We took an oath.

🚨 #BREAKING: Elon Musk’s net worth surpasses the value of dozens of miles of California high-speed rail.

Correct. The Capital of the world.

1…1…1….

A GUY AT GOOGLE DEEPMIND MADE AN ISOMETRIC PIXEL-ART MAP OF NEW YORK CITY AND PUT IT ON THE OPEN WEB FOR FREE it's called isometric.nyc you open the tab and the city is just sitting there in classic SimCity 2000 isometric pixel art. you scroll. and it keeps going. and going. i zoomed in on midtown and i could read the H&M signage in times square. in red. as actual pixel-art letters on the side of a building. i could see the crystalline spire of the Bank of America Tower poking out of a clump of skyscrapers. individual rooftop HVAC units. tiny green roof gardens. the little driveway loops in front of the hotels. he estimates the map needs roughly 40,000 tiles. nothing is a placeholder. the guy who made it is Andy Coenen, a senior staff engineer at Google DeepMind. he is not a pixel artist. by his own admission he is "a former electronic musician." what he actually did is kind of insane: > pulled NYC's geometry from the Google Maps 3D tiles API > fine-tuned an open-source image model (Qwen-Image-Edit) on ~40 hand-paired examples of "satellite tile → pixel art tile" > spun up 50 parallel instances on rented GPUs and generated tens of thousands of tiles in a few hours > the fine-tune cost him 12 bucks his own stated mission for the project, verbatim, is one sentence: "what's possible now that was impossible before?" apparently the answer is "one engineer can pixel-art most of a metropolis for the price of a sandwich." and the wildest part to me is he didn't sell it. no signup. no paywall. no NFT. you open the URL and the city is yours to wander. the post landed at 1,325 points on Hacker News and topped bestofshowhn's 2026 list. we live in a timeline where a senior engineer at one of the largest AI labs on earth spent his nights pixel-arting Manhattan for fun and then gave it away. the internet is healing.

Imagine how alive you must feel after shooting down a drone with a shotgun from the cockpit of your warplane

All these neurodivergent patriots do is stop crime, kill terrorists, and save lives.

In the 1950s and 60's, screwworm was devastating in Texas, costing billions ( adjusted for inflation) annually. In 1935, 180K livestock were lost to the fly. 50% of deer fawns died, and the fly decimated deer populations. We have to get on top of this urgently.

This is a depiction based on our geolocations of both sides of the tunnel underneath the US-MEX border below. We estimate that depending on where the tunnels were in the structures & if it was a straight line it was roughly between 575-690 meters in total length between sites.

🚨 Ukraine is breaking daily records for vehicles & fuel tankers destroyed, with a focus on the land corridor to Crimea. 524 in 24 hours. In one day, 0.5% (1/200th) of all vehicles destroyed over 1,557 days since Feb 24 2022. One Russian fascist eliminated every 53 seconds - 1560

I'd also like to give a very special shoutout to the KGRK radar site in Williamson county. Through all of the change that has happened in the last few years, KGRK maintained tradition by going down the minute storms approached. The consistency is truly a spectacle #atxwx

The irony that I was looking at KGRk’s status and this apropos post from Ashley is the first thing that came up. We are long past due for a phased array replacement radar network.

Very concerned about Big Almond

Someone is selling an entire hill in Tuscany. 45 hectares, for €1.3M ($1.5M). That's 111 acres of southern Tuscan countryside with a 500m² stone farmhouse on top, 9 bedrooms, 7 bathrooms, a pool, and an outdoor wood-burning oven. The estate sits at 400m altitude on a privately owned hill near Saturnia, 8 km from the famous thermal baths and 50 km from the Tyrrhenian Sea. The farmhouse was built in the early 1800s by the Piccolomini Counts as the steward's residence for what was once a much larger estate. The current 45 hectares break down as 37 ha of woodland, 7 ha of arable land, and 1 ha of olive grove with 50 trees. It borders a nature park and the Albenga River. What makes the price interesting is the land. 45 hectares fully consolidated and bordering a protected park is rare at this level in Tuscany. Most farmhouses in this price range come with 1-3 hectares of land. Here you're buying the hill itself. The trade-off is access. You're 160 km from Rome airport and 200 km from Pisa, so this isn't a fly-in-for-the-weekend kind of place. Then again, if you're buying a hill in Tuscany, being hard to reach is probably the point. How much would something like this cost where you live?

Everyone talks about America needing more power. Fewer people are actually building it. G2_Austin.

Navy ships have hundreds of crew, so there’s usually a trained barber—or at least one guy who can run clippers without creating a war crime. Merchant ships have 25 people. So you get TERRIBLE haircuts. But I’ve never before seen one bad enough to trigger NATO Article 5.

Impressive two weeks of rain ahead for Texas.

Texas’ current grid capacity is ~85 GW. Current interconnection requests statewide? Over 400 GW.

Last year, the city of Austin turned off their Flock cameras as the result of a targeted misinformation campaign. This weekend, for nearly 24 hours, three suspects drove around Austin in stolen vehicles, undetected, conducting a shooting spree at 12 separate locations. They shot multiple people, houses, apartment buildings, businesses, and fire stations. They committed multiple robberies and car thefts during the spree. Despite a full manhunt involving 200 officers, with helicopter and K9 support, they weren't able to locate the suspects, and the spree continued. Luckily, the suspects drove into the Flock-supported city of Manor, TX. Manor is a small city with ~20k residents, and a fraction of Austin's budget. What they do have is modern technology and the ability not to fall victim to misinformation campaigns. After the suspects drove into Manor to continue their shooting spree, Manor PD located them almost immediately. The residents of Manor stayed safe. This is a tale of two cities. I love Austin. I have plenty of friends who live there. I myself almost moved there years ago. I'm glad that the shooting spree is over, but I just wish it never happened.

One of the biggest dogpiles I ever got on X was for saying long deployments are no excuse for returning to port looking like a Russian trawler with tetanus. I was told large rust stains were unavoidable. Well, wither Trump has magic fairy dust or it ain’t impossible 👇

UPDATE: The shelter in place for the south Austin area has been lifted, and two suspects are in custody. One remains at large in the Manor area. More information to follow.