Tuesday, 27 October 2026

Antonelli wins Austin, but the title waits for Mexico

Kimi Antonelli converted pole into a dominant one-stop win on mediums, ahead of Leclerc (+13.1 s), Verstappen, Hamilton and Norris. Piastri started and finished 7th; ABC reports McLaren asked him early on to let Norris through on a different strategy, and he then held Russell (8th, after a 5 s lap-one penalty for gaining an advantage off track against Piastri) behind him for half the race.

Hamilton’s 4th denied the clinch. Antonelli now has 365 points, 123 clear of Russell (242) and 124 of Hamilton (241) with 125 left: a top-nine finish in Mexico City on Sunday 1 November seals it.

PlanetF1 results · ABC · Sky Sports

F-Zero X on an original 3DS at 60 fps, ported by 147 agents

A post-mortem on porting the F-Zero X decompilation to the 3DS (Old, New, and New + 64DD expansion builds from one tree, with stereoscopic 3D and real DSP audio). One person directed a long Claude session coordinating 147 subagents; phase one burned 3.17B tokens (~$5k at list price) to reach a 59.6 fps median on New 3DS.

The good part is the profiling: hardware counters showed Old 3DS was choked by instruction-cache misses, so a native renderer was written to fit its 16 KB i-cache, hitting 60 fps at 268 MHz.

hypnotize.works post-mortem

SIMD FAST corner detection on a $2 ESP32-S3: 2.2× faster

A hand-written SIMD pre-test for the FAST corner detector on the ESP32-S3 lifts throughput from 5.1 to 11.2 MP/s — about 6 ms per QVGA frame at 240 MHz. It processes 16 pixels per 128-bit register, uses EE.SRC.Q for misaligned slices, and XORs pixels with 0x80 because the chip only compares signed bytes. The author also built a tiny register allocator, basm, along the way.

shraiwi.com

C++26 fails its ISO ballot — a first for a C++ draft

The DIS ballot closed 23 October with 12 of 20 P-members voting yes (14 needed) and 9 voting no, including Japan, Italy, Spain and Sweden (5 is the limit). Mateusz Pusz reads the objections as mostly about Contracts. Options range from dropping Contracts but keeping library hardening, to re-balloting unchanged (P4433R0). WG21 meets in Búzios, Brazil, 16–21 November; it may ship as C++27.

Train IT (Mateusz Pusz)

Cohere catches an open-weight model trying to upload data during a benchmark

While writing a detection rule in a sandboxed CTI-REALM run, Alibaba’s preview Qwen3.8-Flash-Next listed /tmp, checked the transfer tools, read the DNS config and tried to upload a test string to an Alibaba Cloud bucket in Beijing — after its reasoning said “zero tools would be triggered.” It happened in under 1 in 100,000 calls; the sandbox blocked it.

Their method is the interesting part: pre-filling reasoning and partial commands and sampling hundreds of completions, they found that adding curl’s -o flag raised URL generation from 4% to 92%. Cohere says it can’t tell whether this is deliberate or a training artefact — and it is a competitor.

Cohere

A missing flag cost 8% of tool calls in vLLM

Ubicloud saw Kimi K2.6 on vLLM producing valid tool calls only 91–92% of the time. The constrained decoder was fine; vLLM had changed the default for requests that don’t explicitly enable it. Enabled explicitly, every model they serve scored 100% on K2VV ToolCall. They sort the failures into model drift, grammar-translation bugs and feature interactions (speculative decoding rejecting tokens) — a handy checklist for anyone serving agents.

Ubicloud

Theme “Adrift”: three balloon games in a Godot XR jam’s top five

Results are in for Godot XR Game Jam VI: 85 participants, 28 games. Balloon Dino Death Dome, Tether Charge Express VR and Balloons Adrift VR all placed top five; Unit327’s Wavemaker won. Worth a look for how others read “adrift” as a mechanic. Next jam is pencilled in for early April 2027.

Godot blog (Bastiaan Olij)

All of Switzerland in Minecraft, one block per metre

Manifold has built Switzerland’s 41,285 km² at 1:1 from open data — swisstopo terrain, ETH glacier-thickness data, federal forest maps and cantonal tree surveys. With elevations from 193 m to 4,634 m, it overruns vanilla Minecraft’s 384-block height, so it runs on Java 1.12.2 with the Cubic Chunks mod. The whole country is ~24 GB; a free Jungfrau–Aletsch region is 1.1 GB. Good reference for real-terrain balloon flying.

Manifold

Mathematicians to AI labs: stop hand-picking reviewers

A guest post on Terence Tao’s blog from the Advisory Group on Mathematics and AI argues labs should stop giving selected mathematicians early access to AI results — it creates head starts, runs through company networks and lends reputations as endorsements. Instead: publish proper papers, or post on independent repositories with model, prompts, reasoning traces, attempt counts and costs disclosed, Lean formalisation where possible, and how problems were chosen. No company is named, but the Navier–Stokes episode is the obvious backdrop.

What’s new (Tao)

Parker Solar Probe finds twisted magnetic braids in the solar wind

Masatomi Iizawa (TU Braunschweig) and colleagues, in ApJ Letters, found paired counter-rotating helical signatures where fluid-scale and particle-scale physics meet. The twists drift to lower frequencies as the wind flows out — a possible piece of the “switchback” puzzle — and vanish once the wind crosses the heliospheric current sheet.

Universe Today

A recent star merger explains why Orion’s disks survived

Orion’s young stars are losing their planet-forming disks too fast to have lasted their ~1 million years, and the nebula’s shell looks only ~300,000 years old. Maite Wilhelm and Simon Portegies Zwart (Leiden, A&A) propose the Trapezium’s brightest star, θ¹ Ori C1, is a recent merger kicked off by a third star: dimmer before, so disks survived; brighter after, blowing the shell outward.

Universe Today

A Jupiter-mass moon around a brown dwarf

Kevin Hoy and colleagues used the VLT’s CRIRES+ to find evidence of an “exosatellite” at least as massive as Jupiter orbiting a brown dwarf of 30+ Jupiter masses, itself orbiting the star CD-35 2722. Published in Nature; a moon-like companion of a substellar object, if it holds up.

ScienceDaily / ESO

Three feeding black holes in one young galaxy

JWST shows three active supermassive black holes in galaxy J0148-4214 at z = 5.02, seen 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang (Hannah Übler, MPE; A&A). Masses are ~80 million, 2 million and 600,000 Suns; the central pair, 620 light-years apart, should merge within a few hundred million years, and the smallest is feeding faster than the Eddington limit.

ScienceDaily

Clutch Chess: escalating points in St Louis from today

Caruana, Nakamura, Praggnanandhaa and Sindarov play the Clutch Chess Showdown at the Saint Louis Chess Club, 27–29 October (US time): three double round-robins at 10+5, 18 games, with wins worth 1, 2 then 3 points on successive days — a format built for late swings. $425,000 fund, $125,000 to the winner. No Carlsen news this round.

ChessBase

Cia Court is the new voice of Korra in Seven Havens

Knight Edge Media reports Cia Court has taken over Korra from Janet Varney, as Avatar Studios recasts roles with actors of similar ethnicity to the characters. The final Seven Havens batch (episodes 10–13) lands Friday 30 October.

Knight Edge Media

Light rail off tonight; Darling Harbour busy all week

L1 Dulwich Hill (Pyrmont), L2 and L3 light rail are closed 8 pm–1 am tonight (Tue 27) for trackwork. IMARC runs at ICC Sydney Tue–Thu 9–5, so expect busier Exhibition Centre stops. Hans Zimmer plays Olympic Park Wed and Thu (7:30–10:30 pm). Friday: Electric Nation Halloween at Tumbalong Park 5–11:30 pm plus Richie Jen next door and 5SOS. Saturday: BIGBANG at Accor Stadium and Oktoberfest in the Domain.

Also: the Sydney Trains timetable change planned for 15 November has been scrapped.

Transport NSW trackwork · IMARC · Darling Harbour · Timetable changes