[JSDevOps]

[flagged]

[swesour]

Why is this comment so similar to this tweet: https://x.com/peruvian_bull/status/1866213955687022656

Are you a bot?

[dang]

Yeah, we can't have people doing this kind of thing, so I've banned the account, at least until we have some reason to believe it won't happen again.

[sccomps]

could be the same person?

[dnissley]

Probably not a bot. Just reposting content from twitter over here.

It's quite entertaining though that this particular conspiracy theory is catnip to HN users. Perhaps it's for the same reason it's blowing up on twitter: vague enough to capture the imaginations of people who might be imagining wildly different concrete scenarios?

[dang]

I've banned this account for reasons explained in the sibling subthread.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [e-mail] and give us reason to believe that you won't do this in the future.

[PleasureBot]

Putting on my tinfoil hat for this: It sounds like parallel construction to me. I wonder if the FBI doesn't want it to get out what kind of technology the US government can use to track citizens in real time. Something like 24/7 facial recognition running in major chains like McDonalds.

The police showing up for a random tip in the boonies in PA fast enough to actually catch the guy at McDonalds and he just happens to have method and motive on him 5 days later seems too convenient. I think they ultimately got the right guy, but I don't think the 'tip' was a phone call from a McDonald's employee.

[e_y_]

The guy's face has been plastered over the news for several days and there's a $60,000 reward. Getting a tip from a fast food worker is very plausible.

More plausible in my opinion than the FBI having some kind of agreement with McDonald's to access their store surveillance network in real time.

[Terr_]

Now I'm feeling really paranoid about finding a McDonald's ordering kiosk broken mid-software-update on Friday 6th: I bet that was when they were updating the facial recognition tech to spy and track everyone walking past. :p

[whycome]

It also seems like there might have been some "regular police work" going on at the beginning but when that didn't work fast enough, some bigger tools were called in.

[01100011]

Yeah I think it's very easy to forget we live in a surveillance state. Periodically something happens that lets us see it but we somehow, as a society, stop talking about it and next time something like this happens we're surprised.

We have the DEA and other three-letter agencies stashing cameras all over highways and even in residential areas.

We have mass surveillance of communications.

We have license plate readers everywhere.

We literally carry tracking devices everywhere we go.

Our cars also have their own tracking devices.

Facial recognition(and probably other recognition tech like gait) is widespread.

We have systems that can mass surveil entire cities from the sky.

And these are just the confirmed systems that we know about.

Parallel construction is frequently used and it's not even a secret at this point.

That said, don't underestimate the ability of a criminal, even a smart one, to screw up. As a group of smart engineers, we all know too well that even smart people make mistakes. They make even more mistakes when they're operating outside of their domain and under pressure/nervous. It shouldn't be surprising that the perp got caught.

[jmward01]

No need for conspiracy here. I'd be surprised at this point if McDonald's wasn't running that type of software on all their cameras 24/7 and using to better profile their customers. Is there actually a law against it? There should be, but is there? It likely isn't hard and I am positive the data could be useful to them in many ways so if they aren't then it would only be because they thought it wasn't legal.

[bilbo0s]

I don't think they should tell people exactly how much tech they have. Why give people intelligence briefs on your capabilities? The point is to catch criminals and terrorists. If those criminals and terrorists believe that Palantir or whatever is the most they need to worry about, then society has the advantage.

[coolThingsFirst]

yet 50% of murders go unsolved

[sailingparrot]

Much simpler explanation: he wanted to get caught to increase coverage of his political views.

[danso]

He took his mask off at the hostel, the kind of place that often requires its employees to verify that a photo ID matches the holder’s face. “Let me see you smile” is a common thing that service employees learn to say to get strangers to take off their masks without angering them

[throwaway48476]

Exactly. I don't think anyone in the media commenting on this ever worked in the service industry and therefore doesn't understand the obvious.

[eddsolves]

Where’d you get that IQ? His GitHub isn’t active either.

[radicalbyte]

He went to a selective school.... but 130 isn't particularly high. It's common in engineers.

[bawolff]

Sometimes people do crime to be famous, this pattern would fit that.

[roncesvalles]

Since when did making small talk become "flirting"?

[plasma_beam]

I agree. The media seemed to have jumped on the flirting angle because he was smiling. Isn’t that a little insulting to the hostel employee? I smiled at my barber today. Definitely wasn’t flirting.

[delecti]

As I've heard it, it was characterized as flirting by the employee.

[FooBarBizBazz]

Since the Millennial generation, pretty much, at least among the (over-)educated. It kills me; I'd prefer to pretend we're all participating in some shared project called "civilization".

But, as the shooting in the street and the cheering on the Internet have shown (and the price gouging before that), our society has been coarsening along a great many dimensions.

[ks2048]

This post is dumb in many ways not worth listing. And because of that, I realized I just read something nearly word-for-word on twitter (@peruvian_bull). Is that you or is this just copy pasta?

https://x.com/peruvian_bull/status/1866213955687022656

[blast]

Some criminals want to get caught.

[cj]

Or push their luck to the limit because they think they’re invincible. To be fair I was losing confidence they’d ever find him until today.

[HPsquared]

Probably a kind of "boundary-pushing" personality type.

[wslh]

The Unabomber case was more complex to track [1]. I'm not suggesting it was because he had a higher IQ, as someone with an average IQ could have executed similar actions successfully.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski

[jethro_tell]

It was also in a time where not everything got recorded. You have to think that having cameras everywhere and much more complex package tracking systems like we do now would have made staying hidden quite a bit harder.

[bluedino]

If you were a murderer on the run and there was a manhunt for you, wouldn't you still be carrying a gun?

[Jtsummers]

That's the sort of thinking that helps them get caught. McVeigh was initially caught because his car didn't have a license plate and he had a concealed weapon. If he'd had an ordinary vehicle with a tag and no weapon, he wouldn't have been found so quickly and might have even evaded capture for years (even if his identity as the bomber were discovered).

[manquer]

A gun perhaps, not the same gun used in the murder, that would be dumb to be caught with evidence directly connecting you with the murder. This is America, getting guns is not that hard. Gun owners tend to usually own more than one.

Also you would want to carry a weapon in a manhunt only if you intend not to be caught alive, because firing your weapon in a manhunt would only end in one way for the hunted.

[JKCalhoun]

The weapon used in the murder? I've seen enough movies to know to get rid of it as soon as possible.

[plaguuuuuu]

Hell no. Try to blend in as much as possible and book it to South America via Mexico or something.

[rurp]

No, not at all. You're extremely unlikely to win a shootout in the event law enforcement catches you, and having a gun makes it much more likely you get arrested and convicted. But even if a gun seems worth it, it should absolutely not be the famous murder weapon you just used! I mean, JFC, keeping the distinctive murder weapon on himself was either incredibly dumb or something shady is going on with the story.

[ghyuhg]

A smart person like that would now it would have been a matter of days until they were caught.

It's just too high profile, everybody would be on the case, all the experts in everything.

[Miner49er]

He actually flirted with an employee at the hostel he stayed at, probably days before the murder. But yeah, the rest seems about right.

[cariaso]

Nit

https://github.com/lnmangione

...."Active" GitHub?

[jcgrillo]

..And he was smart enough to ditch the burner phone, clothes, and the backpack but he kept the untraceable weapon and the fake ID? Seriously what..? I hope we'll learn something that brings this all to a sensible narrative but here and now it seems like completely incoherent behavior.

[stuckinhell]

sounds like bs. it's parallel construction

[astrange]

Yes, he's not acting rationally because he's having a mental health crisis.

If you look at his Twitter account, he disappeared a few months ago and all the replies were friends asking where he went.

(Also, he's a tpot poster, which is a kind of tech bro that likes tweeting about how great it is to do psychedelic drugs. This is bad for your mental health!)

[bearincar]

ahhh mental health humans have figured out how to read and rewrite neural pathways

[carabiner]

Ever seen white lotus season 2? Stanford grad falls for a prostitute. Italians cannot resist.

[coolThingsFirst]

>Inactive GitHub profile

>how did you decide his iq was >130?

he threw his life in the dumpster and will spend the next 30 years in a 2x2 cell. smart guy indeed.