> Plenty of people in law enforcement would wipe a drive if their family and debts were taken care of, even in face of prison.
This is beyond ridiculous:
(1) Someone in law enforcement that is in a position to meddle with the chain of evidence can already wipe incriminating evidence, which is already illegal. That would imply that the powerful already have a “get out of jail” card.
(2) There are a myriad of other places where corruption and bias can produce a “get out of jail” card, starting with who law enforcement chooses to investigate in the first place, and ending with who prosecutors decline to prosecute.
(3) Anyone in law enforcement is well-aware of just how horrific a place prison actually is, especially for someone previously in law-enforcement. Nobody is scrambling to wipe their debts to “take care of their family” while going to prison themselves.
> can already wipe incriminating evidence, which is already illegal. That would imply that the powerful already have a “get out of jail” card
We’re referencing a case where a state senator was convicted despite a drive (of potentially exculpatory evidence) being wiped. Then the guy who wiped the drive was caught and charged. So no.
OP suggested the defendant be “automatically found not guilty.” Not fruit of the poisoned tree, where evidence can’t be used. Automatic exoneration.
> myriad of other places where corruption and bias can produce a “get out of jail” card, starting with who law enforcement chooses to investigate in the first place
Nothing automatic. Also, this is why we have overlapping jurisdiction.
> law enforcement is well-aware of just how horrific a place prison actually is
LEO doesn’t get sent to standard prison, largely for safety reasons.
> We’re referencing a case where a state senator was convicted despite a drive (of potentially exculpatory evidence) being wiped. So no.
This senator was not powerful enough (or was actually honest enough) to not leverage the illegal “get out of jail” cards that already exist.
> OP suggested automatic not guilty for the defendant. Not fruit of the poisoned tree, where evidence can’t be used. Automatic exoneration.
What else are you going to do when potentially exculpatory evidence has been summarily wiped by the people responsible for maintaining the chain of evidence?
Force the accused to prove the wiped evidence was exculpatory?
You handle it in appeals, and the appeals court looks at the balance of the evidence weighed against the alleged exculpatory evidence and makes a decision?
> the balance of the evidence weighed against the alleged exculpatory evidence
Surely you see the fundamental problem, here. This shifts the burden of proof onto the defendant. Demonstrating the previous existence and, in particular, the exculpatory nature of destroyed evidence is practically impossible.
If the state directly conspires to an unfair trial, the state’s case must be forfeit.
The destroyed drive was discovered before the trial started and there was a motion for dismissal that was made, appealed, and ultimately denied because
A. The evidence was available through other means
B. It was not strong enough to exculpate the defendant
[1]
I agree that taking a strong inference against actions of prosecution when evidence is destroyed and unrecoverable. However, in this case, that's not what happened. Evidence was destroyed, but it was also preserved in other locations (it was uploaded on dropbox).
Our court system, while weak in many areas, isn't terrible in this sort of circumstance. It doesn't take hard lines because things are tricky.
This sort of problem with evidence is made to come out of the regular court proceedings. It's why discovery happens before we start a trial.
That we’re ignoring all of the evidence that contributed to the case (and conviction, which was made after the wiped drive was discovered) outside one laptop?
Yes. You are. Because ethics lapses by State actors who are empowered to such an asymmetric degree, demand it.
If exculpatory evidence is destroyed, adverse inference demands the court infer that that evidence be viewed in the worst light for the destroyer of the evidence, which in this case is the State. It really doesn't matter what was on that disk at this point. Now that the chain of evidence has been destroyed, we have to assume it truly was exculpatory.
Just as we'd assume a defendant destroying evidence would indicate it was so damning the jury should assume it was just the thing the State needed to prove their case.
Good of the goose, good of the gander. No self-referential inconsistency.
Is the prevailing goal of our justice system to convict this one particular defendant, or to ensure that trials are as fair as possible for all defendants?
Unfortunately in most cases the defendant is far too poor to afford to hire an attorney for an appeal. Justice very often relies on the contents of your bank account
My experience in USA with appeals is they only look at technical process, mis-application of case law, or "clear error". Constitutional issue can be raised, and will lose basically every time.
Any balance or weighing of evidence is in the lower court.
I couldn't find a news article stating this. I'm skeptical that a highly politicized and infamous former policeman would not be immediately shipped to PC at any prison he went to -- he or his lawyers would probably request it outright.
We don’t know what was on the drive, since it was wiped. We just know the agent says they had it wiped.
Creating a situation where bribing a law enforcement officer to claim to have destroyed evidence gets you out of a criminal charge automatically seems like a pretty problematic idea.
True. Tho' I believe the arc of the point is...a system based on humans and human nature is subject to a wide range of questionable behaviours.
Just recently there was a judge - was it judges? - found guilty of sending kids to prison based on kickbacks received from the prison. And that, pardon the cliche, is just the tip of the iceberg.
Human behavior is both predictable and yet often bizarre.
Humans - you and me included - are far from perfect. A title or position does little to alter that. In fact, title and status breeds overconfidence and additional biases.
I'm not a cynical, simply realistic. We don't know about a fraction of the shit that goes down.
With the right amount of incentive, they could hire a lawyer to get them house arrest instead of prison time or a reduced prison time in a minimum security luxury prison.
Home appraisal is arbitrary and subjective — ridiculously so.
All this particular stunt shows is that two appraisers can and will appraise a home wildly differently — which anyone who has their home appraised already knew.
It would be nice if more of the burden of proof were on subjective systems that historically have been full of racial bias, rather than on the communities that have historically suffered from the effects of the discrimination.
This is not an isolated incident, there are dozens of lawsuits and the study from the Brookings institute linked elsewhere in this thread.
I don’t think it would actually be nice if the burden of proof rested on the accused. This example isn’t a study of systemic bias, and is both individually and statistically meaningless.
It would be nice, however, if the paper of record didn’t call out a home appraiser, by name, in front of a national audience, with no evidence, as being a racist.
A) the historical evidence about discrimination at every level in the housing system
B) the study from the brookings institute showing bias with housing appraisal
I’m also not claiming all of the burden of proof should lie with the accused.
What I am saying is given the anecdotes, lawsuits, and retrospective analysis, I think it’s fair to put more pressure on the system to help with investigating the issue more systematically.
Getting the type of statistical evidence you are talking about is expensive and I think there are enough indications that 0% of the cost seems like too low of a cost to expect a huge industry to cover.
I haven’t ignored any of that; I simply don’t believe that it is ethical to use the state’s monopoly on violence to punish individual actors (including said industry) without due process.
If you want the state to fund systematic investigation of systemic crimes, then fine.
> I’m also not claiming all of the burden of proof should lie with the accused.
None of the burden of proof should lie with the accused.
So I think we are probably aligned that Government Sponsored Enterprises should be spending some time looking into this given the (weaker) evidence that's already there.
If systemic issues with appraisal are found there, it seems fair to me that there should be some regulation and/or state-sponsored investigation of whether the same systemic issues are happening with purely private appraisal.
So, guilty until proven innocent, but where the standards of innocence are undefined statistical measures that nobody will commit to up front? Sounds mediaeval.
Switch teams to a different domain every six months?
In the domains I’ve worked in, it might take six months just to get the basic idea sketched out and working. The current project has a timeline of 8 years to full completion — two years just to get to the first minimal release for a subset of our problem domain and the hardware to run it on.
It sounds like you’ve been doing unchallenging work in unchallenging domains and have acquired a much too inflated opinion of yourself in the process.
I've worked on teams with 6 month ramp up times. Almost always this happens because there is an absurd amount of domain/business knowledge encoded in some massive 500k line code base. Tenured engineers gate keep with domain knowledge. The real learning happens by switching between working on those types of systems and then moving to greenfield to implement the patterns you observed.
How do you know if you did a good job if you leave after a few months? Did you leave a beautiful work of art, a bug-ridden unmaintainable mess for others to clean up, or anything in-between?
A large part of experience is doing things that seemed like good and reasonable idea at the time, and then discovering that it actually wasn't. And how do you know what are and aren't good ideas? By sticking around and seeing what does and doesn't work.
> there is no learning after a certain amount of years of coding (I would argue at 4-5 years of good/varied experience mark).
If you stopped learning after 4-5 years in the field, the barrier you hit wasn’t the lack of new things to learn. It was your own ability to learn them.
> I would argue that the idea that the human brain can hold ten years of programming information to be absolutely absurd.
You’re demonstrating the ignorant hubris of youth quite successfully.
To be generous, if we're talking coding specifically, 4-5 years is a reasonable cap in my opinion.
Coding is not the same thing as software engineering or systems/architecture design or technical leadership or... All of those things can be improved significantly through a human lifespan. The act of writing code? Not so much.
The other caveat is that most people will not be getting enough experience to hit that cap in 5 years. You need the right environment, mentors, etc.
It’s a blind spot in DEI and intersectionality; the idea that an oppressed class can also be an oppressor class, and that it’s not an attribute of the perpetrator’s class at all, but in fact, situational and individual.
That's... Exactly the opposite of a blind spot in intersectionality. The idea that those in the intersections of marginalized groups suffer more doesn't come from some bizarre belief that those at the top mistreat them twice as much. It comes from recognizing that more people feel comfortable mistreating them.
It's well-documented at this point that black women in the USA during slavery were mistreated just as much by white women as white men, despite the weight of patriarchy causing white women to be mistreated by white men as well: oppressor in one situation, oppressed in another.
Intersectionality is calling out that those differences are present within groups, and that no analysis based on only a single axis can ever explain the full situation.
It's telling that you didn't actually address my point.
See, isn't innuendo fun?
Telling of what, precisely? If you think my point is false, please do say so. If you think my example isn't accurate, please say so. If you think my example is accurate but not a good analogy for the original discussion, please explain why that matters when I'm refuting a claim you made that is also not related to the original discussion.
Don't just slather on innuendo. Make arguments consisting of assertions of fact, reasoning from those asserted facts, and conclusions drawn from that reasoning.
The concept of intersectionality was invented by a black woman who definitely has never had any problem pointing out how black men can oppress black women. Nobody wielding the concept need have any discomfort pointing this out. So I don't think anyone has any idea what point you're making here with the repeated innuendo.
If you were hoping to suggest that intersectionality does not allow black people to be considered oppressors, that's just a right-wing caricature of the concept. You should read about intersectionality from sources that actually describe the concept accurately, rather than ones that merely want to sneer at it.
You promote bad, inauthentic uses of the concept because you want the concept to fail. Why you want the concept to fail is left as a trivial exercise for the reader.
Agreed. In tech especially, certain minority groups (East and South Asians) are over represented so our processes must evolve to deal with the situations that result from them.
I'd rather the processes evolve to treat all discrimination on factors such as race or caste as bad, regardless of the race or caste of the people doing the discriminating.
That’s the theory, which, if you actually took to its logical conclusion, would result in treating and evaluating every individual as an individual, and the entire concept of group identity as a short-hand mechanism for assigning “intersecting identities” would have to be abandoned.
It does not logically follows at all. Nothing in what previous poster said prevents analysis of group behavior or treatment. It does not make it impossible to talk about race or gender or age - it only makes it less naive.
It makes it impossible to assign an individual identity — and evaluate individual behavior and status — as merely a function of their coarse-grained group membership.
It does not make it impossible at all. And it also does not need to. You can talk about how groups are influenced or how they interact without making all the interaction to be result of "merely" just that.
> ... the idea that an oppressed class can also be an oppressor class, and that it’s not an attribute of the perpetrator’s class at all, but in fact, situational and individual.
I think this is a textbook description of intersectionality[1].
> It’s a blind spot in DEI and intersectionality; the idea that an oppressed class can also be an oppressor class, and that it’s not an attribute of the perpetrator’s class at all, but in fact, situational and individual.
what's really bleakly funny is that you're right - that's how it's taken, but that's actually a major _point_ of intersectionality.
Well, "DEI" in the end is the neoliberalization of (the capitalist-corporate-compatible parts of) intersectionality, so it's not really surprising that something of significant value was lost in the appropriation.
The most charitable interpretation is that they are attempting to increase representation in the pipeline of candidates, such that their unbiased, neutral selection process will naturally produce outcomes representative of their candidate pool.
That’s legal.
In reality, when you have companies literally setting hiring targets on the basis of protected characteristics?
It’s very unlikely that the selection process is neutral to those protected characteristics, which is not legal.
DEI is just rebranding of the struggle for equality, in which the fight against casteism has been raging for decades. This is a very western centric view.
And intersectional praxis is, overwhelmingly, an ideology of white people. Most people in the individual groups (Muslims, Hispanics, etc.) are advocating for their own interests. It’s white people that subscribe to a theory that ties these completely different groups together.
Shit, all those queer black women who have been telling me that intersectionality is important because they experience unique struggles because they are at the intersection of multiple sets of traits have been doing so because it's popular with white folks?
Intersectionality is the idea that multiple identities intersect, and like the intersection in a Venn diagram, the overlap is a unique zone.
There’s not enough queer Black women to make intersectionality more than an academic topic. White people are who give it prominence. Black people themselves are as conservative as republicans on sexuality: https://news.gallup.com/poll/112807/blacks-conservative-repu.... When you see BLM-style advocacy that ties together Black+queer, that’s primarily for white people. Similarly, folks like Ilhan Omar and Linda Sarsour have such prominence not because Muslims see themselves as having common cause with queer people (https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/28/us/lgbt-muslims-pride-progres...) but because white people do.
Put differently, Black people and Muslims may advocate in their own self interest, but otherwise believe whatever they believe. Ordinarily, such advocacy would seek to avoid issues that divide the community within itself. White people, by contrast, are not advocating on their own behalf, but on behalf of a variety of groups that are the object of their sympathy. Intersectionality uniquely reflects how such white people see the world.
What. You realize that much of mainstream culture is drawn from the queer Black community, right? Voguing, house music, slang like "yas queen", "slay", "shade", and "tea", Pride parades, and more.
And that BIPOC cultures have a history of third gender peoples? Two Spirit, fa'afafine, chibados, muxe, sipniq, etc.
To say these things only exist because of white liberal sexuality is patently absurd.
White people are the ones who control “mainstream culture” and decide what gets absorbed into it. That includes things pertaining to minorities. For example, “BIPOC” is a term popularized by white people to refer to a group that’s most pertinent to white people—people other than themselves. Most people who fit the label “BIPOC” don’t identify with some larger agglomeration of “people who aren’t white.” They identify as black, Pakistani, Cuban, etc.
LatinX is a good example that clearly illustrates the power dynamic. Although it was coined by a Puerto Rican, it is unpopular among Spanish-speaking Americans. If Spanish speaking Americans took a vote, they wouldn’t call themselves “LatinX.” The term has become a prominent label because it appeals to white people.
Third genders actually illustrate how “BIPOC cultures” view gender very differently from white people. Bangladesh, where I’m from, recognizes a third gender. But it isn’t associated with ideas of gender and gender roles being fluid, as it is in white societies. It instead functions to separate sexual minorities from everyone else in a society that is intensely gendered and heteronormative.
The Wikipedia article on third genders actually contains a disclaimer reminding white people not to project their own concepts of gender and sexuality onto superficially similar concepts in other cultures.
We don’t need to rely on our subjective experience with our respective “circles.” There is extensive polling and research on this. LatinX is extremely unpopular, and way more Latinos find the term offensive than use it: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/many-latinos-say-latin.... I suspect most Latinos have never even heard of “Latin@“ or “Latinao.” Most just don’t think Spanish needs to be “fixed.”
BIPOC is similar: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/01/us/terminology-language-p... (“In a national poll conducted by Ipsos for The New York Times, more than twice as many white Democrats said they felt ‘very favorably’ toward ‘BIPOC’ as Americans who identify as any of the nonwhite racial categories it encompasses.”)
It’s important for white people not to confuse their personal experiences with individual “BIPOC” as proxies for “BIPOC” communities: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/us/politics/elizabeth-war.... These folks are often activists who align with white power to overcome the majority opinion within their community.
Every time I've been to an art museum (and this is a handful, not just SFMOMA), there has been a person or two in a room with some, well, art hanging on the wall. They had notebook of the appropriate paper medium and art supplies and were copying the existing work.
Copying of existing works is part of how an art student learns. That this one happens to be a math model at its core is an interesting philosophical problem. The other people's work to serve as your training set is exactly what art students do - and the works they copied and the works that they have yet to produce are not royalty encumbered.
Nor should a mathematical model. It happens that the developers working on this problem have gotten it so that it can do its learning and creation many times faster than an art student in a gallery... but it still can't get hands and faces right.
> The other people's work to serve as your training set is exactly what art students do
“Training” an art student and training an AI model are vastly different, and your equating the two is, frankly, nonsensical and absurd.
An art student isn’t a trivial weighted model capable only of mapping stolen text prompts to stolen image representations of them.
> It happens that the developers working on this problem have gotten it so that it can do its learning and creation many times faster than an art student in a gallery
It hasn’t learned anything.
It correlates stolen textual descriptions with stolen images, and then regurgitates mash-ups of the same.
This type of AI model cannot produce anything other than purely derivative work stolen from others.
When it comes to playing around in blender - my designs are obviously derivative of others - do I need to credit those artists? Even the ones that I don't remember more than a "I saw this print at a comic art show once..."
How original does my own work have to be before it isn't a mashup of stolen images that I half remember?
> If I was to dabble in sci-fi art and made something that fit in the art style of Steward Cowley … do I need to credit the art?
Probably, yes.
> When it comes to playing around in blender - my designs are obviously derivative of others - do I need to credit those artists?
Again, probably, but nobody is likely to care if you’re not actually selling your work.
> Even the ones that I don't remember more than a "I saw this print at a comic art show once..."
Then that’s not the prompt you should be starting with if your goal is to produce an original work.
> How original does my own work have to be before it isn't a mashup of stolen images that I half remember?
How original does it have to be before it’s not plagiarism?
Now, remove your ability for individual creativity, such that you cannot come up with an original idea. All you can do is plagiarize.
That’s the difference, here. This isn’t an AI trained to have creative thought, a genuine understanding of what it’s making, and original ideas. It’s an AI trained to regurgitate mashups of plagiarized works based on weighted correlation between the prompt and the (also plagiarized) descriptions of the works it’s regurgitating.
What do you think the artists "trained on"? Didn't they ever see anyone else's art? Don't you think it influenced their art?
If it's a 1:1 copy, I agree. If it's a "that looks vaguely like the style that xyz likes to use", I disagree.
And I assume you'd run into plenty of situations where multiple people would discover that it's their unique style that is being imitated. Kind of like that story about a hipster threatening to sue a magazine for using his image in an article only to find out that he's a hipster and dresses and styles himself like countless other people, so much so that he himself wasn't able to tell himself apart from another guy.
Your entire point hinges on a false assumption; “training” a human artist (or programmer) is the same as training an AI model.
It is not.
The AI model can only regurgitate stolen mash-ups of other people’s work.
Everything it produces is trivially derivative of the work it has consumed.
Where it succeeds, it succeeds because it successfully correlated stolen human-written descriptions to stolen human-produced images.
Where it fails, it does so because it cannot understand what it’s regurgitating, and it regurgitates the wrong stolen images for the given prompt.
AI models are incapable of producing anything but purely derivative stolen works, and the (often unwillingly) contributors to their training dataset should be entitled to copyright protections that extend to the derivative works.
That’s true whether we’re discussing dall-e or GitHub copilot.
> The AI model can only regurgitate stolen mash-ups of other people’s work.
We all stand on the shoulders of giants. If you're very dismissive, I think it's easy to say the same about most artists. They're not genre-redefining, they carve out their niche that works (read: sells) for them.
The art that was trained on was all Creative Commons apparently, so perhaps artists should understand licenses first before giving their work a permissive license.
All CC licenses, other than the “CC0 public domain dedication”, require attribution, but CC themselves have taken what I’d consider to be an ass-backwards position on the matter:
> At CC, we believe that, as a matter of copyright law, the use of works to train AI should be considered non-infringing by default, assuming that access to the copyright works was lawful at the point of input.
It's not backwards. It's the same as if a human artist studied it.
Backwards would be thinking that any creative work you make is a derivative work of many creative works that you've seen in the past which you aren't copying from.
Where is this said? I'm looking at the collection of artists this site is happily offering to rip off (https://twitter.com/arvalis/status/1558632898336501761/photo...) and there's a lot of people with long careers making copyrighted work. I really can't imagine finding a ton of CC work by Bernie Wrightson or Wayne Barlowe or Brom or Junji Ito, for instance.
Czech workers during the communist era used to say “If you’re not stealing from the state, you’re stealing from your family” (“Kdo neokrádá stát, okrádá rodinu”)
This is beyond ridiculous:
(1) Someone in law enforcement that is in a position to meddle with the chain of evidence can already wipe incriminating evidence, which is already illegal. That would imply that the powerful already have a “get out of jail” card.
(2) There are a myriad of other places where corruption and bias can produce a “get out of jail” card, starting with who law enforcement chooses to investigate in the first place, and ending with who prosecutors decline to prosecute.
(3) Anyone in law enforcement is well-aware of just how horrific a place prison actually is, especially for someone previously in law-enforcement. Nobody is scrambling to wipe their debts to “take care of their family” while going to prison themselves.