Sunday, 11 October 2026

Russell bins the sprint lead on lap one; McLarens collide

In the rain-hit Singapore sprint Russell passed Verstappen at the start, then slid into the wall at the final corner of lap one (“overly confident”, he admitted). Verstappen won from Hamilton and Leclerc; Antonelli took 4th. On the last lap Norris attacked Piastri into Turn 5, they touched, and Oscar spun to 14th — the incident is under investigation. Antonelli now leads Russell by 89 (325–236).

GP qualifying: Verstappen pole from Leclerc, Hamilton, Antonelli, Norris. Russell qualified 6th but drops to the back for his engine change, so Piastri starts 6th.

Formula1.com: sprint · RaceFans: points · Formula1.com: qualifying

Prove the pipeline on known answers first, then go looking

Jesse Waites pointed an embedding search plus Claude Haiku at 4.35 million transcribed VOC pages and old newspapers. The pipeline didn’t count as working until it had re-found known events as controls: Tambora, Laki and Breen’s 1615 dodo record. Then it turned up candidates: an 1812 meteorite fall near Pandharpur, three Javan rhinos shipped toward the King of Kandy (none survived), and three volcanic eruptions missing from the Smithsonian catalogue. Each find is traced to a scan of the original page and is marked “pending specialist review”. The toolkit, Antiquity, is open source.

jessewaites.com

Hales: what Lean can and can’t vouch for

Thomas Hales’s guest post on Tao’s blog is a calm audit of the trusted base. The kernel is a few thousand lines of C++. This summer several soundness bugs turned up, one of which “disproved” Collatz. AI-assisted security researchers found them, and they are now fixed. Cross-checking against ~25 independent kernels helps. The bigger risk is misformalisation: a valid proof of the wrong statement. Hales’s fix is a human audit of statement fidelity, which is far cheaper than checking the proof. He also flags a new worry: an AI planting a subtle backdoor soundness bug.

“We absolutely cannot put blind trust in systems such as Lean.”

What’s new (Tao’s blog)

Agents write 30% more code, but no more issues get resolved

Harvard’s Fiona Chen and James Stratton studied Jellyfish data from 700+ firms: ~300M commits and PRs from 2021 to March 2026. After teams adopted agents, lines of code rose 30% and PRs 23%. Time from PR to merge rose 49%, comments per PR rose 35%, and the share of PRs needing changes nearly doubled. Issue resolution showed no significant gain. The bottleneck has moved to review.

Superpower Daily (via Ars Technica)

REA: reverse-engineering tools for your coding agent

An MIT-licensed toolkit that lets an agent walk native binaries (functions, strings, xrefs, call graphs) and pick apart JavaScript/Electron apps from their ASAR archives. It can also capture browser runtime activity and diff it across runs. The aim is to explain a feature, then change or rebuild it. It doesn’t cover firmware yet, but the binary side is close.

rea.tools · GitHub

Triple-A Minesweeper

Minesweeper buried under every AAA convention: unskippable-feeling licence logos, a Metal Gear-style narrated backstory for a hero called Sweeper, subtitles over the playfield, a hint arrow that points to the wrong square, a “John Sweeper” DLC hat, audio logs and a closing credits song. It’s a sharp checklist of what not to put between a player and a good little puzzle.

Play it

A balloon telescope maps magnetic threads above the Sun

SUNRISE III hung a 1-metre solar telescope under a helium balloon at ~35 km, above most of the atmosphere. Three new ApJ Letters papers use its infrared spectropolarimeter. They find ~725 km magnetic threads in the quiet-Sun canopy, weaker than predicted, with occasional polarity-flipped intrusions that simulations tie to twisted flux ropes.

Universe Today

An antenna made of light

NC State researchers ionised a thin channel of air with a laser and used the plasma filament as a 30 MHz VHF transmitting antenna. A metal ring capacitively couples the RF in, with no physical contact. The antenna’s length is set by laser parameters and it is steered by moving the beam. So far it only transmits (IEEE Journal of Microwaves).

ScienceDaily

A planet born after its star died?

The team reanalysed a 1999 Hubble spectrum of white dwarf HS 0209+0832 with an updated atomic database. Many mystery lines turned out to be niobium, an element tied to stellar death, not birth. TESS adds a repeating brightness signal. The candidate is a Jupiter-sized “second-generation” planet built from the star’s ejected material, now losing its atmosphere (Nature Astronomy, Warwick). This new result came out of 27-year-old data.

ScienceDaily

Wallace and Gromit, 90% alone

Nick Park made A Grand Day Out mostly by himself, starting in 1982. He had no video assist, so he saw each shot only when the film came back a week later. One script line about building a rocket became more than a year of animation. The project stalled at seven minutes until Aardman hired him and let him finish it in spare hours. Gromit lost his dialogue early and has acted with his eyes ever since.

Animation Obsessive

Maghsoodloo wins Freestyle Friday

In the weekly Chess960 event Parham Maghsoodloo scored 9/11 in a 112-player field (his only loss was to Yakubboev). Bortnyk, Sklokin and Duda finished on 8.5. The result is a step toward the 2027 FIDE Freestyle World Championship; the knockout finals are in December.

Chess.com

Spring Cycle rolls through Pyrmont this morning; busy week ahead

Today: Spring Cycle runs from North Sydney to Parramatta Park via Pyrmont, so expect road closures and crowded trains this morning. Wed 14: XG at Afterpay Arena. Thu 15: Rugby League World Cup opener at Allianz Stadium. Fri 16: Sydney FC v Wanderers, Avenged Sevenfold, and Sculpture by the Sea opens at Bondi (to 2 Nov). Sat 17: The Everest at Randwick and Anyma in the Domain.

Transport for NSW events · Spring Cycle

Last three weeks of The Lion King; Carousel next door this week

The Lion King closes at the Capitol on 1 November (Beetlejuice moves in later that month). Closer to home, the amateur Carousel plays the Foundry Theatre in Pyrmont from Thu 15 to Sun 18 Oct, the same dates as Spamalot at The Star. School holidays end Monday.

Sydney Theatre: The Lion King · Sydney Theatre listings