Tuesday, 6 October 2026

Sepang’s red flag: the FIA hot-patched the control software mid-race

New detail on Sunday’s delayed start. On the wet formation lap, an untested combination hit the FIA-supplied power-unit software: low speed, low grip, wet-weather energy limits and Sepang’s minisector layout. Throttle input went entirely into recharging the MGU-K, so cars sat at idle behind the safety car. Verstappen was hit first, Hamilton too. Mercedes-powered cars were affected less.

During the hour-long red flag the FIA wrote and shipped a patch that lifted the 250 kW wet-speed cap in the affected minisectors, and all eleven teams installed it before the restart. Drivers were not impressed (“totally unacceptable”, Pérez; Hamilton compared it to a LEGO race). The result and the 84-point gap stand.

Motorsport.com · AutoNext · ReadMotorsport

A wild pointer in Infocom’s Infidel hid in plain sight for 43 years

Andrew Plotkin found it while building Visible Zorker, his tool for showing the inside of Infocom games as they run. In Infidel (1983), the DESERT-TO-TABLE routine relies on a default argument that the compiler never initialised. Instead of writing to address 11,129, it writes object data starting at address 30, which eventually corrupts the abbreviations table used for text compression. The result is garbled text and occasional crashes.

Nobody noticed, the playtesters included, because it only happens if you drop several objects in an empty, unmapped stretch of desert. The bug sat where nobody went until a tool made the memory visible.

Zarf Updates

Strata: a 125B model on a gaming PC at up to 94 tokens/s

Strata is an open-source inference engine for Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, a 125B mixture-of-experts model, on 12 GB+ NVIDIA or AMD cards. The model has 24,576 small experts and uses only 10 per token. Strata keeps the hottest experts on the GPU and the rest in RAM, with lookup tables on SSD. It quantises the model down to 35–90 GB, and speculative decoding adds 1.6–1.8×.

On an RTX 5070 and an RX 9070 XT it reports 53–94 tokens/s output and 1,600–2,650 tokens/s prompt processing. Caveats: you need 32 GB of RAM (64 GB is better), and expect a 1–3 minute freeze on first load. It exposes OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible APIs, so coding agents can point at it.

GitHub

Jane Street’s ASIC puzzle: the chip was a Star Battle checker

Jane Street published only the GDS layout of a small chip and asked people to work out what it does. About 400 entries came in from 30+ countries, from high-school students to retirees. The answer: it validates 11×11 Star Battle (“Two Not Touch”) solutions. That means two stars per row, column and region, with no two stars touching, diagonals included. A correct solution makes it print TWO STARS; failures print EMPTY SKY or BIG BANG.

Solvers extracted netlists with KLayout and Yosys, wrote their own simulators, used SAT solvers, and decrypted an LFSR to recover hidden strings. Two people found all six intended Easter eggs, and some also found an unintended floating-wire bug.

Jane Street Tech Blog

The Glashütte Trash Clock runs for exactly half an hour

During a residency in Glashütte, the German watchmaking town, Niklas Roy built a working pendulum clock from rubbish. It has a roughly one-metre seconds pendulum, an escape wheel with paperclip teeth, cardboard gears, and friction wheels instead of cut gears for the minute reduction. The drive weight is a paint can full of scrap, and it hits the floor after 30 minutes.

A rubber-boot weight drives a separate striker that hits a glass-bottle gong on the hour. Just before the clock runs down, a wheel of fortune spins between NOW and NEVER. Roy has also declared “GTC” a time standard, with this clock as its reference.

Niklas Roy

Fluid-blowup experts weigh in, carefully, on the AI Navier–Stokes claim

On Tao’s blog, Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa survey finite-time singularities in fluid equations since Elgindi’s 2019 Euler result. Their technique is a “cascade of vortex layers”, where each scale amplifies the next, so that infinitely many amplification stages pile up at one finite time. It works for forced Euler, weakly dissipative fractional Navier–Stokes, porous media, Boussinesq and gSQG. They stress that none of this is the unforced Millennium Problem, and they reserve judgement on OpenAI’s September blow-up claim pending detailed analysis.

Separately, Quanta’s Jordana Cepelewicz asks what is left for mathematicians when proofs arrive faster than understanding. It covers arXiv’s two-a-month submission cap, falling MathOverflow activity and student “AI vegetarians”.

What’s new (Tao) · Quanta

A fan rescued Tippett Studio’s CD-ROMs from the closing-down auction

Tippett Studio closed on 28 August. Phil Tippett animated the stop-motion holochess in Star Wars, and his studio went on to make ED-209 and the Starship Troopers bugs. At the auction, someone calling themselves “TippettFan” bought a folder of discs and has put 90 disc images on the Internet Archive. They include behind-the-scenes material from RoboCop and Starship Troopers, original Star Wars slides, CG creature tests and a 2008 interview with Tippett.

Film Stories

Every lighthouse on Earth, blinking in its real rhythm

Aaron Becker’s night globe plots every charted navigational light. Each one flashes or sweeps at the period and pattern printed on the nautical chart, so coastlines become recognisable by rhythm. Presets jump to Scotland, Brittany, Norway, Japan and Cape Town. As inspiration for a balloon game, it shows how to read landmarks at night by their timing alone.

mapped.earth

Going down the Marius Hills pit to look for a lava tube

NASA’s PRISM programme has funded GIMLI, a Planetary Science Institute project led by Than Putzig with Honeybee Robotics and the Norwegian Space Agency. It will put ground-penetrating radar, seismometers and a gravimeter beside the Marius Hills Pit to check whether the skylight opens into a lava tube, and if so, how big it is. Lava tubes are prime candidates for sheltered lunar bases.

ScienceDaily / PSI