In 2019 imaging M87* took 1,000 lbs of hard drives; now a MacBook and 1 hour of fine-tuning does it

yassineyousfi_ · x · 2026-08-28

In April 2019, producing the famous M87 black hole image required 1,000 pounds of hard drives to store telescope data. Today, a MacBook Pro and roughly one hour of fine-tuning a diffusion model can generate thousands of physically plausible black hole images. The author celebrates how far tech has come.

Related event: From 1000-pound hard drives to a MacBook: black hole imaging leap(2 posts)→

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