There is a heated discussion about RustGIS on Reddit! reddit.com/r/gis/comments/1x… I stopped posting/commenting on Reddit a few weeks ago. Not good for my mental health. Here are my personal opinions about RustGIS: Nobody is forcing you to use RustGIS. If ArcGIS/QGIS works well for you, that's great! Keep using it. I believe in giving people choices. Competition and diversity drive innovation and ultimately benefit everyone. Why do we have so many car manufacturers, such as Toyota, Honda, BMW, and Tesla? They all serve the same basic purpose, but offer different features, experiences, and approaches. The same applies to smartphones. We have iPhones and Android phones from Google, Samsung, Motorola, and others. Should we all use the same phone? GIS software is no different. ArcGIS, QGIS, and RustGIS can coexist, each serving different needs and communities. I'm not trying to replace anyone's favorite GIS. I'm simply building another free and open-source option for people who might find it useful. More choices are a good thing, especially in open-source software. If you want to learn more about how RustGIS compares to other software, check out rustgis.app/comparison

A sharper view of our changing planet is coming. 🛰️🌎 Meet LandIS, the Landsat Instrument Suite that will fly aboard Landsat 10, the next satellite in the Landsat series. With 26 spectral bands spanning visible light to thermal infrared, LandIS will collect more than twice as many bands as Landsat 8 and Landsat 9. These additional bands will help users better distinguish features on Earth’s surface and monitor water quality, agriculture, vegetation health, snow and ice, soil conditions, and other environmental parameters. LandIS will also capture finer spatial detail, with resolutions of 10 to 20 meters for visible, near-infrared, and shortwave-infrared observations. That means a clearer view of smaller features, including streams, streamside habitats, woodlots, and individual agricultural fields. Together, more spectral bands and finer spatial resolution will help users detect, distinguish, and track environmental change with greater detail and precision. Expected to begin operations in the early 2030s, LandIS will also continue Landsat’s coverage of sunlit land and near-shore waters, along with select nighttime observations. It will also uphold the program’s high standards for data accuracy, extending a record of Earth observations that spans more than 54 years. Learn more about Landsat 10 and its planned capabilities: ow.ly/X4gK50ZW4EE 📷: A visual comparison of spatial resolution showing the 30-meter pixels of Landsat 8 and 9 (left) alongside the finer, more detailed 10-meter pixels planned for Landsat 10 (right). Credit: NASA

Create yours, supporting any characters or png! kejunmao.github.io/chars-dra…

Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel. - Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all. - Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract. - Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code. - And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while. The funnel is driven by a combination of factors: 1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel. 2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel. 3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal. So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.

BREAKING NEWS The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the 2026 #NobelPeacePrize to Navanethem “Navi” Pillay for her efforts to promote peace and international law. #NobelPrize

For Landsat 8 and Landsat 9, every week is space week. 🛰️🌎 This World Space Week, take a spin with Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 as the satellites follow their paths around our planet. Both satellites travel about 438 miles above Earth in sun-synchronous, near-polar orbits. Each completes one orbit around Earth in about 99 minutes. As Earth rotates beneath them, the satellites observe a different strip of Earth’s surface with each pass. Each satellite returns to the same “start” or ground path every 16 days. Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 provide complete coverage of Earth’s land surfaces every eight days because their orbital cycles are offset by that many days. Along the way, each satellite collects about 750 scenes per day, building a detailed record of how Earth’s land surfaces change over time. That’s one busy pair of Earth observers. 🎥: A sped-up animation showing Landsat 8, represented in blue, and Landsat 9, represented in green, orbiting Earth. Credit: USGS #WorldSpaceWeek #Landsat #EarthFromSpace

It's pencils down, people. Writing code by hand is no longer an economically viable skill for most programmers at most companies. But the future of making software has never been brighter. Don't you dare black pill this beautiful moment! youtu.be/vDjW_dRyKXY?si=6Fsf…