The Precarity of the Frothy AI Market
News broke over the weekend that a Chinese-developed, open-source large language model AI product is delivering comparable results to ChatGPT’s
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Tech
Nvidia: The Cards, The Hype, and the Cost-Effectiveness.
I spent part of the winter shopping around for a good computer setup that could handle the withering demands of
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Nuclear Power Is Actually Not Bad. Microsoft is Bad.
Constellation just announced a deal that the generation utility will restart the surviving Three Mile Island reactor, which was shut down in 2019. That’s good news. The more complicated news is that Microsoft is buying all of that power for its data centers and artificial intelligence, both of which continue to consume staggering amounts of electricity– which they buy for far cheaper than what we peasants must pay.
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Line Go Up: Book Review of “The Cold Start Problem,” by Andrew Chen
I was recently hanging out with a buddy who, responding to my standby joke about how we must all be
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How Modular Construction Can Help Fix The Housing Market
Industrialized and modular construction have a lot of potential to help fix the housing market. The value proposition is pretty simple. Realizing it, however, is a much heavier lift.
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Matterport: Should I Use iPhone Instead of iPad?
You can use the iPhone instead of the iPad Pro to scan using a Matterport camera. It works great– with a few caveats.
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Better Living With Robots: Scanning Buildings For Energy Efficiency
Fraunhofer, Signetron, RMI, and ADL Ventures talked about energy efficiency in building retrofits at a recent webinar.
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Musings from Up North: Are Planners Pragmatic Dreamers? Or Just Jaded Bureaucrats?
Michigan has a ton of professional talent. It’s also got a lot of planners who are stuck in the passenger seat in a vehicle driving 85mph in the left lane, headed toward Sprawl City. Can we fix the worst politics of the profession and still keep our jobs? Or, is it simply incumbent upon us to figure out better, more sustainable solutions wherever we can?
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Midjourney Parameters: Style & Chaos In Speculative Urbanism
Imagining cities and their infrastructure using artificial intelligence, and playing around with some of the weirder parameters in Midjourney to see what we can squeeze out of the generative AI platform.
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MDOT’s Michigan Avenue Plan Is A Game-Changer. Will It Happen?
For one of the first times ever, the state’s road agency is proposing narrowing a major arterial street and producing a dedicated bus lane. Sort of.
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