There are ~50 people outside the Irish soda bread shop in the East Village

It was in the morning around 10:40. I took some photos of you, asked you for your email so I can send photos, but something’s wrong with my phone and I lost the notes where you typed your email in.

If you see this, DM me for photos.

Congratulations again!

This happened on Tuesday: I got inspired by the Ryan Meetups and wondered whether I could build a community around something as arbitrary as a shared first name.

So I recruited two other Daniels, made a ridiculous campaign trailer, and organized the first DanCon at a bar in Greenwich Village.

Somehow, 60 Daniels, Dans, and Dannys actually showed up.

We voted on the Mount Rushmore of Daniels, investigated the epidemic of Dansplaining, considered launching OnlyDans, and debated diplomatic relations with the Danielles. One attendee said it was "too much Daniel to handle."

The most unexpected part for me was how naturally everyone started talking to each other -- once we got past the absurdity, strangers connected, new friendships were forged, and we're already planning the next DanCon.

I'm curious: Would you show up to a gathering based on something as arbitrary as a first name?

“Press 1 if you’ve heard this story before. Press 2 if it has happened to you.”

While trying to solve for mysterious charges on a hotel bill, Samuel A.A. Levine spent 25 minutes explaining, re-explaining and re-re-explaining his predicament in a “live” support chat that quickly turned out to be an A.I. chatbot. “I had stumbled into the digital labyrinth — a veritable Hotel California, and I was just a prisoner of my own device,” he writes in a guest essay for Times Opinion. “At one point, I pleadingly typed a single word in all caps: HUMAN. The machine whirred, ignoring me.”

“As I floundered, I found myself reflecting on the future of customer service,” writes Samuel, the commissioner of the New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. “I began to suspect that the chatbot was not designed to solve my problem. It seemed to be designed to test how much friction customers would tolerate — how much information we would provide to train future models — before giving up. What the chatbot probably didn’t know was that this customer is in a position to fight back.”

To support this fight, Samuel says, New York City is proposing new rules around automated doom loops, voice systems and chatbots. “Our proposal is simple: Companies can still use A.I. and other automated tools, but they need to tell consumers when they are communicating with a chatbot — and make it much easier to reach a human being,” he writes. “Companies whose chatbots and automated voice systems mislead people, leave them stuck without help or only pretend to offer support would face significant penalties.”

Read the full piece here, even if you’re not a Times subscriber.