Tobler’s Law in Latent Space There’s an idea in geography called Tobler’s First Law of Geography: “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.” It sounds almost obvious when you first hear it. Of course nearby things are similar. But recently I’ve been wondering whether AI is quietly breaking this intuition, or revealing that “near” was always more complicated than we thought. Deeper into Tobler Tobler was not the first to notice this...
19 days ago • 3 min read
Thoughts on meeting fatigue, because I have thoughts again I was staring at the wall. My mind was blankish. I say blankish because there was still this nagging feeling that I had forgotten something. That there was something left to do. This was not simply resting, it was more light disassociation. If disassociation could ever be light. My brain had quietly opted out. I was anxious about all the things I should be doing, aware of time passing, but unable to pick anything up. No book. No...
21 days ago • 4 min read
ChatGPT and Claude are typing...to each other Back in the heyday of AOL I made AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) chatbots. I was part of an entire community that did this. These bots were not intelligent at all, but they had all sorts of themes and we had fun. Creating different types of chatbots has always been an interest of mine, especially having them interact with each other. This is what led me to think about how to get LLMs to talk to each other while retaining their memory about the human...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Why Are You Making the Thing You’re Making? When I first started mapping in OpenStreetMap, I walked every trail in my neighborhood. I’d walk trails that were already perfectly visible from satellite imagery. I didn’t need to do it, I could hand digitize if I wanted. But I was mapping those trails as a one person protest. You see the neighborhood next door had all the same resources but big “no trespassing” signs for non-residents. I coined the act “spite mapping” and the act of trespassing to...
2 months ago • 6 min read
A Tangled Cetacean and AI Safety Theater Note: This is a heavy topic involving the death of stranded whales. Over the weekend a young humpback whale was stranded on a beach in Oregon. They were tangled in rope from crabbing equipment. People came from all over the area to help, posting that they had extra wet suits, lights, and other tools, as well as volunteering to be in the cold ocean overnight. A dangerous situation, and yet they were all coming together for this creature. I was riveted...
3 months ago • 3 min read
Using Models Together ChatGPT Atlas and Earth Index A lot of my experimentation lately is using common AI tools in different ways. I decided to see what would happen if I tried using ChatGPT with geospatial models. And I just did a simple experiment where I was working to create labels in Earth Index and using ChatGPT's browser Atlas as my partner in that. I'm sharing with you part one, which is not the more successful part of doing this. ChatGPT has difficulty using the map and it would have...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Introducing the Promptatorium I’ve been following the work of some folks who are using LLMs more efficiently than I am. One of the key skills seems to be orchestrating a series of agents working together. I've had a little success with doing this in while coding, but not to the extent that I have observed others. I was looking for another way to explore more deeply. I’ve always been interested in simulating biological systems, so instead of trying to figure out how to orchestrate a bunch of...
3 months ago • 4 min read
You'll Always Remember Your First System Early in my career I always panicked a little when beginning a new role. This time, I was really panicking. I'd just joined a Ruby on Rails shop after spending years in the .NET world. The organization I was coming from ran an entire Microsoft stack down to the version control. My new role? A different programming language, a different database, different source control, it was all different!I shared an office with the most senior developer there and...
3 months ago • 4 min read
Quick Fixes Can Poison the System: Your Inventions in a Complex System are Crucial I could solve my rat problem in a weekend. Box of rat poison, hungry rats and by Monday most of the rats would be gone. Except poison doesn’t stay where you put it in the system. The rats eat the poison. The cats eat the poisoned rats. My dogs eat the poisoned rats. The hawks and owls eat the poisoned rats. I’d be trading “rats are eating my feed” for “dead cats, poisoned dogs, and worse rodent problems.” How...
3 months ago • 4 min read