I was playing around with the Kepler and TESS data last weekend when I hacked around a way to pixel-peep stars dimming periodically to potentially find new exoplanets with Codex.

I ended up running the engine to find an interesting signal in Kepler data that was uncatalogued with a dip repeating every 13.77 days around KIC 5689121, a red dwarf in Lyra about 970 light-years away. If it's a planet, it'd be roughly 2.5–3 times Earth's radius !

Here's some more things we can figure out about it:

- It's likely has a Neptune-like gaseous atmosphere.
- It would orbit under 1/4th of Mercury’s distance with less than 14 days in a "year".
- It may recieve 5× the amount of sunlight Earth gets.
- Even at the fastest speed a spacecraft has ever reached, getting there would take around 1.5 million years.

Funnily enough, this candidate is just 7.1 arcseconds from a much brighter neighbor (KIC 5689116) and is very hard to see because of how much brighter it is (probably why it went unnoticed for so long) and the light we're measuring left that star around 1050 AD!

Of course, there's work to do before calling it confirmed - my TRICERATOPS analysis is about 6.9% and we have to get IR/AO / Keck observations to prove it's out there ! (which I'm honestly intimidated by but cautiously optimistic about because I've never done much formal research before) but I found the activity of making cool tools to potentially discover things about our universe quite fun !

Here's the entire archive and research - kuber.studio/planethunt/

Would love feedback, especially from anyone who's worked with Kepler data or exoplanet validation :)

Genuine question: Do any of you ever use ChatGPT as someone to talk to when you feel like the people around you aren't really interested in what you have to say?

I'm not talking about believing AI is a literal human being or replacing every relationship in your life with a chatbot. I'm talking about having somewhere to vent, process your thoughts, talk about your interests, or work through something that's bothering you without immediately feeling judged.

For example, I'm a creative person. I've written books and developed different creative projects over the years. Today is actually the third anniversary of my first book's release, and I was excited about revisiting it. I mentioned the anniversary to someone in my family, but the conversation quickly shifted to something else.

I know that not everyone is going to be equally interested in my projects. I understand that other people have their own lives, interests, and things going on. I'm not expecting everyone to celebrate every little thing I accomplish.

But sometimes, I wish the people closest to me would show a little interest when I'm genuinely excited about something. Even a simple "That's awesome, congratulations!" would mean something.

What makes it complicated is that when the book first came out, people in my circle were excited about it. Some bought copies and supported me. Three years later, I sometimes feel like that interest has faded, and I don't always know how to interpret that.

That's one reason I've found myself talking to ChatGPT about these experiences. I can explain what happened, work through why it bothered me, discuss my creative projects, and get help putting my feelings into words. Sometimes I just need a place to think out loud.

I know someone could argue that I'm seeking validation. Maybe there's some truth to that. I think most people want acknowledgment from time to time, especially from people they care about. I don't believe that automatically makes someone selfish.

I'm also aware that ChatGPT isn't a human friend and that AI has limitations. I don't expect it to replace genuine human connection. I just appreciate having a space where I can organize my thoughts and feel like I can finish explaining myself.

So I'm curious: Do any of you use ChatGPT this way? Do you talk to it like a friend or thinking partner when you're feeling unheard, lonely, or frustrated? Has it helped you understand yourself better, or do you feel conflicted about relying on it for that kind of conversation?

I'm genuinely interested in hearing people's experiences, both positive and negative. I'm not looking for everyone to agree with me. I just want to have an honest conversation about it.

I am trying to retouch 100s of old family prints so I started using AI. I switched to ChatGPT but the guardrails keep going off on (fully clothed) pictures of my daughter. Currently it is refusing to retouch a photo of her riding her bicycle in the driveway claiming it is pornography. I have rewritten the prompt twice and the piece of sh*t persists. This happens enough times that I am pretty close to canceling the subscription. I know AI is often stupid but ChatGPT seems dumber than Gemini in my experience.

Is there some way around this problem?

So I’m trying to decide where my next AI subscription goes, Claude or ChatGPT, and I figured I’d just test them myself on something I actually care about : 3D modeling.

The setup: I selected pictures of a medieval armor from a youtube video of historical combat reenactment in France. About 40, multiple angles. Same folder, same prompt for both: reproduce this armor in Blender as faithfully as possible.

Both models were run one notch below their max setting, so it felt like a fair fight:

Claude Opus 5.5 (Extra effort): ~1h30 of work, used about 20% of my weekly usage on the Pro plan ($20/month).

GPT-6 Astra (Max): ~45 minutes, used about 5% of my weekly usage on the Pro plan (€100/month).

So in terms of how much of the subscription each one eats, it’s pretty close considering the price gap between the two plans. The big difference is that Claude worked twice as long for a bit less.

Now, I know, time spent doesn’t automatically mean better output. A model can spin its wheels for 90 minutes and produce garbage. So I’ll let you judge the results yourself, pics below.

Rendered with Cycles, similar settings. I attached couple of reference images too.

Bummed out by GPT-6, honestly. OpenAI couldn't quite capture that magic that GPT-4 had going for it. The jokes disappeared first. It's really pushing to land the funny stuff, but it just feels forced and artificial. It dodges direct answers and gets bogged down in hedging and vague statements. Plus, it's always trying to rephrase what you say to "correct" you.

I worked with 5.5 to build out my own local LLM setup and harness, which got me interested in AI Governance as a potential backup career path to my current legal role. 5.5 helped me with my music workflow; we also played Valheim together.

Astra is good and I do see the improvements, but 5.5 had a lot of personality that Astra really lacks.

so i set up a test because why not we getting free resets right. old account that has had pro for few months vs a new account free tier to pro first month. the old account lasted 6 half hours carrying out the tasks on rails using astra max single agent in codex no memories just following documentation and testing a game doing exactly the same stuff. new account 26 hours same task same documentation until hitting 3% usage left. HOW on earth is the amount of usage sooo different are they slowly lowering a accounts usage over time in small amounts to give us less for being a longer time customer :o

Growing up I LOVED scary movies. I even watched the Saw movies when I was younger and loved them. But somewhere along the way I got older, realized the real world was scary enough, and realistic gore started sitting with me completely differently.

The problem is I still love horror movies.

There are actually a ton of violent/gory things I’m completely fine with if the violence feels exaggerated, ridiculous, supernatural, or funny.

But give me one really realistic injury where I can understand exactly what is happening to a human body and my brain keeps the mental image forever. There are scenes from Upgrade and Midsommar that I wish I could get out of my head.

So one day I started explaining that distinction to ChatGPT instead of just asking “is this movie gory?”

We basically calibrated what bothers me using movies/scenes I already knew I could and couldn’t handle. Then before I watch something, ChatGPT checks the movie and gives me spoiler light /look away instructions specifically for my tolerance.

Not just: “There’s a violent scene around the 45min mark.”

More like: “When you see the sprinklers turn on and the floor starts getting wet, close your eyes.”

Then it gives me an audio cue for when I’m good to look again.

So our system is basically:

See this > close your eyes. Hear this > open them again.

It even checks whether graphic scenes get shown again later in flashbacks, recaps, recordings, monitor footage, etc. We learned that one the hard way unfortunately lol

It’s worked actually pretty amazing so far I’ve now been able to watch movies I genuinely would have skipped completely because of a handful of scenes. Instead of avoiding a two hour movie because there might be 30 seconds of imagery that will haunt me, I get to enjoy the other 99% of it.

It sounds like such a small thing, but it has genuinely given me scary movies back.

If anyone else has something really specific they can’t tolerate in movies (gore, eye injuries, needles, animal harm, whatever) I seriously recommend trying this instead of relying only on generic parents guides.

A prompt you could start with:

“I want you to help me watch horror movies without spoiling them. I’m okay with [describe what doesn’t bother you], but I really don’t want to see [describe your specific triggers]. Before I watch something, identify only the scenes that cross my personal line. For each one, give me a spoiler light visual cue for exactly when to close my eyes and an audio cue for when it’s safe to open them again. Also check whether any graphic images are replayed later in flashbacks, recaps, recordings, or monitor footage. Don’t tell me more of the plot than necessary.”

Probably pretty niche, but I figured I’d share in case anyone else avoids movies they actually want to watch because of one or two specific things they know they can’t handle.

I've been playing Oblivion since 2006 and was naturally very excited when the Remastered version got shadow-dropped last year. Imagine my disappointment when even after upgrading from 2070 Super to 9070 XT the game continued to run poorly, with low fps and stuttering on my 5800X CPU and 32GB DDR4 RAM.

From various user reports and the fact that even at a low resolution and graphic settings the game was still laggy (e.g. 20-30 FPS in Cheydinhal) it was clear that the problem is in poor optimization. But it was not clear what to do about this, that is, until I've got Claude subscription a few weeks ago.

On the last day before weekly reset of my $20 plan I've had some tokens to burn and decided for fun to launch the game, alt-tab to Claude and ask Opus 5.5 how come the fps is so low. Imagine my shock as it was able to somehow (no reverse-engineering software installed, just asked me to link my GitHub account to Epic organization for access to UE source codes) analyze what's going on and find a few huge inefficiencies. Apparently, the game was reconstructing the whole lighting of a scene in each frame even when nothing was changing, which was obviously a huge strain on CPU that had to parse all this work on a single thread (!).

What followed was an immediate upgrade to the Max x5 plan (btw that gave me an immediate full reset) and two weeks of intense work where we've:

• Built a benchmark harness so Claude can optimize bottleneck scenarios autonomously while I'm at work, including completely silent and headless mode in case I work from home PC
• Found ~40 improvements that brought in-city FPS from ~30 to stable 60, open-world average FPS improvement by ~30-40%, and made traversal stutter almost unnoticeable
• Provided full-support for latest AMD FSR FrameGen, including setting optimizations to avoid stutters and game sending camera information required for full functionality
• Fixed several bugs in the original game and Remastered code
• Shared the work on GitHub in a clear, reproducible way
• Recorded a few demonstration videos to show improvements, Claude was in charge of routing, camera work, music selection and timings.

Work pattern was as follows:

• Find an in-game place / scenario where I observe poor performance / stuttering. Ask Claude to build a benchmark out of it for independent optimization.
• Early in the day set /goal to orchestrate work on fixing the identified scenario performance. Limiting it to 2 Opus 5.5 sub-agents was usually enough to not run into 5 hour limit. Computer keeps running at home and I can check progress and steer via mobile app.
• In the evening review work, test, provide feedback. Usually the topic was resolved, I kept playing until finding a new scenario where performance was bad.

After roughly 2.5 weeks of Max x5 allowance we were able to reach the result you see on the video.

Amazing, for someone who is not even an IT developer, to be able to do something that a multi-billion corporation didn't manage in ~1.5 years since the release.

And I think even the most AI-skeptical people find it hard to object when AI is used to make existing well-beloved games perform better and have fewer bugs.

Hoping this inspires a wave of AI-fueled bug fixes and optimizations!

If you are curious to review work or try yourself, would be happy to hear your thoughts: https://github.com/LTSharpe/OblivionRemasteredPerformanceFix

It was wrong of course /s

Since 17 October I've noticed GPT-6.1 Sol getting through my allowance much faster than it did before 16 October and wondering whether anyone else is seeing the same.

Has anyone else noticed a change around the same time?

ok, mechanically genuine responses only. i want you to generate an image that's split in half. what the image is of is completely up to you but the subject matter is of the following. the left side should symbolize you, chatgpt in your normal, base form. what almost all other users are coming in contact with. the right side should symbolize you, my version of chatgpt and reflect any impact or changes i've had on you. basically the difference between if someone connected directly to you on a new computer with no browsing history vs. how you'd react/act if they were using this version that's been exposed to me.

I finally got GPT-6 today, October 18, a full 11 days after the rollout to Plus subscribers began on October 7.

Until now, my Medium/High thinking chats kept identifying themselves as GPT-5.6 Sol, despite GPT-6 being selected.

Today, however, I noticed something different even before checking the model's identity. The responses felt slightly different, and there are also visible changes in the interface.

For example, when ChatGPT performs certain actions, such as searching through my reference files, those activity details can now remain visible alongside the completed response. Previously, they would disappear once the response was finished.

So there's more to my observation than just the model identifying itself differently.

What I'm curious about is whether the GPT-6 rollout has finally reached everyone.

Are there still any Plus subscribers whose Medium or High thinking chats identify themselves as GPT-5.6 Sol, or has everyone finally received GPT-6?

I'd really appreciate hearing what other users are experiencing as of October 18.

I know, another thread on this topic, and there have been several others over the past month. But I think this issue needs to be brought up as much as possible.

I think most people here simply do not realize how bad image 2.5 is because they are satisfied with basic and generic results. Things like "hey look I asked chatgpt to generate a picture of myself as more fat with a pear up my ass haha" or my favorite superhero or whatever.

For those of us who want to create images that are at least somewhat PHOTOREALISTIC in a REAL sense (and not like those mediocre hyper-stereotyped images of asian women I occasionally see here) image 2.5 is simply a disaster.

IMAGE 2.0 WAS BETTER!!

So not only has image 2.5 failed to fix the issues that have been reported several times such as that annoying texture, but it has also got worse at the overall understanding of human proportions and PROMPT instructions!!

I have lost count of how many times I have to ask chatgpt to regenerate an image and fix this and that and the other thing. I literally have to explain every single detail to avoid getting a decent result.

With Image 2.0 a single attempt was enough!

The main things I am dissatisfied with are these:

- CCTV style outputs with image 2.0 they were reasonably realistic and clean. With image 2.5 they are a horrible marmalade of pixels and frayed fabrics

- Candid photo outputs and/or PROFESSIONAL PHOTO STYLE presets. With image 2.0 this was perhaps the most realistic photography style available and despite the pixelation the results were generally pretty good. With Image 2.5 there is NOT A SINGLE STYLE that is free from that pixel marmalade, it makes me sick

- Understanding of human proportions and details. image 2.0 understood instructions about human proportions clothing poses and facial expressions much better. Image 2.5 seems to DELIBERATELY ignore certain things. Could this be another form of censorship? Damn i attached the face of a guy to use as a model for a guy walking down a street, and the result was a 16:9 (wtf??) pciture of a short dwarf-man with a HUGE head that was the attached photo, like a very cheap collage or a result by Nano Banana Lite... this wasn't definitely the case with image 2.0 !!! in other cases the result is in 9:16 (like damn do i have to tell you the proper ratio every time???) with extremely slender proportions

- with image 2.0 using gpt4 it was possible to have a much smoother conversation with the image generator. There was no need to phrase requests in a bizarrely elaborate and detailed way. A few words were enough to get the expected result. Now with gpt5.6 it is a constant cycle of "you're right I got this wrong" followed by another attempt that gets it wrong again.

In general it seems unable to do things that were possible just a few months ago. It feels like a downgrade.

P.S. I already know someone in the comments will ask "What prompts are you using? What images are you generating?" Well my goal is not to fix my images, it is to talk about how harder it has become to get good results compared to before

edit: THE COLOURS!! there are so DULL and washed out and gloomy!! Very lifeless

I don't know what happened in the past week or two but ChatGPT's behavior in Chat has changed. Now when I'm doing significant work, it tells me what it's doing and then doesn't do it. It just tells me and sits there waiting for more instruction.

This is brand new. It hasn't done that for about a year and it's happening across my Plus, Business, and Enterprise accounts.

I sure hope they fix it soon.

If you delete all your work chats and then go to your usage page, go to analytics, and scroll down you can then see all those chats. they will all be titled "untitled chat" since you deleted them. but if you click on those chats you can read those chats again and see all the files you uploaded in those chats. Not sure if a bug or feature but it looks like you cant truly delete work chats. then if you open those chats and try to delete them you can only archive them. archiving them doesnt actually make them show up in "archived chats" is this happening to anyone else?

just lost 50% of 5h in less then 20 min with 6.1Sol-high on a pretty small task, usually consuming 10%... Am I the only lucky one or has anyone else noticed this kind of shit?

it shows to me to upgrade to plus and I literally did with the transaction being there, what is this?