For a brief year in review, total views for the two different websites have decreased in the past year. For this blog, I am going to be a few thousand shy of 100,000 views. (2023 I had over 150k views, and 2024 I had over 140k views.) For the Crime De-Coder site, I am going to only get around 15k views.

Part of it is I posted less, this will be the 21st blog post this year on the personal blog (2023 had 46 and 2024 had 32 posts). The Crime De-Coder site had 12 blog posts, so pretty consistent with the prior year. Both are pretty bursty, with large bouts of traffic coming from if I post something to Hacker News I can get 1k to 10k views in a day or two if it makes it to the front page. So the 2024 stats for the crime de-coder was a few of those Hacker News bumps I did not get in 2025.

Some of it could legitimately be traditional Google search being usurped by the gen AI tools. This is the first year I had appreciable referrals from chatgpt, but they are less than 1000. The other tools are trivial amount of referrals. If I worried about SEO more, I would have more updating/regular content (as old pages are devalued quite a bit by google, and it seems to be getting more severe over time).

I have upped my use of the free tools quite a bit. ChatGPT knows me pretty well, and I use Claude Desktop almost every day as well.

An IAM policy scroll is more of a nightmare, and I definitely ask more python questions than R, but the cartoon desk is pretty close to spot on. I am close to paying for Anthropic subscription for Claude code credits (currently use pay as I go via Bedrock, and this is the first month I went over $20).

What pages on the blog are popular I can never be sure of. My most popular post last year was Downloading Police Employment Trends from the FBI Data Explorer. A 2023 post, that had random times where it would have several hundred visits in a short hour span. (Some bot collecting sites? I do not know.) If it is actual people, you would want to check out my Sworn Dashboard site, where you can look at trends for PDs much easier than downloading all the data yourself!

One thing that has grown though, I do short form posting on LinkedIn on my crime de-coder page. Impressions total for the year is over 340k (see the graph), and I currently am a few shy of 4400 followers.

LinkedIn is nice because it can be slightly longer form than the other social media sites. I would suggest you follow me there (in addition to signing up for RSS feeds for the two sites). That is the easiest way to follow my work.

I also took over as a moderator of the Crime Analysis Reddit forum, it is better than the IACA forums in my opinion, so encourage folks to post there for crime analysis questions.

Crime De-Coder Work

Crime De-Coder work has been steady (but not increasing). Similar to last year had several consulting gigs conducting crime analysis for premises liability cases (and one other case I may share my opinions once it is over), and doing some small projects with non-profits and police departments.

One big project was a python training in Austin.

The Python Book (which I also translated to Spanish/French), had a trickle of new sales. 2024 had around 100 sales and 2025 had around 50 sales. It is close to 2/3 print sales and 1/3 epub, so definately folks should have physical prints if you are selling books still.

Doing trainings basically makes writing the book worth it, but I do hope eventually the book makes it way into grad school curriculum’s. (Only one course so far.) I have pitched to grad schools to have me run a similar bootcamp to what I do for crime analysts, so if interested let me know.

The biggest new thing was Crime De-Coder got an Arnold Grant. Working with Denver PD on an experiment to evaluate a chronic offender initiative.

At the Day Gig

At my day gig, I was officially promoted to a senior manager and then quickly to a director position. Hence you get posts like what to show in your tech resume and notes on project management.

One of the reasons I am big on python – it is the dominant programming language in data science. It is hard for me to recruit from my network, as majority of individuals just know a little R (if you were a hard core R person, had packages/well executed public repo’s, I could more easily think you will be able to migrate to python to work on my team).

So learn python if you want to be a data scientist is my advice (and see other job market advice at my archived newsletter).

AI Predictions

At the day gig, my work went from 100% traditional supervised machine learning models to more like 50/50 traditional vs generative AI applications. The genAI hype is real, but I think it is worthwhile putting my thoughts to paper.

The biggest question is will AI take all of our jobs? I think a more likely end scenario is the AI tools just become better at helping humans do tasks. The leap from helping a human do something faster vs an AI tool doing it 100% on its own with 0 human input is hard. The models are getting incrementally better, but I think to fully replace people in a substantive way will require another big advancement in fundamental capabilities. Making a human 10x more productive is easier and still will make the AI companies a ton of money.

Sometimes people view the 10x idea and say that will take jobs, just not 100% of jobs. That is a view though that there is only a finite amount of work to be done. That assumption is clearly not true, and being able to do work faster/cheaper just induces demand for more potential work. The example with calculators making more banking jobs, not less, is basically the same example.

One of the critiques of the current systems is they are overvalued, so we are in a bubble. I do not remember where I read it, but one estimate was if everyone in the US spent $1 a day on the different AI tools, that would justify the current valuations for OpenAI, Anthropic, NVIDIA, etc. I think that is totally doable, we spend a few thousand a workday at Gainwell on the foundation models for example for a few projects, and we are just going to continue to roll out more and more. Gainwell is a company with around 6k employees for reference, and our current AI applications touch way less than 1k of those employees. We have plenty of room to grow those applications.

It is super hard though to build systems to help people do things faster. And we are talking like “this thing that used to take 30 minutes now takes 15 minutes”. If you have 100 people doing that thing all the time though, the costs of the models are low enough it is an easy win.

And this mostly only holds true for knowledge economy work that can be all done via software. There just still needs to be fundamental improvements to robotics to be able to do physical things. The tailor’s job is safe for the foreseeable future.

The change in the data science landscape to more generative AI applications definitely requires social scientists and analysts to up their game though to learn a new set of tools. I do have another book in the works to address that, so hopefully you will see that early next year.