Space and Physics
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Around 26,000 light-years from Earth, at the center of our galaxy, lies Sagittarius A* – a supermassive black hole 4.1 million times the mass of the Sun.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.While it poses no threat other than to the nearby stars it demolishes, it's still nice to know where it is at all times. A new app for the iPhone, made by designer and space enthusiast Matt Webb using ChatGPT, does just that for you.
Webb explained in a blog post that he had once trained himself to track the location of the galactic center throughout the day, and over the course of the year.
"I would end up pointing through the pavement, or down a street, and thinking, huh, that’s where it is," Webb wrote.
However, over the years, he lost his ability to find it. In 2021, he thought about making an iPhone app or website to help, but concluded that there was too much to learn for him to be able to do it properly. But in 2024, he picked up the project again, using ChatGPT to assist him in creating the app. Of course, this isn't a matter of simply asking the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot to create the app for you.
"The generated code is not obscure to me. I’m not asking ChatGPT for huge goals with multiple steps and pasting in code unseen – that wouldn’t work," Webb explained in his blog post announcement. "The experience is more like very, very good autocomplete, or very, very good spellcheck: I can understand the output even if I couldn’t get there on my own."
Webb made the app, figuring maybe a few other people would want it too, but it has proven surprisingly popular around the world.
The app, named Galactic Compass, is available on Apple's App Store for free. It really is neat to load it up and know where you are in relation to the center of the Milky Way.
[H/T: ArsTechnica]
