the only medieval depiction of the half-hour silence in Revelation 8:1 is a plain yellow rectangle in the Silos Apocalypse circa 1100 (the image above, excluding the text).
art historian Elina Gertsman calls that rectangle an effective screen that “blocks the beholder's gaze.”
we think the current market is experiencing its own Yellow Silence of sorts. oil is high, indices are near highs, UMich sentiment is at the lowest its been in months, midterms are near, data center backlash remains an issue, frontier labs are becoming less of a focal point (good) but circular financing & off-balance-sheet financing remains incredibly sus (bad), market breadth is awful—three-quarters of S&P 500 names sit below the 50-day moving average & the top 10 hold 41% of the index, the highest since the dot-com peak—and the list goes on.
everyone can grok the build-up & the aftermath, but few are comfortable sitting in, let alone recognizing, the silence—the “half-hour” after every would-be historical analogue has since fallen by the wayside.
as we continue to explore the best way to share what we’re reading/watching/digesting & thinking, here’s some news in lieu of anything substantial.
🌐 software
Ai2's Nature paper on "byteification" retrofits subword models to byte-level on a fraction of the pretraining budget.
a UW + Meta FAIR paper converts token logits to byte logits, enabling cross-tokenizer distillation.
Nous Research raised $90M from Nvidia, Microsoft's M12, Samsung and others to build "Hermes for businesses."
Nvidia's AVO hit 100% on ARC-AGI-3 with the same Claude Opus 5 that scores ~30% solo.
Microsoft cut its projected $1B annual internal Anthropic spend by a third, steering staff from Claude to Copilot.
Meta cut internal Claude Code users from 60k to 30k and pushed them to Metacode.
the Pentagon told the BBC it "has ceased the use of Anthropic products.”
the DC Circuit upheld the Pentagon's Anthropic ban 2-1 on 09/25.
🧬 biotech
Keith Robison's BOB-Seq post on Sculpta Bio's preprint — bioorthogonal barcoding tags RNA inside the cell for pooled sequencing.
CancerBench grades AI leaders on the gap between their cure-cancer pronouncements and cures actually delivered. all tied for first. and last.
lab instruments run named on-device protocols with no versioning. OmicsOmics proposes push-at-runtime plus cryptographic hashes.
🏗️ infrastructure
Mideast Gulf crude exports are back to pre-war levels, with 40% now bypassing Hormuz entirely.
South Africa joins the resistance against American data centers, with a legal challenge against two proposed Equinix facilities in Cape Town and a moratorium demanded.
an Uppsala group proposes using datacenter fiber itself as memory, streaming LLM weights once into a recirculating fiber ring instead of each accelerator holding its own HBM copy.
💰 finance
Ben Carlson argues "most stocks are losers", the hardest environment of all time for active managers.
on sentiment vs 2000, AAII bullish hit 75% in 01/2000 against retail bearish at 53.3% on 09/18, a 16-month low.
🏛️ society
the Pentagon won't finish spending its Ukraine funds until 2029, with $307M of $400M obligated by the 09/25 deadline.
the 2026 NDAA scales back US funding and shifts the burden to Europe, while the US-Ukrainian minerals fund sealed its first $30M deal.
the Telegraph embeds with a Ukrainian drone pilot for 24 hours of FPV hunting missions.
⏳ perspectives
the CAPS autumn 2026 meeting posted its recordings (National Academies, NASA-sponsored).
Quanta revisits the 1960s planarian memory-transfer experiments — and finds the worms have stopped learning.
a new paper argues Rosalind Franklin understood Photograph 51 before taking it, having calculated the B-form helix parameters from the earlier Photograph 49.
🎨 art
Yellow silence is the one medieval depiction of Revelation's "silence in heaven" — a plain yellow rectangle, ca. 1100.
portfolio news
09/30: signed an MOU with Sophia Space to develop orbital data center infrastructure (deployable structures, spacecraft integration, AI/edge compute in orbit).
10/05: won a follow-on Axiom Space contract for two ROSA solar-array wings for Axiom Station's second module.
10/06: won $3.3M in additional funding through the Trusted and Assured Microelectronics program, with BAE Systems and SiFive, for third-party IP security assurance.
10/05: signed a data and antibody services agreement with Lilly's TuneLab, making Twist's antibody characterization a built-in option in Lilly's AI drug discovery platform.
10/08: Araceli Biosciences collab, integrating Araceli's Endeavor high-content imaging into Nebula's lab-in-the-loop.
10/08: offering autonomous-lab access to NSF's X-Labs program, with remote access to the Boston autonomous lab plus protein testing for X-Labs researchers, announced by OSTP's Kratsios.
09/27: Russia hit Kyivstar HQ (drones, no casualties) in a wider telecom/data-center campaign.
10/06: 5G modernization announced, bringing 30% faster speeds and 50% more capacity at upgraded sites.
10/08: collaboration with Myriad Genetics to advance prostate genomic instability score (PrGIS) tech for precision oncology with AstraZeneca.
09/29: MOU with Riverlane to integrate real-time quantum error correction with the neutral-atom platform in the UK.
10/06: collaboration with Honeywell Aerospace and UC Santa Barbara on a chip-scale optical cavity to shrink quantum sensors toward handheld size, built on Honeywell's silicon-nitride photonics foundry process.
09/30: largest-ever commercial Electron deal, 20 Synspective StriX launches 2028–31, backlog past 100 missions.
10/07: preliminary Q3 revenue up 2,300% YoY to >$2.5M, from $101,422. nine-month revenue >$5M (+1,200%) on U.S. Army/Air Force subcontract deliveries.
10/08: awarded a new U.S. government AI subcontract and launched SPAI Ground Truth, a five-component suite fusing air/ground AI threat detection built on 3.1M+ Ukraine drone images.
10/02: Delaware court ruled Liquidia's Yutrepia infringes two UTHR inhaled-treprostinil patents, rejecting the invalidity arguments.
09/29: strategic partnership with Anduril across advanced weapons and propulsion. (already contracted for >$60M of tech to Anduril for solid rocket motors, divert/attitude control.)
10/05: awarded a $22.4M DoW OTA to prototype next-gen satellite deployment systems for the Space Force.
10/05: won a cancer-research mission-management contract, managing Symphony Biosciences' biopolymer cancer implant experiment on the ISS.
10/06: collaboration with Flexcompute and Starlab Space on GPU-native simulation of cabin airflow for Starlab's life-support system.
10/08: disclosed 15.1% stake in ENDRA Life Sciences via 13D, plans to vote its shares on ENDRA's proposed merger
see you next time.
AURUM NOSTRUM NON EST AURUM VULGI 🪱