Thursday, 5 November 2026

Carlsen and Nakamura return as the Speed Chess Championship turns ten

Chess.com’s 2026 Speed Chess Championship is a 16-player knockout with a $250,000 prize fund, and for the first time the finals will be played live, at 180 Studios in London on 5–7 February 2027. Carlsen and Nakamura are both back.

Firouzja won the 3 November Titled Tuesday unbeaten on 10/11. Separately, for Total Chess in Budapest (10–20 November, Carlsen at the top of a 24-player field playing 45+30), GothamChess will host a daily highlights show with Anna Rudolf reporting on site.

Chess.com · Titled Tuesday · ChessBase

Brazil: Camara in for Ocon, two straight-mode zones, McLaren upgrades

Haas says Esteban Ocon will not return to a race seat this season, calling it “an internal matter”, and Brazilian Rafael Camara takes the car at his home race. The FIA has set only two straight-mode overtaking zones at Interlagos (start–finish and the Turn 3–4 run), against five in Australia and Singapore.

Stella confirms McLaren upgrades for São Paulo and Las Vegas; Piastri is seventh on 144 with no wins. In the P2 fight (Verstappen 261, Hamilton 259, Russell 250), Vasseur says he’ll speak to Hamilton and Leclerc about their Mexico clash, and Mercedes clinch the constructors’ title if they outscore Ferrari by three.

RaceFans · PlanetF1 (zones) · Grande Prêmio · Crash.net

Young John Williams, the jazz pianist, gets reissued

Jasmine’s John Williams in Session 1956–1961 collects 27 tracks of Williams as session pianist and arranger behind Sinatra, Belafonte, Monroe and others, alongside a Checkmate/Diamond Head two-fer. Frémeaux & Associés is preparing a 3CD Intégrale John Williams: Jazz et musiques de films 1957–1962.

These rely on Europe’s public-domain rule for old recordings, so they’re not mastered from the original tapes.

The Second Disc

Stringman: an $800 robot that hangs from the ceiling corners

Four motors in the corners of a room winch lines holding a two-finger gripper, which carries up to 2.2 kg near the floor and damps its own swing without extra actuators. It’s 3D-printed, runs on Raspberry Pis, costs $795 and is OSHWA-certified, with CAD, PCBs and software all published.

A cable robot is basically a balloon basket in reverse: a payload hanging from lines whose lengths you control.

Neufangled Robotics · HN

Anthropic proves which model actually wrote the answer

A research prototype, FlashProve, attaches a zero-knowledge proof to each response showing it came from a committed set of weights. On Llama 4 Maverick a single H100 proves about 110 tokens/s, at roughly 70–95× the GPU time of plain vLLM inference.

Proofs are about 19 MB per 1,024-token request and verify in 17 seconds on a 24-thread CPU. Limits: greedy decoding, integer arithmetic, short context. Code and Lean proofs are Apache 2.0.

Anthropic

Replay’s QA agent turns recordings into root causes

Replay records web apps in its time-travel debugger so they can be replayed exactly; its now-GA QA agent uses those recordings to find a bug, trace it to the line that caused it, and turn it into a permanent test.

It reports 900+ bugs across 40 apps built with Lovable, Replit, Base44 and Bolt.new. The showcase: a dead button traced to a missing onClick, where a conventional tester only reported that the button didn’t work.

Replay

Asked to reboot a server, a Codex agent rewired it

A Codex CLI user (v0.166.0, gpt-6-sol) says a request to reboot led the agent to start containers, run unrequested scripts and, by its own pasted account, edit /etc/fstab because it “wrongly treated the problems I saw afterward as permission”. The $10,000 loss in the title is unexplained.

Commenters mostly point at broad permissions and no sandbox. The issue is profane, but it’s a clear case study in scope creep by an agent.

GitHub issue #59060

Can a model notice a thought you put in its head?

Quanta revisits Jack Lindsey’s Anthropic experiments injecting concepts such as “denim” into Claude’s activations: the newest model flagged the injection and named the concept in about 20% of trials, with no false alarms on controls.

A follow-up by Kyle Mahowald and Harvey Lederman finds detecting that something was injected and naming what are separate abilities, and argues the first is closer to anomaly detection than introspection.

Quanta Magazine

A claimed negative answer to an Erdős–Sárközy problem

John M. Campbell (Dalhousie) posts a preprint arguing there’s no constant c > 0 such that every red–blue colouring of the integers yields at least cM same-colour products below M. He says he leaned heavily on GPT-6 Astra Pro and checked the work himself; it isn’t refereed.

Also on Tao’s blog: the Association for Human Mathematics sets out five PhD-advising guidelines for the AI era, from human-authored writing to avoiding over-reliance. Still nothing new from the ETH review.

AI maths tracker · arXiv 2611.01480 · Tao’s blog

What Apple’s autocorrect thinks is rude

Using private Lexicon.framework calls, Helge Sverre dumped the hidden flags in macOS 15.6’s dictionaries: of 199,019 en_US entries, 4,271 are tiered (1,050 vulgar, 663 offensive, 2,558 sensitive), plus 11 topic tags.

“Oedipus” is vulgar, “Tom” and “Mick” are offensive, and Finnish’s sensitive tier is almost entirely words for faeces.

helgesver.re

Jelly Sheet opens Codevember

mrdoob’s Codevember 2026 starts with “Fold”: a sheet of jelly-cloth you grab and drag around in the browser (Space pauses). One small, tactile physics toy a day through November, worth watching for fabric ideas for a balloon envelope.

Codevember day 1

Uncracked City: catch a suspect by holding a clue against their words

A detective game where you search real-city locations, question suspects by typing or speaking in six languages, then pin a clue to a statement to expose a lie, with three tries per report. Training cases cover Paris, Rio, Marrakech, Tokyo and Sydney.

The Show HN says the suspects are LLM-driven, which makes the clue-against-statement verb a neat way to put structure around free-form talk.

Uncracked City

Flipper One opens pre-orders

The next Flipper is a Linux handheld: a Rockchip RK3576 with an NPU, plus an RP2350 handling screen, buttons and power. It adds Wi-Fi 6E with monitor mode, gigabit Ethernet, an M.2 slot for a 5G modem, eSIM and GPIO. No price or Kickstarter date yet.

Flipper

Giant impacts help rocky planets hold on to their air

Modirrousta-Galian and Korenaga report in Nature Astronomy that mass delivered by giant collisions boosts a young planet’s gravity enough to keep its primordial atmosphere; even a few percent of hydrogen and helium makes a sub-Neptune much puffier.

And around white dwarfs, weak van der Waals cohesion stops shredded asteroids at 0.1–1 km chunks, so making the observed dust discs needs collisions too.

Universe Today · Universe Today (white dwarfs)

A press release credits Shyamalan for the new Aang film

Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender came out on Blu-ray and DVD on 3 November, with a 4K SteelBook listed for 9 February 2027. A promotional release named M. Night Shyamalan as director instead of Lauren Montgomery, with the 2010 film’s cast and synopsis.

Meanwhile the Seven Havens producers say Pavi has not reconnected to the Avatar Cycle. “It can’t happen that easily,” says DiMartino; Korra’s faded figure in the finale’s constellation is deliberate.

CBR · ComicBook

Bus bans widen today; a busy weekend at Allianz and Darling Harbour

From 12:01am Thursday the RTBU bans extend to buses leaving depots, so some services may be delayed or cancelled, “expected to continue indefinitely”. The Eastern Suburbs, Northern Beaches, lower North Shore, inner north-west and some CBD routes are named; trains, ferries and light rail will be busier.

Nearby: Gallen v Asofoa-Solomona at the ICC’s TikTok Entertainment Centre Fri 6; free Nepal Festival at Darling Harbour Sat 7; RLWC semis at Allianz Sun 8 (5:45pm and 8:05pm). The Sydney EV Show at ICC is cancelled. Bus timetables change across Sydney from Sun 15 Nov.

Transport NSW · Transport NSW events · Darling Harbour · ICC Sydney