Sunday, 8 November 2026

Brazil: Verstappen to start from the back, both Ferraris and Russell also penalised

All three drivers fighting for second in the championship take grid penalties at Interlagos. Red Bull went over their limits for the engine, turbocharger and exhaust on Verstappen’s car, which adds up to 30 places, so he starts from the back. Hamilton and Leclerc each drop 10 places for going over the season’s combustion-engine allowance, and Russell drops five for a fresh engine. Pérez (Cadillac) is also penalised. Going in, the standings are Verstappen 261, Hamilton 259, Russell 250.

In practice, Antonelli topped a damp FP2 (1:10.763) and Verstappen topped FP3 (1:11.622), 0.025s ahead of Antonelli. Hamilton was only P12 in FP3 with a suspected power unit problem. Leclerc is back after his daughter’s birth. Piastri was P5 in FP2 and P6 in FP3. He says McLaren’s upgrades “look positive”, though a slow puncture spoiled his long run. Qualifying was under way and red-flagged in the wet as this went out.

F1.com — penalties · F1.com — Russell · PlanetF1 — FP3 · Speedcafe — Piastri

Anthropic: agent memory works when the agent checks its notes against what actually happened

Anthropic’s research post sets out the layers of agent memory: raw transcripts as a searchable log, notes Claude writes itself, organised forms such as wikis, and context loaded into every session. Memory lifted Opus 5.5’s score on a continual-learning benchmark from 0.655 to 0.838. Telling the model to record only failures cut much of that gain. A record of what went right turned out to matter too.

The Pokémon comparison is a good example. Sonnet 3.7 wrote 413 memory files across 225 folders and earned one badge. A later model kept nine files plus a global.md and earned four. “Dreaming” is an offline pass that tests notes against the original transcripts. In one run it caught a wrong note about Mt. Moon, and the corrected agent got through where the uncorrected one never did. In other words, the agent’s own beliefs get checked against the evidence.

Anthropic Research

libghostty 1.0: Ghostty’s terminal core becomes a stable C library

Mitchell Hashimoto has declared libghostty-vt and its C ABI stable. It is MIT licensed and needs only libc, or can be built freestanding. ABI compatibility is checked in CI, and the full-featured WASM build is under 1 MB. JetBrains IDE terminals already run on it, and Neovim has an approved PR to replace libvterm with it, waiting on this tagged release. A basic working terminal takes about 1,500 lines of C. As a stress test he ran 10,000 live shells on a 4-core, 8 GB server, using dash because bash used too much RAM.

mitchellh.com

Asahi Linux: M3 Macs supported, a first GPU triangle, and a switch to GPLv2+

The Linux 7.3 progress report brings M3 Mac support out of expert mode and into the normal installer. Minimal device trees for M4 Pro/Max and M5 boot to a console. The GPU team got its m1n1 bootloader to initialise the M3 GPU and draw a triangle, the traditional first milestone. The project is also starting to move all its repositories to GPLv2-or-later. It says in-development code was lifted from personal forks without attribution, some of it rewritten with LLM help to hide where it came from.

Asahi Linux

Deus Ex: “problems, not puzzles”, and the bug they decided to keep

Jimmy Maher’s history of Ion Storm Austin’s 2000 game covers how Warren Spector’s team of about 30 worked to the rule “problems, not puzzles”. Testers found they could stick proximity mines to a wall and climb them like a ladder. The team didn’t patch it out. They made the simulation sturdy enough that unplanned solutions were allowed to work. That is a useful stance for any game built on a physical system, such as a balloon riding the wind.

The Digital Antiquarian

Need for Speed: Underground 2, recompiled to run in a browser

A fan project says it runs the original PC game’s code recompiled for Chrome and Firefox: up to 120 fps widescreen, controller and wheel support, online races, and free roam with crews of up to four. The page keywords mention WebAssembly and WebGPU, but the author hasn’t explained how the recompilation works. It joins this autumn’s run of static-recompilation ports.

nfsu2.xyz

A cheap judge that knows when it’s unsure, and passes those cases to Opus

Hightouch built a fast, cheap “decision model” to grade identity-resolution merges and sends only the cases it scores between 30% and 90% to Claude Opus. On their easier test set, the hybrid hit 98.8% accuracy at $0.88 per thousand cases, against 99.0% at $3.86 for Opus alone, with about 22% of cases escalated. On the harder set the hybrid slightly beat Opus (95.3% vs 95.1%) at just over half the cost. The approach depends on the cheap model’s confidence scores being well calibrated.

Hightouch blog

Coldframe: a honeypot that pretends to be a supermarket fridge controller

Coldframe is a single-file, standard-library Python honeypot that imitates a Danfoss AK-SM 800A or Dixell XWEB EVO refrigeration supervisor over HTTP(S), with optional Modbus TCP. It logs logins and known exploit requests and never executes anything. The README cites real 2026 attacks that used default passwords to force defrost cycles. It is a small example of making an attack visible by giving the attacker something to talk to.

GitHub

Carlsen gets a head start on a third Esports World Cup; Yakubboev wins Freestyle Friday

Chess returns to the Esports World Cup in Riyadh in summer 2027. Carlsen, champion in 2025 and 2026, is the only player already qualified. The other twelve places come from a reworked Champions Chess Tour leaderboard, and the Speed Chess Championship and Chess.com Open now award points rather than direct places. In Thursday’s 3+0 event, Nakamura beat both Carlsen and Nepomniachtchi on his way to winning with 10 points.

In Friday’s Chess960 event, Nodirbek Yakubboev scored 9.5/10 ahead of Nepomniachtchi (9) and moved to third in the season standings with four events left. Total Chess Budapest starts Tuesday with Carlsen as favourite: four groups of six, then knockouts where a blitz win is worth 1 point, a rapid win 4 and a 45+30 “Fast Classic” win 8.

Chess.com — EWC 2027 · Freestyle Friday · 3+0 Thursday · ChessBase — Total Chess

Burwell’s Wild Horse Nine and Sato’s Godzilla Minus Zero are out; Andrew Bird writes songs for I Play Rocky

Film Music Reporter’s weekly roundup lists two new score albums. Carter Burwell’s score for Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine (Hollywood Records) and Naoki Sato’s Godzilla Minus Zero (Milan) are both out now. Separately, Peter Farrelly’s young-Stallone film I Play Rocky gets a soundtrack album on 20 November with nine songs written and performed by Andrew Bird, three of them unreleased, plus a score by Dave Palmer.

Film Music Reporter — roundup · I Play Rocky album

Tao collects essays on doing maths alongside AI; still waiting on ETH and UGC verdicts

Terence Tao’s latest post links five essays on what mathematics is for now. They include Pavel Etingof’s “Use of AI in Mathematical Research: A Guide for Young Mathematicians”, Larry Guth’s “What math means to me”, and two by Anna Gilbert, “Math qua math” and “Mathematical criticism”. His popular book Six Math Essentials is out Tuesday. Meanwhile the ETH discussion blog has posted nothing since 1 November and has no verdict yet. Aaronson says the video of Moshkovitz’s Unique Games lecture is coming “as soon as we can manage it”.

Tao’s blog · ETH discussion · Shtetl-Optimized

Earth’s tides may have kept the young Moon’s volcanoes going

Miao Chen’s group at Chengdu University of Technology models two “tidal heating anomaly zones” near the Moon’s core–mantle boundary, about 2.5% of the mantle. Around 3.2 billion years ago, when the Moon orbited every ~16 days instead of 27, Earth’s tides flexing these zones would have released about 150 GW. That is more than four times the heat from radioactive decay. The model could explain the surprisingly young, ~2-billion-year-old basalts brought back by Chang’e-5.

Universe Today

A new weather satellite’s first loop: cloud layers sliding past each other

ESA has released the first imagery from Meteosat MTG-I2, launched on Ariane 6 in August. A 45-hour animation from 3 November shows fog and low cloud settling over central Europe and deep convection building over the Mediterranean. It also shows stacked layers of Atlantic cloud moving in opposite directions, which is wind shear you can see. When operational in 2027 it will scan Europe every 2.5 minutes. The loop is a good reference for layered winds of the kind a balloon pilot steers by.

ESA

Duets with Antarctic seals, and Basinski for three nights in New York

Bandcamp’s October field-recording picks include The Weddell Seal by Australian violinist Anna McMichael and bassist Helen Svoboda, who improvise against recordings of Weddell seal calls. crys cole’s Testing the Waters layers water in different states with drones. Separately, New York’s Durations festival (9–15 November) has William Basinski playing three nights and Eiko Ishibashi performing a live score to Hamaguchi’s GIFT.

Bandcamp Daily · Avant Music News — Durations

This week’s openings: a pirate-queen Treasure Island, Neil Diamond, and John Farnham

Three new shows open this week. Silver Tongue is a new Australian musical retelling of Treasure Island with Billie Palin as a pirate queen, directed by Richard Carroll with music by Alec Steedman, at the Hayes Theatre in Potts Point (13 November – 12 December). A Beautiful Noise, the Neil Diamond musical, starts at the Sydney Lyric, a short walk from home, on Saturday 14 November. Whispering Jack, about John Farnham, previews at Roslyn Packer Theatre from 15 November, with the season running to 27 December. None gives age guidance; Silver Tongue looks the best bet for a 15-year-old.

The Scoop — Silver Tongue · Sydney Lyric · Sydney Theatre Co.

RLWC semis at Moore Park today; Foo Fighters Tuesday; bus bans continue

Today’s Rugby League World Cup triple-header at Allianz Stadium (gates 4pm; Kangaroos v Samoa 8:05pm) expects more than 40,000 people. Tickets include public transport until 4am. Use L2/L3 light rail or walk about 25 minutes from Central, and note Sunday trackwork on the City Circle and most T lines. Foo Fighters play Accor Stadium on Tuesday 10 November, with express trains from Central from 4pm. Bus drivers’ work bans in Regions 7–9 continue indefinitely, so expect gaps on northern and north-western routes.

Transport NSW — RLWC semis · Foo Fighters · Bus industrial action