Monday, 2 November 2026

Mexico: Hamilton on pole, Antonelli starts 4th, Piastri 12th

Lewis Hamilton took his first pole since 2023 with a 1:16.514, nine-thousandths ahead of George Russell. Leclerc was third. Verstappen qualified fourth but drops to fifth for his FP2 clash with Lawson, which puts Kimi Antonelli fourth. Lawson was disqualified from qualifying because his power unit didn’t cut out as the rules require, and he starts from the pit lane.

The title maths hasn’t changed: Antonelli is champion if he finishes ninth or better, or if neither Russell nor Hamilton wins. He says he is “still not 100 per cent” after his illness, and Hamilton starting from pole is the danger. The race is on as this page is written.

PlanetF1 · Crash.net (grid) · PlanetF1 (Lawson)

Piastri out in Q2: “I just had no grip at all”

It was Piastri’s first Q2 exit of 2026 and only the ninth time in his career he has missed Q3. It was also McLaren’s worst qualifying of the season. On new tyres he “barely improved”. Andrea Stella said the team had expected his used tyres to be enough to get through, and blamed “the inconsistencies that we see this year with the MCL40.” Piastri starts 12th once Lawson’s disqualification is applied.

Speedcafe

Carlsen trains in Spain with Abdusattorov ahead of Total Chess

Carlsen’s camp for Budapest includes Abdusattorov, David Howell and Peter Heine Nielsen. Total Chess runs 10–20 November at the New York Palace hotel. It starts with a blitz Swiss, then a group stage of fast classical games (45 minutes + 30 seconds per move), then knockouts that mix classical, rapid and blitz. It is a trial for a FIDE-approved tour starting in 2027.

Chess.com

Freestyle Friday: Movahed wins again; Carlsen leaves after a loss

Sina Movahed won his second Freestyle Friday in three weeks with 9½. He won his last eight games in a row. Yakubboev was second on 9 and Oro third on 8½. Carlsen recovered from 1½/3 with four straight wins, then left the event after Fedoseev ended the streak.

Chess.com

November ratings: the largest gap ever between title-match players

On the new FIDE list Carlsen is first on 2823, ahead of Nakamura (2792) and Caruana (2783). Sindarov is fourth on 2782. Gukesh has fallen to 26th on 2710. That 72-point gap is the biggest between the two title-match players since the title was reunified in 2006. The match is in Geneva from 22 November, with Game 1 on the 24th. Roman Shogdzhiev, 11, is on 2484 and needs 2500 plus one more GM norm to become the youngest grandmaster ever.

Chess.com · World Chess (match dates)

The grid’s 60-second heartbeat is batteries checking the time

For years Europe’s grid frequency has dipped at the start of every minute. Dirk Witthaut’s team at Forschungszentrum Jülich has found the most likely cause: large battery storage systems all check their state of charge on the minute, so their control actions line up. The same signature shows up on grids around the world. The proposed fix will be familiar to anyone who writes firmware: add jitter. Published in Nature Energy.

Forschungszentrum Jülich

Jepsen: 96 issues in a database, mostly with no faults injected

Jepsen’s analysis of ParticleDB 1.1.4, a Rust “multi-model database for AI workloads”, lists 96 issues. All but three occurred on healthy single-node instances. A query asking whether 4 = 5 returned a row. Dropped tables came back. Strings were returned as 8-bit integers. Acknowledged writes went missing. Most issues were fixed during the engagement. It’s a good case for testing harder than you think you need to.

Jepsen

Demoscener-7B: a model trained on one person’s taste

The author continued pretraining Qwen2.5-Code-7B on about 25,000 Dwitter “dweets”, the 140-character JavaScript demos, which cut perplexity from 28.63 to 8.57. He then did RL with himself as the reward function. In each round he watched eight generated animations and kept the one he liked best, about 40,000 in total. The model and dataset are on Hugging Face.

datavorous.com

bootgpt: a language model in the boot sector

The inference engine is hand-written 16-bit real-mode x86 that fits in the 512-byte MBR. The BIOS boots it, and it loads 11.5 KB of int8 weights from the next 23 sectors. Its context is eight characters, it has one hidden layer, and the weights are scaled by powers of two so imul/idiv are enough. It “dreams a Linux boot log”, typos included. The Python trainer reproduces the integer arithmetic and matches the boot output character for character.

GitHub

Classic Mac OS on a Wii, and BeOS in your browser

Rairii got Mac OS 7.6 and 9.2.2 to boot on a Nintendo Wii. The work included patching Apple’s Trampoline loader, remapping hardware registers, faking an interrupt controller, and writing a SCSI driver that actually talks to the SD card. On real hardware 7.6 boots in about 40 seconds. The writeup says no coding agent was used for the Mac OS work.

In a similar spirit, Infinite Mac now runs BeOS in the browser. Getting there meant fixing an ADB bug that made the bootloader think modifier keys were always held down, and working around Developer Release 8.2’s 1 April 1997 time bomb.

Virtually Fun · persistent.info

NES Contra ported line by line and checked frame by frame

Working from an annotated disassembly, the 6502 assembly was translated routine by routine into C, then compiled to WebAssembly with online co-op that sends only button presses. Every frame was checked against the original in the Mesen emulator. The early output had visible errors, so the team built a telemetry harness around Mesen to find where the port diverged. According to the HN thread, Claude and Codex did most of the translation.

Play it · HN discussion

The Altoids Project: a father and son build a computer in a mint tin

Over two months a 12-year-old and his parent built a working computer inside an Altoids tin: an Arduino Nano, a 128×64 screen salvaged from a Sparki robot, a LiPo battery and a 3D-printed case. It took five versions, a torn pad and several broken wires. An AI tool confidently gave them a 20-pin pinout for a display with only 10 pins, and a forum schematic is what got them working.

uvdn7.github.io

Raye will write music for Safdie’s Lizard Music; Murray Gold’s Doctor Who specials get albums

Raye will contribute original music to Benny Safdie’s live-action/CGI Lizard Music. It stars Dwayne Johnson, with Jeff Goldblum and Colman Domingo in the voice cast, and opens on 25 December 2027.

Silva Screen is releasing Murray Gold’s scores for the three Doctor Who 60th-anniversary specials (The Star Beast, Wild Blue Yonder, The Giggle): digitally on 23 November and as a 3-CD set on 27 November.

Film Music Reporter · Film Music Reporter

Mathematicians publish their AI plans; ETH reviewers open a public site

The organisers of a Harvard CMSA summit (Freed, Guth, Kra, Riehl, Abouzaid) published a report on how research is judged and published, formalisation and open tools. The next day Tao shared the UK Academy for the Mathematical Sciences report “The mathematical sciences in an AI-enabled world”, which calls for independent checking of AI results.

Impagliazzo, Paturi and Williams opened ethdiscussion.blog to review OpenAI’s claimed refutation of ETH. Their position: “Our involvement should not be taken as certification of the claim.” Several people report that the Lean proofs compile. Separately, Dana Moshkovitz speaks at UT Austin on 4 November on “The Unique Games Conjecture – Proved (!!?)”.

Tao (CMSA report) · Tao (UK report) · ethdiscussion.blog · Aaronson

Trees feel their own shape and straighten without gravity or light

INRAE researchers laid young poplars on their sides inside an evenly lit rotating sphere, which removes both gravity and light as cues. The stems straightened anyway. The trees moved their “tension wood”, which works like a muscle, to the other side as they curved. The authors call it “a genuine sensorimotor loop” in wood. Published in New Phytologist.

ScienceDaily

This week: Powerhouse Parramatta opens Saturday; RLWC semis Sunday

Powerhouse Parramatta opens on Sat 7 November with a 23-day festival of 179 events, about 65% of them free. Exhibitions are free for under-16s. The opening weekend has steam trains and vintage buses, and Es Devlin’s installation Come Home Again. The F3 ferry from Circular Quay goes straight there, and so do T1/T2 trains. Expect crowds.

Also this week: Melbourne Cup lunches around Cockle Bay on Tuesday afternoon, and the World Business Forum at ICC Sydney on Thursday–Friday. On Sunday 8 November Allianz Stadium hosts a World Cup triple-header with the wheelchair final, the Jillaroos semi and the Kangaroos semi (8:05pm). Your ticket covers transport, so expect busy light rail. No major trackwork is listed for the week.

Time Out · Transport NSW · Allianz Stadium · Darling Harbour