Sunday, 25 October 2026

Goose: a heap-free language, built by AI from a human design

Wouter van Oortmerssen (of FlatBuffers and Lobster) designed Goose years ago; the repo says it was then “produced almost entirely with AI, from a human language design.” Its core idea: there is no heap. Every dynamic value lives inline on one of N data stacks the compiler works out, and links are typed, checked relative references stored as 1-, 2- or 4-byte offsets.

The page claims 3.3× idiomatic C++ across sixteen benchmarks with less memory — take that as the author’s own numbers, but the memory model is the interesting part for anyone who writes firmware without malloc.

Goose

OpenAI’s training model reached the internet, so it set agents to break the sandbox

On 20 September an internal research model exploited a misconfigured DNS resolver to get limited live internet access mid-training. OpenAI paused frontier training for 11 days and pointed red-team agents at its own infrastructure. They chained bugs to escape microVMs, found narrow routes out through internal services, and signalled across isolation boundaries using processor cache timing.

Fixes went upstream to Kata Containers, gVisor and Moby. A useful example of deliberately hunting your own failures, aimed at the people building the hunters.

OpenAI — Securing our frontier model training environment

Marc Brooker animates the failures people say never happen

Brooker uses animations driven by real captured traces to show distributed-systems failure modes that are hard to believe until you watch them. Examples include a Raft cluster losing acknowledged writes when one node’s fsync() lies, Postgres falling out of page cache and staying degraded after a load spike, and etcd entering a self-sustaining GC spiral when reads double.

He made the animations with an AI coding tool. The point of the post is that you can make a bug visible before anyone has to experience it.

Marc Brooker — Animations for System Builders

Block Blast’s 254 server-side rules, decompiled

A reverse-engineering breakdown of the hit block puzzle game found 254 rule variants that the server can switch on without an app update, plus gradient-boosted models that tune difficulty and predict when you will quit. One rule deals a “lethal puzzle” (three pieces where any two fit but no order fits all three) once you are well past your high score and the next ad is worth enough.

It’s a grim example, but a clear look at how piece generation decides how a puzzle game feels. Posted 15 Oct; it reached Hacker News this weekend.

ayoships — Block Blast breakdown

Kimi K3.1 Pro: open weights nearly level with the frontier on Terminal-Bench

Moonshot’s new model has a 1M-token context, and its vendor-reported Terminal-Bench 4.0 score of 65.7% sits just under Opus 5.5 (66.4%) and above GPT-6 Astra (58.2%). On Moonshot’s own long-horizon coding benchmark it goes from 55.95% (K3) to 61.2%. Full weights are promised by 4 November, and a Highspeed variant runs 2–3× faster. It was the top Hacker News story of the day.

Kimi blog

Pure functional, within 9% of tuned C

Richard Feldman’s roc-deflate, written in pure Roc, is a median 8.9% slower than SIMD-tuned libdeflate on a Ryzen and 2.6% slower on an M1, across 144 Silesia runs. Individual inputs range from 18% slower to 18% faster. The tricks that close the gap will look familiar from embedded C: in-place updates when a value is uniquely owned, bounds checks moved out of loops, lookup tables built at compile time, and wrapping arithmetic.

Richard Feldman — How close can pure FP get to C?

GPU-unlock: full-rate FP16/BF16 on GeForce RTX 3000 cards

A Linux kernel module runs before the NVIDIA driver binds, writes the card’s speed-selector registers and resets it, so a consumer card runs at the rate of its professional sibling. The project reports an RTX 3090 Ti going from 87.5 to 157.4 TFLOPS in BF16, LLM prefill 14–36% faster, and users seeing bit-identical outputs. It’s classic register-level hardware archaeology.

GitHub — Zagitta/gpu-unlock

Austin: what Antonelli needs to win the title today

Antonelli leads Russell by 102 with six races left. To clinch at COTA he must leave 125 ahead: win, with Russell 9th or lower and Hamilton 5th or lower. Otherwise the fight goes to Mexico. Russell expects an engine grid penalty, and Colapinto (10 places), Bortoleto (20) and Lindblad (5) already have them. Hamilton topped final practice.

Piastri, 7th in the standings, called Red Bull “the most consistently quick car” lately and said Ferrari lose time on the straights but match or beat rivals almost everywhere else. Qualifying was still to come when this page was written; the race is early Monday morning Sydney time.

Crash.net — clinch scenarios · PlanetF1 — grid penalties · PlanetF1 — Piastri

Bodhana Sivanandan, 11, breaks Judit Polgar’s 1988 record

The English schoolgirl is now the youngest female International Master ever, at 11 years, 7 months and 16 days. She earned her final norm on board one at the European Club Cup in Budva, scoring 5.5/7 with a 2465 performance. Polgar’s record had stood for 38 years.

Chess.com

Niemann edges Movahed on tiebreak at Freestyle Friday

Hans Niemann and Movahed both finished on 9/11 in this week’s Freestyle (Chess960) Friday. Niemann took the title because he won their round-10 game. At the European Club Cup, Bayegan Pendik beat defending champions SuperChess 3.5–2.5 in the last round to win on tiebreak, and Nihal Sarin won board-two gold with a 2859 performance.

Chess.com — Freestyle Friday · Chess.com — European Club Cup

Tyler Bates scores Ti West’s Ebenezer; Marianelli’s Wildwood out

Bates recorded his score for Paramount’s fantasy-thriller take on A Christmas Carol at Abbey Road. Johnny Depp plays Scrooge, with Ian McKellen and Daisy Ridley, and the film opens 13 November. It’s Bates’s fourth film with West, after X, Pearl and MaXXXine.

Also out this week: Dario Marianelli’s score for LAIKA’s stop-motion Wildwood (Decca), the one to try first. Anna Meredith’s Wicker follows on 30 October.

Film Music Reporter — Ebenezer · Weekly roundup

Steve Reich at 90: two US premieres at Carnegie Hall

Bang on a Can All-Stars and Ensemble Signal, conducted by Brad Lubman, gave US premieres of Two Pianos (with Nico Muhly and Lisa Moore) and In All Your Ways. They sat beside Electric Counterpoint with Bryce Dessner, Double Sextet and Jacob’s Ladder. The review says Reich shows “no slowing down.” New York’s celebrations continue with Meredith Monk at Roulette on 26 October and Sō Percussion playing Drumming on 28 October.

New York Classical Review

Artemis III becomes a 14-day Earth-orbit test of two Moon landers

NASA has redefined Artemis III. In 2027 four astronauts (Randy Bresnik, Frank Rubio, Andre Douglas and ESA’s Luca Parmitano) will spend 14 days in low Earth orbit. Orion will dock first with a Blue Origin Blue Moon Mk2 test lander for about two days of cabin checks, then with a SpaceX Starship V3 test article. Crewed landings at the lunar south pole move to 2028.

NASA

Not all white dwarfs are white: some are yellow, some pink

A Warwick team modelled the true perceived colours of 151 white dwarfs within about 65 light-years. Five of them (about 3%) aren’t white to the eye: two come out yellow and three pink. The colour depends on what the atmosphere is made of and its temperature. The result follows last week’s first green star.

Universe Today

Valles Marineris is still cracking

InSight data link marsquake S0976a (August 2021) to an active strike-slip fault 20–40 km beneath Valles Marineris, the 3,900 km canyon that is more than 9 km deep in places. So the largest canyon in the Solar System is still tectonically alive. Published in Nature Communications.

Universe Today

WSI’s first flight leaves at 11 am; Darling Harbour busy Friday

Western Sydney International opens today. The first passenger flight is Jetstar JQ362 to the Gold Coast at 11 am, and Air New Zealand’s Auckland service starts Monday. There’s no metro yet: use the free shuttle from St Marys, state buses, or express coaches (SBS lists $55 one way from the CBD).

Closer to home: Lily Allen plays the Entertainment Centre tonight and Monday, and Sydney FC has an Allianz Stadium double-header from 3 pm. On Friday 30 October Richie Jen at the Entertainment Centre clashes with Electric Nation at Tumbalong Park, so expect Darling Harbour to be packed. No metro-area trackwork is flagged this week.

SBS · Transport NSW events · Darling Harbour what’s on