Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution:
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Ice can say what they want. The Constitution is the ultimate law of the land here.
Oh yeah, and facial recognition does not work to anything like this degree of accuracy, and probably never can. Nice try.
A constitution is a worthless piece of paper if it is not enforced. I'm about 50/50 right now if the midterms can safe the U.S., so far it doesn't look good.
To be more specific, ICE will be scanning the lines to vote, and pulling people out. In some states, poll watchers will be there to say, “no, you don’t have to go with them”. In other states, poll watchers will also be scanning.
Gaming this out theoretically and actually being seized and put into a detention facility where you're not allowed to call anyone including a lawyer are two different things.
It's not just gaming it out theoretically! It's important to keep in mind that it's not just a policy dispute - everyone involved in this is violating the law, and when constitutional government is restored they can and should go to prison for it. (If you find yourself working for ICE, even indirectly, I'd encourage you to keep that in mind!)
> when constitutional government is restored they can and should go to prison for it.
I completely agree but fear the democrats will be too spineless to do anything like this. A radical change in the democrat party is needed - they should be promising to pack the supreme court and prosecute 3/4s of this administrations officials, at a minimum.
IMO there is a profound degree of anger within the Demoratic party (as evidenced by their approval ratings). I will absolutely vote for the candidate who vows to viciously pursue every single person who broke any law during this entire ordeal. I'm a single issue voter, that's my issue, and I doubt I'm alone.
Why only democrats? Why should American citizens who identify with the Republican Party tolerate destruction of constitutional order? If the constitution goes, it won’t matter what party you prefer - everyone is at risk.
The modern Republican Party stands for the destruction of the constitutional order. Liz Cheney was publicly purged for not being willing to go along with it. As a number of Bush-era constitutional conservatives have realized, an American citizen who won’t tolerate the destruction of the constitutional order cannot identify with the Republican Party.
The only reason we have come this far is because we have a system of laws that rests on constitutional order. And policy, cultural, and commercial norms of respecting and preserving that order. We did not get here blindly - though we can lose it if people blindly forget that we are part of a bigger society.
> Ice can say what they want. The Constitution is the ultimate law of the land here.
You roll a persuasion check: it's a 1 - it failed. Your argument of "you can't do this, the Constitution says nu-uh" failed.
"Fuck the constitution", the masked ICE officer yells at you. "civil rights are for real American citizens, not for your kind." He spits in your face.
The two masked goons holding you start to drag you towards their unmarked van. You struggle a bit. The officer stashes away his Scanning Smartphone and puts his hand on his sidearm.
You make a good argument that nobody needs to follow any laws any more. By your argument, it’s all about brute force. Ice has it now, but anyone can later. Is that the world you want? Or, would you prefer a society of laws after all?
Nope they didn't decide that. It's actually even worse!
A lot of Americans have the impression that SCOTUS keeps deciding in the administration's favor, but this is not true.
SCOTUS is saying: "We're not going to hear this case right now, but we likely will in the future. In the meantime, we are going to overturn the lower court who did actually hear the case and allow the administration to continue its actions. No, we will not explain we think the lower court got wrong."
Increasingly these SCOTUS orders totally unexplained which is a blatant violation of their judicial obligations, and they are frequently unsigned by the majority (conservative) Justices. Presumably because they don't want their names written on papers that they know will be understood by future generations to be totally indefensible.
SCOTUS has proven itself functionally incapable of fulfilling its Constitutional duties and has proven that we need a lot more Justices. If you don't have the time to hear the cases we need you to hear, then the court needs to be scaled up and we can pick random panels to hear different cases.
Nothing to do with policy disagreements (how would any American even know if they had a policy disagreement with an unexplained, unsigned SCOTUS order?) – we just need courts that can decide on things that are important to our country.
Frankly it's a miracle it took this long to be a problem IMO.
The supreme court over the years has watered down constitutional protections against government enforcement upon individuals massively because doing so was necessary to empower the government to enforce speeding tickets, financial regulation, environmental regulation, chase bootleggers, etc, etc, with it's power only constrained in practice by political optics.
So now here we are, in a situation where the government is doing what it always does, levying what's essentially a criminal punishment (incarceration in this case, typically fines historically) in a case where allegedly no crime has been committed, and then give the accused only kangaroo court administrative process because it's not a crime, but now it's doing it at scale, flagrantly, loudly and against the political will of some of the locations it's doing it in.
There are a lot of bricks in this road to hell and someone somewhere was issuing a warning as each one was laid. Should have listened.
This was a problem in 2012 and SCOTUS ruled unambiguously in Arizona vs United States that we cannot stop people based solely on their outward "apparent" immigration status. In SCOTUS's own words, "the usual predicate for an arrest is absent" and being merely "suspected of being removable... does not authorize an arrest."
"As a general rule, it is not a crime for a removable alien to remain present in the United States. See INS v. Lopez-Mendoza, 468 U.S. 1032, 1038 (1984). If the police stop someone based on nothing more than possible removability, the usual predicate for an arrest is absent. When an alien is suspected of being removable, a federal official issues an administrative document called a Notice to Appear. See 8 U. S. C. §1229(a); 8 CFR §239.1(a) (2012).
The form does not authorize an arrest."
This is a MAGA and Heritage Foundation-driven reversal of VERY recently settled law. Absolutely not business as usual.
I'm not even debating the legality of the stop. It doesn't matter. Whether or not the stop is legit the whole system from there on is a kangaroo court rife with rights violations as well. That's the real problem here. Hair splitting over the specific reason for a stop is a distraction. Even if you fix it it won't change much. Whether or not they can make the stop doesn't really matter. They'll find other ways to force people to produce their papers.
It literally changes whether brown-ish Americans can go about their day without being thrown on the ground in zipties or not.
> They'll find other ways to force people to produce their papers
Okay, so make them find other, increasingly illegal ways so they can be held accountable at a future date. Not quasi-blessed by SCOTUS's delay tactics.
Tell that to all the black new yorkers who had their guns and/or weed stolen by the government during the stop and frisk era.
Having the ability to stop people isn't worth much if you don't have the unaccountable bureaucracy that can unilaterally doll out whatever punishment it wants.
The usefulness of these sort of fishing exercises regardless of what kind of violation is being gone after is wholly predicated on the upstream system denying these people their rights. If enforcement bureaucracies had to give everyone subject to "serious punishment" (whatever we agree that is, incarceration likely fits it) real rights, follow real protocols involving warrants, evidince, etc, etc. and potentially drag them in front of a jury then you wouldn't have any of this.
And it's not just limited to ICE. Pretty much every other law (and I don't just mean criminal, civil too) enforcement excess evaporates overnight if people get full protection afforded by their rights after law enforcement interacts with them.
Now, you could argue that we should instead impose the constraints on law enforcement contact and then all these unaccountable systems that violate people's rights will be fine because the enforcers won't be shoving innocent people into them, but looking at the last ~50yr of executive branch (not just feds, states very much too) history, that's basically what we've done and it clearly hasn't worked.
This isn't a brown people problem. This is a bigger fundamental problem with how we've architected law (once again, not just criminal) enforcement in this country. The brown people are just the newsworthy implementation at this particular minute.
You mean the policy that was aggressively fought by the very same people fighting this policy? Who exactly do you think you're arguing against here?
Are you looking for a "good job potato3732842 for being mad about Stop and Frisk previously," and unless you get that you're going to hem and haw about how awful a nationwide expansion of a far more aggressive variant with far worse consequences at orders of magnitude larger scale of a similar policy is?
> enforcement excess evaporates overnight if people get full protection afforded by their rights after law enforcement interacts with them.
Yeah, duh. That's why people are here advocating for people to retain their rights and for law enforcement to be held accountable.
If your argument is that the current policy is just another point on the same continuum as many others: yes, obviously that's true.
If your argument is that this means it's somehow equivalent to other points on the same continuum: no, obviously it's not.
If your argument is instead that this is a different point on the same continuum, but because people weren't upset about Point A they have no justification to be upset (or even more upset) about Point B: that's ridiculous.
aren't programming languages like SQL designed to strike a quasi-optimal balance between precision and economy? that is to say, if I want to use plain English to specify some kind of data operations, the prompt will necessarily be more verbose and/or less specific than SQL statements. So why not just learn SQL properly? And then learn the domain-specific considerations of the source data as well as the domain-specific business requirements? Or am I missing something essential?
It's hard because relational algebra is hard. It's hard because it's easy to write a query that returns arbitrary data, but it's hard to write a query that returns only the correct data that you really want.
The problem is that, IMX, AI is just as shit at that as most humans are. AI can find and connect primary keys and columns with the same name. It doesn't understand cardinality of entities or how to look for data that breaks the data model of the application (which is a critical element of data validation).
None of the actual hard parts of writing SQL go away with AI.
+1 for the Lead Hypothesis. Apart from negative health effects, lead exposure leads to more impulsive behavior and reduced inhibition - which kind of covers nearly everything here.
Have to say, I am glad that the world is safer and less wild, but I do miss the creative energy and "real world" social engagement of 1980s-1990s
That generation were a bunch of mindless, selfish dicks. Free from poisoning, the new generations can think clearly about how to be selfish dicks, and plan it out more deliberately.
Generalizations about generations are pretty silly. Every generation, baby boom, X, Z, millennial, etc. has a pretty heterogeneous mix of mindless, selfish dicks, geniuses, morons, artists, business people, wizards, creeps, and normies.
Similar to YAML? Also do consider ancient formats like fixed width - in which case you don’t even need delimiter characters. Are LLMs clever enough to parse these if given a code book or old-school INPUT statement? Cheers
Actually, yes. This kind of management reporting is either (1) going to end up in the books and records of the company - big trouble if things have to be restated in the future or (2) support important decisions by leadership — who will be very much less than happy if analysis turns out to have been wrong.
A lot of what ties up the time of business analysts is ticking and tying everything to ensure that mistakes are not made and that analytics and interpretations are consistent from one period to the next. The math and queries are simple - the details and correctness are hard.
Is this not belligerently ignoring the fact that this work is already done imperfectly? I can’t tell you how many serious errors I’ve caught in just a short time of automating the generation of complex spreadsheets from financial data. All of them had already been checked by multiple analysts, and all of them contained serious errors (in different places!)
No belligerence intended! Yes, processes are faulty today even with maker-checker and other QA procedures. To me it seems the main value of LLMs in a spreadsheet-heavy process is acceleration - which is great! What is harder is quality assurance - like the example someone gave regarding deciding when and how to include or exclude certain tables, date ranges, calc, etc. Properly recording expert judgment and then consistently applying that judgement over time is key. I’m not sure that is the kind of thing LLMs are great at, even ignoring their stochastic nature. Let’s figure out how to get best use out of the new kit - and like everything else, focus on achieving continuously improving outcomes.
There’s actually different classes of errors though. There’s errors in the process itself versus errors that happen when performing the process.
For example, if I ask you to tabulate orders via a query but you forgot to include an entire table, this is a major error of process but the query itself actually is consistently error-free.
Reducing error and mistakes is very much modeling where error can happen. I never trust an LLM to interpret data from a spreadsheet because I cannot verify every individual result, but I am willing to ask an LLM to write a macro that tabulates the data because I can verify the algorithm and the macro result will always be consistent.
Using Claude to interpret the data directly for me is scary because those kinds of errors are neither verifiable nor consistent. At least with the “missing table” example, that error may make the analysis completely bunk but once it is corrected, it is always correct.
Speak for yourself and your own use cases. There are a huge diversity of workflows with which to apply automation in any medium to large business. They all have differing needs. Many excel workflows I'm personally familiar with already incoporate a "human review" step. Telling a business leader that they can now jump straight to that step, even if it requires 2x human review, with AI doing all of the most tediuous and low-stakes prework, is a clear win.
I'm taking a much weaker position than the respondent: LLMs are useful for many classes of problem that do not require zero shot perfect accuracy. They are useful in contexts where the cost of building scaffolding around them to get their accuracy to an acceptable level is less than the cost of hiring humans to do the same work to the same degree of accuracy.
>LLMs are useful for many classes of problem that do not require zero shot perfect accuracy. They are useful in contexts where the cost of building scaffolding around them to get their accuracy to an acceptable level is less than the cost of hiring humans to do the same work to the same degree of accuracy.
Well said. Concise and essentially inarguable, at least to the extent it means LLMs are here to stay in the business world whether anyone likes it or not (barring the unforeseen, e.g. regulation or another pressure).
Sometimes there can be an advantage in leading or lagging some aspects of internal accounting data for a time period. Basically sitting on credits or debits to some accounts for a period of weeks. The tacit knowledge to know when to sit on a transaction and when to action it is generally not written down in formal terms.
I'm not sure how these shenanigans will translate into an ai driven system.
That’s the kind of thing that can get a company into a lot of trouble with its auditors and shareholders. Not that I am offering accounting advice of course. And yeah, one can not “blame” and ai system or try to ai-wash any dodgy practices.
Computers are already fast and efficient at multiplication - optimized long ago. Transformers are fast and efficient at working with sequences of tokens. Tools are not universal. A hammer is not a good violin bow. A MRI machine is not a good relational database. This extends to the natural world too. A zebra is not a good dairy animal. And a human poet may or may not be a good surgeon. It’s good to explore what things can do beyond their intrinsic nature - but expect to encounter limits eventually.
Try considering the opposite situation. Suppose Biden or Obama sent a mandate to universities making unilateral and ideologically-motivated demands of their curriculum, policies, and practices. Everyone cool with that scenario? Or, does each new presidential administration get to impose their will on institutions of higher learning? What would that be like?
There was an Obama "Dear Colleague" letter (actually, 3 of them) that I think at least partially qualify as unilateral and ideologically motivated.
Yes, every new administration can attempt to impose their will on institutions of higher learning (so long as the administration has some sort of leverage, like funding or legal threats). The wise administrations limit their imposition, preferring to allow academia to enjoy high levels of freedom, autonomy, and funding to achieve their mission.
The linked letter reminds schools of their requirements to comply with civil rights statutes that have been on the books in the US for many years. The trump admin, otoh, is on a witch-hunt to “protect” conservative views based on their own feelings and concerns. Not the same.
Ice can say what they want. The Constitution is the ultimate law of the land here.
Oh yeah, and facial recognition does not work to anything like this degree of accuracy, and probably never can. Nice try.