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Possibly andrewlaack’s clanker run amok


At least this is more informative than "Thanks Andrew".


IMO including the totally unnecessary phrase “unlikely situation” here is quite indicative of a toxic environment within the company.


McDonald’s getting a strongly worded letter from the Mayor of Hamburg over their use of “cheeseburger”.


It just means they were completely transparent with the court when getting the data, and believed themselves it was lawful.

What’s hard to believe about that? They clearly put some effort into minimising the collateral privacy intrusions.


"Sorry we broke the law, but its ok this one time because it would be detrimental to the case".

I mean... slippery slope? Just because they were sincere about it doesnt make it magically ok to use the illegal evidence.


Well, it potentially does make it “ok” in the sense of being less bad than letting the guy off. That’s why the legal concept exists. There are other contexts where there is no good faith exception, but in this situation there is one.

In this case the crime is a bank robbery which isn’t victimless but most people think of as somewhat “victim-lite”. If the crime was the stranger rape of a little girl then the vast majority of people would have been outraged if the police had not obtained this warrant.


If the cops believe hard enough anything is legal.


In retrospect, the part I quoted is very unclear for what I intended. I should have added more.

What's hard to believe is the data is apparently still allowed in the case. Like... how?


Apparently, the legal understanding is that the Fourth Amendment doesn't guarantee some right that illegally obtained evidence can't be used against you (it merely guarantees that those obtaining the evidence illegally will be punished).

The reason why evidence obtained illegally is generally suppressed is to act as a deterrent to the Government. Even if individual officers were willing to risk their own punishment for illegal search or seizure (say, maybe they believe they are acting for the greater good), the evidence will generally be suppressed so that there is no rational gain from these illegal actions.

However, if the officers who obtained the evidence illegally were acting under good faith, then there is no deterrence obtained from suppressing the evidence they obtained. They did not act to illegally obtain evidence, in a way that they might be deterred from doing again if the evidence is suppressed - they thought they were collecting the evidence legally so they would do this again. So, in this case, there is no point in suppressing the evidence - no one is harmed by it being admitted (because, again, the Fourth Amendment doesn't promise you that illegally obtained evidence would not be used against you, it just promises that the Government will do all it can to avoid illegal search and seizure).


That interpretation is insane to me. If all it takes is, "haha, oops," to use evidence gained from an unconstitutional search, people do not actually have Fourth Amendment rights.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised, knowing that civil asset forfeiture is a thing.


You have to consider the fact that it's really weird for everyone to know that evidence against you exists, but be forced to pretend it doesn't and hide it from the jury. It's not at all self-evident that this is the only, or the best possible, remedy against the government abusively collecting this evidence from you. Ultimately it's very important for the good functioning of society that guilty parties are appropriately punished and innocent parties are exonerated, and disregarding evidence can harm both goals. It's of course also important that the government doesn't seize your property or violate your privacy without a reasonable cause, but this doesn't necessarily conflict with the primary goal of justice.

Also, the good faith exception is supposed to be relatively weak - it's supposed, at least originally, to only apply in cases where the officers performing the illegal action had no reasonable way of knowing that it is illegal; the original case is quite clear - a search was conducted in one state based on an out-of-state warrant, and that warrant itself was later deemed to have been improperly issued. I find it quite reasonable to say that the officers conducting the search had no reasonable way of knowing that this warrant was problematic. If the good faith doctrine was watered down so much that an "oops, I didn't know I was breaking the law" from an officer is enough, then the problem lies with these standards, not with the principle.


I guess I am a 4A absolutist.

The original case is clear that that person's rights were violated. It certainly is reasonable for the officers to believe they could conduct a search in that case, so they should not have consequences. (Officers that do unreasonably violate rights should experience consequences, they currently don't.) But there's nothing in there curing the violation of rights.

It's so weird to me that this is possible. If that happened with other rights, it'd feel like, "oh, yeah, definitely these soldiers shouldn't have been allowed to live here. They do now, though, and will continue to. Sorry."


This is mostly true.

You have to remember that evidence exclusion for a constitutional violation is a modern thing, and it is what's known as "judge made," e.g. it wasn't made by legislature, it was invented by the courts. (Miranda warnings are the same -- I remember one time-travel book I was reading where the guy went back to 19th century New York and was complaining about the police beating him and not reading him his rights)

So sometimes it can be kinda hand-wavy and bullshit, especially using the "good faith" exception which has been very over-used in the last decade or so, especially because of new technologies, which gives a get-out clause to the police unless the exact fact pattern of their "search" exactly matched some previous case that was solidified in appellate case law in their state or federal district, or by SCOTUS.


> ...and it is what's known as "judge made," e.g. it wasn't made by legislature, it was invented by the courts.

In fairness, this describes so much of US law, and is why you can't really understand much of the rules that apply to you without also understanding all of the cases in which those rules were applied in novel ways.

Is it good that things work like that here? I don't think so, but I haven't thought through all of the particulars of another system.


“Haha oops” isn’t good faith. You’re making a false equivalence here.


Because the police got a warrant, exactly as this decision now says was required.

And there's something called the "good-faith exception" for unreasonable warrants: If you get a warrant where it's required (or in this case, where the government tried to argue it wasn't!), and a magistrate grants that warrant, it's a legal warrant so long as all participants were acting in good faith, believing their actions to be legal. Even if a court later finds that the warrant should not have been issued for one reason or another.

This is why Alito was grouchy during oral arguments and in his opinion that the Court took the case in the first place. The police got a warrant, acting in good faith. It allowed them to identify the criminal, who was later convicted. It wasn't clear that any decision by the court on the warrant requirement would have anything but an advisory effect, and SCOTUS doesn't do advisory opinions by longstanding tradition.


So, all you need is a magistrate that rubber stamps every warrant and it removes all protections from search and seizure from anyone?


Rubber-stamping every warrant without regard for Constitutional and other legal standards would not be operating in good faith.


Would that not, by definition, preclude the argument that the warrant was obtained in good faith?


Yes too much “it’s not X it’s Y”, and too few references to personal actions/biography.


I also got curious, this is the most personal comment I could find

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44498083

Funny, but might as well be generic, trained from reddit comments. What a time we live in.


Such sleeper accounts, slowly acquiring clout and time on the platform are often used by botnets. One day they (or their actions) will be sold to the highest bidder to upvote a comment, support an idea, ideology, politician or party or some virtual product, stock or coin.


Possible and that is definitely a thing, but I personally I would not rule out, that there still can be a human behind it, just with that specific style and careful about his privacy.


Is there a SOTA OCR model that prioritises failing in a debuggable way?

What I want is an output that records which sections of the image have contributed to each word/letter, preferably with per word confidence levels and user correctable identification information.

I should be able to build a UI to say: no, this section is red-on-green vertically aligned Cyrillic characters; try again.


The relevant term is "bounding box", as you probably need the confidence level of a character or word, not just the image. I built such an interface. I think the effort is only worth it if you really have multi-millions of pages.

Niels lately posted a lot about other OCR engines: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/niels-rogge-a3b7a3127_lots-of...


This is almost certainly because a member of the public phoned the police/FBI and alleged that GM was /u/maxwellhill, not that it was part of the FBI’s case. Look at the other stuff on the list.

I don’t know if the claim is “absurd” but it appears to be essentially baseless.


I don’t think this is true at all. What do you mean by “general bricks”? If anything there is more brick-built stuff nowadays.

For example the Creator 3-in-1 Castle (which I got for my son for Christmas) is pretty similar to castle sets I had as a child but basically way better and with brick built horses rather than large mould ones


The 3-in-1 sets (where the set numbers actually begin with 31) should really be the first thing you look at when choosing a set for a child, and they deserve more praise. There are a lot of cool 3-in-1 sets out there. That castle (31168) is really good (and those horses are too!), and the haunted mansion (31167) is just cool with minifigs which are a hit with any kid.

For a small and cheap present that hamster (31376) is just too cute to pass up too.

It feels like those sets are where the Lego designers get to do their thing and do it right, without the weight of licenced IP (of which there is so much) and the trite offerings of the City range.


Other ones that to me felt like completely fair value and better than anything I had as a child were the Creator Bunny, Space Telescope, and Space Robot. Something like £18/£25/£25 the second two having light bricks included.

JK Brickworks has an alt build for the bunny that doesn’t require a massive amount of different pieces and makes it lay mini eggs.


The citation for your quote appears to be an unsourced Reddit post.

The agreement at the heart of 5 Eyes is to not surveil the other nations - this must be up there for most persistently misunderstood fact among techies (probably why AI spits it out)


Unless there’s new information, this is exactly what the Snowden leaks exposed.

Snowden wasn’t showing the world the NSA surveillance systems against them; he was trying to show that the US was illegally spying on its own citizens by leveraging the five-eyes countries to collect and aggregate the data on their behalf.


I was always baffled by this "revelation". Everyone has always known about the five-eyes arrangement. It was common knowledge when I was growing up in the 70s. It wasn't new info.

There were a lot of things Snowden revealed, but most assuredly it was also about spying on US citizens. The NSA directly wiretapping people, even in cases when all communication was domestic. The NSA working to bypass security via routers diverted during shipping to Google, Facebook, and others, backdoors installed, thus compromising their infrastructure.

Back to the 5eyes, there is a difference in terms of scope and scale, when it comes to a foreign country spying on your citizens, and you doing it. The scope is entirely different, the scale, the capability.

It does matter whether it is 5eyes doing it, or whether it is domestic.

Now, does this stance matter overall? I don't know. It's a nice moral stance, I think. Is it functionally realistic?

I just don't know.


Who are you going to cite?

Snowden, as a very rare exception, did show clearly that the government agencies are quite capable of not providing anything to cite.


The agreement, conveniently, isn't legally binding. It's a gentleman's agreement between utter scoundrels, formed to give a semblance of trustworthiness.

As an Australian, I wouldn't trust it at all. The US government has already asked the Australian government for highly expanded information on Australian citizens, and that's above the table.

Stop believing what these people are telling you. They have an awful track record, and the people making the statements now are even worse than the previous people.


This is literally my favourite website, I use it several times a week.

I do wish the search was a bit better; it could show the matching quote below the matching frame, and it doesn’t seem to support phrase queries.

A more advanced feature would be searching by speaking character too.


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