I keep a reaction gif on hand to clarify why I care so much about the availability of market-rate rental housing to urban professionals

There’ve been a bunch of debunkings of that essay from people with numbers (eg, economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/11/26/t... ) but I think it’s worth asking WHY is housing so expensive. Food is so much cheaper than in the past; why is housing more scarce?

I’d want to ask someone earning $100k whether they feel impoverished.

A few other things stuck out to me about the article:
- is the poverty line is higher when people spend less on food?
- should fewer people pay taxes?
- where are those housing costs coming from?

(None of this went into the jury deliberation bc I was only an alternate. This is just how I stayed occupied while waiting through sidebars.)
🔚

After the trial I looked up NHTSA experiments on low-damage rear-end collisions. For ΔV = 11km/h ≈ 3.06m/s they measured mean acceleration 3.2g.

3.06² / (2 *.07) ≈ 67 ≈ 6.8g so my math is an overestimate vs experiment.

www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/ESV/Proc...

(3/4)

Acceleration = ΔV / time.

We don't know pulse time, but can estimate ΔV² = 2ax .

Wheel suspension communicates force to frame; compression travel ≈ 7cm in road cars ≈ x.

Acceleration ≤ (1.58)² / (2 *.07) ≈ 17.7m/s² which is 1.8g, about like a plane landing.
(2/4)

💯 The arithmetic I was doing was ΔV² = 2ax

An early encounter gets revisted at the climax with all of the protagonist’s skills leveled to max. There’s a running gag that’s very Kojima (you’ll know it when you see it).

And “Predator: Badlands” stars a space creature with a wisecracking robot strapped to its back, so...

I think you could find a better analogy for this one.

Or you can use leading zero count (LZCNT aka __lzcnt64()) , which is defined as 0 → 64, and also 2 cycles faster than bsr.

*undefined = on some CPUs it returns 0 and on other CPUs it return either 0 or garbage depending on flags and source operand type and who knows what else
DON'T ASK HOW I KNOW

That said, I mostly enjoyed Tron: Ares. It's not a great film, but it has a great soundtrack, and it was fun to spot all the quotes and references.

AI as nascent lifeform is also core cyberpunk. But I think we're past that story being "Frankenstein" and need to start doing it as "Dr. Strangelove". The best movie we've had on the peril of overfit machine learning so far is M3GAN.

But a lot of Tron: Ares is cyberpunk about cyberpunk. War between the corporations. Computer hacking is infiltrating a Futurist building in cyberspace, straight out of Neuromancer. The world is saved by a heroic video game developer 😁

There are glimmers. Tron: Ares opens with a depiction of reinforcement learning from the GAN's perspective. One of its AIs transcends its training given more context. Another becomes misaligned from a bad prompt.

Tron isn't religious propaganda, it just uses allegory as a narrative device, and that allegory isn't 1:1. But allegory gives theme; the movie is *about* something, it's a parable of purpose and faith. Tron: Ares is mostly about Tron.

The rest is obvious. Tron, his faith in the Users unwavering, is a disciple. The I/O priests are conduits between the programs and their creators. Flynn sacrifices himself to restore that connection, then ascends bodily to the creators' world.

But things in Tron's world *do* have purposes! The tanks and Recognizers are game entities. The solar sail is a research sim. The programs use these things without knowing why they exist. Flynn can work miracles because he has context.

The same actors portray both programmers and their programs. AIs are made in their creators' images. So when Flynn gets abducted into cyberspace, he's literally The Creator bodily manifested among his creations, then condemned by Pilate.

Some programs believe they were created for a purpose by a higher power they cannot see. The local authority wants them to serve itself instead. So the ones who believe in The Users are sent to the games to die.