Friday, 9 October 2026

Margaret Hamilton (1936–2026)

The woman who led MIT’s Apollo flight-software team died on 30 September, aged 90; MIT announced it this week. Her priority-driven executive is why the 1202 alarms during Apollo 11’s descent shed background work instead of aborting the landing, and she pushed the term “software engineering” when it was still a joke.

The story worth keeping: her young daughter crashed a simulator by launching the pre-launch program mid-flight. Hamilton wrote it up and proposed a guard; she was told astronauts were too well trained to make that mistake. Jim Lovell made it on Apollo 8, and the fix went in.

MIT News

Claude Haiku 5.5: a subagent at a tenth of the price

Anthropic’s new small model costs $0.10/$0.50 per million input/output tokens for prompts under 100k (about 90% below Haiku 4.5), and is the first Haiku with an adjustable effort setting. On Terminal-Bench 4.0 it scores 39.2% against Haiku 4.5’s 0% and Sonnet 5.5’s 70.6%. Anthropic’s own pitch is as the cheap worker under an Opus or Sonnet orchestrator, not as the main coding model.

Same day, OpenAI rolled GPT-6 out to all ChatGPT tiers with “Intelligent UI” (answers rendered as small interactive widgets); the Codex models are unchanged.

Anthropic · OpenAI

A Lean check passed — for a different proof

Bastounis, Circelli and Anders Hansen argue that the AI-written Lean formalisation behind OpenAI’s Navier–Stokes blow-up claim does not correspond to the natural-language proof it is supposed to certify. The kernel verified something; the mistake hid in the translation step. Their wider point: a green Lean build of an AI autoformalisation says nothing about the informal argument unless a human checks that the statements match. Pertinent, given how many of this week’s 377 OpenAI results lean on exactly that.

arXiv 2610.08144

“The absence of results was not evidence of a limitation”

In a guest post on Terence Tao’s blog, Raghu Meka argues that folklore barriers (“famous people tried this”, “a heuristic says it can’t work”) spread like rumours and steer people away from problems, and that AI picking off long-abandoned questions suggests some of those walls were never there. He recalls dismissing a question Adam Klivans asked him as a student; an answer to it later became key to a central result. His asymmetry: wrongly believing in a barrier costs more than wrongly doubting one.

What’s new (Tao) — Raghu Meka

The first stand-alone nuclear clock is ticking

Thorsten Schumm’s group at TU Wien has a thorium-229 clock that locks a laser to a nuclear transition in a crystal and corrects its own drift, running unattended for over 24 hours at about 10⁻¹⁵ stability — no atomic clock needed as a reference. That’s not yet better than the best optical clocks, but nuclei are far less sensitive to stray fields, which is the long-term bet. A Beijing team reports a nuclear clock of its own at the same time.

Nature · TU Wien release · Popular Science

Rosalind Franklin didn’t miss the helix — Photo 51 was a deliberate retake

Alistair Sponsel and Brian Sutton examined Franklin’s actual X-ray camera and slides at King’s. The earlier Photo 49 carries a blemish from a slipping camera part, yet she had already used it for helical calculations. Notebooks in three cities support the reading that Photo 51 was a “publication-quality retake”, shot specifically as evidence of a helix — not a picture whose meaning she failed to see.

Science History Institute · Science

Webb reads the debris of planet-sized smash-ups

Kate Su’s team took mid-infrared spectra of 21 “extreme debris disks” — hot, fine dust where rocky planets would orbit. A third are silica-rich, like volcanic glass: vaporised rock from Mars-sized bodies colliding, seen only around stars younger than 300 million years, the window when Theia hit Earth and made the Moon. The rest look like gentler grazing impacts between Moon-sized objects.

ScienceDaily

God of War on PSP, statically recompiled to WebAssembly

No emulator: the decrypted MIPS executable is split into functions and emitted as C++ against a model of the PSP’s registers and memory, then built with Emscripten. OS calls are reimplemented at high level, GE display lists are decoded on a worker and drawn in WebGL2, and the audio synth is rewritten. Chains of Olympus plays boot-to-combat at ~60 fps in a browser, phones included. Bring your own disc.

GitHub · HN

Bigwords: the sign lives in the URL fragment

A tiny open-source tool that turns any screen into a big-text sign. Everything — message, colours, font, slides, countdowns — sits after the #, which browsers never send to the server, so there’s no backend and nothing stored. Built to drive a wall tablet its author can’t physically reach.

bigwords.page · HN

Weekend crowds, then the Rugby League World Cup opener

Last weekend of school holidays: Olivia Dean at Afterpay Arena Fri–Sat, Monster Jam at Accor Stadium Sat, and Spring Cycle rolls through Pyrmont on Sunday morning. We Are The Tigers opens at the Hayes tonight. Next Thursday 15 Oct, Australia v New Zealand opens the Rugby League World Cup at Allianz Stadium (8.05pm) — tickets cover transport, and there’s trackwork on several lines from ~9.10pm, so check the planner for the trip home.

Transport NSW: RLWC · Transport NSW events · BroadwayWorld