Charlie Loyd
@vruba.bsky.social
A pixel/geography/other person in Oakland. With @rahawahaile.bsky.social. Marginally more active at @[email protected] on mastodon. He/him.
Pinned
Charlie Loyd
@vruba.bsky.social
· Dec 23
It’s got a lot of moving parts and I wanted to make it intelligible to several audiences, so the documentation gets pretty into things. I hope it makes good holiday reading.
Please make all necessary preparations to read my wonderful partner’s wonderful book.
Some great news. My hybrid memoir IN OPEN COUNTRY will now be published by Little, Brown. It’s about freedom of movement and stillness in the US, and the ways capitalism & settler colonialism have shaped (and continue to shape) the answer to who has either across time. I also do a lot of walking.
February 4, 2026 at 7:28 PM
Please make all necessary preparations to read my wonderful partner’s wonderful book.
Sending good vibes to the adult whose feelings I hurt as a teen in 1998 for suggesting that Deepak Chopra might in some way lack credibility or integrity.
February 3, 2026 at 11:33 PM
Sending good vibes to the adult whose feelings I hurt as a teen in 1998 for suggesting that Deepak Chopra might in some way lack credibility or integrity.
(But also: hire me!)
February 1, 2026 at 11:13 PM
(But also: hire me!)
(Mostly off social media right now due to The Horrors, which I do not optimally digest in this format. If I follow you, I would welcome an e-mail or other asynchronous communication from you. Otherwise, expect me when you see me.)
February 1, 2026 at 11:12 PM
(Mostly off social media right now due to The Horrors, which I do not optimally digest in this format. If I follow you, I would welcome an e-mail or other asynchronous communication from you. Otherwise, expect me when you see me.)
So in the actual implementation, Potato expects (1) a pan band, (2) the particular spectral sensitivities, and (3) the particular spatial artifacts of the WV-2/3 sensors. However, almost everything in it on a conceptual level should translate for … pretty much any visible sensor.
January 5, 2026 at 10:31 PM
So in the actual implementation, Potato expects (1) a pan band, (2) the particular spectral sensitivities, and (3) the particular spatial artifacts of the WV-2/3 sensors. However, almost everything in it on a conceptual level should translate for … pretty much any visible sensor.
checking my spam folder
I have to finish my damn project so I can try to get interviewed on one of the big pansharpening podcasts.
December 29, 2025 at 12:44 AM
checking my spam folder
this is obviously ai
December 26, 2025 at 12:02 AM
this is obviously ai
Reposted by Charlie Loyd
You gotta hear this song, it'll change your life I swear. (plays the Shins cover of "Wonderful Christmastime")
December 24, 2025 at 9:06 PM
You gotta hear this song, it'll change your life I swear. (plays the Shins cover of "Wonderful Christmastime")
(Some of it is in the source data. You can see Potato drawing some non-physical “shadows” around the boats, for example; it’s definitely not filtering as much as it should be here. But that can only be part of what’s going on.)
December 25, 2025 at 5:52 AM
(Some of it is in the source data. You can see Potato drawing some non-physical “shadows” around the boats, for example; it’s definitely not filtering as much as it should be here. But that can only be part of what’s going on.)
Yeah. I have some hunches about what’s going on, but I’ve tried not to spend time even informally reverse-engineering it. Knowing exactly what’s going on here wouldn’t help me do anything I want to do.
December 25, 2025 at 5:47 AM
Yeah. I have some hunches about what’s going on, but I’ve tried not to spend time even informally reverse-engineering it. Knowing exactly what’s going on here wouldn’t help me do anything I want to do.
Reposted by Charlie Loyd
This one is less subtle. Look at the paddleboards’ colors and the ringing artifacts (dark halos) around the paddleboards, boats, etc. Also, those faint diagonals in the water in the standard image? They don’t diffract. They’re artifacts, not ripples.
December 25, 2025 at 4:59 AM
This one is less subtle. Look at the paddleboards’ colors and the ringing artifacts (dark halos) around the paddleboards, boats, etc. Also, those faint diagonals in the water in the standard image? They don’t diffract. They’re artifacts, not ripples.
Stand-up paddleboards and boats, Marina Del Rey, 2025-01-16 (CID 103001010C12B000). L: standard, R: Potato.
December 25, 2025 at 4:58 AM
Stand-up paddleboards and boats, Marina Del Rey, 2025-01-16 (CID 103001010C12B000). L: standard, R: Potato.
One of the big aims is to make images that look like photos, pictures, not just visualizations of data that happens to be visible light. (Nuance on this is in the essay in docs/personal.md.) So putting aside technical details, what I’m looking for here is a sense of seeing a real moment.
December 24, 2025 at 11:46 PM
One of the big aims is to make images that look like photos, pictures, not just visualizations of data that happens to be visible light. (Nuance on this is in the essay in docs/personal.md.) So putting aside technical details, what I’m looking for here is a sense of seeing a real moment.
Boats at a breakwater, Manila. A subtler one, maybe – zoom in? 2025-11-13, latitude 14.5818, longitude 120.9576, CID 10400100770EF000. Commercial off-the-shelf pansharpening on the left, Potato on the right.
December 24, 2025 at 11:46 PM
Boats at a breakwater, Manila. A subtler one, maybe – zoom in? 2025-11-13, latitude 14.5818, longitude 120.9576, CID 10400100770EF000. Commercial off-the-shelf pansharpening on the left, Potato on the right.
Secret Potato lore (it’s in the docs, but not the interesting part of the docs): I hand-rated more than 1,400 satellite images on several quality axes to filter the training data. I put a lot of city miles on QGIS. This was a terrible idea, but I chose to be guided by the sunk-cost fallacy.
December 24, 2025 at 10:33 PM
Secret Potato lore (it’s in the docs, but not the interesting part of the docs): I hand-rated more than 1,400 satellite images on several quality axes to filter the training data. I put a lot of city miles on QGIS. This was a terrible idea, but I chose to be guided by the sunk-cost fallacy.
Critics are raving about Potato!
Charlie is too modest to say so, but potato is (in my opinion) a significant step forward in this area of image processing. If you have a requirement for high-quality remotely-sensed images for human consumption, try it out immediately.
I just published Potato, a new pansharpening package. It aims to render certain kinds of satellite imagery more clearly and accurately than what’s for sale and on satellite maps today: github.com/celoyd/potato/
December 24, 2025 at 10:27 PM
Critics are raving about Potato!
(This is me gently reminding any satellite data execs who might be reading that if you want people to increase the value of your data, at some point you have to let them see your data. “They’ll pay us to improve our product” is not the 🌌🧠 strategy you seem to think. Release large sample datasets.)
December 24, 2025 at 5:14 PM
(This is me gently reminding any satellite data execs who might be reading that if you want people to increase the value of your data, at some point you have to let them see your data. “They’ll pay us to improve our product” is not the 🌌🧠 strategy you seem to think. Release large sample datasets.)
Short version: As shipped, it’s narrowly adapted to the particular artifacts of the WV-2/3 sensor. But I expect it to be adaptable to others with less work than starting from scratch would be. (If I’d had a good pool of Planet training data, I would have tried!)
December 24, 2025 at 3:58 PM
Short version: As shipped, it’s narrowly adapted to the particular artifacts of the WV-2/3 sensor. But I expect it to be adaptable to others with less work than starting from scratch would be. (If I’d had a good pool of Planet training data, I would have tried!)
Reposted by Charlie Loyd
Happy holidays, Bluesky! I got you a megathrust earthquake, soil liquefaction, spine-tingling papers about the way our networks confound knowledge, and a PDF in a pear tree. It's my wrap on a year of trying to make sense of how we make sense of what's happening to us.
www.wrecka.ge/landslide-a-...
www.wrecka.ge/landslide-a-...
Landslide; a ghost story
On March 27, 1964, a converted liberty ship named the SS Chena brought a shipment of supplies to the port of Valdez, Alaska. Valdez, which I need you to know is pronounced “valDEEZ,” sits at the end o...
www.wrecka.ge
December 23, 2025 at 10:19 PM
Happy holidays, Bluesky! I got you a megathrust earthquake, soil liquefaction, spine-tingling papers about the way our networks confound knowledge, and a PDF in a pear tree. It's my wrap on a year of trying to make sense of how we make sense of what's happening to us.
www.wrecka.ge/landslide-a-...
www.wrecka.ge/landslide-a-...
Sure, by the Pan band.
December 24, 2025 at 12:01 AM
Sure, by the Pan band.
Look at the yellow bases of the lamp posts, the edge between road median and paved surface, and the details in the rails. Look at the vegetation: which looks more like real plants? But the one that gets me is the roof color. Google’s own user-submitted data shows who’s got it right.
December 23, 2025 at 11:47 PM
Look at the yellow bases of the lamp posts, the edge between road median and paved surface, and the details in the rails. Look at the vegetation: which looks more like real plants? But the one that gets me is the roof color. Google’s own user-submitted data shows who’s got it right.
Here’s a highway by a switch yard at the edge of the Port of Durban, South Africa. (I prefer mundane test images over landmarks.) CID 10400100770EF000; 2022-04-2. Latitude -29.8937, longitude 31.0134. Google Earth on the left, Potato on the right.
December 23, 2025 at 11:45 PM
Here’s a highway by a switch yard at the edge of the Port of Durban, South Africa. (I prefer mundane test images over landmarks.) CID 10400100770EF000; 2022-04-2. Latitude -29.8937, longitude 31.0134. Google Earth on the left, Potato on the right.