And another one for my fellow geonerds - where is the latest to read up on using consumer drones to create orthophotos of some land? I knew there were several places before but never followed them too closely. Well now I am really interested! Thanks for any pointers!

This one is for my geo LIDAR homies. I want to get the finest detail point cloud data for a small area central California. The only resource I can find to download are ALL THE POINTS IN CA. Better suggestions?

New study finds that nudging people to be more reflective did not reduce susceptibility for vaccine misinformation. Accuracy nudges can be a quick way to respond more thoughtfully, but they don't always work well with highly polarized topics. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

PyTorch 2.10 is now optimized for Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors to bring high-performance AI to the PC and edge. Read our latest blog from the Intel PyTorch and Client AI SW teams for the full technical deep dive and benchmarks: https://pytorch.org/blog/pytorch-2-10torchao/

Frontiers | Fine-scale proximity to offshore wind turbine foundations increases biomass of demersal fish species www.frontiersin.org/journals/mar... | A common finding. Offshore wind infrastructure is habitat for fish, just like a shipwreck or artificial reef. 🧪🦑🌎🐠

Build differentiable computational physics with NVIDIA Warp. It bridges CUDA and Python for high-performance GPU kernels with native auto-diff. Interoperable with PyTorch, JAX, and NumPy. https://bit.ly/4uG78UQ

TorchSpec and Mooncake teams introduce TorchSpec: a torch-native framework for speculative decoding training. By streaming hidden states via Mooncake, it enables disaggregated pipelines where inference and training scale independently. https://bit.ly/47eBfIR

GDPA introduces an attention kernel for RecSys, replacing softmax with flexible activations. Deployed in Meta’s GEM model, it achieves 1,145 BF16 TFLOPs (97% utilization) on NVIDIA B200, outperforming FA4 by 3.5× in short K/V settings. https://bit.ly/418LQl8

#ExecuTorch addresses fragmented native deployment for #AI agents as a #PyTorch native platform. It enables voice models across CPU, GPU, and NPU on Android, iOS, Linux, macOS & Windows 🔗 https://pytorch.org/blog/building-voice-agents-with-executorch-a-cross-platform-foundation-for-on-device-audio/

FBI Director Patel: FBI personnel are on the scene with partners in Michigan responding to the apparent vehicle ramming and active shooter situation at Temple Israel synagogue in West Bloomfield Township, Michigan.

I wish I could say that I’m surprised but @justingarrison.com said stuff like this was going to happen. www.ft.com/content/7cab...

Hey, my new JPAM article is online! It's called, "Can Pollution Cause Poverty? The Effects of Pollution on Educational, Health, and Economic Outcomes" and you can read it here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Cognitive load refers to how much working memory or short-term memory someone is using at a time. Minimizing the cognitive load it takes to use your site makes it more accessible for people with cognitive disabilities. Limit what you're asking users to remember to use your site.

Took the survey and I enjoyed it - basically got to look at pretty pictures of forests for a bit www.biodiful.org#/forest

Americans: we live in a fallen state—embroiled by sin, cheating, lying, and evil. You cannot trust anyone, not even those who claim to know you best Canadians: I love my neighbors and my friends!

Each one of those three missiles costs 33% more than the annual budget of the national park where I work.

This is HUGE and really calls into question the use of AI coding tools. This might kill it's use for both proprietary and many open source code bases. I am sure this is going to have to be refined. At what % of ai Gen code do you lose copyright How many drops of milk make meat soup unkosher?

Short musings on "cognitive debt" - I'm seeing this in my own work, where excessive unreviewed AI-generated code leads me to lose a firm mental model of what I've built, which then makes it harder to confidently make future decisions simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/...

The drunk uncle theory. You don’t argue with the casually homophobic uncle at Thanksgiving dinner to change his mind; you argue so that the closeted cousin at the kids table knows there’s safe people and better possibilities out there

If people are working on open research for scaling RL in llms i'd love to talk to you.

Well this is fcking crazy. Work from @msbbirds.bsky.social and others found that Black Metaltail hummingbirds can drop their body temperature down to 3 °C (37 °F) during torpor. 🤯 Turns out birds aren't warm-blooded after all! royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbl/article... 📷 Steve Juhasz

My research team recently published “Guardians and gardeners: Managing wilderness for the twenty-first century.” If you’re interested in wilderness philosophies, Indigenous stewardship, and the questions raised by climate change and fire - this one’s for you! www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Time line cleanse to go into your weekend - Billy Idol talking about his career and possibly getting inducted into the Rock & Roll hall of Fame www.billboard.com/music/awards...

This one hits hard.

The WILDLABS Awards are back in 2026! With support from Arm, we’re providing $50,000 and $10,000 grants to up to 15 conservation technology projects. Learn more and apply by March 18 here: wildlabs.net/funding-oppo... #tech4wildlife #conservationtech #naturetech

CNN confirms what MSNBC reported live a few hours ago: DOJ is surveilling Dem lawmakers when they go to the DOJ to search unredacted Epstein files.

#Bluecrab #oyster #parasite "Oysters reduced parasite densities in the water...Our results jointly support that oysters benefit adjacent community members through feeding on transmissive stages of their pathogens" share.google/mpaHCGaeSn2K...

📉 Last year, India and China simultaneously registered a drop in coal power generation -- for the first time since 1973. www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coa... #Sustainability #Climate #Renewables #CleanEnergy #GoodNewsletter

Trump's financial regulators can't even say insider trading is bad. Most corrupt Administration in history.

Hey folks - as someone actively reviewing talk CFPs for a conference, make sure to give your bio love and attention. I am much more likely to approve CFPs for talk that show any evidence of attempting talks. Doesn't mean you are an expert at speaking but at least you have done it before.

Fun to set up real analytics and learn that my RLHF Book pdf is downloaded 50-100 times a day from my site (doesnt include Arxiv downloads/views). Thanks for reading!

I and millions of Americans believe exactly the same thing Kasparov does. Too many troops, too many new prisons, too much money not under Congressional supervision. We're not just witnessing a mass deportation scheme anymore. This is something significantly bigger and scarier.

A Kansas man wrote an op-ed criticizing local police for cooperating with ICE. Instead of respecting his First Amendment rights, the police used automatic license plate readers to track him in hopes of finding wrongdoing. We must keep getting this easily-abused surveillance out of our communities.

The CIA just stopped publishing their World Factbook and took every page, including the archived copies of previous versions! This sucks. It was public domain, so I recovered the 2020 edition (the last one published as a zip file) and shared it to GitHub simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/t...

Early in his career, William Randolph Hearst famously joked that if his papers kept losing $1 million a year, he'd lose all his money in 60 years. If the Post continues to lose $100 million a year, it will take Jeff Bezos 2000 years to lose his money.

Our client emailed DHS expressing his disagreement with their treatment of a man seeking asylum. DHS issued an administrative subpoena to force Google to hand over his personal information. This secretive and abusive tactic is used too often by our government to chill our First Amendment rights.

Introducing 𝐀𝐬𝐲𝐧𝐜-𝐆𝐞𝐨𝐓𝐈𝐅𝐅, a new library for reading GeoTIFFs and COGs. developmentseed.org/async-geotif... - Fast, with a Rust core - Uses a non-blocking thread pool for image decoding - Integrates with NumPy, PyProj, Affine & Morecantile - Remote data support with Obstore - No GDAL dependency

happening this morning in Minneapolis -- ICE agents drawing guns on observers. I reiterate again that it is only a matter of time before DHS kills more innocent people in Minnesota. Congress needs to shut this shit down right now.

2008: Epstein is convicted of procuring a minor for prostitution 2018: Despite that conviction, [files indicate] he was invited by Rowling’s team - along with a guest of his choosing - to the Broadway opening of Harry Potter and the private after-party Protecting women and children, is it?

Do you remember when people were saying "I think my phone is listening to me, i'm getting ads for stuff I spoke about" and people said "They arent listening to you, they're just this good at predicting your interests"? Well, it happens they were doing exactly that. www.cbsnews.com/news/google-...

Several unidentified drones flew over German military infrastructure on February 1.

NEW | Russian drones struck a maternity hospital and a bus carrying miners on February 1, causing significant civilian casualties. Read more here: www.criticalthreats.org/analysis/rus...

ICE recently deported 5-year-old Génesis Ester Gutiérrez Castellanos, a U.S. citizen without access to legal counsel or a hearing. The trauma and chaos of this case show the rampant due process violations that are tearing families apart.

we said all along that they wanted Gawker dead not because we embarrassed a pro wrestler but because the Epstein story is one Gawker was covering a decade before most other people caught up & was just one of many stories exposing powerful people and their misdeeds

"MPR News has learned that the police chief in the small southern Minnesota city of St. Peter intervened Thursday afternoon to prevent federal immigration agents from arresting a local resident" who had been observing federal agents. www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...

I think this is a critical finding. Our current "AI" is a tool. How you use a tool matters Same with a calculator, internet search, a.chainsaw, a nav app... For things you care about - stay curious my friends, stay curious

Oh. My. God. Chomsky talking about the 'hysteria' that has developed about the abuse of women and giving Epstein advice on how to handle the media. In 2019. The Media studies discipline and much of the left should reflect on the power given to this one flawed man to shape generations of thought.

At this point, they're barely even arguing that they're not Nazisno. They just say it's mean to call them that.