Geospatial technology, markets, and practice
In the late 1990s and early 2000s I worked in critical infrastructure protection, building geospatial applications and data sets to model how infrastructure networks behave. I worked on systems like switched telecommunications, commercial rail, and refined petroleum products, along with the ways those systems depend on one another. Working on those teams, I learned a … Continue reading Mission Assurance and Human Geography
In 1951, Paul Fitts edited a report on human engineering for air-navigation and traffic-control systems. One of its lasting artifacts was a deceptively simple allocation device that came to be known as the Fitts list: what humans are better at and what machines are better at (Fitts, 1951). In shorthand, it became HABA-MABA: Humans Are … Continue reading Interpretation and Ownership
Introduction The current data center boom appears to be an early-stage, brute-force response to the first wave of artificial intelligence demand. The market has encountered a rapid increase in demand for training, inference, and AI-enabled cloud services, and the immediate response has understandably been physical scale in the form of larger campuses, more megawatts, denser … Continue reading AI Data Centers and the Risk of Stranded Infrastructure
Every general-purpose technology reaches a point where it stops being the subject and becomes part of the foundation. The web passed through it, as did virtualization, the relational database, and cloud infrastructure. Few people now describe a product as running "in the cloud" as though that were the noteworthy fact about it. The capability has … Continue reading Life After AI
I recently finished implementing a network analysis through PostGIS and pgRouting, exposed through an MCP interface so it can be called by AI. I have done versions of this as a Lambda and as a Google Cloud Function. Before that, I did it in Node. Before that, in ASP.NET with a different routing library. Before … Continue reading Twenty Years, Part Three