iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

I was surprised that the data centres that power AI models are not simply in places near the traditional centres of 'tech' , but rather cluster around places where they have access to water and cheap(ish) energy. I explore this in my visual essay 'Who Powers AI?' motherduck.com/dive-gallery...

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

This is a bit of a new area for me to look at and I learned a lot - but don't pretend that I'm completely over every angle and am fully aware it's a developing area! Would be keen to hear thoughts though.

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

Key points are, we're seeing a bit of a bet playing out here - where you have AI labs who own basically everything in their supply chain, whereas frontier models rent compute and infrastructure from some big players.

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

You can also click the Sankey diagram to get a dynamic story behind each 'AI Lab'- the visuals and text will filter to show that story.

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

(Seems to work best on a proper computer and in Chrome - I've had a few issues with Safari)

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

WHO POWERS AI? My visual essay on the AI data infrastructure and how it supports the work of big AI players like #OpenAI and #Anthropic. Visual powered by @motherduck.com and Claude using the excellent data from @epochai.bsky.social #datafam #datasky @dataBS Link: motherduck.com/dive-gallery...

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

@motherduck.com is there anyone I can talk to regarding Dives. They don’t seem to work in safari

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Basically, you've described a David Lynch film :-D

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

🤣🤣🤣 you’re not wrong!

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

Stating the obvious is appreciated DLG! Snd I like that observation!

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

I think many of us know this intuitively (i.e what is an ‘insight’ and what is not) but curious to know how people define them. (Fair warning, this is some crowd-sourced research for an article I’m writing). #datasky #databs

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

Curious to know from people in my feed. How do you define an ‘insight’? Specifically, how do you define a ‘data-driven’ insight? #datasky #databs

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

Gràcies per llegir-ho i compartir-ho!

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

…though it does read this down the bottom. But I’ve literally not changed anything and can still auth into myGov

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

Yeah works fine - though I never deleted the app.

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

I like LLMs but sometimes they take you off on the deep end and you end up spending hours analysing something for very little outcome - and often with large opportunity cost. Sometimes just better to do the analysis yourself.

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

This seems like the best answer. There is now a much more powerful incentive to get it right.

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Reposted by Darragh Murray

Simon Kuestenmacher @simongerman600.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

This history map shows the US bombing in SE Asia during the Vietnam War from 1965 to 1975. Blue dots are 1000 lb bombs or larger. Source: buff.ly/1KXSRrd

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Reposted by Darragh Murray

News Eye @newseye.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

Someone has actually done this on Google 😂😂👏

The location of the Strait of Hormuz on google with the opening hours shown at Mon-Fri 9.30am - 4pm

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

Stuff like what's features on 16colo.rs/pack/corrupt...

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

I always grin when I use @anthropic.com Claude Code because it uses ANSI/ASCII art - something I myself used to make back in the early 90s as a kid when I ran a Bulletin Board System!! #dataSky, #dataBS #Claude en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_art

en.wikipedia.org

ANSI art - Wikipedia

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

Well....perhaps that ship has already sailed :-/ Maybe the best time was when ChatGPT hit the market, and the second best time is now?

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

Need to ruminate a LOT more on a lot of this. Is a new, or at least different, role being created here, advocating for responsible use of these types of tools? Tight visual guidelines? A strong return to fundamental visual analytics skills?

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

Still think it's somewhat inevitable we'll end up using tools like Claude Design+Code to prototype faster, but perhaps there's a way to not lose the other thing.

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

And I have to admit: I've already seen some pretty awful prototyping in other platforms doing this stuff (Figma Make, looking at you). It does make me inclined to credit that we're just increasing the potential size of a future Dashboard Graveyard.

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

I do agree that the process of sitting with a client, teasing out what they want to achieve through thoughtful iteration, *is* often quite valuable.

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

Getting past my initial excitement about speeding up a process (prototyping can be laborious, particularly if you happen to do it in the BI tool itself, which I've seen done), I do find myself nodding along with a lot of what you're saying.

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

Appreciate the sentiment @datarocksnz.bsky.social! and you're raising some pretty interesting points that are making me think a bit more critically about the place of such tools in the wider BI/analytics toolchain.

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

I should say, I'm enjoying the discussion and glad to be back and engaged on BlueSky!

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

Thats an interesting piece for sure (which I've saved for a deeper read). I will just say that my original article is just evaluating the practical uses of a tool - I'm not advocating for the mass firing of all analytics professionals and the scrapping of visual design fundamentals here...

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

I would say though, I've seem a huge amount of very bad dashboards in production pre-AI that obviously haven't been through the problem triage process. :/ It's not a new thing- but we may have to deal with this at scale.

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

I like this point and I agree with it - perhaps it will make the 'craft' of the dashboard more important or valuable? We may have to wade through a huge amount of slop to get there though :/

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

I thought this post by Ryan Dolley on the 'Four Big Bets Reshaping BI' is very well written and pretty much captures how AI is creating a decision point for all major business intelligence platforms. Very worth reading. #dataBS #DataSky #datafam superdatablog.substack.com/p/the-four-b...

superdatablog.substack.com

The Four Big Bets Reshaping BI

When data display commoditizes, things get weird.

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

I've been a bit lax on Bluesky recently, but it seems the data community is still here! That's good!

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

You'll note in my quick review, Claude didn't get it anywhere right the first time - despite a fairly 'good' prompt, and I had to basically go through a back and forth with it. Like I would with any junior visual analyst. That's how I think of it.

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

I sympathise with this view somewhat - there is a huge danger of a production line of terrible dashboards. But, to use a metaphor, one can use a paintbrush to paint an image that resembles something that a toddler might paint or I might paint the Mona Lisa. In the end, AI is simply a tool.

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

Hey guys, original author here - great conversation. I guess @insightsmachine.bsky.social what I meant by that is that it resembles the work of a competent developer - but I do acknowledge, this stuff does require peer review/quality control. My article was simply a quick 'hot-take' :)

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

Hey @motherduck.com - can you record and publish your excellent webinars! I can't find the latest one on Dives and I really want to watch it. Unfortunately, being in Australia, it's difficult to get up at 2AM to watch them live.

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

I asked a Claude-powered four AI agent team to debate the future of higher education using the Socratic method. Here's how it works and why it produces sharper strategic insight than a single prompt. thedatavist.substack.com/p/kill-the-l... cc: @anthropic.com #DataSky #DataBS #AI #AIAgents

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

Literally every text message my dad has sent me on a smart phone has been with the SLAM effect. That’s like a decade of SLAMz

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 17/11/2025

A few people are writing about semantic layers recently, and now I've joined the fray with a small piece on 'Onboarding AI: Why Semantic Layers Matter'. You can read here: thedatavist.substack.com/p/onboarding... #databs #datasky #ai #genai

thedatavist.substack.com

Onboarding AI: Why the Semantic Layer Matters

Giving AI the context it needs so it stops making up numbers at the worst possible time.

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Darragh Murray @darraghmurray.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

Quite an interesting take! Love to see you guys kicking goals and keeping the dub dub dream alive.

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