Eric Ness

I recently updated my news site for anyone who is interested.

So I feel like this is coming very soon to almost everything you can think of. 'Someone Rebuilt Free, Open-Source Versions of Photoshop, Premiere, and Lightroom Using AI' - petapixel.com/2026/10/07/s...

I had never heard this speech before. I is absolutely wonderful. 'The Books That Made Christopher Hitchens Dangerous' - www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEqU...

Handing in revisions to a journal. Fingers crossed.

Interesting YouGov survey of nearly 30,000 Americans: 85% own physical books, but only 25% own 100 or more. And the most common way Americans organize their books? They don't. 29% say they use no system at all. - yougov.com/en-us/articl...

Cheney Orr took this picture for Reuters in Washington, D.C., on July 4, 2026. It reminds me of the James Baldwin quote, “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”

Two Russian military satellites, COSMOS 2581 and 2583, performed a sophisticated maneuver, passing within 3 meters of each other in low Earth orbit last week. The purpose of this close proximity operation remains undisclosed. #space #News

This is a fairly fascinating video. Most people don’t realize this: AI pricing and latency mostly come down to batching. Bigger batches = cheaper tokens but slower responses. Faster modes? You’re literally paying to jump the queue and reduce batching efficiency. www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmkS...

This is clever: Sentinel-2 captures RGB bands ~1 second apart. Moving vehicles shift between captures → creating color “smears.” DrishX turns those into vehicle counts, speeds, and trends across the globe. github.com/sparkyniner/...

The numbers here are difficult to ignore. If aid reductions continue, we’re looking at tens of millions of additional deaths by 2030, including millions of children. What you see here is derived from actual historical relationships, not hypothetical ones. #AIDE - www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

What if LLMs aren’t the future of AI? AI pioneer Yann LeCun argues they’re a dead end—too brittle, inefficient, and disconnected from real-world understanding. A new modular approach may be next. Great video discussion. #AI www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IMV...

Growing concern over academic freedom as some college students monitor & report professors for perceived political incorrectness. Texas A&M incidents cited. #AcademicFreedom #News

I built a GitHub issue–centric workflow framework for Claude Code. A GitHub issue # drives everything: plan → audit → execute → review. Fully configurable (TDD, ADR, etc.). At this point, my 9-year-old could probably do most of my job. github.com/Eric-Ness/Tiki

Big milestone today: I integrated my satellite-based water quality models into the web app I built. I can now view and interact with the models in one place. Shown here: chlorophyll-a in the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers. #RemoteSensing #WaterQuality #GIS #Landsat #EarthObservation #DataScience

Tired of firing up QGIS just to peek at a raster? viewtif lets you: • View single-band + RGB GeoTIFFs • Overlay shapefiles • Browse NetCDF time steps • Open HDF/HDF5 + FileGDB rasters All from the command line. #GeoSpatial #Python - github.com/nkeikon/tifv...

SWOT captured 65-ft waves during Storm Eddie, the tallest ever measured from orbit. These waves traveled 15,000 miles, carrying the storm’s power across entire oceans. #SWOT #EarthObservation #RemoteSensing #ClimateScience www.space.com/space-explor...

The World Bank just released updated high-resolution official boundaries (Admin 0–2) across GeoJSON, Shapefile & GeoPackage. Includes NDLSA areas, ocean masks, and full data dictionary + attribute tables. #GIS #RemoteSensing #Geospatial datacatalog.worldbank.org/search/datas...

Burnscar Detection Pipeline: NASA FIRMS + Sentinel-2 + Google Earth Engine + SQLMesh + DuckDB = open-source system to spot suspicious burn scars & potential arson events. #OSINT #RemoteSensing #FIRMS Library: github.com/Centre-for-I... Writeup: bigdatarepublic.nl/articles/det...

So I just implemented a major update to the news clustering algorithm on newsmap.org. If anyone is interested, I am also currently supporting a number of new languages.

Wildfire modeling just got faster. PROPAGATOR uses stochastic cellular automata + rate-of-spread physics to simulate fire behavior in minutes — helping emergency teams make real-time decisions. #GIS #EmergencyManagement #RemoteSensing www.mdpi.com/2571-6255/3/...

My cat's litter box is connected to the Internet. Surely this is a sign of the end of days.

This looks interesting — Lonboard 0.13 just dropped and now supports H3, S2, Geohash, and even A5 layers. Lots of new ways to explore geospatial grids in Python. #GIS #GeoPython #Lonboard - github.com/developments...

SAR satellites don’t need daylight — they image Earth day, night, rain, or clouds. Different radar bands (P, L, S, C, X, Ku, K, Ka) reveal everything from subsurface rivers to cars in a parking lot. Wild tech. #SAR #RemoteSensing #EarthObservation #Radar #Geospatial - www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT6c...

Analysis finds China's CO2 emissions have been flat or falling for 18 months due to increased solar & wind power. Sector emissions remained flat despite rising electricity demand. #ClimateChange #News

Tired of hunting down shapefiles? The new wkls Python library gives you instant access to 625K global administrative boundaries with clean, chainable syntax — no downloading, no parsing. Just wkls.us.nyc.cityofnewyork.wkt() #GIS #Python #GeoSpatial #Wherobots - github.com/wherobots/wk...

With a $600 satellite dish and open-source software, UCSD & UMD researchers intercepted cleartext IP traffic from 50% of GEO satellite links — voice calls, grid data, in-flight WiFi, retail systems, even military assets. - satcom.sysnet.ucsd.edu/docs/dontloo...

If you’ve ever wondered where endless scam calls come from… SIM farms. USSS just shut a few down. That’s good news. But no, they weren’t going to knock out every phone in New York. - www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBZj...

My advisors and I finally submitted our next paper! #PhDChat

Orbio Earth just open-sourced their full methane detection pipeline—models, tools, synthetic-plume engine & validation notebooks—for Sentinel-2, Landsat 8/9, and EMIT. #Methane #ClimateTech #OpenSource - orbio-earth.github.io/Project-Euca...

How do we track water flowing through rivers from space? This major review says: 1–3 day revisit. Resolution down to 30–100 m widths. Must include width, slope, & velocity. Flood forecasting + water management depend on it. #EarthObservation #RemoteSensing #WaterResources doi.org/10.1029/2024...

The Trump administration is pushing NASA to kill two critical climate satellites. The Orbiting Carbon Observatories track CO₂ globally — data vital to scientists, farmers, and even oil companies. Cost? Just $15M/year. #ClimateScience #EarthObservation futurism.com/white-house-...

"At the current rate of horrible fiery deaths, FuelArc projects the Cybertruck will have 14.52 fatalities per 100,000 units — far eclipsing the Pinto's 0.85. " - futurism.com/the-byte/cyb...

Want to overlay a heatmap on a real map using Python? This guide walks through visualizing EF3–EF5 tornado trends across the U.S. with NOAA data, grid-based bins, and Matplotlib. Bonus: how to include tornado endpoints too! #geospatial #Python towardsdatascience.com/how-to-overl...

Just launched: SMAP salinity data V5.0 + V5.3 with ice/ocean flags — available now via NASA’s SNWG Earthdata Portal. Track salinity near the sea ice edge like never before. #SeaSurfaceSalinity #NASAData www.earthdata.nasa.gov/news/sea-sur...

A record-breaking heatwave is sweeping across southern Europe and North Africa. Copernicus Sentinel-3 reveals land surface temps far above normal – and the Mediterranean Sea isn't spared either. #ClimateCrisis #EarthObservation www.esa.int/ESA_Multimed...

NASA’s PACE satellite just dropped a year of stunning hyperspectral data—mapping chlorophyll, carotenoids & anthocyanins globally, every 1–2 days. It's the first time we’re seeing land plants in full spectral color from space. #RemoteSensing #EarthObservation - svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5548/

It appears that MethaneSAT is gone. Launched in March 2024 to track powerful methane leaks, the Bezos-backed satellite veered off course over Norway and lost power. #MethaneLeaks #ClimateChange #MethaneSAT www.reuters.com/business/ene...

Microsoft just launched Planetary Computer Pro (Public Preview) — a cloud-native geospatial platform built for AI, ML, and massive-scale analysis. 50PB+ of data, now enterprise-ready via Azure. #Geospatial #AI techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/iotblog...

A great read on automating your ML workflow in just 10 lines of Python. With LazyPredict + pycaret, you can test over 20 models instantly and compare their performance. #MachineLearning #Python #AutoML towardsdatascience.com/how-i-automa...

This is even worse - Brian Wilson just passed away. The Beach Boys are probably my all-time favorite band, and Brian Wilson was an absolute treasure. www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvNX...

So sad to hear of Sly Stone's passing. Absolutely loved him and the Family Stone. www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG_x...

ChatGPT just released Codex. You can connect to a GitHub repository, and it will explain the codebase to newcomers, suggest codebase improvements, and identify and fix critical bugs. Then do a pull/merge request! Kind of awesome. chatgpt.com/codex/ #vibecoding #chatgpt #codex

Satellite images show Mount Etna's major eruption on June 2nd, 2025, releasing a large plume of sulfur dioxide & ash. ESA's Sentinel-5P & Sentinel-2 missions captured the event. #MountEtna #News

NASA’s “Power of 10” for safety-critical code is awesome. No recursion. No dynamic memory after init. No function > 60 lines. Every return value is checked. Brutal but beautiful. Great video review. #CleanCode www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWKa...

Is America facing a literacy crisis? Not exactly. But 40% of 4th graders can't read at a basic level. And 28% of adults are functionally illiterate. The real problem? It's been bad for a long time—and it's getting worse. But Mississippi shows it's fixable. #reading www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvCT...

Trump admin. revoked Harvard's ability to enroll international students, impacting nearly 6,800 students. The action follows accusations of harboring anti-American agitators & CCP ties. Harvard disputes claims. #HigherEducation #News

Flannery O’Connor’s once-hidden artworks are on view at her Georgia farm, offering new insight into her creative process. #FlanneryOConnor #ArtExhibition www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/s...

Based on the article I came across yesterday, I put this together. It's an 'LLM-Assisted Project Development Template'. I am unsure if it works entirely, but I will test it out. Not sure if anyone else is playing with this type of development. github.com/Eric-Ness/my...

I really like this tutorial – defining .cursor/rules as your AI’s “operating manual” keeps context consistent and cuts down on misfires. #AICoding #PairProgramming - www.aitidbits.ai/p/sahar-ai-c...

Check out creative ways to export your maps from QGIS to Illustrator — then bring them to life with animations in Premiere! #QGIS #Illustrator #PremierePro #MapDesign - www.chiaraphillips.com/post/make-th...