We enjoyed this month's Meet Me on Milwaukee so much, we made a little montage. We saw folks playing violin, guitar, a DJ set, and a whole lot more, so make sure to check out the next one on October 26th!

A new study, based on a survey of 1,150 workers suggests that the injection of AI tools into the workplace has not resulted in a magic productivity boom and instead increased the amount of time that workers say they spend fixing low-quality AI-generated “work.” 🔗 www.404media.co/ai-workslop-...

Hey Chicago friends! One day only grubhub is doing a 5x match to donations to the Chicago food depository- let’s make it big!! www.chicagosfoodbank.org?form=FUNZTFT...

chatgpt is much like an improv comedy group 1) you are the audience, giving it prompts 2) it produces things roughly shaped like your prompt 3) it is trained to respond with Yes, And 4) it has the factual accuracy of improv 5) it does not understand comedy

Thread worth reading about how AI is being jammed into legal training despite the obvious hazards and risks involved

i don’t think people on bluesky understand the severity of this situation. i woke up to literally hundreds of texts from friends and family thinking about either moving back home to india or applying to other countries for jobs. this includes me.

Which elected officials in Illinois have said what EXACTLY they plan to do about the fact that ICE killed a man on Friday

Political violence is evil, killing people is evil, a country with more guns in it than people is broken, and what the government is saying about political violence right now being a primarily leftwing phenomenon is factually, statistically untrue. They are using this moment to rewrite history.

Looks like the ICE presence in Chicagoland—and I emphasize the “land” part—is purposefully operating in a way as to avoid media coverage. By grabbing people here and there on city edges, outskirts & random suburbs, they don’t attract activity that generates coverage, let alone protest.

ICE killed one of our people, and lied about it.

From ‘The Onion’ Editorial Board:

Never once giving a shit about what Ezra Klein thinks about a single topic to the point that I don't even know his positions has served me so well in life thus far that i think I will simply be continuing the practice

Sidewalks are critical infrastructure!

Know your rights, Illinois. Stay safe and stay informed.

Reporters from across newsrooms in Chicago are collaborating to collect visual evidence of federal agents detaining people & using force in Chicago. Send videos to tinyurl.com/chicagojournalists, or get in touch via email [email protected].

I got my flu and covid shots today- make the effort to protect yourself and your community!

This is so infuriating. I want my neighbors to feel safe celebrating.

My newest column is out, and it’s a cautionary tale about the huge cost of throwing AI into your business for no good reason

Sometimes take the win. Reduce summer murders to be the lowest in 60 years does deserve a victory lap by those who have been doing violence interruption work. That doesn’t mean people are satisfied but take a fucking win people. www.wbez.org/news/2025/09...

ACTUALLY what is driving the surge is DRIVERS SPEEDING.

Milwaukee Avenue between Ashland and Damen was pedestrianized today thanks to Alder Daniel La Spata. Great to see lots of folks walking, conversing, and shopping on a quieter and more vibrant street that was a community platform and not just a pipe for cars.

fun fact: if any politician in the United States so much as hints at wanting to separate housing from the profit motive, the New York Times will immediately start taking dictation from actual neo-Nazis in an attempt to scuttle their electoral chances

As a federal operation looms, Chicago's mayor signed an executive order looking to safeguard the city. “Unfortunately we do not have the luxury of time. We have received credible reports that we have days, not weeks, before our city sees some kind of militarized activity by the federal government.”

hall of fame legal AI moment: a judge figures out that someone's court submission was generated using AI because it cites "a wholly imaginary judgment for which the plaintiff claims that I am the author."

you do not in fact gotta hand it to the suicide encourager

Is it just me or is absolutely everything going on in Chicago this weekend? I have “stuff I’d like to do” triple booked!

There's no reason we need people with guns to write parking tickets. Currently the only way to report a parking violating in Chicago (e.g. someone blocking a crosswalk) is to call 911 and they dispatch police at the lowest priority. This is a pilot to have 911 parking calls re-route to non-cops.

"What if the real doomer scenario is that we pollute the internet and the planet, reorient our economy and leverage ourselves, outsource big chunks of our minds, realign our geopolitics and culture, and fight endlessly over a technology that never comes close to delivering on its grandest promises?"

Just think - if one million people turned off their wifi for one hour it would save enough electricity to run one ChatGPT data center for ten seconds

"pictures are famous for their human-ness and not their picture-ness"

We must be perfectly clear: The problem is not that Weiss has closed, the problem is that Weiss was unfit to operate. We can blame private equity all we want but the root of the problem is that the incentive structures of capitalism are misaligned with the goal of providing good care.

This entire thread is absolute gold, and I want to highlight that last part: "Ph.D.s are about depth... in ONE SINGLE TINY TOPIC." This matters because the PhD, as indicated in every hooding ceremony, demonstrates that the degree holder has made an original contribution to THEIR FIELD OF STUDY.

Well this is bad. Google is indexing ChatGPT conversations exposing sensitive user data I tried a few quick searches. I found someone's chat where I can see their api key I found some building their resume. Their name, email and phone numbers are exposed. www.fastcompany.com/91376687/goo...

“I think you’re giving permission to schools to not focus on compliance at all,” said Cohen. “In the context of everything that’s happening at the federal level, I think what they’re saying is we’re not going to worry about these rules so much.”

Are general-purpose LLMs safe for sensitive mental health conversations? @StephanieKirmer.com's new deep dive reveals why non-fine-tuned models can fall short, sometimes with alarming or even harmful consequences.

Hope you'll #MeetMeOnMilwaukee in August, September, or October :)

Being in tech and having a single modicum of critical thinking is just screaming "this isn't what LLMs are designed for" over and over as people shove a bunch of word predictors into critical decision making processes because some glorified used car salesmen told them it would fix all their problems

This sucks www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/a...

CDOT survey to improve bus stops/shelters! tell all your transit friends to fill it out @ctaction.org, @chicagocta.bsky.social research.net/r/busstops22

“He should be remembered as a living expression of our national decay: a hero exposed as a fraud, a fraud exposed as a coward, and a coward who cried with joy upon finding an authoritarian who told him that his sins were, in fact, virtues.”

A Quebec fisherman who was fishing 15 kilometers north of the US border was essentially kidnapped by US Border Patrol, who capsized his boat and dragged him to an American prison cell. In any normal time this'd be quite the international incident, y'know? www.ctvnews.ca/montreal/art...

Finally! I don’t know if these interventions will work, but it’s about damn time someone tried SOMETHING. (And not just “more cops”.)

Report bike lane obstructions like this with our mobile app BikeLaneUprising.com Reports help: *Create maps of problem areas *Infrastructure improvements *Get laws passed *Education programs *Enforcement of hot spots *Court cases where bicyclists have been injured or killed *National statistics

How many times do we have to remind people: the chatbot *cannot* admit to *anything*. It *doesn't know*. When you ask it about itself, it generates its answer the same way it generates your request that it write an email. It takes what you tell it and responds in way to sound plausible.

🚨 BREAKING Chicago city council has passed sweeping parking reform to eliminate parking requirements around transit! Thank you @aldermanlaspata.bsky.social for sponsoring this legislation! @abundanthousingil.bsky.social @parkingreform.org @betterstreetschicago.org

one of the most effective and highly bought corporate propaganda campaigns ever was convincing individual people that turning off the lights and recycling were the solutions to climate change and not dismantling corporate polluters brick by brick and demanding policy and regulation

Stop asking billionaires questions, recording their answers and sharing their uninformed and/or racist and/or otherwise bigoted and nonsense ideas as journalism. It’s ridiculous. They are the most boring people. Oh wah I am a white man who has more money than I can spend and I’m so mad about it!

CommunityHealth, a volunteer based health clinic for the uninsured in Humboldt Park, just cancelled their block party this weekend due to the threats of ICE raids in the area. They just released this statement.