Yeah its huge demand upswing from the growth of openclaw and similar pushing resources. Very clear from recent changes and announcement around this [0]

Fwiw there are worse delays from second tier providers like moonshot's kimik2.5 that are also popular for agentic use.

[0] https://hackernews.hn/item?id=47633396

No surprises many people on YCs site align with Sam Altmans view of the world - right or wrong.

I’m just surprised the alignment guy is struggling with alignment. Dodged a bullet I guess.

If I remember my D&D, Lawful Evil is an alignment.

Agree with this. They are re-solving a problem that has been solved better by others before (with R-trees).

They may well be using some data storage where spatial indexing is not possible or standard. Geoparquet is a common one now - a great format in many ways but spatial indexing isnt there.

Postgres may be out of fashion but still an old fashioned postgis server is the simplest solution sometimes.

Why do you consider Postgres + PostGIS out of fashion? What are people using for spatial data these days?

For use cases like this - long term geospatial people still use postgis as foundational - mainly for its speed at scale and spatial indexing.

For the wider tech world - I would say postgres suffers from being "old tech" and somewhat "monolithic". There have been a lot of trends against it (e.g. nosql, fleeing the monolith, data lakes). But also more practically for a lot of businesses geospatial is not their primary focus - they bring other tech stacks so something like postgis can seem like duplication if they already use another database, data storage format or data processing pipeline. Also some of the proliferation of other software and file formats have made some uses cases easier without postgis.

Really Id say the most common path ive seen for people who dont have an explicit geospatial background who are starting to implement it is to avoid postgis until it becomes absolutely clear that they need it.

But what would they use before bringing in postgis ? I'm curious about the alternatives. MongoDB for example doesn't seem to have a geospatial ecosystem, apart from basic 2d features. Clickhouse ?

I wouldn't say R-trees solve the problem better. Joining multiple spatial dataset indexed with r-trees is more complex as the nodes are dynamic and data dependent. Neighborhood search is also more complicated because parent nodes overlap.

Its a well researched area. My understanding is for most use cases and data like this R trees outperform as bounding box comparisons are fast to run and the bounding boxes tend to be well organised to chunk data efficiently. H3 is a looser area and you may find lots of your points are clustered in a few grids so you end up doing more expensive detailed intersection calculations. Of course it all depends a little on your data, use case and to some extent the parameters chosen for the spatial index. But I think safe to say now based on industry experience that r trees do a very good job 99.9% of the time.

You can of course also use h3 in postgis directly as well as r trees. Its helps significantly for heatmap creation and sometimes for neighbourhood searches.

Theres only one solution to this problem and its 2 data centres in some way or form

What's the line from Contact?

why build one when you can have two at twice the price?

But, if you're building a datacenter for $5M, spending $10-15M for redundant datacenters (even with extra networking costs), would still be cheaper than their estimated $25M cloud costs.

Or build two 2.5MM DCs (if can parallelize your workload well enough) and in case of disaster, you only lose capacity.

You need however plan for 1MM+ pa in OPEX because good SREs ain’t cheap (or hardware guys building and maintaining machines)

Or just do what the Japanese do - remove unlimited (and overnight) on-street parking in urban areas and require anyone owning a car to prove they have a private parking spot to house it

That would be a good idea, but one of the main impediments is the fact that heavy regulations make underground concrete structures (and hence underground parking lots) very expensive, a lot more than in Europe or Asia, where it's often economical for even 3-5 story residential buildings to have underground parking space. That's the reason why developers push for on-street parking.

I think you're also forgetting the other aspect that allows this which is having readily available public transport.

Most of Japan doesn't have excellent public transport.

Car ownership is less common in most of the places in Japan with excellent public transport.

But I do like that each car legally requires its own parking spot. It is tricky to go to people's homes, because often extra parking is extremely limited or non-existent. It requires specific planning.

The more you subsidize automotive infrastructure, the more public transport will suffer for it.

That's pretty drastic, and would probably only be the best alternative on a densely packed island. Seems like overkill for any other situation.

Price parking appropriately and make people pay for it. If land is cheap, parking is cheap, so not a big deal. If land is expensive, then no freeloading on the streets, which can be put to better use anyways (sidewalks, bike lanes, outdoor cafes etc...)

The car registration and gas taxes don't even pay for a quarter of all road-infrastructure-related costs. It boggles the mind to see free street parking in places like NYC, where a more reasonable cost structure would be something like other cities around the world (and Canada) do: divide the territory in parking districts. Locals can buy a discounted annual pass for the district where their main residence is located (should not cost less than $400/month in a place like Manhattan), while elsewhere the rate should be at least $10-12/hour.

You're leaving your property on public land. How much would that land rent for?

You perhaps pay tens of dollars per month. Is that enough to fully cover all externalized costs of owning that vehicle? No.

You should look up how your local government pays for the kinds of local roads you can park on.

If you live in the US, there's a very good chance that's coming from the property and sales tax everyone pays, not any tax on your vehicle.

> probably only be the best alternative on a densely packed island

So Manhattan or the San Francisco Peninsula?

I suspect the refusal to kowtow to car owners and the density are interrelated. Tokyo is more dense, in (small?) part, because there is far less space consumed by inanimate appliances.

No, it's in very, very large part due to this. You can see it not just walking around, but especially when you go up in one of the tall buildings or in SkyTree tower and look at the city from above: you can't see any parking lots anywhere, and most of the roads are pretty small (there's some large boulevards, but not that many). Compare to any American city that was built up after the rise of the automobile and it's staggering how much space is wasted on cars in those cities.

Covered multi-story parking lots.

And those cost money. That is the crux here. Free parking is frankly insane. It became untenable in Amsterdam as early as the 1960s when most people could afford a car.

If you want trees, a sidewalk and bike lanes something has got to give.

Looks great. I wish there was similar advancement for full 3d tiles. The only real option at the moment is cesiums 3d tiles format which is nowhere near as fast as it could/should be

"it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."

The other side is lack of colourfast pigments back then. Underlayers would be cheap and colourfast. Top layers would usually be more expensive and deteriorate much more quickly.

Most colourfast pigments are minerals, and many of them are found in the natural world (purple hues being notoriously absent). Ultramarine, cadmium red, and lead white have been known since ancient times.

The bar is incredibly low considering what OpenAI has done as a "not for profit"

You need get a bunch of accountants to agree on what's profit first..

Agree against their best interest, mind you!