Calls, puts & mise en place

Appel & Mise

Vol. IMonday, September 14, 2026 · 66° & mainly clear on the UWSThe daily, for Jeremy Ettlinger

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The lede

Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher

Vals AI · made the Sunday

Sir Thomas Urquhart buried sixty-four numbers in his 1653 Logopandecteision and nobody read them for 370 years; the model got there in forty-four minutes and 176,000 tokens, and not by cryptanalysis. It read Urquhart's own prose for the hints he left — his insistence that no number but thirty-two would do, his promise that the reader would find 'the Author's minde' — and worked out that each cipher number indexes a word in the corresponding Proquiritation, first letter only. The answer self-verifies: thirty-two letters a line, and the lines rhyme. As a picture of what long-horizon model work looks like when it actually succeeds, this beats any scoreboard.

AI & Agents

Dan Luu

Bad benchmarks and evals: Senior SWE-Bench, napkin math, and winter tires

Luu takes apart three unrelated benchmarks — the napkin-math latency figures, Senior SWE-Bench, and the received wisdom that all-season tires go hard below 7°C — and finds the same failure in each: something continuous and high-variance flattened into one precise-looking number. The Senior SWE-Bench section is the one to read before your next vendor conversation, where an LLM grader wrong about twenty percent of the time and a hard cutoff at 121 lines of code together decide whether a solution counts as 'tasteful,' and 25.0 percent gets reported against 24.4 as though the difference survives a rerun.

Simon Willison

commit-rewriter 0.1

Willison went to ship the Datasette security work publicly, found the history full of coding-agent cruft and issue IDs from a private repo, and built a small local web app that edits messages in bulk and rewrites everything from the first edit forward. It cuts a timestamped branch before touching anything, which is the detail that makes it usable rather than alarming — and the problem underneath it, agent-written history you would not want a stranger reading, is arriving in everyone's repo at roughly the same time.

Engineering & Leadership

Annie Vella, LeadDev

How to lead a technical discussion

Vella's premise is that leading the room is a facilitation job rather than a knowledge job: you are there to pull tacit knowledge out of people's heads and find where the group agrees, up to and including agreeing on what nobody understands yet. The part worth stealing is her handling of the heated moment — a strong objection is a compressed insight, so you ask questions until it becomes a testable prediction, which quietly converts the loudest skeptic into a contributor.

Web & Product Craft

Gianni Rosato

The case against JPEG XL

Rosato's argument is not that JPEG XL is bad engineering but that it is the wrong shape for the web: no directional prediction, no real deblocking filter, AVIF now ahead across the entire fidelity range, and a decode that trails WebP by more than tenfold on a file ninety kilobytes larger. The point that should land for anyone shipping images is the security one — a format expressive enough to encode nearly anything is expressive enough to encode something that takes forever to decode, and that is a denial-of-service primitive pointed at your users' phones.

New York & the Table

Yvonne Vávra, West Side Rag

From Bad Baldies to Frozen Food: The Upper West Side Kind of Fancy

Vávra kept sneaking back to 72nd and Broadway to see whether the Trader Joe's had reopened, got bored of the vigil, and went digging into what stood on that corner first: the Colonial Club of 1892, with a rooftop observatory, an opera house, and a gallery from which wives could look down on the men conducting important business. It came apart in a factional war between members The Sun named the Roses and the Thorns, which is more or less the energy of a Saturday morning in the frozen aisle.

Nadia Chaudhury, Eater NY

The OG Fish Cheeks Remains Relevant

A decade in, the Nolita original still holds: the $31 crab curry has not changed because it has no reason to, and the $45 happy-hour seafood tower running until five is one of the few raw-bar numbers in this city that is not an insult. No pad thai, by design, and Little Cheeks will send the crab curry to your door if the counter time is the problem.

Diversions

Luke Plunkett, Aftermath

If Hideo Kojima Games Aren't Safe, No Games Are Safe

PlayStation quietly told Kojima Productions in mid-June it was cancelling Physint; the studio spent three months hunting a new partner and landed at Xbox, which posted its announcement roughly a minute after Sony's. Plunkett's read is the uncomfortable one — if the most bankable auteur in the medium, whose work effectively defined a PlayStation era, can lose a project mid-development, then nothing anyone is currently building is structurally safe.

Loose Change

Nautilus

The Moon May Have Been Created in Just Five Hours

The standard account has the Moon condensing out of the wreckage of the Theia impact over something like a decade. Adeene Denton and colleagues at Arizona and the Southwest Research Institute reran the simulation treating both bodies as rock with real material strength rather than as fluids — the first time strength has been in the model — and got a nearly complete Moon in about five hours, with a further day of mopping up. It only works inside a narrow window where both surfaces sit near 3,140°F, hot but not molten, and nobody knows how hot Earth and Theia actually were that day; cooler rock is stronger rock, and stronger rock takes its time.

The Back Page

The Guardian

Premier League: 10 talking points from the weekend's action

The 199th Manchester derby turned on Phil Foden's red card and a Haaland winner that Pro Ref has since admitted should not have stood, with Enzo Fernández — now anchoring Maresca's City midfield alongside Elliot Anderson — interfering from an offside position. Watching two-thirds of a Stamford Bridge spine settle in so quickly at the Etihad is its own kind of Monday; elsewhere Lewis Dunk hit a 35-yard pile-driver in Brighton's five-goal rout at Coventry, and Spurs still have not scored a league goal.

Barney Ronay, The Guardian

Arteta embraces perfect storm to play the victim in game of his own making

Ronay grants that Arteta was right about the Konsa penalty and entirely insincere about being sad over it: a manager who micro-plans the placement of a training-ground toilet seat does not accidentally radiate wounded integrity in front of a board covered in adverts. The sharper claim is that refereeing has become an unplayable job largely because of the frame-by-frame culture of grievance that managers like Arteta spent a decade building, and Arsenal are top of the league while he complains about it.

Around town

Wed Sep 16 · 6:00pm

From Concept to Conviction: AI in the Designer's Toolkit

BrainStation, 136 Crosby St, SoHo

Mareike Carolin Keller, a product designer at Spotify, on moving AI from the thing designers play with to the thing that produces the sprint's deliverables — interactive prototypes instead of static mockups, and the stakeholder buy-in that follows. Forty-five dollars for the practitioner version of an argument usually made by people selling something.

professional

Thu Sep 17 · 10:30am

Regal Rise

Chelsea Studio, 34 W 27th St, Chelsea

A vendor's conference about production-grade customer-facing agents, which would be easy to skip except that David Pan, Cursor's CTO, is on the bill alongside operators from Mutual of Omaha and TaskUs. Free, and the enterprises-past-the-demo question is the one worth hearing answered by people who have to keep the thing running.

professional

Thu Sep 17 · 6:00pm

Padel w/ Founders

Mink Padel, 439 W 127th St, West Harlem

Rackets, Vietnamese food and founders from CPG, law and creative media rather than the usual AI-mixer crowd, fifteen minutes up the west side. Beginners are explicitly welcome, which is the only honest way to run a networking event built around a sport most of the room has never played.

casual

Fri Sep 18 – Thu Sep 24

Charles Burnett's My Brother's Wedding

Film Forum, 209 W Houston St, West Village

A week-long run of Burnett's 1983 Watts feature, the one he made after Killer of Sheep and never got to finish on his own terms. Opening night carries a conversation with Burnett and Maya Cade of the Black Film Archive and is already sold out — a standby line forms half an hour before — so the quieter weeknight showings are the better bet.

casual

Thu Sep 24 · 6:30pm

History by a Hair: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and Solving a 200-Year-Old Mystery

The New York Historical, 170 Central Park West

A single strand of hair found inside Jefferson's Bible, and fifteen years of forensic analysis, genealogy and archaeology spent working out whose it was and what that settles. The Smithsonian's Richard Kurin tells it as a detective story in which the evidence is physical and the stakes are the founding, which is a different thing from a history lecture. Thirty-five dollars, eight blocks from the front door.

say yes

Quote of the day

“A gentleman is never rude unintentionally, only by design.”

— Barney Ronay, in the Guardian

On this day

September 14, 1901 — William McKinley dies in Buffalo and Theodore Roosevelt, born on East 20th Street, is sworn in that afternoon as the youngest president the country has had.

The puzzle corner

The Mini · Wordle · Connections

A model cracked a 370-year-old cipher by reading the author's prose instead of attacking his code, and directly beneath it Dan Luu explains why the number on the scoreboard was never going to tell you that was coming.