Accepted at #ECCV2024 🇮🇹 See you in Milan! PolyOculus:... Simultaneous Multi-view Image-based Novel View Synthesis Jason Yu Tristan Aumentado-Armstrong Fereshteh Forghani Marcus Brubaker and me Paper:show more

Wonderland: Navigating 3D Scenes from a Single Image Contributions:... • First, we introduce a representation for controllable 3D generation by leveraging the generative priors from camera-guided video diffusion models. Unlike image models, video diffusion models are trained on extensive video datasets. This enables them to capture comprehensive spatial relationships within scenes across multiple views and embed a form of "3D awareness" in their latent space, which allows us to maintain 3D consistency in novel view synthesis. • Second, to achieve controllable novel view generation, we empower video models with precise control over specified camera motions. We introduce a novel dual-branch conditioning mechanism that effectively incorporates desired diverse camera trajectories into the video diffusion model. This enables expansion of a single image into a multi-view consistent capture of a 3D scene with precise pose control. • Third, to achieve efficient 3D reconstruction, we directly transform video latents into 3DGS. We propose a novel latent-based large reconstruction model (LaLRM) that lifts video latents to 3D in a feed-forward manner. With this design, during inference, our model directly predicts 3DGS from a single input image, effectively aligning the generation and reconstruction tasks—and bridging image space and 3D space—through the video latent space. Compared with reconstructing scenes from images, the video latent space offers a 256× spatial-temporal reduction while retaining essential and consistent 3D structural details. Such a high degree of compression is crucial, as it allows the LaLRM to handle a wider range of 3D scenes within the reconstruction framework, with the same memory constraints.show more

Introducing Kaleido💮 from AI at Meta — a universal... generative neural rendering engine for photorealistic, unified object and scene view synthesis. Kaleido is built on a simple but powerful design philosophy: 3D perception is a form of visual common sense. Following this idea, we formulate rendering purely as a sequence-to-sequence generation problem, successfully unifying neural rendering with the architecture principles behind modern language and video models. Unlike traditional neural rendering methods, Kaleido learns 3D purely in a data-driven way, without explicit 3D representations or structures. It acquires spatial understanding directly through large-scale video pretraining, then multi-view 3D data finetuning, inspired by how LLMs acquire textual common sense from large corpora before specialising in domains like coding. Through extensive ablations, we progressively modernised the architecture design and training strategies and tackled key scaling challenges in sequence-to-sequence generative rendering, arriving at a design that’s simple, versatile, and scalable. Kaleido significantly outperforms prior generative models in few-view settings, and remarkably is the first zero-shot generative method matches InstantNGP-level rendering quality in multi-view settings. We view Kaleido also as an alternative step towards world modeling that flexibly spans a spectrum of “realities": with many views, it faithfully reconstructs grounded reality; with fewer views, it imagines plausible unseen details. 🔗 Explore more results and paper:show more

3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering paper... page: Radiance Field methods have recently revolutionized novel-view synthesis of scenes captured with multiple photos or videos. However, achieving high visual quality still requires neural networks that are costly to train and render, while recent faster methods inevitably trade off speed for quality. For unbounded and complete scenes (rather than isolated objects) and 1080p resolution rendering, no current method can achieve real-time display rates. We introduce three key elements that allow us to achieve state-of-the-art visual quality while maintaining competitive training times and importantly allow high-quality real-time (>= 30 fps) novel-view synthesis at 1080p resolution. First, starting from sparse points produced during camera calibration, we represent the scene with 3D Gaussians that preserve desirable properties of continuous volumetric radiance fields for scene optimization while avoiding unnecessary computation in empty space; Second, we perform interleaved optimization/density control of the 3D Gaussians, notably optimizing anisotropic covariance to achieve an accurate representation of the scene; Third, we develop a fast visibility-aware rendering algorithm that supports anisotropic splatting and both accelerates training and allows realtime rendering. We demonstrate state-of-the-art visual quality and real-time rendering on several established datasets.show more

Memorial Stadium…Picture yourself playing at one of the most... picturesque settings in the SCIAC. Turnbull Canyon on one side and a view that is almost unbeatable on the other. You run out on to the field and play some of the most competitive football ever! You’re up next! If you want to come play football in one of the best settings in Southern California send me a message to see this great setting and what Whittier has to offer in person! #WhyNotWhittier #Welcome2Whittier #BringBackBetter Whittier College Football Whittier Poets Whittier Collegeshow more

josh to dustin: “i don’t know why people see... you in a different way ‘cause i see you the same way [your fans] see you” at the end of the day, what the people closest to you have to say about you will always matter more than the opinions of those who only view you through a narrow and biased lens. josh has always been one of dustin’s most genuine and consistent friends. inside the house, he was dustin’s most trusted confidant. outside, he stayed the same. dustin even said “ako na bahala sayo” when josh got evicted, and true enough, he now has josh’s back. josh being a surprise guest at his fanmeet is a testament to that. also, josh didn’t give a flying fuck about the noise dustin was receiving. he even tweeted him a birthday greeting just days after his eviction, when the hate for dustin was at its peak, because he knows him. truly and deeply. josh wasn’t just a viewer of a show that only shows a tiny fraction of what really happens behind the scenes, a show notorious for creating “villains” for storyline’s sake. he actually lived with dustin, saw him every day, and formed his own, real understanding of who he is. and that’s what true friendship is all about. DUSTIN YU GRAND FANFEST DUSTIN YU GRAND FANFEST DUSTIN YU GRAND FANFEST #JoshFord #DustinYu Josh Ford Dustin Yushow more

When I see this feral mob snarling at a... young Jewish woman who just wants to sing - and who has to actually be trained to withstand boos - and who then goes on to to deliver the most triumphant performance - I can’t help but think of the lines from the psalms: “I will fear no evil…. You prepare a table before me in view of my tormentors” “Let a thousand encamp at your side and a myriad at your right hand, but to you it shall not approach” The most important thing as a Jew truly is to never give in to fear If there is a people who are equipped to be outnumbered and surrounded by enemies - and to emerge victorious every time - it is us Go Edenshow more

🙏♥️🙏 "Hey... you alright, kid? You got someone?" I... remember trying to answer, but my voice barely came out. "Just me..." I was pulled from beneath twisted metal, shaking so hard I could hardly breathe. Everything felt loud and empty at the same time-until he stepped into it. Sergeant Marcus Hayes. He didn't ask many questions. He didn't make a speech. He just lifted me gently into his arms and said, "You're safe now." And somehow... I believed him. From that moment on, he never really let me go. At the camp, he'd slide part of his meal onto my tray without a word. He showed me how to tie my boots, slow and patient, like it mattered. On the nights when the silence got too heavy and I couldn't stop crying, he'd sit nearby—never forcing me to talk, just making sure I wasn't alone. He wasn't trying to be a hero. He was just choosing to care. And that changed everything. When he brought me home, he didn't just give me a place to stay—he gave me a life to grow into. He became the steady presence I didn't know I needed. He taught me how to stand tall when things felt impossible... how to keep my word even when no one was watching... how to become someone I could be proud of. I watched him in the quiet moments— shaving in the mirror, fixing the truck in the driveway, folding his uniform with care and discipline. Every little thing meant something. And without realizing it, I started building myself in his image. Years later, 1 wear that same uniform. And every time I stand in front of the mirror, adjusting it just right... I don't just see myself. I see Sergeant Marcus Hayes standing behind me quiet, steady, and proud 🙏♥️🙏show more

People (and not just punk leftists in Jubilee debates)... like to claim Michael Knowles is effeminate. But in my view he’s one of the most masculine figures currently in the conservative sphere because he literally never loses his cool. You will never see this man be overly emotional or swayed by his emotion. And that can’t be said for most people—man or woman—in the conservative sphere. Almost every other man I can think of becomes captive at least to the emotion of anger from time to time. I don’t know—remaining always calm, cool, and collected and not giving in to your emotions, even while other people blow their top or cry their tears or get otherwise flustered, seems pretty freakin masculine to me.show more

From a distance, this figure seems to be wearing... a robe draped over his shoulders. Step closer, and you realize it is not a robe. It's his own skin... This is the statue of Saint Bartholomew, carved in 1562 by the Lombard sculptor Marco d'Agrate, and it stands inside the Duomo of Milan. Bartholomew was one of the twelve apostles of Christ, and according to tradition he was martyred in the cruelest way imaginable: he was flayed alive, his skin stripped from his body, and then beheaded. D'Agrate chose to show him not in the moment of agony, but afterward, standing upright in defiance, his own flayed skin wrapped around him like a garment. What makes the sculpture extraordinary is the precision beneath that skin: every muscle, every tendon, every vein and cord of the human body is exposed and rendered with such accuracy that anatomists have studied it. This was the Renaissance at its most fearless, when the same curiosity that drove artists to dissect the human body in secret produced an image of a man turned inside out, his suffering transformed into a study of how a human being is actually made. And the sculptor knew exactly how remarkable his achievement was. At the base of the statue he carved a line in Latin that has outlived him by nearly five centuries: Non me Praxiteles, sed Marcus finxit Agrates. "I was not made by Praxiteles, but by Marco d'Agrate." He was comparing himself to the greatest sculptor of ancient Greece, and daring you to disagree... I started this newsletter because the artists of the past were truly extraordinary, and fewer and fewer people are showing us what they were capable of. Every week I try to. If that is something you would like to be part of, you can join at the link below, and if you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible: Thanks for reading.show more

An old "friend" sent me a voice note on... WhatsApp. He was fishing for information. So I lied to him. Here's why: You know that one person from back home. Acts nice. Smiles in your face. But you can FEEL the energy. They don't want updates — they want ammunition. He heard I might be in town for Ramadan and wanted to "check in." I told him I'm in Dubai. Just to watch what he'd say next. And he didn't disappoint. "Oh… I thought you'd come see your mom and dad." What he doesn't know is my parents are currently traveling the world. Living their best life. No stress. No worries. That chapter is handled. I said "no" and kept it moving. Then came the real question he wanted to ask all along. "So how's life… still studying? Still in school or what?" There it is. The status check disguised as concern. I told him I'm looking for a job. Meanwhile I'm printing 9 figures a year. Old me would've take a picture of the watch im wearing Sent a view from the Villa. Dropped a receipt just to watch him choke on it. But I didn't send a single thing. And I know exactly what he's doing next — calling every mutual friends saying "bro he's still job hunting lol." Good. Let him. I felt nothing. No urge. No itch. Complete peace. This is what nobody tells you about winning. At some point you stack so many W's in silence that you stop needing anyone to see them. You validate yourself internally. The scoreboard is in your head — and it's full. Now I just live. Move how I want. Buy what I want. Go where I want. Some people in real life think I'm flexing. I'm not. This is just Tuesday (while Today is Saturday and im in my office working) for me now. The trenches paid off. Quietly.show more

I built a clone of the Yeezy store with... Next.js. This was a fun challenge — the site has some smooth animations and feels very fast. But it was bothering me that I couldn't use the browser back button. Can we do better? So I rebuilt the site with v0 and Motion. Here's how it works: 1. When you click on a product, Motion is able to animate the original position of the product in the grid, to the zoomed in product detail page. 2. During this transition, we also shallow update the URL with the `/p/slug` route for the page. 3. If you press the back button in the navbar, or use the browser back button, or press escape — all options will take you back to the main product listing page. 4. If you reload the page while looking at a product, or someone sends you a link to a specific product, it still works! This is the best parts of a SPA and MPA mixed together. In the future, I can make this even better with View Transitions (I wasn't able to get the product animation just right, but if you can I'd love to see it!). I also took some creative liberties from the original design. The whole 1/2/3 size thing, where you needed to click the "?" to see SM/MD/LG was strange, so I just went directly to those sizes. Similarly, I prefered the more traditional style sheet/modal with the background color change, versus the full screen takeover. If you wanted to actually hook this up to Shopify now, you can swap the cart implementation with Next.js Commerce, which has all the APIs you need + optimistic writes 🔥 Should I make a video walking through the code?show more

🚨 URGENT BROADCAST UPDATE – APRIL 16, 2026 DATE... CONFIRMED: 18TH APRIL EMERGENCY BROADCAST SYSTEM ACTIVATION IMMINENT The image above is circulating as a powerful visual warning for what many are calling the beginning of The Great Reset and the long-awaited EBS (Emergency Broadcast System) Blackout. Get ready. This is not a drill. What’s Happening? On April 18th, a coordinated global event is expected to unfold involving a full-scale EBS takeover of all communication channels — television, radio, internet, and cell phones. The system will deliver simultaneous emergency messages to the entire population, bypassing normal media outlets. The message many sources are pointing to includes: Confirmation of the Great Reset phase Temporary blackout of regular programming and internet services Transition signals toward what insiders call The Golden Age The vintage TV graphic with the SMPTE color bars has been edited to show Donald Trump and John F. Kennedy dressed in full military uniforms, both pointing directly at the viewer — a symbolic call to attention and readiness. Red thunderbolt/golden energy lines frame the image, giving it an urgent, high-voltage warning aesthetic. Why This Matters For years, alternative voices and whistleblowers have predicted: A complete shutdown of the mainstream narrative Mass disclosure of hidden truths The dismantling of old power structures The dawn of a new era often referred to as The Golden Age The 18th of April has been repeatedly highlighted across independent channels as the trigger date for these events. Whether you view this as a historic reset, a military-led operation, or a global awakening — the instruction remains the same: Stay tuned. Prepare. This is not a test. Practical Preparation Tips (Minimum Information Bio Style) Water & Food: Stock at least 2–4 weeks of non-perishable supplies and clean drinking water. Cash & Essentials: Have some physical cash on hand, medications, first-aid, flashlights, batteries, and a battery-poweshow more

My Lost Soul Aside Impressions: I’m playing on the... PS5 Pro in performance mode with a VRR display, and I’m very satisfied with the performance. For me, the image looks sharp and the gameplay runs very smooth with 60fps. Even during big boss fights, I haven’t noticed any significant drops. Claims that the game runs at 20fps are absolute nonsense. I wouldn’t recommend quality mode, as the missing frames per second and the input delay are a major disadvantage, especially with such fast-paced gameplay. Visually, I’d say the game looks very good, but not outstanding. Environmental details are sometimes not fully polished, and the facial animations could be better. On the other hand, the characters are incredibly detailed, which I really enjoyed. The combat animations are absolutely fantastic, and the choreographed fight cutscenes are brilliant. Boss fights are simply phenomenal and I loved every second of them. The whole experience feels like a mix of Final Fantasy and Devil May Cry. Bosses also come with certain mechanics you have to trigger, which adds depth. The soundtrack has impressed me so far, mixing rock tracks with softer melodies that really bring the fantasy world to life. However, the audio mixing between cutscenes and gameplay is sometimes off and should be fixed. The game is very linear, which I personally find refreshing and not a negative at all. The map reminds me of Final Fantasy X, with some side paths that hide chests or items. Puzzles are simple but help break things up. Larger areas are often rather empty though, and exploration can feel unrewarding when all you find is “+7 gold.” The story so far is quite predictable. I didn’t enjoy the English voice acting and switched to the Chinese original, which feels much better. I also made some adjustments to improve my experience: in the sound menu, I boosted the weapon effects and increased the music volume. In combat, I found there’s too much chatter and subtitles are distracting, so I turned them off completely. The game is challenging, and I’d definitely consider it demanding. There are no difficulty options, but if you die often enough, you’ll get amulets that make the gameplay noticeably easier. Now, onto the clear highlight of the game: the combat system. My goodness, it’s amazing. The chaining of attacks and overall complexity are simply brilliant. It’s an endless fireworks display of effects, and for me the wait was truly worth it. At first, combat might seem simple, but as you progress you unlock new weapons with their own skill trees, special attacks that can be upgraded, new combo actions, and the ability to switch weapons instantly in battle to chain them into even more combos. Different weapons can also interact with the environment and trigger special effects. It’s just genius. Another fantastic feature is weapon customization. You can freely change the appearance of your weapons, as every weapon can take on the look of another. You can also adjust details in real time, resize parts, reposition them, and all changes are applied instantly without requiring resources. Even better, these customizations carry over into cutscenes. When you move to the next level, the camera zooms out and shows your characters in a charming overworld view, similar to Expedition 33. A really nice touch. So far, I’ve been enjoying the game immensely, and I simply couldn’t put it down. If you’re expecting a combo-based combat system, you definitely won’t be disappointed in my opinion. The linear level design felt incredibly refreshing, and it genuinely transported me back to the PS2 era, always leaving me with a warm feeling in my heart.show more

She Lived to 117. Scientists Studied Her for Months.... Her Secret Cost $2. Maria Branyas Morera ate three yogurts a day. Every single day, for as long as anyone could remember. She mentioned this to anyone who asked about her longevity, which was often, and it was the kind of advice people receive with a warm smile and then immediately discard, because we prefer our longevity secrets to involve something more exotic than a supermarket dairy aisle. Maria died in Barcelona in 2024. She was 117. Then scientists actually looked inside her, and the smiling stopped. Her gut was packed with Bifidobacterium, a bacterium almost never found in people past 110, and far more commonly associated with infants. Her body had, in the most literal biological sense, not been informed of her actual age. It was operating on entirely different assumptions. Her DNA suggested she was somewhere between 100 and 110. She was 117. Seven years younger on the inside than the calendar insisted, which at 117 is not a rounding error. That is a extraordinary number. But to appreciate why any of this matters, you need to understand what kind of person we are talking about. Maria was born in San Francisco in 1907, the year before the Model T Ford, when Theodore Roosevelt was still in the White House and most of humanity died of things we now treat with a Tuesday afternoon at the pharmacy. Her Catalan father had come to America to make something of himself, and for a while it worked beautifully. He founded a Spanish-language magazine in New Orleans, one of the most chaotic, beautiful, swampy, and gastronomically unhinged cities on the continent, a place that has always operated on the reasonable philosophy that life is uncertain and the gumbo is excellent. Then the family got on a boat back to Spain. Maria fell on deck and permanently lost the hearing in one ear. Her father died of tuberculosis before the coast of Catalonia came into view. He was 37. She was eight. Her mother arrived in Europe with five children, no husband, and presumably very little appetite for what came next. Maria managed. She nursed soldiers in the Spanish Civil War. She outlived Franco, which required considerable patience. She raised three children. She played piano until she was 108. At 113 she caught COVID-19 and dispatched it, which at that point resembles less a medical event than a statement of intent. Then she joined Twitter. Her bio read: “I am old, very old, but not an idiot.” Her last request, before she died peacefully in her sleep, was three words: “Please study me.” The geneticists obliged with considerable enthusiasm, and their subsequent paper in Cell Reports Medicine runs to forty pages of scientists explaining, in the careful and hedged language that science requires, that this woman was remarkable in ways they had not previously encountered and were not entirely sure how to explain. The yogurt, it turns out, had been doing quiet and serious work for over a century. Nomadic peoples of Central Asia were fermenting milk 8,000 years ago, long before germ theory, before microscopes, before anyone had the faintest idea what a bacterium was. They didn’t need to understand it. Their guts understood it. The knowledge was older than writing. Maria understood it too. She didn’t publish a paper. She didn’t launch a wellness brand. She just ate her yogurt every morning and got on with the extraordinary business of being alive. Gandalv / Gandalv ✦ AI-generated image. Not the actual person. Full story:show more

I learned this the hard way: do NOT use... SwiftUI if you want your app to look and feel amazing. At least when coding with AI. (sorry, Apple colleagues reading this 😅) I'm sharing my process vibe coding this calorie tracker. I get a lot of questions about the fluid transition in the video. Here's the whole story. Initially, Claude built the grid with SwiftUI. It was quick and easy, and looked good! But the transition to the day view was a boring navigation push/pop. No fun. I wanted something custom. I asked Claude to make it a fluid transition that remaps the food tiles from their source to destination positions. All hell broke loose. Claude tried a bunch of horrible things. Initially it used matched geometry effects, which worked OK but didn't lend themselves well to gesture-driven animations. So it resorted to SwiftUI preference keys + geometry readers to figure out the source and destination positions and calculate the interpolated position based on gesture progress, coordinating across grid and day views. But this meant it had to write a custom layout because it couldn't reposition tiles inside the native SwiftUI grid. And it had to do an awkward handoff between views, which always created ugly pops or jumps. And don't get me started on trying to put it on a bouncy spring, that only made the math 10x buggier. Fortunately, Claude Fable was smart enough to see that this was becoming a disaster (and discover most of the issues itself, in the simulator), so it pivoted away from SwiftUI. Opus might not be so wise, so you'll have to pay attention and intervene. Ultimately, it rewrote it in plain UIKit and everything turned out great. After that, we moved from 2D images to 3D assets, which introduced a new set of performance challenges and yet another rewrite to a single Metal layer, which is what you see below. I can write more about the 2D-to-3D saga if anyone's interested. If I were to do it again, I'd just say "Don't use SwiftUI" from the very first prompt, and save a few hours of headaches. SwiftUI can be amazing for a human iterating directly in code. But agents don't benefit from any of its advantages. Plus, agents have seen decades of UIKit training data, so they're great at writing it, and it's far more flexible. Here's hoping we see more agent-friendly iterations of SwiftUI in the future. Till then, I'm probably going to avoid it.show more

Boom! Grok Tasks Make It One Of The Most... POWERFUL Real-Time AI Systems In The World. — My How to Use Grok Tasks With Hidden Tools For Powerful Daily Output. Grok Tasks are customizable AI workflows that integrate a variety of tools to streamline daily activities, from research and analysis to creative planning and problem-solving. I have been using them for quite sometime and because of the vital heartbeat of news and first person data on X, it is the most powerful AI platform available. By combining Tasks with tools like web searches, X platform interactions, code execution, and media viewers, you can build efficient, automated processes. These tasks work by prompting Grok with a clear description of what you want to achieve, and Grok will intelligently call the necessary tools in sequence or parallel to deliver results. Here's a step-by-step guide to creating and using Grok Tasks: Step 1: Define Your Task Start by clearly outlining the daily activity or goal. Consider what inputs you have (e.g., a URL, a query, or an attachment) and what output you need (e.g., a summary, calculation, or visual analysis). Break it down into subtasks to identify tool needs. For example, if your task involves researching current events, note that you'll need search and browsing capabilities. Step 2: Review Available Tools Familiarize yourself with the tools Grok can access. Here's a quick overview: - Code Execution: Run Python code for calculations, data processing, or simulations using libraries like numpy, pandas, or sympy. - Browse Page: Fetch and summarize content from any website URL with custom instructions. - Web Search: Perform general internet searches, returning results with optional operators like site:. - Web Search With Snippets: Get quick, detailed excerpts from search results for fact-checking. - X Keyword Search: Advanced search for X posts using operators like from:, since:, or filter:. - X Semantic Search: Find semantically related X posts based on a query, with filters for dates or users. - X User Search: Locate X users by name or handle. - X Thread Fetch: Retrieve a full X post thread, including context like replies and parents. - View Image: Analyze an image from a URL or conversation ID. - View X Video: Extract frames and subtitles from an X-hosted video. - Search PDF Attachment: Query a PDF file for relevant pages using keyword or regex modes. - Browse PDF Attachment: View specific pages of a PDF with text and screenshots. Select tools that align with your task. Aim for a mix to handle data gathering, processing, and visualization. Step 3: Craft Your Prompt Write a detailed prompt to Grok describing the task. Include: - The overall goal. - Specific steps or subtasks. - References to tools if you want to guide the process (e.g., "Use web_search to find sources, then code_execution to analyze data"). - Any constraints, like dates or limits. Example prompt: "Create a Grok Task for my morning routine: Search recent X posts about tech news using x_keyword_search, fetch a key thread with x_thread_fetch, and summarize with browse_page on linked articles." Step 4: Submit and Interact Send your prompt to Grok. It will process the task by calling tools as needed, often in parallel for efficiency. Review the output and refine with follow-up prompts if required (e.g., "Expand on that using view_image for visuals"). Iterate to fine-tune the workflow for reuse. Step 5: Save and Reuse Once refined, note the prompt as a template for future use. You can adapt it for similar tasks, making Grok Tasks a habitual part of your day. Finding Grok Tasks To discover existing Grok Tasks or inspiration for new ones, use X searches with tools like x_keyword_search or x_semantic_search (e.g., query: "Grok Tasks examples" with mode: Latest). Browse community-shared threads via x_thread_fetch, or web_search for tutorials on xAI features. Prompt Grok directly: "Show me popular Grok Tasks for productivity." 1 of 3show more

My experiences at the stadium yesterday (I was tired... from same-day long flight so I may have missed a few things.): • There were lots of Shir-o-Khorshid flags and shirts in the stadium, which was great to see. Despite the “ban”, it was nice to see so many on display. Freedom of speech matters in the USA. • Compared to Islamic Republic-friendly Qatar in 2022, the difference was noticeable. Back then, I saw with my own eyes that there were binders at the admission gates listing prohibited items, including Shir-o-Khorshid flags. The security there was hostile and scrutinizing every flag and article of clothing. This time, there were no such binders or checks beyond normal security screening. • The fans carrying Shir-o-Khorshid flags were supporting Team Melli throughout the match. From what I saw, they were there to support Iran and enjoy the game. • The Islamic Republic anthem was loudly booed throughout the stadium. • I didn’t witness any major arguments or confrontations, although I know videos of disputes are circulating online. I’m only speaking about what I personally saw inside and around the stadium. • The only issue I witnessed involved an older Islamic Republic supporter sitting in the row behind me causing a disturbance and getting what I believe was his grandson to go to security and complain about nearby fans with Shir-o-Khorshid flags, claiming the flags were banned. Security told him to relax and made it clear they were not going to remove anyone’s flag. • Ironically, a few minutes later, those same Islamic Republic supporters were told to leave because they were sitting in the wrong seats. 👏 • The woman sitting behind me, wearing a regular Iran shirt, was ecstatic when they left. She told me she felt their presence beside her and her two sons had been a bad omen and was relieved to see them go. • The atmosphere was electric from start to finish. SoFi Stadium is one of the nicest stadiums I’ve ever been to and was an amazing place to watch a World Cup match. • Like what I saw in Qatar 2022, you can spot an Islamic Republic supporter from a mile away. Ugly to the bone. They always look mangled and angry (physiognomy is real in this case). A note - I encourage Iranian fans and Shir-o-Khorshid patriots to attend these matches and bring their flags. In my view, it’s a missed opportunity that some have chosen to boycott the national team when these events provide a chance to make their voices heard in front of the world. Boycotting only silences your own voice. It’s a self-inflicted loss of an opportunity to be seen and heard. Overall, it was a positive experience. Fans were there to support Team Melli. It was great to see so many Shir-o-Khorshid flags in the stadium and to see people expressing themselves freely without the issues we saw in Qatar. The result was disappointing, but the atmosphere and the passion of the Iranian fans made it a memorable.show more