Industry
Margaret Hamilton, Apollo software pioneer, dies at 90
The engineer who led Apollo's on-board flight software and coined the term "software engineering" has died, aged 90.
Still
Crunchy.
YESTERDAY, STILL WORTH KNOWING
Thursday's briefs span a software pioneer's legacy, a heavy patch day for Cisco, the power maths of AI data centres and a crowded slate of game release dates.
Remembering Margaret Hamilton, the coder behind Apollo
The day's most human story is the death of Margaret Hamilton at 90. She led development of the on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo program and is credited with coining the very term software engineering, a discipline that barely existed when she joined MIT's effort to write the guidance code that helped make the Moon landings possible. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, and in 2017 appeared as a LEGO minifig in the Women of NASA set alongside astronauts Mae Jemison and Sally Ride.
Olivier de Weck, interim head of MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, called her work one of the most complex systems humanity had ever achieved and said calling her a pioneer would be a dramatic understatement. Born in Paoli, Indiana in 1936, she graduated from Earlham College in 1958 with a mathematics degree and a philosophy minor, then wrote advanced code herself while leading the Apollo software team.
Cisco's big patch day and the AI power squeeze
Cisco's security teams had their hands full: 35 vulnerabilities patched across Meraki gear, NX-OS switch software, License On-Prem and the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller, more than a dozen of them critical. The worst sit in NX-OS, which got fixes for 14 flaws, seven critical, including two that could let remote, unauthenticated attackers run arbitrary code with root privileges or trigger denial-of-service. License On-Prem picked up eight fixes, five critical, two exploitable without authentication. Cisco says it is not aware of any being exploited in the wild, though a high-severity server-side request forgery flaw in Finesse has been publicly disclosed.
On the industry side, researchers argue software could ease AI data centres' power squeeze. The International Energy Agency expects data centres to consume around 945TWh for AI by 2030, roughly Japan's current electricity use, yet average power usage effectiveness has barely moved in six years. Concrete examples abound: running Alibaba's Qwen 3 model in FP8, a lower-precision number format, used a third less energy than bfloat16, while the Perseus training optimiser cut training energy by up to 30%. Nvidia's Blackwell power profiles claim up to 15% savings. The catch is Jevons' paradox: savings may simply fund more tokens.
Data centres, chips and the politics of where computing lives
Finland's Licensing and Supervision Agency has ordered Google's subsidiary Tuike Finland Oy to stop construction on data centres in Muhos and Kajaani until environmental impact assessments are completed, amid an investigation into the alleged clearing of more than 740 acres of forest. Google admitted it had fallen short of its own standards. Unlike power bottlenecks elsewhere in Europe, this dispute is about land use, a reminder that even Finland's plentiful land and electricity come with strings.
Meanwhile AMD's Lisa Su visited Samsung's Seoul headquarters to press for more HBM memory supply for AI accelerators, with Samsung reportedly a principal HBM4 supplier for the Instinct MI400 series. Samsung reportedly wants foundry orders in return, but AMD is said to view that as too risky, citing potential delays and yield problems. Separately, Wolfspeed landed a conditional 30-year, $1.5 billion loan commitment from the U.S. Department of War for silicon carbide and gallium nitride work, though it must issue warrants for up to 7.5% of its equity and the deal still faces due diligence.
Hardware you can buy and games you can wait for
Pre-orders opened for laptops built on Nvidia's RTX Spark chip, shipping October 16, with prices from $2,599.99 for the Asus ProArt P14 up to $6,999.99 for a 128GB ProArt P16. A catch: RTX Spark is two chips, a full 20-core version and a cut-down 18-core part, and listings only say N1X, so buyers must check core counts. No independent performance results have surfaced beyond Geekbench leaks, and AMD's rival Gorgon Halo machines are already on sale.
Gaming brought a flurry of dates: Stronghold 4 enters Steam Early Access on December 7 as the series' first Unreal Engine 5 entry, The Road of Dust and Sorrow lands December 3, and 2027 brings PRISON OF HUSKS on January 27, Trainwatch on March 10, ReVamp on March 25 and the pixel roguelike Little Prince Tyger. 11 bit studios also announced Volatiles, a top-down roguelike where you build the map tile by tile, with no date yet.