A VerySpatial Podcast - Episode 781

0:00You're listening to a very spatial podcast episode 781, March 15th, 2026. Hello and welcome to a very spatial podcast. I am Chessie. I'm Sue. I'm Barb. And this is Frank. And this week we're going to be talking about our reflections on some of the things that Bill Dawlands has been posting on recently. Just because they're their topics that we probably, you know, should come in on. But first, of course, we have some news. QGIS 4.0. As we spoke of last week, we weren't sure when QGIS 4.0 was coming out or if it was already out. The answer now is it is out. So Northcloping, which is the 4.0 release, is available. It is a little snappier, I would say, with the shift to QT6. They touted some things about LiDAR and stuff that in my literally four

1:04minutes that I played around with it and added a LiDAR data set. I didn't, I had issues, but that might have been my data or just the time I didn't have to spend with it. So it is out there. There are new things going on with it. A lot of focus on bringing it up again to that QT6. I didn't check any of my extensions either that I have in older versions to see, you know, which ones may have been rewritten already, which ones aren't rewritten to take advantage of the new interface capabilities. So yeah, it's why it's not the long-term release. It's the 4.0. 4.2 will be when it's going to be the long-term later of the year. But check it out. Yeah, along with the new release, they've revamped the QGIS hub in the community sites because, you know, it's a community effort and they also added more security, which is always a question that you hear about anything that's been updated. Google has continued to Google. So one, they have the new immersive navigation visualization, which gives you a 3D view compared to the more

2:11traditional view that we've gotten used to over the last, I don't know, decade or so. And then, of course, more integration with Gemini in Google Maps so that you can, you know, just ask about things that are around you or what's going on or about locations or whatever you want to ask your mapping app. Which is called Ask Maps. Yeah. I wanted to say because I had two articles I found, but I didn't put them up related to this because there's a lot of discussion and advertising and marketing about the new Ask Maps. And one is graphic designers are tearing apart the new logo. They don't like it. From the original, basically, the big circle or gap in the middle is what they're commenting on. But the second thing is in marketing is how fast, I guess there's a mascot associated with Asmaps now that's just gone viral. So it's just really interesting to me that Google can continue to just, you know, capture the imagination like that from the very first

3:17time they unveiled, you know, the maps to the public to now. They do things that just speak to the public more than just the geospatial community. So the interesting thing here is in the link of the show, it says, but this is more than a visual update. This is a, we're also adding new functionality to make your drive as stress free as possible. And I'm looking at the video. And I'm starting to ask the question of when does various military make problems, right? I mean, somewhat the reductionist nature of maps kind of gives me a general idea what I need to be doing when I'm driving. And more information is just more crap for me to process while I'm driving by looking at the map. So I'm I'm curious to experience this in a real world situation, particularly in like an urban setting, if I'm driving the little Pittsburgh where like I basically

4:19have to pay attention to traffic constantly. And I just need to glance at the map to figure out, am I going left here? Am I going right here? What's going on? If this is going to make it better or worse? I think if anybody has ever driven from the airport or I 79 in two Pittsburgh downtown, whenever you come out of the tunnel or even just as you're going into the tunnel, either side, this yeah, I think that is the defining statement of whether or not this works if you're trying to go to the strip and it takes you, you know, the weird and if you're trying to go out to the university and stuff over to the right. Yeah, just that intersection anytime I think of any interface and wonder whether or not it'll be any good. I think of literally that place. Because you've got like two or three stories of different roadways and different directions. And on top of that, so essentially coming to the tunnel, you go across a bridge and then of the bridge, you've got literally, I think it's one, two, three, four, five, six lanes. And they all take you different places. And so I think it's six, let me be five, but they all

5:24take you different places. And if you're on the wrong lane, you can recover, but you have a very short period of time to recover within. If you're on the far right hand lane, you need the far left hand lane, you're just screwed. There's just you're driving into downtown and then fix again. Yeah, you're going to have to have a rebound and figure something else out. And on top of that, that's the worst case scenario, really. But most of Pittsburgh is like that where you'll have a very quick left and then immediately within three card links, a right that you have to follow to get yourself in the right direction. If you don't, it can be miles before you can get yourself back there in a reasonable way, particularly with Google, which has an annoying propensity to, I don't know if they're using time or if they're using distances, the most important metric, but it has an annoying propensity to go, okay, take a left and take a right and take a left and take another right and take a right. And you're like, can I have just gone straight to the end there and hang out right at the end and gotten why I was trying to go? You know, there's all these weird sort of back roads that it makes you take. The point is that this makes me nervous and I want to

6:28experience it. And I also really want the ability to go, nope, nope, this doesn't work. Go back, back to the old version. One of the questions I have is again, it's talking about you can ask the map and it'll give you personalized recommendations. But the example that it uses is about, you know, you're coming into Midtown with friends, any spots with a cozy aesthetic. And it gets into that question of, you know, do you want them to find what a cozy aesthetic is? How much more work are places that want to show up and appear in that search going to have to do beyond just saying, hey, we're here in here are hours, you know, because that's a pretty fuzzy feeling of, you know, a cozy aesthetic for a table for four at seven. Businesses aren't already paying for SEO than they're not being found. So yeah, hopefully people would want to buy them and see them. We get them to turn this into a topic, but I was just point out the Gemini is not perfect.

7:30So none of them. No, it's, it does a good job. And the number of times that I've searched for something and go, did you actually mean to search for that and go, no, I actually meant to search for the things that I actually typed in to the search bar. Do that, you know, that's my concern. I don't want to get an argument with my mapping app when I'm in traffic. Anyway, next news. The 2024 rolling on ADA, which has led to the need to make sure that everything is ADA compliant on your digital spaces, your web pages, your mobile apps, if you are a state or local government and of course, as well, is counting down. So the decision back in 2024 said that if you're a municipality or entity that has 50,000 people or more in your jurisdiction, then you have to have all of your resources up to date and ADA compliant by April 24th, 2026. Now if you're 49,

8:33999 or less, you have an extra year. I assume for various economic reasons. But yeah, since most of the places that have distinct websites and mobile apps are in that larger category, we got about a month to do that. And of course, this includes higher education and it includes, you know, your local city council and their website and anything that is placed online as of 2024, 2026 moving forward has to. And we have a link to the show notes to what you need to know from the state and local government's perspective. But that's applies to, you know, more or less, everybody who falls under these rulings. Yeah. And so, I mean, just he said it, but just to make it very explicit, everybody has to do this, even if you have two people in your municipality. It's just the deadline is different. That's, see, everyone's got to follow this. So you should be working on it if you're not already.

9:37But the flip side of this from a mapping standpoint in the United States, of course, elsewhere in the world, they have different rules. But in the United States, mapping is always a nightmare, how to make it ADA compliant. And oftentimes we've defaulted to just some sort of tag. This is, it's a map and then move on with life. I'm kind of curious if this is going to end up being the de facto moving forward or they're going to be more forceful and compliance, even for those things. You can go to Ezri's long running now blog post series on how you should handle their technologies. And some of those, of course, apply to, to geospatial, geospatial web in general. So something you might want to take a look at and ensure there's others out there who have been focusing on it from the accessibility side. Yeah, I also think that the overlap between ADA compliance and just good practice. There's an overlap there. Huge. So Cardin Gamelin is working with Sleepcycle, AI company that

10:41does sleep technology and they are exploring ways to use sleep data to do epidemiology and modeling for things like outbreaks. So they're thinking that they can use this data in order to look for these spatial patterns and they'll be able to look at both seasonal and emerging disease outbreaks. It's a really interesting use of spatial data that we don't often think about that were, but generating a lot, especially with, you know, any devices that are part of the, the internet of things. The interesting thing here is they're looking at, not just sleep, but also looking at stuff like coughing patterns, which is, you know, kind of interesting to think about. And obviously very relevant if you're talking about influenza and these sorts of outbreaks that, that, you know, commonly happen. What made me kind of laugh about this is I'm having a perennial problem with, we have two cats in our household and one of them occasionally likes to sleep more or less on my

11:42face. And I'm kind of curious how much to what degree you at false negatives, because I know part of my coughing is just because I've got fur in my face that, you know, causes me to cough. But it's going to be interesting to see if in what this allows them to do, particularly, it was kind of neat. And especially since the database is so large, they have three billion nights across 180 countries. Also a little creepy as all technology like this is sometimes. Yes, this one. You're just like, okay, do I just want to get rid of all the microphones, which would include phones and echo devices and off the grid, man, off the grid. Well, I mean, in a strange way, it reminded me of years ago, this was before COVID where, you know, when people first started wearing the smart watches, the fitness watches. And there was that earthquake out in California. And then job on, I think, was the company, you know, essentially put out some press that they were able to tell

12:46when the earthquake occurred because all of a sudden, all these people woke up at like three in the morning or whatever time it happened. And that was kind of, you know, one of those early reminders that, hey, this stuff that's collecting data on you becomes that data becomes, potentially, proxy for being able to tell other things, but also they have this data. In today's web corner, ESRI has created what they're calling the dance of the continents. It's an interactive map that starts from today back to 600 million years ago to basically show the the changing earth. It's pretty cool as a tool. They're using all of the data they could find everywhere as a resource from what I can tell. And it's just, it's beautiful, you know, if you're using anything like this for education or for your own use because you're interested and you're going back to physical geography and geology from grade school, this is just a really

13:51nice interactive map and tool. Okay. So as we said at the beginning, we're taking a look at some of the articles recently at giumusingens.com, Bill Dallan's blog where someone does still blog. He's not the only one. There are other people who still blog is just, you know, still surprising because we gave up a long time ago as the upshot. And so, yeah, always nice to just read something. So both of them are pretty much AI-related. One is basically looking at the postGIS revisited. So, you know, about a decade ago, you wrote an article about postGIS and how we were moving at that time away from GIS into just being part of larger systems. So you didn't have to

14:51have a GIS specifically. A lot more of the code was being tied into online systems and, you know, we were seeing more interoperability between data sets and all those type of things. And so that was a decade ago. This article, he talks more about, you know, where we are in the last couple of years with the shift from, you know, where we were in the GIS spatial web. And, you know, a lot of the ability of GIS spatial technologies to be just embedded in any app that's out there, mobile desktop web, whatever. To now, it's not even really thinking about that aspect. It's more about how through vibe coding and those type of things, you can just, without even really knowing GIS spatial as a thing at all, begin to incorporate these things because you're just telling it what you want the app to do. And it's giving you the pieces for you to put together.

15:55And so that's kind of what he's talking about in that article. So what are your thoughts on where we are heading currently? Because I mean, to be fair, while we do have some apps out there that are more of this, we're going to see a lot more of this in the near future. So I just want to make a note, even though it should have been explicit from Jesse's sort of introduction there, when we talk about post GIS in this context, we're not talking about post GIS. Not post-gress with post GIS, but yeah, they're not related. They have the same name, but you could do a post GIS as we're talking about it on post GIS, but that's more the technological infrastructure nerd stuff back in. It's not related. Which is actually related because he talks about post GIS and one of these two, I can't remember which one it is. So yeah, fair. So the thing that's interesting to me here is somebody who is, again, a computer scientist and

16:57sort of familiar with the underlying technologies that drive a lot of this stuff. I see where this idea post GIS is coming from to start thinking about GIS or geospatial related stuff, not as explicit infrastructure you utilize, but as an implicit infrastructure that gets utilized. So my interface with the system, whatever it may be, whether I'm just an end user or using an app on a phone or whether I'm somebody who's asking questions of a data set or something like that using, but I'm looking at my browser right now and it's got Ask Gem and I in the upper right hand corner, whether I'm using something like that, it's going to use GIS approaches to analyzing data, storing data, retrieving data and all that sort of stuff, but I don't know that necessarily. I'm just asking a question that can be answered with GIS and the thing in the background is going to make it happen and give me the answer.

18:00But we know why it's going to do it. We know how it's going to do it, right? Because it was trained on substack and tons of people have asked GIS programming related questions for decade plus. And so yeah, we know that it's going to be pulling from GIS because it's out there heavily in the online space that the things are being trained on. I think this is not dissimilar to cloud computing or cloud services or something like that. It's an implicit infrastructure that does necessary to do a lot of things we do. But most of the time, most people doing what they're doing aren't thinking about the fact that this is a cloud-based infrastructure, not just GIS, almost anything, you know, looking at a YouTube video, whatever it may be. It's a cloud-based infrastructure, yes, but it's kind of implicit to the process, not something you engage in overtly intentionally. So what I liked about what he wrote was when he broke it down into three waves and he talked

19:03about the walled garden was starting to open. And I really like that as a way of describing that moment from the GIS as, you know, system and infrastructure to what Frank's saying into just, you know, not explicit, but implicit. And I think, you know, it is that recognition that and it's one of the things that we've said the entire time we've been doing the podcast, we don't want geographers to be the only people who are focusing on GIS. And you know, that's coming from, you know, two people in the podcast who were using it as part of archaeology before we started using it as a broader geography tool anyway. But just we wanted to see it become ubiquitous. We wanted it to be out there. And it was amusing. Dr. Bergeron this week was a little annoyed because there was a little example of where someone at the university was pushing hard on geography and GIS kind of ideas, but in a way that wasn't touching on geography or GIS. And she was a little bit

20:08annoyed by that. I was like, but isn't this what we've wanted the whole time was for people to adopt these spatial ideas in the broader context? I can sort of see what we're, we're shoes coming from only because when I was reading through what Bill was saying and he started to talk about metadata and some of the issues going on with, you know, being beyond those walls and the importance of metadata and how critical it is because without it, we're not able to bring in the geography and geospatial, you know, when AI is basically the agents are basically looking at things. They don't understand, you know, some of the terms we understand it has to be more explicit. And the way you make it explicit for it to find is with detailed metadata. And in some ways I felt like, well, isn't that our chickens coming home to roost because we all know metadata is so critical, but it takes a time to do. But now it's very critical for bringing the geography and geospatial to other people that might not even realize what a data is. So,

21:08well, yeah, I think actually there's many debates, right, that we revisit with disruptive technology or, well, or ideas. And, you know, this, I'm reminded a little bit to go back to one of our early conversations, right, where we had the whole conversation over the internet and access to information. And, you know, the sort of Peter Mooreville ambient, you know, ambient findability kind of thing in that sense, right? If anybody can find anything, how will they evaluate it? And now you have agents that are potentially doing that and that, you know, the discussion over, well, domain knowledge, that is where, where we can draw the line. But the AI can potentially read the same books that we read, right? Do those kinds of things and develop their own potential ways to sort of have domain knowledge. So then, you know, where do we go from there? Kind of thing. And all these debates are not necessarily unfamiliar. But I think maybe we're confronting them in a different way. Well, I think they are unfamiliar because you're using the word

22:13knowledge. And I think that's, of course, very key in the conversation with anything for AI. Is that yes, we can see that it is building on knowledge, but it is not knowledgeable. It is putting together tokens. And so it's putting together words in a way that is probabilistic as it's going through. And it's just, it doesn't have the knowledge that that we have. And, and, you know, that's one of the big things whenever that part of the article that Barbs talking about when metadata, we can make sense of weird names that we've all kind of put together as we've been creating data. But it doesn't have that context. And so that knowledge isn't there. And it may get to the point where it does have the ability to, you know, decipher those things as we start building out more text for it to be trained on. So it understands. But, oh, I totally agree. But in pointing it out, I wasn't, you know, no, no, downplay it. But I think I totally agree that this is a huge. Well, let's take a step back. Challenge. And not talk about it. Let's talk about

23:17they. So I'm going, let's, we need to take a step back in this development and start asking questions about, you know, exactly what happened at Keyhole, right? Keyhole, add a bunch of geographers and a bunch of computer scientists. And it was bought out by Google and they fired all the geographers because that's not really relevant. That's their thinking. And then they've slowly realized, oh, we actually do need to in fact have geographers engaged in this because they've gotten knowledge. I was thinking back to, as we were talking about the stuff, I was thinking back to a conversation I have with a faculty member at WVU who expressed the opinion that why aren't these companies and these groups doing these things, particularly this case was 3D coming to geographers and asking them how to do it. And I had to tell them, well, it's because that's not what they're trying to do. They're trying to just make money. Usually gaming. They're just trying to make something fun and make money. They don't really care if they're doing it right. So one of the things that I think is the risk of post GIS situation is,

24:19are they doing it right? Are they picking the right algorithms? Are they accounting for the, the issues with doing a creaking as opposed to doing, you know, another type of analysis? Are they, doing those things? And to go back to something that Sue often talks about is the black box question of if this stuff is implicit, it's in a black box. I don't know how it's doing it. And if I don't know how it's doing it, how do I know that its answers are, quote unquote, right or sufficient or some of everything I need to know? And if you've got people who aren't experts in geography programming these things, then it makes sense that the they will go to it and it won't necessarily program these things. And that's assuming that we're just doing all this on a, I don't want to use word ignorance, but maybe that's the right word of geographic principles as opposed to less ethical approaches. Like we talked about earlier with, you know, going on a Google, do we know that

25:22what they're giving us is, you know, information that we need or are they just giving us that that which company has, has this SEO properly tuned to maximize ad revenue for this company. That, that's the type of problem we run into with this. And I think that to your, I get a long way to get there, but the sort of answer to your kind of question, Jesse, is I think that the tension is happening. We want our children to grow, but not do that. So one of the articles we wrote to gives an example and it touched my heart just because before I was a geographer, I worked at places that worked with early web crawlers and things like that. And I could see my own on questioning not bad practices, but bad etiquette, you know, for being part of the geospatial community, I didn't know I was a part of in it. And he talks about how there was a volunteer maintain map project called vaguely rude places, which is a really cute idea. And they found, you know, had done the work of finding all these vaguely rude places, agents went out and they just got,

26:28you know, so much traffic that it used up all their monthly tile allocation and then they weren't able to serve that map for the rest of the month because of the billing period. So essentially, the map that people would find because they loved it, it was fun was gone. And also you can, you can think about the fact that, you know, a lot of people put in a lot of time to create this fun little place. And as he said, it wasn't a critical infrastructure fail, but think about the, you know, just the general part being part of the geospatial community, we would consider and think about the fact, you know, you don't just don't do that to someone, especially someone smaller. But in this case, you know, the people doing it, they might not be aware of it or just, you know, not even questioning it or like Frank said, they don't care, they're making their money off of it, but it's off the work of a small group of volunteers, which is always my big thing. A lot of this is off the work of volunteers without any consideration for them and their contributions. And so this is on the second article if you're you're looking through our two links that we have

27:28there. And it is not just individual size. And again, that's not the only one by the means as he points out. And even larger projects like open street map, you know, instead of doing regular pulls, some people are doing scraping and you're just like, well, that's actually more effort for their servers to deal with. Yeah. And it just comes back around to how this impacts the organizations. And we haven't been impacted as a small podcast, you know, we have a few hundred episodes out there. But because of the way our hosting structure is set up, we host through, we, well, Libson, and they charge us for the amount that we upload each month, as opposed to how much is being downloaded. Web service, our website and everything like that is based on how much is downloaded. So if we had continued as we were at the very, very beginning to host on our website, you know, we would have been taken down every time we uploaded a podcast in the early days. And so I just am terrified to think about how much and it doesn't impact us because again,

28:31somebody else is dealing with that part of the hosting. But how much has been impacted? Because we're creative comments like, like, license. So I am sure that our data has been downloaded to be transcribed and used by LLMs at some point in time. And just the number of downloads that would have been in that month would have just been, you know, it's gigs. And that would have taken our our site down if we had been hosting that way. So yeah, it's just, it's weird to think about, but it's a very impactful thing on the smaller producers. And on top of that, let's think of another impactful here that certainly in the United States, I think this is probably true in most countries. The government is usually the biggest producer of geospatial data in terms of volume. What happens sometimes? Well, one, that's not free, you know, not just generating the data, but hosting that data and making it available. That's not free. That costs taxpayer dollars. So there's a cost there. But on top of that, generating that data costs significant amount

29:33of money. In the United States, we've made the decision, I think, incredibly wisely to not charge the public paid for it. So public gets it. I love that. And there's nothing, I would nothing, I want to see change there. However, particularly at state and local levels, decision makers who control budgets, politicians sometimes look at the existence of these things and say, well, this is here. Why do I have to pay for this over here? And they don't understand the connectivity of that implicit infrastructure that in fact, it exists within the implicit infrastructure because you paid for it. And it continues to be useful for so many people because you continue to pay for it. And that being hidden in that black box makes it really hard to make that argument for resources, particularly, you know, as state government and local government resources become more and more scarce in places like West Virginia and other places. And that almost makes a call back to, you know, Google maps and their ass maps that, you know, this started then. And it

30:36continues to be a problem. It's one that we haven't really found a good way to address as a community or to get people to understand. And it's just become more accelerated and critical now. I really have no idea what direction I wanted this to go at the end. Your wrap up thoughts or current thoughts if we haven't finished? I have a thought, Jesse. And it might be different from what everyone was getting out of the articles. But if you enjoy any of these, you know, community sites, volunteer sites that are built, just send an email to let them know, you know, because I think sometimes they're, their stuff's getting used. We know it's being used to build. It's like that, that cartoon of everything being held up by one little block. But also to, to really, I was thinking about this, I go, well, when people are scraping that and things like that, are they able to value the work that went into building what they're scraping? So I thought, well, something that we could do is, you know, let people know we do value all the work you've been doing, you know, just a small note to say, hey, you know, like open street map and some other sites,

31:39we really like, you know, and see all the work that you've put into this. Yeah, qualitative data is data, by the way. So never forget that. So having that in your back pocket can help a lot of times to make an argument. So I'll go, my takeaway from this is is basically, we have to find a way to balance the experts and their expertise with the growing utility of this stuff. The number of groups and people I see reinventing wheels, because they have a bother to engage in an expert body of some sort, makes me want to throw things out of window and flip desks. The one I see it a lot right now give in the United States, because it's not exclusively, but it's very dominant in the United States politics, and obviously politics is very heated in the United States right now, is things about gerrymandering. And I see a lot of people that this is a very specific example, but I think it can be more broadly applicable, or it is more broadly applicable,

32:39is people who are looking trying to solve gerrymandering, which I maintain is unsolvable, but that's a whole different argument. And they're doing it in such a ways that yeah, we already tried that, or geographers are familiar with what you're trying to do, and we already know how to do this more efficiently, then you're trying to backward work your way into. I think that one of the challenges I'm so pitfalls, I'll call it pitfalls, of AI is that it has the potential because it can do all this at such a rapid speed, I'm trying to reinvent as many wheels as it can and ending up with wheels that are flat on one part. There's a good way to do this, and we've already worked this out. I see things in like regionalism, which is a viable, you know, domain, but I see things that they're trying to recreate regionalism of the 19th century in some cases, and I go, well, we've already worked through some of this stuff already. Why aren't you engaging with the entirety of the body and knowledge, just the piece that seems to be, you know, probabilistically

33:44connected here, especially when some of the probabilistic is based upon people expousing opinion, which is fine. There's something wrong with that. You can even have informed opinion. It can be incredibly powerful, but in the day, we've got an evolution that needs to be tapped into. How do we get that to work yet at the same time retain things like copyrights and retain things going back and giving proper credit and proper citations? That's a tricky thing, and I think the speed of AI is making that get kind of, just like metadata, kind of lost in the mix a little bit, and that's going to make it a less useful implicit infrastructure than we're used to with an explicit infrastructure. I think for me, my thoughts actually kind of in a way intersect with what you're saying, Frank, in that more. And again, I am not engaging, I think, in this as much as I need to be, but my thought is about kind of as an educator, like how we define expertise, and so like brother, you know, things that have started with a, a kind of specific, you know,

34:50sort of approach. But anyway, that question, right, we are, we have the benefit of having been educated and been out in the professional world where we did get those critical thinking skills and we knew, knew to ask the questions, right? Part of expertise is knowing to ask the questions and then knowing what questions to ask in as many, you know, many situations as we can. But, but now we're seeing a situation where yes, we want to solve a problem, but we now have the ability to get that problem saw, you know, the answer, a, answer to that question quickly, and then say, all right, I'm going to move on and take action. So, you know, your example, Frank, of the Gearch Professor, who said, why don't they come to us for 3D, right? Because they can in theory make it without us. And there, as you said, want to make money, but their experience isn't fundamentally downgraded. If it's not completely accurate or whatever it is, the expert would provide in that situation, right? That they don't see any measurable loss of

35:51satisfaction with the, with the product, right? And they also don't necessarily know to ask, right? And so, the expert's role, and so here's, here's where I think it's coming around to something that I'm just contemplating, right? What is the expert role? Because I tell my students, right? You're in these classes, you're, you're getting this degree to hopefully build expertise and that is what people will want from you. And they will trust that the background that you bring into it means that when you tell them something that they can have some confidence in it, right? Hopefully, hopefully. And if we're going through where a lot of our problem solving is just seeming like we're typing in a prompt or whatever it is we're doing to engage with, with AI, then really even if we had a question about it, other than just asking the AI to, to clarify things, where is, where is that expert perspective going to be in this, this sort of a system of problem solving? And so I agree with you because the, you know, the due spatial, just geospatial in general

36:53is, you know, complex, like extremely complex. And so if it's getting simplified like that, the question becomes, you know, what's, what's complexity are we leaving out? And in whose opinion or what mishmash of opinions are we approaches, are we building on when we can't even among ourselves, among the experts, a lot of times agree with things and have to negotiate out when we're making these types of spatial decisions. There's a whole other conversation there just on that last 10 words, but that is the whole point of us being experts is so that we can have different ideas and debate into what is the best way to go. Yeah, so that's, that's it for this time. Again, kind of strayed away from where we started with, with Bill Allen's posts, but hopefully, you know, it gave you some new ideas. I think we spent so long not talking about AI that now we've

37:53fallen to the trap of talking about it every time. So maybe we'll, we'll skip it a couple of episodes. Well, it's everywhere. That's the problem. Our idea is a spatial thinking aren't tied to how the AI will do this in the future, because it's still not doing it well. G-O-A-I is their machine learning deep learnings there, but this whole idea of being able to toss it into an L-L-M and getting a generative AI to give us something spatial is is still in development at best. If you want to go to an event and you should want to go to an event, you can check out one of these events in your neighborhood. The Louisiana remote sensing and GIS workshop will be taking place the 14th to the 16th of April in Lafayette, Louisiana. H-D-H 2026. So that's the Association for Computing in the Humanities. That will be June 24th through the 26th and it'll

38:58be virtual. The 2026 ASPRS International Technical Symposium will be taking place October 5th through 8th in its virtual online. And GIS Pro 2026 will be in Milwaukee in October 12th through the 15th. Of course, if you'd like this to add your event to the podcast, send us an email to podcastveryspatial.com. If you'd like to reach this individually, I can be reached at suetveryspatial.com. I can be reached at barbedatveryspatial.com. You can reach me at franketveryspatial.com. I can be reached to kind of spatial, we need to find all of our contact information over at veryspatial.com slash contacts. As always, we're the folks in very spatial. Thanks for listening. And we'll see you in a couple weeks.

40:16Cheer up, Flint and Sparks. Now, let's fire in the dark, but it never really lies. It's not supposed to be this hard. I know you couldn't, but a wish that you could. I know you wouldn't, but a wish that you would. I know I shouldn't, but a few more I should. But I just went so bad in the end, so you're so good. That was then, I know this is now. It was never when it was only ever home. I know it's been once, but to tell you the truth. I'm sad that I'm still sad that I'm not with you.

41:19If I could wind back time and change some things that night, maybe we'd be fine. Oh, maybe you'd be mine. Fine, I feel okay. You don't feel all safe. Whoever I can't get anywhere makes us still be just the same. Hope that I get home. But when you're quiet on your own, you'll see it out to me to know. I know you couldn't, but a wish that you could. I know you wouldn't, but a wish that you would. I know I shouldn't, but a few more I should.

42:21But I just went so bad in the end, so you're so good. That was then, I know this is now. It was never when it was only ever home. I know it's been once, but to tell you the truth. I'm sad that I'm still sad that I'm not with you. I'm sad that I'm still sad that I'm not with you. I'm sad that I'm still sad that I'm not with you. I'm sad that I'm still sad that I'm not with you. I'm sad that I'm still sad that I'm not with you

43:42I'm sad that I'm not with you