Andy Wheeler @CrimeDecoder

Oakland's ALPR cameras identify so many stolen vehicles and stolen license plates that they just keep the alerts off so as to not overwhelm the understaffed police department. oaklandca.gov/files/assets/c…

Chris Hoofnagle @hoofnagle

17 hours ago

Thousands of stolen cars are detected by Flock, so many the police don't have the resources to respond oaklandside.org/2026/06/05/flo…

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The data forensics report in the Francesca Gino v. Harvard lawsuit is an eye-opening read on how experts can document file manipulations.

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Nïck Brown🌻 @sTeamTraen

21 hours ago

@florianederer @andre_quentin @FakePhD_reveal drive.google.com/file/d/1Fkw2n7…

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@ZackKorman Seriously debating making this come out of people's budgets. (The individuals going off the rails with tokens are the ones I am the most concerned about doing something silly.)

This is data from a serial offenders journey-to-crime, github.com/apwheele/buffer Let me know if you have another application of this though!

If you want to estimate whether some strictly positive data's PDF is decreasing or has a hump, you need about 50 observations. Can fit a gamma (and shape > 1 is evidence of a hump), or use a kernel density estimate (taking care to not smear data to negative values)

@GoogleAI When is API access going to be available?

There was a fad about personalized medicine maybe 10~20 years ago. This was mostly focused on genetics, and some folks thought analysis of "big data" (like claims) might also be the path. Humans are too varied, and these are pretty much hopeless. But one path that does make sense is regular measures and self-experimentation. Even with incredibly large studies, you can still only estimate a quite noisy dose-response curve. If you have easy access to personal measures, you can however measure it for yourself. So my money is on LabCorp will figure out personalized medicine before anyone else. Making MRIs cheaper is another major innovation in measuring. Making them cheaper so people can just pay out of pocket and see progress on whatever condition they want would be excellent. In-situ devices I expect will also be important to get to real personalized medicine (expanding beyond blood sugar).

Paul Graham @paulg

2 days ago

There's a startup in the current YC batch that built an MRI machine in 101 days.

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If you are actually spending a decent amount of time copy editing and using prior source material to mimic your voice, Pangram will not flag it, andrewpwheeler.com/2026/03/20/usi… It is pretty clearly AI slop that Pangram flags (which is good!)

Max Spero @max_spero_

2 days ago

@akoustov @pangram Genuinely man what is your problem? I respect if you personally don't have use for the tool. If you don't mind seeing AI content then you're not my target audience. Do you truly wish there was no way to tell whether something is AI-generated? I don't think you fully understand

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More basic than a bank account -- there should be a mechanism via parole release plans to get inmates a new state ID (and then get replacement documents like birth cert and SSN if they need it). So they just have that when they get out.

Right On Crime @RightOnCrime

2 days ago

Most of us log into our bank accounts online without a second thought. But for many people reentering society, accessing basic banking services isn't always that simple 👀

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andrewpwheeler.com/2014/09/25/qua… Debated on making a slide rule to figure this out for lawyers/judge to use during during voir dire (@OrinKerr 's recent post on slide rules reminded me of it). But probably just a web app is fine.

In the US when seating a panel of jurists for a trial, each counsel can either strike a juror for cause, or use a limited number of peremptory challenges in which you can eliminate a juror for whatever reason. Except that you cannot eliminate entire protected classes from the jury pool. E.g. if there were 3 Asians in the pool and the defense eliminated 2 of them, the prosecution could raise a *Batson* challenge. This blog post (linked in 2nd comment) shows how to use the hyper-geometric distribution to determine the probability of eliminating P protected classes out of N potential jurors with K challenges by chance. Batson challenges are determined on appeal, so often it is difficult to exactly know N (and sometimes P given the way venire is run), so this post shows some simple bounding exercises for the case in question. The probability of randomly striking 2 out of 3 Asian jurists, given the large number of challenges, was not that small. So to me this particular appeal should have been thrown out in the first stage of the Batson challenge. Most people do not have a good intuitive sense of these by chance probabilities, so 2 out of 3 seems bad but is not that rare even if just choosing people randomly. It also highlights one way to eliminate the possibility of racial bias in peremptory challenges -- the fewer the challenges the less likely one can eliminate entire classes. Each side should only get 1 in my opinion (2 for defense if you insist).

Anthropic models (and Claude Code) are good products. These blog posts are not. The long story short of this post is have good, human readable documentation and save evals in a table. (Which does not take 4k words to say, but fine.) They do not mention *at all* data access patterns. Agent should only have read? Maybe some sane timeouts if you have a long running query? Or a locally cached copy/reporting server for testing? Sensitive data only send summaries to Claude Code or only sends whether query was successful? It is fine if you want to have a crazy agent and deal with table schemas that change daily (which I would suggest folks rethink their schemas a bit if that is occurring, it is not normal). But how about even giving a token sentence about not letting the agent drop all your tables on prod because it fails your test.

ClaudeDevs @ClaudeDevs

3 days ago

How do we automate business analytics with Claude? New blog post covering our best practices for skills, data foundations, and evaluations when building agents to perform data analysis: claude.com/blog/how-anthr…

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@catmcgee @pedrobarretto_ The compliance API for codex is not turned on by default (or at least it was not as of like two months ago), the admin has to at least turn it on. Once turned on, conversations are saved for 30 days.

While it is definitely the case that chronic offenders also commit domestic crimes at higher rates, the macro level time series trends between the two do not correlate (like Nicole shows for traffic). Most of the volatility is driven by outdoor violence between young men (not per se gang). Here is homicides in Chicago for example. DV homicides have a long term downward trend (above population loss in Chicago).

For a few graphs to go with Peter's observation, Dallas/NYC/Chicago when superimposed follow very similar trajectories over time, and are good bell weathers for the national trend. Baltimore basically never came back down from the 90's beak.

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Peter Moskos @PeterMoskos

4 days ago

Baltimore has always been a bit resistant to national trends. And sure, it's fun to say: "That's just Baldimore, hon!" But looking at _why_ the city bucks so-called trends is revealing. (thread)

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One of my favorite maps, proportion differences in violent crimes vs pedestrian stops in NYC.

7 Days to Destroy Her Garden... Or Else!

@ashleytrubin It is more so because people are overly risk averse. So even when the expected value of change is positive, because of potential variance people do not make the change.