chaps

We don't. Because they left it vague. It reads like something a lawyer would write to be factually true but empty in any meaningful way.

  "When attempting to get information from the Census Bureau, for instance, AI agents used tools reserved for software developers to access it, the company said. "

What. Tons of people use tools to access Census Bureau data. They have a widely used API that people have built tools on top of like https://github.com/datadesk/census-data-downloader

lol zing i don't even have a car

Thanks for joining me on this ride. Have a good one.

What I'm not really understanding is why "a bit overhanded" is a small throwaway point. Speaking from Chicago where we have very notorious public speakers at city council and it's one of those that's-just-what-happens things. I've also done a fair amount of research/reporting on criminal courts where the idea of arresting someone for giving the middle finger to city council absolutely fucking floors me. So a lot of my questions are oriented around trying to understand why getting arrested is such a (seemingly) small deal.

- Do you think Springfield could have handled the situation better without arresting her?

Not setting up a trap, I'm just genuinely interested in where you're coming from because, frankly, I don't get it. Sorry you've had bad experiences on the internet and thanks for your patience.

Why do you think your public comment was ineffective?

Got it. Couple more questions:

- Have you ever spoken at a public meeting? How'd your experience go?

- Do you think the person thought they had zero possibility of getting arrested for that?

Just trying to gauge what your experience is with law enforcement. You seem interested in having a facts based conversation so I think it's important to understand where you're coming from first.

Do you think all forms of civil disobedience are worthy of arrest? Asking genuinely.

Out of curiosity, have you ever been arrested?

I care about preventing the proliferation of flock cameras (and more) and I do not hate this woman's actions even one bit.

Yeah, that's kind of what I'm talking about! It's a very specific visualization where it comes and goes and feeds into itself. It's really cool. The brightness you're talking about is legit. It's fun to play with bringing that in and out.

A thing that seems to kinda trigger the visualizations I've experienced is to focus on where those blueish blobs disappear into nothing. For me, that looks like an intense brightness kinda sorta collapsing into the center of my vision which happens again starting from the edges of my vision. In a way it feels like I'm watching some low level neuron activity.

But if I close my eyes and try to force some sort of visualization, it doesn't happen until I slow down and just pay attention to that middle point between my brain and my vision. Not really a meditator, but I've experienced it the strongest when I'm about to fall asleep.

Once I'm in that headspace, I can keep it going until I see those wild, megalithic visualizations.

Years ago while working as a contract sysadmin for a clearing firm, a coworker made an overbroad puppet change that changed every server's time zone from UTC to CDT. The only thing I heard about it was from a text from an old colleague/friend who was troubleshooting why their clearing reports were all off by five hours. I still chuckle at that random text.

When you close your eyes, can you make any visualization whatsoever? Not the press-fingers-into-eyes stuff nor from-memory visualization, but just anything. When I close mine, I can let my brain wander with little intention/feedback and my mind will create giant megastructures that I kinda sorta fly through. It's fully continuous almost like I'm zooming into a fractal.

Ridiculous and only tangentially related question, but.... is Base83 uniquely useful in any way?

Last time I stopped smoking cannabis I got these for a couple days. They are intense. The most recent was kind of like taking a slow rollercoaster ride through three black hole sized perfect spheres orbiting nothing. Another one was less geometric but was basically me getting sucked into a black hole. Both had this almost lucid dreaming feel where my entire sense of self became condensed into a single point... but I was still there, aware of what was happening... it was incredibly memorable.

I'd argue that chess similarly has "useless skills". But learning "useless skills" is one of the most important things you can do for yourself to learn "useful skills".

Not everything has to be an absolute competition-or-not. For the same reason you can enjoy a casual game of chess with a friend, you can enjoy a casual game of some RTS. Helps that there are a lot of open source RTS communities that each have their own skills-emphasis.

You (and others) should check out real time strategy games if your hope is to learn much of what you're sharing here!

Since when are Pokemon Go players representative of everyone else? Methinks you should surround yourself with fewer technical people if your goal is to understand what's generally understood about the world.

You have a substantially undeserved set of rosy glasses for the courts. For your own sake, please try some court watching. :)

Friend, these things happen even with buffer zones.

Next time try to make yourself easier to talk to and maybe you'll get better answers. When responding to you it felt like all you were trying to do was "own the left" instead of approach it with actual curiosity and interest. The sort of thing where nothing I say will ever, ever, ever satisfy you. Have a good one.

The documents I'm talking about didn't come from FOIA. They came from printing them at the clerk of courts' office. They aren't redacted.

But yes, these documents should be FOIA'able and I shouldn't have to redact them. It's one of the reasons why I'm involved in advocating for masking the judicial branch FOIA'able in Illinois.

I don't know what to tell you besides yes, it's really that bad. A lot of it is just people passing the buck down the road, a lot of it (at the time) was covid, a lot of it was the difficulty of people on EM to publicly talk about their situation. Defense attorneys just want to get their clients out of jail and a lot of the EM stuff is a distraction to that. It's very much a, "we'll put in a ticket" sort of situation across many moving parts.

Lawyers began telling their clients to film themselves in their homes at all times so that they could prove to judges that they were in their homes when the devices went off. That's advice they give because the risks of not doing that are going back into jail. And to prove all that, you still have to go through all that process, filming yourself, etc. It's truly bad.

It happened with both RF and GPS! The Cook County Sheriff's Office moved between the two at one point so it was possible to see the effects over time as folk moved over. Some people got more false alarms when moving to GPS, some got fewer. IIRC it was about even.

It wasn't easy to find, heh. Lots of FOIA requests to even get to a point of where I could go through court records at the Clerk of Courts. Obstinate lawyers for months and months. But after all that, I can find the court documents at the Clerk of Courts. I printed them there and I don't have them anymore. I would need to redact even if I had them. But they were all the same form, but with the actual violations largely hand-written notes written by a prosecutor in a hurry. It was usually a list of like, ten instances that they seemingly picked from random of the GPS rlogs. The best glance I had into what was by FOIA'ing the GPS records of someone who died much later but had a lawyer who fought tooth and nail to show he didn't leave his home. GPS is truly all over the place in these logs. I validate a lot of that against call center records that themselves took months to get but show when alarms and calls are made to the devices, plus when dispatch is done.

A lot of this stuff is hard to talk about because it's about real people in real pending (at the time) cases.. and I'm also not a criminal defense attorney by any means. There's a reason the first article I posted had their identity completely removed. There's weird liability and believe me I want to say more.

Very honestly, I wish I could have done more reporting on how fucked up those devices were. I put a lot of time and effort into reporting that couldn't make it to print, largely because I was doing freelance work at the time. The first offer I got for that piece was $50. Wasn't sustainable.

Do you have any questions about these EM programs?

Yes, everyone on the devices received false alarms. It's why there was a call center that managed the false alarm flows. I highly suggest you read the articles I've shared.

I fought tooth and nail to get access to the data showing how often devices reported "invalid" status (where the device's specs said it was something like, within 150 feet of inaccuracy it reported "invalid"). They initially told me they couldn't get me that data because it'd crash their database running that query. Basically threatened to sue them and over the next 6mo or so I got two 100GB MSSQL dumps. Hundreds of millions of rows of devices reporting back that their GPS signal was invalid. It would take a lot of time to make it sharable because they included the actual GPS location infos.

That might be true for a place in the middle of nowhere with no features, the same device model managed by the same company and the same call center person and same sheriff and judges and prosecutor. But with GPS in an urban environment where many homes are over 100 years built from many different materials, 33 feet is a lot.

They did, yes. I hope you have a better day.

"You've essentially claimed police/judges are doing something rather stupid and terrible."

Yes, yes I am. You really need to realize just how unbelievably fucking arbitrary the criminal courts are. At every level. They're not tech people.

To answer your question, I have examples of motions by prosecutors to suspend people from the EM program where they specifically cite specific data points just barely out of their homes, where video footage provably shows they were inside the whole time. They're not mine to share.

Btw, the courts are public and you should try some criminal courts watching. Pick a random day and just go.