411–420 of 434 posts
If so, you could somewhat automate this, or at least allow incarcerated people to cross check their own situation by providing their data.
If you can automate this, you could allow extensive lawsuits to pressure the penal system to get this disgusting problem solved.
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1. Once you work for a big bureaucracy, you realize how slow this stuff is. In terms of how much actual work it takes, it depends very much on the condition of the test environment -- whether it has been maintained and how much effort is required to get back up and running. Plus, how much paperwork is involved in dealing with the government agency that contracts this out. I can easily see a situation in which you don…
I'm not saying it mightn't be 2000 hours of red tape, incompetence, and corruption. I could believe that easily enough. I'm saying it's not 2000 hours of actual work.
Yes, it's a few weeks of coding at best. Maybe more if they need to integrate with some external systems for data ingestion.
But it's not a lean agile MVP for a startup. Redtape is just as much a deliverable as the function itself.
And 2000 hours for a 4 person team is a quarter of a year. Sure it might take less for a full stack ninja with 5 years of rockstar experience, but those folks are not available for some reason (Pink Floyd - Money!).
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How do you propose for an inmate to contact his representation?
Presumably by saying something like "I understand my phone privileged have been revoked, but I need to contact my lawyer", at which point the authority in question would recognize that this constitutes an exception to said revocation. You know ... the obvious way.
You would think heating prisons so inmates don't shiver even in all the clothes they can pile on would be obvious. Yet every year the reports are the same. Some prisons can't manage to do it plus they willfully tolerate it and force inmates to be in their cell/room.
Nor do regulators care much, nor does the public.
Look at all the documeted law enforcement abuses. Prison guards are also enforcing laws. But inmates rarely have protests well documted by journalists. Think about that for a second. All the incentives are set up in the most fucked up way too. If an inmate reports a problem with the guards and it doesn't get solved (or even if it gets solved) they are still stuck with the guards. Who can and will make their life even more miserable. If they do if after release? Nobody cares, why didn't they speak up when it happened, blabla. So the system is pretty resistant to change (improvements).
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Is rehabilitation not the main goal in the USA? We call the places correctional facilities, and do other things that are ostensibly there to correct behavior and prevent recidivism. In fact, it seems like most of the things that prevent people from being successful are unintended side effects. Here's a thought: Why do we permit private companies to not hire ex-cons? Why do you just get to decide that you don't want t…
We pretend the goal is rehabilitation, but its obviously not. I don't really think any justice system is actually putting rehabilitation first. Otherwise, you'd be sentenced to "until you get rehabilitated or no more than X years."
I don't think that example you gave is a flaw in the logic. We don't know when people are rehabilitated, and there's reasons for having minimum sentences, whether you agree with them or not.
The greater issue in my opinion is that we do a bunch of stuff to create this illusion of safety for the public (and businesses), and we're not willing to budge to give people a chance. We very reluctantly pass laws that clear some peoples records if they're young enough and haven't done anything so terrible... and that's if you're lucky.
Disenfranchisement should be an exception for people that are likely highly-dysfunctional, not a general purpose solution. A new despised underclass to place a substantial percentage of the population. Seems dystopian to me.
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The "right" bureaucratic system isn't one with humans doing calculations (which we're bad at); nor is it one where computers on their own make decisions (which they're bad/inflexible at.) Instead, it's one where computers do calculations but don't make decisions; and then humans look at those calculations and have a final say (and responsibility!) over inputting a decision into the computer in response to the calcula…
> humans look at those calculations and have a final say (and responsibility!) over inputting a decision into the computer in response to the calculations the computer did, plus any other qualitative raw data factors that are human-legible but machine-illegible (e.g. the "special requests" field on your pizza order.) Or, have the computer make decisions when there aren't any "special requests" fields to look at, and…
I have a great example that just happened to me yesterday.
• I signed up for a meal-kit service. They attempted to deliver a meal-kit to me. They failed. Repeatedly. Multiple weeks of “your kit went missing, and we’re sorry, and we’ve refunded you.”
• Why? The service apparently does their logistics via FedEx ground, though they didn’t mention this anywhere. So, FedEx failed to deliver to me.
• Why? Because the meal-kit service wants the package delivered on a Saturday, but FedEx thinks they’re delivering to a business address and that the business isn’t open until Monday, so they didn’t even try to deliver the package, until the food inside went bad.
* Why did FedEx think this? Well, now we get to the point where a computer followed a rule. See, FedEx is usually really bad at delivering to my apartment building. They don’t even bother to call the buzzer code I have in Address Line 2 of my mailing address, instead sticking a “no buzzer number” slip on the window and making me take a 50min ride on public transit to pick up my package from their depot. But FedEx has this thing called “FedEx Delivery Manager”, which you can use to set up redirect rules, e.g. “if something would go to my apartment, instead send it to pick-up point A [that is actually pretty inconvenient to me and has bad hours, but isn’t nearly as inconvenient to go to as the depot itself].”
I set such a redirect rule, because, for my situation, for most packages, it makes 100% sense. And, I thought, “if there’s ever a case where someone’s shipping something special to me via FedEx, I’ll be able to know that long in advance, and turn off the redirect rule.” But I didn’t know about this shipment, because the meal-kit service never mentioned they were using FedEx as a logistics provider until it was too late.
Some computer within FedEx automatically applied the redirect rule, without any human supervising. Once applied, there was no way to revert the decision—the package was now classified as a delayed ground shipment, to be delivered on Monday. (Apparently, this is because the rule gets applied at point of send, as part of calculating the shipping price of the sender; and so undoing the redirect would retroactively require the sender to pay more for shipping.)
A supervising human in the redirect-rule pipeline would easily have intuited “this is a meal-kit, requiring immediate delivery. It is being delivered on a weekend. The redirect location is closed on weekends. Despite the redirect rule, the recipient very likely wants this to go to their house rather than to some random pick-up point that we can’t deliver to.”
You get me? You can’t teach a computer to see the “gestalt” of a situation like that. If you tried to come up with a sub-rule to handle just this situation, it’d likely cause more false negatives than true negatives, and so people wouldn’t get their redirect rules applied when they wanted them to be. But a human can look at this, and know exactly what implicit goal the pipeline of sender-to-recipient was trying to accomplish by sending this package; and so immediately know what they should actually do to accomplish the goal, rules be damned.
And if they don’t—if they’re not confident—as a human, their instinct will be to phone me and ask what my intent is! A computer’s “instinct”, meanwhile, when generating a low-confidence classification output, is to just still generate that output, unless the designer of the system has specifically foreseen that cases like this could come up in this part of the pipeline, and so has specifically designed the system to have an “unknown” output to its classification enum, such that the programmer responsible for setting up the classifier has something to emit there that’ll actually get taken up.
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> humans look at those calculations and have a final say (and responsibility!) over inputting a decision into the computer in response to the calculations the computer did, plus any other qualitative raw data factors that are human-legible but machine-illegible (e.g. the "special requests" field on your pizza order.) Or, have the computer make decisions when there aren't any "special requests" fields to look at, and…
It’s not just when there are “special requests.” (Or rather, it could be, if every entity in the system were able and expected to contribute “special request” inputs — but usually there’s no place for most entities to do this.) I have a great example that just happened to me yesterday. • I signed up for a meal-kit service. They attempted to deliver a meal-kit to me. They failed. Repeatedly. Multiple weeks of “your ki…
That's not necessary. You can teach a computer to recognize anomalies and route those to humans. Repeated failures is an obvious one.
> A computer’s “instinct”, meanwhile, when generating a low-confidence classification output, is to just still generate that output
That's a poorly designed system. Human failure.
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If my tax $ goes to it, it should have source available (excepting natsec). it would be nice to get some value out of it. If it's well written, I could learn how a large scale project works. If not, I can have something to petition and voice my concerns about, inform about vulns, etc.
You exempt national security, and suddenly everything is national security. Look at the FISA “courts”. Not arguing against it. State secrets are needed in some instances. Just pointing out that if you exempt something , there’ll be people who’ll construe as much as they can under than exemption. Is there any solution to that?
That something must be kept secret does not mean the rationale for why it must be kept secret must also be. For example you don't need to tell me any secrets about how nuclear weapons are designed to convince me that nuclear weapon design software should not be open source. Even in cases where the devil is in the details and the discussion of whether something should be secret requires an understanding of those secrets, independent auditors with the proper qualifications and clearances can be appointed to validate the need for secrecy, and either they or the officials who appointed them can be publicly scrutinized.
Every system complicated enough to require decision making is open to potential abuse by the decision makers. The entire purpose of democratically elected leaders is to make sure those who would commit such abuses don't have the opportunity to do so for very long. If no one suffers any consequences for skirting a law, why even have laws to begin with?
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You the taxpayers are the people who would prefer these people stay in prison than release them. You took on the responsibility when you put in place a system to imprison them. You could always campaign for prison abolition if you don’t want the responsibility...
> You the taxpayers are the people who would prefer these people stay in prison than release them. That's a rather broad blanket statement bordering on collective punishment (which BTW is classified as a war crime by the UN). The status of taxpayer makes you a victim of the state, not necessarily someone with influence over its behavior and certainly not an ardent supporter of all its policies. The vast majority of t…
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It’s not just when there are “special requests.” (Or rather, it could be, if every entity in the system were able and expected to contribute “special request” inputs — but usually there’s no place for most entities to do this.) I have a great example that just happened to me yesterday. • I signed up for a meal-kit service. They attempted to deliver a meal-kit to me. They failed. Repeatedly. Multiple weeks of “your ki…
> You can’t teach a computer to see the “gestalt” of a situation like that. That's not necessary. You can teach a computer to recognize anomalies and route those to humans. Repeated failures is an obvious one. > A computer’s “instinct”, meanwhile, when generating a low-confidence classification output, is to just still generate that output That's a poorly designed system. Human failure.
If we could get pure-AI systems to be “confused by default” like humans are, such that they insist on emitting “unknown” classification-states whether you ask for them or not, they’d be a lot more like humans, and maybe I wouldn’t see humans as having such an advantage here.
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1.5 million prisoners in the USA. You want to go through that list, without software?
This is a somewhat horrific argument for draconian imprisonment. Maybe we'd have better results if inmates could file paperwork to receive the payments that would normally go to the prison for their imprisonment, starting on the date they should have been released.