Daniel Kay Hertz

Oh, I definitely do plenty of cross-checking to validate

I think the thing is that one of Obama's main legacies are his speeches! Like, it's missing an opportunity by not letting people perceive the substance imo

...hearings that have been scheduled, and I was able to put that on the summary cards in my version and pull those up to the top automatically. I could be wrong but it doesn't seem easy to do that in LegiScan

The limitations with the free version of LegiScan are the 50 bill limit, which we definitely exceed in terms of things we want to watch; I also didn't see a way to bulk upload bills we were interested in, which we had recorded in an Excel. Also one of the biggest things we want to see is...

honestly, having to interact with a command line not in natural language is a pretty big barrier to me, even though I can tell this is relatively simple!

website

For folks asking about how--this is what I wrote in a DM earlier

Yep

Because a lot of people have asked about actual use cases for AI products--it costs several thousand dollars a year to buy a subscription to a legislative bill tracker. Without one, manually keeping tabs on everything we're interested in is impractically time consuming. Claude made me one in a day.

Haven't seen it on Bluesky yet: a nice paper is making the rounds, estimating that the cost of housing permits in LA can explain 1/3 of the gap between construction costs and housing prices.

That is: LA's terribly slow housing permitting is extremely costly!

To be clear, it's running all this in the background while I do other stuff, so I'm not complaining--more like, it's sort of remarkable to watch it self-test and re-run over and over.

I did do a pretty extensive plan--I asked it to interview me. But I also asked it to pull specific variables from natural language articles and the errors it's refining are all about how to identify those variables correctly.

I'm in a loop of Claude running a sample of the project, me saying "find and fix the problems," and Claude then running out on its own, finding problems, rewriting its own code to fix them, rerunning the code, looking for problems on its own, rewriting the code, etc--been doing it for 20 minutes

I think I got my IP blocked by chicagoyimby.com lol

Sure, yeah, okay

Doing my first slightly insane Havelock-style personal Claude Code project, wish me luck

First project to use the fast track for affordable housing that Eric Adams’s charter review commission put on the ballot in November, Mamdani endorsed, Open New York and other housing advocates pushed for, and voters approved 💪

Got nerdsniped by this q and worked with Claude Code to answer it: sbahamon.github.io/bus-check/in... Short answer: yes, ridership has increased (for what we have data) and no, headways have not been consistent (veeeery preliminary results, come back in ~2 weeks to see if that's still the case)

oh my god

Governor Pritzker convenes a roundtable on housing in Illinois.

Just unveiled the Building Up IL Developments (BUILD) plan and gathered a group to talk about housing in our state.

The consensus? We need to build more and fast.

Looking forward to getting it out to communities across Illinois.

I am excited to see Edgewater Neighbors for Responsible Development's take on allowing 4-6 units per lot...gasp...west of Broadway

Pritzker to propose statewide zoning laws to spur homebuilding, limit local control Gov. Pritzker’s BUILD plan proposes statewide zoning laws to legalize granny flats and expand multi-unit housing.

There’s a lot to love in Pritzker’s “Building Up Illinois Developments” (BUILD) plan!

ADUs allowed statewide 🏘️
Up to eight homes on large residential lots 😏
Middle Housing exempt from parking mandates 🅿️
Standardized impact fees & review timelines 💰

capitolnewsillinois.com/news/pritzke...

This is not, like, an epoch-defining jump, but I think it's a meaningful concrete improvement in our ability to share our work in a way that is accessible and usable

If I had done this a few months ago, it probably would have been a combination plain text (very, very long) webpage, plus maybe a downloadable pdf. I think the likelihood is that this gets read by meaningfully more people, and helps them understand which candidates are actually on their ballot

Cook County Board of Review Commissioner Candidate Questionnaire 2026 | Impact for Equity window.addEventListener("message", function(e) { if (e.data && e.data.borHeight) { document.getElementById("bor-survey").style.height = e.data.borHeight + "px"; } });

Okay for something concrete, this got published today: I was able to use Claude Code to present our Board of Review candidate survey in this way, with the ability to click between candidates and see side-by-side answers for a given district, and an address lookup impactforequity.org/what-we-do/h...

Fair! In the cases I've done this with so far, I've used manual checks/other software to check the work. I'd definitely be hesitant to use it in cases where I couldn't do that.

I'm not saying they don't! I do think that the reason AI seems objectively more like the internet than NFTs in at least one significant way is that in just a few years, the proportion of the population using AI has become very substantial, far far higher than ever engaged with NFTs

Which is one reason I can't really imagine using it for writing, since as has been observed ad nauseum the act of writing is how you think through something

I'm also coming from a place where I have domain knowledge and AI outputs can be an input to critical analysis and/or a presentation of analysis I or others have already done. AI feels much more fraught for situations where struggling through is part of how you build domain knowledge

I appreciate it! And I definitely share those skepticisms. So far my use cases have been relatively straightforward, low-stakes, and easy to verify. If/when those things aren't true the question of how to mitigate downsides are very significant