Geospatial technology, markets, and practice
I've been doing some recent work related to automating QA in AI workflows. Most recently, I built a small jury pool app to assess agreement across generated outputs, which got me interested in small models. It's a necessary step to ensure quality and precision, and it well-trodden by research. After running down a few rabbit … Continue reading Applicability of Small Models for Agentic QA
For eighteen years, I drove past the Morgantown Generating Station on my way to work. Its stacks were part of the background geography of my daily life, sitting along the Potomac River in Newburg, Maryland. Like many pieces of industrial infrastructure, it was both conspicuous and easy to stop seeing. It was just there. Then, … Continue reading What Spatial Finance Cannot See From Orbit
Open a dataset of building footprints for a mid-sized city in sub-Saharan Africa. The polygons are clean. They snap to grid, close correctly, and sit at plausible addresses. Run them through any geometry validator and they pass. Load them in QGIS and they look, to every reasonable inspection, like a map. Some of them may … Continue reading Plausibility Is Not Provenance
In February 2026, Gary Gale published a brief post describing a problem that, on its face, looked mundane. A volunteer‑maintained mapping project called Vaguely Rude Places had experienced an abrupt surge in traffic. Daily requests jumped from the low thousands to the hundreds of thousands. There was no corresponding spike in public interest, no viral … Continue reading When Geospatial Is Consumed at AI-Scale