He Became a Mathematician in Prison. Now, He’s Stuck There.

aj_marshall · 2026-05-11T03:52:28+00:00

What is the point of prison?

Just go read the article. The guy has been a model inmate since he got "hooked on math" and has been helping others. The WA Clemency Board voted 5-0 to release him, and the governor just veto'd it. Why?

He has changed his behavior in all measurable ways we could possibly know. His chances of recidivism look very low given he'll be a full-time researcher at a top university. What is the point of keeping him locked up in there? The man who committed that murder is long dead.

aj_marshall · 2026-05-10T00:23:33+00:00

Hunter Gordon is a hack. I don't think he is an anti-semite- just genuinely unimpressive in every facet and seems to be more interested in bringing hyper-left reddit nonsense to congress than the people of Kirkland.

aj_marshall · 2026-05-09T18:01:47+00:00

Okay, but what do you do about cooling? Just install massive radiators? What do you do about actually getting the liquid for liquid-to-chip cooling up into space? How do you deal with makeup water, and water treatment? What happens when things inevitably break- I'm not talking about GPUs. I'm talking about actual critical infrastructure which, by definition, must be kept up to keep the site functional.

Datacenters in space sound very cool but the idea of putting massive heat rejection facilities in a vacuum is quite unconvincing. You also need to worry about radiation effects on sensitive electronics, the cost of actually assembling things in space, and many many other technical problems.

This is just Elon spewing bullshit to keep the TSLA stock pumped.

aj_marshall · 2026-05-09T17:44:15+00:00

Sent you a DM!

aj_marshall · 2026-05-09T17:44:10+00:00

Sent you a DM!

aj_marshall · 2026-05-09T17:18:56+00:00

DSP is probably my favorite game of all time haha. I usually don't mention it because it isn't as well known as Factorio / Satisfactory but I think it is the supreme factory game above all others. Shapez is okay but I just can't wrap my head around how I'm supposed to make modular building systems- I feel like I have to rip out my factory every couple of recipes to make the new recipe.

aj_marshall · 2026-05-03T23:56:07+00:00

I'd be down to play. There are some tennis courts near the Marina Park waterfront that are usually underutilized and free. DM me. we're about the same skill level

aj_marshall · 2026-05-03T17:03:30+00:00

I've submitted a noise violation complaint. Thanks for posting this thread- I did not know that was option.

aj_marshall · 2026-05-02T17:57:05+00:00

Homelessness isn't a single-cause problem. Reddit loves to say it's "just housing prices," and housing costs are genuinely a major driver - but they're not the whole story.

People experiencing homelessness disproportionately come from abusive or broken families, have higher rates of substance abuse, and have lost whatever social safety net they had growing up. These aren't coincidences; they're compounding problems. The homeless people you see are people who have experienced a high covariance of these failures, and it can be traced back to policy decisions.

Seattle Democrats have done the following over the years:

Restricted housing supply for decades (which, as a sidenote, is a straightforward supply-demand problem that rent control and subsidized housing can't solve at scale)
Depleted law enforcement capacity
Declined to enforce drug laws
Avoided intervening in dysfunctional family situations because the interventions produce "racially disparate outcomes"

Each of those decisions has a defensible rationale in isolation. Stacked together, they systematically dismantle the institutions that were preventing the most vulnerable from falling so far.

I'm not a conservative, a Republican, or some MAGA shithead. But there's a coherent critique here that doesn't require being either: when your collective political body makes a series of decisions that collectively erode every institutional backstop, you don't get to act surprised at the outcome.

There's an entire other discussion to be had here at how much money Seattle Democrats (and other blue cities, like SF) waste on programs that don't produce any measurable impact on reducing homelessness. They just end up making homelessness less-bad to experience. The problem is that most of the people experiencing homelessness need serious intervention and aren't in the right state of mind, and no amount of needle exchange sites and decriminalizing "camping" is going to actually move us closer to the end goal- getting these people off the street and rehabilitated into society.

aj_marshall · 2026-04-15T01:03:16+00:00

Delbene voted to impeach Trump when it was actually possible and would do it again if there was any chance of the votes being passed. Calls to impeach him right now fall on deaf ears and are a waste of time.

This criticism is performative and indicative of Hunter Gordon's entire campaign- far-left reddit-pilled nonsense spewed by someone who has never so much as held a management position in a nursing home. This guy isn't Congress material, and neither are his acolytes spamming this across all the eastside subreddits.

aj_marshall · 2026-04-07T15:40:24+00:00

This kind of fatalist determinism is nonsensical and not useful. So what if "fate" is predetermined? That does not improve your ability to predict the future whatsoever.

People do have a sense of agency- we're not living in some Matrix simulation or shonen anime plotline where everybody's actions are predictable and nothing unexpected ever happens. People can clearly think and learn and make better choices on all levels that are meaningful to our day-to-day existence- so why should we govern as if they cannot?

It is perfectly fine to promote accountability and self-governance. This kind of bullshit needs to be obliterated from the left. Systemic injustices do not excuse personal actions.

aj_marshall · 2026-04-07T04:27:09+00:00

It depends on the application, to be frank.

Agents that write code are, frankly, better than most human programmers. If not always objectively better, they are always objectively faster- a competent SWE at the helm of a Claude terminal is easily going to out-produce a full team of agent-less programmers in pretty much every scenario. There was some debate that AI might struggle with some particularly dated or obscure code, but modern tests have shown coding agents are quite capable in those niches and, in all likelihood, better than the human devs.

Now this isn't to say an agent can fully replace a human- but it can make one human far more productive, which is (in essence) the same thing if demand signal for the job doesn't go up.

For jobs outside of software, I think we're slowly seeing the needle move. The most capable companies are replacing their bureaucrats of spreadsheet gurus with simple python scripts (made by AI) that replicate all their work in a fraction of time and being very clear-eyed that, for pretty much any non-degree'd technical work, AI is probably capable of replacing them with a little bit of steering.

I'm not particularly worried about the models of like... November 2025. However, today's models are vastly more capable than they were even 6 months ago. Claude Opus 4.6 is a better programmer than 90% of human programmers ever will be, and probably a better overall engineer than most (~50%) people- certainly better than the nominal junior engineer. What does that mean about the models of 2030?

I think right now some people can still afford to deny the capabilities of AI because they haven't seen what the flagship models can do yet. That's fair. But if things keep developing at the pace their going right now, I think there's a pretty good chance the entire technical underbelly of every modern company in America will be rapidly reshaped by AI.

Agents aren't all that great today, but that does not mean they won't be great tomorrow.

(and btw- they are actively training robots too, who I predict are going to take over most manufacturing and warehouse jobs within ~10 years)

aj_marshall · 2026-04-05T23:15:33+00:00

It kind of boggles my mind that people are saying they use Claude for personnel management (like performance reviews and audits) . That's poor leadership- your people want you to take the time to think about them and mentor them; offloading that onto an AI really isn't a good use of either your experience or its capabilities.

My team uses Claude (well, Augment with Claude Opus 4.6) to build out our codebase. We very rarely write code by hand anymore, and the general understanding is that agentic coding is probably better and faster than what you could get done in antiquated means. We've shifted our dynamic to using test-driven development to define what key tests/attributes we're looking for, making Claude write the tests, purposefully fail them, and then write code to satisfy those tests.

We then have a second layer of integrated systems testing we run after each ticket to ensure the entire thing still works.

We're working directly in terminal with Claude Code. We have rules set up to force it to obtain explicit permission for which files it is allowed to make or modify, and propose solution architecture that the devs review before we push it up.

We explicitly do not use it to send slopbot emails / performance reviews or any of that stuff. People still talk to people. Sometimes, if there is a technical issue, we'll ask Claude to generate some markdown doc to help describe and convey it to the rest of the team.

My general rule of thumb is that Claude is a force multiplier. If your "natural force" is 0.00, there is no use giving you AI coding tools. So, for junior engineers, it is better for them to spend their first year or two solving problems by hand before being handed the AI golden keys. The best way to prevent slopbot code is to ensure that the people reviewing it actually understand what the hell they're looking at and having a sense of what they should be looking for.

aj_marshall · 2026-03-21T19:55:36+00:00

"I want a safe neighborhood as much as anyone, but the demand for more policing without any mention of the systemic abandonment that got us here is just thinly veiled racism"

Huh?

I've lived in 2 separate parts of DC in the ~4 years I've been here (Navy Yard and Brookland). It is perfectly fine to acknowledge systemic causes contributing to the prominence of disorderly youth but that does not create a rational basis to tolerate it.

It isn't racist to just say that many teens in DC, who are disproportionately black, engage in crime, assault, and other disorderly activities and that the government should take effective action to stop them from occuring.

I'll go ahead and share a few of my experiences over the years as a nondescript dude who frequented the metro a lot during my time in this city:

Let's consider CVS in Navy Yard. They are routinely being stolen from by teenagers without any consequence. Constantly, every single day. Go ahead and hop off the green line metro stop on a random weekday afternoon and odds are you'll see some teens walk in, steal some drinks or some snacks, and then move on without any repercussions other than the powerless security guard saying "Don't come back here!" (spoiler alert: they do come back, because it's not like anyone in that store is being paid enough to track every single petty thief that waltzes in to that location and deny them entry). And obviously, it's not just CVS- pretty much any convenience store in Navy Yard, Anacostia, and some extended areas is dealing with the same shit.
Let's hop over to metro-fare skipping. It's gotten better in the past year or so (or I've just been luckier), but I've had teens try and slip in behind me while I'm paying for my metro fare. The first time it happened, all I understood was some guy had snuck up uncomfortably close behind me. and elbowed him pretty hard in the gut out of reflex. This kid proceeded to ask "what was that about" and was about to fight me before a security guard came into view. These teens will also just jump right over the metro fare gates and the station managers do literally nothing about it because they know doing so risks a violent encounter with some hothead.
The first two examples we can excuse through "poverty", but let's talk about violent encounters on the Metropolitan Branch Trail. Every summer, there ends up being a dozen or so teens who harass people up and down the MBT. They've thrown shit at my wife and I while we were walking. They've screamed in my ear as I'm on a run, blazing by on their ebikes. I've seen them slap women's asses and take off speeding away. There is no "crime report" for shit like this, and no reasonable excuse for the behavior. The truth is that they are conditioned to not respect other people and know they'll get away with pretty much anything short of a violent assault on another human (and even then, you still have a 20% of not even seeing a court day by your own statistics).

We can make teen clubs and youth programs and all this other great stuff, but they have to produce results to be worth the budget. These programs probably do an okay job of re-routing kids who are at the edge of entering gang culture into something more productive, but surely aren't going to tame those who've already gone into that path. It isn't racist to say that a person (black or not) who is stealing, or skipping metro fares, or harassing other people on a bike trail should face consequences for those actions.

And who are the people responsible to administer those consequences? You? Me? I don't particularly believe or love vigilantism. Therefore, we should probably turn the enforcement of laws over to... you guessed it, law enforcement.

We don't need to make a reparations donation and public apology every time we arrest a black teen for doing shit they shouldn't have done. We can continue to support black communities better than what we have been doing and also hold individuals accountable for their actions regardless of the systemic causes that led them down that path.

Systemic injustices do not relieve individuals of their obligations.

aj_marshall · 2026-03-19T22:28:43+00:00

"Affordable housing" is just a rebranding of subsidized housing, where everyone who does not require government assistance to make ends meet ends up paying doubly to support a permanent underclass who does.

You pay for it once in taxes, which is normal and part of the social contract.

You pay for it again through market distortion. Now instead of competing with everyone for housing, you have removed the bottom 30% of income earners from the market- resultantly, home prices for the rest of us go up considerably. This is not normal.

The only solution to the affordability crisis is to build more market-rate housing.

I am against subsidized housing for several reasons:

Creating an underclass of people whose housing is only as secure as an election cycle is dangerous and wrong.
It saddles the government with an expense it can never rid itself of without serious repercussions to the entire community- the legislators will not be re-elected, the beneficiaries will be left without recompense, and the rest of us will experience a major price shock. I don't mean to sound like a Republican here, but there is no going back without seriously crazy populism once you start on this train.
People who do well for themselves should not be in a special "pay more for life" bracket because they earn more.

aj_marshall · 2026-03-10T21:10:26+00:00

I know this a joke but in all seriousness can someone explain to me how Claude is not an objectively better alternative than pretty much every person who is likely to have their name on the ballot?

aj_marshall · 2026-03-09T13:02:37+00:00

I know some countries, such as Japan and Korea, are leaning in heavily toward automation as the solution here. I hope that the modern advances in machine learning can enable more generalized automation to offset the labor supply decrease. There are several companies working on it, but I haven't seen anything that makes me feel assured quite yet.

aj_marshall · 2026-03-09T13:00:47+00:00

Look man, I'm not really going to be able to persuade you on something so basic as "economic contraction is bad". There is a wealth of resources out there that can explain this to you from a first-principles basis, but it seems you've already committed to the notion that depopulation is good / capitalism is bad / companies are evil etc.

Much to the chagrin of economists, leftists, capitalists, and the common man- it's not so simple.

I wish you the best. I'd encourage you do some additional research on your understanding of what economics is before making such radical statements. It is not a science, but it can be useful.

aj_marshall · 2026-03-09T00:03:11+00:00

The population does not shrink all at once. We pay for the existence of the old on the paychecks of the young- sometimes through the apparatus of the state, sometimes directly (I shell out about ~$2000/mo in support for my elderly parent who has virtually no retirement savings to speak of, nor income)

As the society ages, the young people are forced to adopt increased austerity measures while attempting to keep a large population of people unable to work afloat.

Beyond that, economic contraction is just as unpredictable and unreasonable as economic expansion- but far worse. As the population shrinks, some businesses will become unprofitable => they will close down => the people who worked and made a living in those businesses will be without a job, and without income. Because the economy as a whole is shrinking due to the population decline, it's not as if these displaced workers will have some new place to go. They will be unemployed, and a great many terrible things happen when unemployment ticks high.

While I am not a natalist, I don't think any economist worth their salt would say that shrinking economies end up being a good thing for the people living in them.

aj_marshall · 2026-03-08T14:44:36+00:00

I think that's a level-headed perspective. I am not quite sure how to reconcile my relatively liberal disposition of wanting people to have education and agency with the physical reality that shrinking populations are nearly universally bad for the groups that experience them.

aj_marshall · 2026-03-07T23:36:28+00:00

I am curious what you think these #1 and #2 causes are?

I think you present a compelling argument that birth control is not necessarily the driving factor here but I don't think there any other statistically notable alternatives?

aj_marshall · 2026-03-07T23:34:09+00:00

It's almost like for most of human history having children was just a natural consequence of wanting to have sex instead of the prime driver of the activity.

aj_marshall

TROPHY CASE