Saturday, 7 November 2026

Brazil FP1: Norris quickest, P2 rivals line up 3-4-5 behind

Norris topped Friday’s opening practice at Interlagos in 1:11.717, 0.082s ahead of champion Antonelli. The three drivers fighting over second place in the standings finished in standings order: Verstappen P3, Hamilton P4 (quickest Ferrari), Russell P5. Slater’s Audi brought out a red flag; Beganovic, standing in for Leclerc, had an engine problem and was P21.

Piastri sat FP1 out so McLaren could do a mandatory rookie run. F2 champion Leonardo Fornaroli drove his car to P11. Piastri says the MCL40 “can be very quick” but is “difficult to drive”. McLaren are fourth, 17 points behind Red Bull. This is a conventional weekend with no sprint, and the race starts 4am Monday Sydney time.

PlanetF1 — FP1 results · Fornaroli in Piastri’s car · Grande Prêmio — Piastri

Axiom formalizes the entire Stacks Project in Lean

De Jong’s Stacks Project is a roughly 7,500-page open-source reference on algebraic geometry. Axiom has translated all of it into about 16 million lines of Lean, using swarms of AI agents working in parallel to translate statements, prove them, reuse Mathlib abstractions and check each result against the source. Axiom calls it the largest integrated library of formalized mathematics.

The useful part: dozens of statements in the original needed “local refinement”, meaning missing hypotheses, positive-characteristic edge cases and claims that didn’t hold in full generality. The agents built counterexamples and corrected versions.

Axiom Math

A clarinettist reconstructs Loeffler’s octet, unheard since 1897

In 2020 Graeme Steele Johnson found the unpublished manuscript of Charles Martin Loeffler’s octet in the Library of Congress. It is scored for clarinet, harp and strings. He spent a year reconstructing it, then produced the first critical edition and a recording. Chamber Music Charleston performs it on Sunday 8 November, alongside Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet. The edition and recording are worth looking up if you want repertoire beyond the usual.

Holy City Sinner

METR: Anthropic’s AI R&D is speeding up about 1.9×

METR assessed Anthropic independently. It finds Anthropic’s benchmark-progress trend has run about 1.9× faster since October 2025 (95% CI 1.5–2.8×), and guesses that roughly 80% of this month’s acceleration comes from AI doing the work. In internal Slack polls, staff reported up to 12× uplift from the latest internal model. METR calls that “only very loose evidence”, and says much of the key data was redacted.

It is the first serious outside attempt to measure AI speeding up AI engineering itself, and the error bars are wide.

METR

The Unique Games proof gets a three-hour public walk-through; mathematicians surveyed on AI

Dana Moshkovitz gave a three-hour public lecture at UT Austin on OpenAI’s claimed proof of the Unique Games Conjecture, to nearly 200 people in person and on Zoom. Scott Aaronson says the video will go on YouTube, and no verdict has been given yet.

Separately, a guest post on Terry Tao’s blog launches Futures of Maths, a “living” survey of how research mathematicians are using AI and where they think the field is heading. In London, Imperial has opened a £5m “Langlands Lab”, funded by XTX Markets and led by Kevin Buzzard, to do AI-assisted mathematics with every result checked in Lean.

Shtetl-Optimized · Futures of Maths (Tao’s blog) · Imperial

80,000 hops a second: an FPGA-driven sweep shows how Starlink pairs uplink and downlink

Jiao Xianjun moved AD9361 channel hopping from software (about 10k hops/s) into the FPGA: one hop every 12.5 µs, so all eight Starlink channels are swept in 100 µs. The datasheet asks for 20–30 µs of settling, but 10 µs turned out to be enough, leaving 2.5 µs per hop to integrate energy. The receive chain is satellite-TV LNBs.

The finding: the terminal always used the same channel index for uplink (8 × 62.5 MHz slots) and downlink (8 × 500 MHz slots), switching at multiples of 15 s. It was picked up off-axis, from several metres away.

sdr-x

MoofTCP: a modern TCP/IP stack for a 4 MB Mac Classic

A drop-in replacement for MacTCP on System 6.0.8, covering TCP, UDP, ICMP, DNS and DHCP. The driver is about 95 KB and leaves roughly 30 KB of system heap free. The portable C core uses no malloc and no global state. It is fuzzed and run under sanitizers on a modern host, then cross-built with Retro68. NCSA Telnet, Fetch and TurboGopher work with it.

The README says it was built with Claude Code, with a human doing the planning and testing. It is a neat example of putting modern testing discipline on 1980s hardware.

GitHub — MoofTCP

Reverse-engineering a gym’s QR code, and the home-made AES that passed its own tests

Shayon took apart a gym app’s offline check-in QR code, which refreshes every 15 seconds. The tools were blutter on the Flutter binary, jadx and a rooted phone. The code turned out to be an AES-128-CTR-encrypted expiry plus a nonce and a checksum, and the key material was sitting in a plain-text log.

The lesson worth keeping: the rebuilt implementation passed its own round-trip tests but failed against OpenSSL’s test vectors. It only matched byte-for-byte after fixing a seconds-versus-milliseconds mix-up and a base64url bug. Checking against an outside oracle is what exposed mistakes that self-consistency tests hid.

shayon.work

World Strike: tanks that flatten real OpenStreetMap cities, persistently

A browser multiplayer toy. Pick any city and you spawn in a toy tank on a nearby road, among buildings extruded from OSM data. Anything you knock down stays down for every player, and each city has its own leaderboard. It shows a whole planet’s worth of level design coming from open map data, and a shared, persistent world that remembers what players did to it. Both ideas could carry over to a balloon flying over real terrain.

World Strike

BUI: Blender’s UI widgets lifted out into a standalone toolkit

Blender’s widget drawing code (interface_widgets.cc) has been ported to C as a standalone toolkit, with bindings for Python, Rust, JS/React, C++ and Dear ImGui. The default software renderer redraws only the 64×32 tiles that changed, so an idle window uses no CPU.

The author’s benchmarks: first frame in 40 ms versus 231 ms for GPUI, about 15 MB of RAM, and 60 fps on a 3,000-cell animated scene where GPUI managed 20. It could be handy for in-house tools that should look like Blender.

GitHub — BUI

Window Sweaters: knitted borders for your Mac windows

A menu-bar app that puts knitted-pattern borders round macOS windows. Each app gets its own colourway, and you can load your own PNG knit charts. It is a fork of JankyBorders, built “purely for fun” with AI help after a joke post took off, and it reached 440 points on Hacker News. It is pure whimsy, and the pattern-chart format is a nice touch.

GitHub — Window Sweaters

Hera’s first close-up of Didymos, the side DART never saw

From 60 km away, ESA’s Hera imaged most of the 780 m asteroid Didymos from the side DART never saw. It shows the same equatorial ridge, plus boulders, craters and possible grooves, some of which may be debris thrown off its moonlet Dimorphos. Dimorphos itself is mostly in shadow. DART shortened Dimorphos’s orbit by 33 minutes. Detailed images of both asteroids are due on 25 November.

ESA

Hints that Mars is still volcanically active

ESA’s Trace Gas Orbiter caught unexpected spikes of hydrogen chloride in early northern summer. Its camera also found fresh fissures, some hundreds of metres long, on the flanks of the volcano Alba Mons. Alexander Trokhimovskiy’s team suggests the gas leaks from magma below, gets trapped under ice through winter, and is released when the ice evaporates. The paper is in Science Advances.

ESA

Lékó and Svidler named commentators for Gukesh–Sindarov

FIDE has named Péter Lékó, who drew a world title match with Kramnik in 2004, and eight-time Russian champion Peter Svidler as official commentators for the 14-game World Championship in Geneva, which begins later this month. Lékó is known for calm, deep analysis and Svidler for his wit, so they should balance each other well.

ChessBase

Kris Bowers’ Steps album dated; Pinar Toprak scores Bad Day

The soundtrack for Steps, the animated film, comes out 20 November, the day the film arrives. It has Kris Bowers’ score plus JENNIE’s new song “Someone to Hold”, written by Justin Tranter, Julia Michaels and Jason Gill. Separately, Pinar Toprak (Captain Marvel, Fortnite) is scoring Jake Szymanski’s action comedy Bad Day.

Film Music Reporter — Steps · Bad Day

RLWC semi-finals Sunday; bus work bans now reach the depots

Sunday 8 November at Allianz Stadium has three games: the physical disability final at 4:15pm, the women’s semi (Australia v Fiji) at 5:45pm and the men’s semi (Australia v Samoa) at 8:05pm. Extra L2/L3 light rail runs from Central, with shuttle buses back to Central after the matches. Match tickets cover public transport until 4am. Driver Ave closes from 2pm, and Cleveland St has clearways from 6am.

The RTBU’s bus work bans are indefinite, and since Thursday they include depot bans: drivers refuse buses showing dashboard warning lights and insist on full fuel before shifts. Expect cancellations in the Eastern Suburbs, inner north-west, lower North Shore and Northern Beaches; school services get priority. There is no major trackwork before 17 November. Darling Harbour’s free Nepal Festival starts today.

Transport for NSW · Manly Observer — bus bans