Finding that users are pushing back against mandatory AI features? Forcing adoption can damage your brand. In her latest piece, @stephaniekirmer.com makes the case for making new AI tools optional to preserve user trust.

This was a fun one, went on the Stack Overflow podcast for the first time in years, specifically to talk to that audience of coders about why we shouldn’t believe the hype that LLMs are some kind of magical technology. Grateful to the crew for having me back! stackoverflow.blog/2025/12/23/s...

These declines are MASSIVE. And the comparative silence in media coverage is absolutely DAMNING. “Why are ppl always so afraid of crime?” THIS is why. When crime goes up, media trips over itself to report it. Falls to pre-war (!!) levels? Just CRICKETS.

The full spiked 60 Minutes CECOT package, clean & subtitled. 1/5

If your alderperson voted for this heinous Chicago city budget, give them a call and a piece of your mind. You have influence over your local reps.

really cannot be emphasized enough that bari weiss has literally never done journalism. i don’t mean that in the pejorative sense. i mean that in the “has never performed the job she was hired to do” sense

Sometimes the no comment is the entire story!

Truly the worst of all possible scenarios- corporations don’t pay their fair share and now our city budget is going to be more than 50% for cops.

Nenko Gantchev should still be alive—home with his family. After 30 years contributing to Chicagoland as a small business owner and taxpayer, ICE detained him, ignored his medical needs, and he died in custody. This system is cruel, reckless, and must be held accountable.

The fact that CTA does exactly nothing to try and remedy bus bunching is my obsession. How they claim they can achieve 10 minute or less headways without taking real action on this baffles me.

since 311 calls are in the news I think it's worth noting that the city app is **English only** which says something about who the city believes it is serving

​Right now, Chicago City Council is weighing drastic cuts to the very safety programs that have driven this unprecedented drop in severe injuries and fatalities on our streets — cuts that would mean more dangerous speeding, more violent crashes, and more families grieving loved ones taken too soon.

Had a pretty good year on @transit.app

This whole story was fucked up from the beginning but this is a whole new level…

This is the future Mayor Johnson and City Council are keeping from you. #PlowTheSidewalks

What if — hear me out — instead of hiring a person to only plow in front of a single business, we hired them to go down the entire block….and the next…and the next… We could even have a small fleet to cover whole swaths of the city. #PlowTheSidewalks

It’s blowing my mind that schools, universities, public services would run headlong into this. We spent 15 years documenting black boxes. This is a black box in a black hole!

This is the kind of art we need in our lives blockclubchicago.org/2025/11/21/c...

This is fucking brilliant, and you should read it: lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...

Do I add this to my CV as an invited lecture? 🤔

i can’t believe a good thing happened we should do this more often

Improve your product from the inside out. Dr. Janna Lipenkova's new article teaches you how to use SLMs to analyze user feedback and support chats in real-time, providing insights before launching user-facing AI features.

“”AI” is a failed technology. … LLMs haven’t met any markers of success we’d apply to, well, literally any other technology.” Great article by Ethan Marcotte @ethanmarcotte.com ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/agains...

This is awesome news- I loved this experience the past few months

I said there was something up with this operation and they just put it in the deck. The real business model is Ads, Data Mining, and Licensing of the products built on the data. Ads. Data. Licensing. With a side of courier bot. 9/14

Republicans understand that the best way to kill social programs is to paint their beneficiaries as Black, as support for these programs declines — even amongst white people who need them — when they think large numbers of Black people will benefit. news.stanford.edu/stories/2018...

Such a perfect example of what we all give up when we refuse to address basic inequalities. I don't want to live in a country where all the public space is militarized to keep hungry people from stealing food, just give them money to buy food!

I hope this is becoming widespread here. Thinking of the landscapes taken this week and how many may not know where they’re at risk.

OpenAI put out a press release today addressing mental health concerns. I have many issues with it, but something super troubling: They estimate a WEEKLY prevalence of 560,000 users displaying signs of psychosis or mania and 1.2 MILLION users indicating suicidal plan/intent.

The federal government does not fund health care for undocumented people. Punto. Republicans are spreading lies while kicking 15 million people off of health care and raising their premiums.

Cook County Commissioner Jessica Vasquez and Alderman Anthony Quezada released a statement alerting 35th Ward and 8 district residents about heavy ICE activity. They advise vulnerable residents to take extreme caution.

I sat down and tried to really break down the AI economy in tech startups, and I think it illuminates a lot of the phenomena we see on the ground!

this rocks. when indiana edu killed the student newspaper, Purdue stepped up, printed the forbidden issue, drove it to Bloomington and stocked the boxes.

Okay, for the folks who asked: here's the majority AI view, writing up the reasonable, thoughtful view on AI that the vast majority of people in tech hold, that gets overshadowed by the bluster and hype of the tycoons trying to shill their nonsense. anildash.com/2025/10/17/t... Please share!

I haven't had the capacity to keep up with moderation lists for a bit, but this one is really obvious, so I'm stealing some energy from Future Me: a list for the extremely obvious wave of inauthentic accounts following today's newly-created US gov accounts bsky.app/profile/did:...

the actual story here, which the media never talks about, is that police in this country have become a discrete right-wing political operation. the story isn't about cops leaving (they're lying about that), it's about the police trying to exert influence over elections.

Listen to the response to this and look how easy it is to say it.

Claim: 10 cars rammed ICE Truth: No cars rammed ICE Claim: She boxed ICE in Truth: ICE boxed her in Claim: She shot a rifle at ICE Truth: She did not have a rifle Claim: ICE returned fire Truth: Only ICE fired Claim: She drove herself to the hospital Truth: Paramedics found her

Here are the signs that will go up around #Chicago Great reporting @thetriibe.com

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson: "Private establishments can partner with us to make it clear that private property is private property and ICE cannot enter establishments without a valid warrant ... If Congress will not check this administration, then Chicago will."

It’d be a mistake to take Conway’s comments as anything other than disingenuous, but it’s worth noting that his back-of-the-napkin estimate is wildly off. O’Hare alone, which wouldn’t be part of the program, takes up 5% of the city’s area. Then there are dozens of square miles of industrial areas.

Fellow Chicagoans looking for ways to help our neighbors being terrorized by ICE could do a lot worse than throwing a few bucks to the Street Vendor Relief Fund. Help people who can’t work for fear of kidnapping pay their bills. www.gofundme.com/f/chicago-st...

STORY: windycitytimes.com/2025/10/03/a...

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.