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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   23206 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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If this is not Culture War tell me, but I'm flabbergasted, I have to share that with you all.

So it seems there is a documentary out about Elizabeth Holmes. I had no idea until I stumbled across this trailer, and at first I thought it was a movie. Because it looks like a movie. And I thought this was two actors and one, at least, of them was going to turn out to be a serial killer.

No, it would seem this is indeed the one, the only, the real genuine pure-quill Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos infamy herself. And all I can say is holy crap.

Because she looks nuts. She looks like "I am about to slip some gelsemine into your tea and then sit by your bedside mopping your brow and cooing reassuringly as you slowly succumb to its effects, in the best traditions of the Golden Age of British murder".

It seems to be shot like a film, there has to be a hefty dose of acting going on because the guy playing? being? the director/narrator of the documentary looks like he is acting the part of "guy reacting to something he doesn't trust" with the hanging open mouth and sucking his tongue etc. reaction. But it seems like the filming really was that weird.

Gosh amighty. And there's a small child, a real small child and not "the script needs a baby" child actor, in this and everything. That really makes me concerned, because I would not leave that woman in charge of a goldfish.

The woman was either crazy as a loon or drugged out to the orbit of Pluto, or both. Because that kind of "pop your eyes wide open until the balls nearly fall out and stare unblinkingly and hold that stare for minutes" kind of behaviour, that is not normal.

How the hell did she get money from the supposedly rich and canny, the kind of hard-nosed business people whose job it was to sniff out frauds and schemers, who made tons of money by making the right decisions on investments and trades? Did the crazy only come out later?

How the hell did she get money from the supposedly rich and canny, the kind of hard-nosed business people whose job it was to sniff out frauds and schemers

Because DC money does not understand how Silicon Valley works. Almost all her investors are from DC circles, which makes sense given her pitch. "Female Zuckerberg reinvents medical testing" is a compelling sell to the sufficiently ignorant.

And on paper why couldn't she do it ? On paper Tesla, SpaceX, and Theranos do not look that different from each other : 'Autistic savant finds space with lazy legacy players, blindsides them with a technology leap and cleans house despite expert insistence that the technology simply wasn't there yet.'

Now, if you're from the valley, then you immediately see the folly in that reasoning. If you are YC, A16z or Sequoia, then you get pitched this exact story 20 times a day by an equally talented Stanford dropout. Premier VCs know that the story is for the media, they want to see hard outcomes : Growth (like Facebook before it made its first dollar), Technology (like when Altman showed Satya GPT3) or Revenue. Theranos had none of those, and failed to secure a single tier 1 VC.

Tesla wasn't just ambitious, it was standing on the shoulders of legacy giants who had already made and subsequently canned electric cars because of political pressure more so than technical pressure. Tesla was started at a time when batteries were improving exponentially by the year. Tesla hit the goldilocks zone in so many ways it is incredible. The ambition and the crazy founder were secondary to what was clearly fertile ground for disruption. Compare that to Elon's ill-fated attempts to reinvent trains (hyperloop), tunnels (boring company) or trucks (cybertruck). One may think that Elon's personality is what made him successful. On the contrary, Elon's personality is tolerated so VCs can get in early with tech's clearest technical thinker (alongside Bezos) with a proven record of hitting jackpot about 20% of the time.

Unfortunately, DC investors do not have the keen ability to tell the difference between someone with the right optics vs the true signals that indicate possible success. Holmes' narcissism (bad = ruthless climbing and image management) was mistaken for turbo-autism (good = technical obsession and single minded force of will). Her hyperbolic claims (fraud or naivete) were mistaken for insight. DC elite are used to military projects that make billions vanish without a trace. Spending $1B on seemingly valid breakthrough did not read as fraud. After all, the F-35 wasn't demonstrated for decades after the $50 billion in funding. They were especially gullible given the DC & old-money credentials of the Holmes family.

The woman was either crazy as a loon or drugged out to the orbit of Pluto, or both

Probably both.

Tech VCs regularly yeet money into far dumber stuff than Theranos. Theranos definitely skewed East Coast due to the Healthcare aspect, which is something that Tech generally historically hasn't had that great a taste for and has its own crazy infrastructure of tiny explorer companies and acquisitions.

Is that really the case?

What else do we have that's high profile and obviously physically impossible? Even things like exaggerations of self driving cars are "not quite there yet and not clear when we'd get there" not "impossible."*

*With the caveat that Theranos is obviously impossible without other more eye catching and valuable technologies, not impossible with science fiction technology.

Silicon Valley tends to ignore Hardware as much as possible since it's too expensive, tricky and prone to falsification. YC's kicked out a bunch of companies over the year for straight-up fraud, though.

And on paper why couldn't she do it ? On paper Tesla, SpaceX, and Theranos do not look that different from each other : 'Autistic savant finds space with lazy legacy players, blindsides them with a technology leap and cleans house despite expert insistence that the technology simply wasn't there yet.'

Now, if you're from the valley, then you immediately see the folly in that reasoning.

This reminds me of the people who talk about 'growth' a lot in government. They're not necessarily stupid people, but they seem to see 'growth' as this thing that just turns up when you prepare the ground right and want it really really badly. It doesn't seem to occur to them that growth might correspond to something: to individual discoveries that compound into innovations, to solving problems that actually exist and actually matter, to synergies that grow up between quality home industries.

Which makes it very difficult for them to tell growth from financialisation.

A24 is mainly famous for making eerie movies / horror movies. And Elizabeth Holmes comes off as creepy to many people anyway. So it's not surprising that everyone involved would lean into a "horror" tone here, with the disturbing music and close-ups. It's the best path to making money on this movie.

She looks like "I am about to slip some gelsemine into your tea and then sit by your bedside mopping your brow and cooing reassuringly as you slowly succumb to its effects, in the best traditions of the Golden Age of British murder".

Indeed, sounds like something out of a story involving rather a different Holmes. Nominative determinism fails?

Thank you for this. First time I've been really surprised by something all week. IT'S NOT AN ACTRESS trying to seem as untrustworthy as possible. Lmfao.

First off, that's just a teaser. The full trailer dropped: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HvW_N5p1q44

Wealthy Boomer men have been very effectively trained to feel guilty about the opportunities they had that women didn't.

Holmes was very good at making them feel like she's the genius daughter / granddaughter they never had who just needs a chance.

More than that, she's from a well connected family and was born in DC. Her mom was a DC staffer. Her dad worked at USAID and ENRON.

There's a class of DC people who viewed her as "one of our own" getting rich and kicking ass in Silicon Valley.

You can see that when you look at the people who were on her board: Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, James Mattis, and Betsy DeVos.

I don't quite understand how her schtick as a hypnotic alien helped but somehow it did.

Thanks for the link. The comment section is gold, I really liked this one:

"It took me a really long time to be able to cry on command... but check this out" single tear rolls down cheek

Or how the other comment put it:

She almost shit herself producing that teardrop

I am still laughing my ass off over it, a real goldmine in there. Also I unironically think that we may be witnessing a birth of a new hero for Lindsay Clancy's gaggle of lunatics. I'd not be surprised if a few years down the road Holmes is AOCs chosen for vice-president or something like that.

Emotional derangement can be very magnetic. Many people who interacted with Hitler up close said that he had mesmerizing, hypnotic eyes.

The big eyes also helped with her sex appeal.

Sex appeal plus magnetic eyes plus deep voice plus "autistic genius" personality is a great combination for a woman in her 20s wanting to be taken seriously by people who have a lot of money.

Okay, the full thing is more normal. But this really is a woman putting on a performance so constantly that I don't think she knows herself what's true or not. She has that "this is how a person who is [in X situation] would react, so I react like that" aura about her, which leads to the uncanny effect.

It looks like a very interesting production after all. The truth (or part of it) may be that Holmes has something off-balance about her but genuinely convinced herself that she was not scamming, that this would all work out, that she did not lie and deceive, and so she is convinced of her own innocence. But she is so removed from reality that she has trouble connecting with normal people, and this was her attempt at explaining herself.

That, or she and her partner really are accomplished liars and con artists.

That, or as the comment from the gold mine of youtube comment section put it more succintly:

She went to the Zuckerberg school for human emotions

In related(?) Zuckerberg news, him and the missus are throwing money at local sports clubs now they are going to be lords of the manor round these parts:

The donation comes as the Chan Zuckerberg family begins to put down roots in the Waterford community, with the couple recognising the central role the GAA plays in towns and villages across the country.

“The GAA is at the heart of communities across Ireland,” said Mark and Priscilla. “As new members of the Waterford community, we’re proud to support these local clubs and the important role they play.”

It does make me laugh because I think the guy would not know a hurley if you bet him over the head with it, and they don't need to buy goodwill because the locals in them parts are well used to tugging the forelock to the big house (the Duke of Devonshire has a little summer place there) or at least being very happy with how their bread is buttered once rich outsiders come in to buy and do up manor houses. Still, all donations gratefully received, even if I think this is Mark downloading programming about "how do flesh units integrate into local communities?" and learning all about the importance that the lowly sons of toil place on activities like sports, so supporting sports aids in gaining popularity for their new overlords 😁

Tallow GAA Treasurer Kieran Geary told WLR’s Big Breakfast Blaa that the club plans to invest in coaching and games, as well as a number of facility upgrades.

He said the funding will help with plans to tarmac the club’s community walkway and develop a spectator stand.

The donation is the largest single contribution Tallow GAA has received in its 139 year history.

Mr. Geary revealed that the process began around a month ago when club secretary Lindsay Murphy received a call from an unknown number.

That led to a series of meetings with representatives of Zuckerberg and Chan, with Mr. Geary admitting it had been ‘a hard secret to keep’.

He also described the donation as ‘a bit surreal’, saying people had jokingly suggested the club should approach the couple after news emerged that they had purchased Strancally Castle.

Another funny part to me is the revival in local cricket clubs due to the influx of Indian/Pakistani immigrants to Ireland; formerly a garrison sport, now the established local clubs are featuring new members and good luck to them!

The generous take is that Holmes tried to apply the silicon valley "fake it till you make it" strategy and got in way over her head. Then she just stubbornly kept pushing forward hoping everything would work out.

This was John Carreyrou's take in his book, and he wasn't very sympathetic.

It fits really well with the anecdotes littered in the book about her obsession with Jobs.

Christian and his friends were always ready and willing to do Elizabeth and Sunny’s bidding. Their eagerness to please was on display when news broke that Steve Jobs had died on the evening of October 5, 2011. Elizabeth and Sunny wanted to pay Jobs a tribute by flying an Apple flag at half-mast on the grounds of the Hillview Avenue building. The next morning, Jeff Blickman, a tall redhead who’d played varsity baseball at Duke, volunteered for the mission. He couldn’t locate any suitable Apple flag for sale, so Blickman had one custom made out of vinyl. It featured the famous Apple logo in white against a black background. The store he went to took a while to make it. Blickman didn’t return with it until late in the day. In the meantime, work at the company came to a standstill as Elizabeth and Sunny moped around the office, consumed by the hunt for the Apple flag.

Greg had been aware of Elizabeth’s fascination with Jobs. She referred to him as “Steve” as if they were close friends. At one point, she’d told him that a documentary espousing a 9/11 conspiracy theory wouldn’t have been available on iTunes if “Steve” hadn’t believed there was something to it. Greg thought that was silly. He was pretty sure Jobs hadn’t personally screened all the movies for rent or sale on iTunes. Elizabeth seemed to have this exaggerated image of him as an all-seeing and all-knowing being.

It all fits the image of a very immature , mentally ill person who thought she could just push through.

The real question is what the fuck Sunny Balwani was thinking.

The eye contact during a blow job must’ve been next level

Two things:

  1. Nathan Fielder is involved with this. This immediately makes it questionable how much of this is a documentary vs. a movie and what genre it is, also how much Holmes is involved in the "joke." If you don't know who Nathan is I really recommend looking into it, a few YouTubers have multi hour long videos that make you question reality. The guy is doing some really interesting performance art and/or is a wild person.

  2. Holmes was always part of the take adjacent delusion complex. The technology was very obviously physically impossible to anyone with a science background, so like many scams you immediately filtered off anybody with any sense, so everyone involved was an idiot or profoundly desperate to find a blond female tech savant.

Nathan Fielder is involved with this. This immediately makes it questionable how much of this is a documentary vs. a movie and what genre it is, also how much Holmes is involved in the "joke." If you don't know who Nathan is I really recommend looking into it, a few YouTubers have multi hour long videos that make you question reality. The guy is doing some really interesting performance art and/or is a wild person.

Indeed. Nathan For You vibes are strong with the teaser.

The trailer is only a few minutes long, and of course the way it's shot and scored and presented makes it look like a movie. So the impressions we are/I am getting are those the film makers want us to get.

But seemingly they really did invite in this crew:

Holmes and Evans invite Fielder and Oppenheim to document their lives in the days before Holmes goes to prison, and the filmmakers continue following the couple over the course of three years.

Oppenheim and Fielder contacted Holmes upon hearing through a friend that she was looking for someone to document her life. Fielder had read John Carreyrou's 2018 book Bad Blood and thought that the story had already been thoroughly covered in the media, but he became curious about Holmes's perspective following her retreat from the public eye.

In April 2023, Holmes and her partner Billy Evans invited the film crew to live at home with them and their children during the 34 days prior to Holmes beginning her prison sentence. A24 gave the filmmakers permission to pursue the project without a deadline or obligation to turn the footage into a finished film, with the studio saying that if nothing came of the project it could just be scrapped. According to Fielder, they knew they had a compelling story when crew members disagreed about what was happening in the house, saying: “And that’s when we really realized, 'Oh, this is really interesting to follow this. We’re all smart and we’re really working at the top of our intelligence. Why can’t we make sense of what’s happening in this house?'"

The original plan was for Fielder to remain behind the camera, but the interactions Fielder had with Holmes and Evans were so strange that it was decided to include them in the film. Fielder and Oppenheim also reached out to several people who knew Holmes or had worked with her, but were unable to get them to participate in the film. Fielder said "People did not want to appear in this, or people from the past were just sort of done with her."

So this really is Holmes doing her utmost best to be appealing and charming and "I'm being real, I'm being honest, I'm not hiding anything" and instead looking completely uncanny. Why did she and her partner do this? Why did they think it a good idea? Clearly when she was shopping around for someone to make a film or piece about her, the idea was to create propaganda (if possible) about her being a pure-hearted blossom who only had the best of sincere intentions and it all somehow went sideways. But this? Invite them in before she goes to jail, then they keep hanging around for three years, and out comes the most uncanny of valleys in the shape of the trailer?

I genuinely thought this was a docudrama with an actress playing her, brilliantly conveying how unhinged she was, but with a lot of artistic licence going on. Nope, this is the real lady showing us how unhinged she is.

The original plan was for Fielder to remain behind the camera, but the interactions Fielder had with Holmes and Evans were so strange that it was decided to include them in the film.

I find this hard to believe. Both seasons of The Rehearsal we're about him inserting himself into the story he's documenting. I think it's a big part of what makes his art so good; blurring the like between documentarian and documentee (?) is the point.

That said, those chilling shots of Holmes looking like a sociopath... I think the effect is really increased by the magic of filmmaking. Close-ups, cuts between faces that potentially extend the timing of awkward silences.. the music in the background. All documentaries should be taken with a hefty serving of salt.

This is why I generally hate all but the most lighthearted and inconsequential of documentaries. Half the information of a book/long article, but chock full of every emotional manipulation trick in Hollywood's arsenal. It's like eating a survival ration where half the calories were replaced with cigarettes.

Based off what he did with airplanes my guess is that he told her she would be able to rewrite her story and tell it "how it really was" and he'll manipulate her into getting an interesting product that she may or may not realize is dangerous to her and crazy (because of her presumed/likely personality disorder).

For those unaware, Nathan Fielder is the guy who did the sort-of-comedy/sort-of-serious show Nathan For You where he would give businesses outlandish business strategies to try out. Like a gas station offering ridiculously cheap gas, with the catch being you had to fill out a rebate form and deliver it to a drop box at the peak of some mountain in a national park two hours away.

Can you point me to the YouTube videos. Sounds right up my alley. I like Nathan fielder but I’m not expert.

Super Eyepatch Wolf did a long one, I feel like someone else did too but I can't remember who it was.

The guy is doing some really interesting performance art and/or is a wild person.

Sort of. Fielder makes one-of-a-kind shows and movies by putting non-actors in very unusual situations surrounded by improv actors and then weaving their genuine words and actions into the narrative he wants to tell. People talking about the shows get confused only because the primary improv actor is him, playing a fictionalized version of himself, and he almost always plays that character in public appearances.

What makes the documentary so interesting is that the "real person" in this case is walking into the whole situation open-eyed about who Nathan is and what he does. What narrative does he plan to create given that situation? How successful will he be going up against her desire to tell her own story the way she wants it to be understood?

the "real person" in this case is walking into the whole situation open-eyed

I see what you did there.

To answer the question seriously, I don't think you need to try very hard to get someone like Madoff or SBF or Holmes to dig themselves a hole after they've been exposed. Just sit and record them trying to explain why what they did wasn't a scam.

I am not a personal consumer of his content but I've heard in commentary on him that it deliberately makes it unclear what is a joke, what's him being awkward, what is him pretending to be awkward etc.

This means even if you know what he does it is easy to get thrown off since what is and isn't a character is blurred.

How the hell did she get money from the supposedly rich and canny, the kind of hard-nosed business people whose job it was to sniff out frauds and schemers, who made tons of money by making the right decisions on investments and trades?

People overestimate how canny these rich people are versus lucky. Also people who are really smart and good at something are still usually only good at one thing. Many of them are quite happy to hop on the hype train if other hard-nosed business people believe in the project. It's not like any of these people know anything about blood testing, but if Walgreens and Larry Ellison thinks it's the real deal why shouldn't they follow suit?

Also also, SV is overflowing with people flinging money at questionable ideas, the vast majority of which fail. Theranos blew up because it was massive, long-running fraud, not just vaporware. (And biomedical tech fraud has higher stakes than "our productivity software package is shit.")

Did the crazy only come out later?

Nope

This. Larry Ellison is not some genius stock trader who turned a hundred dollar inheritance to 200 billions. Instead, pretty much like Gates, he made his fortune by investing in and leading one software company over decades, and having luck (and competence, and ruthlessness) on his side.

Just because you are in the top percentile of "running a software company", that does not mean that you are some genius stock-picker. Additionally, if the feedback you get from the universe is "on average, your deals are going great, you are one of the richest people alive due to your business decisions", a common side effect of that is overconfidence. Besides, the stock market is probably the only place where Ellison can experience the thrill of gambling, it is not like he can go to Vegas and bet a billion on a single number.

In short, just because someone is very rich that does not mean they are a professional investor, just as someone being very tall does not mean that they are an NBA player.

My world model would be that the people who are actually good at investing are working for Goldman Sachs and the like. If it turned out that they were long on Theranos when it crashed (buying and selling it earlier is fine if you can get away with it, of course), that would be very surprising to me.

pretty much like Gates

Naah, dont make a comparison to Gates.

Gates was insanely intelligent, in that he was intelligent and he was insane. I worked for Microsoft, and personally know people who knew Bill. So these are 1st hand accounts. Dude was insane. He was reading 24x7, while walking, pooping and....driving. (as told to me by someone who was unfortunate enough to sit beside him in his Porsche 911 that he drove while reading at the same time). He was as obsessive as Jobs, and had temper tantrums about 10x of what Jobs was famous for.

Gates' mad-man persona was sanitized through his seasoned veteran image created during his non-profit foundation era. But Bill-Gates was a genius. There are no 2 ways around it.

Ofc, it helped that he was born in a top 0.01 percentile privileged household. He was definitely the first child in Seattle to use a computer.

Perfect trifecta of luck, nepotism and talent.

Your general point is still correct, but I get a sense that Gates legacy gets overlooked because of his deliberate revisionism.

It’s funny you cite height. Do you know the odds of playing in the nba if you are 7 feet tall or higher? They are multiple orders of magnitude better than if you are below 6 feet tall.

So it is with rich people. Who is a better investor: random GS VP or Peter Thiel?

Funny too because it’s been 20 years since GS was a training ground for investors. They basically closed down all their investing capabilities post Dodd-Frank. Now it’s various forms of professional services. You use to see a bunch of hedge funds come from their ranks but without prop trading those days ended.

If it turned out that they were long on Theranos when it crashed (buying and selling it earlier is fine if you can get away with it, of course), that would be very surprising to me.

I mean plenty of elite professional traders get blindsided by big macro happenings since they're overfocused on the stock price as a signal. Theranos did never go public (partly due to the fraud involved making it hard to get through audit), though, so limited scope to be traded as well. My professional background is essentially VIP services for Online Casino so I meet a lot of crazy, crazy rich people and I do 100% believe that sheer aggression and compulsive all-inness is probably the most required trait to be superduper rich. It's very hard to snowball into that level of money out of sheer smarts if you have reasonable bankroll management.

Oh my God.

I know it's said she admired Steve Jobs so much she tried to turn herself into a clone of him with the black turtlenecks, but that is pure Zuckerberg "Hello I am an android" mimicry going on there.

Is everyone in Silicon Valley batshit insane? Does this pass for normal there?

I saw a clip of this trailer and also just assumed it was from a TV show and they were actors--maybe something shot in a mock documentary style. The incongruence between her eyes and smile, and the way she holds that expression with the tilting head is highly unsettling. At that moment, I think she really believes herself when she says that she's always honest.

I had the same reaction. I thought it was a faked-up overdone reenactment and it was quickly out of my mind. A little later someone pointed out that it was actually a real interview with Holmes (her look has changed a lot), and it instantly turned it into a must watch for me.

One of my old co-workers was an early FTX employee and I got a lot of proxy exposure to a network of huge-money Crypto and Tech people as a result.

A lot of them are kinda nuts to be honest. Becoming a Billionaire is more about aggression and tenacity than brilliance, since way better to either have a pretty-good idea and charge like a bull or just be a serial idea-haver and hope for the best instead of being a perfectionist. Plus in Holmes case the whole impending judgement, cameras being present, small child sleep deprivation stuff is likely compounding her inherent nature.

She is an actor, pretending in real life, even if her pretend self is her real self. It’s a continuous performance - a continuous grift, except it’s no longer really a grift, because now you’re getting what’s on the tin, a documentary about a pathological con woman.

How the hell did she get money from the supposedly rich and canny, the kind of hard-nosed business people whose job it was to sniff out frauds and schemers, who made tons of money by making the right decisions on investments and trades?

A lot of hard-nosed business people are actually pretty bad at sniffing out fraud even if they try. Furthermore, a lot of them simply don't give a fuck. Venture capitalists make a lot of bets. They expect most of them to not pay out, and for the few that do pay out to more than cover the bad bets. Mahayoshi Son of SoftBank is probably the best example of that. If the reason the bet didn't pay out is because of fraud, that's not really much different than it failing to pay out because of internal failures or acts of God. After all, you did your due diligence. You met with the founders and they made all the right mouth noises while pointing at a hockey stick graph projected onto the wall. You couldn't have possibly known there was a fraud going on, so you face no unique downside.

That just seems like throwing away free alpha. If the average legitimate venture capital investment opportunity generates such high returns in expectation that it can make up for rampant fraud, then a fraud-savvy investor could earn even greater returns by discriminating and getting these lucrative opportunities without the fraudulent ones weighing them down. Even if you can't avoid internal failures or acts of God, every case that you do nonrandomly avoid is free money.

Maybe the riskiest ideas with the greatest potential for growth sound fake. Refusing to bet on possible grifts may also filter out some of the best startups. That's not necessarily true, but if something like it is then a savvy investor could be insensitive to scams.

Also your ability to profit is based on market sentiment not the actual reality of these projects. A fully rational investor is going to miss out on a lot of hypebubble money.

Yeah but if you manage to completely sniff out everything that's fraudulent you're probably costing yourself since there's sufficient businesses that start fraudulent/have intervening periods of insolvency that they make it through via bloodymindedness, nobody calling their bluff and market exuberance. Plus however you want to diagnose companies that lurch around from an original okay-but-not-great idea and end up landing on something that works later on. If you were smart enough to not invest in the original idea, you may have missed out on the second iteration.

Also sufficient 'regulatory arbitrage' cases in business where it's just a fight to the death between regulators and spurious crazy people. Uber seems to have worked. Maybe Kalshi/Polymarket work or don't work out in the end but the fraudulence ratio has swung around wildly throughout the whole enterprise.

Early in Microsoft they had OS builds filled with fatal bugs. Practically unusable software. Bill Gates would demo it to potential customers and investors. He carefully avoided the many actions that would crash it and falsely presented it as working. His software demos really impressed people. Later they mostly fixed the bugs and delivered something like working software to customers.

Later they mostly fixed the bugs and delivered something like working software to customers.

Citation needed!

Firefly (the meeting transcription / note takes service) being the most recent and relevant example. The CEO literally used to join calls as "Firefly AI" and make the notes by hand, but now the product works and it's great.

Yeah plenty of stories like that with elements of faking it till you make it plus these days hard to have a genuine moat in most SAAS vaporware startups so being crazy and willing to push the envelope is a ton of how one of 500 fairly-identical companies comes out of the melee.

It's also worth pointing out that the "avoid the weirdos" heuristic is probably an actively counterproductive strategy for a VC. You avoid Holmes types, but you also avoid Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Altman, Amodei, Musk types. Since the latter group is where VCs take the large majority of their profits, they'd be reduced to a bunch of small, conventional bets that don't sustain the model.

Yeah. Plus when times are good there's massive laudatory portraits of 'how weird our misunderstood genius is but we managed to look past it and made money with SBF'

Stealing this from @ToaKraka in the FF thread:

A 911 call is made regarding a robbery perpetrated at gunpoint by three juvenile males in black clothing. One mile away from the location of the reported robbery, the responding officers find two juvenile males—one in all black, and another, KC, wearing a black shirt and mask and gray pants. The officers pull over alongside the juveniles and start walking toward them while shining a flashlight at them. KC starts walking away. An officer steps in front of KC, blocking his path, and asks him what's in his waistband. KC discards the object in his waistband (a gun) and runs away, but is quickly apprehended. He is charged with various delinquencies.

The trial judge grants KC's motion to suppress the evidence. The officers fully detained him, rather than casually speaking with him, when they shined a flashlight on him and blocked his path; and they did not have reasonable suspicion to detain him, since the description given in the 911 call was vague and KC didn't even match it. (The caller didn't even provide a direction in which the assailants fled. Did the officers have the power to detain all juvenile males wearing a single article of black clothing within a one-mile radius of the robbery? No.)

Our own BJ Campbell wrote that this is one of the important differences between the US and Western Europe. A German or British police officer would have the power to detain all juvenile males wearing a single article of black clothing within a one-mile radius of the robbery and physical evidence wouldn't be suppressed even if obtained without following the proper trail of investigation.

Is the USA shooting itself in the foot there? What will it lose if it changes its legal norms to lower the bar on probable cause and evidence suppression?

In the same vein, we have this comedy skit.

[Two Philadelphia police officers] were traveling… in a marked patrol car when they observed Appellant standing on the sidewalk with the handle of a firearm “printing through his T-shirt”. Officer Heeney stopped the car and Officer Moore asked Appellant “if he had a permit to carry”. Appellant responded, “Carry what?” Officer Moore replied, “What’s in the front?” Appellant began to reach in his left pocket and stated, “My keys.” Officer Moore asked again, “No, what’s in the front?” Appellant said, “I don’t want no trouble, I’m sorry, officer.” Officer Moore questioned Appellant, “Do you have a permit or not?” Appellant replied, “I’m not carrying anything.” Officer Moore exited the vehicle, and Appellant began to walk away and put his left arm in front of his body. Officer Moore commanded Appellant not to run, approached him, and grabbed a firearm out of Appellant’s front waistband. Officer Moore again asked Appellant if he had a permit to carry. Appellant told Officer Moore that he had it in his vehicle, and that it was not on his person. Officer Moore conducted a National Crime Information Center (“NCIC”) search and learned that Appellant did not have a license to carry a firearm. Officer Moore arrested Appellant and charged Appellant with Firearms Not to be Carried Without a License and Carrying Firearms on Public Streets in Philadelphia.

Officer Moore testified that he has been a police officer for seven years on the same assignment in the 22nd District, he has made over 150 arrests, he has made at least five firearms arrests in a two-block span of the area where he arrested Appellant, he has made a few dozen arrests in the same area, and the area is violent with numerous shootings and has a police car assigned there around the clock due to gun violence. Officer Moore further testified that since he has been a Philadelphia police officer he has encountered “more than 50, maybe more than 100” individuals who have lawfully carried firearms and has “never had somebody that lawfully carried a gun tell me that he wasn’t carrying anything when I asked them if they had a permit when I could clearly see he had a gun”. Officer Moore explained that he has encountered “at least 20” people who have said that they’re not carrying anything when they are clearly carrying a firearm “and they all ended in arrests” because they did not have a license to carry.

Under state precedent (concurrences: 1 2), following federal precedent, the mere presence of a concealed gun does not give rise to reasonable suspicion that a law is being broken. If upon seeing the gun the officer had immediately performed an investigative detention, then the evidence would have been suppressed. However, in this case the officer started with a "mere encounter", and the man's blatant lies in response to the officer's questions, in addition to the man's abortive flight and the officer's personal knowledge of the area's high crime rate, then gave rise to reasonable suspicion under which the officer could conduct an "investigative detention" (telling the man to stop and pulling the gun out of the man's waistband).

(I wanted to post this in the next Friday Fun Thread. But it's too relevant to this culture-war-thread top-level post for me to post it there. Alas…)

oWo what's this? Do you have a permit to carry or are you just happy to see me?

The US is more interested in 'freedom theater' than actually running the country.

The US has 5x the violent crime rate of Europe. Bipartisan policy on crime should be priority #1. But, narrow fixations on founding myths and the its original sin leads to weird stances on racist-optics of policing, the 2nd amendment, the jury system and more.

I call it theater because the high crime rate is a leading contributor to violence faced by black people. Reducing it, even by racist means, will reduce the suffering of black people. Hobbyist gun-owners face gun-abolition threats from Dems precisely because 2nd amendment nuts oppose sensible limitations on mentally ill and untrained gun-owners. The judicial system of life-time justice appointments and social-media-blinded juries is held up as sacred, all while it was clearly designed for a bygone era.

With that I wade in the main question-

A German or British police officer would have the power to detain all juvenile males wearing a single article of black clothing within a one-mile radius of the robbery and physical evidence wouldn't be suppressed even if obtained without following the proper trail of investigation.

Is the USA shooting itself in the foot there? What will it lose if it changes its legal norms to lower the bar on probable cause and evidence suppression?

That's because of the precedent set by European police officers. They don't have a reputation for suicide-by-cop. They don't have a reputation for turning off body-cams at suspicious times. They don't have a reputation for shady protection schemes for rotten-apple police-officers. If American police want the right to stop random strangers, they must establish accountability and through it, build public trust.

It's funny. My favorite quote of the last 10 years comes from Kamala Harris of all people. "You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you".

That's all it is. The legal norms were established in a different era with different assumptions. You cannot ask a question about the suitable legal norms for today without discussing why we got here in the first place.

It is unfashionably 'woke' to weigh history & context over material facts. But the pendulum has swung too far. Legal norms don't exist in isolation. A discussion on the powers owed to law enforcement must start with the local relationship of the people with their local law-enforcement. To change the norms, one must change their hostile relationship with the populace first. Law enforcement must make the first people offering because 1. they have monopoly over violence and 2. they are an organized entity unlike the populace which isn't a single entity.

So, I am going to do the annoying thing and counter a question with a question.

What concessions can law enforcement offer to civilians that would convince them to give up valuable protections. Protections that maintain the current balance of power in court ?

Hobbyist gun-owners face gun-abolition threats from Dems precisely because 2nd amendment nuts oppose sensible limitations on mentally ill and untrained gun-owners.

Name a sensible limitation on mentally-ill and untrained owners.

That's because of the precedent set by European police officers. They don't have a reputation for suicide-by-cop. They don't have a reputation for turning off body-cams at suspicious times. They don't have a reputation for shady protection schemes for rotten-apple police-officers. If American police want the right to stop random strangers, they must establish accountability and through it, build public trust.

This doesn't make any sense. Sometimes, rarely, crazy people in the US attack the police and force the police to shoot them, therefore the police need to build enough trust with the public to do basic policing work?

American police already have the right to stop random strangers. What they can and cannot do is defined by the law. It has nothing to do with public trust or accountability or context. This is also the reason why those people could be stopped in Germany or the UK - because the laws are different. Not because the public trusts the police more.

Hobbyist gun-owners face gun-abolition threats from Dems precisely because 2nd amendment nuts oppose sensible limitations on mentally ill and untrained gun-owners.

The people pushing those limits are not sensible, will not restrict themselves to the mentally ill, and openly talk about how this is a wedge to eventually disarm the population entirely. Perhaps your contempt would be better directed at the controllers, to encourage them to learn literally anything about how guns work and how people use them.

He is charged with various delinquencies.

That makes it sound like he was not linked to the robbery at all, if they could make the robbery stick then "various delinquencies" would be a weird way to phrase it.

My take (which is not the position of US law, or German law) is the following: if they had found their robber, they should keep the evidence -- stopping people within a mile of a crime scene does not seem so disproportional that we want to squash the evidence to limit the invasion of privacy. If instead they had DNA tested everyone within the state, that would be different.

On the other hand, I do not want cops to go on a fishing trip any time some crime is committed somewhere. So if they got him for drug possession instead, I would be fine with suppressing the evidence. The justice system should not depend on police getting lucky and catching delinquents while having probable cause for some totally unrelated crime, it just gives cops bad incentives ("please keep your description of the suspect as vague as possible so we can stop and frisk the maximum amount of people").

My understanding is that the standard in the US is different than what I propose, either the cops had PC, in which case any evidence is admissible even if totally unrelated to the PC, or they had not, in which case the evidence is inadmissible even if it is just what they were searching for.

Is the USA shooting itself in the foot there? What will it lose if it changes its legal norms to lower the bar on probable cause and evidence suppression?

I think the strong evidence rules are a brilliant tool to align law enforcement to the law.

The natural incentives of cops is catching criminals. Nobody will celebrate a PD for not conducting illegal searches. Good luck trying to have a cop get punished through disciplinary or judicial measures for an illegal invasion like making you open the trunk of your car. Even getting fired would not be enough to deter cops from illegal behavior in sufficiently high profile cases, anyone who caught a serial killer through an illegal search and got fired for their trouble would be celebrated as a martyr and land a cushy private sector job. And securing any criminal conviction against cops typically involves them being filmed from multiple angles killing someone and subsequent race riots.

So instead, you hit them where it hurts, and let criminals go free if their procedural rights were violated. Suddenly the cop who cut procedural corners to catch a criminal is no longer the hero who worked creatively around a broken system, but the fuckwit whose inability to follow SOP ruined an investigation.

Sure, you lose a few criminal convictions, but if you want to maximize catching criminals, you do not want civil liberties in the first place.

I think you've misunderstood the motivation for the doctrine -- it's not "invasion of privacy" but here the court found (debatably, sure) that the officer violated the suspect's physical person. The key part being that the suspect was (in the eyes of the court) physically seized at the moment he was (arguably) not free to leave.

You're free to say that doesn't change your opinion on the ultimate resolution. Maybe it shouldn't, I really don't know.

Rights versus safety is despite the Ben Franklin quote, not necessarily opposed. There are two ways that I can take your freedom. The first one is the government arresting people arbitrarily and framing them for crimes. The other is allowing crime to go on and get bad enough that ordinary citizens are unable to go about their lives. The second becomes even worse if the government also limits how a citizen can protect himself from crime. When that happens, the citizens are deprived of their rights just as surely as if the government had taken them.

Sure, you lose a few criminal convictions, but if you want to maximize catching criminals, you do not want civil liberties in the first place.

I don't think maximizing catching criminals is the goal, it's minimizing the crime rate. Ideally, policies should be structured in a way that deters people from committing crimes in the first place. If the cop that cut procedural corners to catch a criminal is automatically fired, then you can both eat your cake (the crime is solved) and have it, too (other cops are deterred from doing the same, unless they think solving this specific crime is worth it).

He is charged with various delinquencies.

That makes it sound like he was not linked to the robbery at all

Correct. The opinion says that he was charged only with "firearm violations and related offenses"—presumably something like carrying without a license, carrying while underage, etc.

A German or British police officer would have the power to detain all juvenile males wearing a single article of black clothing within a one-mile radius of the robbery

I've read a lot of crime books in my life, and one of the things that's always interested me is suspect descriptions and how useful they are. I've read about cases where police failed to solve the crime because they seemed to focus on a description that wasn't very good, and others where they didn't solve the crime and dismissed good descriptions as being too vague. I've also seen authors excoriate police departments for not focusing on suspects who matched relatively vague descriptions. So during my time at the DMV I also thought about a rubric that could be used to categorize suspect descriptions.

  • A Level 1 Description would be one that eliminates 90–99% of the population. This may seem high, but anything less than that isn't really even a description. If the suspect is described as a black female, well, only 12–14% of the population is black, and about half of them are female, so that eliminates 93% of the population right there. If the suspect is described as a young, tall, white male, 40–45% of the population is white males, eliminating children and anyone too old to be reasonably described as young and you cut that in half, and cut it in half again to get rid of anyone shorter than average height, and you're down to 10%. These kinds of descriptions are of little to no use in a police investigation and are completely worthless in a trial.

  • A Level 2 Description is one that eliminates 99–99.9% of the population. These can be of some use in an investigation but are of little to no use in a trial. Suppose the man running from the scene was described as an African American teenager, short and extremely overweight. Take the 7% who are black men, teenagers being about 20% of them, divide by half again to get people shorter then average, then in half again to get anyone plausibly described as overweight (always use the larger numbers), and we're in that 0.1–1% range. But in most places there are going to be entirely too many short, black, overweight teenage boys for police to identify and question them all.

  • A Level 3 Description would eliminate 99.9–99.99% of the population, but still include between one person in a thousand and one in ten thousand. To give a few examples:

    • Caucasian male, age 50 to 55, tall, athletic, blue eyes, grey hair, driving an older model pickup.
    • Caucasian female, 20–23 years old, brown hair and eyes, about 5'7", large breasts, extremely good looking, piercing in the nose and tattoo on the lower back.
    • Hispanic female, 45 to 50, extremely short, somewhat overweight, perhaps 4'11" and 130 pounds, bushy eyebrows, wears glasses, blue painted fingernails.

    These kinds of descriptions are of value to police and may play some role in a trial, but no one could be reasonably convicted of a crime based on them. It's also worth noting here that some of the attributes are changeable, and this needs to factor into the analysis as well.

  • A Level 4 Description would eliminate 99.99–99.999% of the population, but still probably include a few people in any decent sized metro:

    • Caucasian male, 40–45 years old, between 5'2" and 5'5", thin, long, sandy-colored hair, large glasses, large square face, smokes cigarettes, looks a little like John Denver.
    • African-American male in his 20s, average height, muscular build, shaved head, several gold teeth, gold earring in left ear, prominent scar on neck. Very deep voice with trace of a Jamaican accent.

    If you match a description of this specificity you should expect the police to come to your door, but it still wouldn't be enough to convict absent other information.

  • A Level 5 description would exclude 99.999% of the population or more, aka 1 person in 100,000 or less. This is the point where you stop combining combinations of independent variables that belong to lots of people and zero in on very specific attributes that are themselves fairly unique: A missing finger, a particular tattoo, one green nipple, etc. At this level you're on the defensive; if you match a Level 5 Description, you're going to need an alibi.

  • A Level 6 description is a description that applies to only one person: Fingerprints, DNA, being recognized by someone who knows you. A Level 6 Description is an identification.

The above is taken from an award-winning post I did about a year ago when something similar came up. I apologize for the long quote, but I omitted the formatting to make it less annoying. Anyway, it makes the point. If 20% of the population can be reasonably described as juvenile, and another 20% is wearing at least one article of black clothing, that description describes 4% of the population, making it a Level 1 description. If the suspect had simply been described as an Asian male, about 6% of the US population is Asian, about half of them men. Would it be reasonable to round up and detain all Asian men based on this description? Remember that the statistical probability of one of these being the perp are about 25% higher than a random juvenile with an article of black clothing.

And then you have to consider the area. This isn't some rural village. It isn't even some backalley urban ghetto. The robbery took place in Chinatown in Philadelphia, which is just outside of Center City. A one mile radius from here includes an estimated 57,479 people, likely more as it includes some of the most visited parts of Philadelphia on a Saturday night. One can expect there to be approximately 2,300 people within a one-mile radius of the robbery who fit the description. In my estimation, police need to get at least to Level 3 before a court will determine that, in similar circumstances, there is reasonable suspicion sufficient to allow an investigative detention, and at least Level 4 before you can start talking about a custodial interrogation.

If 20% of the population can be reasonably described as juvenile, and another 20% is wearing at least one article of black clothing, that description describes 4% of the population, making it a Level 1 description.

What fraction are carrying a (at the time only presumed) gun in their waistband? And at that point, can the cops ditch the description altogether and detain them regardless of any connection with a reported crime?

Unless "An officer steps in front of KC, blocking his path, and asks him what's in his waistband." is hiding a substantial gap between those events, I'd call it a reasonable detention.

Ditching the gun was a serious crime. Carrying it may well not be.

I know. Things which "may well not be" crimes can A) match him to the description more exactly, or B) provide justification on their own, which is what I was pointing out.

I don't think throwing a gun away is a crime. In contrast, it definitely is illegal for a juvenile to carry a gun, and carrying without a license is another crime.

I don't think throwing a gun away is a crime.

Throwing a gun away is negligent handling of it. What if someone who's not allowed to have it (child, felon, mentally ill person) picks it up?

My cursory searching does not reveal any law saying that discarding a gun is illegal in Pennsylvania. I guess your suggestion that it might count as reckless endangerment of, or unlicensed transfer to, whoever eventually picks it up isn't totally unreasonable, but IMO it still is a pretty big stretch.

'Pulling it out of your waistband' almost certainly is a technical violation of the law around presentation or brandishing.

I fail to see how throwing a gun away counts as directly menacing or endangering anyone nearby, especially with modern safety mechanisms that prevent the gun from going off when it hits the ground. (It appears that Pennsylvania does not have a specific law against "brandishing".)

The problem is that the cop didn't notice the gun until after he initiated the detention. If the detention were initiated based on his seeing the gun, there would be reasonable suspicion to retain and there wouldn't be a problem. Hence why the state tried to argue that it wasn't a detention.

If the detention were initiated based on his seeing the gun,

That was my assumption. He didn't mention the gun until after he initiated the detention, but it reads like he noticed it after the contact but before the detention.

It seems to me the problem with law is its universality. We need hard paternalism for the bottom 10% and classic liberalism with protections for everyone else

We kind of have that with parole eh? Parolees can be searched for far less than the rest of us.

Hypothetical: you're now in the bottom 10%. How do you live differently under hard paternalism? How do you qualify to leave the bottom 10%?

I interpret "bottom 10%" as being unable to follow obvious rules like no assault or theft (without a reasonable excuse like self-defense or genuine need), especially breaking the same rule multiple times, with strong evidence. Maybe this isn't actually 10% or what the parent implied, but it's my criteria for facing the real law, like "hard paternalism".

I'm sympathetic even to these people, and feel bad arguing for their harm. But society must do something or (there's overwhelming evidence) more people will suffer. And the only way I can imagine myself in their shoes is after brain damage that would make present me want to restrain future me ahead of time (similar to how I may prefer euthanasia over decades of dementia).

How do you live differently under hard paternalism?

Some way to ensure you can't assault or steal from innocents. You could live in a confined area with others guilty of your crime (i.e. ghetto - I try not to hide under euphemisms), a confined apartment (i.e. cell, where you can be alone or with friends), or walk among official civilization with restraints that prevent your crime.

How do you qualify to leave the bottom 10%?

If you can convincingly demonstrate that something has changed so that you'll no longer assault or steal. e.g. spending enough time not attempting to, even under pressure, especially if restrictions can temporarily be kept but moved out of your perception.

You could live in a confined area with others guilty of your crime (i.e. ghetto - I try not to hide under euphemisms)

1997
New York City
Is a walled
maximum security
prison.

Breaking out
is impossible.

Breaking in
is insane.

Yes, and the way that this should be implemented is swift and sure punishment with escalation ladders.

For example, let's say you are caught shoplifting. First offense, a warning. Then 1 day in jail. Then 30. Then 1 year.

Instead the law is like "Crime carries a sentence of 5 years but they probably won't prosecute and if they do the judge will probably let you out with a warning, unless they decide not to for some reason and throw the book at you".

You get bizarre cases where a first offender is thrown in jail for a long time and the (more common) scenario where a repeat violent criminal is released dozens of times. Three strikes you're out was the right idea, we just need better refinement.

Anarcho-tyranny can defeat even that. Your white guy goes to prison the third time some cashier fails to scan everything in his cart and he doesn't catch them. His protestations that it is not his fault fall on the judge's deaf ears. People of the proper race just walking out the door with a bunch of stuff don't get prosecuted at all and the escalation ladder doesn't matter.

Draconian law-n-order stuff just makes life worse for the people the law is meant to control, without controlling the people it wasn't controlling anyway.

The store ain't calling no cops when you'll pay for the goods.

If they assume you were trying to put one over on them, they will.

Instead the law is like "Crime carries a sentence of 5 years but they probably won't prosecute and if they do the judge will probably let you out with a warning, unless they decide not to for some reason and throw the book at you".

This proposal won't prevent that. They would still not be required to prosecute (and a rule saying 'they must prosecute' is a bad idea for obvious reasons) and it just moves the discretion from the judge to the prosecuter, and the judge could declare you not guilty anyway.

This seems the way. Swift and sure punishment is how you create very safe societies with modern policing. Look at Dubai many people here insist that a society full of Arabs and Indians can be so safe and yet it is.

Especially when punishments that could seriously deter/derail the lives of the top 90% are essentially lettuce floggings to people in the bottom 10%. You can pile infinite fines on somebody who's already subsiding purely on government aid and cash jobs

The "free to leave" analysis for whether it was a detention seems awfully hard to square with Florida v. Bostick and United States v. Drayton. A state is free to have stronger protections under the state constitution than the federal one, but a judicial opinion has to make it explicit that the court is relying on the state constitution rather than the federal one per Michigan v. Long, and I don't see the court specifically relying on the Penn. state constitution in that decision (but I didn't check all the cited decisions, so perhaps those do).

That case would be a solid loser for the defense in my state. I have, in fact, lost motions to suppress on very similar fact patterns, and I'm far from the only one (so it's not simply my incompetence).

The "feels free to leave" test comes from Michigan v. Chesternut. The cases you cited seem to ask whether the suspect would have feltn free to leave in particular circumstances that don't apply here, or free to refuse a search in circumstances that don't apply here.

Bostick was a terrible decision, though.

Courts have been making the definition of seizure or detention very expansive. I know of a couple cases in my home state of Washington.

In State v Sum they ruled that an officer waking a man sleeping in a vehicle, asking for identification, and saying he was investigating a stolen vehicle, constituted seizure. They vacated Sum's conviction for giving a false name subsequent to the seizure. They also added a racial component to the law's hypothetical reasonable observer, "an objective observer is aware that implicit, institutional, and unconscious biases."

The Washington State Supreme Court ruled in State v Meredith, relying on the racial dimension introduced by Sum, that officers asking for proof of payment from someone on a bus constituted a seizure, and that the officers lacked cause for the seizure. The decision vacated his conviction for giving a false name subsequent to the seizure. The lead opinion stated that fare enforcement has a “known, racially disproportionate impact” and later said its holding served “to mitigate the known, racially disproportionate impact of such fare enforcement practices."

In both of these cases the stakes were low. Meredith had already served the 58 day sentence that was vacated. The details of Sum's sentence aren't available, but it was also already served. Both were misdemeanors.

In both cases advocacy orgs like the ACLU pursued the cases on behalf of the defendants. Funnily enough the region's transit orgs filed amici briefs in favor of Meredith.

In both cases we had men who were already making net negative contributions to society, and who had their stupidity amplified by well funded organizations to make it even more difficult to rein in the behaviors of men like themselves. The defendants don't even have to show up for the apellate court hearings. I had ChatGPT try to find evidence that they did attend, and it was unable to find any.

Sum

As set forth in this court’s precedent, the seizure inquiry is an objective test in which the allegedly seized person has the burden to show that a seizure occurred. To aid courts in the application of this test, we now clarify that a person is seized for purposes of article I section 7 [of the state constitution] if, based on the totality of the circumstances, an objective observer could conclude that the person was not free to leave, to refuse a request, or to otherwise terminate the encounter due to law enforcement’s display of authority or use of physical force. For purposes of this analysis, an objective observer is aware that implicit, institutional, and unconscious biases, in addition to purposeful discrimination, have resulted in disproportionate police contacts, investigative seizures, and uses of force against Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) in Washington. Finally, in accordance with our precedent, if the person shows there was a seizure, then the burden shifts to the State to prove that the seizure was lawfully justified by a warrant or an applicable exception to the warrant requirement.

Based on the totality of the circumstances presented in this case, we hold that petitioner Palla Sum was seized when a sheriff’s deputy requested Sum’s identification while implying that Sum was under investigation for car theft. As the State properly concedes, at that time, the deputy did not have a warrant, reasonable suspicion, or any other lawful authority to seize Sum. As a result, Sum was unlawfully seized, and the false name and birth date he gave to the deputy must be suppressed. We therefore reverse the Court of Appeals and remand to the trial court for further proceedings.

Meredith

Finally, we consider whether the disturbance of Meredith’s private affairs in this case exceeded what was “reasonably necessary to further substantial governmental interests”. To make this determination, we consider “‘reasonableness…’ along with history, precedent, and common sense”. As a matter of both reasonableness and common sense, unless mass transit is offered for free, transit operators must be able to charge and collect fares from passengers. Therefore, as history and this court have long recognized, passengers using mass transit must pay their fares or they “may be ejected”. We do not question that premise.

However, in this case, Meredith was asked for proof of payment by law enforcement officers, who then identified and arrested him using resources that no civilian conducting fare enforcement could have accessed. Although we are not asked to opine on the constitutionality of these later actions, they could not have occurred without the initial seizure.

Moreover, as detailed above, the risk of such escalation would be acutely felt by reasonable transit passengers, who are more likely to be members of “historically marginalized groups”, including Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color. Members of such groups are already known to be “‘disproportionate victims’” of “police encounters without reasonable suspicion”. If allowed to continue, the high level of intrusion that occurred here would only exacerbate these disparities. The State has not shown such an outcome is reasonably necessary to further the governmental interest in fare enforcement on public transit.

To be fair, it appears that this ruling forbids only fare enforcement by police officers, not fare enforcement by transit employees who are backed up by police officers if they find a noncompliant passenger.

Yet, “[o]n this particular day [the officers] didn’t have any [transit employees] to work for [them,] so [the police officers] worked as a team of two deputies riding the bus fully outfitted in [their] patrol uniforms and then one deputy in a chase car in case [they] dealt with anybody.”

if, based on the totality of the circumstances, an objective observer could conclude that the person was not free to leave, to refuse a request, or to otherwise terminate the encounter due to law enforcement’s display of authority or use of physical force. For purposes of this analysis, an objective observer is aware that implicit, institutional, and unconscious biases, in addition to purposeful discrimination, have resulted in disproportionate police contacts, investigative seizures, and uses of force against Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) in Washington.

I mean this basically would include most encounters with the police that the party didn’t initiate themselves. An armed policeman with a gun is by nature a show of authority. His uniform is his authority, and most people would be properly intimidated by a person authorized to use force, in the uniform that symbolizes his ability to use force, walking up and asking questions about my activities. As such, especially if you throw in the race angle, most police encounters are seizures simply because a person knows better than to walk away from a guy with arresting authority and carrying a weapon.

The Washington State Supreme Court is very blackpilling. They essentially rule like kings, vetoing citizens initiatives, and rubber stamping acts of the state government which are obviously against any clear reading of the state constitution.

The state is controlled by an interlocking grid of far left institutions. Merely replacing one won't help. The whole rat's nest has to be slowly unwound which would take decades. Change is essentially impossible.

I get the sense that this is how it must be in Europe, even more so with the supranational EU and European courts that exist far removed from any democratic control.

Democracy is essentially dead in a lot of places.

Democracy works.

Washington residents voted for this.

Washington residents have voted for a lot of things, and then the WA supreme court overturns them arbitrarily, whilst letting their favored laws stand. My favorite recent example is their ruling that a capital gains tax is not an income tax under the state constitution. This is despite the state itself directly reporting said revue in their own accounting as an income tax.

Democracy only works in an area where consent of the governed is equally geographically distributed.

In Washington, it is not.

They also voted for 35 dollar car tabs.

What the hell is a car tab?

Registration renewal

Thanks

And the Supreme Court that overturned them. And they never punish those Supreme Court justices. The last justice to lose a reelection bid was Richard B Sanders in 2010, and he was replaced by Charlie Wiggins. Sanders was conservative, Wiggins a liberal. Wiggins was on the majority opinion in the court's 9-0 decision that held that the death penalty was unconstitutional becuase of disparate racial impact.

The voters don't punish overturning initiatives, so the Court is free to reason to achieve its desired outcomes.

the court's 9–0 decision that held that the death penalty was unconstitutional becuase of disparate racial impact

Link

The decision does not appear to be based on disparate impact. Rather, the justices relied on a report finding, with p-values of 4.8–11.1 percent, that race was a factor in the application of the death penalty. (In a footnote, they declined to use the common p-value of 5 percent as a "mechanical bright-line rule".)

That's 'disparate racial impact' with numbers attached.

No, disparate impact would be "blacks are more likely to be death-penalty-eligible criminals, so they get the death penalty more often" or "among death-penalty-eligible criminals, blacks commit more depraved crimes with more aggravating factors, so they get the death penalty more often". The study found that, among death-penalty-eligible criminals, and controlling for differences in aggravating factors, blacks got the death penalty more often.

(The justices cite three different versions of the study, but provide convenient links only to versions 1 and 2. The version that I have provided here is version 2, the "Updated Beckett Report". I don't care enough to look for version 3, the "Commissioner's Report".)

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Have you voted in Washington state? The elections are basically like

Judge A: Leftist with a AAAA rating from the Bar Association. Certificate of honor from good girl club.

Judge B: Leftist with a AAAA rating from the Bar Association. Certificate of honor from good girl club.

They are not running on the issues like legislative candidates because of the fiction that they are merely interpreting the rules and not making them. It's a farce. Sure, change isn't impossible, but it would take a decades long march through the institutions to get there.

While the elections are nominally non-partisan, I just open the candidate's website and usually can quickly discern their party alignment. If the front page doesn't make it clear from language about equity or law and order, it's easy enough to find out who's endorsed them.

I don't recall ever lacking a conservative option, but until about 2018 I would have voted for the liberals.

There are non-leftists on the ballot for judges for a few seats every election and every time they get absolutely destroyed. Seems like a strong signal from the voters what they want.

They voted for $35 car tabs to get sent to judges, and they voted for those judges to nuke it.

I wonder what the voters really wanted. It's so mysterious.

Yeah, I'm aware that voters are retarded and will vote for a balanced budget, tax cuts, and to give every old and black person a free Cadillac. All at the same time.

Nevertheless, I don't think the voters of Washington should be allowed to vote for kings to rule over them unless they know explicitly that's what they are voting for. These justices run on platforms like "I have a highly qualified rating from the bar association" not "I'm basically Mao in a robe".

It's a farce when the kings will allow the vote to count sometimes, but not other times, depending on whether the kings like it. Feels like Calvinball, largely because it is.

You're familiar with the term "manipulation of procedural outcomes", I presume?

It’s not news that I believe the Cathedral is evil. And since it’s 2008, you’d expect evil to have not only a name, but a blog. And sure enough it does. Evil’s name is Timothy Burke, he is a professor of history (specializing in southern Africa) at Swarthmore, and his blog is Easily Distracted.

The great thing about Professor Burke is that he appears to have a conscience. Almost every post in his blog can be understood as a kind of rhetorical struggle to repress some inner pang of doubt. He is the Good German par excellence. When people of this mindset found themselves in the Third Reich, they were “moderate Nazis.” In Czechoslovakia or Poland they “worked within the system.” Professor Burke is nowhere near being a dissident, but there is a dissident inside him. He doesn’t like it, not at all. He stabs it with his steely knives. He can check out any time. But he can never leave. His position is a high one, and not easy to get.

The entire blog is characterized—indeed it could serve as a type specimen for—the quality that Nabokov called poshlost. Simply an embarrassment of riches. I am saddened by the fact that, as a new parent, I cannot devour the whole thing. But as a case study, I have selected this. The whole post is a treat, but I am especially tickled by the line:

I am drawn to procedural liberalism because I live in worlds that are highly procedural and my skills and training are adapted to manipulating procedural outcomes.

“Manipulating procedural outcomes.” My entire post—maybe even my entire blog—reduced to three words. If you want to know how you are governed, this is it: you are governed by manipulating procedural outcomes. It’s perfect. It belongs on someone’s tomb.

A German or British police officer would have the power to detain all juvenile males wearing a single article of black clothing within a one-mile radius of the robbery and physical evidence wouldn't be suppressed even if obtained without following the proper trail of investigation.

If you don't suppress such evidence, police will not bother following the proper trail of investigation; they will simply do what is expedient. This is great if you want more incidents closed by arrest (and more criminals caught if the cops are at least honest, though 'expedient' can go beyond that point), but lousy if you want to get around without being hassled by police if you have any resemblance to common criminal types (age, sex, color, clothing, etc)

Wouldn't people trying to differentiate themselves from the criminal types instead of imitating them be a good thing?

While suppression of 'thug' culture is a good thing, it probably won't work(people will just get mad about it) and a lot of fairly justifiable criminal stereotypes are not something an individual can change- young black males getting hassled can't exactly michael jackson on short notice.

  1. No, I do not want sumptuary laws enacted through some back door

  2. Some of those things are unavoidable, such as age.

Is it really back door sumptuary laws to say “maybe dont wear gang colors in a gang area”? I don’t think that’s reasonable, as really wearing gang colors and flashing gang signs in the wrong area is a good way to get pegged by a rival gang. This isn’t hard stuff either. Dont carry a colored hanky in your pocket, don’t wear a doo rag, and dont do weird signs with your hands.

That doesn’t seem like a high bar. You can still dress pretty badly

Remember than the law can't just say "don't wear gang colors" and call it a day. The law has to either define gang colors or designate some authority which will define them. I can guarantee you that there are jurisdictions who would just love to define MAGA caps as gang colors.

Is it really back door sumptuary laws to say “maybe dont wear gang colors in a gang area”?

Yes.

I mean I just don’t see it. The bar is pretty low, and most people would pass it just by chance. Things like the colored hanky are pretty rare in most places. Doo rags are maybe a bit more common, but really they come off pretty easily. And as I mentioned above, it’s already dangerous for people to walk the streets dressed like a gang member because rival gangs will shoot people who look like members of other gangs.

What I am suggesting is that it shouldn’t be considered authoritarian for a cop to recognize obvious signs of gang membership and act appropriately— which at minimum would be investigating why that person is in the area and whether or not they are armed or match the description of a suspect. I get that you need to have some caution about letting a cop detain or seize someone, but if the only way to solve a crime is for the cops to catch them in the act, there’s no reason to have the police investigating crimes.

When a cop comes over to me because of what I'm wearing and demands to know why I'm in some area open to the general public, it IS authoritarian. Neither the police nor the local gangs rightfully get to decide how I dress. Obviously the local gangs don't care about "rightfully", but the police are supposed to.

I suppose we’re going to disagree here, but I really tend to land on the point that the purpose of having a criminal response unit is to respond to and investigate crimes with a purpose of bringing the guilty to Justice and to keep the community safe by doing so.

When you make rules that suggest the police and law enforcement are not allowed to notice and act upon very obvious signs of criminality (in this case clothing highly correlated to gang membership and thus criminality), in the interest of doing the things we have police for. If there’s a gang connected shooting, I want the cops to talk to anyone in the area who looks like a gang member. I want the cops to notice an increase of gang fashions in my neighborhood, because there are zero good things that come from that, and probably a whole lot of bad things.

I’ll agree to reasonable policing where cops don’t have a blank check to do anything at any time, but it has to be reasonable in the other direction. You have to have rules loose enough that the cops can notice and deal with obvious signs of potential criminality. Or to notice that someone looks suspicious and deal with it.

What I am suggesting is that it shouldn’t be considered authoritarian for a cop to recognize obvious signs of gang membership and act appropriately

The problem with this, as you know, is that there's a really, really easy proxy for this: evaluating based on the gang colors you can't take off. (Unless you're Michael Jackson, I guess.)

That's the classical liberal concern with doing this: that targeting gang colors is already accepting this should be done (and in so doing destroying the noble lie that profiling is useless), and are back to haggling over the price. Skin color-ism lives at the bottom of that slope.

What I am suggesting is that it shouldn’t be considered authoritarian for a cop to recognize obvious signs of gang membership and act appropriately

I consider it authoritarian when a progressive recognizes signs of my "gang membership" (I can't really hide being male) and acts "appropriately" [or, were I an appropriately tomboyish woman, would consider it authoritarian if a traditionalist saw "woman" and does the same], and I don't [and wouldn't] like that, so per veil of ignorance I feel I would have to consider this authoritarian too.

Whether I care about not being authoritarian is another matter given outgroup consensus is to do it to me.

I don’t see that as horrific. I think cops should be given enough leeway that noticing and responding to anything that makes a person likely to be committing a crime or likely to have committed a crime.

True, although a real blackpiller will recognize that these rules exist to help the underclass victimize you, not to protect you from illegal police searches. If they want to nail you, they still will.

All Western legal theory falls apart when the subjects of the law start viewing the enforcers of the law as just another competing tribe. Same thing happens when the enforcers of law start viewing the subjects as a competing tribe.

To that end these discussions are very quaint. No one is interfacing with reality.

All Western legal theory falls apart when the subjects of the law start viewing the enforcers of the law as just another competing tribe.

Said enforcers view THEMSELVES that way. The thin blue line, or "the biggest gang in town". Cops view themselves as a breed apart and above ordinary citizens.

I sometimes muse on the viability of an armchair utopia where most police work would function as a kind of national service that ordinary citizens are called to for a couple of years, so that the average beat or traffic cop is not someone who's made "cop" the core of their sense of self.

You know, this is the most interesting idea I've heard in weeks. I've never paid much attention to the idea of instating mandatory national service to replicate what mass conscription did for previous generations because I just couldn't think of what we could possibly do with that labor pool that outweighs the deadweight loss of corvee labor. Now. However, I see the vision: a sort of labor that by its very nature instills pro-social behavior. I can imagine even just having college age students take one or two days out of their week to serve as effectively glorified security guards in return for a small stipend/scholarship/government healthcare wouldn't be obscenely expensive while still instilling a respect for public order.

I don't think replacing career cops with sortitioned cops altogether would work (it would mean everyone would be constantly undertrained), but something like 50/50 might. Cops patrol in pairs, don't they?

Also, while "let's just put somr ordinary people in charge" tends to sound nice in theory, in reality what almost always results is a stealth takeover by whatever permanent administrative support staff you're forced to keep around. Every school board and small town city council I've ever seen has one or two firebrands, then six or seven clueless local retirees who just do whatever the professional lawyer sitting in the corner to "advise" them tells them to. Orfinary people have a pathological desire to defer to authority, even when their entire job is to act as a check on such authority.

We need professional sociopaths aligned with our interests to run things, otherwise we're just abdicating to other sociopaths we have even less control over.

Israel does this. I follow some math professor who does some part-time cop work.

I tend to feel these type of proposals run into issues on how many hours are in the day. But for 90% of the population 4 years as a cop probably teaches them more than 4 years in college. Perhaps we could do these things in a less credentialed world.

Speaking from personal experience(no, I’m not law enforcement, just to be clear here), it’s very difficult not to fall into this mode of thinking when you have access to sensitive information that the public can only be partially aware of and giving info out could get you and your organization in severe trouble.

I know I’ve slipped into calling some groups ‘civilian’ before mentally slapping myself and looking to find another term.

This sounds like woke judging for black youths. No detention took place. There is an underlying assumption here that black youth are not smart enough to talk to a police officer.

If I want to talk to someone I walk directly at them in their path. That’s a completely normal interaction. The black youth in question could have just responded to the cop “I don’t want to talk you can you get out of my way”

I would like to see the body cam to see how the cop impeded the black youth but everything in the report is just a normal human interaction. And yes a big way we catch criminals is they are not that smart. But that’s a criminals problem not a cops.

IMO if I had a bright orange t-shirt on and the officer did not think I was the criminal he was searching for but wanted to talk to me and asks “hey did you see a couple teens in black around here” the cops behavior would likely be 100% identical. This is just how you approach someone at night you want to talk to. We can’t make it illegal for cops to talk to people.

If I want to talk to someone I walk directly at them in their path.

If you're approaching them from the opposite direction then yes, that's perfectly normal. What happened here is that the officer was following K.C. from behind, got ahead of him, and turned around, blocking his path forward. If a stranger did this to you in public, it would be highly abnormal and probably raise some kind of alarm. If a cop did this to you, it would not suggest that the encounter was casual.

Yes, I 100% agree that it is not casual. The office either suspects me of a crime or thinks I may have information he wants. It’s a clear indicator he wants to talk to me. I could see a colleague doing in this in an office walking up from behind and turning to face me. They have something they urgently want to talk to me about.

But wanting to interact with me and being detained are not the same thing.

Someone above posted prior case law like Florida v Bostick. I feel comfortable saying this ruling is not in line with US constitutional law. And this court is overstepping their authority (since apparently they haven’t stated this is based on state law).

If I were this suspect: Do I think the cop suspects me of a criminal offense: yes Has he detained me: no

I commented above, and those cases don't really apply here. Michigan v. Chesternut says that it's a detention if a reasonable person would feel free to leave due to an officer's is of force or authority. Blocking someone's path so they can't proceed in the direction they were traveling is a pretty clear escalation from simply wanting to speak to someone. The officer was certainly capable of communicating that he'd like to have a chat without physically impeding the kid's progress. This wasn't even a particularly close call.

Ugh. Now we are debating body language and exact path someone walked. Like the cop walked wrong?

I think a reasonable person can asks “yo am I being detained”

Cop - no Suspect - later

I don’t think you are using a reasonable person standard but a bottom 10% idiot standard.

I have annoying save the whales people walk in front of my path all the time. I don’t call that kidnapping.

I think a reasonable person can asks “yo am I being detained”

I don't think the standard for due process rights should be knowing which magic words to use. Not unless we're going to make public policy of educating people about which spells they have in their spell slots (c.f. Miranda Rights) and force cops to proactively tell people about their detainment status or lack thereof with every interaction.

I am down with magic words. A reasonable human being is able to make conversation. That is what makes us human.

The alternative ends up being a cop looked at me wrong therefore evidence suppressed.

And I disagree with the characterization of “am I being detained” or “get out of my way I’m walking home” as some kind of magic versus normal human conversation. It’s not some priestly class words that only a few people from a special caste know how to do.

I don’t think you should need a law degree - magical words - to interact with police. That’s not the standard I’m arguing for.

And there isn’t any downside in this specific case. The officer still can’t search the subject without establishing probably cause for detention. You can still suppress for an illegal search. In this case a subject ran because an officer talked to him.

I am down with magic words. A reasonable human being is able to make conversation. That is what makes us human.

Police like to make it unclear whether they are detaining someone, so that someone can be intimidated into responding as if he was detained, yet the officer gets the benefits of a court treating him as not detained.

That's why magic words are necessary in the first place.

And I disagree with the characterization of “am I being detained” or “get out of my way I’m walking home” as some kind of magic versus normal human conversation. It’s not some priestly class words that only a few people from a special caste know how to do.

People using normal human conversation can get some idea about whether they're detained. But without magic words, the result depends on 1) how badly the officer obfuscates whether they're being detained and 2) the court's hindsight about whether that conversation was good enough. That's a bad position to be in, even though it might work anyway.

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A reasonable human being is able to make conversation.

A reasonable human should not be obliged to make conversation with a cop. That's what the "no self incrimination" amendment is for. The government should not be able to compel ANY kind of speech.

(Yes, I know subpoenas exist. I'm not happy about them as applied to private individuals.)

And I disagree with the characterization of “am I being detained” or “get out of my way I’m walking home” as some kind of magic versus normal human conversation. It’s not some priestly class words that only a few people from a special caste know how to do.

"I am not detaining you. This is not a search." aren't magic words either. I don't see why we should put the burden on citizens, instead of the cops, to clarify the law.

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Cops on duty who approach a pedestrian are not normal human conversation. And by my estimate a regular reasonable 100 iq person who hasn't been schooled on cop interactions doesn't know the first thing about rights and laws around detainment.

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If I want to talk to someone, I walk directly at him in his path. That’s a completely normal interaction.

You aren't a police officer with the power to stop someone for questioning. Even for a normal person, intentionally blocking someone else's path is rude. For a police officer, it can rise to the level of implicit detention.

The suspect has reasonable methods to find out if they’re being detained. They can walk around the officer or just say “hello could you please get out of my way”.

You can’t make it illegal for police to talk to people. There is a difference between being rude and being detained. And I disagree it’s even rude to walk directly towards someone you want to talk to.

The suspect has reasonable methods to find out if they’re being detained. They can walk around the officer or just say “hello could you please get out of my way”.

Yes, both of these tests will work. In the sense that if you ARE being detained, you'll know it, because you'll be down on the ground with a split lip.

In reality, the police will just say no, and only beat you if you resist arrest.

You are going too far. This would be a very easy civil lawsuit to win if the police behaved as you just described.

LOL, no. The police will say whatever it takes to win, the judges support them (in court, your word is suspect and theirs is gospel), and even if they get caught doing something wrong, there's qualified immunity. When they lose cases it's because the politicians want them to lose (e.g. sympathetic minority plaintiff)

That’s not what qualified immunity is. It means you can’t sue the cop personally. You can sue the city. And you can get jury trial. And you would have video evidence.

you can sue the city for what?

"cop did something bad" isn't enough to hold a city liability for the bad behavior of one of their cops

a video of a cop protected by qualified immunity doing something bad isn't some golden ticket to find municipal liability

under Monell, it is even more difficult to find municipal liability than individual liability with a steep evidentiary burden which courts are very reluctant to allow much discovery (if any) to find (if they don't just dismiss the claim during the pleading stage for failure to present supporting evidence)

in roughly half the federal circuits, a finding of municipal liability when qualified immunity has been upheld is all but impossible because the circuits have held local governments cannot fail to train to prevent a cop from violating a constitutional right which isn't clearly established

iirc, only the 9th circuit allows an independent claim to functionally survive upheld qualified immunity but in practical terms is very hard and very rare

for all practical purposes in typical cases, an upheld finding of qualified immunity ends the lawsuit

responding to someone pointing out these cases are not "a very easy civil lawsuit" by implying these sorts of claims are difficult because the vast majority of the time qualified immunity is upheld that they don't understand this situation because municipal liability is, to be frank, ridiculous

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Yes, exactly what he said. The law is swift and brutal to you, not to underclass criminals.

The suspect has reasonable methods to find out whether he's being detained.

Forcing someone to risk being accused of acting suspiciously by evading detention sounds unreasonable.

The officers could have just not blocked his path. The opinion gives two different examples where that was permitted: 1 2

I disagree it’s even rude to walk directly towards someone you want to talk to.

I said it's rude to block someone's path, not to walk directly toward someone.

Refusing to talk to police as far as I know is not probable cause for detention.

I keep reading what you say and want to say in a less polite way “I am not a member of a low IQ demographic”.

People of my tribe are perfectly fine dealing with this situation even if we did the crime and walking away unarrested while also not having our privacy rights impeded. But yes I understand we live in a world where a significant percent of our population is constantly confused. I don’t think we need to design society so that dumbest parts of our society can do crime and get away with it.

People of my tribe are perfectly fine dealing with this situation even if we did the crime and walking away unarrested while also not having our privacy rights impeded.

No, you aren't, assuming you're a white collar white guy. If the cops decide you did it (and they may have already done so before the stop), they will arrest you. All your friends and most of your relatives will invoke just-worldism and assume you're guilty and cut ties with you. And thus the appearances are maintained. Minority cultures where the cops are treated as enemies are simply correct; a black person who gets arrested will have the support of his community, whereas a white collar white man will have to conceal his arrest to maintain his viability within his community afterwards if he is acquitted or the charges dropped. In neither case does actual innocence or guilt matter. The white people maintain the illusion that THEY will have no problem in such a situation by defining anyone who does have a problem as not one of theirs.

Wouldn’t this be reasonable suspicion, as for a traffic stop, and discarding the gun is itself probable cause?

I'm not quite sure what you're asking.

  • If you're pointing out that the standard in this case was reasonable suspicion rather than probable cause, then I clarified that here.

  • If you're saying that the officers had reasonable suspicion for a stop and the suspect's discarding of the gun upon being stopped then gave them probable cause for an arrest, then the judges found otherwise: there was no reasonable suspicion for a stop.

reasonable suspicion

Whose reasonable suspicion is it? Is it a 'reasonable man' or is it someone expert in detecting suspicious / criminal activity. It seems reasonable to me that this officer perhaps skilled in the art may notice an odd gait or posture due to carrying a wepon in a waistband that I or the judge may not as we are insufficiently skilled in the art of detection.

Whose reasonable suspicion is it? Is it a 'reasonable man' or is it someone expert in detecting suspicious / criminal activity.

The latter, according to Terry v. Ohio (the original case which established this)

In this case, the prosecutor characterized KC as "grabbing at his waistband and [blading] his body away from" the officer, but the trial judge "explicitly disagreed with this description of KC's actions after reviewing the body-camera footage".

However, I can't tell whether that disagreement is relevant here. The police officers initially stopped their car solely on the basis of the clothing worn by KC and the other juvenile, not on the basis of any suspicion of a gun. And it is unclear from the panel's summary of the officer's testimony whether the officer developed a separate suspicion that KC was carrying a gun before or after walking up and blocking his path.

I could see stopping based on description in the broadcast to make contact. Then upon approaching developing further suspicion. For blading I'd expect the officer to have to be face to face with KC to observe.

Even if I accept the officer didn’t have reasonable suspicion to detain KC, the discovery of the gun doesn't seem to be the result of a search. KC produces the gun to ditch it as he flees. Isn't it in in plain sight at that point? Is it the officer would have frisked for officer saftey and discovered the gun incident to this unreasonable detention?

Had the officers stayed in their patrol vehicle, spotlighted KC and asked if he had a gun, he ditches the gun and flees, are we looking at the same result?

I want officers out detecting criminal activity and removing guns from criminals. What should the officer have done differently in this situation to contact KC so the gun he ditches as he flees can be used as evidence?

What should the officer have done differently in this situation to contact KC so the gun he ditches as he flees can be used as evidence?

The officers could have just not blocked his path. The opinion gives two different examples where that was permitted: 1 2

Had the officers stayed in their patrol vehicle, spotlighted KC and asked if he had a gun, he ditches the gun and flees, are we looking at the same result?

This is exactly what happened in the linked examples. Example 1:

While driving eastbound on Cumberland Street, [Officer Moore] observe[d Joyner] walking in the same direction. [Joyner’s] right arm was allegedly pinned to his side as he walked with only his left arm swinging. As Officer Moore passed [Joyner], he allegedly saw what he described as a heavily weighted square object[,] which he associated with being a gun. More specifically, Officer Moore testified repeatedly during direct and cross-examination that he knew [Joyner] was concealing a firearm.

Upon seeing the officers, [Joyner] turn[ed] around and [began] to walk westbound on Cumberland Street. [Joyner] then walk[ed] onto Natrona Street[.] Officer Moore [reversed course down Cumberland Street and] pulled up to [Joyner at Natrona Steet. Officer Moore then] asked [Joyner] if he was carrying a gun. [Joyner] respond[ed] no. Officer Moore ask[ed] if [Joyner was] sure and he [said no again and began walking away]. As Officer Moore opened his door, [Joyner ran]. No lights or sirens had been activated.

Example 2:

Officer Zgleszewski testified that at approximately 7:25 p.m., he and his partner were driving westbound on Wingohocking street, approaching the intersection of Wingokocking street and 19th street. Officer Zgleszewski saw Appellee exit a corner store and begin to walk eastbound on Wingohocking street towards the officers. Officer Zgleszewski observed an “L” shaped bulge in the front of Appellee’s waistband that appeared to be a possible firearm. As the officers continued to drive forward on the street towards Appellee, Appellee quickly turned around and began walking in the opposite direction and then northbound on 9th street after he reached the intersection.

The officers did not activate their car siren but pulled up next to Appellee. Officer Zgleszewski exited the car and began to approach Appellee. Appellee continued to walk down the street and began to look back in Officer Zgleszewski’s direction. Officer Zgleszewski stated, “come here” and simultaneously, Appellee fled northbound on foot. Officer Zgleszewski pursued Appellee on foot while his partner followed in the car. During the chase, Appellee reached toward the bulge in the front of his waistband, produced a firearm in his right hand, and continued to run with the firearm in his hand. Officer Zgleszewski continued his pursuit of Appellee, while giving numerous verbal commands to “drop the gun.” As he continued to run, Appellee threw the firearm underneath a parked car. Officer Zgleszewski recovered the discarded firearm. Appellee was apprehended and arrested by Officer Zgleszewski’s partner.

These were ruled "mere encounters" rather than "investigatory detentions".

Except there the officer's suspicion is that Joyner has a gun and he flees before the officer is out of the car and seems to be the reason for the encounter.

With KC we don't seem to have a timeline when the officer developed a suspicion about a gun in KC's waistband.

I'm not clear why a reasonable youth wouldn't feel free to leave the KC detention, but would feel free to leave the Joyner encounter. After an officer sees Joyner, and Joyner starts waking in the opposite direction, the officer reverses and follows asks if he's carrying a gun, and exits the patrol vehicle.

Both still flee.

Stealing this from @ToaKraka in the FF thread:

Link to the full opinion

probable cause

Reasonable suspicion for a brief investigative stop is a lower standard than probable cause for a prolonged arrest. (The English word "detention" is a bit misleading here, as in colloquial use it implies a prolonged arrest.)

In this instance it was a detention because the officer stepped infront of the youth and shined his flashlight upon him, and a 'reasonable' youth wouldn't have felt free to leave?

It seems like the youth actually leaving would cut against that.

7:30 on an October evening, I'd want a flashlight too.

In this instance it was a detention because the officer stepped in front of the youth and shined his flashlight upon him, and a "reasonable" youth wouldn't have felt free to leave?

Yes. According to the judges: "A reasonable person, with his path impeded by a police officer, the officer asking him investigative questions while another officer stood nearby, and the questioning officer training a flashlight on him, would not have felt free to simply leave the interaction."

It seems like the youth actually leaving would cut against that.

(1) The officers stop their car next to KC, get out, and start walking toward him while shining a flashlight at him. This may or may not count as a detention.

(2) KC starts walking away. You can call this evidence against the idea that item 1, standing alone, counts as a detention.

(3) One of the officers deliberately steps into KC's path, blocking him from walking away. At this point (with both item 1 and item 3), a detention definitely has taken place, considering the totality of the circumstances (say the judges).

(4) The officer asks KC what he has in his waistband. KC discards the object (a gun) and flees. If the stop had been lawful, then this would constitute probable cause for an arrest. However, the stop was not lawful.

7:30 on an October evening, I'd want a flashlight too.

According to the judges: "The body-camera footage shows that the street was well lit by various streetlights".

The officer asks KC what he has in his waistband. KC discards the object (a gun) and flees. If the stop had been lawful, then this would constitute probable cause for an arrest. However, the stop was not lawful.

That's what my problem with the situation is. The gun was there, its existence wasn't dependent on the lawfulness of the stop. I can agree with suppressing verbal evidence obtained by unlawful questioning, but physical evidence? Mandatory prosecution of every such case using facts established by the original trial would be at least equally just if note more so.

The possibility of gaining such physical evidence incentivizes the police to do illegal stops. Allowing use of such evidence would catch a criminal in this case, but would make it harder for all the innocent people the police illegally stop because f the incentive you created.

According to the judges: "The body-camera footage shows that the street was well lit by various streetlights".

Camera footage may look appear brighter than the same scene to the eye and I'd expect a flashlight to illuminate shadows and provide better contrast. Feels very 'vibes' based.

I wouldn't have expected spotlighting to be detention adjacent unless accompanied by, "You there! Stop! Police!" I suspect the counter narrative of being charged with fleeing / obstruction after being 'detained' via spotlighting would also be dismissed.

I think I prefer the sates narrative that he ditched the gun and fled prior to detention and the his fleeing was within seconds of the officer steeping in front of him. I'd like to see the video.

Thank you, I am not that well-versed in American legal terminology.

A scandal has erupted in the French literary scene after Thélyson Orélien the Canadian-Haitian author of C’était ça ou mourir has been accused of writing his novel with AI.

The novel won the Fnac Novel Prize and is currently a finalist for some of the most prestigious annual French litterature awards such as the Goncourt and the Renaudot.

On Tuesday an X account called Balance ton Claude claimed the book was entirely written with AI using Pangram 4 to attest it, but any frequent user of AI assisted writing can recognize blatant tells in the text of the novel, such as common AI formulations, incoherences between different chapters and a generally repetitive style.

The author denies it, claiming the first draft of the book dates back to 2019, well before AI tools were widely available.

However, beyond the author, the scandal is splashing over the whole Parisian edition milieu, a well oiled book selling machine whose mediocrity and pompousness has long been criticized. Are the people who claim to be the defenders of Eternal France and its prized literary tradition so asleep at the wheel that they'll award prestigious prizes to low quality prompts?

The defense of the author and Grasset, the publishing house, also takes a certain culture war direction, shielding themselves behind the author's origins and "exceptional life story" against "numerous racist attacks".

A recent development of the story may put holes in this defense however, as another X user has discovered that an older award winning novella of Orélien's, Où va le monde, was entirely plagiarized from a 1960s text of Louis Pauwels.

Man, I'm almost afraid to put this out there, but I keep wondering when the left is finally going to discover some new bullshit like "cognitive equity". They aren't liars who faked all their credentials with AI. AI is actually a form of cognitive equity! It's leveling the playing field the same way retards of all walks of life can demand accommodations from the cradle to the grave, and push all the externalities of their misbegotten existence on the schmucks around them who are still dumb enough to try to be productive.

Man, I'm almost afraid to put this out there, but I keep wondering when the left is finally going to discover some new bullshit like "cognitive equity". They aren't liars who faked all their credentials with AI. AI is actually a form of cognitive equity!

Yeah, possibly they will argue that (1) AI training is based on all the world's writings (2) as everyone knows, the majority of the world's writings have been created by people of color and even literature with nominally white authorship was typically stolen from non-whites (3) therefore AI is yet another example, kind of like corn, of westerners stealing and commercializing the tireless and generous work of the Global South, and (4) therefore it's completely reasonable for people like Jason Arday to make use of AI in their work.

Or perhaps they will take the classic hypo-agency route: Westerners created unfair conditions which inevitably lead to these sorts of situations.

I think what's most likely that progressives will argue that these types are being targeted and hounded due to racism and more or less ignore it if the accusations are true.

It's an interesting exercise to guess at the strategy they will pursue, but ultimately the main thing is that one way or another, I'm pretty confident the Left will find some way to minimize, distort, deny, or deflect this type of misbehavior while blaming the situation on their favorite scapegoats.

It's leveling the playing field the same way retards of all walks of life can demand accommodations from the cradle to the grave, and push all the externalities of their misbegotten existence on the schmucks around them who are still dumb enough to try to be productive.

Which is why an elite cluster that wants to survive maximally unenslaved needs to hurry up and establish (or retain to the greatest extent possible) an aristocracy of the Abel-bodied those who are dumb enough to be productive on their own before their own AI puts enough of them out of work for said people to [have to] force this kind of settlement on them.

Perhaps such an elite will come to the conclusion that they must subsidize the conditions required for classical liberalism far beyond the point they economically make sense. That is the best way we have to create such an aristocracy, for in such a system, it is the worthless who are forced to subsidize the worthful by their disproportionately suffering real, measurable harm to their psyches created by the existence of things they don't like.

incoherences between different chapters and a generally repetitive style

This is my problem with accusations of "AI slop".

Most 100% human-made genuine artisanal work is slop. This guy is on the cusp of winning prestigious awards with obvious slop, but, wait, he had some AI assistance. Maybe a little. Maybe a lot. Now it is the bad kind incoherent repetitive slop that we can't let sully prestigious French literary awards. Not the good incoherent repetitive slop deserving of the highest accolades.

This is my problem with accusations of "AI slop".

Agreed the worst is uppity engineers who get off on calling everything AI slop. They were the same ones who dismissed LLM agents as ever having the ability to develop software as good as them when it was new, now that the writing is on the wall they have a new way to protect their ego: call everything AI slop.

Can you rewrite your PR description? It's AI slop. Get the fuck out of here, the description is actually fine, just because you can tell it was written by an LLM doesn't make you any better of an engineer.

Haven't ever seen an AI pr description hit the points that are actually important, like what the pr is actually supposed to do.

They always just rehash the object level changes without context, which are obvious from the code anyways.

The point of the text box is to convey additional information that's not obvious from the diff.

This is just so outdated, the PR descriptions absolutely provide context and link Jira tickets. Vastly superior to previously human-written PRs. Granted that's only been true in the past say six months. But yes, believe it or not the agent that wrote the code is also at better at writing the PR description than you are.

This is why it just screams "uppity engineer" to me. Really? You're going to tell me that the LLM can't write a PR description with necessary context but you can? No. If you gave it the relevant context during planning it will be described in the PR description, and described way better than previous human-written PR descriptions.

Maybe you can make it do that but I haven't seen a single case of what you say in the wild.

Why don't you show an example if such a thing exists? I can show you dozens of examples of shit made with the latest models, let's see you show a single example of a good pr.

This is really the phenomenon I'm describing. I cannot believe there are people who believe what you just said- that using the latest models, an LLM can't create a good PR including a good PR description. You are just in denial in order to protect your ego, like before it was "LLMs will never be able to code as well as me" but now that's gone so these uppity engineers are pretending LLMs can't write PR descriptions when they absolutely can do so very well with barely any handholding.

It is not the case that LLMs are capable of writing ~99% of code but are unable to write PR descriptions of the code they wrote, it is the case that egotistical engineers still want to assert a sense of superiority by calling things "AI slop" which are actually well-written and useful and vastly superior to what they would have handwritten by hand.

Show me an example then. I'm waiting. I've seen dozens of prs from the latest claude opus and they all suck.

If AI is as good as you say it is, surely there must be one pr in an open source or source a available corporate project that demonstrates this.

This is an example of an AI-generated PR with an AI-generated PR description I would instantly recognize as LLM-generated. It's totally fine. Yes, it's obvious that it was not written by the engineer and that's honestly what sets off the uppity engineers who complain about "AI Slop" that majority of the time. They can just tell it was written by AI so they complain and nitpick.

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Possibly relevant: Hundreds of LLM-generated pull requests in the repository for Duolicious

I am not much of a programmer, so I don't know whether these are good or bad.

Dunno. If you can't be arsed to write a description, leave it blank. It's not like we were diligent about it before AI (at least not anywhere I've worked). Don't make me do extra work checking if the generated description makes sense. I've got to review the code anyway.

If you had an AI generate it, I want to be able to tell that you, the human being, personally did at least a first pass over it, not just chuck it over the fence unseen for me to either reject or greenlight. And that does mean go through it and remove the most obvious AI-isms by hand. Not because I care about the AI-isms per se, but because I want to see that you have at least read your own submission.

If I'm to sign off on it then I want to make sure it's OK. I'm taking part of the responsibility for it after all.

It's so easy to have AI generate reams and reams and reams of text, or code, and it is not fair, I think, to have the reviewer be the first real person to read through it to see if it all makes sense. Humans aren't perfect either but at least there's a limit to their output.

One should expect more rigor and good taste from the highest literary prizes than from a teenager's first draft essay, surely.

Yeah good art is messy, to say that disqualifies the whole category because bad art is messy too is sophistry. An honest man can tell the difference.

The French literary establishment can't because they're socialite idiots who stopped caring about their supposed object of worship a long time ago.

If the first draft dates back to 2019, it's an open and shut case, right? We just need to see the draft.

It would depend how close the published version is to that first draft. It's possible that they wrote the first draft themselves, but then re-worked it using AI. Especially since (I'm just going by his wiki biography here, I had never heard of him before) he grew up speaking Creole, not standard French. And apparently he plagiarized a lot of other things he wrote from existing books.

Is it time for all writers to start using git to be able to prove they really wrote something?

Git history can be faked. I think it should be a timelapse, like the artists do.

Timelapses can be faked, too.

It’s harder than git, which is trivial with AI. But it’s also fakeable, yeah

This is a solved problem. Just put the commit hashes on a blockchain as you make them.

Of course, there's (by design) no way to do it after the fact; you need to have anticipated you might be challenged on the timeline and set this up in advance. Doubt many people are actually doing this in tech, let alone writing. Certainly no one was worried about proving their novel wasn't written by AI in 2019, though this process does have other uses, like establishing authorship (or at least that you had access to the intermediate versions at the time).

The traditional solution from the ye olden days of the 20th century was that when you sent a manuscript to a publisher for review, you would also mail a copy to yourself.

But what does that prove today in the context of AI?

It doesn't "prove" anything anything.

What it does is provide corroborating evidence for claims of prior knowledge/ownership of the material in question.

That doesn't make it unfakeable. Just have the AI break down the story into a plausible sequence of edits and schedule for publishing the commit hashes to the blockchain. By design you still have the latency of writing but don't have to actually write anything.

Oh, apologies, I think I misunderstood your point. This method establishes a time lapse is real in that it demonstrates the various intermediate versions existed at the stated times. (They could all be made ahead of time, but each piece must have existed prior to its timestamp.) It doesn't prove those intermediate versions weren't made with AI. (It would have if the author in question could prove they had a substantially identical draft in 2019, but that's not terribly useful going forward.) In terms of 'proving' the work isn't AI, it really only makes it less convenient, not impossible. The same is true in principle of art time lapses (which are generally accepted as evidence), but it's probably easier to fake for written work, given your git commits are going to be a lot less granular. I suppose you could include your vim undofile (or equivalent) in the repo, which would be harder to fake convincingly.

Doing that in 2019 would be quite the feat.

Indeed.

Almost like faking a moon landing in 1969.

You can upload them to any website then archive it. archive.org or archive.today tampering with their archive is unlikely (yes I’m aware of the stupid drama between archive.today and this blogger, but that doesn’t translate into him ever tampering your blog for your benefit). Both tampering is even unlikelier.

The downside is your draft must have a public URL. Except it can be someone nobody would stumble on, then the archive sites get too much requests, it’s basically still private.

You could publish an encryption of the text and just not reveal the key until you need to.

Sure, I guess? It just seems inferior to the blockchain method, which requires zero trust and has no risk of exposing your work. I'm also not sure how easy it would be to prove ownership over an archived website at the time of archival -- well, you could just put a digital signature on the page, I guess. I suppose the edge is that it's easier to explain how this proves the timeline to nontechnical people? And maybe cost, though I'm not sure about that given opentimestamp's batching strategy; both are free to the user, anyway.

I think the blockchain is technically better, but archiving is more accessible for normies.

OTOH I don’t know how to upload a commit hash to a reliable blockchain. I found https://commitproof.com/, but is it trustworthy? Why Cardano? And it costs ~$0.75 per upload. I suppose I can ask Claude.

Or I think I could upload to IPFS, but this blog post (first search result) makes it seem relatively complicated. Whereas to archive I just paste the URL into an archive site.

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Hoo boy. The question is, is the novel worthy of the award regardless of whether or not it's AI written standing on its own merits? If so then I suggest it gets the award and for next year the committee can update it's rules to forbid AI submissions.

If being a "true" story about the author's hardships growing up in Haiti and smashing racism, rather than any quality of the writing, then yes I guess so...

You're going to have blood on your hands if he kills himself in response to these racist, colonialist attacks.

Speak plainly.

It's pretty clearly a reference to Jason Ardnay, the black Cambridge professor who killed himself after being revealed to be a serial fabulist and plagiarist.

No doubt. I just have an aversion to certain types of ironic posting, which make various assumptions about the audience in a way that is reminiscent (to me) of reddit.

If only shame was all it took to spill the blood required.

A recent development of the story may put holes in this defense however, as another X user has discovered that an older award winning novella of Orélien's, Où va le monde, was entirely plagiarized from a 1960s text of Louis Pauwels.

I was bewildered by this. How is it that it could be entirely plagiarized from a work from the 1960s, even if that work is by a writer on the more obscure side? He's notable enough to have an English Wikipedia entry, surely someone should have noticed something in the 14 years since Orelien's novella was published? Well, it's really just the tip of the iceberg:

Several of Orélien's other works were subsequently [after AI allegations] investigated. According to Radio-Canada's Décrypteurs team, about half of his short story "Où va le monde", which was awarded Radio-Canada's Prix du public in 2012, was plagiarized from The Morning of the Magicians, a book written by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, and published in 1960. The opening lines are identical to that of the 1960 book, but the last two words were removed.[20] According to Le Point, Orélien's opening lines also clumsily copied the original's "débonder une source" as "déborder une source", and elsewhere in the story he copied many sentences verbatim.[21] Radio-Canada also found at least five journalistic pieces by Orélien that were published by Canadian and French media in 2012 and 2013 and which it determined had been partly copied from texts by other writers. Orélien's 2012 opinion piece "Ne mettons pas nos héros sur un piédestal", published in La Presse, was found to have plagiarized a piece published five days earlier in The Philippine Star. This was acknowledged by La Presse, which has now tagged the article saying, "Since the publication of this text, we have learned that its author committed plagiarism." Orélien's 2013 piece "Barack Obama aurait pu être Trayvon Martin il y a trois décennies", published on the blog of France's RFI, included a word-for-word translation from Portuguese to French of at least four paragraphs of "Matin, Obama" by Gilberto Rodrigues, which was published by Pressenza [it] days earlier. His 2013 piece "Le prochain pape devrait être plus jeune", also for RFI, features verbatim almost half of an editorial published in India's The Hindu two days earlier. Additionally, in 2013, his piece "Sommes-nous aussi libres que nous le pensons?", also for RFI, borrowed phrases and paragraphs from "The Problem of Free Will" by Pablo Saborío, published in 2008 on Saborío's personal blog Beyond Language.[20]

I don't even know what to say. Has there ever been a prominent English language author who got away with this much naked plagiarism for this long? Do you guys not have turnitin dot com or something?

How advanced were non-English plagiarism checkers in 2012? Ripping off a Portuguese article by translating it into French seems like the kind of thing someone could get away with back then, but would get caught pretty trivially today by LLM analysis. No one looked too hard at random op-eds, but once the author got scrutiny by winning a major award he was doomed.

And what about the short story that's half copied verbatim out of a book?

It could be that for these sjw awards and stuff nobody actually reads the work, they may just performatively buy it and put it on a shelf. Same way most Nazis never read mein kampf. So I could totally buy that nobody noticed.

It could be, but then you'd expect to see that in other languages too. And I don't really think you do. Perhaps Arday is the closest example, but he didn't win an award for his writing per se, and AFAIK he only plagiarized certain passages rather than entire works.

The author denies it, claiming the first draft of the book dates back to 2019, well before AI tools were widely available.

This doesn't strike me as much of a defense even if it's true. If he could put the first draft and published draft side by side and show how much of the former he'd retained in the latter, that would be one thing. But presumably the published draft is all but unrecognisable compared to the first draft.

That incident shows how small and insulated the Francophone literary world is. Midwit English-language fanfiction readers can recognize LLMisms practically instantly, but fancy French literary critics do not use LLMs in French and do not read anything else beyond the latest crop of literary fiction, allowing themselves to get bamboozled by an AI-cowritten novel in late 2026.

Or they didn’t find it particularly important, because this novel was already going to be the award winner and they didn’t give a damn about anything else?

Ah, a story I can root against everyone involved! Shitty artists! DEI bullshit! The French! Lit snobs with terrible taste!

At this point, any aspiring writer who isn't faking six disabilities, four genders and three ethnic groups is just plain lazy.

This is why I only submit to mil-sf outlets anymore. If you can't bench press your body weight, march ten miles in full kit, and fuck a hole through the carburetor of a 1963 Chevy Impala, you're not even going to get out of the slush pile.

You can publish mil-sf without doing any of those things. I know women who have published mil-sf.

But you are right that Baen books or Black Library doesn't care how many disabilities you can fake.

Does autism qualify as a disability?

Yes, but I suspect most mil-sf writers are not faking it.

I know women who have published mil-sf.

I'd keep them away from your carburetor.

Now that's a car part I've not seen for a long time.

Time to return to the honored tradition of using a fake pen name and persona to write your novels, I suppose.

Who wants to read female-protagonist urban fantasy by a guy named "Daniel"? An initialized name like "MLN Hanover" is much better.

I'm not sure it counts as a persona, given that he can be found out in literally one second of research.

Time to return to the honored tradition of using a fake pen name and persona to write your novels, I suppose.

I think if you wanted to capitalize on affirmative action, then most likely at some point you would need to step forward and prove that you really are a wheelchair bound black Muslim lesbian or whatever.

As I recall, there was a case a few years back in Australia where a white male writer pretended to be an Aboriginal woman and won some prestigious prize. But I think it would be hard to get away with that for long.

Gattaca but for lily white nerdy authors and their wheelchair bound lesbian black body donors.

Yeah kind of, but, some white women get away with it. Sacheen Littlefeather, Elizabeth Warren and others. A white guy could never pull this off. Quite a few white women have. One in the US Senate right now.

Jamake Highwater comes to mind: he wrote several award-winning books and worked on PBS documentaries on the fake basis that he was Cherokee. IMO worse, after this was published in the 80s, he continued to have a career doing so, notably consulting on Star Trek: Voyager.

Ward Churchill would have got away with it if he hadn't made crass comments about 9-11. And I assume there are more male fake Indians who didn't do anything cancellable who did get away with it.

Tsk tsk, this is Grey Owl erasure!

Honestly, there seems to have been a mini-craze in the late 19th/early 20th century for accounts by Red Indians (as would have been the terminology of the time) of how things used to be, and it seems a lot of those were written by non-natives. These ranged from what I suppose you could call historical fiction, stories of real American Indians but written by white men, to fake biographies of white men claiming to be Indian (as with Grey Owl).

This unironically.

Yesterday Radio-Canada put out an analysis comparing Orélien's work to others with Pangram, and it looks pretty damning. Obviously those who cannot speak French can translate it via AI, but the gist is that they tested the various excuses used by Orélien's defenders: seeing how it stacks up versus the other books nominated for the Prix Goncourt, how it compares to works by other contemporary Haitian or African francophone authors, and how it compares to various classics. The conclusion is that Orélien's is the only one that shows use of AI, and to a very convincing degree: apparently the false positive rate for Pangram is much lower in French than in English.

Using AI to translate a tool which uses AI to measure the AI usage in a book.

How perverse.


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