Embedded
Your ESP32 is secretly a software-defined radio
Three projects found the same undocumented trick on their own: several ESP32 parts (C5, S3 and the new S31) let firmware skip the fixed Wi-Fi/Bluetooth demodulators and pull raw IQ baseband samples instead. Coverage is roughly 2.2–2.7 GHz and 4.8–6.0 GHz, at up to 80 MS/s with 13–54 MHz of bandwidth. The ESPARGOS team uses it for phase-coherent direction finding on 2.4 GHz. One Reddit user streams continuously from an S3 through an FPGA USB3 front end. The C5VRX project turns a C5 into a 5.8 GHz FPV video receiver, and the S31 can stream 16 MS/s over Gigabit Ethernet.
RTL-SDR.com
Science & AI
An AI-assisted archive search turns up a new dodo sighting
Historian Benjamin Breen gave Opus 5.5 a research question about the dodo and set it loose on GLOBALISE, a searchable corpus of Dutch East India Company records. It ran several agents and ranked candidate passages. The best was a 1615 log from the Wapen van Amsterdam saying the crew on Mauritius “caught many tortoises, dodos [dodeersen], and some geese and parrots”. Breen checked it against the specialist literature, and it falls in a previously empty 1611–1616 gap in the dodo record. He's frank that the agents often wandered into archival detail only a specialist could vouch for.
Res Obscura (Benjamin Breen)
Film Music
Nine composers, one film: Gilroy’s Behemoth!
Tony Gilroy’s Hollywood drama is full of music made inside the story: two themes by a fictional composer, a cello etude, and four invented films that each need a score. So he cast composers like actors. Silvestri wrote the in-film blockbuster, Giacchino a cartoon tune, Jackman an action-comedy and James Newton Howard the fictional composer’s score. Michael Abels wrote the cello practice pieces, with Emily Bear, Brandon Roberts, Nami Melumad and Lukas Frank doing the rest. Credited as “The Behemoth! Collective”. NYFF premiere this weekend, cinemas 4 December.
Film Music Reporter
AI & Software
Pi 1.0: the minimalist coding-agent harness grows up
Earendil has shipped 1.0 of Pi, its “hardened, minimal, extensible” agent harness, which it says hundreds of thousands of people use every week. New in this release: native MCP and Codemode, deferred tool loading, cache warming for Anthropic models, mid-conversation system messages, and support for non-LLM models such as image and decision models. It shipped alongside Pi Durable, an experimental package for long-running agents. MIT licensed.
Earendil · Pi Durable
AI & Software
Context Language Models: let the model edit its own memory file
A team from UW, Ai2 and Meta (Zettlemoyer, Koh, Lambert and others) gives the model its context as a file it can rewrite, so the model decides what to keep. This also scales neatly to multi-agent setups, with one file per agent. Zero-shot, it beats existing context-management methods: +11.4% on BrowseComp-Plus with 21.5% fewer operations, and +5% on a 12-hour EdgeBench run with 59% fewer. RL fine-tuning lifts Qwen3.5-9B by 47.6%.
arXiv
Software
“Git 3.0’s SHA-256 default will be a costly mistake”
Scott Chacon (GitHub and GitButler co-founder) argues that switching the default hash fixes a mostly theoretical problem at real cost. You'd need about 1.4 septillion files in one repo for an accidental SHA-1 collision, and real attacks go through maintainers and supply chains, not hashes. The costs, he says: broken submodules, repos that can't talk to each other, invalid signatures and broken tooling. His alternative is an optional signed SHA-256 tree-hash header for projects that want the extra assurance.
GitButler blog
Game Dev
Godot 4.8 hits feature freeze
Dev 7 (29 Sep) is the last snapshot with new features. Beta comes next, with no dates yet. Highlights for 4.8: project-wide symbol renaming in the editor, moving/rotating/scaling 2D nodes in the running game with undo, animated decals, and allocation-free typed physics queries. Also new: UI sound themes, so buttons can click and menus can whoosh, plus touch-friendly TabBar and PopupMenu.
Godot Engine blog
Science
Butterflies run a barber-pole illusion on predators
Researchers at Exeter and Essex used high-speed video of real butterflies, wing patterns from about 400 European species, 100 human “predators” on touchscreens, and 50,000 evolved patterns. Their finding: as the wings flap, the stripes change angle and give a false sense of the insect's speed and direction, so strikes miss in the final milliseconds. Published in Nature. Motion-camouflage patterns would make a nice mechanic for anything you have to track.
University of Essex
Astronomy
Hubble’s 200,000th orbit: waiting for a supernova’s rerun
Hubble passed 200,000 orbits on 19 September and marked it by looking at Supernova Athena, found by JWST last year behind the galaxy cluster MACS J0417. The cluster's lensing sends the light along paths of different lengths. Models predict another image of the same explosion will appear between now and early March 2027. Timing that delay gives an independent measure of the Hubble constant.
Universe Today
Formula 1
Sepang Friday: Ferrari and Red Bull quick, Mercedes off the pace
Leclerc topped FP2 at the relocated Bahrain GP (1:37.528), ahead of Hadjar (+0.099) and Norris (+0.137), with Verstappen and Hamilton next. Piastri was 6th. Title rivals Russell and Antonelli were only 7th and 8th on what Mercedes called one of their toughest Fridays of the year. That could matter with Antonelli 66 points clear. Hamilton is under investigation for impeding Bortoleto. Qualifying is today at 4pm local, which is 6pm Sydney time.
Formula1.com