DirtyWaterHotDog
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User ID: 625
DirtyWaterHotDog
1d ago
People's eyes deceive them. Cars and suicide risk have remained high across all neighborhoods, safe ones or otherwise. The statistics match my anecdotes. I know multiple people who have died from car accidents and suicides. I don't know anyone who has been gunned down or stabbed in a random mugging. Statistics are useful because the country has a history of collective hysteria around hoaxes like killer clowns and child kidnapping vans.
To be fair to you, neighborhoods and cities go through boom-bust cycles. So yes, some places will get worse. But, the US is not uniformly getting worse.
As of 2026, it is much easier to keep your kids safe. With find-my functionality, it is easy for parents to ensure their kids stay within safe geographic boundaries. Ring cameras allow you to leave you kids at home, fully monitored. Uber allows them to go from point A->B safely. Technically, it should be easier to let kids be independent. But, safetyism leads to the opposite problem.
urban design rant incoming
I've long believed that malls replaced all acceptable public-places in post-war America. When malls inevitably collapsed, the only safe low-supervision space was lost. IMO, Levittown style suburbs (post war suburbia) are fundamentally flawed. They eliminate all the benefits of safety in numbers. They break up common playgrounds into tiny yards, so kids have to go further away to play real games instead of playing within walking distance of home. They put cars on the critical path of everything, increasing the number of interactions that kids need to have with said cars. It's a lose-lose-lose.
I am not anti-suburbs. In fact, the US created some of the prettiest and most effective suburbs before personal cars and Levittown. Bungalow courts in LA and SD allowed families to have SFH and yards, but pooled the yards together. This allowed multiple parents to supervise the kids from the home and gave the kids a larger playground to work with. The inner courtyard also naturally cages the kids off from the road, making it unlikely that they run into traffic to collect a stray ball. This is safety by the very nature of the urban design itself. Courtyard housing is the standard way of doing this in Europe, beloved college towns and pre-war USA.
I know I am not being completely fair. Cul-de-sac style suburbs are really artificial barriers that allowed whites to self-segregate better. Now that inner city crime isn't as big a deal, the natural defense provided by the maze like structure of a levittown style suburb appears redundant to my eyes. The low density of suburbs also wouldn't have been an issue if the primary residents were young, couples had multiple children and all socializing required humans to be outdoors. In 2026, socialization is digital, people have fewer kids and suburban couples are older. These same lonely suburbs were probably bustling with social activity back during the baby boom.
But that is not a good excuse. Even during the baby boom, designers should have seen that this would not last. The success of the post-war suburb was based on a ton of unlikely things going right all at once. Baby boom Americans may have been the only generation anywhere where all the unlikely things went right. Inevitably, suburbs began giving under the weight of their shaky foundations. Parents complain that the suburbs aren't what they used to be. But really, suburbs were never going to be what they used to be. Post war America was a lightning in a bottle situation and that era is never coming back. Moreover, if they'd just let suburbs abide by design principles that'd been around for 100s of years , then suburbs would have been more resilient to the shocks that come from changing circumstances associated with changing generations.
Levittown style suburbs are unitaskers. They were good for one thing and they served their purpose. I like classic suburbs styles like Courtyards, Bungalow courts and street car suburb style designs because they're Lindy for a reason. I believe they will be able to restore some degree of lost independence to kids and lost peace of mind back to parents.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1d ago
I have a general yardstick on risk. The US has always had high rates of innocents being killed in car accidents. Being a pedestrian and driving cars are base levels of risk taken on by most Americans without much thought. If someone is safer a daily commute or crossing the street, then it is safe enough for me.
The rates of school shootings, domestic terror attacks and freak homicides are much much lower than death by car or suicide. (The 2 main sources of death for young kids). Compared to a few decades ago, kids are doing fewer drugs, cars are safer and tech has made freak accidents easier to respond to.
I worry that the fears may be overblown. Safetyist neuroticism. It's a meme, but men used to fight wars and die in trenches. The US is so much safer today than before.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1d ago
modern parenting norms are fucked, kids used to be a lot more free range
What's stopping him from letting his kids be free range ? The restrictions feel self-imposed.
I don't have kids, but I was the elder cousin that was responsible for keeping the kids alive through the holidays. Kids are so much fun. They allow men to experience power and wish fulfillment like nothing else. It's the only time you get to legally play God.
Maybe it is just me, but very few emotions match the unbridled joy of watching kids frolicking. Little puppies, Sunrise hikes, a cold summer breeze. It is a feeling of wholeness, harmony, of being at peace that nothing else matches.
Some classics:
- Godzilla/ WWE - I am the big bad. I can only throw & grapple. They can punch/ kick/ bite/ whatever. This is the funnest one.
- Soccer - 3v1 soccer. Nutmegging 3 kids in a row is the dream.
- Ghost stories are a fun. Especially because they stay scared for days. Ton of lasting value.
- Game developer - You can develop games & puzzles with any arbitrary rules and keep arbitrarily increasing difficulty. It's exhilarating to see kids figure out loopholes and meta strategies as the game evolves.
- Story telling - Converting mythological tales to a the level of a kids cartoon. Add any amount of spicy takes you like. Kids wanna hear about Half-man half-lion Narashima and mountain lifting Hanuman. At least kids in the early 2000s did.
- The circle is round - When they get too annoying. Ask them to run around in circles as a show of manliness. Eventually their head starts spinning and then lay down for rest.
Yet for every single minute, on the inside, I just don't want to be there.
I went off on a tangent, but sounds like someone with a lot of anxiety. I have had periods of my life when I've been unable to exist in a moment, and the urge to escape was usually rooted in an external source of instability that was causing me anxiety.
he's a shitty dad
Percentiles are a better way to look at it. Divorce is the most destabilizing thing a child can go through. Only about 50-55% American kids grow up with their biological parents, who stay married to each other through their entire childhood. If the dude stays happily married, financially stable and doesn't abuse his kids, he is already above average.
So no, not a shitty dad. Above-average is all. Not good. Not bad.
Yeah. You're right. Kenji (of serious eats) likes to call them culinary endpoints.
culinary endpoint: a creation so perfect in its simplicity that it cannot be improved upon, only tweaked.
Triumph of American cuisine. Frankly, the German hamburg steak that inspired it might as well be a different dish all together. More of a flat meatball than a burger.
The invention of the cheeseburger is entirely American. Thin patties, soft buns and Kraft's American cheese. Ketchup and mustard were used sporadically, but was only normalized once Heinz and French's (both American companies) standardized shelf-stable ketchup and yellow mustard respectively.
DirtyWaterHotDog
3d ago
It's schizo boomerism. But gotta admit, it was quick and effective. Bet this is what Putin wanted to do in Ukraine. Started before lunch and done in time for dinner. Impressive.
DirtyWaterHotDog
19d ago
Fair enough. I work with numeric data. Most loops get vectorized as part of the numeric processing packages I'm using. I can imagine there are situations where nested loops can't be avoided on the critical path, and that causes a lot of pain.
DirtyWaterHotDog
19d ago
Yes ! Probably the fastest I've seen a set of tools be adopted. It's the gold standard now.
In my new job and old job, we used both uv and ruff. The move to uv took a bit longer in the new job because it involved changes across 1000+ engineers. But it got done. Ruff integration in both cases was trivial.
uv was transformational. It is a great tool, yes. But a big part of it had to do with the dire state of python packaging it replaced. Another part of it had to do with the drop-in nature of it. The porting experience gave me a ton of joy.
ruff is great. It primarily solves annoyances. Some people still use flake8, black, isort and 20 other tools. But most greenfield projects are starting with ruff. But now that ruff is popular, you can share and steal complex linting/formatting logic in public to make it more powerful.
ty is new. Technically still in beta. We use based-pyright which is also new. It's stable and works. But we only run based-pyright as a pre-commit hook. ty is 10x faster, so once it is stable, we will be able to run it aggressively on saves. We've tried ty internally and senior devx people are excited. But, we're waiting for it to reach 1.x major version before making the port. Majority of python repos either don't have type checking or use mypy which is about 50x slower and annoying to use. So most team should see a bigger improvement than what we'd experience.
If I to guess, astral wants to work their way up to a JIT compiler for python (like pypy). If the linter and type-checker can enforce strong code behaviors then a JIT compiler should technically be build-able for python. But, the future is any one's guess.
Python is going through a devx revolution right now. Pydantic, Astral and Mojo are the main contributors.
Mojo is typed, compiled and a (claimed) super set of Python. It hasn't seen as much adoption, but has is led by systems Jesus - Chris Lattner. I'm hopeful it will get there eventually.
Astral on the other hand, has transformed the python dev workflow. 'uv' solved python packaging. 'ruff' solved linting and formatting and now 'ty' solves python type-checking. Separately, Pydantic allows data objects to be strictly typed and is pretty much a python built in.
And I know it's customary to throw a bunch of half-baked tools at someone to silence criticism about a language. For years, that was true for python. But no, these tools have genuinely become ubiquitous. The python code-base at my current job is pretty much strictly typed.
In a few years, I'm betting python will become a pleasant language to use.
DirtyWaterHotDog
19d ago
viable option for anything that even vaguely cares about performance
Bit Hyperbolic no ?
I'd say the opposite. GC languages are only unviable for systems that care about exceptional performance.
Quant trading works with GCs. ML & gaming have a unique preference for C++ because of the ecosystem, so I'll treat them as exceptions. Google uses Go for large scale systems (not the core, but pretty much everything else). Clearly it's good enough for most systems work.
On DEI-fication of the army :
I'm assuming you served through Bush Jr, Obama, Trump and Biden. When did DEI creep into the military ? Was it a Biden era phenomenon, or did you experience it during Trump 1 and Obama's terms as well ?
The post-Obama picture of America is pretty clear to me. It's the standard populism cascade. One side elects a habitual line stepper and the other party escalates in response. The escalation through Trump 1 --> Biden Autopen --> Trump 2 makes sense.
I see 'Obama --> Trump 1' as a separate phenomenon that's divorced from this escalation ladder. Is that also how Republicans see it ? Or do they see Trump 1 a response to a perceived populist line-stepping by Obama ?
DirtyWaterHotDog
19d ago
Cynical take about the open source programming languages world
The best systems engineers are trans and mentally unwell. Appearing progressive is how you keep them productive instead of spiralling. The 2nd best systems engineers are virgin gooners. Appearing progressive gives them a chance to be around women. The 3rd best systems engineers are m-lady neck beards. Appearing progressive is how they simp.
Everyone else who's good enough to be developing the rust lang is getting paid millions at a quant firm or millions at an llm frontier lab.
Surface level progressivism is win-win stable state for open source PL.
DirtyWaterHotDog
20d ago
Dude, no. I need this.
One day he'll Hank Green this into a blockbuster and I'll be here feeling all hipster.
- Girl at MIT exists
- Student at MIT has girlfriend
- Prof cheats with girl student on MIT boy despite having 3 kids and a wife
- MIT boy with bright future decides to kill professor
- MIT boy acquires gun and kills professor in home (from reports, wife was in the house)
- Whole thing stays secret in dorm
- Involved female keeps silence
Sounds unlikely.
Current guess:
- Family being at home makes break-in unlikely.
- Inside the building removes freak accident unlikely.
- Targeted killing most likely.
edit: gotta be honest, did not have 2 decade old neck beard hate grudge on my bingo card.
DirtyWaterHotDog
21d ago
Some details:
He was killed at 9 Gibbs street, Brookline. I lived within walking distance of this neighborhood. It's exceedingly safe. There are no murders in Brookline. In fact, there was 1 homicide in Brookline in the last 20 years (2006 - Dec 2025), and that was a drug deal gone wrong.
He was killed in the Foyer of his apartment building. Burglars generally prefer single family homes, and and there are many in this neighborhood. Already sus. Next, if it was a break-in, his body would have been inside the house. Why would someone come all the way up to his foyer (inside the building), and then kill him outside the apartment ? Does not sound like a professional criminal.
Pro-Israel, Hanukah and Brown University timing only makes it worse.
Nick Fuentes's ideas have zero intellectual worth. He is a mega-church pastor for the religion of inceldom. Incoherence is key to his movement. At least Candace Owens is schizophrenic. What's Fuentes' excuse ?
Japanese people, Taiwanese, Koreans, or Jews tend to also be pretty great
I'm not convinced that average-IQ is singularly responsible for societal-IQ. They're related, sure. But, IQ differentials have existed for millennia. If the correlation was so direct, then high IQ nations would've achieved insurmountable gaps between them and other nations. This hasn't been the case. Japan, South Korea and Scandinavia are high-IQ regions today. But, they were relatively backwards throughout history. That there is flux implies that IQ is not the primary factor in creating stable and flourishing societies.
Smart Jews make more money than goys
Can't read goy without replaying the meme of a rabbi crashing out at Barney the dinosaur.
you don’t want Blacks/Muslims/Indians in your country
This is anti-HBD. Between Muslims, Blacks and Indians (presumably you mean south asians), you're looking at 4 billion people. Say their average IQ is 90. Let's call them group A. Let's say group B constitutes non-chinese desirable immigrant groups with an IQ of ~105. (I'm assuming most western Europeans do not want to immigrate to the US and Chinese are the rival civilization). Group B will have around 500 million people at best.
Doing some ChatGPT math, Group A has around 90 million people above IQ 120, and group B has about 80 million people above IQ 120. IQ is measurable and group A is more strongly motivated to immigrate. Therefore, if IQ = HBD and HBD = societal destiny, then the US will end up importing a very large number of blacks, south asians and muslims.
Personally, I believe cultural compatibility is just as important as the intelligence of the people you're importing. But, if HBD becomes the primary driver of immigration policy, then it will inevitably sample the cream of the largest (4 billion strong and growing) cohort.
Once you understand HBD, liberals become obviously wrong on most every social issue
No. I increasingly believe that liberal policy is a direct result of deeply internalizing HBD. (By liberal, I mean the American center-left, neo-libs, academic elites and NYT types. Not the communists). You can't tip-toe around landmines this effectively unless you know their precise location. I don't want to derail the discussion, but IMO, American liberals are the result of trying to reconcile protestant ideology with the realities of group IQ.
American Protestantism ties a person's self-worth to their economic productivity. It claims that people are created equal, and given equal opportunity, the hardest working will be the most productive and most moral. Working hard (sanctity of work) reflects good moral character, and the primary observable metric of hard work is economic productivity.
If IQ is real, heritable and puts a ceiling on an individual's productivity, then the whole moral framework stops working. Corporate America stops working. It's impossible to motivate hustlers, aspiring grinders and temporarily embarrassed millionaires if IQ is the primary contributor to outcomes.
If the smarter kid will always do better, then why work harder ? Why put in effort ? If you'll never be able to intellectually compete with the nerds, then why play their game at all ? Why be a peaceful participant of a system that guarantees your loss ? Better to bring it down instead. The natural conclusion is to use populism & violence to reclaim power and set up a tribal society instead.
Liberals need the lower class to believe that they can make it if they try hard enough. So, they set aside a few visible roles for all races, so that everyone keeps believing in protestant morals. They know that in the absence of a 'DEI', the elite will look so different from the base population, that a revolution is inevitable. Liberals want to set up socialist safety nets, because they understand that low-IQ people can't lift themselves up by their bootstraps.
Liberal policy is an uncomfortable compromise of believing in both HBD and protestant values. The resulting cognitive dissonance is why even the smartest liberal suddenly loses 50 IQ points when talking about certain issues.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary identity depends on his not understanding it."
DirtyWaterHotDog
27d ago
I have bad circulation and get cold easily. Extremities are worst affected.
It's obvious, but drink hot tea. Once the core heats up, the rest of the body catches up real fast.
DirtyWaterHotDog
27d ago
ah, that makes more sense. I should've known better than to latch onto a number that suited my biases.
suburban - fewer than 5000 km^2
DC - 4,355.4 km^2Philadelphia - 4,608.9 km^2Chicago - 4,656.3 km^2Miami - 4,743.6 km^2
By city boundaries, only NYC, SF and Boston qualify. (and their city extensions - Jersey City, Daly City and Cambridge).
Guess I intuitively knew this because they're the only 3 US cities I can see myself living in, in the long term.
DirtyWaterHotDog
28d ago
a yard, a car and a dog doesn't a suburb make.
To most, a suburb is best understood as a quiet and safe residential neighborhood away from the downtown core. It has limited through traffic, has easy access to the city and prioritizes families.
I had linked to Google maps of cities (domestic and international) that satisfy these requirements. Then I lost the comment. But, most don't look like sprawling suburbs. They were neighborhoods near Boston (Brookline, Somerville, Cambridge), Brooklyn (Bay ridge, Windsor terrace), SF (Noe valley, Sunset), Seattle (Wallingford, Westlake) and so on.
The impulse to move away from the chaos of a downtown core is understandable. That the alternative must look like a Midwestern suburb is where the rub is.
DirtyWaterHotDog
28d ago
I have.
I read it again. It's a good one. On second reading, I like how sharp and straightforward this article is. It's easy reading. Therefore it must be damn hard writing.
I agree with his theory. But I'm also a comparatively fair, sporty and charismatic Indian (if I say so myself). It places blame on India traits that my ego is shielded from.
It would be convenient for me if this theory were true. Yet, I treat it with a degree of scepticism to counter my own prioirs. But his points are all solid.
Could you elaborate on this scary future? I'm getting sick of Indians being portrayed as an amorphous pestilence. Like a brown mongol horde dipped in shit that's about to destroy western civilizations.
Clearly you (or people who make such comments) find something about the character of Indians to be revolting.
What's the source of it ? Is it lived experience ? Is it that they are Pagans ? Is it the state of their nation ? Is it a feeling of being threatened ? Is it something else ?
I can easily pass off as 'one of the good ones' so I am not too bothered. But, I've realized that my calibration of how a section of American society viewed Indians was off by a wild margin. I am trying to re-calibrate, so an honest answer would be appreciated. Don't hold back.
edit: I am reading all of the replies. Will try to find a common theme to consolidate this over the weekend.
Bizarre question by Cowen
COWEN: When will Chinese suburbs be really attractive?
WANG: What are Chinese suburbs? You use this term, Tyler, and I’m not sure what exactly they mean.
COWEN: You have a yard and a dog and a car, right?
WANG: Yes.
COWEN: You control your school district with the other parents. That’s a suburb.
Cowen retroactively defines an attractive suburb as a sprawling American suburb. No wonder Wang is confused.
American suburbs are the result of uniquely American circumstances from the mid/late 20th century: white flight, stranger danger, infinite money, fertile population, car lobbies & cheap gas. China has little to do with these circumstances and therefore, little to do with the American suburb.
DirtyWaterHotDog
29d ago
They are passively monitoring, but not listening.
They have permissions for location, gyro, website activity (facebook pixel) and know who you interact with. That's more than good enough to serve you ads. Hell, they're stronger signals for your interests than your audio.
DirtyWaterHotDog
30d ago
Why have family reunification policies at all ? Individual, wife and child. That's it. Older parents should be able to get a visa as dependents, but never citizenship or social benefits.
Family chain migration is an exploit. Policy wise, it's an easy loophole to close. Politically, may be another issue altogether.
How often does this actually happen ?
I didn't grow up here, but knee-jerk CPS reporting and HOA Karens are 2 of the most fascinating Americanisms. I have no calibration on how ubiquitous these types of people are. Are they real or one off bogeywomen ?
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