New York City's Budget is now #opendata! I cannot believe I'm about to tell you that the missing gap in the budget data had to be filled by scraping 20 years of PDFs!!! Now we need @council.nyc.gov to ensure that their data flows don't go stale again! #civictech www.beta.nyc/2026/07/08/w...

formal rules are functionally a subset of informal ones, embedded in the cultural norm that if we write them down they're extra important

What would NYC's budget look like if it were Venmo? Looks like Khaled Eltokhy asked that from our data scraping. www.khaledeltokhy.com/budgetmo/#ny...

The 2010's were the peak of consumer friendly digital technology.

You can even watch the footie game afterwards. Anyway, just like Hallway Track, 90 minutes of me and interesting people talking about the business of making software and how people work together in teams. Plus because it's me, some tortured Star Trek references. calendly.com/verylittlegr...

Friday, 9am PT on Zoom, free! Come to How People Work, Live! a live show where I talk with interesting people like @jukes.ie about the messiness of making products and services a) for humans, and b) with humans, which is the only way software gets made, to be honest. calendly.com/verylittlegr...

Canada's host cities at 1st and 3rd place. Canadian urbanism is a unique and good thing!

directing a tenth of the unearned hopefulness about new technologies towards each other instead magic

This week’s @showuptoronto.ca is in your inboxes and it’s a guest email by our volunteer muhannad! Yay muhannad!! Plus, the usual slate of events buttondown.com/showup/archi...

Has there been any time in the modern computing era (since, idk...1990?) when we've seen the prices of computers and their components go up, substantially, industry-wide? I was too young for a chunk of that period to know for sure, but...I don't think so? AI: Is there nothing it *can't* do?

I'm endlessly interested in what drives enterprise-level adoption of generative AI and my current theory is that it's at least in party an emotional decision - on a par with buying a flashy sports car - rather than an entirely logical, business-driven one.

Well this doesn't sound like the senior management team at my place of work, no sir

Anyway, my theory - FWIW - is that lots of the experienced and senior people who are hooked on LLMs are actually having a midlife crisis, and that spending money on Claude is cheaper than buying a Lambo buttondown.com/justenoughin...

We often just make stuff up about the future, and present it as factual. Maybe a big political promise, an excitable analysis of the impact of emerging technology, or just a bad plan that won't deliver. False certainty is everywhere you look. daverog.substack.com/p/false-cert...

NEW: “This isn’t cutting edge anymore. It’s just learning from our own successes & failures, and standing on the shoulders of smarter cities. Time to get it done.” My op-ed in today’s @vancouversun.bsky.social makes the case for a people-first Granville Street (& MORE streets) beyond the #WorldCup.

centrism? in this economy?

But don't worry—they promise to only use the even more sensitive information that Lawful Access laws would grant them responsibly. They totally won't use the ability to turn cellphones into tracking devices to stalk women they think are hot. Really! The minister promises!

The police department designed a computer database that is enabling its officers to commit crimes If you change the way the computer database is designed so the police can’t access the information used in their crimes, they will no longer be able to commit those crimes It is pretty simple, really

There is no legitimate reason for random cops to have unfettered access to sensitive personal information like this Instead of publicly humiliating himself making videos telling officers to knock it off with criminally stalking women, Ottawa’s Police Chief could cut off access to these databases

The Ottawa Police has a problem with women: sexual harassment, sexual assaults, sexual misconduct. The number of examples of wrongdoing: from sergeants to the police union president who himself is accused of sexual assault: www.hilltimes.com/2026/06/24/t...

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My sincere respect to Leonid for this decision. The MLI has become a hotbed of unprincipled, simplistic, and ugly attacks on the courts in the past year or two. It has left the Institute's reputation in tatters, and should concern anyone committed to judicial independence and the rule of law.

I have resigned as Senior Fellow of the Macdonald Laurier Institute, which in my view has abandoned its commitment to constitutionalism and the Rule of Law in Canada and become adverse to these principles. A bit more on my reasons for having come to this conclusion: doubleaspect.blog/2026/06/24/n...

Rigorous, damning, and it's worth waking up for a second and thinking: as unbelievably bad as this administration looks, it's almost certainly much, much, much worse

Canada is a wealthy country with lots of people who are extremely wealth. Extreme economic inequality leads to social and democratic collapse. www.taxfairness.ca/en/resources...

My local parent chat is full of people in search of affordable electric cargo bikes. Demand for used bikes is off the charts. The people want to bike!

"But Ana Brandusescu...who has testified to the INDU committee, said Guglielmin’s investments in those companies, particularly Palantir, is alarming. “When you see our MPs buying into a company like this that is also courting and lobbying our government — that is a huge problem,” Brandusescu said.

As a long term advocate of open government, seeing the increased government opacity around problematic companies has been concerning. Thanks Zak Vescera and the @theijf.org addressing this critical issue.

"She said the government, which has has Palantir on a list of approved vendors for AI products since 2021, should be cautious about doing more business with the company given its growing involvement in various human rights crises. “Canada has just been kind of quiet about it,” Brandusescu said."

"She warned that Palantir was increasingly pitching its services beyond those sectors, including in areas like health care and business management."

"The opacity around the Palantir contract is typical for business deals involving that company. “No matter what we do on policies around open government, features including more transparency on contracts in the Department of Defence and law enforcement have not come to fruition,” Brandusescu said.

For more on this topic: jbam.scholasticahq.com/article/1516...

It's rare that a newspaper says this out loud.

Consultants 🤝 AI actual purpose is to justify what they already wanted to do

Can't wait for our CRAFT workshop on trans AI policy at ACM FAccT this Sunday, June 28 at 2:15 ET, co-organized with @blairaf.com, @jhereia.bsky.social, and @techlissa.bsky.social! programs.sigchi.org/facct/2026/p...

I think like any comedown from the booster cycle, there's very much a need for more voices we trust to say "hey yes everything is crazy right now you're not losing your mind or hey maybe you are. Join the club." But to do is with kindness and succintly as he does is a gift

🦊 Wrote down some rambling thoughts on “AI”: as generational damage, on what repair might look like, and on asking what happens next. ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/all-to...

This is a great comparison. It's hard to get the public to understand how secret Canada is, and why they should care (and why it isn't just a "journalist problem"). This lays out why, and the difference, starkly.

I wrote about the fog of secrecy surrounding the expansion of Billy Bishop airport. When even the mayor doesn't have the whole picture, you know there's trouble www.thestar.com/gift-redeem?...

Counterpoint: we have The Spreadsheet because the automation doesn’t meet our needs.

Somewhere in your company is The Spreadsheet. At least one person is responsible for updating The Spreadsheet. Multiple people update other databases based on what The Spreadsheet says. As long as The Spreadsheet exists, nothing can be automated.

right? we already had vibe coding. it was called "that excel doc with no version control that runs six departments"

Could not agree more (I have visibility into the small and medium non-profit world). Slapping some AI tool on top of the operations and IT that is unexamined, underinvested, poorly understood... is the opposite of helpful. I hear "AI can do this!" but think, "a *basic* Excel function could already!"

The more I talk to folks trying to implement AI in small and medium size businesses the more apparent it is that what they really need to do is figure out their internal IT stuff & create streamlined systems for the humans already doing the work. Can't even begin to bring in AI until this is done.

this is what i mean when i say ai is a rhetorical technology. functionally this is a tool for *justifying deportation*, not a tool for assessing age. when someone is pitching an ai product, don't ask them what it's supposed to do. ask yourself what it's supposed to justify

The most inconvenient truth in the world right now is that trans people are in the early-to-middle stages of the *fourth* historical attempt to genocide our entire community.

Sobering, if validating, thread:

"I was coming to the conclusion that by staying inside, I was becoming a tool to justify some of the things the government is doing, which I find to be unjustifiable." Read every word of Stephen Guilbeault's explosive exit interview with @meyer.bsky.social.