Friday, 16 October 2026

Claude Code as a USB-trace detective for Linux drivers

Christian Schaller passed a Plustek OpticFilm 8200i film scanner (Genesys GL128, no Linux support) through to a Windows VM, captured its USB traffic with usbmon, and had Claude diff the traces against Linux behaviour. Result: a SANE backend with colour, greyscale and infrared scanning, plus a GNOME negative-scanning app. The same approach produced kernel and libcamera patches for a ThinkPad X1 Carbon’s IMX471/IPU7 camera, lifting low-light frame brightness from 31 to 91.

His caveats are the useful part: single units, single frames, blue still ~17% short, and every result had to be checked on real hardware.

Christian Schaller, GNOME blogs

The leap second gets a retirement date: 20 May 2027

Resolution 5 of the 28th General Conference on Weights and Measures (Versailles, 13–15 Oct) makes UTC continuous from 20 May 2027 and lets UT1−UTC drift up to an hour. The driver is the 30% chance of a negative leap second by 2035, which very little software has ever exercised. NPL estimates the full hour won’t be reached for at least a millennium.

BIPM, CGPM 2026 Resolution 5 · The Register (background)

Slowing every division to fix one in 2⁶⁴

Futhark’s C backend could crash on INT32_MIN / -1 — undefined behaviour in C, a trap on x86. The fix adds a branch to squot32 and negates via unsigned wraparound. CPU and real GPU benchmarks show nothing; a contrived CUDA division benchmark goes from 5.5 ms to 12.6 ms. A neat case study in paying a certain cost to remove a nearly invisible one.

Futhark blog

Mononoke’s builder says Scion borrowed without credit

Follow-up to Anthropic’s git-replacing Scion: Rain (sunshowers), who worked on Meta’s Mononoke, argues Scion’s “derived data” design for operations like blame closely mirrors Mononoke, while Anthropic credits only Sapling’s “hard-won lessons.” The objection isn’t to copying open source, but to attribution — with a warning that LLM-designed systems will increasingly re-derive prior art without knowing it. A second post adds more.

sunshowers, part 1 · part 2

Niko Matsakis on what agents mean for Rust

Rust’s long-time language designer opens with his own unease about LLMs, then argues Rust is already a strong fit for agentic development — the compiler is a fast, strict reviewer — and sketches where the language could lean further into that. Companion to his SPLASH workshop talk.

babysteps

Meta releases Muse Spark Open

An 816B-parameter mixture-of-experts (42B active) with a 1M-token context, pitched at coding and long-horizon agent work and billed as the most capable US open-weight model. The licence is Meta’s own with limited commercial terms. Reportedly runs on two M5 Ultra Mac Studios via MLX.

Meta AI Research

Simons Foundation puts $15M behind maths in the AI era

With Anthropic and OpenAI as funding partners, the foundation will run open grant calls for workshops and projects on checking AI-assisted results, learning tools and setting community norms; the labs add compute. David Spergel: the maths community, not a company, should decide how these tools are judged. The same day, Derek Thompson’s essay on why mathematicians grieve frames maths as a cross-generational conversation that AI risks interrupting — “knowledge without understanding,” in Strogatz’s phrase.

Simons Foundation · Derek Thompson

Teaching sparrows a song they lost in the 1960s

Physicist Gabriel Mindlin’s group rebuilt a rufous-collared sparrow song from hand-drawn 1960s annotations, synthesised it, and played it in a Buenos Aires park. Within three months a local bird was copying parts of it. Related work: regent honeyeaters bred in zoos learning wild song from live tutors (“birds don’t learn very well from CDs”) and then teaching the next generation.

Yale Environment 360

Perseverance passes Opportunity’s distance record

45.22 km to Opportunity’s 45.16, in 5.5 years instead of nearly 15. The difference is AutoNav: it images the terrain, builds a 3D hazard map and plans on the move, now doing about 90% of the driving (vs ~5% for its predecessors) and up to 412 m in a sol.

Universe Today

A third galaxy with no dark matter

DF9 joins DF2 and DF4 as a triplet ~65 million light-years away, each apparently made of ordinary matter alone. One explanation is an ancient collision in which the dark matter sailed through while gas clumped. Either way, it’s awkward for MOND: you can’t strip away a modification of gravity.

Quanta Magazine

Why the Moon has two faces: Earth’s tides

Using Chang’e-6 far-side samples alongside Apollo and Chang’e-5 rocks, Hejiu Hui’s Nanjing team proposes that once the Moon was tidally locked, tidal heating warmed the near side more, driving circulation in the magma ocean: magnesium-rich anorthosite drifted far-side (thick crust), KREEP pooled near-side. The deep mantle is the same on both.

ScienceDaily (National Science Review)

How a bendy bus stays un-bent at speed

A bearing-ring turntable joins two subframes under the bellows. In rear-engine “pusher” buses, sensor-driven semi-active dampers watch speed, steering and articulation angle, stiffening the joint when jackknifing looms and cutting throttle via drive-by-wire if needed — stiff on the motorway, loose at the kerb.

The Autopian

Fortran turns 70

The first Fortran manual appeared on 15 October 1956. Still a workhorse in weather, climate, nuclear and materials codes; Manchester’s Science and Industry Museum hosts a free celebration workshop on 1 December (Zoom available).

fortran-lang.org

Woodward topples Caruana in the US Championship

Round 5 was the bloodiest yet — eight decisive games of twelve. Andy Woodward beat the defending champion in a Ragozin for his career-best win and now shares the lead with Wesley So on 3.5/5. Rose Atwell beat Carissa Yip with a brilliancy; Alice Lee leads the women by a full point on 4.5/5.

Chess.com

Sculpture by the Sea opens today, 30th year

Bondi to Tamarama coastal walk, 16 Oct–2 Nov, ~450,000 visitors expected. Route 333 from the city or T4 to Bondi Junction plus shuttles; extra buses daily, local road closures and weekend clearways on Bondi Rd and Campbell Pde. Tonight also has Sydney FC v Wanderers at Allianz.

Transport for NSW

Last ten days of PACA’s Mamma Mia! in Chatswood

PACA Presents’ production at the Concourse Theatre runs until 25 October; all ages, 2½ hours with interval. Also closing soon: My Fair Lady at the Opera House (31 Oct) and The Lion King at the Capitol (1 Nov).

SydneyTheatre.com