Andy Wheeler

Technical consulting for coding, predictive analytics, and optimization. Focused on public sector applications, mostly with police departments.

[Andy Wheeler @CrimeDecoder]

Anthropic has AI architect roles that are focused on Federal, State, and Local government.

I think these are good positions -- I would like gov to invest in more in house capabilities to do these things as well.

For current students and professors, the skills to get this job (listed at $240 - $345k in NYC for this particular advert), is fundamentally what my book, Large Language Models for Mortals: A Practical Guide for Analysts with Python, is about.

This thread is a tech skills needed for a modern LLM stack focused AI engineer.

[Andy Wheeler @CrimeDecoder]

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).

[Andy Wheeler @CrimeDecoder]

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.

[Peter Moskos @PeterMoskos]

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)

[Andy Wheeler @CrimeDecoder]

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

[Institute for Justice @IJ]

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

[Andy Wheeler @CrimeDecoder]

@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.

[John Loeber 🎢 @johnloeber]

Notes on 100+ Recent Technical Interviews

I interview a ton of engineers. Recruiting is the single most important technical CEO activity. Here are a bunch of impressions

1. There is a severe ZIRP engineering overhang that is currently washing out. They're getting laid off, managed out, etc. after having been massively overhired around 2020-2022. This is worst for Tier-2 big tech (think PayPal, Bill, etc.) but also FAANGs. These are overwhelmingly bad engineers.

2. This flood of unqualified but good-on-paper candidates makes this the hardest SF hiring market I have ever seen, due to the amount of nominally strong-looking candidates that you need to grind through.

3. I am highly skeptical of "AI as a cause for engineering layoffs". I think this is a large-scale polite fiction -- the companies don't want to admit they overhired, the engineers don't want to admit they are bad at their jobs. Everyone's blaming AI when it's really just the market rectifying itself.

4. Many of these engineers appear never to have had a real engineering function at their corporations. They're sitting in meetings, "making decisions about technology" but are unable to write software. I leave many interviews baffled by what exactly they were doing for so many years, let alone what their manager was doing.

5. I have interviewed some engineers from FAANG companies so shockingly nontechnical that I am forced to conclude that there is either (1) a lot of resume fraud going on or (2) that there are kickback grifts within those organizations -- people hiring their cousins and splitting the pay, that kind of thing. I have no other explanation.

6. There's a fun side-effect where after interviewing 20+ people from certain small but public companies, I actually feel like I am gaining a short sellers' advantage: there are financial technology companies out there that, knowing what I now know, I would never deposit a single dollar into.

8. Based on this "exhaust" data, and extrapolating a little bit, maybe aggressively so: I think folks like @pmarca are basically right when they say that ~every tech company is overstaffed by a factor of 2-4x. Whatever the reason -- staffing ahead of need, monopolizing certain engineer types (Google-style), headcount-driven promotion incentives, the reality is that a lot of these companies are not being run for the shareholders. The aggregate SBC expense is insane, and I expect this is going to get rectified eventually.

I'm sure that AI will play a role in rectifying this -- but I fear that people are going to blame AI for taking people's jobs when the reality is that the jobs were already long-gone, possibly always useless, but the highly-paid butts-in-seats remained. People will be mad at AI for taking away their lucrative sinecures. Maybe that's the same effect from a public policy perspective, but it feels different morally.

[Andy Wheeler @CrimeDecoder]

Blog post is here, https://t.co/GPoEw0glM0

The test is currently in my ptools R package, https://t.co/HQVPIBIW6C

[Andy Wheeler @CrimeDecoder]

When I was a crime analyst, I developed a small sample test to determine if an offender showed a random distribution to offend on different days of the week.

The same work can be applied to Benford analysis of digit distributions.

This blog post I go through an example of fraudulent checks in the Nigrini book (which he states is too small a sample to conduct analysis on, 23 checks).

I show the p-value in his example with my test is incredibly small. And even if people are using a random number generator (which is unlikely, as most people when they fudge tend to be much less random), the power with 20 some checks is around 50% for my test.

[Andy Wheeler @CrimeDecoder]

For what it is worth (professional software engineer), I do not believe the total disruption of the software industry will happen. AI will be a complement, not a replacement.

Many white collar organizations are fat (think when Elon took over X and fired more than half the staff and everything was fine). Most software companies would similarly survive that. Nothing to do with AI (and the hiring glut for Covid free money has only really recently leveled back to equilibrium).

The software industry is the most easily replaced by AI (for reasons John mentioned). What engineers do though is too varied to get 100% replacement. (The exception are companies being built now that 100% leverage AI to build everything.)

I had been using the AI tools before they were popular (before the 180 John talks about, I taught myself Claude Code on Sonnet 3.5 and then 3.7, so early 2025). It really has not been that big of a shift, people who 180'd were not familiar with the tools to begin with.

They can be very helpful, folks saying they are writing 30k+ lines of code a day though are full of it. I am happy if I have a session of 1k lines (and after the product base is built, it is often not even that, but more tedious small incremental testing).

There is a happy path for everyone even with AI just being a complement (still makes the AI companies a ton of money, and most people are not squeezed out of jobs). So I just do not foresee total replacement.

I also do not foresee massive gains in productivity. AI can be a real boon for very good engineers, most engineers are just not at the caliber though to effectively 10x their output and produce quality work. (One of the reasons I harp on wanting more good social science grads to go into software engineering, the median software engineer is not good. Giving a not good software engineer AI will currently just mostly compound the not good output, not on average improve it.)

So my overall take is very boring. Marginal improvements across a wide variety of white collar jobs are likely to occur, but not massive disruption.

[John Arnold @johnarnold]

After many conversations over past year with friends, business associates & policymakers about the future of AI job disruption, I’ve tried to get my thoughts in order. With the caveat that I have no specific AI expertise, here they are. Comments and corrections encouraged.🧵
1/n

[Andy Wheeler @CrimeDecoder]

I presume PLoS One already collected their fees, so they probably don’t care if a paper is retracted after that. (Assuming they do not give refunds.)

[I4R @I4Replication]

Incentives to replicate articles are so bad. Even when your comment leads to the retraction of a PLOS One article, the reward is a (10 days late) email with a thank you at the bottom.

Retraction notice: https://t.co/JZYtD7IvVg.

But we are not complaining about PLOS One 🧵

[Andy Wheeler @CrimeDecoder]

I have always viewed my career as "we have a problem, what is the best solution to solve that problem". This not uncommonly involves combining either existing algorithms to new scenarios, or entirely creating new algorithms.

For example, here is an algorithm I created to help identify *the best* individuals to deliver the message to in a focused deterrence intervention. The idea behind FD is a collective action problem, you can't get a single gang member to stop carrying a gun if everyone else is carrying a gun. So you tell all the groups at once, if you shoot at another gang member, we are coming after the entire gang.

You deliver this message via a call-in. The rub is you often cannot dictate every gang member attend the call-in. When looking at data for a few jurisdictions in upstate New York I worked with, they tended to call in very sub-optimal individuals on the periphery of the network. So I developed a greedy algorithm that identified the best people to spread the message in the network.

You can apply the algorithm on your own networks on a web-app on my site, https://t.co/gfecgi5rqp. (This is run on your local computer, so you can input sensitive data on here and I cannot see it.)

[Andy Wheeler @CrimeDecoder]

Just tried out the Grok CLI. With X premium you get credits.

It did fine in my task, fixing a user email sign up for a not trivial code base. (If I asked a human to do this without knowing the codebase, I would give them two days as reference. If they knew the codebase I would give them 1 day.) Did all the usual stuff I expected it to as well (viewing logs, starting up Docker, reviewing the code base).

It did not one shot the issue, but I am not sure any of the other tools would have either.

Context window filling seems to be slower than the other tools, so the 512K (top right) I don't suspect will be a problem. This session I am pretty sure would have reached the 1 million token window for Gemini and Claude Code. So not sure what magic Grok is doing to keep that in check, but I like it.

I will try out some more on various projects, but could totally see just keeping my premium and using this. (I have been doing pay as you go for Gemini and Claude Code previously.)

[Andy Wheeler @CrimeDecoder]

@3RenChengHu @moultano Uni admissions are easier, but it is more that tests for baseline competency right now are difficult to impossible for most employers to use, https://t.co/rNzp8NvXFG.

[Andy Wheeler @CrimeDecoder]

And old blog post but a good one, how do you estimate whether a particular trait in individuals crosses (a question of interest in lifecourse criminology)

This post I discuss if you fit a function of time, how to tell if the two lines cross.

https://t.co/z304cov9ir

[Zack Korman @ZackKorman]

This is hilarious.

However, I do want to explain my experience and background for those who don't know me that well. I don’t want people to feel misled.

So here's a thread about... me, weirdly.

[Andy Wheeler @CrimeDecoder]

I actually don't think it is all that bad an idea. So things like the Crime and Justice Research Alliance are arguably activist (they just advocated for things folks in this thread mostly agree with).

It is hard to draw a bright line, https://t.co/Xe1ZOoW1ui, just let people have a section of ASC and do their own thing. If they really care, they can later make a non-profit org to support their mission.

[Andy Wheeler @CrimeDecoder]

https://t.co/SJNSpwTjIo

[Andy Wheeler @CrimeDecoder]

Still the best book showing different APIs, advanced use cases (structured outputs, RAG variants, tool calling, and agentic coding).

Buy the book!