teakettle42

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Or, I could refer to what actually occurs in practice. My original point stands.

I apologize for the insult, but perhaps this means there’s still more for you to learn, and even deeper and more interesting problems to explore?

I’m about 25 years into my career, and I still have so much more I want to learn!

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.

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.

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.

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.

That’s not how it is applied in practice.

Telling of what, precisely?

The blind spot I posited and which you then summarily demonstrated.

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.

DEI is intersectional praxis, not a “rebranding of the struggle for equality”

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 both a very recent and a uniquely western ideological construction.

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.

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.

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.

It's the same as if a human artist studied it.

It’s not a human artist, and it can only regurgitate mash-ups of work stolen from others.

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.

https://creativecommons.org/2021/03/04/should-cc-licensed-co...

Stealing people’s work to serve as your training set is not human progress.

Sounds like the AI model should be paying royalties to every affected artist for the right to sample their work.

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”)

macOS has supported NFSv4 ACLs since 10.4 (released in 2005), and Zoom could have made use of them.

Rent-seeking is more abusive than enforcing ownership rights, by far.

Copyright is an invention; if it is being used to grossly undermine ownership rights, then we should reconsider the extent to which we privilege copyright holders, including our current approach of granting state-backed legal enforcement of their DRM schemes.

Swift on the other had is a language where wonks decided to throw every silly feature they thought off to the point that is becoming more complex than even Scala.

What features in particular do you think represent unjustified complexity?

Swift is not my favorite, but I wouldn’t consider it to be a “kitchen-sink” language, and it’s certainly less complicated than Scala.

Nobody (other than you, with that intentionally ridiculous claim) is ascribing a secret end goal; their goals are quite plainly articulated.

I’m not saying you did this, but many people deliberately distort that into “they wanna take all your guns” in bad faith.

Well, who is “they”?

The majority of activist organizations arguing for restrictions absolutely have an end-goal of banning all guns.

Claiming “we just want common sense gun laws” is a far larger bad-faith distortion of the truth than “they wanna take all your guns”.

Gun laws proposed by these organizations only go one way: more restrictive.