Wednesday, 11 November 2026

Claude designs three circuit boards, writes their firmware, and all three work on the first build

Anthropic gave Claude Fable 5.2 (released 9 Nov) three full hardware projects: a USB-C speakerphone puck on a 4-layer board with Bluetooth through a PCB antenna and a capacitive touch wheel, a voice-assistant hub with Ethernet, and a handheld virtual pet. It produced the schematics, layouts, BOMs, firmware and assembly notes. Diode Computers fabricated all three, and none needed a respin.

Two details are worth reading. Claude found that a ~25 mm mic port resonated near 3.4 kHz, which is inside the voice band, and shortened it to ~10 mm to push the resonance up to ~8.9 kHz. It also scrapped and re-routed the hub layout dozens of times. Diode’s PCB benchmark went from 25% (Fable 5) to 69%. The caveats are spelled out: these are prototypes with no electrical validation, no antenna tuning, no certification and no bench equipment. Anthropic also has a commercial relationship with Diode.

Anthropic · HN discussion · Fable 5.2 launch

Agents translate 16% of CPython into Lean and turn up 418 bugs

This project translates CPython 3.15.2 into Lean one function at a time. So far 4,071 of 26,004 functions are done, with 18,898 theorems. Opus 5.5 agents write the Lean code. Each function is checked against real Python on at least 50,000 inputs, and a second agent attacks the result. About 55 of the 418 bugs found are serious, including a setdefault segfault, memory corruption in ElementTree slice assignment, and pickle behaving differently in C and in Python.

The most useful lesson is a practice lesson. Early proofs were true but too weak, because a broken implementation would have passed them as well. Reviewers now ask one question of every theorem: would a faulty version also satisfy this? That is a deliberate way to make the gaps in your own checks visible.

broyojo.com · HN discussion

Piastri leaves Mark Webber’s management after seven years

After São Paulo, Piastri confirmed that Webber no longer manages him, ending a partnership that began in 2019. Webber said they had “collectively agreed that now is an appropriate time” and referred to a “new management structure” without naming anyone. Piastri is contracted to McLaren until the end of 2028. He hasn’t been on the podium since China.

PlanetF1 · RaceFans

Three races left, and three drivers within 18 points for P2

Verstappen is second in the standings. Russell is 17 points behind him and Hamilton one point behind Russell. Ferrari explained Hamilton’s 65-place grid penalty in Brazil: after smoke in FP3, they changed the whole power unit there so he would start Las Vegas without a penalty. He started 20th and finished 9th.

Wolff said backing Russell “could be a possibility” and that Mercedes will go “full blast” for the last three rounds. He hasn’t confirmed team orders for Antonelli yet.

PlanetF1 · Crash.net

Simon Willison finds a mystery beep with five devices and some acoustic triangulation

An intermittent beep was coming from a room full of moving boxes. Willison had Claude Code build “Beep Locator”: a Python WebSocket server plus WebAudio listeners on two iPads, a phone and two laptops. The devices worked out their own positions by chirping at each other, a method from the 2007 BeepBeep paper. An FFT detector picked out the beep, and the server could hot-swap JavaScript onto the listeners while they ran. It located the beep to within about 40 cm: an old carbon-monoxide detector with flat batteries.

simonwillison.net · HN discussion

An overnight agent run builds a 12-stage, 4-player brawler from a nephew’s drawings

A nephew had drawn heroes, 12 villains and a story for a beat ’em up. Given those, Fable 5.2 threw away most of an earlier, thin prototype and produced a complete browser game with cutscenes. It generated about 175 images and 140 audio clips, and four Bluetooth DualShock 4 controllers worked. The interesting part for a game dev is how it checked itself: a headless-browser bot played every stage and the model inspected the screenshots. The run used about 340M tokens. The author admits he never tested whether earlier models could have managed it.

notesbylex.com · HN discussion

Patching a $20 Tuya camera to stream ONVIF/RTSP without the cloud

This is part 2 of an Anyka AK3918 teardown (the camera runs Linux 3.4.35). The steps: Ghidra to find the onvif_enable flag, a patched mkfs.jffs2 to rebuild the image with 4 KB erase blocks, a CH341A and flashrom to write it, and 3.3V UART for U-Boot. An LLM recovered the obfuscated U-Boot password for $0.22. The last obstacle was a Tuya cloud check in ppsapp that silently dropped ONVIF requests when the camera was offline. Once that was patched, ports 8000 and 8554 opened. The author’s own verdict is that it wasn’t worth it. The write-up is good because it records every dead end.

ericswpark.com · HN discussion

The hardest tarball: one archive, eight different results

The archive contains four things: a file, a hard link to it named “café” (the non-ASCII name forces a pax header), a pax size=512 record, and an empty file. Every tool unpacks it differently. GNU tar, Python and Go ignore the size. bsdtar writes a tar header into the hard link and corrupts the original file. Java Commons Compress invents an extra file. R applies the size to the wrong entry. Haskell mangles the name into “café”. .NET and Julia reject it, which the author thinks is the right response. It is one of 134 cases in his tar-minefield test suite.

stoppels.ch · HN discussion

Godot 4.8 beta 3: regression fixes only

74 fixes from 51 contributors. They include a race condition in CommandQueueMT flushing, mouse motion overriding controller input in menus, and “Save on Focus Loss” bringing back deleted scenes. There is also a new abstract LineBase3D class and a light-vertex input on the VisualShader output node. The .NET build now needs .NET 10 or later. Only a few blockers stand between this and release candidates.

Godot blog

A 24-hour clock that lights up the hours of daylight

A 24-hour analogue wall clock with noon at the top. A ring of 48 NeoPixels lights the daylight span for a chosen latitude and longitude. It runs on a Feather RP2040 with an RTC and CircuitPython asyncio, and computes sunrise and sunset with a port of the NOAA solar calculator. A control box lets you step the date a week at a time with a rotary encoder or slide the latitude, so you can watch the seasons sweep around the dial. The laser-cut face was inspired by the Zytglogge in Bern. Light by time and place is useful material for a balloon game.

hannahilea.com · HN discussion

Total Chess Budapest groups are set; Carlsen enters an open rapid in London

Budapest has four groups of six. Carlsen is in Group C with Giri, Nepomniachtchi, Mamedyarov, Martirosyan and Mishra. Caruana is in B with Pragg, Keymer and Rapport. Abdusattorov, Firouzja and Aronian are in A. So, Niemann, Erigaisi and MVL are in D. Monday’s 3+2 blitz Swiss only breaks ties within groups. The top three qualify for the first 2027 Tour event, and the top two in the Tour standings get 2028 Candidates places.

Carlsen has also entered the open London Chess Classic Super Rapid in Hammersmith on 5–6 December (£50 entry, £10k first prize) as a warm-up for the World Rapid & Blitz in Istanbul. FIDE has confirmed the Gukesh–Sindarov world title match: games 24 Nov–12 Dec at the Fondation Martin Bodmer in Cologny, near Geneva.

Total Chess — groups · ChessBase · World Chess · ChessBase — WCh

A new recording of Tiomkin’s Strangers on a Train; Zimmer’s Blue Planet III album

Intrada and Volta are releasing a new Royal Scottish National Orchestra recording of Dimitri Tiomkin’s 1951 Hitchcock score, along with music from I Confess. Silva Screen’s Blue Planet III album (Hans Zimmer, Thom Lukas, Laurentia Editha) is out digitally on 13 Nov, with a 2-CD set on 11 Dec. Mutant will release Volker Bertelmann’s Clayface on CD and double LP in January. There is still no firm date for John Williams’ Seven for Luck CD.

Film Music Reporter — Tiomkin · Blue Planet III · Clayface

A two-clarinet programme from sea to stars; Other Minds gets a new director

New York’s Black Sheep Contemporary Ensemble opens its season on 4 Dec with a programme built around two clarinettists, Nicole DeMaio and Bradley Frizzell. It includes Gerald Cohen’s Sea of Reeds, Mohammed Fairouz’s AdZel and Stacy Garrop’s The Solitude of Stars, three pieces worth looking up. On the experimental side, Other Minds has named composer Brian Baumbusch executive director from January. Fire! Orchestra’s WORDS (22 Jan) sets texts by Joe McPhee among others.

NYS Music · Avant Music News

Survey of 260 early-career mathematicians on AI, posted on Tao’s blog

Three MIT students surveyed more than 260 early-career mathematicians from about 60 institutions, mostly before 6 October, so before the latest wave of AI proof claims. They call it a “temperature check” and say some answers about career outlook and research motivation “surprised and/or dismayed” them. The blog post gives no figures; those are in the arXiv preprint. There is still no ETH verdict from the review blog.

Terence Tao’s blog

Tiny swirls on the Sun may be what heats its corona

The Inouye Solar Telescope sees Kelvin–Helmholtz vortices a few dozen kilometres across on the solar surface. This is the same shear instability that curls clouds into breaking-wave shapes. A new ApJ Letters paper puts about 2×10²⁴ ergs in each one, with millions forming and fading every few minutes. Only 5–8% of that energy would need to reach the corona to explain why it is millions of degrees hotter than the surface.

Universe Today

This week: A Beautiful Noise opens in Pyrmont on Saturday, and bus changes start Sunday

A Beautiful Noise (Neil Diamond) opens at the Sydney Lyric on Sat 14 Nov (ages 8+), and STC’s Whispering Jack starts previews at Roslyn Packer on Sun 15. For amateur theatre, Xanadu Jr runs 13–29 Nov in Lane Cove, and CODA’s SpongeBob Musical plays the Eternity Playhouse in late November (its listing gives two different date ranges, so check before booking). Beetlejuice at the Capitol still has inconsistent dates online.

From Sun 15 Nov, route 378 runs Bronte–Bondi Junction–CBD–Pyrmont, 373 extends to Circular Quay, 343 and 370 go 24/7, and the new 444 links Balmain East and Leichhardt. Bus work bans continue with no end date. Big events: Christmas at Darling Harbour from 15 Nov, Dermot Kennedy at the TikTok Entertainment Centre on Wed 18, Benson Boone at Afterpay Arena 17–19 Nov, and the L4 light rail closed 18–22 Nov. The RLWC final (Kangaroos v Kiwis) is in Brisbane on Sunday at 7.35pm.

Sydney Lyric · STC · Xanadu Jr · SpongeBob (CODA) · Transport NSW — bus changes · Darling Harbour · NRL