Bill Fulton has been on a tear about sprawl (unsurprising) on his Substack. It’s good to see some old school urbanist writers coming back to this topic.

“If your attorney makes that mistake, you have recourse. Legal malpractice exists for a reason. There’s insurance. There’s accountability. But if your AI-drafted contract has a fatal flaw, where do you go for relief? Who do you sue? The chatbot? Good luck with that.”

I use Modern CSV for most of this functionality, but this is interesting. Seemingly more lightweight and cheaper.

I've been thinking about this a lot. There's a major tension here between "get my data cleaned quickly, efficiently, and as a responsible steward of my research resources" and "teach the next generation how to conduct research." Anyone who tells you the answer is easy is kidding themselves

My millennial brain found this absolutely irresistible.

It’s time to tax this hotel conference center wifi with an hours worth of video uploads to Youtube. Wish me luck.

In case you’re wondering what this is from. It’s a great book.

Book contracts are wild, y’all.

Excalidraw is doing work today.

This is quite good (not something I usually expect from the “new” Governing). Property assessments should be clear about the sources of AV increases, especially for distressed properties.

Congress should act to categorically exempt statistical agency staff from this schedule. Statistical agencies by definition do not set policy. Their only power and purpose is collecting data & publishing credible, informative stats. Without political independence, they can't do this.

We (academics) should figure out ways to enable and lift up contract work that 1) supplements faculty salaries in useful ways, 2) connects scholars to useful policy networks, and 3) has secondary research implications. The way to start that is to increase its value in the T&P process.

A botched Tyler Tech implementation in Cook Co. has (more) consequences.

Some context from that Lays ad. People are very stupid and don’t realize that potato chips are literally made out of potatoes. That’s why they were parading around a potato in that ad like it’s the fucking Rosetta Stone.

I watched Glory and Saving Private Ryan on my four hour trainer ride today. Feed that patriotism right into my veins.

Some people (me, though not in this piece) have been saying.

NIU was cooking with their typography and logo in the 1970s.

I did not expect that “what’s the best OCR method?” is a rabbit hole you can fall far down.

Most things are made better (or less painful) with ice cream sandwiches.

“Yet another vehicle struck Long Grove’s iconic covered bridge at Robert Parker Coffin Road Wednesday evening. Village officials said this is the 73rd strike since the bridge reopened in August 2020.” Long Grove’s (IL) iconic covered bridge takes another smack www.dailyherald.com/20260205/news/…

It’s super neat that Raycast will do datatime math and it’s format agnostic.

Where my data packrat tendencies come in handy: The IL Comptroller’s Local Government (Data) Warehouse only currently goes back to FY2000. I, however, have it back to 1994 because I downloaded it sometime in 2010 for…reasons.

If I could snap my fingers and create a new Boox (or other e-ink company) e-ink device, it would be in the form factor of a Remarkable Pro Move but running some version of Android. Like a Palma but slightly bigger (larger than a phone but smaller than a 8” tablet).

Well, this is neat.

This is great. The bits about Software Carpentry and their teaching philosophy in Stephen’s blog post really sticks with me. Some of those workshops were the start of my data science journey way back in the day.

It is an incorporated municipality with all the powers that entails.

Banana blueberry bread. Much tighter crumb than I expected, but quite tasty for 7 ingredients. tasty.co/recipe/healt...

“The question for this group can be stated very succinctly: What does one teach an administrator with ten years experience who enrolls in a Master of Public Administration (MPA) program” - Gibson & Hildreth (1977). I see not much has changed in 50 years. www.jstor.org/stable/4386588…

My article (with @bradhumphreys.bsky.social ) "Yes, There is an Economic Consensus That Professional Sports Facilities are Inadvisable Public Investments" is now published in Economic Development Quarterly. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Replacing hundreds of lines of code with barely more than a dozen (for the same functionality) feels nice.

Please excuse my excitement about a package update. These are features that I wanted but made ok workarounds to get in the past. `dplyr` and `fixest` derived commands are easily 75% or more of the calls I make in a normal analysis chain.

These look like some very useful updates!

Kaiju. Some levity for your day. (This show and the entire Monsterverse are big and dumb, but also amazing escapism.)

I saw someone posting this morning (and I cannot remember who) about the French policing raiding X’s Paris office with caption “BONJOUR TOUT LE MONDE” and I cannot stop giggling when I think about it.

It’s wild to me that the Cook County Forest Preserve handles security for Preckwinkle. Also wild that the CCPFD is functionally a department of Cook County. That’s not how FPDs work everywhere else in IL.

IL has one of these laws. When paired with almost no traffic enforcement, there are places where I have to take the entire lane, forcing drivers entirely into the other lane, to stay safe (or otherwise get buzzed/run off the road by someone going 50-55 mph in a 35).

If “The Conversation” cannot keep your attention as a film student…we’re done.

Your tax dollars, funding X’s losses.

Sounds pretty close to tearing down to me

I’m increasingly of the opinion that we should move all federal statistical agencies into a single department (Commerce or whatever), so that federal data are either completely on or completely off.

I’m trying to institutionalize a series of “reviews” (in the GTD-style, though decidedly not like GTD) into my workflow. Again, it’s freeing to have a series of auto-repeating to-dos that requires me to think about something for 45 seconds.

How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...

Hi 👋 Budget prof here. This is very good. And unusual. I might even assign it my budget class.

I have managed to get all forms of media that I have all onto my NAS and all accessible via various apps (only within my home network right now because I’m paranoid). - Plex for video media - Kavita for ebooks - Audiobookshelf for audiobooks (and technically podcasts, but I don’t use that) Neat.

This is my default regression package these days. It’s nuts how quickly it displaced everything else.

Last year, I was interviewed by a local paper about NDAs in peri-urban mega development projects. I said elected officials should refuse and negotiate in public—residents should know what their leaders are giving away. The biggest blowback I got was from local govt economic dev people.

For context, there’s a record 73,000 people in immigration detention right now. The plan would see the Trump administration add more than 75,000 NEW beds

NEW: ICE has spent at least $172 million this month on warehouses that it plans to convert into immigration jails www.bloomberg.com/news/feature... W/ @sooophie.bsky.social