Monday, 5 October 2026

Verstappen wins at Sepang; Russell’s engine dies and the gap is now 84

The relocated Bahrain GP started about 90 minutes late after tropical rain and formation-lap software problems. Verstappen converted pole into Red Bull’s first win of 2026. Antonelli was second and Hamilton third. Russell’s power unit failed about five laps from the end behind the safety car, so he scored nothing. Antonelli now leads him by 84 points with six or seven races left.

Piastri finished P6. Norris went through the gravel behind the safety car, avoiding Piastri, and recovered to P9. Next up: Singapore, 9–11 October (sprint weekend).

Formula 1 · SSBCrack

Kolibri: a 78B open-weight model that runs with 3.5B active

Aleph Alpha has released Kolibri under Apache 2.0. It is a mixture-of-experts model: 78.1B parameters in total, 384 experts, 6 active per token, so about 3.46B parameters do the work for each token. It is bilingual English–German, has a 1M-token context and four reasoning levels, and supports tool calling. Reported scores: 85.9 on LiveCodeBench v6 and 96.9 on AIME 2025. It is built for self-hosting, which is the pitch for anyone whose code can’t leave the building.

Aleph Alpha · TestingCatalog

Agents need documentation, not memory, and budgets that actually stop

Two short posts on making agent-built software safer. Liao argues that RAG-style “memory” retrieves by similarity rather than relevance. The better pattern is a plain Markdown workspace the agent reads before work and updates afterwards: prompt → consult → build → update. The result is knowledge you can audit and diff.

Simon Willison argues that cloud and API spending should have hard caps by default that stop the service, not just send a warning email. Agents now make it trivial for inexperienced people to deploy things that can run up huge bills. AWS and Google Cloud have only recently added such caps.

liao.gg · Simon Willison

BinRange: ultra-wideband ranging to answer “did the bins go out?”

A fixed anchor (an ESP32-WROVER with a DW3000 UWB module) ranges six coin-cell tags stuck to household bins. The tags are KKM K4Ws with an nRF52833, a DW3110 radio and a LIS3DH accelerometer. Beyond 10 m a bin counts as “out”. A sustained ~90° tilt means it has been emptied. Home Assistant combines this with the council collection calendar to send reminders.

The engineering notes are the good part. Antenna orientation dominated range. Tags use interrupt-driven sleep and check in every 30 minutes when stationary. Firmware updates go over the air with health checks and rollback. The 3D-printed case uses tapered pins and catches instead of screws.

sjg.io

Hole Punch: you don’t fly the ship, you shape the gravity

A small browser physics puzzle (posted to HN by its developer). The spaceship has no engine. You place black holes, add mass to them (click and hold, arrow keys to fine-tune), then press space to run the simulation and watch the ship sling through the field. Players on HN called it “surprisingly fun” and good with kids. They asked for sim speed-up, exact mass entry and a way to delete holes.

This is the reverse of direct steering, and close to the balloon problem: the player sets up a field and then commits to it. It’s worth trying for the plan-then-run rhythm.

Hole Punch · HN discussion

What AI means for a mathematician at a small college

In a guest post on Tao’s blog, Jennifer Taback (Bowdoin College) writes about a different case from the headline breakthroughs. AI hasn’t cracked her long-standing problems, but it acts as the specialist colleague a small department lacks. It catches errors, restructures papers and pushes her to think harder. She argues for disclosing AI use openly, without stigma, as long as results are rigorously checked before they are shared. She also wants liberal-arts faculty, not only research universities, to have a say in how teaching changes.

What’s new (Terence Tao)

A superconductor gets stronger inside an empty box

USTC researchers, with MIT and Shanghai Jiao Tong collaborators, placed ultrathin NbSe₂ inside a terahertz “dark” cavity. The cavity is engineered to amplify quantum vacuum fluctuations, with no light shone in. The critical temperature rose by up to 5.4% compared with the same material outside the cavity. Changing the electromagnetic environment alone, without touching the material, tuned a quantum phase (Nature).

ScienceDaily

Roman’s coronagraph sees first light

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope passed its pointing-stability tests. NASA compares the precision to holding a laser on a dime from about 240 km. Its Coronagraph Instrument took first images on 22 and 27 September, of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The coronagraph is a technology demonstrator for blocking starlight well enough to image planets and dust disks directly. Harder observations come next.

ScienceDaily / NASA

Awonder Liang goes 12–0 to win the Seirawan Chess Championship

GM Awonder Liang won every game of the eight-player double-elimination event (3+2, best-of-four matches) and beat FM Jakub Chyzy 3–0 in the final. In Seirawan Chess each side gets a hawk (bishop + knight) and an elephant (rook + knight). They can be dropped onto first-rank squares as those squares are vacated, so up to eight pieces per side can move like knights in the middlegame.

Chess.com