If you visit the Clairvoyint website, it says that we turn expert analytical methodology into reusable agents that can perform analysis and produce reports, briefs, and assessments while preserving…

On August 10, 1846, Congress established the Smithsonian Institution with a simple mission: “the increase and diffusion of knowledge,” and gave it “perpetual succession.” One hundred eighty years l…

independent, nonprofit, and immune to politics

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 know…

My recent essay on the SaaS market argued that AI pressure is unlikely to apply evenly. The exposed segment was products in the middle of the market that are expensive enough to prompt examination,…

In early February 2026, a sharp software-sector selloff, widely described in market commentary as the “SaaSpocalypse,” erased hundreds of billions of dollars in SaaS and software-servic…

boygenius, Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus · boygenius · Song · 2018

A few weeks ago, I was on a catch-up Zoom call with a friend I hadn’t chatted with in a while. He made mention of the recent uptick in my blogging activity and then, very good-naturedly, took…

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 i…

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 …

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 Goog…

This post summarizes themes that emerged across multiple sources curated by GeoFeeds during April and May 2026. Taken together, these themes suggest that geospatial AI (GeoAI) is moving through a f…

In a post last week, Open Data and AI, I discussed how open data projects are facing a new kind of consumer: AI-automated systems that can pull public data continuously, at scale, and in patterns t…

Open data projects are seeing a new kind of consumer in the form of automated systems that can consume public data continuously, at scale, and through access patterns that were not designed with th…

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, …

Summaries of selected talks from FedGeoDay 2026, Day 1, April 2026, US Census Bureau, Suitland, MD Once again, I served on the FedGeoDay organizing committee this year. FedGeoDay continues to be on…

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I first saw the typewriter when I rolled up the door of the shed. That small shed with the gabled roof and T-111 exterior had been there since the mid-1990s. My father built it with two sections. O…

Note: This post is the second in a four-part series leading to the 20th anniversary of this blog. I was recently at a conference that was primarily focused on climate risk. One particular panelist caught my attention when talking about analyzing vulnerabilities by first creating a digital twin and then using an AI model to analyze vulnerabilities to a structure and assess their impact.

Following up on my previous post, I built a new Claude skill to take advantage of the increasing wealth of data online in cloud-native formats like GeoParquet. Given that DuckDB can read from such sources in place, I built the skill to use it to perform spatial analysis tasks on specified data sets. Here is an example using data in the…

When Steve Crocker published RFC 1 on April 7, 1969, he did not present it as doctrine. He described tentative agreements, open questions, and a document offered in expectation of reaction (Crocker, 1969). That posture matters. It is a reminder that stewardship and governance were not late additions to shared technical infrastructure. They were part of its identity near the beginning.