Matt Youell

An advocate for time and space to eff around

[Matt Youell @built]

Utopians ruin everything.

[Terence Shen @Terenceshen]

37 years ago today, the Chinese government brutally crushed peaceful protesters in and around Tiananmen Square who were demanding an end to corruption, freedom of speech, and democratic reform. The massacre revealed a truth the world should never forget: the Chinese Communist Party will do whatever it takes to preserve its grip on power. If it did not value the lives of its own citizens, why would it value the lives of others?

[Matt Youell @built]

@TerribleMaps One of your better maps.

[Melissa & Chris Bruntlett @modacitylife]

Such a scene is often framed as proof the Dutch are superhuman—they’re not.

The real miracle isn't the Dutch cyclist. It's the environment that allows ordinary people to do extraordinary things. Build the infrastructure, and you'll find your city is full of capable cyclists too.

[Matt Youell @built]

@beginbot @ThePrimeagen @AdamCYounis @haley_shirley Oh it gets undone

[Matt Youell @built]

“Just because a company doesn’t make money doesn’t mean it shouldn’t go public” is a thing a Bloomberg talking head just said. https://t.co/C3wZW2NRs2

[Matt Youell @built]

@MarkusQ @ICEgov @MarkusQ I had a Dutch friend try to convert me in middle school, meaning I've been unconvinced for 40 years. I will grant, ketchup is overrated and a good fry requires little other than heat and salt.

[Matt Youell @built]

Someone call @ICEgov

[Dutch Rojas @DutchRojas]

Americans are going to find out about me during the World Cup and I’m just going to say it now: I put mayonnaise on my fries.

Not ketchup. Mayo. The Dutch are right and I will not be debating this.

[Matt Youell @built]

@MarkusQ @ICEgov

[Matt Youell @built]

@aj_muse_ 2,500

[Matt Youell @built]

@Eagles

[Matt Youell @built]

Also: Water is wet, the sky is blue, and women have secrets.

[Charly Wargnier @DataChaz]

🚨 NVIDIA just pulled off something crazy: making bounding box detection 10x faster by ripping out the exact step the entire industry assumed was mandatory ↓

Every VLM grounding model treats boxes like sentences, predicting them token by token. It’s inherently slow.

Enter LocateAnything (trending #1 on HF, CVPR 2026).

It’s an advanced 3B vision-language model that finds any object, UI target, or text using natural language by asking a simple question:

Why serialize a box at all?

The four corners are coupled.

It predicts the whole box atomically, in one parallel step.

The impact of parallel decoding:
→ 12.7 boxes/sec on a single H100 (10x faster than Qwen3-VL, 2.5× vs Rex-Omni)
→ Accuracy goes up, not down (+3.8% F1 on LVIS, big wins at IoU 0.95)
→ Dense scenes (300 boxes) hit ~25 BPS while sequential falls off a cliff
→ Built-in fallback: reverts to sequential decoding if the output looks wrong
→ Trained on 785M boxes / 138M queries across referring, GUI, and OCR tasks

The breakthrough isn't just speed.

It’s realizing that forcing structured outputs through text-shaped pipes creates artificial bottlenecks.

Boxes were never tokens.

Repo, demo, weights, paper, and other resources in the 🧵 ↓

[Stijn Spanhove @stspanho]

🏃‍♂️ I've gamified my own run so I can race my own ghost with the Meta Ray-Ban Display.

I built a web app for the glasses, loaded a previous GPX from Strava, and dropped game mechanics on top.

Pick up coins when you keep pace, sprint zones reward extra points if you push, and a mini leaderboard on the lens shows how you're tracking against your past self in real time.

Best part: it actually works. Seeing your ghost 20 m ahead is a way stronger nudge than any number on a watch. 😅

[Matt Youell @built]

@salingergregor Feet? FEET?

[Matt Youell @built]

@rickasaurus Gotta be a legal minefield.

[Matt Youell @built]

"culturally specific care" is a new one on me.

[Governor Tina Kotek @GovTinaKotek]

Madras is breaking ground on a new Latino residential treatment facility, expanding access to culturally specific care for Oregonians working toward recovery. This investment will help more people access support, healing, and treatment closer to home. https://t.co/87ZNNHCRLj

[Matt Youell @built]

@ChiefScientist This automation is putting buxom German women out of work and I won't have it.

[Matt Youell @built]

Jack it up like an AMC Eagle, make the headlights flip up, and I'm in.

[Computer ♥ Records @ComputerLove_]

1977 AMC AM Van Concept.

[Darwyn Metzger ⚫️ @DarwynsTheory]

The homelessness crisis has never been about housing.

If housing first works, it would’ve worked.

Make treatment mandatory, reunite families, & stop allowing criminals & our political leaders to profit off of the homeless.

We can no longer wait for the homeless to find the door to treatment.

We need to kick it open and walk them through it.

[Matt Youell @built]

@CooperZurad Poe's Law in full effect here

[Matt Youell @built]

@davidclowery