Tuesday, 10 November 2026

Brazil: Norris wins in the rain, Verstappen goes from the back to second, Piastri sixth

Norris got away slowly from pole but won the wet São Paulo Grand Prix, his third win of 2026. Verstappen started at the back after his power-unit penalty and finished 14.6s behind him in second. Hadjar was third, so both Red Bulls made the podium. Antonelli led early but spun at Turn 1 on lap 20 (a suspension problem is suspected) and finished fifth after a 5s unsafe-release penalty.

Piastri climbed from tenth to sixth, 56s behind. Russell was fourth. Leclerc took a 5s penalty for hitting Lawson on lap 70 and dropped to eighth, and Hamilton finished ninth.

Sky Sports · PlanetF1 — results

Mercedes clinch the constructors’ title; Verstappen now leads the fight for second

Mercedes sealed their ninth constructors’ championship with three rounds to go, which ties Williams for third on the all-time list. The drivers’ standings now read Antonelli 390, Verstappen 279, Russell 262, Hamilton 261, Leclerc 251, Norris 246, so Verstappen is 17 points clear in the race for P2.

Russell spun at the pit exit after his first stop, and Antonelli later let him through on team orders. Toto Wolff says Mercedes “absolutely” want Russell to finish second.

RaceFans — standings · GPblog

Aaronson on the AI proof of the Aaronson–Ambainis conjecture: “likely correct”

Scott Aaronson has now written about PSI’s claimed proof. He thinks it is likely correct, even though he hasn’t followed it fully himself yet. He gives three reasons: the Lean certificate, expert review, and an expository write-up by Blanc, Docter, Strassle and Tan. The proof shows that some variable has influence of at least about 1/d⁶. It came from PSI’s research harness running an internal Claude model.

He stresses how narrow the result is. It rules out one kind of quantum speedup (yes/no problems with random oracles) and leaves Shor’s algorithm and quantum simulation untouched, so “quantum supremacy is dead” headlines misread it. Separately, a guest post on Tao’s blog asks what undergraduates should be taught now. There is still no ETH verdict.

Shtetl-Optimized · Tao’s blog — Gevertz & Marcus

Bare-metal STM32MP2 from on-die SRAM turns up a TrustZone silicon bug

Andrew Zonenberg ran his own firmware on the STM32MP257 eval board (Cortex-A35 plus Cortex-M33) with no Linux, U-Boot or DDR, executing entirely from on-chip SRAM. He got PCIe talking to an FPGA, and fixed intermittent link drops by switching from the internal reference clock to the board’s external 100 MHz clock.

Along the way he found a RISAF5 bug that let non-secure accesses get past TrustZone on the PCIe region. ST now lists it as errata 2.3.33.

serd.es

“AI brain fry”: running many agents without losing the plot

Sergey Kuhne describes the overload of supervising lots of Claude Code and Codex sessions, and the system he uses to cope. Work is a priority queue of markdown tickets kept in git. Agents research the tickets, build the ones marked safe and run the tests, but never deploy. Anything that needs his judgement lands in a single inbox. He reviews it one item at a time and writes each verdict back to the ticket, so decisions are visible and recorded rather than held in his head.

sergeykuhne.com

Agent-written PR descriptions: fold them away, or don’t be a “meat proxy”

Simon Willison suggests a human-written opening line, with the long agent-generated PR description folded inside a <details> block. Bruno Rocha takes a harder line: pasting agent output back without guiding or checking it adds nothing and pushes the clean-up onto colleagues. In serious cases, he argues, it should be grounds for dismissal.

Simon Willison · SwiftRocks

SQLite extension in C vs Rust: twice the speed at a twentieth of the size

Willison built the same parse_number() SQLite function, which turns currency and percent text into numbers, in both C and Rust. The optimised C version ran at 16–19 ns per row, about twice as fast as Rust (41–46 ns on mixed data). The C binary was 14 KB against roughly 300 KB for Rust. The code was written in a Claude chat, not by a coding agent.

Simon Willison

What is malloc doing, anyway?

Ben Andrew builds a sequence of toy C allocators: bump allocation, then free lists, coalescing, heap trimming, and mmap for large blocks. He benchmarks each step. glibc still wins by a wide margin thanks to size bins and a thread-local cache, although it sometimes keeps more memory resident.

benmandrew.com

KetchUp: an open-source SketchUp-alike in Rust and WebGPU

A free, MIT-licensed 3D modeller aimed at woodworking and furniture. It has Push/Pull, snapping, typed dimensions, groups and components, imports SketchUp .skp geometry and exports OBJ. It runs natively on Windows, macOS and Linux, or in the browser. It was one of yesterday’s most-upvoted posts on Hacker News, and might suit quick blockouts before Blender.

KetchUp

Chimera: a voice synth where every sound comes from a simulated airway

A browser toy that physically models the vocal tract, so you shape vowels and consonants by moving a simulated airway instead of choosing samples. Hacker News commenters call it a modern Pink Trombone. It’s worth a few minutes if you’re after strange new sound sources.

Chimera Vocal Synth · GitHub

Total Chess begins in Budapest today with a blitz seeding day

Day 1 (10 Nov) is a nine-round 3+2 blitz Swiss with no points or prize money. It only sets seeding, tiebreaks and colour choice. Four groups are drawn at today’s opening ceremony, and the top seeds go into separate groups: Carlsen (2823), Caruana, Abdusattorov and So. The prize fund is US$650,000, with $80,000 for first.

ChessBase India

A robot has assembled part of a structure in orbit with no astronauts

Caltech’s DARPA-funded ASTRA payload, launched in March, has put together part of a truss in space by itself. Technical problems mean its planned 1.4 m antenna won’t be finished before the mission ends in December.

ScienceDaily

Light made into a supersolid at room temperature

University of Warsaw physicists have made a “supersolid”, which has crystal-like order but flows without friction, at room temperature rather than near absolute zero. They used hybrid light–matter particles in a liquid-crystal microcavity. The paper is in Science Advances.

ScienceDaily

A food emulsifier tames sloshing rocket fuel

Concordia researchers used lecithin and a trace of calcium chloride to gel kerosene. The gel behaves like a solid at rest, so it doesn’t slosh in tanks, and becomes more than 100 times runnier under pressure so it can still flow through injectors. It stayed stable for over a year but hasn’t yet been tested in real high-pressure injectors (Langmuir).

Universe Today

The youngest white-dwarf partner of a millisecond pulsar yet found

NGC 362D spins every 5.83 ms in the globular cluster NGC 362, about 29,300 light-years away. Its helium white-dwarf companion stopped feeding it only about 0.6 billion years ago, the youngest such companion found so far. The team combined radio data with ten years of Hubble images.

Universe Today

Foo Fighters at Accor Stadium tonight: up to 60,000 people, plus trackwork

Gates open 4:30pm, the Foo Fighters are on at 8pm and it finishes around 11pm. Your concert ticket covers public transport until 4am. From Pyrmont, take the L1 to Central, then an express train (about every 10 minutes from 4pm). Coming home, express trains leave Olympic Park about every 6 minutes until 12:30am. Watch for trackwork: T2 Inner West runs only City–Homebush from 3:40 to 11pm, and buses replace T8 Airport trains from 9:30pm to 1:30am.

Later this week: Ashanti at ICC Sydney (Fri), Robbie Williams at Accor, Jack Johnson at The Domain and George Wassouf at Darling Harbour Theatre (all Sat), and Iron Maiden at Allianz (Sun). The bus drivers’ work bans are unchanged.

Transport for NSW — Foo Fighters · TfNSW — bus action