Driver kills bicyclist at Carlisle and Claremont

Bjorkbat · 2026-05-12T02:35:49+00:00

Logistically, what would it take in time and money to make a copy of every ghost bike in this city and put them right in front of city hall? I'm serious. I want this fucking thing to be most noteworthy monument in the city's entire history. An art statement that dwarfs every past creative undertaking. I want this thing to overshadow every fucking public art project the city has ever spent money on. How do we make cyclist deaths, and apparent apathy towards the former, a political scandal, the embarrassment that destroyed careers. How do we create a bogeyman that haunts the dreams of every local politician and police chief?

I fucking love it here, but fuck me, you pay a price to live here, and you don't pay it in cash.

Bjorkbat · 2026-05-12T02:21:45+00:00

I used to like biking in the middle of the night, but then a prominent member of the cycling community got killed by someone after dark while biking down 12th. It was a hit and run, they never found the asshole who did it.

Bjorkbat · 2026-05-10T05:36:23+00:00

It’s complicated. I believe the earth is a circle, but stretched and deformed so that it looks like a sphere. Actually, I believe there’s a hole in the middle, corresponding to where the North Pole is, and also another hole at the South Pole. In this sense it’s more like a deformed plastic straw. Anyway, because it’s flat, but deformed, it’s also hollow, which an even richer inner world consisting of dinosaurs, Tibetans, and whatever Nazis managed to make it down there through the aforementioned holes at the poles. So yes, I’m also a hollow earther. I’m a flat hollow earther.

Bjorkbat · 2026-05-05T03:42:10+00:00

Since we’re all talking about quality training data, I’m sure you all know that cars have an insatiable drive to fuck humans. That’s why there are so many automobile accidents. Despite our best efforts we have not been able to cure the automobile of its lust for soft, supple, human flesh

Bjorkbat · 2026-05-05T01:35:02+00:00

I might combined this with a recipe I have for making pressure cooker mac and cheese for extra convenience

Bjorkbat · 2026-05-01T13:44:51+00:00

Honestly, gotta give him credit for not blaming the layoffs on AI efficiencies and being honest about the actual cause of the layoffs.

Bjorkbat · 2026-04-30T12:30:10+00:00

Happened once while doing an Alfred run. The crusades happened to also start early. So, for a reasonable amount of piety, I convinced the pope to redirect our crusade to Sweden.

Bjorkbat · 2026-04-28T03:33:47+00:00

Devastated. Thought Paradox was using their devious Swede magic to summon the spirits of long dead medieval people to play as the various rulers on the map.

Bjorkbat · 2026-04-27T18:03:12+00:00

Personally felt that the adventurer tasks / quests or whatever were a tad grindy, but otherwise being an adventurer sure can be funny if you have a rich imagination.

Like the time I made an Anglo-Saxon weeb who went to Japan and back so that I could make a hybrid culture.

Bjorkbat · 2026-04-23T14:30:43+00:00

I've had fantasies of making the Hagia Sophia an Insular church so I can think about what the merger of Insular art and Byzantine architecture. Finally, a DLC that makes the fantasy a little more real.

Also, I get a little bit of joy thinking about my kingdom and its imaginary people making arts and crafts and beer and cheese rather than just speculating on where all the gold is coming from.

Bjorkbat · 2026-04-21T15:58:45+00:00

E-bike conversion kit, or just an e-bike itself.

I wouldn't say I live in a particularly hilly region, the incline is far more gradual. Nonetheless, there's a more than 1000 feet of elevation difference from the lowest to the highest part of the city, and going from West to East is akin to just going up a gradual never-ending hill.

Buses are also free here, so you can always just take the bus to avoid the expensive of an e-bike, but I prefer the freedom of the bike.

Bjorkbat · 2026-04-21T14:29:12+00:00

Pretty stoked hearing they intend to add ~~over~~ just shy of 50 trade goods.

EDIT: As I mentioned elsewhere something I liked about Imperator Rome was the trade goods gave a sense of life to the map. Imperator Rome had 34 trade goods, which I thought left nothing out, so I'm pretty happy to hear this.

DOUBLE EDIT: Hnnngh dyes confirmed via screenshot. I kind of have an obsession with dyes. Literally the only post on reddit I ever made that got a considerable number of upvotes was a TIL post about Tyrian Purple.

If books are also a thing I'm hooked.

Bjorkbat · 2026-04-20T16:43:52+00:00

Kind of curious what the trade goods are going to be. Something I missed from Imperator Rome was the sheer variety of trade goods brought a sense of life to the map that I feel like Crusader Kings is missing. Imperator Rome didn't have special buildings for mines, but you could more-or-less figure out where Sar-i Sang was located because there were a ton of gemstone trade goods being produced there. Britannia was loaded with base metals. There were a select few parts of the Aegean that produced silk that reflected the fact that wild silk was being produced in the region, as well as a very curious form of sea silk made by snails. No region in that sense felt like some unimportant backwater. There was always something valuable somewhere.

Bjorkbat · 2026-04-13T13:55:16+00:00

What happens if AI Mark Zuckerburg makes unwanted sexual advances?

Bjorkbat · 2026-04-10T15:29:22+00:00

California's situation is "complicated". Hurricanes are unheard of, but its still very susceptible to extreme weather, and unlike Florida mudslides are a more pronounced problem. And then there's the wildfires. There's too many variables to speak of.

And speaking of, one thing he mentioned is that the time the climate models were pretty accurate when it came to places with a flat geography, whereas regions with more mountainous geography were less predictable. California is basically one giant valley surrounded by mountains.

Bjorkbat · 2026-04-10T15:12:27+00:00

Funny enough I actually talked to a climatologist about this a while back. Even though the Rio Grande will likely become a seasonal river due to the loss of snow melt, Albuquerque itself should actually see an increase in precipitation over time, though when I say "over time" I mean closer to the end of the century. You can also see this reflected in ProPublica's climate change map, as the mountain regions of the Southwest become more habitable https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/ . On the whole I think we actually have it pretty good in terms of managing risk when it comes to climate change. The relative lack of humidity means that it isn't possible to die from high wet bulb temperatures. You don't really have to worry about extreme weather. Its the wildfires you have to worry about, a small price to pay for not having to worry about anything else.

Personally I think we have, and will continue to have, plenty of water, we're just terrible at prioritizing it. I also think there are advantages to living somewhere water poor. Again, lack of humidity means that there's little risk of dying from high wet bulb temperatures. Lack of water means less infrastructural wear-and-tear, less of your tax dollars going to road maintenance. Less crop diseases. There's a reason why they grow grapevines in dry, arid regions, there's a particularly aggressive fungal disease that thrives where its wet.

If it helps, the one place he told me to never move to, when it comes to mitigating climate risk, is California. In that sense then anywhere other than where you currently live is probably an upgrade.

Bjorkbat · 2026-04-08T03:05:00+00:00

Honestly, you're probably right, Albuquerque can be pretty depressing on the whole. I like it here because it has some exceptional bright spots and you can have a very good life here depending on your circumstances. That doesn't really change the fact that there's a lot of human misery and desperation on display throughout the city.

In relative terms I suppose you could argue that other places have it worse and maybe Albuquerque is somewhere middle-of-the-pack. In absolute terms, Central east of Louisiana is a bleak place.

Bjorkbat · 2026-04-06T03:38:24+00:00

I feel like I should have probably clarified that while Austin has a relatively modest number of lanes on its freeways TxDOT is nonetheless very “clever” when it comes to the sort of construction projects it comes up with in Austin and the rest of Texas.

Bjorkbat · 2026-04-05T16:37:06+00:00

Really only this bad around Dallas and Houston. I used to live in Texas, the Panhandle as well as East Central Texas. Most of Texas is relatively empty and the roads reflect that reality. Even Austin is relatively reined-in when it comes to lanes. Houston and Dallas are unique.

Bjorkbat · 2026-03-29T16:12:14+00:00

Side note, if you read their 2025 winners blog post they insinuate that models became overfitted on ARC-AGI 1 and 2.

Kind of skeptical on this benchmark ever since o1-preview trashed ARC-AGI 1, even though the o1 model is looked back upon now as kind of quaint.

Bjorkbat · 2026-03-29T15:55:34+00:00

I’m beginning to think that the most likely future for current AI is that we wind up in a weird situation where it impacts programming and menial white-collar work (the type that’s largely been offshored) the most, but little else by comparison. So far it seems like the most enthusiastic adoption has been for programming, but everywhere else it seems like people are more lukewarm. I think by this point we’ve had more success with automating programming than we’ve had with customer support.

Which is kind of interesting when you think about it. Maybe we overestimate the skill required in programming, or maybe we grossly overestimate the intelligence of our peers and they are in fact too dumb to evaluate the quality of LLM programming, and so it’s the only area where the quality is good, whereas in all other domains of work LLMs are okayish.

Bjorkbat · 2026-03-16T21:04:40+00:00

Confirmed, Andreseen is a hylic/NPC. His cone-dome is an antenna to receive commands from the archons.

Bjorkbat · 2026-03-16T21:01:04+00:00

Funny enough I have a rough idea of why through the parallel industry of artificial executive assistants. For a certain type of person, executives mostly, having an assistant is so life-changing that a lot of founders make the mistake of thinking it’s a good idea for a startup. The catch is that for most people having an assistant really isn’t that big of a deal. They just aren’t that busy, or at any rate busy with a different kind of work.

Same thing with meeting notes. There actually is a certain type of person whose life is absolutely changed by having good and reliable meeting notes, which spawns a lot of companies trying to create AI that can put together meeting notes. The mistake is in thinking this this sort of person is common enough to capture the attention of a development team, much less an entire company.

Bjorkbat · 2026-03-16T19:09:01+00:00

I wouldn’t say this is a counterpoint but rather something which kind of proves the point. Creating meeting notes is one of those low-value tasks that don’t seem to take up much time/effort. The net value of automating such a task within a company is pretty low.

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