iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I’m going to a Halloween party as linear algebra.

A screenshot of some clearly broken output in the terminal: lines and lines like: “654, Point3D { x: NaN, y: NaN, z: NaN }”.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Good day to be a license-respecting Gaussian splat hobbyist, I suspect.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

My parents both had high-end educations and chose economically low-end jobs, and I think a lot of people would wisely make similar decisions if it were safe enough to do so. (I remain agnostic on UBI as a specific route; I see plusses and minuses and am not interested in debating.)

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I gotta find a way to keep up with my friends that isn’t The Site For People To Post About Things They Don’t Like.

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Reposted by Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️

Walter Hickey @walthickey.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

"what are your infrastructure priorities" in one pic

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Reposted by Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️

David @puca.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

A neat thing with historical Landsat data - you can go back to 25th of September 1983 and see the wispy high altitude clouds over North Dakota around 17:00 UTC, roughly 3-4 hours before the false alarm. On the left, the missile fields of Malmstrom overlaid on Landsat image from 26th of September.

Map showing a section of the border between the United States and Canada. On the left side of the screen are markers showing missile silos at Malmstrom in Montana, and a Landsat image from 26th of September. On the right of the screen, the wispy clouds of the 25th of September over North Dakota.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Hurricane Polo yesterday. Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar, so we’re seeing the wind’s imprint on the water surface, not clouds. The sea-level air pressure in the eye is equivalent to ordinary pressure at about 1.1 km or 3,500 ft. Guerrero coast in the north; swath is ~410 km across.

A radar image of a hurricane. The spiral pattern fills most of the frame, with some coast visible on one edge. Turbulent patterns in the water surround the main spiral: perhaps upwellings driving by the hurricane. The texture of the water, especially near the eye, resembles a metal surface rough-polished by a radial sander.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The other day I stubbed my toe on a curb very badly and I have to say I kind of regret doing that.

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Reposted by Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️

Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

The Facial Expressions of Tethys by artist Julius von Bismarck. A suspended high-sea buoy that moves in real time. Sensors on a twin buoy out in the Atlantic Ocean send live satellite data to motors inside the museum. This makes the indoor buoy copy the exact, real-time movements of the ocean waves.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

In “Jurassic Park” (1993), Dr Sattler is realizing that they’re growing extinct plants just as we first see the dinosaurs. Yet the dinosaurs are eating eucalypts (E. camaldulensis?). But (1) eucs are post-K/Pg and (2) hyper-oily leaves were very likely basal. So what the hell?

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Exciting times for everyone who intrusively thinks about the Fujiwhara effect every 36 hours anyway.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

A post saying “China using bamboo to replace plastic” might mean it’s a high-priority government policy that’s measurably changing the manufacturing sector. Or that one hobbyist who happens to be Chinese was in a tourist’s widely reposted photo. Or anything in between. This post is not about China.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Oh, and you’re so cool you never learned an MGMT song on an iPod Touch ocarina app in 2011. I see. Sure.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Everyone with any sense already muted me, so I can say whatever I want!

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

My plan to move public opinion on matters important to me is to spend a portion of my day reposting every article and zinger I see go by that agrees with me to an audience of people who follow me because they find this behavior tolerable. I’m pretty sure this will work eventually.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Sad to see about Annie Dillard, a good writer. She used to live part-time on the island where I grew up. Oldtimers said she would often chop her firewood nude. They considered this unwise: there are splinters, and what if the axe hits a nail?

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

(I think a lot of people’s response to the Chinese Room thought experiment was “Oh, so it doesn’t know Chinese. Case closed!” and this is alien to me. I’m not a maximalist in the other direction either, fwiw!)

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

By randomly selecting the same number of drinks from my actual drinks, with replacement, I can nah never mind I’m bailing out of this one.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

That’s what I call it when the weather turns cold, I’m sweating less during the day, and I accidentally over-hydrate.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Well, I fully understand New Mexican political and cultural (and culinary) life because I follow you. But in other cases, sure.

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Reposted by Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️

Kitty the tiny dancer @girlyfriday.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

All I will say about 9/11, was that there was a man in my town of 9k, named Osamu. He ran a small sushi restaurant. People flipped the fuck out about his name, that he had to change the name of his restaurant.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I guess I don’t know what it is to make things in public right now. For all the obvious reasons. I know I like when others do, but I have very little to offer them. (This is me trying to name something that’s been bothering me, not a request for validation or suggestions.)

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Acquaintances are like “Ooh, you should do the kind of work you want to get hired for” or “Ooh, you should get back to writing online” and I want to say: I did. No one really liked it. I got like five extremely kind social posts about it and then crickets. Nothing about it stuck.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

When I think about posting more stuff I’m thinking about, I find myself imagining trying to use video or something. I think this would be like trying to pet a cat backwards. I don’t know. I see the slippery slope to clickbait and the kind of #scicomm BS that makes me want to throw away my monitor.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

But it has given me a gnawing sense that “Here’s a thing I did in more detail than you’ll think you want at first” is no longer a useful strategy on the public internet. It’s cooled my desire to work up several similar projects to a presentable state.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I feel mild disappointment about this outcome but no serious regrets about the effort. I’m glad I did it, glad it seemed to interest some friends at least, and glad that it’s there to be found by people looking in certain directions in future years or decades.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

There’s an Easter egg tucked away that I was using to see if anyone got really interested in the details. Not yet. I think Potato hit people uninterested in pansharpening as being about a weird niche, and people interested in pansharpening as not being in their sub-niche.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

And so little has come of it. Industry did not hire me off it; there were some conversations but they led nowhere. Academics (some of whom I respectfully e-mailed) have not cited it so far, nor silently adopted its ideas in the way that, cough, sometimes happens.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

There’s a narrow range of paths that could possibly bring an adult of sound mind into caring about a kind of image processing they’d never heard of before, and I was building trail somewhere else. I was worried about the wrong things.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I do wonder if maybe it should have been a kind of pseudo-preprint instead of a repo. Or an interactive version that you could watch work (and adjust parameters of) in the browser. Either would have been a big time investment, but so was what I did.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Where I think I failed was in crafting a graspable surface. There’s a reason journal articles require an abstract and a stately procession of topics. I made something I would find fun to explore, not something of legible appeal. That’s not only word choices but actual structural weakness.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

And I think I packed a lot in there. There’s some in-the-stacks stuff about pansharpening narrowly, but also materials on how we use multispectral bands, how we scale satellite images, and how we think about them that are, I think, nontrivial contributions to bigger conversations.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I learned whole new skills from the project and I think it did a good job of its technical goals. As far as I know, it’s on the Pareto front of quality and speed. So it advanced the state of the art in its little niche.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

No(t that I know of). I’m just trying to be annoying, due to personality flaws.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

📎💁 You have to write dollar signs on either side of your equation to make it math.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

[Showing up to a first date topless and barefoot but in stiff, un–broken-in jeans, clearly trying to push my voice a little lower, offering one of two coffees I’m holding:] Hello.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Still extremely annoying to me that the first big wave of “AI” criticism, the one that stuck, had a whole bunch of clearly bad ideas. A very the-late-medieval-church-had-very-serious-problems-but-so-did-Luther situation.

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Reposted by Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️

Garth Marenghi's Catbus @catbus.phd · 04/12/2023

explaining some online beef to a normal person

Uncle, how to get to the beautiful country? by Xiaoyu Wang

a green alien in a space suit showing a map to a seated man smoking a cigarette playing a board game

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

I’m about halfway convinced that the reason we haven’t had a proper Nasa mission to Uranus – one of the most interesting places in the solar system – is that Congress doesn’t want the hyuk-hyuk headlines.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Becoming a table-thumping Mercator projection advocate but when you press me on it I reveal that I’m talking about UTM zone 10 specifically.

QGIS displaying OpenStreetMap at world scale in the Universal Transverse Mercator 10 projection.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Hot take: We should use seasons to describe local vibes, not distinct timespans. Issues of astronomical v. meteorological, N/S hemispheres, what year(s) a winter in, etc., make them bad for things like deadlines and the names of issues of periodicals (that aren’t deliberately local).

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

When he moved a few years ago, @patricio.io gave me his dry-erase plotter. It’s been in a box since then. Today I finally had space to get it out and make it draw a (live-calculated) Lorenz system.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

There’s a reason you don’t see me walking back old opinions and predictions on “AI” as the situation changes (with public opinion, market outlook, technical progress, etc.). It’s that I’ve been careful to only say true things and not talk out of my ass nonstop. Hope others find this inspiring!

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

(Using this to test Bluesky’s threading tool. Apologies if I messed it up.)

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