My Wife Thought the Thumbscrews on the Wide Angle Finderscope Were Too Long

It looks much better now.

And you can see the packaging from Thumbscrew Depot (a US maker with a very narrow niche name).

More Evidence Fact-Checkers Are Statistically Ignorant

 2/20/26 Crime Prevention Research Center:

A widely cited February 2024 report by Politifact claimed: “No evidence of rising LGBTQ+ violent extremism or ‘trans terrorism.” A follow report by them in September 2025 that examined both the FBI’s definition of active shooting attacks and the notion of mass shootings concluded: “Are trans people ‘statistically’ more prone to commit gun violence? Data shows a different picture.” It looked at the period from 2018 to 2024 that we examine here.

Unfortunately, these and similar claims make a basic error: they look only at the share of attacks committed by transgender individuals and fail to adjust for transgender individuals’ share of the population. That is an obvious statistical mistake. If a group makes up just 1 percent of the population but commits 10 percent of the attacks, no one would dismiss that disparity simply because the group accounts for “only” 10 percent of active shooting attacks.

Excel and Access Do Not Play Well Together

I have been working on a spreadsheet that does some data analysis on what the antigunners now call "high-fatality mass shootings" (6 or more killed in one incident). Their expert submitted a declaration that plotted the number of incidents and deaths since 1974.  It was a scarily rising line but not adjusted for population growth (which was pretty substantial)  i have been using the data from my mass murder database to extend high-fatality mass shootings back to 1891. Adjusted for population growth, the trend lines for both incidents and dead slightly declined 1891-2023. 

This involves Excel querying the database and a bit of processing of data. I already had a spreadsheet that did this, but it was not entirely my work and if called to testify about the methodology, I might have had to admit that I was not as sure as I would like, so I am recreating it.

This has been a booger to do.  I have been Microsoft CoPilot to help me and I am glad that I did. There are so many aspects of the interaction that are error-prone as even CoPilot admits that i would likely never have gotten as far as I have. At least it is something that I understand, but I find the nature of its failings overwhelming. 

Yes, if a field contains 1890 is formatted as text not number, i can see why VLOOOKUP might be unable to use it to do a numeric match. The obvious solution would be for VLOOKUP to be smart enough recognize and make the conversion.

Worse, 1891 converted to Number formatted cell apparently automatically converts to floating point, so VLOOKUP does recognize that the lookup of an integer 1891 should match 1891.00000.

The way that Excel does Access queries is also stupid. If you change the query in Access and refresh the query, it does not run the query against the named query but refuses a cached copy of the SQL from the last time. Fixing this is not as simple as saying to clear the cache or just making a fresh call to Access with that named query. What a mess.

Property Liens

This was one of the scams by the Freemen, a check fraud scam with pretensions of antigovernment political sect some years back.  They would file property liens alleging unpaid bills against...it seemed anybody they wanted to harrass.

So this 2/14/26 New York Post article about someone filing hundreds of millions in property liens for cleaning and financial services against Benedict Canyon homes surprised me not much except for the scale of the chutzpah.  The person filing the liens is a "life coach" who speaks very broken English.

Perhaps she needs an ICE visit.  

We Rescued a Chicken

A Polish White Crested which looks like a visit to the hairdresser went badly. It was in the field in front of our house driving our dogs nuts. (They like chicken even though it am sure that though I am sure they do not connect sautéed chicken Breast with that silly bird outside the fence.)

It was getting cold and the chicken probably could not call Uber. Rhonda knew of a house that had this particular breed so we drove it over there, where disclaimed knowledge of it, but happily put in the branches of a tree with the other chickens. 

As Rhonda was getting out of the car, the chicken thanked us by laying an egg. It went into an omelet this morning. 

Free AI Reputed to be Inferior to Paid AI

 This article asserts that the paid versions of AI are far superior to the free versions and the speed of improvement is accelerating:

I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just... appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.

Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I'll tell the AI: "I want to build this app. Here's what it should do, here's roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it." And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn't like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it's satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: "It's ready for you to test." And when I test it, it's usually perfect....

How fast this is actually moving

Let me make the pace of improvement concrete, because I think this is the part that's hardest to believe if you're not watching it closely.

In 2022, AI couldn't do basic arithmetic reliably. It would confidently tell you that 7 × 8 = 54.

By 2023, it could pass the bar exam.

By 2024, it could write working software and explain graduate-level science.

By late 2025, some of the best engineers in the world said they had handed over most of their coding work to AI.

On February 5th, 2026, new models arrived that made everything before them feel like a different era.

If you haven't tried AI in the last few months, what exists today would be unrecognizable to you....

What you should actually do

I'm not writing this to make you feel helpless. I'm writing this because I think the single biggest advantage you can have right now is simply being early. Early to understand it. Early to use it. Early to adapt.

Start using AI seriously, not just as a search engine. Sign up for the paid version of Claude or ChatGPT. It's $20 a month. But two things matter right away. First: make sure you're using the best model available, not just the default. These apps often default to a faster, dumber model. Dig into the settings or the model picker and select the most capable option. Right now that's GPT-5.2 on ChatGPT or Claude Opus 4.6 on Claude, but it changes every couple of months. If you want to stay current on which model is best at any given time, you can follow me on X (@mattshumer_). I test every major release and share what's actually worth using.

Second, and more important: don't just ask it quick questions. That's the mistake most people make. They treat it like Google and then wonder what the fuss is about. Instead, push it into your actual work. If you're a lawyer, feed it a contract and ask it to find every clause that could hurt your client. If you're in finance, give it a messy spreadsheet and ask it to build the model. If you're a manager, paste in your team's quarterly data and ask it to find the story. The people who are getting ahead aren't using AI casually. They're actively looking for ways to automate parts of their job that used to take hours. Start with the thing you spend the most time on and see what happens.

I am going to ask the subscription Grok to review a spreadsheet that I created to evaluate it for errors in assumptions and math. Yes, it found errors.  It is not perfect but it is getting me where the data is something that I can say that I understand.

Even SuperGrok has some resource limits and I reached them trying to get Excel charts to make sense. So I switched to CoPilot figuring it would understand a Microsoft product. After several hours trying to get data that plots fine as a line chart to become an XY scatter plot because trendline is only valid with XY scatter plot even though Excel will let you add a trendline to a line chart. I do not see how anyone uses Excel charting without AI.

"That Thing That Never Happens is Now Happening Every Day"

Small Dead Animals exaggerates but still.  2/17/26 CTV News reports on a shooting at a Rhode Island hockey game that left three dead including the murderer:

"Goncalves identified the shooter as Robert Dorgan, who she said also went by the name Roberta Esposito and was born in 1969."