Week in review 2023-01-09
First week of 2023, back to work and starting new personal projects. This has been an easy week, getting the pulse of the new year, and settling back. After two weeks off getting back to work took a little bit of time, but now the engines are running again.
As the year started, I wanted to start with a new project/improvement, so I opened a newsletter. I have been writing in the blog for some time now, but I wanted to make it easier to read, find and have the opportunity to keep writing more about software, and cities.
The intersection between the digital and the physical, is something that has always been attractive to me. Thinking about cities, how we live in them, how do we create and evolve them, and how they allow us to be together is fascinating by itself. If we now take software into the equation, and think about them with data, and tools to analyze such data, the cities become even more fascinating creatures. So I’ll be writing about these intersections in the newsletter. Sharing insights into how software is used to manage, analyze, and plan cities; how the infrastructure we use shapes how we can inhabit a city; or what the data tell us about how we live. I already published the first issue of the newsletter, and you can read it here.
The week had interesting finding, from links around the web, to papers and podcast, make sure to check them out bellow. This week also had good images around the city, such as this cyclist riding with his dog.
Papers
- Large cities are less efficient for sustainable transport: The ABC of mobility // A new paper by Rafael Prieto Curiel, and Juan P. Ospina. In this paper the authors analyzed data from over 800 cities in over 60 countries to understand the relationship between the distance traveled by cars and city size. The study found that in cities outside the US, the proportion of car journeys decreases in larger cities, but the distances traveled become longer. In the US, cities have more vehicle kilometers traveled compared to cities in other countries of similar size.
Web
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Never write a Bash command again (with the help of GPT-3) // via Jochen’s blog, a good use of GPT to write in plain English and have the terminal execute it.
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Why are there so many tech layoffs, and why should we be worried? Stanford scholar explains A quote from the interview on why are so many companies dong layoffs:
The tech industry layoffs are basically an instance of social contagion, in which companies imitate what others are doing. If you look for reasons for why companies do layoffs, the reason is that everybody else is doing it. Layoffs are the result of imitative behavior and are not particularly evidence-based.
I’ve had people say to me that they know layoffs are harmful to company well-being, let alone the well-being of employees, and don’t accomplish much, but everybody is doing layoffs and their board is asking why they aren’t doing layoffs also.