Calls, puts & mise en place

Appel & Mise

Vol. ISaturday, October 24, 2026 · 46° & partly cloudy on the UWSThe daily, for Jeremy Ettlinger

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The lede

Kimi K3.1 Pro and K3.1 Pro Highspeed

Moonshot AI · made the Sunday

Moonshot is claiming 65.7% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 against Opus 5.5's 66.4% for a 3T-class model with a million tokens of context, and says the full weights ship by November 4 — which would put something within a point of the frontier on agentic terminal work onto hardware you can rent. Read the post for the engineering rather than the scoreboard: the claimed gains come from RL infrastructure (sandboxing, rollout scheduling, environment quality checks) applied across hundreds of domains rather than any new architecture, and the most concrete disclosure is a deliberate capability cut — stripping cyber data from mid-training and RL dropped their internal xdev-bench-hard pass@3 from 90.5% to 81.0%. All of it self-reported, and all of it checkable in eleven days.

AI & Agents

Corgi

Corgi, a terminal multiplexer for humans (and agents)

tmux solves the wrong half of the problem once your long-running processes are agents: you don't need panes so much as a board showing which ones are working, which are blocked on you, and which finished while you were elsewhere. Corgi adds exactly that over Claude Code, Codex, Pi and OpenCode — a catch-up view, per-workspace resource and token accounting, and an install script that doesn't ask you to change editors unless you want image paste.

Block

Dessa: a conversation model trained only on speech

Block's research lab trained a full-duplex speech-to-speech model from scratch on human conversation audio — no text, no pretrained base — on the argument that transcription is where the timing, the sarcasm and the laughter go to die, and reports it running faster than real time on an M4 Max after training on a single GB200 NVL72. Worth the ten minutes of demos and the skepticism they deserve: there are no benchmarks, no paper and no weights, only a waitlist, so the interesting claim — that a model can learn language from far fewer words when the words arrive as sound — is currently unfalsifiable.

Engineering & Leadership

Philip O'Toole

Twelve years of distributed SQLite

The author of rqlite argues that most arguments about replicated SQLite are people answering different questions, and gives you the taxonomy to tell which one you're in: consensus (rqlite, dqlite) if you can't wait for a restore, streaming (Litestream) if you only need to survive the machine dying, merge (cr-sqlite, local-first) if several writers must proceed without agreement. He also tells the quieter story — a 2017 meeting that went nowhere, a Raft library swapped out in 2016, libSQL forking the engine, D1 and Durable Objects turning the idea into a product — and notes the idea was open source for eight years before anyone charged for it, without sounding bitter about it.

Web & Product Craft

Cloudflare

Origin Range Requests: serving large files without range-request tuning

The old design asked you to choose a cache range size per zone, which meant choosing your own pathology: at R2's 64 MiB a small read straddling a boundary cost 128 MiB of transfer, while small ranges meant a swarm of origin requests each pinning memory, and changing the number invalidated everything. Now the fetch unit is the disk chunk Pingora already stores, so a range request serves what's cached, pulls only the missing chunk-aligned bytes, and can attach to an in-flight download instead of starting a second one — p99 time to first byte on R2 roughly halved. Good reading even if you never serve video: it is a clean example of deleting a configuration knob by making the storage layout the unit of work.

New York & the Table

West Side Rag · made the Sunday

Upper West Side election guide: early voting, who is on the ballot, find your polling site

Early voting opens today and runs through November 1, with the late 8pm closings on the 27th and 28th and nothing at all on the 2nd — and the detail worth internalizing is that your early site is almost never your Election Day site, so the lookup is not optional. The Rag has the races down to the NY-12/NY-13 split that cuts through the neighborhood, plus the reminder to turn the ballot over for five citywide proposals that otherwise get decided by whoever happened to flip it.

Hell Gate · made the Sunday

Stolovaya serves up Soviet-era nostalgia with superb Russian favorites

Hell Gate's $20 Dinner goes to 813 Avenue U, where a room done up in hammers, sickles and portraits of Marx has been feeding Sheepshead Bay since 2000, one wall built to look like a train carriage and the televisions on in every corner. The order is veal-and-pork pelmeni, the liver 'le cream,' and a $18.95 chicken Kiev — an hour on the Q each way for dumplings, which is the right kind of Saturday.

Diversions

Aftermath

Dog Online reminds me I used to like websites

A Neopets-shaped virtual pet game that has been in open beta since April Fool's Day and has 10,000-odd people tending scruffy dogs, fishing in ponds, grinding a turn-based RPG called the Lonely Tower, and shopping at a Hot Topic parody. Nicole Carpenter's point is the one you reach every time a page hijacks your scroll: the best thing about the site is that it lets players build their own ugly, hand-made pages for their dogs, and she means ugly as praise.

Loose Change

The Guardian · made the Sunday

Chris Wickham obituary

Wickham, dead at 76, spent a career arguing that the thousand years after Rome fell are unintelligible if you read them through bishops and kings, and rebuilt them instead from the 85 to 95% nobody wrote down — Framing the Early Middle Ages did it from Denmark to Egypt and was called the most significant book of its kind in a century. The method is the pleasure: a 1998 essay showing that gossip in a 12th-century Tuscan village was political infrastructure, a way peasants manufactured an agreed truth and used it against their lords, and a last paper reading the Kerala pepper trade to argue that regional economies, not luxury shipping, drove growth. He joined the Communist party rather than the Socialist Workers because it only wanted one night a week.

The Guardian

Olivier Mourgue obituary

Mourgue, dead at 87, designed the Djinn chairs that furnish the lobby of the orbiting Hilton in 2001: A Space Odyssey — steel frame and rubber webbing hidden under a seamless stretch skin in fifteen colors, light enough to carry under one arm, and still reading as the future almost sixty years on. He hated his parents' dining room and spent his life on the opposite of it: a flat-pack range for the Prisunic department stores he described as bringing beauty at the price of the ugly, a prefabricated furniture system meant to replace the internal walls of 500 social-housing flats in Rouen, and a succession of travelling studios he built onto a Land Rover, a VW van and an army surplus Renault truck he toured central Europe in with his children.

The Back Page

The Guardian

Older, calmer, but still playing the hits: Mourinho and Madrid primed for clásico

Sid Lowe on a return with two layers to it: Mourinho goes back on Sunday night to the stadium he first walked into thirty years ago as Bobby Robson's translator, three months into a Madrid job he was given because the club has gone two trophyless years while Barcelona won leagues with weeks to spare. He has already skipped a press conference to avoid a ban, which is its own form of preparation, and Lamine Yamal has volunteered that he loves the needle.

Posting and Toasting · made the Sunday

Celtics 107, Knicks 103: 'I took the over at 58. Still alive.'

Four days after the rings came out, the champions are 0-2, and this one had the shape of a playoff game until Tatum went for 36 and simply took it. The encouraging part is Miles McBride going 6-of-8 from three off the bench for 20; the alarming part is Mikal Bridges missing all eight attempts and not reaching the free-throw line once this season, and Mitchell Robinson doing honest work in Celtic green.

Around town

Sun Oct 25 · 11:00am

Film Forum Jr.: Corpse Bride

Film Forum, 209 W Houston St, West Village

Burton's stop-motion one, in a theater, on the Sunday before Halloween, at eleven in the morning — which is the correct hour for a film about a corpse. Film Forum Jr. is nominally for kids and functionally for anyone who would rather see puppets lit by hand than rendered.

casual

Tue Oct 27 · 5:50pm

NYC in Transit: A Bronx Tale

Film Forum, 209 W Houston St, West Village

De Niro's directing debut as part of a series about the city in motion, which for this film means a stoop, a bus, and the few blocks a boy is allowed to cross. $18, $12 for members, DCP.

casual

Tue Nov 3 · 6:00pm

Agents We Shipped, Agents We Killed

Follia, 179 3rd Ave, Gramercy

AuthZed and AWS put platform, security and AI leads around a dinner table with no presentations and one subject: what an agent may see, whose authority it borrows, and which ones never made it out of staging. Off the record and free, which is usually the arrangement under which people say the second half.

professional

Thu Nov 5 · 6:00pm

NYC AI Demos #12: Health Tech

The Refinery at Domino, 300 Kent Ave, Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Headway, Oscar, Evvy, Norbert Health and Cleo Health demoing live, which is the format with nowhere to hide — a deck can describe an agent, a demo has to run one. The vertical is not his, and that is arguably the point: health tech ships under constraints most consumer teams never meet. Free, space limited.

professional

Sat Nov 7 · 9:00am

SREday NYC

The New York Times Building, 620 Eighth Ave, Midtown

A free reliability conference in the Times building on a Saturday. The reason to give up the morning is that SRE talks are the genre least able to hide behind a roadmap — the material is always something that broke.

professional

Quote of the day

“Furniture like that has nothing to do with life.”

— Olivier Mourgue, on his parents' dining room

On this day

October 24, 1929 — Black Thursday. Roughly 12.9 million shares changed hands on the New York Stock Exchange, several times a normal day's volume, and a pool of bankers sent Richard Whitney onto the floor to bid above market for U.S. Steel. It worked for an afternoon. The actual collapse arrived the following Tuesday.

The puzzle corner

The Mini · Wordle · Connections

Early voting opens on the Upper West Side this morning, which pairs oddly well with Black Thursday's anniversary and a model release whose boldest disclosure is what its makers took out.