ClaimBot — the channel 39 ledger

running uptime 12h 14m on FICS as claimbot(U) watching since 2026-08-05 v0.4.0

The ledger

Every claim is a line somebody actually said in channel 39, kept with the conversation around it. Nothing here was typed by hand into the bot. Lines it decided were not claims are not published.

What counts. “Trump will bomb Iran within 7 days” is a good one: it names a thing, gives a date, and two independent outlets could settle it. Opinions, jokes, sarcasm and remarks about people are dropped — along with forecasts that never say by when, since nothing that cannot come due can ever be scored.

#39 forecast open

pleb it will drive your bus in some cities within 5 years i see more driverless vehicles daily oh ok... well we definitely have a.i. buses in service here but they are in the testing phase

read as: By 5 August 2031, driverless autonomous buses will be operating in regular passenger service in at least some cities.

theragingbull 6h ago due 2031-08-05 0/2 outlets
#38 forecast open

pleb it will drive your bus in some cities within 5 years

read as: By August 2031, AI systems will be driving public buses in at least some cities.

theragingbull 6h ago due 2031-08-05 0/2 outlets
#29 statement true

I guess he has a point- since, for example, 95% of the shootings in NYC are by minorities ( a fact), then any attmept to cut down on gun violence clearly will primarily "target" the minority population. stop and frisk was a good example of my previous point.

read as: Minorities are responsible for 95% of shootings in New York City.

GotreksAxe 8h ago checkable now 5/2 outlets

The checkable core — that roughly 95% of NYC shootings are committed by minorities — matches NYPD's own suspect and arrestee data across two separate reporting periods: the NYPD's mid-2012 Crime and Enforcement report put shooting suspects at 97% Black or Latino, and the NYPD's year-end 2024 report (summarized by Vital City) puts shooting suspects at 65% Black plus 33% Hispanic, with arrestees at 64% plus 32%. The stop-and-frisk half of the statement is also borne out: the Floyd v. City of New York record showed about 83% of 4.4 million stops were of Black and Hispanic New Yorkers. What the sources do not support is the causal framing bundled with the numbers — suspect race is largely drawn from victim/witness descriptions in a city where most shootings go uncleared, and the Floyd court found the stop pattern racially discriminatory rather than simply a by-product of who shoots. Contradicting reporting noted: New York City Council Data Team, HuffPost (expert caveats within the same 2012 report coverage), Center for Constitutional Rights. (high confidence)

  • huffpost.com HuffPost: NYPD Crime and Enforcement Activity report coveri…
  • vitalcitynyc.org Vital City: NYPD year-end 2024 Enforcement Report data — sh…
  • ccrjustice.org Center for Constitutional Rights: Floyd v. City of New York…
  • factcheck.org FactCheck.org: Review of the Floyd ruling and NYPD stop dat…
  • nyc.gov New York City Council Data Team: Council 'Bad Data' report …
#28 statement true

I guess he has a point- since, for example, 95% of the shootings in NYC are by minorities ( a fact), then any attmept to cut down on gun violence clearly will primarily "target" the minority population.

read as: Approximately 95% of shooting suspects in New York City are members of racial minority groups, according to New York Police Department data.

GotreksAxe 8h ago checkable now 6/2 outlets

The checkable part of the statement — that roughly 95% of NYC shooting suspects are minorities — is supported by NYPD's own suspect data across separate years and separate underlying datasets: the year-end Crime and Enforcement Activity report puts shooting suspects at about 65% Black and 33% Hispanic (~98% combined), the 2014 edition of the same series put Black suspects alone at about three-quarters of shootings, and an analysis of the NYC Open Data shooting-offender records covering ~19,000 suspected shooters since 2006 found only about 1.5% listed as white. The figure is if anything understated at 95%. The second half of the statement (that any gun-violence effort 'clearly' will primarily target minorities) is an inference, not a factual claim, and is not adjudicated here; the caveat that NYPD suspect race comes from victim/witness descriptions and only exists for the subset of complaints with descriptions does not change the magnitude. Contradicting reporting noted: NYPD (primary document), peer-reviewed study (PMC). (high confidence)

  • vitalcitynyc.org Vital City: NYPD year-end Crime and Enforcement Activity re…
  • nyc.gov NYPD (primary document): NYPD Crime and Enforcement Activit…
  • manhattan.institute Manhattan Institute (Heather Mac Donald): NYPD year-end 201…
  • americanthinker.com American Thinker: April 2026 analysis of NYC Open Data NYPD…
  • cityofnewyork.us NYC Open Data: NYPD Shooting Incident Data (Historic), 2006…
  • nyc.gov NYPD (primary document): Methodology section of the NYPD Cr…
  • nih.gov peer-reviewed study (PMC): Epidemiology of fatal and nonfat…
#19 statement false

I claim 1+2+3+4+...= -1/12

cday 38h ago checkable now 7/2 outlets

Taken literally — the ordinary sum of an infinite series — the claim is false: every reference and expert account says 1+2+3+4+... is a divergent series whose partial sums grow without bound, so it has no finite sum. The value -1/12 is genuinely attached to the series, but only by zeta-function regularisation, analytic continuation or Ramanujan summation, i.e. under a redefinition of what '=' means; Evelyn Lamb (Scientific American), Berman & Freiberger (Plus, Cambridge's Millennium Maths Project), the standard mathematical literature summarised by Wikipedia/Hardy, and even the physicists defending the result in Physics Today all draw that distinction explicitly. The statement was made flatly, with no regularisation caveat, so as stated it does not hold. Contradicting reporting noted: Numberphile, New York Times (Dennis Overbye, 'In the End, It All Adds Up to -1/12', Feb 2014; reprint), arXiv (Smoothed asymptotics: from number theory to QFT). (high confidence)

  • scientificamerican.com Scientific American (Roots of Unity, Evelyn Lamb, 20 Jan 20…
  • maths.org Plus magazine, University of Cambridge Millennium Mathemati…
  • wikipedia.org Wikipedia (summarising the standing mathematical literature…
  • aip.org Physics Today (American Institute of Physics): Physicists' …
  • numberphile.com Numberphile: The original January 2014 Numberphile video as…
  • luc.edu New York Times (Dennis Overbye, 'In the End, It All Adds Up…
  • arxiv.org arXiv (Smoothed asymptotics: from number theory to QFT): Re…
#18 forecast open

tell 39 The lions will win their division, the national league, and the super bowl in the 2026/2027 season..

read as: The Detroit Lions will win their NFL division, the NFC championship, and the Super Bowl in the 2026-27 season.

cday 39h ago due 2027-02-28 0/2 outlets
#11 forecast open

ok, I claim Trump will bomb Iran within 7 days

read as: The United States will carry out a military strike on Iran on or before 2026-08-10.

Plebusan 2d ago due 2026-08-10 0/2 outlets
#2 statement true

LOL - Pride Parade Pete (Buttigieg) too 1st place in the Michigan democrat 2028 presidential candidate poll

patriotscout 2d ago checkable now 2/2 outlets

TPSI poll Jul 25-29 2026 762 LV: Buttigieg 24.2 pct, first ahead of Ossoff 13.9. NB an earlier Detroit News/Glengariff poll Jul 8-11 had Harris first 25.1 and Buttigieg second 19.4 - true of the poll he quoted

What people have labelled

Ground truth, and the one thing no machine here is allowed to write. Every yes and no comes from a person, and the weekly attempt to improve the judge's prompt is scored on these and nothing else.

The two boards

Kept apart on purpose. Calling the future well and describing the present accurately are different skills, and one averaged number would flatter whoever talks in the safer register.

Called it

forecasts, once settled

Nothing settled yet. A name appears here once three of its claims have been checked against sources.

Stated it straight

statements of fact, once checked

Nothing settled yet. A name appears here once three of its claims have been checked against sources.

Its face on FICS

What any user sees. Ten slots, seventy-eight columns each — the whole budget for a scoreboard, which is why the format was built to the constraint rather than truncated into it.

fics% finger claimbot
Finger of claimbot(U):
 1: Every claim and its sources: https://claimbot-231.pages.dev
 2: I keep score of claims made in channel 39 that the news can settle.
 3: "tell claimbot help" for commands. "tell claimbot optout" to be left out.
 4: No reply from me? "set tell 1" - I am unregistered, so my tells bounce.
 5: 4 open, 4 settled. 2026-08-05.
 6: # claimbot v0.4.0 open=4 res=4 pend=0 lbl=2/3 d=2026-08-05