California Department of Transportation is seeking a Chief Data and AI Officer Not GIS specific, but lots of data management and policy, and they have a huge GIS program (with great people running it), so there'd be a GIS component […]

I usually avoid politics here, mostly because I don't think it helps. I'm going to share something #uspol now. This is a very good episode of the Law and Chaos podcast - I see it's paid subscribers only though - the intro monologue is what I wanted to link and the summary covers it […]

I'm also writing it to just share thoughts publicly about what I see as the real uses of generative AI. I don't think it has the ability to do the work of most human workers, no matter what the people who want your money say. But I hear a lot of people saying they have to hop on because it's the […]

I realize that's just super-search, where the search is likely still coming from an index and the LLM is just interpreting my language to perform the search on my behalf, and that makes me skeptical of the overall technology at the same time as I think I finally have a use for it that I […]

Similarly, I'm finding some uses asking LLMs not for answers, but for where to find the answers on particularly thorny questions. The generated answers may still be wrong or lack nuance, but if I ask it where to find the answers, it can often process my language and intent to connect me to the […]

I'm getting increasingly tired of suggestions that LLM-based AI can generate content from prompts or that it can truly answer questions when it just can't do it reliably. In a world where we expect computers to provide deterministic outputs, it's so far from crossing the reliability threshold […]

For something a little sillier and fully in the GIS realm - thought of this at work the other day.

The unit I'm in is hiring again - this time for a Web Domain Specialist - see the job description at https://calcareers.ca.gov/CalHrPublic/Jobs/JobPosting.aspx?JobControlId=490145 We've hired a few cool positions recently. I don't work on the specific team in this link, but I know the managers […]

Are there any options for running a serverless patterned STAC endpoint? Or even better, a fully static STAC-metadata store that requires the client to do the filtering? I see that https://github.com/stac-utils/stac-fastapi can use a parquet storage as its backend, which seems like it could get […]

Three job openings across three different State of California departments - in thread: 1. GIS Enterprise Architect with the State Water Resources Control Board - closes May 1: https://calcareers.ca.gov/CalHrPublic/Jobs/JobPosting.aspx?JobControlId=474362

Today I got a vendor to reproduce a bug in a clean environment that causes the browser tab to fully lock up in a loop repeating the same request to their servers over and over again because the user is signed in, but is in a specific unauthorized state. They replicated it, then told me it was […]

The most iconic figure in the environmental sciences is the Keeling Curve, the CO₂ record from Mauna Loa, Hawaii. NOAA had a wonderful site where you could visualize and download these data, and now it's just gone. These data belong to us and we should not let this happen!

Don't believe him: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-trump-column-read.html

I set up a quick uptime tracker for websites that Trump & Musk are most likely to screw with. (It's only tracking whether the home page loads, not whether data sets disappear or whatever.) https://updown.io/p/ldv2p

Incredibly mad that many people I know, who have devoted their lives to helping others, are out of a job right now because Elon Musk has some kind of grudge against USAID. Far worse things will happen around the world - thousands of people will die, millions will be harmed. Musk isn't elected […]

The State of California is hiring a senior leader in web strategy - officially the Web Services Manager - this person leads web development and strategy for the state, building the design systems and platforms that other departments use to run their websites, including the main ca.gov portal […]

If restaurants priced like cloud computing providers: Guest: "Hi, I'd like you to deploy one plate of pasta to my table please. How much would that cost"? Server: "Hard to say. You'll need to subscribe to the ingredients service, which has a spot pricing option. You'll need to add on the […]

The California Department of Technology is hiring a senior web developer. This is a great team full of forward looking people and building websites and services that support many, many agencies. Hiring details at https://calcareers.ca.gov/CalHrPublic/Jobs/JobPosting.aspx?JobControlId=458256 […]