Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

The Western Australia dust storm is pretty astonishing even at this scale. https://botsin.space/@dscovr_epic/111569828399944670

How I know I don’t have telekinesis is there hasn’t been a multi-year rash of human combustion incidents by cooking influencers who take a bite of the dish they just made and performatively smile like they’re honestly amazed how good it is and the camera just happened to catch that totally unplanned moment of spontaneous joy.

Every time we go to Lost Landscapes I look around at the crowd of vaguely artsy, apologetic-looking nerds and think “I must know like 20% of the people here online.”

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?