I made the tragic mistake of clicking on an article about the next generation of Schizophrenia drugs designed to help people with serious mental illness overcome their delusions and paranoia without many of the traditional side-effects of Schizophrenia drugs – namely the withdrawal from daily life and uncontrolled body movements.
Now I’m being followed around the internet with ads with creepy faces on toasters and refrigerators saying, “Know the Sneaky Signs of Schizophrenia”. The rather colorful and cute ads remind me of a psychedelic album cover from the late 1960s. You know the kind of artwork you might enjoy when you are pretty darn stoned and looking for something to be tuned into.
The irony of it all is such targeted advertising is not only creepy and plays in one’s own paranoia, it actually is in many ways a realization of the modern suburbanite’s home, full of internet connected appliances, constantly beaming information over the internet, some that you consent to and find useful but much of which can be used for nefarious or even surveillance purposes by hackers or government agents if they actually found you to be of something of interest.
I don’t have Internet at home but I have been to plenty of homes where people have Amazon Echos and “smart” televisions and refrigerators with large displays that smile at you and try to be friendly in appearance, even if they are data collecting machines, mostly for innocent purposes like telling you when your toast is done on your cellphone, that and selling your data and marketing to you. I mean, the schizophrenic aren’t exactly wrong about whereAmerica is going these days in your typical suburban home.
Next create a pipeline.txt for pdal with the classification (For DSM, 1 are unclassified points like buildings and treetops, while 2 are ground points, if you want a DEM, you can also make them this way too with Classification of 2:2):
Next convert the point clouds into digital surface model (GeoTIFF), you can use this shell command with xargs to go over each LAS file, using the above pipeline:
The above command can be somewhat slow depending on how many LAZ point clouds you need to go through and your selected resolution. -P3 sets the number of parallel process (3) which can help speed things up a bit.
Now we have the digital surface models raster that can be used in QGIS for hillshade for 3D.
Build a virtual raster (dsm.vrt) for easy loading into QGIS rather than loading separate files.
Meanwhile, according to the disclosure and records of internal communications, members of the DOGE team asked that their activities not be logged on the system and then appeared to try to cover their tracks behind them, turning off monitoring tools and manually deleting records of their access — evasive behavior that several cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR compared to what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do. White House senior adviser Elon Musk walks to the White House after landing in Marine One with President Trump on March 9.
The employees grew concerned that the NLRB's confidential data could be exposed, particularly after they started detecting suspicious log-in attempts from an IP address in Russia, according to the disclosure. Eventually, the disclosure continued, the IT department launched a formal review of what it deemed a serious, ongoing security breach or potentially illegal removal of personally identifiable information. The whistleblower believes that the suspicious activity warrants further investigation by agencies with more resources, like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or the FBI. Sponsor Message
The labor law experts interviewed by NPR fear that if the data gets out, it could be abused, including by private companies with cases before the agency that might get insights into damaging testimony, union leadership, legal strategies and internal data on competitors — Musk's SpaceX among them. It could also intimidate whistleblowers who might speak up about unfair labor practices, and it could sow distrust in the NLRB's independence, they said.
