iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I do understand the argument that AI proofs are often ugly. But that is nothing new. We heard the same complaint about the proof of the four colour theorem. It might even be the right time to try to formalize a bit more the concept of mathematical beauty and use it to guide AI proofs.

000

that AI proofs are having a negative effect on math culture. This is not getting understood and is generating a negative reaction, which then gets a dismissive reaction from the mathematicians causing a worse counter reaction. So sad to see such an ugly debate about a field I studied and love.

I am puzzled to see the mathematicians' reaction to AI generated proofs. I was expecting to see complaints that the proofs were incorrect or that the Lean formalization was incorrect or even that somehow the AI was not properly crediting relevant work by humans. But instead the complaint is ...

Which view to cover is a complicated decision which depends on the credibility of teams A and B, the number of papers that support or do not support each side etc. Typically Wikipedia can't handle this decision especially as it may change over time.

Very often Wikipedia only covers one of these papers, typically the one that got the most media coverage.

Is Wikipedia ‘deeply biased’? Sandi Toksvig says it is – so she’s backing a rival

There are many problems with Wikipedia sadly. One problem for science is the "one truth" model. Often science team A puts out a paper stating "X is true". A year after, science team B team puts out a paper saying "Y is true but X is not true". www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

theguardian.com

Just 19% of the online encyclopedia’s biographies are of women. Is this because it’s edited by ‘mostly white, middle-aged, European men’, as the comedian claims?

Galaxy Map @galaxymap.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

I'm curious about credible examples. I'm still skeptical about people overhyping AI (either for all the good people claim it can do or all the bad people claim it can do). As we know from rm -rf /* when people get access to technology they can always abuse it to do stupid things.

010

Galaxy Map @galaxymap.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

But seriously, are you really forwarding messages from an antitech account devoted to spreading fear about Meta? Personally I have been skeptical about AI being overhyped but I like useful tech. After all this is an account all about science and technology.

100

That is Muse. I am using Muse Code, a much more specialized AI agent that only has access to a single Unity project directory on my workstation.

100

... for first time I have an AI agent that is actually saving me development time. It obviously is not like a human assistant. It wrote all the button labels backward initally and it took a few minutes to get it to "understand" what the problem was.

100

I gave it some quite high level instructions and it delivered working buttons, the ability to toggle off the visibility of parts of the starship, change sky boxes etc. It has a good understanding of Unity and the various Meta VR SDKs so ...

100

I have been trying out Meta Muse Code to help me develop a new virtual starship and so far I have been favourably impressed. I have provided the astronomy data, starship model I created in Blender, skyboxes, all images etc. I asked Muse Code to help me create a Star Trek control panel.

200

Cool. Usually the creators of television shows are anonymous or barely known figures. That is not the case for Gene Roddenberry and Lucille Ball. I hope these figures do well.

111

The movie asks for the source of Armstrong's extraordinary combination of intensity, concentration and bravery and argues that at least some of it was a form of protection against the grief he felt towards the death of his daughter.

Arguably First Man does portray Armstrong as a hero but not a comic book one.

Reminds me again of what a wonderful movie First Man is and the odd public response it got when it first came out. Maybe I'm cynical but I always thought movie viewers who like movies about people would like First Man but movie viewers who prefer movies about Marvel superheroes would not.

Anne Carson wins Nobel prize in literature 2026

I'm a Canadian but have never heard of this writer. Perhaps that confirms me as a cultural Philistine? 🤔 www.theguardian.com/books/2026/o...

theguardian.com

Most prestigious literature prize goes to Canadian known for genre-crossing works such as Autobiography of Red

Other sources say that although some Apollo systems used triple redundancy, the flight system used a task prioritization system instead. In any case, it had to deal successfully with a number of hardware errors.

First Man (2018) - The landing scene

I think this is Margaret Hamilton's software in action. It had triple redundancy so despite the hardware glitches that generated the 1201 and 1202 alarms, the flight system did not crash and guided by Armstrong and Aldrin led to a successful landing. youtu.be/zfNhkYHrfj0?...

youtu.be

YouTube video by Mydriaze

191

Galaxy Map @galaxymap.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

It says about 3600 objects including white dwarfs and brown dwarfs, within 20 parsecs. So I think that is meant to be complete for stars and brown dwarfs.

010

Also love your hot star. Again nothing like the Sun (or Betelgeuse). Betelgeuse is a calm pussy cat compared to this thing: luiscalcada.com/luminous-blu...

luiscalcada.com

Luis Calcada - Luminous blue variable star

Luis Calçada data and science visualization artist. Music Producer.

040

Galaxy Map @galaxymap.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I notice that this paper uses ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024ApJS... which is yet another catalog of nearby stars. I've seen nearby star catalogs going out now to 10, 20 and 25 parsecs (plus the Gaia Catalog of Nearby Stars going out to 100 parsecs but that does not try to be complete).

ui.adsabs.harvard.edu

130

Galaxy Map @galaxymap.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I believe that the above more realistic image of Betelgeuse was commissioned by ESO: www.eso.org/public/image...

eso.org

A plume on Betelgeuse (artist’s impression)

100

Real stars are various shades of blue, white and orange. Even red giants are not actually red.

100

One of the frustrations I often hear from astronomers is how media illustrators often illustrate stars by taking a NASA image of the Sun and changing the colour. When in fact only G-type main sequence stars look like the Sun. And by the way they even get the Sun wrong by colouring it yellow.

A real red giant star has an indistinct surface and lots of dust.

Here's a famous image of Betelgeuse done by astronomers.

130

Not great I would say. The trouble is that AI image generation systems know very little about astronomy and they make all stars look like variations of the Sun.

I know many people really really hate AI images here but I admit that I was curious at how Meta Muse could handle a request for a Betelgeuse-like red giant star. Here's the result after I kept asking for more dust.

I'm now up to about 50 people signed up for the Atlas of the Milky Way Kickstarter. Would still like many more before I launch it. Please sign up here: kevinjardine.dev/signup/ Would love your suggestions on how to promote this now that I have a nice profile page here: kevinjardine.dev/profile

kevinjardine.dev

Email Confirmation App

010

Atlas of the Milky Way Kickstarter profile

I've updated my profile page with an endorsement from Anthony Brown, chair of the Gaia Mission Data Processing and Analysis Consortium: kevinjardine.dev/profile/

kevinjardine.dev

Explore the Milky Way with Kevin Jardine's detailed cartography.

084

Galaxy Map @galaxymap.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Granted people here don't seem to hate the poor like they do in the United States.

100

Galaxy Map @galaxymap.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Well, I live here in the Netherlands and I think the mixed system works pretty well. In addition to private health insurance, wealthier people pay a special health tax to subsidize public health costs for the poor. Last time I went to emergency at my hospital, I had to wait for only 10 minutes.

100

Galaxy Map @galaxymap.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

The prices charged by US health care providers seem more like extortion.

Galaxy Map @galaxymap.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Public health insurance advocates often forget that it needs two policies: a. a public option and b. tight regulations to reduce the cost of drugs and health services. The Netherlands has private insurance for most people but the system works because the government controls costs.