I was writing about this recently [0]. In the 2000s, we were bragging about how cheap our services are and are getting. Today, a graduate with an idea is paying $200 amounts in AWS after the student discounts. They break the bank and go broke before they have tested the idea. Programming is literally free today.
I often see these angles, how we should have prepared better or attacked this instead of that, or the unexpected strategy from the adversary. What about not bombing? The best safety trick the US can use is not bombing others.
It's a lot more than "just" not bombing. We also need to stop meddling in other countries' affairs. 9/11 and the war on terror are a direct result of all of our "nation building" over the prior decades. If we'd left well enough alone, the twin towers would likely still be standing, and we might still be able to bring as many liquids as we want on planes, and see our loved ones off at the gate when they're taking a trip and we're staying behind.
We need to stop treating business's resource extraction from foreign countries as "national security".
And I'd be all for "nation building" if it actually worked and moved countries to be democratically run. The +$6T spent on Iraq and Afghanistan are an indictment of our efforts to "help".
We just fucked with Venezuela -- where are the reports of us "helping"?
I would love for nobody to bomb or kill anyone. Did Ukraine bomb Russia? Is Taiwan bombing China that declares it is going to take Taiwan by force?
There isn't a single conflict in the world today where I can see that someone can just say "we're going to stop" and they'll be safe. There is always something more to it. If Ukraine says we'll just stop attacking Russian soldiers is that war over? If Russia says we'll just stop attacking Ukraine and stay where we are is that war over? Is there any other conflict where the answer is simply stop and it'll be fine?
The US are also the major enabler of Israel's colonial expansion and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. This was clearly expressed by Bin Laden himself as one of the motives behind the 9/11 attacks.
> Were you thinking the US was just minding its own business and some bad guys came and attacked it
As I remember, this was exactly the way the US explained 9/11: "they hate us for our freedom".
No, he didn't. His "letter to America" starts with the question:
"As for the first question: Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:
Because you attacked us and continue to attack us."
And proceeds to list all the ways the US are militarily attacking and oppressing Muslims in the Middle East. It's a long list.
Homosexuality is mentioned only once in the letter, in the next section, where he criticises American society and morals in general and calls it to embrace Islam. This is explicitly an exhortation and not part of the reasons for the attacks (so probably intended as a diagnosis of the symptoms of a moral disease and the proposal of a cure - note that I'm not endorsing it, just explaining its function in the letter).
No, there is no "or else", you are plainly making it up. As I've said, this is the exhortation part of the letter and it's not listed among the reasons for the attacks. Regressive, certainly. Brought as a justification for terrorism, no.
You asked "who did the US bomb before 9/11" and you got the answer. Now you're arguing that they shouldn't have reacted even if the US bombed them before (calling it "an excuse")?
As for the peace process with Palestinians, it was always a sham. The US (as it's evident now to many) are entirely unable to apply any sort of pressure on their "ally". What they've done is just buying time for Israel to expand its colonisation under the temporary pretense of some ongoing "peace process".
"excuse" is a funny way of wording it -- "motivation" or "explanation" might be more appropriate here. is the expectation that the US can and should be able to kill and destroy and the victims just turn the other cheek?
West bank and Gaza were never under full Palestinian control since 1967 both were under brutal occupation or blockade + contant Israeli meddling into internal affairs.
Well yes, and actually instead of wasting billions creating understandable cause of hate, this could be injected into domestic social spendings, and there would probably still be a lot staying on the table to throw in humanitarian endeavors around the globe creating love through so called soft power.
Pacifism at such a large scale is a self-defesting strategy though. If its well understood that a country will never respond, eventually someone will take them over or wipe them out.
> When the choice is "let Iran have nukes" or "bomb Iran", you bomb Iran every time.
Where's the proof that Iran has, or is even remotely close to having, nukes? I mean, actual proof, not the kind of "proof" that led us to invade Iraq in '03.
> I'm not at all mad at the US government for deciding to get rid of Iran's regime.
Ah, you're one of those people. You probably thought "Team America: World Police" was an instruction manual, and not satire, yeah?
Iran having nukes is unsubstantiated. I also don’t think they wanted to have nukes. But they also enriched Uranium up to 60% according to IAEA which has no non-military use. They perhaps wanted to use that as leverage in negotiations which turned out to be not much of a deterrence.
Difficult to reconcile the justification of current efforts of "Iran can't have nukes" with the unequivocal claims made less than a year ago that Iran's nuclear capabilities had been "obliterated".
North Korea started out with a "nuclear weapon": Seoul is within artillery range of the border. Consequently the Kim regime has been able to starve and torture its own population, and yes - develop nuclear weapons - without anyone willing to stop them.
You think the problems inside North Korea are ok? Koreans are human too.
Why are we ignoring the problems inside of North Korea? I take slavery and starving people pretty poorly regardless of where it happens.
That said North Korea routinely acts against the rest of the world in ways that are only possible because the rest of the world is unable to retaliate, with the government sponsoring everything from extorting hospitals with ransomware, to dealing drugs, to counterfeiting currency, to abducting film makers (from Hong Kong).
> I take slavery and starving people pretty poorly regardless of where it happens.
A great many of us feel that way, however historically GreatPowers do not - it's control of resources that move the needle for them.
Currently the US makes much of 30K protesters killed in Iran (number in dispute) but it is very much an action rooted in petro dollar geopolitics, oil, and Israel.
Starving people globally no longer get USAID .. a fractional cost compared to the Iran excursion.
The US didn't feel the need to get involved in regime change following any part of the Rwanda Genocide, and the US took the side of Indonesia (who were going for the resource control) against the West Papuans .. the US and UN turned a blind eye to exactly who and how people were tortured to get a favourable vote.
There's a long long list of starving and essentially enslaved people globally that have been ignored in favour of others by the French, the Dutch, the British, Belgium, USofA, etc.
> That said North Korea routinely acts against the rest of the world in ways that are only possible because the rest of the world is unable to retaliate
In real politik terms the same can be said about the USofA and has been said about the former British Empire.
> When the choice is "let Iran have nukes" or "bomb Iran", you bomb Iran every time.
There was also the choice of “Iran let us verify that they are not making nukes, and in return we remove economic sanctions from them”. It was called the JCPOA, and according to non-proliferation experts it worked. And then on the 8th of May 2018 Trump unilaterally withdrew from it.
Let’s not pretend that there were no other options.
Unilateraly on the level of countries. The other signatories (China, France, Russia, the U.K., Germany and the EU) believed that the deal was good and Iran was holding up their end of the bargain at that time.
If the USA government had credible evidence that it is not so, they could have picked up the phone and presented their case to the other signatories. Or at least to their allies. Then once those countries were convinced that something is off they could have withdrawn together from the agreement. Would have less of a terrible optics than how it went down.
I seek only to point out that we, the United States, have a constitutionally-outlined treaty-making process which involves Senate ratification, and that in the case of the JCPOA, the Senate did not ratify.
Re international agreements: yes, the idea is that _broad support_ is required for binding international agreements. Senate ratification represents broad support.
> Iran has been the driving force behind a lot of instability in Middle East
I'm loving the current stability that the USA has gifted the world and looking forward to many decades of peace and calm in the middle east. Thank you so much.
That choice is doubly false. On the one hand, there was a diplomatic option. It was working until Trump decided to kill it. On the other, it's insane to think that you can bomb a large, industrialized country of 90 million people out of the ability to make nuclear weapons short of wiping them out of existence.
Last year the same idea made it to the front page [0]. I understand that the apps can be faster, or easier to use. But that's intentional. Developers are deliberately making the web experience worst to force you to use the app. The reason is they have control over the experience in the apps. For example, blocking ads on the apps is much harder, and they can extract things like your contacts, GPS data, and run in the background.
At this point, the only apps on my phone are bank apps. Even that is something I'm trying to get rid off.
Just this last week, I wrote about the confusion this creates in the workplace[0]. My coworker said "copilot" literally referring to any code assistant, the same way we say bandaid or kleenex. I thought he was talking about Copilot, the one I see nagging me on Microsoft teams. We had a full discussion about completely different tools without realizing it.
Nuclear is the answer to our infinite appetite for energy. For the long term, nuclear will be part of the solution.
With that said, there is no such thing as an energy shock right now. Instead, Europe has allies who blatantly attacked a sovereign nation. The answer to that is to condemn and sanction the instigators. What are laws for if they can selectively applied? This is a political problem.
> Nuclear is the answer to our infinite appetite for energy
Approximately 100% of the energy in our solar system radiates from the Sun. Long term, solar is the answer. Nuclear is a really good carrier. In the medium term, we need more energy. Preferably cheap. Ideally clean. Going all in on one mode doesn't make sense because it virtually demand the creation of bottlenecks and single points of failure.
What do we do if another asteroid strikes, raises dust plumes and causes volcanic activity for years? The solution is to diversify renewable energy sources.
Nuclear takes to long to plan and build. If that is fixed, then great.
> solution is to diversify renewable energy sources
There are two economically-viable renewable sources: solar and wind. Everything else is, to put it succinctly, bullshit.
We're not producing and deploying as much solar and wind as we can. But global production has limits. Going all in on just those two (together with batteries) requires massively overpaying. That, in turn, makes the economy uncompetitive.
> Nuclear takes to long to plan and build. If that is fixed, then great
Permitting takes forever, too. Nuclear can be done quicker and cheaper, we've seen China do that. It's a good part of the mix because we just need to add power, and ideally, with economies of scale.
Europe should absolutely develop it. But it's no panacea.
Optimistically, "around 43 GW of enhanced geothermal capacity in the European Union could be developed at costs below 100 €/MWh" [1]. That's 3% of European energy demand [2].
In the case we have dust for years that significantly reduces solar output, most people die. What powers our electric grid doesn’t matter if agriculture is crippled.
In context it seems clear they intended to short hand the possible effects of possible global dust clouds that are possibly aloft for some time with the term "nuclear winter", itself a name for a possible effect of some number of large ground level nuclear blasts.
Surely it'd be a nuclear winter if the same number hit not-cities.
eg: Castle Bravo .. not a city, but a ground level strike.
> It's unclear how this is related.
From a geophysics PoV meteorite strikes are not unlike ground level nuclear explosions in so far as dust plumes go.
> another asteroid strikes, raises dust plumes and causes volcanic activity for years?
At least that's my recollection from those old old first approximation nuclear winter papers that were largely circles and arrows on the back of envelope guesstimations.
If we're to quibble, I'd be asking about the meteorite strikes causing volcanic activity (or is it the dust plumes that cause that activity?) .. cause that seems tenuous unless it's a direct strike on an unstable part of the Ring of Fire / Yellowstone Caldera.
Whether it's nuclear or meteorites the theory rests not so much on number of ground events as it does on volume (and type) or particles raised up high ... the Iridium K-Pg anomaly layer is global yet postulated to have come from a single (large) strike.
Because cities have more concentrated flammable material than random locations on the earth surface, and will typically be the targets in a nuclear war, and is why most calculations are done with strikes against cities.
The nuclear strikes would create columns of burning material that stretch into the atmosphere.
I responded to a comment using a concept "nuclear winter", in a way not widely used.
It was interesting, because I assumed to commenter meant that "humanity powers through with nuclear power during the long winter", compared to nuclear winter as in "humanity attacks itself because of greed and stupidity", as it is commonly used.
You then interpreted it in the common way, but explaining it using meteor strike dust plumes, which is not how nuclear winter is commonly explained, as the mode is typically burning stacks of flammable material("guesstimated" first by Carl Sagan and his peers). It's been a long time since I researched the very plausible nuclear winter(stockpile in Switzerland is my plan).
Yes, it is also likely that strategic oil fields will be set ablaze by nuclear strikes, another dimension to the nightmare.
I don't know how valid this theory is, it seems plausible. It was just an interesting scenario, with nuclear powering us through a catastrophe, man made or otherwise, and with current leadership the best we can hope for.
Sweden, my native country, had a similar idea(offensive nuclear capabilities combined with SMRs) in the 50s and 60s, but was eventually(probably for good reasons) cancelled and dismantled it's nuclear weapons program and eventually closed it's first and only SMR in operation, Ågestaverket, eventually building a capable but conventional nuclear industry that provided cheap electricity to the country for decades.
The exif includes time, but not time zone. They are not quite at the moon, and Lunar Time is under active development but not official. Also clocks tick slower under the moon's weaker gravity. (Or is it faster?)
I think the clocks on board Orion are set to Houston time, which would be 5 hours behind UTC (because of Daylight Saving). But I'm not sure. I would expect the EXIF time to be in whatever time zone the spacecraft's clocks are set to.
> clocks tick slower under the moon's weaker gravity. (Or is it faster?)
Compared to clocks at rest on Earth, clocks on board Orion right now are ticking faster, because it's at a high enough altitude above the Earth that the faster ticking due to higher altitude outweighs the slower ticking due to speed relative to the Earth.
That will be true for most of the mission. For clocks in orbit about the Earth, the "breakeven point" where the altitude effect and the speed effect cancel out and the clock ticks at the same rate as an Earth clock is at, IIRC, about 1.5 Earth radii. So clocks on the ISS, for example, tick slower than Earth clocks; but clocks on the GPS satellites (orbiting at 4.2 Earth radii) tick faster (and there is an adjustment made for this on each satellite so that the time signals they send out match Earth clock rates).
For a spacecraft moving at escape velocity, which is going to be roughly true for Orion all the way until splashdown, I think the "breakeven point" is higher, at a little over 2 Earth radii. Orion will reach that point on the way back a few hours before splashdown, I think.
The Moon's gravity well is too shallow to make an appreciable difference in any of these calculations.
I should emphasize that all these tick rate effects are tiny, on the order of one part in a billion to one part in a hundred billion. Even when you add up the difference over the entire mission, it's still only on the order of hundreds of microseconds (i.e., the astronauts end up aging a few hundred microseconds more than people who stayed on Earth).
> So clocks on the ISS, for example, tick slower than Earth clocks; but clocks on the GPS satellites (orbiting at 4.2 Earth radii) tick faster (and there is an adjustment made for this on each satellite so that the time signals they send out match Earth clock rates)
I'm curious, and hope you or somebody else might be able to answer this: is it a single adjustment for each thing, where they just set it to always adjust by X ratio, or does it vary (enough to matter) as it orbits, such that the adjustment needs to be constantly varying slightly?
The exact difference in clock rates is not constant, because the orbits are not perfectly circular and the Earth is not a perfect sphere. So both the altitude and speed of the satellite, and the Earth's gravitational potential, are varying with time, and that means the clock adjustments will vary with time as well.
For the GPS satellites, their time signals are constantly compared with ground clocks, and adjustment signals are sent up to the satellites as needed to keep their clock corrections in sync with ground clocks.
I'm not sure what, if any, adjustments are made to clocks on the ISS, or how they're done.
Thanks! I figured the orbital paths not being exact circles meant they'd be slight variance in the difference, just wasn't sure if it was enough to matter or if they could treat it as if it was exactly the same all the way around without it mattering.
I'm 100% an advocate for not using LLM for writing... But I'll tell you were I use them just for that. For ceremonies.
A large part of our work is about writing documents that no one will read, but you'll get 10 different reminders that they need to get done. These are documents that circulate, need approval from different stake holders. Everybody stamps their name on it, without ever reading it. I used to spend so much time crafting these documents. Now I use an LLM, the stakeholders are probably using an LLM to summarize it, someone is happy, they are filed for the records.
I call these "ceremonies" because they are a requirement we have, it helps no one, we don't know why we have to do it, but no one wants to question it.
Without even looking at the AI part, I have a single question: Did anybody investigate? That's it.
Whether it's AI that flagged her, or a witness who saw her, or her IP address appeared on the logs. Did anybody bothered to ask her "where were you the morning of july 10th between 3 and 4pm. But that's not what happened, they saw the data and said "we got her".
But this is the worst part of the story:
> And after her ordeal, she never plans to return to the state: “I’m just glad it’s over,” she told WDAY. “I’ll never go back to North Dakota.”
That's the lesson? Never go back to North Dakota. No, challenge the entire system. A few years back it was a kid accused of shoplifting [0]. Then a man dragged while his family was crying [1]. Unless we fight back, we are all guilty until cleared.
The thing about the legal system is there's no incentive to investigate to find the truth.
The incentive is to prosecte and prove the charges.
Speaking from the experience of being falsely accused after calling 911 to stop a drunk woman from driving.
The narrative they "investigated" was so obviously false, bodycam evidence directly contradicted multiple key facts. Officials are interested only seeking to prove the case. Thankfully the jury came to the right verdict.
There’s a judge down in Texas, Dallas area I believe, who is in social media a lot because he will excoriate prosecutors who bring bs in to his court room. He’s not soft on crime but hard on rights and process. If a defendant did the wrong thing, he will have the appropriate amount of sympathy, down to zero. At times he will tell them, we all know you got lucky here, do better. But he won’t let prosecutors slate by on garbage charges or statements or investigations by police. Which leads to my primary point at least for this discussion in particular:
To me the scariest part of this as a process is how many times (I’d casually estimate at least 75%) it is blindingly obvious that the prosecutor has not read the statement of charges or officer statements until everyone is in front of the judge. I get on one hand this judge seems to often be handling probable cause hearings but so many of these should never have resulted in any paperwork being turned in to the prosecution, let alone anyone having to show up in court.
Scary process is an understatement, especially because I was facing a domestic violence charge.
Long story short, emotional abusive partner got drunk and verbally combative, despite my attempts to de-escalate. When nothing worked I went into my bedroom and locked the door. She started pounding on the door and demanded her things. I gave them to her and told her she needs a ride home she no longer welcome. She verbally abused and provoked me for 10 minutes before getting in her car. Took the keys, called 911. She grabbed me causing us both to fall a few minutes before the cops arrived and told them I threw her to the ground. We both had a couple scapes so they arrested us both.
Interfered with the 911 call, filed a false police report, assaulted me, caused property damage. She got charged with class c assault only and a dismissal. I felt like I was seen as guilty until proven innocent.
Fortunately I recorded all her verbal abuse (prosecution tried to use it against me and brought in DV expert to explain both her conduct and my 911 call as typical in IPV cases)
Fortunately the jury didn't buy it. I was literally being threatened with violence in my own home for telling her to leave. Between that and the bodycam statements contradicting her testimony I was shocked that they didn't drop the charges or offer a favorable plea deal.
The judge was absolutely fair, prosecutor bent on punishment, alleged victim was attempting to ruin my life (as captured in my audio)
Whew!
In the end the claims were so obviously fabricated that my attorney made no defense. It was clear that the accuser was not credible.
Perjury was provable. No consequences for her. This happened in Brazoria county
I agree with this sentiment but when you start punishing this sort of thing you create more incentive to cover it up. It's a tricky problem and I'm not sure there's a perfect solution.
What we really need is a change in police culture.
Then the system should be redesigned such that transparency is a priority and cover ups are not feasible. And when cover ups eventually get found out, the punishments even more severe.
If the punishment fails to correct the behaviour, it is insufficient punishment or the wrong punishment. In this case, I'd say that individual punishments are the wrong tool to correct systemic behaviour. It should be career-ending for brass and prosecutors to be effective.
until then, there's a simple rule which works well: never talk to a cop. Or at least say the minimum number of words possible, give them nothing to use against you. Present ID if they ask for it, but never admit anything. If they persist, "lawyer". That has worked for me.
Medicine has a culture that adapts to this quite well. If you make an honest mistake and communicate it, you are often persecuted by your peers but not hung out to dry legally by your hospital and generally your actions are always defensible.
Similar practices are used in law enforcement, but the legal implications are seemingly more severe
Great idea, Except that this will never happen because public sector unions are important voting blocks. Public sector unions should be abolished (don’t have a problem with unions) but the conflict of interest is just too great.
Great point. Obviously can't expect them to vote against their own interests, because higher standards, higher accountability, and higher transparency will always be against those interests.
They mean that penalties and restitutions for wrongful prosecutions and wrongful convictions should not come from taxpayer money but private insurance. Right now, police departments feel zero pain from judgements against them so they have no reason to structurally correct their behaviour.
> The thing about the legal system is there's no incentive to investigate to find the truth.
The truth is much more complicated and involves politics. For example Seattle (and possibly other cities?) enacted a law that involves paying damages for being wrong in the event of bringing certain types of charges. But that has resulted in some widely publicized examples where the prosecutor erred by being overly cautious.
And then you have Florida who will bill you about $100 a day for finding yourself in a Florida jail, regardless of whether charges were dismissed, you were found not guilty or any such thing.
And to nobody’s surprise, failure to pay this bill is in itself a Class B felony…
That sounds like a recipe for domestic terrorism - the systemic disenfranchisement of people who have done nothing wrong for no apparent reason other than sheer greed. How long has this been in effect there?
I'm confused. Are you suggesting such a ridiculous system is letting class B felonies slide here? That would certainly be the pragmatic approach to being evil but in that case simply treating it as regular debt and going through civil channels would be more than sufficient.
Are you letting stuff in your backlog that you'll never get to before the product is gone or irrelevant "slide"?
Sure they could round those people up pretty easily just by following up on any contact with the system that they have, but why, for what, to cost the state more money that will likely never be repaid? Especially when sticking a body on DUI detail is hugely in the black. They'll just let that debt, it's accruing interests and the threat of further incarceration linger on the books indefinitely. If the person ever gets their life together they'll have to pay it or face incarceration.
I'm sure someone somewhere has written a DB query to select from outstanding balance where <exists in some other DB that is a proxy for people who have money to pay> and prioritize those cases.
Are you suggesting that Florida it’s to go ‘soft on “crime”’? That would fly in the face of almost all available evidence.
I have extended family in Florida. The system absolutely can and does and will push the issue. There’s a reason that it’s a crime not to pay for your incarceration even if you have a finding of factual innocence against you.
Your family isn't sleeping under a bridge or whatever. Of course the system wants your money or the money of people on comparable economic footing you associate with. If you can work as a debt slave to the system it wants you to do that even if it means a never ending cycle of robbing peter to pay paul, sleeping on other people's couches, etc. The man sleeping under a bridge cannot, so the cops and the DA and everyone else just go fry bigger fish. Maybe they push the issue 1/100th of the time and incarcerate someone every now and they but they absolutely do not prioritize it the way they do someone who could pay even if only by moving heaven and earth. The system doesn't want to manufacture yet another felony and then incarcerate someone for it out of thin air, that just costs the system more money.
Source: my tiny keyhole view into the system.
The parties involve always have have discretion to downgrade stuff to something else, or not pursue it at all and are incentivizes.
> The system doesn't want to manufacture yet another felony and then incarcerate someone for it out of thin air, that just costs the system more money.
You say this like Florida doesn't have both the most private prisons in the country, and the most inmates held in such facilities.
"The system" doesn't care. Florida has, repeatedly, shown a willingness to cut back on education and healthcare.
And private prisons have repeatedly been shown to be a hotbed of corruption.
> The narrative they "investigated" was so obviously false, bodycam evidence directly contradicted multiple key facts. Officials are interested only seeking to prove the case. Thankfully the jury came to the right verdict.
I don't get it, if they only care about prosecuting and proving the case, wouldn't they go by the bodycam evidence? They didn't prove the case. Maybe if their incentive was to prosecute and prove the charges, they'd go by the obvious evidence. Or am I missing something here?
In my experience, the narrative the prosecutor argued on behalf of the accuser was obviously false because specific key facts were contradicted by bodycam statements, for example
"He took my phone and it was dead" -> bodycam showed her using the phone when police arrived
I provided a recording of my accuser clearly being drunk, aggressive, threatening me while I was de-escalating. I was the one who called 911 to stop her from drunk driving. Her speech clearly slurred.
Instead of realizing her story doesn't add up, the prosecutor brought in a DV expert to explain how it's typical for abusers to call 911 and that her behavior was a normal reaction to being assaulted.
Imo they're right, if you're faced with the option of running away from some crazy person or interacting with the police in the USA, the safer option is to run.
A police interaction can escalate to ruinous heights within seconds due to no fault of your own. Remember that cop that got scared by an acorn falling and started shooting at random? I don't care how many "good cops" there are, I'm not rolling the dice on encountering an acorn cop.
Society went through the necessary lessons with DNA and fingerprints. Putting people in jail because the computer produce a match is a terrible idea, especially when its done by an proprietary dark box that no one really understand why it claims there is a match. It can be used as a tool of investigations to give the investigators an hint to find real more substantial clues, but using it like in fiction where the computer can act as the single truth is terrible for society and justice.
A month ago or so people on HN discussed facial recognition when looking victims and perpetrators in child exploitation material, and people were complaining that meta did not allow this fast enough. Neither the article or the people in that discussion draw any connection that the issues in this article could happen. People seemingly want to think that the lesson is "Never go back to North Dakota", as that is a much easier lesson than considering false positives in detection algorithms and their impact on a legal system that is constrained in budget, time, training and incentives.
Yes, of course someone should have investigated, but the larger point here is that people don’t because they are being sold a false narrative that AI is infallible and can do anything.
We could sit here all day arguing “you should always validate the results”, but even on HN there are people loudly advocating that you don’t need to.
I don't think people on HN think "AI is infallible", I think people on HN believe HN is sufficient enough for "most tasks". In the context of HN "most tasks" refers to programming tasks, not arresting and jailing people tasks.
You should always validate the results, but there is an inherint difference between an AI generated tool for personal use and a tool which could be used to destroy someones life.
The problem is that the people who will put this in place rate capability on a linear scale: in their view the ability to write software is sufficiently magic, so such an ability is obviously good enough to recognize criminals. From their perspective, there are hurdles to be crossed (like probable cause) and an AI flagging a suspect feels like a magical intelligence crossing those hurdles and allowing them to continue in the process.
They don't validate the results of their fellow officers, or the validity of warrants, or anything else that predicates an arrest. Why would they start with this?
What about cops and legislators? They thing AI is infallible and thats very convenient for them since they can thus not mandate cops having to double check tmwhat the AI suggests
Where are you seeing people being told that AI is infallible? AI is being hyped to the moon, but "infallible" is not one of the claims.
To the extent people trust AI to be infallible, it's just laziness and rapport (AI is rarely if ever rude without prompting, nor does it criticize extensive question-asking as many humans would, it's the quintessential enabler[1]) that causes people to assume that because it's useful and helpful for so many things, it'll be right about everything.
The models all have disclaimers that state the inverse. People just gradually lose sight of that.
[1] This might be the nature of LLMs, or it might be by design, similar to social media slop driving engagement. It's in AI companies' interest to have people buying subscriptions to talk with AIs more. If AI goes meta and critiques the user (except in more serious cases like harm to self or others, or specific kinds of cultural wrongthink), that's bad for business.
> To the extent people trust AI to be infallible, it's just laziness and rapport (…) that causes people to assume that because it's useful and helpful for so many things, it'll be right about everything.
Why it happens is secondary to the fact that it does.
> The models all have disclaimers that state the inverse. People just gradually lose sight of that.
Those disclaimers are barely effective (if at all), and everyone knows that. Including the ones putting them there.
"The trauma, loss of liberty, and reputational damage cannot be easily fixed,” Lipps' lawyers told CNN in an email.
That sounds a LOT like a statement you make for before suing for damages, not to mention they literally say "Her lawyers are exploring civil rights claims but have yet to file a lawsuit, they said."
This lady probably just wants to go back to normal life and get some money for the hell they put her in. She has never been on a airplane before, I doubt she is going to take on the entire system like you suggest. Easier said than done to "challenge the entire system", what does that even mean exactly?
It was worse than that, the reporting from an earlier story[0]
...Unable to pay her bills from jail, she lost her home, her car and even her dog.
There is not a jury in the country that will side against the woman. I am not even sure who will make the best pop culture mashup - John Wick or a country song writer?
(Also, what happened to journalism - no Oxford comma?)
Well, omitting the Oxford comma is the traditionally correct thing to do. I use the Oxford comma, it makes sense, but it is new. A hundred years ago it would have been considered an error by nearly every editor.
TBF isn't it rather unreasonable that our system permits your home to be foreclosed while you're detained prior to a hearing?
Also rather unreasonable to arrest someone who is clearly neither violent nor a flight risk. You could literally hold the trial via video conference at that point and there would be no downside.
At the risk of sounding like more of an anarchist (irony, autocorrect went with absurdist which isn’t entirely wrong either) than I might usually feel, that all depends on who you believe the system is for and works for? If you believe it’s “capitalism” as been so often proven, then it could be said that it’s entirely “reasonable”.
> depends on who you believe the system is for and works for
We are still enough of a democracy to blame ourselves for this. We could choose that the system is of the people, by the people, for the people. I think too many of us simply don't agree with that, except in the narrow situation where we are talking about ourself.
We could just overcome the tens of billions shoved into our faces aimed at undermining it and brainwashing us, and choose that the system is of the people?
The deck is so unbelievably stacked against it.
Another thing: many people hav e been permitted to vote in let's say 40 elections (at different levels), out of which maybe 1 had a candidate that indeed supported a "system that is of the people", and 39 didn't. Gets tough then doesn't it.
iirc the dog was a dangerous animal and had attacked people and animals uprovoked quite a few times. didnt hear about it so not sure about the horses, but typically people dont just execute horses when they aren't injured or at risk of living out a traumatic existence. who knows, media spins and all that jazz, but I wouldn't hesitate to end a liability of a dangerous dog or a horse in suffering that had no chance of recovery, however reluctant id feel in the moment
The real problem here is she'll get money, who knows how much, but that ultimately does nothing to actually address the problems in the system.
Effectively it just raises taxes to cover the cost of these failed prosecutions.
Everytime one of these cases happens, a cop and a prosecutor should be out of a job permanently. Possibly even jailed. The false arrest should lose the cop their job and get them blacklisted, the prosecution should lose the prosecutor's right to practice law.
And if the police union doesn't like that and decides to strike, every one of those cops should simply be fired. Much like we did to the ATC. We'd be better off hiring untrained civilians as cops than to keep propping up this system of warrior cops abusing the citizens.
> The false arrest should lose the cop their job and get them blacklisted
There is actually a federal register for LEOs that have been terminated for cause or resigned to avoid termination.
The police unions that operate in the jurisdictions that employ 70% of US police have negotiated into their CBAs that the register “cannot be used for hiring or promotional decisions”. Read into that what you will.
I'm generally pretty for unions, but the police union is one that's a complete cancer on society. It pretty much solely exists to make sure cops are free to harm the public without any sort of accountability.
Agreed. And I think we really, really need to put more effort into a "police the police" organization. Someone who has power only over the police, who the police do not have power over, to act as a check.
... test my support for the idea of unionization. I have even said in the past that I think public sector unions are especially important because their boss (the people) are the most capricious and malicious of all.
Maybe we could find a way to put guardrails on what they could and could not negotiate into a contract. Wages, benefits, basic job environmental conditions, stuff like that -- okay. But administrative policies which exist to prevent bad behavior should be non-negotiable.
It's not the police union's fault that there is literally zero pushback against them.
Somehow Teacher unions have near zero power but cops can collectively bargain for the right to murder people to get a paid vacation.
It isn't because they have a union. Most of them don't have more than a high school diploma and minimal training. You can replace them with ease. A strike shouldn't even be considered a threat. They often can't strike, and their normal threat is work to rule, ie follow the law.
It isn't the police union that keeps judges from throwing the book at cops. It isn't the police union that keeps 40% of the country rabidly insistent that gently reforming police would turn this country to ash. It isn't the union that forces them to die in car crashes far more often than they ever face lethal violence.
A union isn't magically powerful and never can be. The employer can always just replace the members. Funny how that keeps unions in check for such skilled jobs as Teachers and Bureaucrats and Nurses and ATC employees, but for people who usually have just a high school diploma and a few weeks of training suddenly it's impossible call the strike's bluff? I hear TSA bodies are desperate for work.
It's a narrative. Police unions are allowed to exist to encourage you to hate unions. Police unions have correctly identified that nobody even attempts to push back against them and are simply doing their job: Advocating for their members. You aren't required to accept a Union's terms. America is chock full of better trained private security that would be happy to scalp a police force.
Hell, police departments are often run by political candidates. Why don't the pro-union ones just get voted out by supposedly anti-union people?
What makes police unions different from other unions is cops have a lot more power to make life miserable for their political enemies. They have effectively a legal right to harass anyone they'd like.
The worst a teachers union can do is strike.
Cops can assault and murder people then claim self defense. It's unlikely another cop will arrest them, and it's unlikely a prosecutor will actually do their job in prosecuting them.
This sort of undue power is what enabled Joe Arpaio to setup a concentration camp. That's somewhat the extreme of what cops can do. And he did, eventually, get prosecuted for it (though he was pardoned). But that was literally after years of those sorts of stunts. [1]
I can guarantee that Arpaio isn't the only corrupt cop out there. He just got too much national attention which ultimately ended his career.
It absolutely was. There's no question of this. Now we need to ask how was the system marketed, what did the police pay for it, how were they trained to use it?
> anybody bothered to ask her "where were you the morning of july 10th between 3 and 4pm.
Legally that amounts "hearsay" and cannot have any value. Those statements probably won't even be admissible in court without other supporting facts entered in first.
> we are all guilty until cleared.
This is not at a phenomenon that started with AI. If you scratch the surface, even slightly, you'll find that this is a common strategy used against defendants who are perceived as not being financially or logistically capable of defending themselves.
We have a private prison industry. The line between these two outcomes is very short.
> Legally that amounts "hearsay" and cannot have any value. Those statements probably won't even be admissible in court without other supporting facts entered in first.
I just want to understand your argument: you believe that any alibi provided is hearsay, and has no legal value, and that they can't even take the statement in order to validate it? That's your position?
The condition here being she was already arrested. You don't arrest someone first and then try to establish their alibi second. That would be an investigation which would be prior to getting a warrant which would allow you to arrest someone. You will never talk yourself out of an arrest, you might talk yourself out of an investigation.
You can offer your story to the police but the fact that you did or what you said to them will not come into evidence in court. You cannot call the officer to the stand and then ask them to repeat in court what you said. That would be "hearsay." So, for a lot of reasons, if you're already arrested, you probably don't even want to tell them any of that. It can only be used against you and never for you. Get your lawyer and have them ready the case to prove that alibi for you.
You're never going to get your statements made in an interrogation into the record as exculpatory evidence.
The purpose of the interrogation is to find _other crimes_ you are also guilty of and charge you with those.
The police are not going to build a case against you, arrest you, and then immediately try to destroy their own case.
There's some real Hollywood confusion here.
There are two legal issues here. First is fighting the false arrest. Your statements will not help you here. Second is a civil rights violation case. The police negligence, if it can be established, is the basis of your case.
In either scenario your stated alibi is not meaningful.
"I saw her at the library" is firsthand testimony.
"I saw her library card in her pocket" is firsthand testimony.
"She was at the library - Bob told me so" is hearsay. Just look at the word - "hear say". Hearsay is testifying about events where your knowledge does not come from your own firsthand observations of the event itself.
That's fair, I'll admit to getting it slightly wrong.
However, the original topic had nothing to do with that as far as I could tell, and instead was claiming it was hearsay for her to testify about her own whereabouts. That is simply not at all true, regardless of my error.
Agree in principle. But people like her does not have the resources, financially and emotionally to go through the legal system again. Unless there are charitable lawyers who are willing to do it on her behalf for free.
Clearview again. ICE is using it too, and their people think it is an oracle that is always correct, so that when someone shows a passport card or a RealID showing that they are someone else, a US citizen or permanent resident, they are usually accused of having a fake ID. It's a flawed tool and it misidentifies people sometimes.
The experience is a lot like when you are talking with a friend, then they decide to ask siri or google a question using voice. The result is always imprecise. Meaning they either have to repeat their query, or end up typing it anyway.
If you want to buy a Walmart product, the easiest way is to go to Walmart. Why add an imprecise middle man in between?
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/programming-tools-are-free
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