I don’t think it’s appropriate to wish ill on other people. When writing I think it’s just as important to consider the impact of your words as it is to express your ideas and emotions. These sorts of words can make people feel unsafe, and in extreme situations can inspire similar feelings in other people with similar problems. Maybe someone that might take more direct action than a blogpost.
I understand different regions have different communication style, but the murder rate in the US is too high for us to joke about these sorts of things.
I disagree, but I appreciate your perspective. I think it’s fairly clear that the author is using exaggerated speech to make a point and convey their feelings. The reason I mentioned regional differences is I often find myself having this disagreement with my west coast compatriots.
I think we often underestimate the intelligence of the criminal population for two main reasons.
1. The dumbest ones are most likely to be caught and have their stories told.
2. Law Enforcement often gets frustrated at chasing the smarter ones and use illegal methods catching them and the real story doesn’t come out in court.
Near as I can tell Luigi nullified all his carefully planned evasion and escape routing by deciding at the last minute he really needed a coffee from the Starbucks across the street from where he was about to shoot his victim and didn't keep his hoody up. If he'd worn a long-billed baseball cap, dark glasses, kept his hoody up and skipped Starbucks he'd probably never have been caught.
His evasion and escape plan was actually pretty good and he put a lot of effort into being hard to trace by arriving and departing NYC via bus and staying in a hostel, which makes it surprising he screwed up the easiest and most obvious things.
I'm not saying this hasn't happened, but any competent criminal defense attorney (like a SMART criminal would have) would go to town on illegally obtained evidence. I'm not saying cops don't do warrantless searches/taps/etc., to gather unofficial clues, but if they can't get real evidence that stands up under scrutiny, the criminal walks.
I'm not sure if prosecution would move forward on such shaky ground in hard to prove cases.
I don't think 'going to town on illegally obtained evidence' works as often as you believe it does [0, 1].
And think back - how many people went to jail for national and/or international scale warrantless wiretapping? How did we, as a nation, respond to Snowden's revelations?
> I'm not sure if prosecution would move forward on such shaky ground in hard to prove cases.
There are people on death row in the US even after being proven innocent and ordered to go free. Dignity in Ink [2] present similar cases every day - they're never going to run out of material.
0 - A major DOJ/GAO-era federal study found that illegal search/seizure issues accounted for about 0.4% of declined federal prosecutions and roughly 0.7% of dismissed cases after prosecution began. - https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/84544NCJRS.pdf
1 - Another study across seven jurisdictions found motions to suppress succeeded in under 1% of warrant cases, and only 1.5% of defendants went free because of successful suppression motions. - https://nij.ojp.gov/library/publications/search-warrants-mot...
Parallel construction is when they use illegally obtained evidence to construct a separate set of ostensibly legitimate evidence. Like, an illegal wiretap might lead to someone being in the right place at the right time to witness a crime.
> Law Enforcement often gets frustrated at chasing the smarter ones
and gives up, moving on to easier prey - and ideally getting them to plead to the other crimes I can't solve as part of a nice plea deal. Great for the stats.
On the other hand, smart people with criminal intent are more likely to find legal ways to profit. Why steal a hundred bucks from somebody when you can figure out how to steal a few bucks from millions and your only punishment is paying a fraction of your profit in fines.
The really smart ones leave people wondering if a crime really happened at all. It doesn't even need to be Oceans 11/12/n++, it can be simply "are you even sure the money is missing?"
I use to get emails with some oddball questions slightly out of my field of expertise from business owners. I would answer, and they would forward my email to the person that asked them the question. They saw their role as routers.
Do you really want to buy the 3rd or 4th most intelligent AI?
There’s so much uncertainty, it seems like the safe option is to give everyone a Claude or OpenAI subscription/api key until the frontier isn’t changing every six months.
I’m always very cautious of “evolution” as a justification for any health/wellness advice. I’d like to preface this point by saying I am a fan of daily walk, and do about 30mins of very hilly terrain daily. I just don’t like your argument for it.
1. It’s really easy to create a fictional narrative of what our ancestor’s activity was 50k years ago because of the lack of empirical evidence. The truth is we know only a little and guess at a lot.
2. It’s been associated with many false claims. So many fad diets, fad supplements, and fad exercise routines have made use of evolution to build a narrative of why it’s healthy. I’ve seen both carnivore and vegans use evolution to explain why their diet is correct.
3. The modern environment is just different than the pre-historical environment. We have clean drinking water, unlimited sodium, modern medicine, air conditioned and heated shelter. To me the real question is what is the healthiest decision for me, not what is the healthiest decision for someone 50k years ago.
Whatever it is, clearly sitting 8+ hours in a chair is no healthy way to live. You don’t have to ask what our ancestors did. You can see it in our bodies. What does a healthy body take? Something on the order of 3-4 days a week of intense exercise. Seeing past 20 feet from time to time to avoid eye strain. Getting sufficient sleep. Time to relax to let stress blow off. Simple, obvious truths, but few of us actually live them with the pressures of modern society.
I’m more triggered by someone using a weak argument that is in support of something I also support. The amount of direct empirical evidence for the health benefits of walking is so huge that we shouldn’t relay on the evolutionary argument, which is often associated with scams and pseudo-science.
Furthermore I’m saying that even if there was a very solid evolutionary argument for a specific human health behavior, it would answer the question “what helped humans 50k years ago reproduce”, instead of “how can I live a healthy life in the 21st century.”
The question you pose is of most relevance. 50k years ago matters when we are still the animals of 50k years ago forced to fit into this modern society. What are we? What are our adaptions? What are the requirements to make us fit? Same questions with the same answers today and 50k years ago. Culture evolved a whole lot faster than our bodies have. What does modern culture select for? A question to ponder.
The future is here now, it’s just not evenly distributed. China will mass produce something to the point that it is widely distributed. That is how China acts as a great equalizer on a global scale.
Another way China is a great equalizer is their willingness to do business with anyone that can pay.
China is willing to do business while giving zero fucks about the environment they are destroying and the global warming they are causing. It really blows my mind people support the china thing so much around here.
...why wouldn't it be? Who cares if e.g. Greenland has near-zero total emissions if nearly nobody lives there? Emissions are a cost of human existence, of course absolute emissions should scale with population.
No, most of the rest of the large developed economies have some standards (e.g. against buying conflict minerals) and sanctions against certain regimes. China is quite happy to ignore that if they can get away with it.
I was really hoping to learn more about the actual writing process than someone’s Linux setup. It’s a bit too complicated for my taste, I can bang out about a thousand words an hour in a chrome tab, given a sufficient source of coffee and the opportunity to silence non-urgent notifications.
I’m specifically struggling with large project editing. I have multiple projects that are hundreds of pages long, but need much more editorial efforts before they see the light of day. Editing anything longer than 10 pages feels like pulling teeth, so I end up underpublished.
My initial reaction was that old compute levels are probably good enough for modern applications, but after thinking through all of the common use cases you’re probably right.
I think it’s AV that makes the difference. The modern smartphone does a ton of processing on the image sensor, and the modern laptop is expected to output multiple 4k video signals (zoom camera + desktop sharing) while accepting multiple video signals, without dropping below 120hz.
I often have the expensive models give relatively simple inaccurate answers, even when they cite sources that directly contradict them. The error rate is lower, but you can’t have confidence with llm answers.
I understand different regions have different communication style, but the murder rate in the US is too high for us to joke about these sorts of things.
reply