Force-majeure notices are commonplace in developments of this scale and are often used to preserve contractual rights among project partners. They do not, by themselves, establish a project delay or change delivery expectations.

Lots of very downbeat takes on Saudi oil. Yet, Riyadh exported yesterday ~6m barrels via Hormuz dark transits -- roughly half of what left the Persian Gulf on the day. Satellite data shows further tankers were loading yesterday at Ras Tanura and Juaymah. If the kingdom wants, it can replicate UAE/Iraq/Kuwait SoH dark transits strategy. All what takes is political will (which Riyadh has been forced to find after an attack closed the East-West oil pipeline) and money to pay for incredible expensive freight. Aramco has spent the last two days selling huge amounts of crude for delivery ship-to-ship in late Sept and Oct in the Gulf of Oman. Most going to Asia.

Today we rolled out Astra to every engineer at Databricks (N=~3500). Some notes that may be helpful to others: 1. Astra unambiguously out performs our previous highest-end models (Opus 5, Sol 5.6) on highly complex tasks, especially those related to high level system design or long range horizontal tasks. 2. Engineers given Astra increased overall coding spend by around 60% compared to baseline. 3. It is not clear Astra meaningfully improves on medium/low complexity coding tasks compared to earlier models. We suspect those tasks are mostly saturated (i.e. perfectly executed) by existing models. 4. We learned above by piloting Astra with around 200 users to gain signal on both quality and cost. We use Unity Gateway to do cohort-based experiments for all new models. 5. We give engineers a sub-budget specific to Astra to encourage them to use Astra selectively on complex tasks while preferring lower cost models for everyday tasks. Our engineers are able to mix-and-match tools and models within their overall budget envelope (we also allow for increased budgets through various mechanisms). These budgets are defined in Unity Gateway and regularly revisited. Note: We do not have robust comparisons of Astra-vs-Fable because we have net yet rolled out Fable widely due to data retention policies.