Friday, 30 October 2026

Fortnow: the Exponential Time Hypothesis is “toast”

Lance Fortnow on the OpenAI result: for every fixed k, k-SAT can be decided and its solutions counted in time (n+m)^O(1) 2^{O(n log log n / √log n)}, which refutes ETH and therefore SETH. Ryan O’Donnell and Shiva Kintali have posted follow-up proofs that aim for simplicity rather than the best bound, and he suggests starting with O’Donnell’s.

“I have not verified the proof myself, but it is safe to assume now that the exponential-time hypothesis is toast.” Impagliazzo, Paturi and Ryan Williams will work on verification. It does nothing for Subset Sum or TSP, because reducing them to 3-SAT adds too many variables. Aaronson has raised his P=NP estimate from 3% to 5%.

Computational Complexity blog · Shtetl-Optimized

Sidon sets: a smaller second-order term, with AlphaEvolve at the start

Tao, Daniel Carter and Kevin O’Bryant lower the upper bound on Sidon sets (sets where all pairwise sums are distinct) in [1,N] to N^1/2 + 0.94304 N^1/4 + O(1). The work started with a blog thread last year about using AlphaEvolve on the problem. After that, a series of computer-assisted refinements ran until “progress stalled”. The method also extends to γ-Golomb rulers. Golomb rulers are worth a look for a composer too, since no two marks repeat an interval.

Terence Tao · arXiv

“The last proof of human craft”: a logic-only Edge exploit

Orange Tsai (DEVCORE) writes up his Pwn2Own Berlin 2026 chain against Microsoft Edge. It uses five bugs plus two Windows features, with no memory corruption and “no LLMs/AI involved at all”. It starts with a universal XSS from a navigation-throttle flaw, overwrites protocols.json through an Immersive Reader file write, and gets code execution via telnet://. It won the Pwnie Epic Achievement award. The post is also an argument that hand-found logic bugs, which come from reading systems closely, still count.

Orange Tsai

A fingerprinting script dressed up as bioweapon code to scare off LLMs

One researcher crawled about 10,000 top sites and collected the canvas images that fingerprinting scripts draw (now in a gallery at fingerprint.garden). One canvas led to a script whose function names and strings looked like they were written to derail an LLM analysing it. Its alarming code paths are dead unless an environment variable is set. Underneath is ordinary navigator and WebGL fingerprinting, which the author traces to a Russian anti-DDoS company. Obfuscation now has a new target audience: AI analysis tools.

nullpt.rs

The case of the 9-bit AES key

PDF tools that advertise AES-256 were generating keys from weak randomness. MuPDF before 1.28.5 seeded its generator with a timestamp, which leaves about 9 bits of effective state, or 512 guesses. Foxit hashed a timestamp together with 32 “uninitialised” bytes that turned out to be zero in practice. OpenPDF and iText are also affected. V12 published brute-force decryptors; MuPDF is fixed. It is the classic firmware entropy bug, turning up in desktop software.

V12

Simon Willison: October is the inflection point for vibe-coded games

Willison argues that models can now build browser games that are actually fun with little guidance. He compares it to what November 2025 did for coding agents. His examples include Tree Appreciator (made from one prompt), Emberwick, Pumpkin Farmer and Battle Drones, which got better after the prompt “Make it a LOT more fun”. He credits Opus 5.5 with gains in 3D modelling, music and game feel. GPT-6 Astra can build games but, in his view, not yet with the same sense of fun.

simonwillison.net

Godot ships in the launch lineup for XREAL AURA glasses

Godot is in the launch lineup for XREAL’s see-through Android XR glasses. Developers can build, export and publish spatial games on the device itself with the Godot editor, and the release adds OpenXR Spatial Containers. The Godot Foundation, Blender Studio and W4 Games are porting DOGWALK to spatial for later this year. A balloon floating over your actual desk is now a plausible demo.

Godot Engine

950 straight days building a JavaScript engine

Yavashark is a small embeddable JS engine that one developer has worked on every day since March 2024: more than 4,200 commits, with progress measured against test262, which it now passes at about 82%. It supports Temporal and Intl and runs React with TypeScript, all on a tree-walking interpreter. A prototype of the next interpreter averages about 3.5× faster than V8’s jitless mode across 19 microbenchmarks, though the author says that figure may change.

Yavashark

How spiders turn “silk dope” into the toughest fibre

Gregory Holland’s group at San Diego State used NMR and modelling on black-widow silk. They found that the dissolved proteins first gather into fluid, droplet-like condensates. Weak bonds between particular amino-acid side groups push the water out and organise the disordered proteins, and those structures carry through into the finished thread. Lab-made silk is still weaker than the real thing; this shows which step it has been missing.

Quanta

Meteors don’t just burn up

Peter Jenniskens and colleagues analysed video of 75 meteorite falls and identified seven stages of atmospheric entry. Melting and breakup, rather than evaporation, mostly decide how much mass a rock loses and where its fragments land. That gives a staged model of how a body comes apart as it falls through the atmosphere.

ScienceDaily

A 1,000 AU “Cat’s Tail” from colliding dwarf planets

A University of Arizona team used Hubble’s STIS to image, in visible light, a dust streak around Beta Pictoris that JWST had previously seen only in infrared. Their best explanation is a collision between two dwarf planets, each about 1–3 times the mass of Ceres, that left a tail of debris about 1,000 AU long.

Universe Today

Betelgeuse turns egg-shaped every 5.9 years

VLA and ALMA radio data show that Betelgeuse’s outer atmosphere distorts on a 5.9-year cycle. The cycle matches its brightness changes and the proposed orbit of a companion star, Siwarha. The companion still isn’t confirmed, but this is the strongest evidence yet that Betelgeuse is a binary.

Universe Today

Fire salamanders glow green and cyan under UV

Max Planck researchers found that the glow comes mainly from the salamanders’ skin glands and toxic secretions, which keep fluorescing for more than a day. Nobody knows yet what compound causes it, or whether the glow is a signal, a warning, or neither.

ScienceDaily

Clutch Chess day 2: Pragg goes from last to first

Praggnanandhaa lost to Sindarov, then beat Nakamura twice and Caruana, and leads with 10 points. Sindarov and Caruana have 8.5 each. Nakamura led after day 1 but drew four, lost twice to Pragg, and is last on 8. Day 3, worth three points a win, was under way at the time of writing, so tomorrow’s page will have the result.

Chess.com

Piastri: the upgrades haven’t made the car easier to drive

Before Mexico, Piastri said rival teams are improving faster and that the MCL40 being hard to drive is “kind of our biggest problem”. Stella says very little is new this weekend, with most upgrades coming in Brazil and Las Vegas. Brundle called Piastri’s decline “painful to witness”. Guenther Steiner has reversed his advice from last year and says Piastri should stay at McLaren and beat Norris first. FP1 swaps: Tsolov drives for Lawson and Mini for Colapinto.

PlanetF1 · GPFans · Speedcafe

Southwest Metro crowds today; Gong Ride Sunday

Sydney Metro expects about 18,000 people between Bankstown and Sydenham from 8 to 9am today and suggests the first morning may not be the best time to ride. Extra staff are rostered and Southwest Link buses back up the service over the weekend. On Sunday the MS Gong Ride starts from Tempe and Engadine. Also on Sunday: Sydney Open, the last day of Ghost Festival in The Rocks, and the last Lion King at the Capitol.

City Hub · Transport NSW: Gong Ride