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Cake day: September 6th, 2024

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  • Exactly. There’s a huge prototyping process. I would expect to make, at an absolute minimum, a dozen prototype stages. And each will take hours to print. This is not some covert process you’re doing in a hostel or homeless shelter. And even if you have access to a makerspace, they’re going to notice and immediately kick you out. No maker space wants that kind of heat on them. And you’ll also need access to a firing range that will let you test your sketchy home-made gun there. And again, no gun range wants that type of liability.

    So again, I ask. Where is Luigi’s workshop? Unless you have an owned or rented space, that only you have access to, it is virtually impossible to make a ghost gun without someone finding out.

    You almost need to own or rent a large piece of rural land if you want to actually do this.


  • This is a self-serving lie promulgated by legislators and jurists who loathe a check on their own power.

    Form follows function. The jury nullification “loophole” has been known for centuries. Entire constitutions have been written knowing full well that they will enable jury nullification. There are ways you could design a legal system that wouldn’t allow nullification. Yet time and time again, the people have chosen not to reform the system to eliminate jury nullification.

    Yes, giving juries power to judge the law often produces negative outcomes. But that’s simply democracy. Sometimes democracies produce bad outcomes, just like any system of government.


  • It’s not some minor quirk of the system. It’s the only reason we have juries at all. If you just wanted a group of 12 people to decide guilt and innocence based on the facts of the case and the letter of the law, you would never hire 12 random untrained nobodies for that purpose. If that is all juries were for, you would have professional juries; being a juror would be a career that required a law degree.

    We have juries to protect against corrupt laws. That is the only saving grace of having guilt and innocence be decided by 12 random untrained nobodies. Legislatures can become corrupted and end up criminalizing things that the vast majority of the population does not consider to be wrong. A jury of your peers is the last line of defense against corrupt laws. And this mechanism is the only reason we have juries like we do.


  • https://www.thecity.nyc/2022/12/13/edny-fbi-investigating-nypd-drug-planting-allegations/

    https://lawandcrime.com/police/nypd-says-cops-who-allegedly-planted-drug-evidence-on-black-men-did-nothing-wrong/

    https://theintercept.com/2020/03/18/nypd-misconduct-body-cameras-marijuana/

    https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ex-nypd-cop-we-planted-ev_n_1009754

    https://www.yahoo.com/news/judge-throws-man-guilty-plea-224510985.html

    It’s a hard truth to accept that police lie, falsify evidence, and frame people. And I don’t even need to make the claim that cops in general plant evidence. I can make that claim for the NYPD specifically.

    NYPD has been caught before planting evidence on people. They were caught doing this not in the dark days of Tammany Hall, but literally just within the last 10 years.

    The only physical evidence linking Luigi to the crime scene is a bottle or wrapper that was found in a nearby trashcan that had his DNA on it. The shooter was dressed in a similar outfit to Luigi, a generic outfit that hundreds of men in NYC are wearing at any given time of the day or night. It might have been Luigi that placed that trash there. Or it could have even been the real killer. The real killer could have simply waited until someone that looked a bit like him dropped a wrapper in the trash, and then transported it to the scene of the crime. For a killer that seems to have planned things to such a level of intricacy, planting a false trail of evidence really doesn’t seem unlikely.

    I could absolutely see the NYPD convincing themselves, “well, we got Luigi’s DNA near the scene. We have a video that appears to be him putting it in the trash can. This is almost certainly our guy, but he’s a crafty one and knew what he was doing. Let’s just fabricate some additional evidence to really seal the deal.”

    It’s telling that Luigi is just the kind of target that the NYPD would pick out if they were going to frame someone for this. Yes, he is from a wealthy family, but he’s been completely no-contact with them for the better part of a year. His family was actively looking for him. Luigi personally was not someone of high social status. He appears to have been living as a drifter and living in hostels and homeless shelters for the last year.

    If the NYPD was going to try and frame someone, who better than some random homeless queer kid?

    Do I think Luigi actually did it? Probably. But we don’t convict people on “probably.” At least with the evidence we’ve seen in public so far, I would vote not guilty for Luigi. I would want to have a lot more info on the provenance of the weapon and manifesto they had on him before I would vote to convict.

    For example, here’s what I want to know. Where is Luigi’s workshop? You’re not making that kind of 3D printed gun in a shared bedroom of a youth hostel. You need space, tools, and privacy. And no maker space is going to let you make and prototype guns on their printers. Where exactly did that gun come from? Where is Luigi’s workshop?


  • Repost of my own comment in a different community:

    I would say that jury nullification isn’t just some accident of the legal system, but the primary reason we have juries in the first place.

    Judges will say that juries are meant to just decide the simple facts of the case. But what sane person would ever design a system that assigns 12 random untrained nobodies to do that task? If all that mattered was judging the facts of the case, why not have 12 legal scholars instead? Why isn’t “juror” a profession, just like being a lawyer or judge is? If we want people to just apply the letter of the law to the facts of a case, why not fill juries with professionals, each who had a legal degree, and who have sat as jurors hundreds of times? Judging evidence and reading law is a skill. And it’s one that can be educated on, trained, and practiced. Why do we have amateur juries, when professional juries would clearly do their purported job so much better? Or why not just do what some countries do, and have most or all trials decided solely by judges? What exactly is the point of a jury? Compared to everything else in the courtroom, the jurors, the ones actually deciding guilt or innocence, are a bunch of untrained amateurs. On its face, it makes no damn sense!

    No, the true reason, and really the only reason, we have juries at all is so that juries can serve to judge both the accused AND the law. Juries are meant to be the final line of defense against unjust laws and prosecution. It is possible for a law itself to be criminal or corrupt. Legislative systems can easily be taken over by a tiny wealthy or powerful minority of the population, and they can end up passing laws criminalizing behaviors that the vast majority of the population don’t even consider to be crimes.

    The entire purpose of having a jury is that it places the final power of guilt and innocence directly in the hands of the people. Juries are meant as a final line of defense against corrupt laws passed by a minority against the wishes of the greater majority. An unaccountable elite can pass whatever ridiculous self-serving laws they want. But if the common people simply refuse to uphold those laws in the jury box, those laws are meaningless.

    THAT is the purpose of a jury. It is the only reason juries are worth the trouble. A bunch of rank amateurs will never be able to judge the facts of a case better than actual trained legal scholars with years of experience. But by empowering juries, it places the final authority of the law firmly in the hands of the people. That is the value of having a jury at all.

    Jury nullification is not just some strange quirk or odd loophole in our justice system. It’s the entire reason we have juries in the first place.





  • That sounds like an infrastructure problem. If you built roads that were only accessible by literal monster trucks, would you try to pretend that monster trucks are suddenly practical necessities instead of ridiculous extravagances? Your aunt just lives in an area where they decided that it’s OK to require people to make a big luxury purchase just in order to get around. It may be necessary to buy a big luxury in some areas, but that doesn’t mean cars suddenly become the transportation of the working class.

    You have to have to be suffering from a severe case of motornormativity to believe the clown math that a $2k purchase is a luxury while a $40k purchase is a necessity.


  • I’m talking the machines themselves. A car costs 10x what an e-bike does. Yes, infrastructure sucks in many places. That doesn’t change the fact that a car is objectively a luxury compared to a bicycle. You live in an area that has made getting around in a luxury vehicle the only practical option. That doesn’t mean cars aren’t luxury vehicles. People who live in areas that mandate that the all homes must be at least 10,000 ft^2 don’t automatically become poor.

    Cars are a luxury, while bicycles are utility. We just build our cities with classism in mind. We build our cities to require expensive luxury travel modes, all in some misguided attempt to keep the poors out.


  • WoodScientist@lemmy.worldtoFuck Cars@lemmy.worldWell well well
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    14 days ago

    I’m just talking basic economics. A car costs 10x what an e-bike does. A car is, by any logical definition of the word, a luxury purchase compared to an e-bike. You just live in an area where you’ve decided that everyone needs to get around in luxury vehicles, and you’ve built that into your infrastructure. This would be like building all of our infrastructure to only accommodate stretch limos, and then trying to argue that limos are a necessity. It’s comically absurd. It’s a clown world.


  • Why are you talking about infrastructure? You’re changing the subject. Obviously the infrastructure needs to support them, just as cars are pretty damn useless without good road infrastructure. But cars are objectively an order of magnitude more complex and expensive than e-bikes. Cars are a luxury, bicycles are a utility. The key problem is that many cities are built to require you to use the luxury means of travel instead of the affordable utilitarian ones.



  • And by that, I mean that Hollywood seems to place something related to lgbtq in nearly every show, and so “culture” here means tv/movies/games

    LGBT people are something like 10-20% of the population. It would be insane for them to not be in a movie that has more than a handful of cast members. Why do you want your movies to show some weird unrealistic version of reality, one where queer people are just mysteriously absent? That’s pretty fucked up.

    I mean, sure, I could maybe see the argument for a period piece. Maybe it’s not too realistic to have a bunch of out queer characters in a drama set in Elizabethan England. But in something modern? Again, one in ten to one in five people is queer to some degree or another. Statistically speaking, if you select a cast at random of anything other than a handful of people, you’re going to have some queer people in that sample.

    Why do you want your movies/games to be less diverse than reality? Do you really need to live out some straight fetishistic fantasy that badly?

    The reason studios put LGBT content in movies and games is that a lot of people in the real world, aka their customers, are LGBT. If a studio rarely if ever did so, they would quickly and rightfully be labeled as “that bigoted studio that likes to pretend queer people don’t exist.”


    • Can it ever get to the point where it wouldn’t be vulnerable to this? Maybe. But it would require an entirely different AI architecture than anything that any contemporary AI company is working on. All of these transformer-based LLMs are vulnerable to this.

    • That would be fine. That’s what they should have done to train these models in the first place. Instead they’re all built on IP theft. They were just too cheap to do so and chose to build companies based on theft instead. If they hired their own artists to create training data, I would certainly lament the commodification and corporatization of art. But that’s something that’s been happening since long before OpenAI.



  • The key in my mind is that this technology cannot work independently. A bucket excavator can replace the work of many people digging by hand. But the operation of the machine truly replaces the laborers. Some hand labor is still required in any excavation, but the machine itself is capable of operating just fine without the workers it is replacing.

    But LLM image generators? They are only possible from the work of artists. They are directly trained off of artists’ work. Even worse, the continued existence of LLMs requires the never-ending continual contribution of humans. When AI image generators are trained off the results from AI image generators, things rapidly generate into literal static. It’s making a copy of a copy. If all art becomes made by LLMs, then the only recent data to train future models will be the output of other LLMs, and the whole thing collapses like a snake devouring its own tail.

    This is also the crucial difference between how image generators and actual artists work. Some will say that how LLMs work is simply the same learning process that humans learn through. The image generator trains off pre-existing art, and so does a human artist, proponents of AI will say.

    But we can see the flaw in this in that real artists do not suffer generational decay. Human artists have trained off the work of other artists, in a chain unbroken since before the rise of civilization. Yes, artists can learn technique and gain inspiration from the work of other artists, but humans are capable of true independent creation. Image generators OTOH are just blindly copying and summarizing the work of others. They have no actual sense of what art is, what makes it good, or what gives it soul. They don’t even have a sense of what makes an image comprehensible. They’re just playing a big blind correlation game of inputs and outputs. And so, if you train one AI off another AI’s output, it decays like making a copy of a copy.

    This is a crucial difference between AI “art” and human art. Human art is an original creation. As such, new art can be endlessly created. AI “art” can only blindly copy. So unless the AI can get continual references from actual real human art, it quickly diverges into uselessness.

    The ditch digger replaced by an excavator has no real means to legally object. They were paid for their previous jobs, and are simply no longer needed. But real human artists and AI? This software is going to be a never-ending vampire on their creative output. It has only been created by stealing their past work, and it will only remain viable if it can continue to steal their work indefinitely into the future.