Eric Roche

Ex "That's not just X, That's Y" statements at the end of a paragraph.

Hey, did you use AI for the script? I noticed some of the summary statements sounded a bit like ChatGPT.

Understood. But then work on communicating those limitations to residents and managing expectations. Don't wait for overnight deployment to cause a crisis. Figure out how you will monitor and report the facts around 911 incidents, road usage, etc.

A city should actively regulate robotaxi fleets *before* they are deployed. There may be major benefits, but there will also certainly be costs and tradeoffs. It's the role of a city to balance the positives and negatives based on what their citizens want. Pause, reflect, be proactive.

#robotaxi

I'm in the middle of a deep-dive on the different ways governments turn legislative and administrative goals into results. The lack of standard definitions around "policy", "strategy", "initiative", etc. is astounding. Everyone has different definitions and the terms massively overlap each other.

It was really easy and added several positive hits to the list that we would have otherwise missed.

I could have been more thorough by promoting things like "which words or phrases are government officials from Puerto Rico (or Tribal Governments) likely to use instead of my terms."

I had about 50 search terms manually drafted. The LLM took that list generated about 150 common misspellings of these words. I reviewed each and thought they were pretty reasonable typos/errors that people were likely to make.

Then used python/excel to search the reports and flag the results.

3/

To find out who may have this issue I generated a list of terms to search their report for. Terms like "General Fund, Budget, Revenue Replacement, etc."

Then had an LLM generate a list of misspellings of these words. Things like "Generall fund" or "General Funs" is what it would come up with.

2/

Sure! I had 30k reports filed by government officials. We knew many of them used our funds for government services, but may have not reported it correctly.

1/

Local governments need to pay attention to this.

If I need to search a dataset for a huge list of terms that have been typed by humans, ChatGPT is very useful for generating common misspellings of the words on my search list.

Allows more robust results and usually finds between 2% & 8% more data that would have otherwise been missed.

Study finds Americans do not like mass incarceration UC criminologist Francis Cullen co-led a study on American opinions about mass incarceration. The study concludes that Americans don’t want their tax dollars spent on more prisons and feel there shoul...

Interesting piece with some policy insights.

www.uc.edu/news/article...

The Onion is doing some really innovative work in survey design

Not sure how many people realize that battery storage already supplies 30% of California’s electricity demand at peak.

Batteries aren’t the future — they’re here now.

For academics that are skeptical about AI's ability to provide perceptive & useful results, a fast way to test your assumptions is to give one of your papers as a PDF to o3 (or Gemini 2.5 but it lacks some tools), with the prompt:

"critique this paper"

I have found very good accuracy & insight...

The Chicago Pope implies the existence of a New Keynesian Pope and a Behavioral Pope

Remember NFTs?

To anybody in leadership at the state or municipal level: 18F’s destruction makes this *the perfect time* to hire experienced technologists, which you all need very badly. Most 18Fers would love to stay in public service. They are spread throughout the country.

Go go go!

There is a lot going on in this paper, but it shows that no matter their maker's country (China or US) or politics (Musk's Grok vs. OpenAI), models seem to converge to the same values, often with some fairly shocking results. Those values might be steered in the future, but by who is a big question.

Can we force a sale of Concur?

I grew up listening to stories about "Jimmy" being told by my grandfather. They both went through the Naval Academy at the same time.

Both were tremendously kind, honest, and wonderful people that I will always admire. The world is a bit dimmer this evening.

Feels like the Dreadnought Moment for AI is coming

When the HMS Dreadnought launched, she rendered all other warships obsolete. It was not one thing, but a mix of technologies combined into the right design that disrupted.

The pieces for transformative AI applications are there, not assembled yet.

Link issue?

📉📈

WASHINGTON (AP) — Agriculture Department orders testing of the nation's milk supply for bird flu.

Everybody Loves FRED: How America Fell for a Data Tool From Facebook political debates to college classrooms, the St. Louis Fed’s data tool has gained a major following.

This is a beautiful jobs-day love letter to FRED, without which #EconSky (and, especially, #NumbersDay) would not be possible. From @jeannasmialek.bsky.social:
www.nytimes.com/2024/12/06/b...

Evidence has demonstrated this effect in numerous cities now.

I understand why it sounds weird to say, 'building a bunch of fancy new townhouses and skyscrapers will make housing more affordable!' but it simply appears to be true.

I find that I often struggle with AI on how it judges what information to keep and what to let go of as it struggles to make complex information more concise. It's not transparent how it judges which info to keep, and which to discard.

Good context

I'm driving (passenger) from Houston to KC today and absolutely need some reading material. Does anyone have any AI articles they recommend?