Not a lawyer but I have some knowledge of criminal law in general. There are a lot of details left out, but I do think she is likely to get a decent settlement. Though the Flock/AI part of it isn’t really the reason.
So, when you get arrested, you are required to be arraigned by a judge, and that judge has to find probable cause for arrest. That requires the prosecution to present evidence to the judge that a crime was committed and you probably did it. It’s a very low standard of proof, but it does have to happen. And then you are required to get bail, outside of very extreme cases. It depends on the jurisdiction, but all of that has to happen relatively quickly after arrest, like 24-72 hours. If she didn’t get bail until 13 days after the arrest, that’s a pretty cut and dry civil rights violation. If they didn’t get a probable cause determination in that time period, that’s a civil rights violation (unless they got an arrest warrant prior, which they might have in this case).
If she did get bail within a couple days, but it was just so much she couldn’t afford it, then it gets murkier. Because at that point thats not the police or the prosecutor, that’s the judge. Similarly, if the prosecutor presented the evidence they had to a judge for a probable cause determination (or the arrest warrant) and the judge granted it, that’s on the judge. You would have to show the prosecutor and/or police lied or presented inaccurate information in court. If not… at that point you have two independent branches of government screwing up.
Wait, was she not arraigned for 13 days? The article makes it sound like it wasn’t until 13 days after the arrest, and her lawyer presented evidence, that she was let out. That… that can’t be right. It varies from state to state, but generally you are required to be arraigned within 24-72 hours of arrest. And then they are required to give you bond (a no bond hold can happen but is very rare and I don’t think any jurisdiction allows that outside of murder).
Was she just given an extremely high bond she couldn’t afford? Not that that’s much better than no bond at all, but I’d really like to understand the details here.
One thing I find surprising is everyone is talking about the danger of an agent going rogue but not the danger of an agent getting hijacked. These companies are making this clusters with thousands of agents running at once, with frontier, often not-yet-released, quality models and massive computational and network resources. And these things are given access to whatever they want on the Internet. Even if that was restricted to read-only access to the Internet, that’s still exposing the agents to untrusted input. All it takes is some bad actor creating a website that attracts one of these agent swarms and doing prompt injection. Then your fancy AI cluster will start doing whatever that attacker wants. And the fact that we have multiple examples of these swarms trying to coordinate on random corners of the internet shows they are almost pre-disposed to it.
Now it feels like companies are treating these breakouts like a chance for PR. I don’t think that will change until their swarm gets corrupted by some random black hat to do en-masse spear phishing or something
Fully sandboxed means no Internet access. You can also specify which packages are accessible and put it in the sandbox. Or you can be lazy and give them access to a package manager that had Internet access, but you don’t get to say “we intended to fully sandbox it.”
Not sure why the reproducibility is a requirement that would contribute to the security. Not that fully sandboxing is harder with reproducibility, but that is a moot point when reproducibility isn’t a requirement.
OP pointed out clusters being hijacked specifically being a bigger concern than rogue clusters, your comment hijacks their comment to talk about “rogue clusters.” Or perhaps this is a promotion for Dwarkesh?
A lot of military comms are point-to-point or broadcast between radios where TCP/IP doesn’t really make sense. On top of that, you need to understand how much legacy military networking stuff is out there. This stuff long predates the internet. We had tactical data links and target tracking where a ground station could receive a target info from a remote radar array, and automatically direct fighters on autopilot on an intercept course with enemy contacts in like 1960 (see SAGE as an example). These systems have been around for decades and been continually improved on. There’s a lot of inertia to maintain compatibility. Because you really don’t want someone to die because your ally tried to warn you but their tactical data link isn’t compatible with yours.
This is actually not true! This is a pedantic point but I think is important.
The department of defense is not equivalent to the pre-1947 War Department. The War Department was in charge of just the army. There was a separate Department of the Navy. There was no over-arching department for all of the US military.
Post WW2 the US military was restructured to organize all of the branches (including the newly-formed Department of the Air Force) under a united civilian leadership. This was done in the National Security Act of 1947. The new structure was initially called the National Military Establishment and then renamed to the Department of Defense.
So the department of war name going away wasn’t a PR thing. It was because of military parochialism. If they had called this unified structure the Department of War it would have seemed like the Army was now taking over the other branches! And I promise you today’s Admirals understand that history, even if the secretary of defense doesn’t.
Ok, so the article buries a lot of the context here. To clarify: plaintiffs can 100% sue the city for this under tort law (I believe the clean water act, but there’s probably other causes of action). This particular case was about suing the city officials in their personal capacity. So making those individuals pay, instead of/in addition to the city. Government officials are generally protected under qualified immunity. One exception to qualified immunity is 42 USC 1983: deprivation of rights under color of law. But that requires them to prove that these officials violated some constitutional right, beyond just some statute.
The victims can sue the city/state. They might already be doing so in parallel. And honestly that’s the only way to be made whole: these city officials don’t have the tens of millions that would be required to compensate victims. This is more about holding government officials individually accountable.
> This is more about holding government officials individually accountable.
The state can also file criminal charges against the officials, although given that the Flint water crisis didn't result in any criminal convictions despite the evidence, I'm not holding my breath. Not to mention that the state could choose _not_ to file charges. In which case, what avenue for justice is left? Financial compensation is only part of it.
They absolutely can, depending on the jurisdiction. I saw plenty of cases out of Atlanta with drug possession cases with no prior history getting an ankle monitor, back when they were live streaming bond hearings from Rice street.
What on earth is this claim? Are you sure you’re on top of Fulton County’s 1500-person ankle monitoring program, and the push to reduce jail overcrowding? Have you really been tracking the national trend to introduce ankle monitors for pre-trial defendants who would have been simply released on recognizance?
I’ve always wondered why candidates need so much money. I mean, this doesn’t go directly into their pockets, it’s largely used to fund ads, right?
I have a pet theory about political ads that I would love to find data to be able to confirm/deny. My theory is that those political ads don’t actually convince anyone about who to vote for, and aren’t intended to. Instead, it’s about convincing the people who already support you and your party to show up and vote. If that’s true, then the root cause of all of this money being injected into politics is really a symptom of low voter turnout. And so anything we can do to improve voter turnout will lessen the influence of money in politics.
My justification for this theory is that I see all of these political ads and really don’t find them convincing or liable to change my vote. I actually find attack ads often have the opposite effect on me, where I am immediately skeptical of whatever claim they advance and feel sure there’s important context they are leaving out. Of course I know I’m not the average voter, and other people may see it differently, but I’d love to see some data on this.
I think you may be taking for granted the political dupoloy and candidate equality.
Third-party candidates are almost always unknown and remain unknown to the public, because they have no money to advertise and achieve name recognition, get their message out. The pay-to-play nature of elections preserves the duopoly of the major parties.
Consider also primary campaigns: typically an incumbent has vastly more money to spend than challengers, who are again usually unknown.
When it comes to general election campaigns between two duopolist candidates, there is usually less of a difference in fundraising ability, so it may seem like money doesn't matter a lot. I see campaign donations as more of an entrance fee than a guarantee of victory. It's gatekeeping, where the gates are closed to any politician who can't be purchased by wealthy interests.
This depends on the ad. Professional political analysts make it a job to understand whether they need to increase voter turnout, convince fence-sitting voters, etc, and shape ads that target those demographics.
Low voter turnout is much more of a problem in the US where voting isn't compulsory.
It's like with commercial advertising. It only needs to influence enough people, whether it convinces them to buy (or vote) what they already wanted, or it convinces them to want that.
I always wondered why the US accuses other South-Asian nation states of deep corruption when they have the most gigantic corruption system in the world.
Do you really think that traveling somewhere to experience a natural or historical or cultural landmark is intrinsically immoral? Do you think less of me for traveling to South Africa to go on a Safari? For visiting the Louvre? Why?
I think that's a bad frame of mind in general. One of the primary ways industry tries to prevent regulation is by putting the burden on the individual. People think the only way we can have a healthy environment is by sacrificing things for the average person. And one of the worst things environmentalists can do is play along with that. In the US there's a push to ban plastic straws, which is annoying to the average consumer, while basically every item you can purchase comes wrapped in tons of plastic packaging. Industry LOVES things like this because it does little to actually reduce plastic consumption, and pits the average person against the environmental movement.
As another example, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from airplanes is several times less than the amount of methane that leaks out of natural gas pipelines every year (here I'm weighting emissions by their global warming impact). The overwhelming majority of those leaks can be prevented with minimal effort, but industry hasn't been incentivized to do so. Maybe before we start banning tourism, we have some inspectors checking pipelines for pinhole leaks?
Oh we can and should absolutely do both. Travel and tourism has other downsides which make it worth reducing it, like the fast spread of diseases for example.
Sure, but as I said in my second example, forcing oil and natural gas companies to prevent methane leaks would have much more of an impact than reducing air travel, and requires no sacrifice for the average person. When considering which policies to advance, we should look at both the potential impact AND the democratic support for it.
Climate change deniers and polluters want to paint the environmental movement as a bunch of neo-Puritans that deride anything that isn’t the bare minimum of subsistence as immoral. And I worry they’ve done this for so long that some supporters of the environment are starting to believe the lie.
The neo Calvinism runs deep. People think fixing problems involves austerity and take aways for the unelect.
It's a real problem because it has really bad political optics. And results in obsessing about 'fixing' inconsequential things or solutions that make things worse.
If people like Steve are advocating for such insanely unpopular policies as ending all travel (or is it just that you need to prove to the government that you have a valid reason for a travel permit?) I don’t think they’re concerned with the ideas’ democratic prospects at all.
Seems like he’s looking forward to a dictatorship that will just tell us all what we’re allowed to do, without the burdensome need for our dumb pleb voices to be heard. Maybe they could call the folks who enforce the policy the “Klimate Governing Board.”
So, when you get arrested, you are required to be arraigned by a judge, and that judge has to find probable cause for arrest. That requires the prosecution to present evidence to the judge that a crime was committed and you probably did it. It’s a very low standard of proof, but it does have to happen. And then you are required to get bail, outside of very extreme cases. It depends on the jurisdiction, but all of that has to happen relatively quickly after arrest, like 24-72 hours. If she didn’t get bail until 13 days after the arrest, that’s a pretty cut and dry civil rights violation. If they didn’t get a probable cause determination in that time period, that’s a civil rights violation (unless they got an arrest warrant prior, which they might have in this case).
If she did get bail within a couple days, but it was just so much she couldn’t afford it, then it gets murkier. Because at that point thats not the police or the prosecutor, that’s the judge. Similarly, if the prosecutor presented the evidence they had to a judge for a probable cause determination (or the arrest warrant) and the judge granted it, that’s on the judge. You would have to show the prosecutor and/or police lied or presented inaccurate information in court. If not… at that point you have two independent branches of government screwing up.
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