Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

I’m constructing algorithmic central planners for these pixels. It has pretty much nothing to do with the thing venture capitalists are interested in.

Telling people I’m using my highly parallel coprocessor to implement some nonlinear optimization techniques invented to manage the USSR’s economy so I don’t have to hear “Oh, you’re doing AI stuff?” ever again.

Let’s set aside petty politics and remember the great statesman in his own words, committing one of his several unimaginably gruesome crimes against humanity.

This is adjacent on one side to the corrosive forces of fame. On another side, to something I think of as the Linguist Scicomm Problem, which is a pattern in science communication where you spend so much time rebutting people’s surface-level misconceptions that you never get to anything else. (Thinking of online linguists who keep explaining that linguistics is descriptive and never actually get to the, you know, linguistics.)

A bad thing about social media is this pattern where a person with expertise starts rebutting bad ideas, and it’s great, but over time it primes them to see everyone who doesn’t hold exactly their opinions as part of a horde of goons with terrible ideas, because that’s who they end up interacting with.

Eventually their online persona is, like, Truth Gladiator. And that’s so much less interesting and important to me than Thoughtful Person With Useful Perspectives.

Remote sensing folks: where can I find nontrivial amounts of openly licensed ~10 cm (or better) aerial hyperspectral data?

The cat is annoyed with me because she doesn’t like the texture of the keyboard she’s standing on. Why would I do this to her.

(I got some new followers so now I have to shake the branches a bit. Sorry.)

It’s very important to pause and feel gratitude. Today I am grateful that my generation will never have moral panics about foolish things that tiny numbers of young people do with new technology, we will never sweepingly reject new technologies out of a vague sense of disgust, and we will never compulsively fiddle with media franchises that need some rest. It feels good to be objectively better than those awful boomers.

Anyway, I still can’t write up all my notes from 2013 because some of the people and organizations mentioned are still very much on the scene and will 100% send me e-mails about how confused they are that I would say such misleading things.