Joni Baboci

cities & complex systems | founder @getlayerxyz |
former city architect @cityoftirana |
thoughts

[Sergio Ferrero @calotonterias]

Los nacidos en los primeros meses del año tienen hasta 2-4 veces más probabilidades de llegar a ser deportistas de élite. Sin embargo, entre los que ya están en la élite, son los nacidos en los últimos meses los que suelen destacar más (hasta un 30-50% más de rendimiento).

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Every time I fly to New York, I'm struck by how many trees there are in the densely-populated areas around the city. (Coming from the West Coast, one arrives over the Garden State, and the suitability of the sobriquet is quite apparent from the air.) It feels like this degree of tree cover in highly populated areas is atypical (the environs of places like Paris, London, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Tokyo, etc., look very different), so I asked the LLM to investigate.

It found GHSL 2020 population and ESA WorldCover 2021 10m land-cover data, and concluded that New York is in fact quite unusual.

As far as I can tell, it's because of some combination of:

* A very favorable climate. (Trees grow quickly without irrigation.)
* Marginal farmland. (Readily outcompeted by the Midwest in the 19th century.)
* Together yielding reforestation before the advent of suburbs.
* And a preference for development patterns that include trees. (Japan's climate is very hospitable, but one sees far fewer trees in the populated areas around the major cities -- forest and habitation are more disjoint.)

[Joni Baboci @dbaboci]

@JoshuaBarzon A or E

[Joni Baboci @dbaboci]

@calotonterias "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times." - G. Michael Hopf

[Simon Kuestenmacher @simongerman600]

This map shows how boys (blue) and girls (red) spend their breaks in a school in Barcelona. This school is used as a case study of space shared equitably. Often in such studies boys simply play on the sports fields while girls spend their break talking or on non-sport playgrounds. Design can impact movement patterns massively. Source: https://t.co/Oadyus85dI

[Ahmed Al Omran @ahmed]

Unintended consequences of war in the Gulf: Japan’s most famous potato chips brand will change packaging to black and white due to shortage of petroleum-based colourants

[Omkar @psomkar1]

Interviewer : where do you see yourself in 5 years ?

Me :

[Marc Porter Magee 🎓 @marcportermagee]

“It’s better to be a poor pupil in a rich country than the reverse”

[Daniel Wortel-London @dlondonwortel]

It’s not just new, it’s newspeak

[The Mind Scourge @TheMindScourge]

The castle was a genuine innovation. The Romans didn’t build castles, for example - private fortification was illegal in most of the empire - and the successor states of the west continued this tradition

Castles emerge in the late Carolingian. They are an expression - or arrogation - by private actors of the use of force within society. They represent a decline, in a sense, of state capacity. Royal governments resisted their spread, unsuccessfully.

The rise of the castle was contingent, not inevitable. But you could not have predicted it from what existed before. It was something new

Be careful when making predictions. History is not so limited as your imagination. This is maybe the real gift of the study of the past. You gain an appreciation for the degree to which things can change

It happened before. It can happen again

[Joan Larroumec @larroumecj]

L’essentiel du malheur français des deux derniers siècles tient dans cette carte.
Au lieu de voir sa population multipliée par entre 6 et 10 comme les autres pays européens, la France n’a fait que 2,5x.

Pour comprendre ce que c’était d’être Français au 18e siècle, il faut s’imaginer une France contemporaine de 250 millions d’habitants.

Cela ne nous donnerait que la densité du Royaume-Uni, avec 3 fois plus de terres arables. Rien d’exagéré ou d’impossible.

Notre relation au monde serait légèrement différente.

Bien sûr que nous avons la gueule de bois.

La Grande Bretagne grâce à ses colonies a même fait 40x.

Pour nous cela aurait voulu dire 900 millions de descendants de Français.
Ce qui n’est pas délirant. Notre modeste population québécoise a été multipliée par 100.

Le but de ce rappel n’est pas d’entretenir la nostalgie mais de remettre sur le devant de la scène un enjeu clé : la fécondité s’effondre massivement, cela va rebattre au 21e siècle les cartes de la puissance et de la prospérité tout autant qu’elles le furent au 19e siècle.
Nous avons été les plus grands perdants à l’échelle mondiale de cette précédente transition démographique. Essayons de ne pas l’être ce coup-ci.

[Ramin Nasibov @RaminNasibov]

I used Nero to burn CDs as a kid and only later got the joke: Nero burned Rome, and "Burning ROM" is such a perfect reference.

[Kane 謝凱堯 @kane]

Waymo is so good at saving lives that if it were a new drug in trial, it would hit the bar for being unblinded and made immediately available to the control group for ethical reasons.

@MorePerfectUS would prefer to keep killing pedestrians.

[Paul Novosad @paulnovosad]

Resilience is great, having very highly educated parents helps too

[Orin Kerr @OrinKerr]

An attorney writes to me about the mostly AI-written law review article he had accepted this spring, now forthcoming in the flagship law review of a Top 50 law school. A draft of the article is now up on SSRN.

According to the attorney:

" Last month I used Claude to assist in drafting a new article . . . . I drafted this article in about 15 hours. In 2022 I published an article of similar length that took around 150 hours."

The attorney adds:

"I used Claude the way I’d use a junior associate—as a first drafter, sounding board, and research assistant. Most of the article, including the entirety of the title, abstract, and intro, is mine from the keyboard up. And anything Claude contributed that made it to the final version is there because I reviewed it, agreed with it, and chose to sign my name to it. This is no different than how I’d review an associate’s draft and then take responsibility for the finished product."

The attorney adds:

"That first draft was by no means file ready, but it was better than what I would’ve received from the vast majority of BigLaw associates. I was blown away, and have since started my own appellate and litigation practice in an effort to replicate these productivity gains for client work."

Your thoughts?

I know the attorney's name, and the journal, and I have checked out the article, but I figured that, at least for now, I would hold that back.

[Mo @atmoio]

AI is making CEOs delusional

[Arpit Gupta @arpitrage]

"rising housing costs since 1990 are responsible for 13 million (11%) children not being born, 51% of decrease in fertility from the 2000s to the 2010s, and a 7pp decrease in the share of 20-29 year olds that have started families"

by Benjamin Couillard
https://t.co/2PTr6M9O1X

[Adam Carlson @admcrlsn]

One of the greatest charts I have ever seen

[Paul Jun @PaulJun_]

Okay, time to finally ship this thing.

The Tenth Muse (10M): an art discovery platform. Over 120,000 artworks from 17 museums and institutions spanning 5,000 years — searchable by feeling, mood, era, color, and medium.

95% are in the public domain. Every piece links back to the source, and for the works that are public domain, you can download the highest resolution image available.

https://t.co/2PatnVcK4e

More of why and how I built this below...

[AukeHoekstra @AukeHoekstra]

I *love* this ternary chart showing developing economies increasingly go directly for clean electrons (solar plus some wind), bypassing the fossil economy that the US and EU went through.

I expect Africa will take an even more direct route than India.
https://t.co/KjsZV3S6P1