Tuesday, 3 November 2026

Antonelli is champion at 20; Verstappen wins in Mexico

Kimi Antonelli finished third in Mexico City and became the youngest Formula 1 world champion ever. He needed only ninth. Max Verstappen won by 0.799s from Lewis Hamilton, who started from pole. Antonelli said he couldn’t see through his tears on the final lap.

Hamilton and Leclerc tangled at the start, and Leclerc took the lead by cutting Turn 4. He got a 5-second penalty and finished fourth. Hamilton on the radio: “The stewards are basically handing Charles this win.” Liam Lawson started from the pit lane and finished seventh. Brazil is next, 6–8 November, and the fight is now for second place: Verstappen 261, Hamilton 259, Russell 250.

Formula1.com · Sky Sports · RacingNews365 (standings)

Piastri climbs from 12th to 7th, then a penalty takes it away

Oscar Piastri crossed the line seventh. On lap 59 he collided with Arvid Lindblad at Turn 2, and Lindblad retired. The stewards gave Piastri 10 seconds (“Car 81 was never fully alongside car 41”), which drops him to 15th and out of the points. Piastri’s version: Lindblad “shut the door extremely late… our wheels were interlocked, and we crashed before we even turned for the corner.”

RaceFans · Speedcafe

John Williams up for a Hollywood Music in Media Award

The HMMA nominations are out, and the sci-fi/fantasy score category is crowded. It has Williams for Disclosure Day, Zimmer for Dune: Part Three, Pemberton for Project Hail Mary, Giacchino for Spider-Man: Brand New Day and James Newton Howard for Sunrise on the Reaping. Göransson’s The Odyssey is in feature score. Gordy Haab’s Star Wars: Zero Company is up for game score, and Bear McCreary’s Rings of Power S3 for TV. The ceremony is 18 November, a good playlist in the meantime.

AwardsWatch · Deadline

“Mathematics has changed. Let’s act like it”

Frank Calegari, in a guest post on Terence Tao’s blog, responds to OpenAI’s 700-plus AI research papers. His comparison is the classification of finite simple groups: finishing a big programme didn’t end group theory. He makes six concrete proposals. Judge all work as if AI-assisted. Hire on in-person interviews and research vision. Have journals raise standards. Teach graduate students breadth and communication. Make senior people take ownership of AI results. And lean on Lean.

What’s new (Tao)

Complexity theorists start writing the post-ETH conjectures

Bill Gasarch lists the claimed AI results together. Anthropic claims 3SUM in O(n^1.9992) and integer APSP in O(n^2.9995). OpenAI claims 3SAT in 2^{O(n log log n/√log n)}, which would refute the Exponential Time Hypothesis. Gasarch suggests weaker replacement conjectures, such as no n^1.5−ε algorithm for 3SUM. There is still no verdict: Mohan Paturi’s review site is now collecting results that follow from the claimed refutation, while still calling it “claimed.”

Computational Complexity · ethdiscussion.blog

Astronomy dates The Starry Night to about 22 July 1889

A Korean team matched the painting’s five central stars to the Hyades. Statistical shape matching puts the sky over Saint-Rémy before dawn around 22 July 1889, with a waning crescent Moon and Venus nearby, not on the traditional 18 June date. The paper, in Scientific Reports, also suggests the Summer Triangle is hiding in Café Terrace at Night.

Universe Today

An Archimedes screw one molecule long

A spiral molecule a few nanometres long is clamped between gold electrodes. Electrons tunnelling through it hand over angular momentum and spin it like a wind turbine. Reverse the voltage and it spins the other way, and above a threshold the rotation becomes continuous. When it turns, conductance rises up to 100-fold. Augsburg, Weizmann, Copenhagen and HUST, in Nature.

ScienceDaily

A backdoor built into the firmware, reinstalled on every boot

Google has taken down the XCPE botnet: more than 1.3M Android set-top boxes, plus telehealth devices, karaoke machines and signage. The Android device maker Videostrong preloaded an app with system privileges that reinstalled itself from the /oem/ partition on every boot. It was obfuscated to get past Google’s certification tests and took orders over MQTT. Access was sold for ad fraud and residential proxies. Videostrong is now banned from certified Android.

Google Threat Intelligence

Linux 7.4-rc1: the biggest merge window ever, and AI fixes are why

The 7.4 merge window brought in 18,591 non-merge changesets from 2,678 developers, 625 of them first-timers. Phoronix’s count of 19,671 commits beats the previous record, 16,267 for 7.3. The rc1 announcement welcomes the timing: “I’m much happier with the flood of AI triggered work going into the merge window than it showing up mainly as extra fixes during the -rc period.” Phoronix describes maintainers as overwhelmed.

LWN · Phoronix

Cloudflare’s shadow builder: proving the shortcut matches the long way

Cloudflare’s DNS now rebuilds only the part of a zone that changed, wherever it can prove the result equals a full rebuild. 93% of builds now skip the full rebuild, and peak memory dropped from 79 to 12 GiB. They made the risk visible before switching over. A mirror builder ran both paths on production data and flagged a 0.31% diff rate across 234,313 zones, and those diffs got fixed before launch.

Cloudflare blog

“Loser thinking”: Proton’s CEO against pausing to pentest

Citing 404 Media, a widely shared post says that when an engineer asked for a few days to pentest new code, Proton CEO Andy Yen called it “bullshit and loser thinking” and told staff to stop “lovingly handcrafting code.” The post’s argument: at a privacy company, the time spent looking for your own mistakes is the product.

blog.raed.dev

OmniDiff publishes its own failure rate

OmniDiff is a Rust difftool that compares 24 languages by syntax tree, using tree-sitter, and works with git and jj. Its README is unusually honest. Across 442,530 real file pairs, 99.95% complete, but only 65.9% of test cases are byte-exact, against a 90% target that it says it hasn’t reached. It was built with Claude Code, with that disclosed in the commit trailers.

GitHub

VHS Camera: analogue video simulated, not filtered

This browser camera runs your picture through a simulation of NTSC encoding and tape recording, using an accelerated ntsc-rs, rather than laying an effect on top. It has a tape-wear setting and a running camcorder date stamp, and everything runs on the device. It’s worth studying if you want a retro look for game footage.

fotojockovic.com

Warsaw city centre in one-metre voxels

Piotr Migdał built a walkable voxel model of central Warsaw from OpenStreetMap, LiDAR and the city’s tree database. You can change the date, the hour and the weather, and take over a pedestrian. He credits Minecraft, MagicaVoxel and Dungeon Keeper as inspiration. It’s a ready-made idea for turning real terrain data into something you could fly a balloon over.

p.migdal.pl

Les Mis tickets are on sale now; the Australian Beetlejuice album is out

A correction to Saturday’s page: general sale for Les Misérables at the Opera House opened at 9am on Monday 2 November, not today. The season opens 27 August 2027 in the Joan Sutherland Theatre. Casting hasn’t been announced.

Eddie Perfect’s new label has released the Australian Beetlejuice cast recording, live from the Melbourne season. It has 34 tracks, every underscore included, against 18 on the Broadway album. It’s good homework before the Capitol Theatre season opens on 21 November.

Sydney Opera House · Theatre Matters

This week: Cup day, ICC fight night, semis Sunday, Taurids Thursday

Today (Tue): Melbourne Cup. Cockle Bay and Darling Harbour are full of Cup lunches from 11am. Thu–Fri: World Business Forum at ICC Sydney. Fri 6 Nov: the Gallen v Asofoa-Solomona fight at ICC, a short walk from home, and Sydney FC at Allianz at 7:40pm. Sat 7: Powerhouse Parramatta opens. Sun 8: RLWC semis at Allianz, Jillaroos 5:45pm and Kangaroos 8:05pm. The EV Show and the Secret Garden concert at ICC are cancelled, and there’s no city trackwork this week.

In the sky, the Southern Taurids peak on Thursday night: slow fireballs, best around midnight before the Moon rises. On Saturday before dawn, a thin crescent Moon sits close to Venus low in the east.

Transport NSW events · ICC Sydney · Darling Harbour · Space.com (sky)