Hey! 👋 Welcome to the first issue of the newsletter. Whoo 🚀!!

Maybe Gemini can solve my simple beam problem?

With the leaked change-log below, Google is upping the ante with the very soon™️ release of their new natively multimodal (text, image, other modes) AI, Gemini. Thankfully, it does seem like Canada may be included in the available countries, so as soon as it’s available, we can watch the highly anticipated continuation to my initial question of “is this the end of the structural engineering profession??”.

Part 1 of x - Nexii falls - in vertically integrated unicorn disasters

With the announcement of obtaining an Initial Order under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act, we see our own home grown Canadian unicorn Nexii fall to the ground. Through my own experiences with Katerra, the parallels were way too similar to ignore - throwing vast amounts of capital at a complex problem might do the opposite of what you intend. Sadly enough, the vision that both shared of sustainability and enhancing construction with technology is something that the industry really does sorely need.

Lightning Round

• Crypto still struggles to find a real/legitimate use case besides “bro I just bought a lambo with my magic internet money” 💰

• The US technology sector sits at all time highs while still laying off around 31k employees

• Canadian market experts expect interest rates to drop starting in April

Quick Tips

• When using generative AI, it helps to give a few examples in a question/answer format (called few-shot prompting) rather than just asking the question directly (called zero-shot prompting).

• Excel - Since engineers will probably use Excel till the day they die, here is an Excel tip: Use named ranges as part of your formulas for better documentation and readability! See gif below:

  

  How to be the cool kid at parties