Tuesday, 13 October 2026

“I’m sorry, but you still have to think”

Piotr Sarnacki uses an AI agent porting Campfire from Rails to Rust, Elixir and Go to show where unread code hides its mistakes. The Rust port quietly dropped CSRF handling and Redis. The Elixir port ran every SQL query in sequence. Closed-loop benchmarks hid the real failures: under a constant arrival rate, the Rust port delivered only about 14% of notifications. Raising a channel buffer from 256 to 16384 got delivery to about 90%, but worst-case latency went from 11 s to over 130 s.

His point is that every trade-off you don’t decide gets settled by chance. You only find out which way it fell when you choose a test that can show it.

itsallaboutthebit.com

Karpathy: the gap in what people think LLMs can do is widening

Karpathy describes three groups of people. Most see a clumsy chatbot, professionals see modest gains, and a small group (he estimates roughly 0.2%) sees agents finish weeks-long projects. He argues the payoff “scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon”, and that human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. The HN thread is split. A verification engineer reports proof projects shrinking from months to days, since the proof checker keeps the output honest. Sceptics ask where the AI-built killer apps are.

Karpathy on X · HN discussion

QGIS proposes banning AI-assisted contributions outright

A new enhancement proposal (QEP 428) would replace QGIS’s earlier, more permissive AI policy with a flat “not allowed”. The author says the old policy failed in practice because AI-generated contributions arrive faster than maintainers can review them. Uses like translation might be handled case by case later. Nothing has been decided yet: debate continues on the developer list, including whether the ban would also cover AI used for review or security.

GitHub: QEP pull request

Meta launches Muse Wonder

Meta released Muse Wonder on 12 October, alongside a larger Muse Wonder Full. It is a frontier model aimed at agent work. Its two headline features are “Active Memory”, which carries context across conversations, and “Active Focus”, which keeps trying new approaches on hard goals and checks in before consequential actions. It is available through the Meta Model API and Muse Code, but only Muse Code subscribers get Full.

Meta AI Research

A Wi-Fi 7 router turned into a 320 Msps SDR

This project repurposes a Gemtek W1700K router as a wideband receiver. Its MediaTek MT7996 radio DMAs raw 14-bit IQ samples into a 1 GiB ring in the Airoha AN7581 SoC’s DRAM. The kernel then streams those samples as UDP over the 10 GbE port. You get up to 320 Msps anywhere in the 2.4, 5 and 6 GHz bands, with a tunable LO and analogue filter, and a browser waterfall on the receiving host.

GitHub: w1700k-sdr

Nanolathe: Total Annihilation, rebuilt from scratch

Nanolathe is a clean-room, MIT-licensed reimplementation of the 1997 RTS, now in public beta. You supply the original game files. In return you get a modern GPU renderer with lighting and glow, terrain upscaled 2× by synthesis, and a “Classic” mode for purists. It runs natively on Windows, Mac and Linux and has online skirmish and Survival. A browser demo includes three original missions. It was the day’s top HN story at 600+ points.

nanolathe.gg · HN discussion

Capturing a commercial “spatial” plugin as four impulse responses

Austin Shijo wanted the effect of a commercial spatial-audio processor that pushes music off your ears and out into the room. He fed it impulses, sine sweeps, tones and noise, then used regularised deconvolution to recover four stereo impulse responses. Loaded into an open-source convolver on Linux, they reproduce most of the sound. What they can’t reproduce, its level-dependent gain and time-varying mode, shows exactly where the processor stops being a linear filter.

epestr.com

Can a picture be rigorous?

In a guest post on Tao’s blog, Kate Stange and Edmund Harriss argue that counting theorems has become a poor proxy for mathematical understanding. They propose that an illustration is rigorous when proofs certify what it reliably shows, which they call its affordances. Their examples include a buggy shader that turned circles into ellipses and turned out to reveal real structure. Early pixel plots of the Mandelbrot set looked disconnected because a feature was thinner than a pixel. They also warn that vibe-coded visualisations can leave their makers not understanding their own method.

What’s new: Illustration Beyond Proof

Music+Sound Awards: game-score finalists, winners Wednesday

The Music+Sound Awards announce winners on Wednesday 14 October. The gameplay-score finalists are John Paesano (Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora – From the Ashes), The Flight (007 First Light), Takeshi Furukawa (Planet of Lana II), the Destiny 2: Renegades team, Sam Slater & Daniel Avery (Saros) and Blue Stahli (Morbid Metal). Paesano, Slater and the Destiny team are also up for cinematics. The list is worth working through before the winners are named.

MCV/DEVELOP

Carlsen on the big screen; So and Liang still lead in St Louis

Grandmasters is Liza Mandelup’s documentary on Carlsen, Niemann and Wesley So. It is having a two-day cinema run (11 and 14 Oct US), and Gregory Tripi’s 30-track score is out on the streaming services. At the US Championships, So and Awonder Liang drew to stay joint leaders on 2.5/3. Shankland and Andy Woodward both won, and Woodward joined Caruana on 2. In the women’s event, Alice Lee, Cervantes and Paragua lead on 2.5. Defending champion Carissa Yip has 0.5.

Film Music Reporter: Grandmasters · Chess.com: US Champs R3

McLaren: sprint clash “unacceptable”, to be settled before Austin

The stewards took no action over Saturday’s last-lap Norris–Piastri collision, which put Piastri out of the sprint. Andrea Stella called it “unacceptable” and said the damage to McLaren’s constructors’ position is “material”. He wants reflection rather than public apologies, and the team will revisit it before Austin (25 Oct). Norris was unrepentant: “I have the right to do that.”

PlanetF1 · Speedcafe · Formula1.com: stewards’ verdict

Tattoos you can switch on and off

Carson Bruns’ group at CU Boulder encapsulated blue, magenta and yellow photochromic dyes in PMMA nanoparticles. A 365 nm UV LED turns the colour on in two or three seconds, and bright sunlight erases it. In skin, all three channels stayed switchable for 1.4–2.2 years, which makes the tattoo a rewritable full-colour display. The paper is in Matter & Light.

Live Science · Matter & Light paper

Weighing the Big Bang’s helium

Using the Large Binocular Telescope, the LBT YP project measured hydrogen and helium in 54 metal-poor galaxies, where stars have added very little helium. They get a primordial helium mass fraction of 24.58%, close to Planck’s 24.67% from the cosmic microwave background. Two completely independent methods agree. About 90% of all helium in the universe dates from the first few minutes.

Universe Today

Saturday is the big one: Bledisloe, Everest and Anyma

Accor Stadium hosts a rugby quadruple-header on Saturday 17 Oct: Wallaroos v Scotland at 12pm, two sevens matches, then the Bledisloe Cup at 3:45pm. Match tickets include transport, and express trains run from Central every 5–10 minutes from midday. Weekend trackwork hits T3, T4, T6 and T9 that morning. The same day brings Everest Day at Randwick, Anyma in the Domain and the Kings at the arena, so expect a crowded network in the afternoon and evening. Sculpture by the Sea opens on Friday.

Transport for NSW: Bledisloe Cup · All events