Calls, puts & mise en place

Appel & Mise

Vol. ITuesday, October 27, 2026 · 54° & clear on the UWSThe daily, for Jeremy Ettlinger

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The lede

Cross-request KV cache exposure in the GLM-5.3 Workers AI model, and our remediation with SGLang

Kevin Flansburg and Michelle Chen, Cloudflare

For thirteen days in August and September, 155 Workers AI responses came back carrying text from other customers' sessions, and the mechanism is the kind you only find by reading the whole post. Cloudflare advertised GLM 5.3 with a 1,048,576-token context window while the KV cache pool on its prefill GPUs held only 681,280 tokens — a mismatch they knew about and assumed the engine would turn into a clean error. It did not: SGLang marked the over-length prompt as rejected, swapped in a one-token placeholder, generated a cache for that placeholder and told the decode node the transfer was complete, so decode generated a reply while attending over pages still holding the previous request's data. Two details are worth carrying around: pages are not zeroed between requests because zeroing them costs too much, and the pool size is not a config value at all — SGLang sizes it at startup from whatever GPU memory is left after the weights load, so nothing forces it to agree with the context length you published.

AI & Agents

OpenAI

openai/math: 721 manuscripts from an unnamed internal model

OpenAI has put 721 mathematical manuscripts in 373 families on GitHub, produced by an unreleased internal model at roughly three hours of thinking compute per result across about 4,000 problems posed. The number that tells you how to read it is 42% — the share of top-line results with Lean formalizations — and the README is unusually frank that the unformalized remainder 'could have issues' and that these are 'raw research data, rather than polished academic papers.' No human authors are named and they defer entirely to the math community on credit and precedence, which is either admirable or a way of making 721 unreviewed claims somebody else's problem.

Simon Willison

GPT-6.1 Terra

OpenAI led the announcement with visual reasoning and computer use rather than benchmarks, which Willison reads correctly as a positioning move: Terra sits where Sonnet sits, in the awkward middle where you have to think about when to reach for it. The useful pricing note is $1 in and $5 out per million, about half of GPT-5.6 Terra and of Sol, and the useful candor comes from OpenAI's own Ted Sanders in a Hacker News comment — better than Astra and Sol at technical communication, similar on vision and computer use but much faster, a bit worse at most other things. Cheap and fast is the right shape for computer use, where the work is repetitive and the volume is the cost.

Engineering & Leadership

Diego Quiroga, LeadDev

Are technical design reviews disappearing?

A team let a clear PRD go straight into agents and straight into pull requests across several services, and the reviewers' objection was not that the code was wrong — everyone agreed it would do what was asked — but that it had quietly picked up patterns from individual repos and skipped precautions the org takes on critical paths. Quiroga's point is that agents compress the distance from requirement to code without compressing the need to argue about the approach first, and that more architectural context in the prompt does not fix it. The fix they landed on is small enough to survive contact with a shipping team: a two-pager on intent and approach, reviewed by risk rather than by policy.

Web & Product Craft

Geoff Graham

CSS-Tricks has a new owner

Geoff Graham has bought CSS-Tricks back from DigitalOcean and is running it independently as his full-time job, nineteen years after Chris Coyier started it and four after the acquisition. He is candid about the economics — display ads and sponsorships again, a membership, a beginner HTML/CSS course, and one or two articles most weeks instead of the old cadence — and about why courses are a hard sell right now, with front-end enrollment down across the board. Worth watching for anyone who writes on their own domain: this is the clearest live test of whether an independent technical publication can still pay for itself.

New York & the Table

West Side Rag

Upper West Side guide to the 2026 NYC Marathon

The race is Sunday, pros off Staten Island at eight and finishing around eleven, with waves still starting until half past, and the finish line sits in Central Park beside Tavern on the Green — which is to say the whole thing ends in the neighborhood. The Rag's non-obvious pick is Marcus Garvey Park at 120th Street: thinner crowds than the four-deep scrum on First Avenue, bikeable from the UWS, and close enough that you can see your runner there and still beat them to the finish. The week before has its own schedule — the free expo at Javits Thursday through Saturday, the Parade of Nations in the park Friday afternoon.

Diversions

James Folta, Literary Hub

Who chooses the poems for the New York City subway?

Poetry in Motion has run since 1992 and may be the largest venue for contemporary poetry anywhere, and the selection process turns out to be two people pulling books off a shelf of ten thousand, photocopying pages and arguing about them. The constraints are the interesting part — twelve lines or fewer so it fits the panel and stays legible, nothing racy, a strong preference for living poets so the thing reads as alive rather than as Shakespeare on the Underground. Creative within constraints, as the Poetry Society's Matt Brogan puts it, which is a description of a spec.

Loose Change

Charles C Mann, Works in Progress

Everything rhymes with porcelain

Mann buys an expensive induction cooktop, discovers the cooking surface is sold separately and made of something called Dekton at five times the price of tempered glass, and goes looking for what Dekton actually is. The answer is porcelain — the same material Chinese potters worked out three thousand years ago by firing kaolin clay past 1,200°C until the silicon breaks free, turns to glass and floods the lattice of needle crystals the clay has reorganized itself into. Getting there took a chain of inventions nobody lists in the history of technology: downdraft kilns that vent through the floor so the heat stays in, and new bricks that would not melt at the temperature the new kilns reached. Europe wanted it badly enough to call it white gold and failed for centuries, mostly because nobody there knew about kaolin.

The New Yorker

How tree rings challenged the myth of American wilderness

Dendrochronologists kept finding something that did not add up: giant sequoias with an average of sixty fire scars each, and across the East, up to 88% of scars dated to the dormant season, when thunderstorms essentially do not happen. If lightning cannot account for the fires, something else lit them, and the pattern the researchers eventually read out of the wood tracks human population density — with a visible 'wave of fire' moving across the map as European settlement displaced the Native communities who had been burning the land deliberately. The whole American idea of untouched wilderness, the one Bradford and Thoreau and Muir each took for granted, turns out to be contradicted by the growth rings of the trees they were admiring.

The Back Page

Barney Ronay, The Guardian

Kane's Ballon d'Or triumph a glorious riposte to celebrity fawning of ceremony

Kane ends England's twenty-five-year wait with 89 goals since August 2025, a European Golden Boot, a Bundesliga title and a World Cup semi-final as captain — and then cries on stage at the Palladium thanking his parents, his wife and, in a swerve Ronay enjoys, José Mourinho. Ronay is scathing about the evening around it, which he calls celebrity culture rather than sport and which opened with French Montana performing on a double-decker bus, and generous about the man at the end of it. The best column of the day on either side of a sport that mostly cannot do sincerity.

David Pasztor, We Ain't Got No History

Chelsea 0-2 Tottenham, player ratings: early-season Blues

The community ratings are a flat field of 4s with Caicedo scraping a 5.6 at the top and Palmer at 3.2 at the bottom, and Pasztor's note that these are generous — that the voters were lenient the way referees are early in a game — is the most damning line in it. Neto stayed at wing-back with Palestra and Gusto both fit on the bench, which is the tactical argument that will not go away, and the back three kept a clean sheet until it was undone by an error and a headrush. Alonso's honeymoon is over eight matches in.

Sean Keane, Golden State of Mind

Yaxel Lendeborg shows out on national stage in Warriors' first win

31 points, 12 rebounds and six assists from the rookie in a 134-114 rout of Denver, and the shape of it is the encouraging part: Denver keyed on Curry early, Lendeborg ran the offense instead, and Horford and Niang hit from distance off a bench that finally had its veterans available. Curry took one shot in the first half and made it, then scored 17 in the third on 6-for-6, finishing 8-for-8 on the night. After three games of blowouts, choke jobs and a rookie-versus-superstar feud, this is the first evidence the roster works.

Around town

Wed Oct 28 · 6:30pm doors, 7:00pm show

Artificially Unintelligent: tech comedy, 31st edition

Broadway Comedy Club, 318 W 53rd St, Midtown

A stand-up night where the comics are engineers, PMs, founders and VCs who also happen to have been on Netflix and Comedy Central, now in its thirty-first run — which is the detail that matters, because a tech-themed comedy show that has survived thirty nights has found actual material. Fifteen dollars, an afterparty five minutes' walk away, and the organizers promising to sell your data to Palantir.

casual

Mon Nov 2 · 6:00pm

Can Your Agents Actually Ship?

307 W 38th St, #1401, Garment District

Two VirtusLab engineers on the half of agentic development nobody demos: the pipelines, CI, review gates and release processes that were all built for human speed and now sit downstream of something much faster. The opening talk is on the data foundations agents need before they can be trusted to find and touch anything. Free, and the honest framing — the bottleneck is not the agent — is the right one.

professional

Tue Nov 3 · 5:00pm–8:30pm

AI Builders Night at Modal

Modal HQ, 233 Spring St, Hudson Square

ClickHouse and Modal host three talks on the infrastructure under large-scale AI systems, with food and a long networking tail on either side. The speakers are still listed as TBD, which is either a red flag or a sign they booked the room before the lineup; Modal's office is worth the walk regardless if you want to talk to people who run inference for a living.

professional

Mon Nov 2 · 8:00pm

Citizen Ruth, with screenwriter Jim Taylor

Film Forum, 209 W Houston St, West Village

Alexander Payne's 1996 debut, the one where Laura Dern plays a glue-huffing drifter both sides of the abortion fight decide to adopt as a symbol, and the film declines to let either of them off. Taylor co-wrote it, along with Election, Sideways and About Schmidt, and stays after for the conversation. Eighteen dollars, twelve for members.

casual

Quote of the day

“To make sure that poetry feels like part of the infrastructure.”

— Matt Brogan, Poetry Society of America, on what Poetry in Motion is for

On this day

October 27, 1904 — New York's first underground subway opens, and Mayor George McClellan Jr. likes driving the train so much he keeps the controls well past City Hall. The IRT ran up Broadway under what is now the Upper West Side, and 150,000 people paid a nickel that evening to ride a hole in the ground for fun. A launch day where the executive refuses to hand back the keys is a genre that has not changed.

The puzzle corner

The Mini · Wordle · Connections

The Cloudflare post-mortem and the LeadDev piece are the same story told at two altitudes: a system did exactly what it was configured to do, and the configuration was never forced to agree with what anyone had promised. One costs you 155 leaked responses, the other a feature that ships the wrong shape. Both get caught by someone sitting down and writing two pages about what was actually meant.