It's hard to classify Reddit as one thing, the communities are all so different.
The subreddit for my town has led to several new friends that I meet with in person. Most of that came from coming together to advocate for something at a city council meeting or similar, where there was a directed meat space purpose. Getting together for hobbies like hiking or other things happens once in a while too.
On other, technical subreddits dedicated to digging deep into details, there are few bots. It's all real people with shared interests. Reddit is far better than most forums that I frequent for finding those communities.
The few times I have been swarmed by bots on Reddit was when I touched on a topic where, say, Russia had a strategic interest, then the subreddit would get tons of new commentators from other subreddits, which was the indication of bots. Fortunately the mods took swift action when this happened, becuase my god the discourse is awful when bots flood the zone with their babble.
Niche/hobby subs are mostly bot-free.
As for the expectation, other than if civil liberties are going to be violated in the name of safety I expect much faster results, and I’m sure the MIT professors family would agree.
Of course the family wants it solved right away but there's a reality to this that seems to be overlooked here but is also not unique here. A lot of murders are never solved. Luck is a factor all the time.
if anything this whole saga makes me happy smart people aren't killers more often because this guy basically got away...
What exactly is the expectation here? Is there some sort of wide-spread belief that the world works like an episode of Law and Order and every crime is instantly solved by rolling up your sleeves and doing good old fashioned detective work?
Would assume for the majority of planned murder to be resolved as quickly as these highly publicized cases have been (the Kirk deal took about 2 days also) there's going to have to be an element of luck. Piecing together digital/forensic evidence is going to require time and effort. If it's not an obvious connection (domestic violence etc.) and there's no direct witnesses it seems logical you only have a few outcomes:
A) Going to be solved due to a lucky break
B) Going to be solved after a ton of time/interviews/piecing together forensic evidence
C) Not be solved.
Also he only "got away" because he killed himself. They likely would have caught him fairly soon after this because they had his identity from the car tags. I guess the point is though luck is all you have if it's solved this quickly because it's so random.
Going back and trying to do all this via emulation is now a lot harder. I don't know if it's the timing or the fact that I'm just old and crappy now, but if I didn't have the save states of an emulator I would have given up on gaming ages ago due to frustration.
Then again I don't have the hyperfocus and 12 hour marathon gaming sessions like I did for much of my youth.
It happened when a buddy and I were completely bored messing around with the game and I remember calling my friends and explaining it but no one "got it" until we showed them.
Then I had a humorous thought - what if this already happened, i.e. cats were superintelligent, invented humans to serve them and then they had no need for their own intelligence.
Basically when the "minds" are benevolent deities all scenarios are possible including this one. We can spend our time with cats, we can even turn into cats...as he writes about "Changers" who genetically alter themselves or shift species at whim.
And as always if someone acts up and violates the Golden Rule they get a slap drone: https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Slap-drone
Would you expect a map of comparative latitudes to significantly change in a decade?
You're quite correct that our "reality" is in part constructed. The Flashed Face Distortion Effect [0][1] (wherein faces in the peripheral vision appear distorted due the the brain filling in the missing information with what was there previously) is just one example.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashed_face_distortion_effect [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-37991-9
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_University_of_Idaho_murde...