Back to Normal, a Siren Song

Data on migration, public opinions, and even data on data. Plus a still looming conundrum of missing people and the apparent non-plan to deal with it, but also hope from our new robot overlords

Random Walk goes short with some little known facts about data, and then long with yet another bang of the table that there is no juice left to squeeze, but no one seems to bother or care. Finally, the AI is coming, even for Random Walk.

Happy Passover everyone!

Scatterplots

City “life”

Good news! Large metros have stopped losing people—they’re not growing, but at least they’re not shrinking:

My guess is that cities have stopped the bleeding more so because the cost of fleeing to the ‘burbs has gone up (because of mortgage rates), than anything that the cities are doing differently. Those are my priors at least. The article is fascinating throughout and touches on many Random Walk themes.

Datas per second

Goldman Sachs is making the case for generative AI, and it starts with the sheer number of measurable and observed things that we do every second, a.k.a. data: