model, tool list, settings), plus explicit breakpoints for choosing which prefixes get cached. You can now change reasoning effort or the allowed tools mid-conversation without invalidating the cache, and prewarm known context at startup. Partners report 20–36% lower inference costs.

For agent harnesses, the lesson is that cache stability is now something you design for.

OpenAI

Allspaw: code review is more than detecting defects

John Allspaw responds to a paper arguing that agents can replace human code review. His case is that review surfaces things detection misses. An expert saying “I don’t understand this” is a signal about complexity. Reviewers ask whether a change should exist at all, and they notice what isn’t there, such as missing error handling or unstated contracts. Review also teaches both people involved. LLMs are good at checking what’s in the diff but tend to miss what’s absent.

Adaptive Capacity Labs · on Hacker News today

The Tiberi Tapes: Coltrane recorded from the audience so a sax player could study his harmony

Starting in summer 1960, saxophonist Frank Tiberi recorded Coltrane in Philadelphia and New York clubs on a Concertone reel-to-reel he kept in a cloth bag. He wanted to learn Coltrane’s harmonic approach. Over 80 reels and 26+ hours survive. Impulse! is releasing an 11-track selection on 6 November (4-LP, 3-CD, digital), including two “Giant Steps” at 226 and 262 bpm. The complete set comes out on USB in early 2027, limited to 750 copies.

Impulse!/Universal · Jazzwise

A walrus, a diamond ring and 16 remote-control “Globitos”: Balloon Fiesta’s new shapes

The 54th Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta opens this Saturday with 117 special shapes, the world’s largest gathering of them. Thirteen are new: Finley the Turtle, a Brazilian walrus, blue jay, falcon and parrot, Johnny Panda, a heart named Agape, and an inflatable diamond ring from North Macedonia. There’s also a fleet of 16 remote-controlled Globitos at about a third of full size, including a spider-pig and a dinosaur.

Game idea: tiny RC balloons that only follow the wind would make good puzzle pieces.

Albuquerque Journal · The Paper

The Bahrain GP, cancelled in April, runs at Sepang this weekend

Round 16 takes the Bahrain name to Malaysia’s Sepang circuit (56 laps) from 2–4 October, its first F1 race since 2017. Qualifying and the race both start around 6 pm Sydney on Saturday and Sunday (clocks go forward early Sunday morning).

Standings: Antonelli 302, Russell 236, Hamilton 199, Norris 186. Piastri says his Baku lock-up, which dropped him from third to 15th, happened when both fronts locked “instantly”, and he suspects a crown in the road on his defensive line.

GPFans · Standings · PlanetF1

Carlsen tops the 24-player Total Chess pilot in Budapest

Aronian, Liem Le and Mamedyarov complete the field for the Total Chess pilot, 10–20 November. The format mixes time controls: a 3+2 blitz seeding event, then four groups of six playing ten 45+30 games each, then knockouts where a blitz win is worth 1 point, rapid 4 and classical 8. Also in the field: Caruana, Pragg, Arjun, Firouzja, Niemann, Nepo, and Vaishali and Bibisara Assaubayeva.

Chess.com

Long-weekend Saturday at Darling Harbour: Naruto with an orchestra, plus a free science fair

Naruto: The Symphonic Experience is at ICC Sydney’s Darling Harbour Theatre on Saturday 3 October. It’s the first Australian date, with a live orchestra playing to the anime. The free Big Ideas Factory (robotics, experiments, construction challenges) runs in Tumbalong Park on 3–4 October. Expect Darling Harbour to be busy on Saturday alongside the Central heritage expo and the trackwork.

ICC Sydney · Darling Harbour school holidays