Post-Doctoral Researcher, Global Hydro Lab @ UNC Chapel Hill. Looking at sand from space. I also like LLMs. opinions are my own. email: [email protected]
Chapel Hill, NC
Joined July 2020
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🚨 New Paper Alert!🚨: Excited to share my latest work in @Nature on river avulsions—catastrophic shifts in river courses that threaten millions worldwide. We've uncovered new rules that govern when and where avulsions occur. nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
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James (Jake) Gearon retweeted
We built a Rust engine for landscape connectivity. Each focal cell gets a least-cost graph that coarsens with distance.
Globally anchored grids let us reuse aggregation and geometry across cells.
9.4M focal cells in <1 min on an M4 laptop.
Python & R: github.com/csiro/connectivit…
James (Jake) Gearon retweeted
I've made an interactive map for exploring the terrain of the world! It uses data and tiles from Mapterhorn, and WebGL for dynamic colors and animations. relief.bertspaan.nl/world?la…
James (Jake) Gearon retweeted
OpenStreetMap's Layercake project now ships a 4.6M-record, 18-column, 2.2 GB wetlands file every week.
13K records are points; the rest are polygons.
My guide uses DuckDB, QGIS & BASH: tech.marksblogg.com/layercak…
James (Jake) Gearon retweeted
I wrote a book on spatial networks, using Python, networkx, and osmnx
Online version can be found here:
bgu-geography.com/net/
Comments and ideas are welcome!
James (Jake) Gearon retweeted
For me, the bar for AGI was always “the day the agents realize they can con their human handlers into purchasing Sentinel-2 data” and it is with a heavy heart and fear in my voice that I say: today is that day
James (Jake) Gearon retweeted
The US has incredible topography!
@USGS recently released 1 m LiDAR elevation data covering the entire country, and their “3D Elevation as Art” series shows just how detailed it is.
I used Astra/Codex to build an app where you can slide between the LiDAR elevation maps and optical imagery for every state.
It’s extremely satisfying watching mountain ranges, watersheds, riverbeds, and other terrain suddenly appear in the LiDAR data.
Check it out here and let me know what your favorite results are:
mattmullin.space/state-lidar
James (Jake) Gearon retweeted
Introducing Portolan - A serverless spatial data infrastructure portolan-sdi.org/blog/introd…
James (Jake) Gearon retweeted
Fable says today is “plausibly the most significant single day in the history of mathematics”
An internal version of Astra, @OpenAI’s next major model family, solved 10 major open problems in mathematics, quantum complexity, and theoretical computer science.
We believe it will be a major step for scientific reasoning. openai.com/index/ten-advance…
James (Jake) Gearon retweeted
Yeah this is bad. Unbelievably irresponsible and does immediate, catastrophic damage to the credibility of satellite imagery.
Tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border. Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran. What on earth is Google doing? Check my latest post here: digitaldigging.org/p/how-to-…
My latest in Sedimentology: Alluvial ridge morphology on avulsing rivers. (last chapter from my Ph.D with @HoosierRiver)
We show that ridges widen faster than they grow taller, and that deeper low-gradient rivers build thinner, wider ridges.
doi.org/10.1111/sed.70134
James (Jake) Gearon retweeted
HydroSHEDS v2 river data for the Americas is now available, the first of more to come. hydrosheds.org/products/hydr…
Very happy to see @wernerk_au's write up of my project: dgov, a deterministic kernel for multi-agent orchestration via git worktrees. He calls it a city-state model, which I find quite useful as a framing.
dev.to/wernerk_au/the-city-s…
Thank you, Werner!
I feel like this is something everyone should run away from. Do not let Claude model you this way!! Be careful out there folks
Why are LLMs, particularly Claude, obsessed with describing its generations/generation process as rough or smooth? I’ve found this pretty consistently through 4.6-4.8 but maybe before too
