I consider the risk of wrongful conviction to be an argument against the death penalty and for the very same reason I'm against performing any kind of inhuman treatment of them (which might be worse than death).
Even if 95% would totally deserve it, I don't think we should just accept that on average 4 innocent people every year are just treated as subhumans just so we can unleash our wrath over those who did truly horrible things.
Death is still a better option rather than being used as lab rat
There should be doubt. There should be due process.
At the same time, I think that with the advancement of the tech (surveillance cameras everywhere, dna tests, the cell tower triangulation and/or mobile device location tracking) there are cases when the guilt can be established without any doubt, and the overall chance of wrongful conviction will drop down.
Hell, have you read the website? One of those pieces of shit made his accomplice to video the murder on the phone.
I'm pretty sure the vast majority of those convicted are rightfully convicted.
But paint me skeptical as to whether increased use of technology can actually improve the reliability of the proofs.
Imagine a world where deep fakes are much better quality but our system hasn't yet caught up to take that into proper consideration etc.
Serving for life is already a big deal as punishment goes. I'm just asking to not have experimental medical experiments on people. I'm not saying they should walk free
I was thinking about deep fakes and tech advancements. Yes, that will add doubts etc. but you know what? There always will be ways. If somebody was convicted in 2015 most likely there weren’t any deep fakes.
Let’s look at, let’s say, Apple and its tight control over entire hardware and software iPhone stack. Nothing prevents them to announce that starting from iPhone 19 they cryptographically sign the video to ensure that it’s authentic and, at least, the video and sound are what the camera saw. Pro cameras can do it, for Apple it’s even easier, more or less. I’m sure that even on this site there are experts who can design such system that is as secure as we expect from Apple devices. And that thing will slowly spread due to competitive pressures.
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Involuntarily drug testing was one of examples that I gave, and you seem to be against. To some it may be extreme, and I completely understand where you’re coming from. To me… as I said - for some examples from the side the murderers surely lost their human privilege. That comment summarized my feelings after reading the website in much more succinct form: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47302490#47305803
Killing 13 month infant, putting bleach on 20 yo gas station employee and setting her on fire, stranding female who was screaming for help during sa. Mate, if your kidney is compatible with someone who is in need, you made your choice way too long ago to have any right to say anything now. Or if there are other uses that will benefit society and humanity as a whole - they are allowed. You are guilty (without doubt and with clear evidence) and sentenced to death. Now you have same amount of rights as cadaver on the table, but probably more uses while you still breathing.
The problem is that I do understand you! I do feel exactly as you do! My lizard brain would like to do all sorts of horrible retaliations to those people who performed such abhorrent acts. I get it, it's natural.
But I think that society should prevent this kind of basic instinctive response to become the way that we collectively handled those monstrosities, mainly because those punishments will be abused against innocent scapegoats.
Also, “in most states, there is no regular procedure for reconsidering the guilt of a convicted defendant after death; that’s one reason why posthumous exonerations are so rare.”
In the end it's more about the appearance of justice than actually performing it. And even in the performance of it, it is still just that: a performance.
If you were to have capital punishment, I'd make prosecutors liable for any knowingly false accusations and the withholding of evidence. And even without that, things could change fast after a few posthumous exonerations when the pitchforks of the deceased's relatives come out for the phony witnesses and corrupt cops.
It's called the "justice system" but how can people be so sure it is? Justice only for the rich or the "club members"? Is it audited? Who gets to hide or shield from it under the guise of "national security?" Are juries being manipulated through the "Reptile Brain trial strategy?"
I recently heard someone say: "Cops kill cops who don't trust other cops?" Why is that? Is a cop killing another cop part of national security too? Who decides? Who do you trust?
The US has executed around hundreds of innocent wrongly convicted people that we're mostly to pretty certain of. And it has thrown a significant fraction of the lives away of around a million who were either innocent or committed very minor infractions, and condemned millions more to near civil death to remain permanently banished from society... untold numbers of innocents swept up to feed the for-profits prison slave labor camps and prevent certain people from voting.
It's always naive, unlearned, horrible people who clamor for "deterrence" and "revenge" via "throw away the key" and executions. Like Trump and the Central Park Five.
95% of your text has nothing to do with what I said and the issue being discussed.
Invoking Trump (that I don’t care about, especially in the context of this conversation) is so cheap... I suggest you to go straight to Godwin law and compare me to literal Hitler, because that’s the quality of your argument (lack of there of, to be precise).
Being a skeptic doesn't make one an irrational hater (surely such people exist and might be noisy and taint all skeptics as such)
I am learning how to make good use of agent assisted engineering and while I'm positively impressed with many things they can do, I'm definitely skeptical about various aspects of the process:
1. Quality of the results
2. Maintainability
3. Overall saved time
There are still open problems because we're introducing a significant change in the tooling while keeping the rest of the process unchanged (often for good reasons). For example consider the imbalance in the code review cost (some people produce tons of changes and the rest of the team is drowned by the review burden)
This new wave of tooling is undoubtedly going to transform the way that software is developed, but I think jump too quickly to the conclusion that they already figured out how exactly is that going to look like
I'd say that the worst thing that can happen to a developer using Claude etc is detachment from the code.
At some point of time the code starts to be "not yours", you don't recognise it anymore. You don't have the connection to it. It's like your everyday working in another company...
My real personal "doom" theory is that AI will, err, remove 99.99% of humans, pretty much everyone except for the top 100,000 based whatever fractally complex metric scheme it deems important.
Then those 100,000 get a utopia, the AI gets everything else, and ultimately the humans are just nice pets.
If Congress declared an actual war and if they declared to use war time laws to force a private company to comply with the war effort, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
What happened was different: a private company decided to enforce some terms, as they can do during peace time and they have been bullied in a way that is disgraceful precisely because it didn't happen during war time nor it has been done using the existing laws around that.
What is the purpose of having laws in the first place if we accept that the government can rule by intimidation?
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