Daily almanacNº 1
Thursday
November 5
Waning crescent · 19 %Leonids · Nov 17
Today on Aster: the day’s AI news, 4 new games and a waning crescent to look at tonight.
At the Allen Telescope Array in Northern California, the SETI Institute and Breakthrough Listen now use AI agents that point the dishes and analyze radio signals as they arrive, running on NVIDIA’s Holoscan platform. The team says tasks that used to take weeks now take hours, and it detected a pulsar in the Crab Nebula in real time.
With its new Images 2.6 model, OpenAI lets you create GIFs from text or an uploaded image, adjust the speed and edit frame by frame. It’s rolling out to all ChatGPT and Codex users on web, desktop and mobile, and image generation in general gets faster.
On its third-quarter earnings call, Uber said that during its busiest week of October, Halloween week, just 4 rides and about 500 Uber Eats orders came through an AI agent, out of roughly 320 million trips and orders. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi called the traction “very, very early.”
The British digital bank swapped commercial services for open-weight models (GLM, from Chinese company Z.ai) running on its own hardware, and says its AI coding spend fell about 90% in under a year. Around 2,000 engineers use the tools; for image tasks it still turns to commercial models.
German musician André Grafert, who records as Coloured Tears, made 23 covers of songs by the band Twice a Man by hand. SubmitHub’s detector flagged all of them as possibly AI-generated, and also tagged 7 of the original 1980s recordings; it linked one from 1982 to a music model released in 2025.
4 challenges that change every midnight. The same for everyone, so you can compare with friends.
Stars appear one by one. Guess the constellation in six tries or fewer.
A five-letter space word. Gold tiles are in place; blue ones belong elsewhere.
Every clue makes it clearer: planets, moons and stars.
Listen to a short melody and guess it note by note.
Tokens, next-word prediction, training, hallucinations and the context window: how a language model works on the inside.
What AI model weights are and how open and closed models differ: privacy, cost, licenses and the safety debate.
NASA’s Anil Menon and the Canadian Space Agency’s Joshua Kutryk spent 7 hours and 11 minutes outside to install the seventh of eight new arrays, which adds about 8 kilowatts. With all eight, the station will go from 160 to roughly 215 kilowatts. Kutryk is the fifth Canadian to walk in space; the last array goes up on November 5.
It’s called Rinconraptor pipoae, lived about 83 million years ago and was a megaraptorid, a group of meat-eaters with powerful arms. It was found near Rincón de los Sauces in Neuquén, Argentina, from ten tail vertebrae and parts of an arm and a leg. A CONICET team presented it in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica.
Free tools that run in your browser. Your files never leave your device.
For musicians: tune up and keep time without installing anything.
The French company released the weights of Mistral Large 4, nicknamed “Le Chonk,” so anyone can download it and run it on their own hardware, under its own license. It has about a trillion parameters, of which it uses roughly 49 billion at a time, and the company says it excels at cybersecurity. It was trained in Europe on about 4,000 Nvidia chips.
It’s called 2026 ED138 and sits about 46 times the Earth–Sun distance away, farther than Pluto. Based on its brightness, it could be 600 to 1,500 km across. Astronomer Matthew Holman spotted it in data taken this year: the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s telescope in Chile had caught it 30 times over 20 nights. It still has to be confirmed as big enough to be round.
Using the VLA and ALMA radio telescopes, a team saw the red supergiant’s atmosphere stretch into an egg shape at times. That fits the pull of a small star called Siwarha orbiting inside its outer atmosphere on a cycle of about 5.9 years. The authors note the evidence isn’t yet enough to confirm it. The study appeared in The Astronomical Journal.
Researchers from Sorbonne University and the CNRS shone ultraviolet light, without touching the walls, on drawings about 37,000 years old in this French cave. They found a transparent calcite film that may protect them like a natural varnish, though if it thickens it could also hide them. Some lines also seem to have been drawn with still-hot charcoal.
A University of Cambridge team simulated 100,000 histories of comet impacts. In 54% of them, none delivered enough hydrogen cyanide, a key molecule for the chemistry that comes before life: small comets break apart in the air and impact heat destroys those molecules. Mars, with weaker gravity and thinner air, fared better.
The General Conference on Weights and Measures, meeting in Versailles, agreed to stop adding leap seconds to official time (UTC) starting in 2027. Since 1972, 27 had been added to keep pace with Earth, whose spin is slowly getting slower; the last one came in 2016. Now the gap can grow up to an hour before it’s corrected, which would take centuries.
An AI system trained on vast amounts of text to understand and generate language.
AIThe small chunk of text (a word, part of a word or a symbol) that a language model reads and writes.
AIWhen an AI model makes up facts, quotes or details and presents them confidently as if they were true.
AIAn AI model whose trained parameters are published so anyone can download and run it.
AIAn AI system that does more than answer: it plans steps and uses tools to complete a task on its own.
AIThe maximum amount of text, measured in tokens, that a language model can take into account at once.
