Sometimes a promotion isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Of course, having a slightly larger ledger and more ration allocations is nice. Yet it seemed that this promotion was more about allowing others to shed jobs and processes they disliked, rather than an elevation in status. This meeting typified the new normal: the weekly morbidity and mortality review. It was a normally dry affair with their section’s Whisperer, Sam. As Whisperers go, Sam had a great personality, if a bit literal; Avery figured that working with prompts for years, trying to bend the model to your will, does that to people.
Today’s MMR was as dry as ever, but Glitch 46.05.029.A3 was simply ridiculous.
A member of the team had asked the Copilot to iterate new street furniture and telecoms devices in preparation for new data service to create a more unified system. The objective was rote, and normally shouldn’t have thrown any errors. But here they were, looking at the glitch sheet showcasing an almost infinite number of parametric options inspired by a children’s book. The Whisperer thought that the Copilot had inadvertently overheard some stray office conversation from new parents back from their leave, and incorporated it into the logic chain. Luckily this Copilot run was sandboxed, or the output would have bee passed up the chain to the department AI for review and recommendations, which would have passed it to the superintendent’s AI for review and approval. A review and approval process which was often more cursory than Avery thought was wise; this event proving Avery correct on the merits. The Whisperer caught the error in time, and paused the process for review. So here they were.
While the only thing that was wasted was compute cycles, they now had a whole lot of useless packages, complete with pricing, parametric, zoning approval, and resident agreements to do something with. While compute time was cheap, storage was not. In the end Whisperer had the great idea to convert some of the better parametric endpoints to holophotos for the new parents, and retain the endpoints which scored high on buildability for future kindergarten installations. This would allow them to report out that the compute time wasn’t fully wasted, and their monthly storage quota wasn’t taxed. Avery noted Whisperer’s suggestion for both acoustical treatment and new runtime logic in the log, recommending these changes to be studied. Implementation would take time, but they at least started a holo-trail of notes for future use.
View more of Avery’s Journey.
Elsewhere
🎲 A game from RAND: Playing the Future
🎲 Simulate a full human life in a few minutes: AnyLife
🏠 Upzonings, Downzonings, and Their Impacts on Residential Construction, Housing Costs, and Neighborhood Demographics
👑 𝗜𝗳 𝗜 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝗞𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝗳 𝗭𝗼𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 👑
Day 3: Deal with the car
If I were the king of zoning in America, these would be the third day’s policy proposals I would implement, in order to increase abundance, reduce cost of housing, and make sure that everyone has access to a safe home.
Cars are amazing, but their centrality in urban design has been a 100 year mistake.
First, get rid of all off-street parking minimums which increase the cost of building units, locks in car-dependency, and makes the street wall and sidewalk dead. On the other end, we need park- ing maximums so we don’t lock in car dependency and builders don’t over- build useless parking. There should be no off street parking allowed within a 10 minute walk of quality transit.
Second, a big impediment to safe streets are cars: they are great tools to travel further than 20-40 miles and can cross the country. But they have no place in cities. The number of people being injured or killed by cars has exploded in the last 5 years. Follow Barcelona’s lead by creating “Superblocks” where vehicles aren’t allowed. Paris also is following suit. Deliveries can be accomplished through e-bikes and safety vehicles can still access through gates.