Jill and I continue to pray for the families and communities facing unimaginable loss and destruction caused by the severe flooding in Texas, North Carolina, and New Mexico. The road to recovery will be long but know that people across the nation stand with you. During our toughest moments, Americans always come together. If you’re able, please consider supporting relief efforts.

All aggregators had their payouts reduced to 60% this cycle. We will add another 20% deduction in the next cycle. It became abundantly clear: flooding the timeline with 100 stolen reposts and clickbait everyday crowded-out real creators and hurt new author growth. The next step is to assign a permanent deduction to habitual bait posters who use “🚨BREAKING”on every post. X will never infringe on speech or reach—but we will not compensate for manipulation of the program or our users.

A Citizen Potawatomi tribal member, she’s reenvisioning how maps communicate Indigenous knowledge, revealing layers of understanding that can inspire people to more sustainably address issues like habitat loss, aging infrastructure, and increasingly severe flooding.

Brazil Sugarcane’s Embarrassing Turn: Loud Critics Now Hoping for Worldwide Misery For years, Brazil’s sugarcane mills loudly denounced corn-based ethanol producers as inferior, unsustainable, or somehow unworthy. How times have changed. Today, one barely needs to search to find just two major corn ethanol players generating more profit than the entire Brazilian sugarcane sector combined. Yet here we are: while a few forward-thinking mills have quietly adapted, the great majority remain trapped in a pathetic cycle of wishful thinking. They pin their hopes on global chaos - skyrocketing crude prices, fertilizer shortages, or convenient geopolitical wars - to magically restore their lost edge. This is not strategy. It is strategic surrender dressed up as optimism. Hoping the rest of the world suffers so you can survive is not merely fragile; it is embarrassingly low-level behavior for an industry that once prided itself on superiority. The Delicious Irony of Praying for Higher Oil Prices The contradiction reaches peak absurdity with crude oil. Higher prices do not kindly anoint sugarcane ethanol (or sugar, for that matter) while punishing everyone else. They slam diesel costs through the roof—precisely the fuel that powers harvesting, trucking, and distribution for sugarcane mills. Meanwhile, those same high diesel prices make it far more attractive for farmers to sell corn locally rather than export it, handing corn ethanol plants a stronger domestic position right in Brazil’s own backyard. On a wider scale, prolonged high energy prices simply crush demand. Struggling consuming countries cut back further, and governments—ever eager for votes—shower even more subsidies on local producers, be they sugarcane or beet. The mills cheer for turbulence abroad, only to watch it boomerang straight into their own costs and shrinking markets. And it gets even better. The very spike in crude, fuel, and fertilizer prices these mills are desperately wishing for would fuel broader inflation, prompting banks to aggressively increase lending costs and widen credit spreads. With the largest sugarcane producer already flirting with bankruptcy, risk-averse banks will be even less forgiving. If there is one thing Brazilian sugarcane mills possess more than anyone else, it is massive debt. The resulting surge in financing costs would brutally squeeze margins and threaten the survival of many over-leveraged operations. Cheering for the conditions that could sink you is a special kind of financial masochism. The Real Fight: Costs, Innovation, and Brutal Market Reality Instead of burning money on yet another trip to New York, these executives would do far better to stay home and fix what actually matters: slashing production costs, lifting yields, squeezing more revenue from every ton, and fiercely protecting their domestic turf. The electric vehicle wave is no longer coming — it has arrived. In the first quarter of 2026, EVs already represented over 66% of imports. The future of liquid fuels is shrinking faster than many care to admit, and denial will not slow it down. And while everyone obsesses over oil prices and EVs, an even quieter tsunami is building: GLP-1 receptor agonists — the Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro class of drugs. Almost no one in the Brazilian sugarcane industry wants to talk about them, but they are exploding in adoption. These appetite-suppressing wonders are slashing cravings for sugar, sweets, and sugary drinks (with users cutting sugary beverage intake by up to 65%), driving down overall calorie consumption, and reshaping food demand worldwide. In a world with high obesity and diabetes rates, wider access and falling prices will deliver a direct slap to sugar demand. While mills dream of higher crude prices saving them, GLP-1s are silently eating their lunch — one suppressed sweet tooth at a time. Cheering for a selective El Niño is equally delusional. Reality check: El Niño years like 2015 and 2023 produced some of the largest sugarcane crops on record, flooding the market with volume and hammering prices. Hoping for convenient climate chaos is not a strategy — it’s Russian roulette with your own balance sheet. Discipline Beats Distraction Every Time Of course, there is undeniable charm in flying to New York, sipping overpriced wine with fancy labels in elegant restaurants, and pretending the world still revolves around your spreadsheets/costs. For a fleeting moment, one can feel like a prince. The market, however, could not care less about your feelings or your frequent-flyer status. It rewards cold efficiency, superior performance, and relentless innovation — the very things the corn ethanol industry has delivered while others complained. The path forward is brutally simple: stop cheering for global misfortune and start building a genuinely competitive, adaptable business. Resilience is not found in desperate prayers for higher oil or foreign crises. It is created through discipline, focus, and the courage to face reality head-on. Those who grasp this will shape whatever future the industry still has. The rest will simply watch from the sidelines, wondering why the world refused to cooperate with their fantasies.

👋Introducing the #Meissonic# & #Menotico# model series, a collaborative pre-trained image generation model by Collov Labs! This marks another step forward in our research journey, following our work on #3D# Prior Image Synthesis and D-edit. In collaboration with University of California, Berkeley AI Research and Stanford University , this series features highly efficient image generation models based on the MIM (Masked Image Modeling) architecture. Designed to surpass traditional diffusion models (such as SDXL), these models enable efficient generation of 1024x1024 and 512x512 images even at the edge. The #Meissonic# & #Menotico# series represents a milestone for Collov Labs as we pursue advancements in hashtag#spatialdesignintelligence#. Our goal is to create stunning, efficient text-to-image models trained with minimal data and parameters, paving the way for cost-effective pre-training that delivers enterprise-grade solutions. By collaborating with clients in real estate and home decor, Collov offers customizable, compliant, and cost-controlled pre-training solutions. Through our post-training pipeline, MIM models excel in downstream tasks, including: 🖼 Precision: Perfectly scaled image generation 💡 Visual Memory: Retaining 3D and 2D concepts with fidelity, like furniture, cabinetry, and flooring textures 🚀 Spatial Reasoning: Intelligent spatial arrangement and drag-and-drop editing capabilities We’re thrilled to contribute to the open-source community, sparking discussions on YouTube and Reddit from Japan, Korea, the U.S., India, the Middle East, and the U.K. Check out this YouTube tutorial on deploying these models efficiently at the edge: We invite you to explore and discuss our work! Our code and full paper are now available: 💻 Hugging Face: 📄 Full Paper: