Mar 14, 2026
Here’s my understanding of the situation:
Anthropic signed a contract with the Pentagon last summer. It originally said the Pentagon had to follow Anthropic’s Usage Policy like everyone else. In January, the Pentagon attempted to renegotiate, asking to ditch the Usage Policy and instead have Anthropic’s AIs...
Mar 14, 2026
Malicious streetlights are an evil trick from Dark Data Journalism. Some annoying enemy has a valid complaint. So you use FACTS and LOGIC to prove that something similar-sounding-but-slightly-different is definitely false. Then you act like you’ve debunked the complaint.
My “favorite” example, spotted during the...
Mar 14, 2026
It’s that time again. Even numbered years are book reviews, odd-numbered years are non-book reviews, so you’re limited to books for now.
Write a review of a book. There’s no official word count requirement, but previous finalists and winners were often between 2,000 and 10,000 words. There’s no official...
Mar 14, 2026
The problem: people hate crime and think it’s going up. But actually, crime barely affects most people and is historically low. So what’s going on?
In our discussion yesterday, many commenters proposed that the discussion about “crime” was really about disorder.
Disorder takes many forms, but its symptoms...
Mar 14, 2026
Last year, the US may have recorded the lowest murder rate in its 250 year history. Other crimes have poorer historical data, but are at least at ~50 year lows.
This post will do two things:
- Establish that our best data show crime rates are historically low
- Argue that this is a real effect, not just reporting...