Wednesday, 14 October 2026

Is an LLM a tool? Hickey says no, and gets a reply

Rich Hickey argues that LLMs are automation, not tools: you hand work over to them rather than wield them, and you lose the learning that doing the work would have given you. In a reply, Huahai agrees about the lost learning but says compilers and spreadsheets automate work and are still tools. On his view, the skill is in how you check the output.

His list of checks is basically a practice regime. Make the model explain unfamiliar code, then challenge the explanation. Read the source yourself. Test every proposed change and reject any that fail. Use the model to argue against your reading of a paper, not to replace reading it.

Rich Hickey (LinkedIn) · yyhh.org reply

Agents write 17× the code but ship 1.3× the releases

A study reported to be by MIT and Wharton researchers followed more than 100,000 GitHub developers from code through to release. Compared with developers working unassisted, autonomous-agent users produced about 17× the lines of code, 2.8× the commits and 2.5× the pull requests, but only about 1.3× the releases. The authors call this a “weak-link” effect: AI speeds up writing code, while integration, review and release management stay at human pace.

Ars Technica · nocode.tech summary

Anthropic moved off git because agents broke it

Merges to Anthropic’s monorepo went from about 2,500 a day in May to more than 30,000 a day by September, and CI runs about 25 million checkouts a day. Git’s offline, distributed design suits few of its clients now, because nearly all of them are always-online agents and jobs. A seven-person team built Scion, a server-centric version control system, and Antique, a review tool, then completed the migration in five months. Scion’s CPU and memory footprint is about 200× smaller than the old git mirror fleet’s, and checkouts take seconds instead of minutes.

Anthropic Engineering

A Rust soundness hole that dates back to 1.4

A new issue shows how to break a struct’s T: 'static bound: assign to a covariant field and let the Drop impl read a dangling reference. The program compiles, and AddressSanitizer reports stack-use-after-scope. Contributors traced variants back to Rust 1.18 (2017), and lcnr found one that compiles on 1.4 (2015). It was triaged P-critical, later lowered to P-high, and is still open.

rust-lang/rust #164250

Who is vfmaddrnd231pd?

An FMA instruction with its own per-instruction rounding mode would be very useful, since the alternative is a slow global mode switch. The 2024 Intel SDM documents one. purplesyringa found that GNU as rejects it, the intrinsics are missing from the compilers, its opcode uses a “DDS” notation found nowhere else in the manual, and it raises #UD on Haswell. It is also gone from the 2026 SDM. Her guess, which she flags as unconfirmed, is that Intel pulled it from silicon late and left the documentation behind.

purplesyringa.moe

Recht: OpenAI’s “faster FFT” is galactic

One of the papers in OpenAI’s maths dump claims an FFT with a slightly smaller log n factor than Cooley–Tukey. Ben Recht says the hidden constant is so large that it would only win at absurd input sizes. It also assumes exact arithmetic on arbitrarily large complex numbers, a model in which earlier work had already ruled out realistic speedups. He calls it “less a breakthrough and more a malicious exploit” of how theoretical computer science scores progress.

arg min (Ben Recht)

Gemini 4 Argon is now generally available

Twelve days after the announcement, Argon is open to paying API customers and to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. Agentic coding in Antigravity is limited to Ultra. Introductory pricing is $2/$10 per million input/output tokens, doubling after 30 November. Google says teams using Argon in Antigravity made more than 35% more agentic code submissions and almost a third fewer rollbacks. It is also giving 10,000 scientists six months of free top-tier access.

Reuters via KFGO

A ten-month, hand-made ZX Spectrum crack intro

Mark Dastmalchi-Round wrote a 10 KB demoscene intro in Z80 assembly for a stock 128K Spectrum. It has a smooth scroller, a parallax starfield, VU meters that read the AY sound chip’s registers back, and an Amiga tracker module cut from four channels to three, with chords faked by fast ornament switching. Each star caches its screen byte and bit mask, so stars move with a single rlca. Its first starfield was slow enough to drag the music down. He debugged in an emulator and on real hardware, with bit patterns sketched in a notebook, and says many of the breakthroughs came on dog walks. He says no AI was used.

markround.com

RimWorld leaves Unity for its own engine

Update 1.7 moves RimWorld to Waylith, Ludeon’s in-house engine, and Ludeon says its next, unannounced game uses it too. The game is meant to look and play the same. Ludeon reports a 2.2× speed-up in a late-game stress test, and a 1,500-mod pack now loads in 6 minutes instead of 14. Saves move both ways between 1.6 and 1.7, and most mods work unchanged. For now 1.7 is on the unstable Steam branch only.

Ludeon blog

Blokkily: a pattern-first DAW an agent can play

Blokkily is an experimental open-source DAW. The pattern is the core unit, with a tracker, a piano roll and a step grid all editing the same pattern live. Tunings are stored in cents, so microtonal and non-12-tone patterns play as written. Probability and loop conditions carry through the arrangement. Run it with --mcp and an agent can write notes, move automation and take screenshots of the open window, and every change it makes can be undone like a click.

GitHub: blokkily

Telling left- from right-handed molecules one at a time

Osaka University researchers built a sensor from two gold wires about 0.57 nm apart. As a single amino acid passes through the gap it changes the tunnelling current, and a classifier identifies its handedness about 88% of the time. Tested on Murchison meteorite and Atacama soil extracts, the results broadly matched lab LC-MS. The device needs no cooling and survives 300 °C, which makes it a candidate life-detector for missions to Enceladus or Europa.

Universe Today

A brain map drawn in fats: 539 “lipizones”

EPFL researchers scanned 109 mouse-brain slices one laser spot at a time with mass-spectrometry imaging, made about 7 million measurements of 172 lipids, and used machine learning to reconstruct a 3D atlas. It splits the brain into 539 chemically distinct zones, including structure in white matter that had looked uniform. The atlas is free to explore online. The study is in Nature.

ScienceDaily (EPFL)

A Hittite royal archive turns up at Samuha

This season’s dig near Sivas, in central Turkey, found 131 cuneiform tablets and fragments, up from 53 last year. They are in Hittite and Hurrian and date to the reign of Tudhaliya II. The excavators call it the largest Hittite-language find this century. Among the texts are generals asking for reinforcements, a fever that killed an infant princess, and what reads like a travel diary kept by bird-diviners.

The History Blog

Caruana joins So at the top; Alice Lee leads alone

Round 4 of the US Championships was decided in endgames. Caruana ground down Robson in a long rook ending to draw level with So on 3/4. Xiong beat co-leader Awonder Liang, and Oparin and Niemann also won. In the women’s event, Alice Lee beat Paragua to lead outright on 3.5, half a point ahead of Cervantes. After Tuesday’s rest day, round 5 starts at 4am Sydney time on Thursday.

Chess.com

Busy from Thursday, starting at The Star

Spamalot opens Thursday at the Sydney Event Centre at The Star in Pyrmont (15–18 Oct), so expect theatre crowds right on your doorstep. The Rugby League World Cup also starts at Allianz Stadium that day. Friday has Avenged Sevenfold at Olympic Park, the Sydney Derby at Allianz (8pm) and the opening of Sculpture by the Sea. Then comes Saturday’s Bledisloe, Everest and Kings triple. XG plays Olympic Park tonight. Nothing is listed for Darling Harbour or Pyrmont itself.

Transport for NSW events · BroadwayWorld Sydney