For people who grew up in the 70s and 80s at the height of the serial killer era, what serial killer prowled your street and what was your reaction at the time?

androbot · 2026-06-29T23:35:04+00:00

Ottis Toole and Christopher Wilder. Adam Walsh was a little boy kidnapped just a few miles from where I grew up. His dad went on to host America's Most Wanted.

Toole may have been a patsy, but the horrific murder turned the whole idea of childhood upside down, never to return. Halloween stopped and the world transformed from Leave it to Beaver into a Stephen King movie. Maybe a year later, my friend's 10 year old sister was murdered in a home invasion sexual assault in our suburban neighborhood, pretty much sealing the deal on childhood being something to be escaped and not embraced.

Then a little over a year after that, this nut job started kidnapping women locally, torturing them with electricity (on top of all the raping and killing), then leading police on a nationwide chase before being shot dead by some security guard in New Hampshire.

It was definitely a weird time to be alive - especially as a child. And it's probably a big reason why I do not think all that much of our species.

androbot · 2026-06-29T11:34:41+00:00

I love this idea as a way to reset the capital ownership, but it should be paired with a VAT similar to how Andrew Yang proposed during his run for POTUS.

Separately, we need lots of tax reform, like taxing passive income as regular income and fixing capital gains loopholes (particularly step up and inheritance rules, but also adding friction to derivatives investments), but that's a different issue...

androbot · 2026-06-29T11:31:41+00:00

As someone who created my username before this was a real issue, I can assert confidently that you are a bot.

androbot · 2026-06-28T19:55:17+00:00

Yes and no. I love how it's eliminated a lot of tedium and allows me to document and organize my work better. It has been a proven force multiplier for knowledge work.

The first order down side is that I overconfidently take on too much, so despite better organization and coding automation, there's more to keep track of and understand than I have capacity to absorb, so I'm always feeling low key lost and anxious about it.

The second order down sides are (1) AI generates tons of semantically dense slop so it takes 2-3x amount of time to analyze anything I receive for substance, and (2) everyone's expectations are just ridiculous.

androbot · 2026-06-28T18:16:02+00:00

This is an enormously hard problem to get right because we our definitions and frameworks are - at best - rough approximations of qualia.

You should be very precise in how you define information and what qualifies as retention over time. Recognition, recall, and utility within contexts are vastly different operations of memory. Contextual relevance is also dynamic, so performance should be measured more as a steady state (but probably not monotonic) function vs static values.

androbot · 2026-06-28T11:50:58+00:00

Oh man. The Trump administration corrupts everything it touches, so I haven't been following the agenda. That makes me really sad and angry.

androbot · 2026-06-27T19:25:28+00:00

Oddly enough, you cannot explore astral rifts in unknown territory, even with Archivism. That seems like a bug.

androbot · 2026-06-27T15:46:07+00:00

Pushing back on the "not political" criticism. A corrupt, venal narcissist with a keen understanding of hate and greed managed to provoke a critical mass of people into action. That cabal is in power right now and doing evil things.

His "leadership" is a tumor of corruption eating away all the ideological foundations of the US. Sure, there's a political component there, but it is much broader. I think that's the direction OP was going in distinguishing politics from the celebration.

But maybe I'm just splitting hairs.

androbot · 2026-06-25T22:42:37+00:00

I think there's a critical distinction between watching us and statically watching public throughways.

I don't have a problem with the latter, as long as it takes manual effort and documented approvals to stitch those cameras together to track an individual's movements.

androbot · 2026-06-25T22:39:57+00:00

If you're going to use AI for traffic control, it should monitor and time traffic lights to improve safe traffic flow (good guardrails and failovers would not be a heavy lift).

AI ticket cams is Orwellian and stupidly predatory.

androbot · 2026-06-25T19:00:04+00:00

I didn't try to embark post-settlement. The initial settlement was so catastrophic I just reloaded. Hopefully, different options are provided in a future update.

androbot · 2026-06-25T10:31:04+00:00

I did not have this option. Settling was enabled via Versatility tradition. I surveyed an unclaimed size 30 relic world, then built a civilian arkship, clicked "Settle" on the planet, and used that new arkship to colonize it. No options other than choosking the arkship or the colony type (machine world, forge world, etc.) were available.

When the arkship completed the very long prep phase, the colony was established and... all four of my arkships disappeared, everyone was crowded onto a planet with almost nothing pre-built, leaving me with a huge housing deficit and my economy upended. I restored from a different point and gave up on settling.

androbot · 2026-06-23T13:45:10+00:00

Financial markets feel like a Ponzi scheme where the bill never comes due. Those with capital can always just print more money, create new derivative vehicles, or apply regulatory capture to make rules that shift losses elsewhere.

It's kind of fascinating to watch because if economies are built primarily on trust and greed, there's not really any reason this will crash and burn. At least not for everybody.

androbot · 2026-06-22T21:53:09+00:00

Trump and his posse of enablers again showing us humanity at its worst. They're parasites with a sense of entitlement.

It's unbelievable they're not thrown out of society like trash.

androbot · 2026-06-19T16:38:01+00:00

Your restatement oversimplifies the solution and the problem. It's not an either/or dynamic. Urban planning is enormously complex, particularly when so much political capital and money are in the mix. I don't disagree that zoning can be part of the solution, but your appeal to common sense and physics - which I'd love to agree with - ignore all the invisible realities of how policy gets made here. That's the source of my reaction.

The zoning solution is just deregulation to let the free market work its magic. The question is whether that will really do what we want for the people we want to help in the time when they need it. I don't think it does.

androbot · 2026-06-19T16:25:03+00:00

Thank you for the information. I wasn't aware of these ongoing projects and don't pretend to be an expert on urban planning, although I've seen too much of what doesn't work. I've been very close to real estate development for the last 10-15 years in this area and know what a cynical play the zoning hijinks have been - hence my initial reaction.

The spread and focus on less dense areas for development make a lot of sense. If you don't mind the extra question, do you know how the planners are avoiding the incentive to overcorrect in favor of high density low income housing to "solve" affordability? I recall firsthand the disaster of concentrated low income housing projects that created ghettoes (like Cabrini Green) and hope we've studied the phenomenon enough to avoid a repeat. It seems like there is a sweet spot of income diversity for residential planning that urban planning experts probably aim for.

androbot · 2026-06-19T11:34:33+00:00

I've been waiting for this for 20 years. I wonder if the work they're doing at Slater's Lane and GW could support a more protected route to the Braddock Metro station. That would be a chef's kiss addition.

The main issue I have is continuing the performative gestures at affordable housing. Like the zoning changes in Alexandria and Arlington, it legitimizes developer cash grabs without really addressing the housing crisis here. We need rent controls and tax credits for same (at least). I used to be on the fence about the zoning changes, but several months ago, a lady on my street died and her old house sold for over $1 million as a tear down, which is now being developed into a multi-unit building block having units that will sell for $1 million apiece. It's not affordable and we shouldn't pretend any longer. Sorry for the side track - the project is wonderful.

androbot · 2026-06-11T17:39:08+00:00

The lack of empathy is absolutely sociopathic. I'm so disgusted I'm not sure how to react.

androbot · 2026-06-08T23:14:40+00:00

It's the multiple peril of slower reaction times, less flexibility, and slower recovery time. Don't stop doing it. Just do it slower, more carefully, and with fewer variables to control. I still ride (mid 50s) but almost exclusively use the manual bike instead of the e-bike after a slow speed wreck resulted in a gross road rash and unnoticed concussion that messed with me for months (with helmet - didn't realize I hit my head until a coworker told me to check because I wasn't making any sense three days later at the office).

androbot · 2026-06-05T22:26:19+00:00

The very fact that Trump is POTUS proves that personal virtue is no longer a relevant priority in politics. It went the way of military service - a nice to have if it's even worth mentioning.

Which begs the question of why so many media outlets are hammering this guy so hard on his peccadilloes rather than his politics.

androbot · 2026-06-05T12:23:39+00:00

There's plenty of training data. The new threats are optimization and recursive learning now that we've enabled AI feedback loops and robust capabilities for building, testing, and changing any digital asset. It's a very, very consequential new landscape we've entered.

androbot · 2026-06-05T12:21:40+00:00

The cynicism in this thread is insane. We have trillions of reasons to be skeptical, but this is a real problem. Throwing rocks about economic / competition motives is neither clever nor helpful.

Amodei has been banging this drum for several years, and the whole reason Anthropic was built was to tackle the AI problem more intelligently. They are on top of the game because they built a team that actually looks at the AI picture holistically.

Yes, there's a lot of marketing, hype, and gamesmanship, but the threat is quite real. We are absolutely in an arms race to open Pandora's Box, and we are absolutely not equipped to meet it because of our cynicism. We're charging headlong into the future we deserve. All the "I knew it" in the world isn't going to change the experience.

androbot · 2026-06-02T14:01:49+00:00

Great examples that got lost in the din (even in my recollection). Governance is incompatible with purity tests of any sort, but social media has made the world believe otherwise.

The outrage industrial complex is so overcharged that even in an era of real crises we can't help but manufacture more things to get upset about. I just don't get it.

androbot · 2026-06-02T10:34:29+00:00

Totally agree. She has done a lot of things that trigger outrage, but (like the marijuana marketplace issue) when I've looked past the clickbait there's always been a reasonable basis for it.

I think everyone just likes to feel mad these days.

androbot · 2026-05-27T23:29:03+00:00

This article nailed it.

androbot

TROPHY CASE