If you're a new or new-ish subscriber, welcome! I hope you're enjoying this weekly letter. If you've been getting The Monday Kickoff in your inbox for a while thanks for sticking with it!

With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:

I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me. — An interesting look at how people, for whom English isn't their native tongue, learn how to write in the language and how that mirrors the ways in which LLMs learn to write.

From the article:

[I]t writes like the millions of us who were pushed through a very particular educational and societal pipeline, a pipeline deliberately designed to sandpaper away ambiguity, and forge our thoughts into a very specific, very formal, and very impressive shape.

Welcome Back to the Office. You Won’t Get Anything Done — Kathy Chow looks at the absurdity of companies requiring their employees to return to corporate offices, arguing that those companies are ill prepared for an influx of returnees and that their work habits will shift to more meetings and make work than anything productive.

From the article:

As a result, even when people return to the office, they are not necessarily bonding with colleagues in-person. Rather, they are on back-to-back virtual calls, irritating other people nearby who are also on back-to-back calls. Daisley revealed that, at one organization he worked with, people were doing calls while sitting on the floor.

The magic of through running — A fascinating deep dive into legacy railway networks, how they influenced the creation of urban metro systems, and modern attempts to bring those systems up to date.

From the article:

This principle of ‘one network, two systems’ enables Munich to manage the trade-off between station spacing and speed, so that both the dense urban core and the suburbs can be served by rapid transit. Other cities try to achieve the same result by running both express trains, and trains that stop at every station, on the same lines, but this is difficult to do effectively, for the obvious reason that the fast trains tend to get bottlenecked behind the stopping ones.

The Sunlight Budget of Earth — A fascinating look at solar power generation not just from the perspective of converting sunlight to electricity but also how it powers natural processes that feed us (and more).

From the article:

The vast majority of solar energy is either never taken up by any of Earth’s systems or is simply absorbed as heat. To be clear, “absorbed as heat” is the eventual fate of nearly all sunlight captured anywhere on Earth by anything.15 Energy captured by a solar panel might charge a battery, but every time that battery is discharged in the course of doing something useful, some (usually most16) of that energy is dissipated as heat. The same is true for a plant — approximately three-quarters of the chemical energy that goes into synthesizing a molecule of glucose is released as heat.