So the time has come, VerusCite is a fully functional site and ready to release to the public. Hallucinations in peer review research are a current major problem. It signals a grave lack of care by researchers, and should trigger subsequently more scrutiny of the claims therein. But even in articles that researchers clearly use genAI tools to write whole cloth, the majority of the citations are correct. VerusCite only takes about 2~3 minutes to extract and verify those citations in an academic paper.

Between this (which in my benchmarks appears to work just as well as the typical web search) and Luna, I will likely be able to reduce VerusCite down to $1 to review a paper instead of $2.

My feed these days is mostly folks arguing about ALPRs and Flock cameras. In 2025, Omaha launched cityofomahaconnect.org/ I've been curious about it for awhile so I used @CrimeDecoder's new Crime Synth app to estimate monthly violent crime rates after rollout.

One of the ironies with the Flock losing contracts, would not surprise me if it forced their hand to pivot to the commercial market and make some cheap alternative camera for homes/businesses (competitor to Ring). Which I expected to happen eventually anyway, but may just happen faster now.

One of the reasons I built the synth tool is I don't like the defaults currently in use. One of those is the use of placebo's, which have way too wide of intervals relative to other conformal approaches. Placebo for city level here needs to reduce/increase crime by nearly 50% to be able to detect an effect!

I was going to wait until my son graduated high school to write about homeschooling my son, but the Nikole Hannah Jones article and the hubbub is worth hopping on to in short. I hate to be the bearer of bad news for folks, but I have experienced almost all of the same things NHJ writes about in public (and charter) schools around the country. These run the mix of basically low income white (Rotterdam NY), and then pretty well mixed schools (Plano TX, which is affluent, and a charter school in Wendell, NC). Probably not at the level of dysfunction that NHJ witnessed, but enough to make me take my son out and home school. (We home schooled after he went back in person after Covid at a charter school in NC for a few months. It quite honestly could have been a scam it was so bad. Reading Bryan Caplan's blog post is also what helped me decide to home school.) Chaotic school lunches that are free for alls (and similar in-classroom behavior, go volunteer a day to help). Teachers and Principals not responding to questions (or when they do, take weeks). Teachers not performing basic assessments, and only when being called out decide to change their mind. Teachers clearly grading homework wrong (I suppose I did not experience teachers not grading things at all). This is just par for the course in school, especially for younger kids, as far as I can tell. The only way for kids to escape the bedlam is via gifted programs. I'm sorry but I'm not sure you can escape "well no one taught my kid division or basic algebra correctly" anywhere currently. I am really grateful that my son got into a prestigious science high school. (I did not look forward to the bias against home-schooling when applying to colleges.) You could unfortunately write a pretty similar article for Plano, TX though if parents bothered to look close enough.