kaz

kaz

@karenkaz.com

Chicago: Belmont Cragin, #bikechi, CTA rants Personal: greyhounds, cats, homeownership, sometimes sports Work: marketing, data, analytics, nonprofits, city planning nerd ABOLISH ICE is the merciful position

669 followers251 following5K posts

I love walking out of my house and seeing this tree in the fall. It’s always so pretty.

The best part is, one of the books is a T Kingfisher book (Daggerbound) which is just the perfect cozy escape I needed

kaz@karenkaz.com

i decided to take a mental health day today, and it's like the universe wanted to reward me because TWO library books i've been waiting on for weeks just came off my hold queue.

i decided to take a mental health day today, and it's like the universe wanted to reward me because TWO library books i've been waiting on for weeks just came off my hold queue.

kaz reposted

trying to do tan suit arugula stuff to obama in 2026 is extremely funny. good luck with that. you need a mortgage to get halloween candy

One of the mayoral candidates sent a text with a video of Paul Vallas saying I should listen to him about CPS president? LOLOLOLOL

Anyway, filled out my mail in ballot which I’ll be dropping off today. Civic duty ✅ (Do I have to put Dottie’s name down on the “did someone help mark your ballot” line?)

Celebrated N’s bday a few days early at Fork and Coin. Can highly recommend! And it was warm enough to sit on the back patio, which was lovely. Walked there and back which is about 4 miles round trip under a cool spooky moon on the way home.

kaz reposted

ATTENTION CHICAGO: valiantly have we resisted attempts by Dark Forces from the West to distract us with the Deep Dish Pizza Discourse so they can steal our water. They see our strength and have invented a new local pizza discourse to beat us. DO NOT FALL FOR IT! DO NOT ENGAGE IN PIZZA DISCOURSE!

Mike Tanier@miketanier.bsky.social

"Tavern style" just means "pizza in a bar." Bars all over the country have this. That's like saying "Chicago has something special called draft beer."

So the Best Buy website has become like Amazon or Walmart, where the item may not actually be fulfilled by Best Buy? wtf man.

I got all excited to see the headphones I wanted at a good price, but it’s fulfilled by “Ted’s electronics” whatever that is???

one of the worst parts about sitting in a cube instead of a private office is all the respect I’m losing for my colleagues as i overhear how much they use AI and talk about AI.

Had a bad dream about my dead dog, couldn’t bike to work because of knee pain, left my overnight oats in the fridge and the breakfast I paid $10 to replace it sucked. Not a great start to the day.

it sucks to have a bad dream about your dog but then you wake up and your dog died a year ago so you can’t even hug her to make yourself feel better.

I’m not even looking for 100% cotton, I just haaaate the plasticky sweaty feel of all synthetic socks!

It’s heated cat bed season for all who celebrate. (Milton. Milton is the one who celebrates.)

The mask has these metal cooling pads that go under your eyes and I was skeptical at first but man it feels good.

kaz@karenkaz.com

Beep bop boop

Just really fucking darkly hilarious that I’m in the office today because I wanted to make the move of shame from private office to cubicle without everyone here, but one other person is here and it’s the person who sits right next to my new cubicle. 😭

(I got kicked out of my office because I don’t have any direct reports and they ran out of office space for people who do have direct reports. “It has nothing to do with performance or the respect we have for the work you do.” Which may be true but it still feels like shit.)

wondering why my bsky morning catch-up feed looks so familiar, then remembering i woke up at 2am and couldn’t fall back asleep so i’ve already read it.

I have needed to buy some plain white athletic socks for like a year. Finally went to the store and bought some today. Realized just now I never checked the size on the package. I bought the wrong size.

I may not use it very often but when I need it, the apple corer/peeler/slicer comes in clutch.

Just want everyone to know that Milton is officially a sweet boy per his medical records

7 am is just a bit too early on a Sunday to be blasting music so loud the entire neighborhood can hear it

Apologies for all the typos in the alt text, my phone did not want to autocorrect for some reason

"working" with an LLM is about as bad as something can be for the way my brain and ADHD works. like the #1 way to get me to not want to engage with something is to dump pages of text that says the same thing over and over in different ways. it actively repels me and my ability to use its output.

View full thread

and nowhere in the pages of the rest of the output does it ever describe or even mention layers 2-3. but there are 10 items in the primary numbered list. each of the items in the primary numbered list has some sort of sub-list that might be A, B, C or might be Step 1, 2, 3 or unnumbered subheads

in other news, my CFO today closed the all staff meeting by telling us he asked ChatGPT how to close the meeting and then said what "she" (yes really, he has gendered it) told him to.

"working" with an LLM is about as bad as something can be for the way my brain and ADHD works. like the #1 way to get me to not want to engage with something is to dump pages of text that says the same thing over and over in different ways. it actively repels me and my ability to use its output.

i'm bad enough at reading human-written knowledgebase articles or help pages or whatever unless they are really precise. the words go into my eyeballs but my mind has already started wandering. LLM output is that x 1000.

also the nested upon nested numbered lists and bullet points? completely disorienting. i have to use an LLM for a project, so i asked copilot how best to engage with an LLM for this kind of work. the first item in the numbered list says "think of the inputs in four layers" and describes Layer One...

milton's primary vet and specialist vet are like proactively talking to each other which is how it should be but has never happened in my 25 year history of owning pets as an adult, so it feels really wild to me

lol i thought "maybe mixing creatine into my cottage cheese would be better than drinking it in water" and boy was i wrong

for the next 2 months i am basically required to eat lots of gluten, so that if i have celiac disease i fuck up my small intestine as much as possible so it shows up on the endoscopy/biopsy. thankfully, i have few symptoms so this will be a fun couple of months and not torturous.

did i make sure to schedule the endoscopy for AFTER thanksgiving? yes, yes i did.

The wording of this email from the Chicago Bungalow Association keeps making me chuckle.

although i am not officially diagnosed and am in fact not yet supposed to start eliminating gluten, i am delighted to see that the Jeni's buttercream birthday cake ice cream is gluten free.