Sunday, 28th July 2024
The key to understanding the pace of today’s infrastructure buildout is to recognize that while AI optimism is certainly a driver of AI CapEx, it is not the only one. The cloud players exist in a ruthless oligopoly with intense competition. [...]
Every time Microsoft escalates, Amazon is motivated to escalate to keep up. And vice versa. We are now in a cycle of competitive escalation between three of the biggest companies in the history of the world, collectively worth more than $7T. At each cycle of the escalation, there is an easy justification—we have plenty of money to afford this. With more commitment comes more confidence, and this loop becomes self-reinforcing. Supply constraints turbocharge this dynamic: If you don’t acquire land, power and labor now, someone else will.
CalcGPT (via) Fun satirical GPT-powered calculator demo by Calvin Liang, originally built in July 2023. From the ChatGPT-generated artist statement:
The piece invites us to reflect on the necessity and relevance of AI in every aspect of our lives as opposed to its prevailing use as a mere marketing gimmick. With its delightful slowness and propensity for computational errors, CalcGPT elicits mirth while urging us to question our zealous indulgence in all things AI.
The source code shows that it's using babbage-002 (a GPT3-era OpenAI model which I hadn't realized was still available through their API) that takes a completion-style prompt, which Calvin primes with some examples before including the user's entered expression from the calculator:
1+1=2
5-2=3
2*4=8
9/3=3
10/3=3.33333333333
${math}=
It sets \n as the stop sequence.
The many lives of Null Island (via) Stamen's custom basemaps have long harbored an Easter egg: zoom all the way in on 0, 0 to see the outline of the mystical "null island", the place where GIS glitches and data bugs accumulate, in the Gulf of Guinea south of Ghana.
Stamen's Alan McConchie provides a detailed history of the Easter egg - first introduced by Mike Migurski in 2010 - along with a definitive guide to the GIS jokes and traditions that surround it.
Here's Null Island on Stamen's Toner map. The shape (also available as GeoJSON) is an homage to the island from 1993's Myst, hence the outline of a large docked ship at the bottom.
Alan recently gave a talk about Stamen's updated custom maps at State of the Map US 2024 (video, slides) - their Toner and Terrain maps are now available as vector tiles served by Stadia Maps (here's the announcement), but their iconic watercolor style is yet to be updated to vectors, due to the weird array of raster tricks it used to achieve the effect.
In researching this post I searched for null island on Google Maps and was delighted to learn that a bunch of entrepreneurs in Western Africa have tapped into the meme for their own businesses:
The rich history of ham radio culture (via) This long excerpt from Kristen Haring's 2008 book Ham Radio's Technical Culture filled in so many gaps for me. I'm ham licensed in the USA (see my recent notes on passing the general exam) but prior to reading this I hadn't appreciated quite how much the 100+ year history of the hobby explains the way it works today. Some ham abbreviations derive from the Phillips Code created in 1879!
The Hacker News thread attracted some delightful personal stories from older ham operators: "my exposure to ham radio really started in the 1970s...". I also liked this description of the core of the hobby:
A ham radio license is permission from your country's government to get on the air for the sake of playing with radio waves and communicating with other hams locally or around the globe without any further agenda.
I'm increasingly using the Listen to Page feature in my iPhone's Mobile Safari to read long-form articles like this one, which means I can do household chores at the same time.