[tclancy]

Your comment makes me think of this recent post, https://laurenleek.substack.com/p/the-basket-and-the-booza, from an always wonderful blog which looks at why Australia has far more independent stores left compared to English cities and comes to a surprising conclusion:

"The unifying claim is this: chains follow legibility. A city becomes legible to a site-selection algorithm when it has been organised into walkable, transit-connected high streets with predictable pedestrian volumes. That legibility is what good urbanism produces and simultaneously what makes a city capturable."

[ericyd]

Not sure if this is an issue of Australian English vs American English but this is way too jargon-laden to mean anything at all to me.

[tclancy]

Oh sorry, the pull quote does seem nonsensical by itself. It's well down in the conclusion of the article which, while written for the semi-layperson, is very heavy on the data science. Essentially it means what we currently think of (for good reason!) as good urban design makes it easier to analyze an area to optimize for profitability.

[kevin_thibedeau]

LLMs can do English-English translations.