>that means one of two things: 1) You are a suspect; 2) You are a possible suspect.
While I suppose this is strictly true, the far more likely option for 2 is that you're a witness to the crime and you can therefore help that crime be solved.
So, in a situation where I am approached by the police to answer questions about something I know I didn't do:
1. I talk, and it helps the police solve a case
2. I talk, and it screws me
3. I don't talk, and it contributes to a case not being solved
4. I don't talk, and it screws me
I read stuff like this article and it tells you about 2, but it doesn't really put that into a broader context about the likelihood that 2 is the outcome. And there is a real decision to be made here!
>Oh right. I'm entitled to a lawyer if I'm ever taken in for questioning. I didn't realise it was so different.
>Can the police just question you and you have no right to legal representation?
No. You always have the right to legal representation -- at your own expense and, in criminal cases, depending on your financial situation, a court-appointed attorney. In many places, the state will only provide an attorney if you're indigent -- and can prove it.
The Miranda Warning[0] (not Miranda "Rights") is generally required if you're being arrested and/or detained for "questioning."
However. the rights mentioned in those warnings (right to remain silent, right to an attorney, etc.) don't magically appear when the warnings are given. They apply regardless of whether or not the warnings are given -- whether you're a suspect, a witness or the object of a police officer's lustful desires, etc.
What's more, the police are legally allowed to lie to you (e.g., "we have your fingerprints on the murder weapon." to get you to waive your rights).
As I understand the primary change over the past 20 years or so is that if you don't positively, verbally/in writing unequivocally invoke your rights to remain silent and have an attorney present, the police may ignore less unequivocal assertions.
>That's the bit that sounds odd. Surely they can't just claim you're not a suspect yet and therefore deny you a lawyer?
IIUC, In a non-custodial situation, they are not required to provide the Miranda Warning[0]. However, the rights mentioned in that warning exist and are in force regardless of your status (custodial/non-custodial). One may invoke them at any time. I recommend doing so loudly if you're within two or three meters of law enforcement.
I recommend watching the video, he makes an IMO excellent case that #1 without a lawyer really is a bad idea. You can still help solve the case in way that protects you, the stakes here are often incredibly high.
After Salinas v Texas, you must positively assert that you are exercising your right to silence, not simply remain silent.
The prosecutor in a murder trial argued, at trial, that silence of the defendant (during police questioning) was evidence of his guilt. The supreme court in Salinas v Texas allowed this.
* The defendant also selectively answered some questions, so perhaps there is nuance, but to be safe, a positive assertion of right to remain silent seems prudent.
IANAL, and would love if an actual lawyer would comment on this.
Convicting you of a crime is not possible. But there are many, many ways in which you can be screwed, from forcing you to spend a weekend in jail to having a prosecutor offer you a plea deal that you can't risk refusing.
The police have a lot more power in any encounter, and there is no way to avoid having them make your life worse. About the only truly concrete advice is that if you are guilty of something then you absolutely, positively must get a lawyer before saying anything at all. The magic words are “I will not answer any questions without my lawyer present,” and any variation from that exposes you to the risk of the police creatively misinterpreting you.
The magic words can help you beat the rap, but they cannot help you beat the ride. If they decide that you are going to jail, then you go with them, and nothing you say or do (or not say or do) will prevent that. And you will stay there until your lawyer shows up.
The police couldn't creatively turn a five-minute interaction into my day/week/month getting wrecked? You can be held for ~2 days without charges being filed, right?
It absolutely is. In theory, staying silent or getting a lawyer shouldn't hurt you in court. But it could lead to the police focusing their investigation on you and/or making your life difficult.
>It absolutely is. In theory, staying silent or getting a lawyer shouldn't hurt you in court. But it could lead to the police focusing their investigation on you and/or making your life difficult.
This is addressed explicitly and at length in the video linked in TFA.
Don't worry. If the lawyers prosecuting you illegally point out your silence as suspicious to the jury, the supreme court can just decide that actually this didn't impact the jury enough so your conviction stands. Great country we live in /s.
4 doesn't really happen, unless you're a mandated reporter and don't report child abuse.
I used to have to testify in civil and criminal proceedings a few times a year as part of my job. If you aren't trained to talk to police or adversarial attorneys, don't.
The magic is essentially talk to them like you would a call center agent. One topic per interaction. Use simple language. Answer a question directly. "He went that way." "I don't know."
Don't answer unasked questions. Don't demonstrate how smart you are. Don't try to "help". If you help, do an Irish goodbye asap.
At the end of the day or incident, the officer is going to write an incident report. You never want to stand out or be interesting that report. The more interesting you are, the more likely you are to get sucked in. I have a colleague who has been ordered to appear at some court in the Bronx for a traffic accident two years ago that he helped with, that turned out to be an insurance fraud case.
>I have a colleague who has been ordered to appear at some court in the Bronx for a traffic accident two years ago that he helped with, that turned out to be an insurance fraud case.
Sorry, I'm not following exactly: your colleague was ordered to appear because he was genuinely involved in something bad, he was falsely set up as being involved in something bad, or he's helping to litigate an insurance fraud case?
He was a bystander who stuck around and tried to do the right thing. The people charged decided to go to trial and now he’s on the hook to show up and answer stupid questions under oath.
The objective of the defense is likely to have him not show up.
I mean...if the correct outcome is rendered and the fact that he stuck around to help and went to court to testify about it is part of the reason why...why would you portray that as something negative?
Because he offered some info that made it into the report and years later some guy they had reviewing the fifteen dozen reports relating to that insurance fraud saw that info and said "let's get that guy on the stand, a jury will eat that shit up".
You don't talk, and it annoys the cop, so they fabricate evidence against you, or charge you with some other unrelated thing that they would have otherwise let slide.
if they are going to fabricate evidence, why do you think they wouldn't also do that if you do talk to them and you already match whoever they are looking for?
Because cops are human, and most people answer questions when cops ask them questions. Refusing to answer questions cannot be held against you in court, but it certainly often is in the minds of humans. And when a cop has "evidence" against you that they cannot use in court, that's when it seems likely they'll manufacture some evidence that is usable.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."[1]
>if they are going to fabricate evidence, why do you think they wouldn't also do that if you do talk to them and you already match whoever they are looking for?
A huge amount of police work is vibes based "this guy looks sketchy, let's wait for him to do something and check him out" stuff. If you talk, they decide there's nothing to see here, move on.
If you don't talk in a clumsy way they decide you're up to no good and pull every trick in the book to get you. And they have plenty of tricks to construe the situation to their favor once they go down that path.
You absolutely can escalate what could've been a warning or simple ticket into a full fledged drug dog fake hit type stop by being obtuse. Or in the case of a real investigation escalate a "this ain't are guy" into a "put them on the short list and really go over them" (which you hope comes to nothing, but still).
If they don't have it out for you to start with, answering their questions can get you out of it. If they pull you over and you just answer their questions, the odds are that they will just send you on your way, eventually.
But if you start invoking your rights and they think you have something to hide, they can easily find an excuse. "I smelled alcohol" is a popular one. If you refuse the test, they can invoke the smell of alcohol as an excuse to bring you in. They will eventually let you go, but that's days rather than minutes.
Police will correctly tell you that they don't want to harass you and it is much easier to simply answer their questions if you have nothing to hide. You don't have to, and most of the time they'll still just let you go as long as you comply with the actual orders. But it's not a guarantee.
You make up a ton of hypotheticals to support your point, versus a lawyer and a retired detective (video in the link) who tell you explicitly to never talk to cops.
Neither of whom are disinterested. The lawyer wants you to hire him to talk to the cops for you, and the retired cop is earning money by giving his "don't talk to the cops" speeches.
Yeah, this is what I was thinking as well. Of course the lawyer says to get a lawyer. The insurance salesman will tell you how important insurance is. The security expert will tell you about the grave importance of MFA and password managers. The electrician will tell you why it's best to let the electrician handle all of the wiring. The epidemiologist is more likely to wear a mask and stay at home.
It doesn't mean any of them are wrong, but experts in their respective fields are most aware of the edge cases, they might not be optimizing for what everyone else is optimizing, and they cost the most: and sometimes that cost is an opportunity cost, be it time, money, knowledge, etc.
My original reply was an attempt to prove at that.
>and the retired cop is earning money by giving his "don't talk to the cops" speeches.
Actually, the "retired cop" (he was not retired at the time of the video) was also a law student taking part in the law school lecture at the law school he was attending.
Every interaction I've had with the cops has been something like:
Cop: I pulled you over for speeding. May I have your license and registration please.
Me: (Hands over documents)
Cop: Where are you headed tonight?
Me: On my way home
Cop: Have you been drinking tonight?
Me: No sir.
Cop: walks back to his car, does whatever they do, comes back with either a ticket (which, honestly, I deserve) or a warning.
That's not to say there's never a situation where remaining silent and lawyering up is your best move, but I do not see how refusing to answer these questions or blustering about "my rights" is going to result in any better outcome in a typical roadside traffic stop.
If you're heading home then he'll want to know where from. Oh, a restaurant? Did you have anything to drink? I smell alcohol! Step of the car please. That's one way it can go, and then he can say you were wobbly on your step and now it's a DUI. People have gone to prison for DUIs where they blew a 0.0. You really have to gauge whether the cop is having a bad day and taking it out on you, then figure out how to best respond. I've had very little experience with this, so I can't quite tell you, but you'd want a lawyer's response anyways.
In England, a refusal to answer questions can be taken as an indicator of guilt. But you can still ask for a solicitor and they will tell you which questions to answer and which not.
Specifically England, not the UK, as Scottish law is different.
You can absolutely talk your way out of situations. Jeffery Dalhmer infamously convinced cops that his drugged victim was his boyfriend and they let him go. Probably not going to be able to do that after you're booked and in jail.
I don't think it's terrible advice to not talk to the cops but it tends to discount the reality of the world. Going through any sort of criminal trial is expensive and has devastating life impacts. Cops are the first step in that process and convincing them not to arrest you is the easy path out.
Exactly. You have to remember you're not just interacting with a faceless legal system, you're interacting with a human cop. There's some nuance to it. I've talked god knows how many fishing stops down to 5min papers checks. I'd still rather have not had them, but better than if I'd have been all "officer, I have a right to remain silent" which likely would've resulted in a whole bunch of hoopla, bringing the dog around to find nothing, etc, etc, all for a petty fine.
If the cops were seeking me personally (i.e the system is seeking me out) out it'd be a different story though.
If you match a description and are in the general vicinity of where the crime took place, it’s enough reasonable suspicion for a detainment. Whether or not you need to produce ID at that point may vary by state but it’s likely the case in every state. If it’s legal for the police to demand your ID and you don’t, you can be arrested for failure to identify.
Now they don’t have probable cause for an arrest based on the original crime they stopped you for, but your day is still ruined.
> If you match a description and are in the general vicinity of where the crime took place, it’s enough reasonable suspicion for a detainment
If you match the description and are in the vicinity of the crime, you are not going to save yourself by talking to the police. You are already in "get a lawyer" territory.
I'm not in the US, so maybe things are very different here, but I still wonder if the absolutist advice is helpful in situations like this:
One night, while walking, I was stopped by police because I roughly matched the description of someone who had burgled a house nearby. They didn't tell me this straight away; they just asked who I was, where I lived, and what I was doing. I didn't have ID on me, but I answered their questions honestly. They went to their car for a bit (presumably checking that my name matched my address and/or that I didn't have a record), then came back, explained the situation, and let me go as they had no strong reason to suspect me. The whole interaction was pretty relaxed and cordial, and they didn't contact me again.
Things definitely wouldn't have gone better for me had I made a point of refusing to engage beyond the legally required minimum, and it's easy to imagine how they could have gone significantly worse.
It definitely depends on the country. I live in Scotland and I've been perfectly happy to chat with police officers but if I'm taken in for questioning (which in Scotland is an arrest) I would have no hesitation in asking for a solicitor and they would probably advise no comment on every question.
If I want to help them out I would then prepare a written statement, approved by my solicitor, and give them that.
You are detained any time your freedom of movement is interrupted. If a cop calls to you and you turn to face them, that’s a detainment. So you’re correct, you can be detained before they’ve even questioned you.
"Don't talk to police" doesn't include legally required things like identification. What you don't do is volunteer more than you're legally required to provide.
Not saying you're 100% wrong, but there are tons of markets where Uber is robust enough to rely on and get you where you need to go, and public transit absolutely is not. (I'm half an hour outside of Pittsburgh.)
It's kind of funny that you say this, because I am a frontend developer and I tend to see the state of the art as being very good at doing the boring behind-the-scenes plumbing that I don't care about, and not great at doing the kind of bespoke design work that my day job's clients want.
I'm not saying that either of us are definitively right or wrong, and I agree that having a more generalist skillset is probably the best way to succeed in this new era; I'm just pointing out that LLMs don't really own any part of the stack so thoroughly that specialists in that segment will just go away.
Yeah everyone thinks its great at the things they don't personally know that much about or appreciate and I think it's kind of embarrassing to proclaim its going to do someone else's speciality great but not theirs and just reveals an underlying ignorance.
I'm solidly a generalist, I custom create designs for products and implement them, and also work on backends and large scale production ml systems. I would actually have to agree with the person you are replying to - simply because backends are text problems, (an LLMs domain), and frontends are visual - llms are just still not quite as good at seeing details as humans, whereas they can scan a large codebase for possible problems much faster than any human could. Both areas need careful supervision and feedback loops, adversarial reviews etc - but for the frontend, I find myself having to do much more manual work actually checking myself, because an llm just doesn't get symmetry if it doesn't perfectly correlate to margin being 16px on both sides of a box, etc, ie symmetry you can see in code. Or whether a design "feels" nice to look at, etc.
But with backend, you give it proper guidance to create tests, do benchmarking, follow sane design patterns, etc, and its very effective.
Honestly I think it's great at the things I do know about. I've been doing this stuff soup to nuts since javascript was released, and it's tactically better across the board - presentation, ux, frontend ui, api, backend, databases, even systems and devops.
It's taste can be atrocious, so we're not replacing engineers entirely yet, but it's clear that it's almost hands off for any task I would have done as a consultant in 2012, for example. And, contrary to my opinion a couple months ago, I think taste is a pretty shallow moat, ultimately. Many of my clients when I was operating a consultancy had plenty of taste, if that's all they required, and I think it'd be foolish to assume frontier models won't acquire taste eventually.
I do think that, ultimately, the tippy top of the pinnacle for things like truly original design work, truly original work of any kind, will take a long time to replace. But most software engineering isn't moving the boundaries of the possibilities of humanity, it's making sure that we can turn $0.10 of infra spend into $2 of revenue reliably.
Codex has been great for me for backend wiring, mapping and creating boiler plate code in C#. However, it seems when I go in to fix things its 60% front-end.
Idk, I like AI when it works, but it drives me insane when it keeps making errors. I've had a few errors which I figured out from documentation fairly quickly, provided said docs but the AI would still mess it up somehow.
> provided said docs but the AI would still mess it up somehow.
The AI is not intelligent. Its really hard to grasp cleanly. But it can't do anything logically like we do. Its pattern matching. It has to be a pattern its seen; then it can assemble them. If there are competing patterns - it'll trip up being consistent. Long established libraries and languages that change the least, it'll be best at. Anything newer it'll be bad at - even with documentation. The only way out is to give it tests, then it can loop over several simpler problems, where the errors (failed tests) match well onto the more basic primitives that don't really change (wrong string, wrong type, wrong structure, etc)
At $LARGE_ENTERPRISE_COMPANY, I've found that if you have:
1) A designer that uses Figma correctly (using well defined components / design systems)
2) A front-end framework as close to HTML / CSS as possible for the visuals (I have success with Web Components / Lit) with Figma MCP
The front-end is usually one-shot using frontier models. However in my experience, designers are all over the place with using Figma correctly.
I agree with you. Maybe AI can generate designs that look moderately good and aesthetically pleasing for UIs that solve known problems in a prototypical way.[0] That is useful, especially for simple utilities, internal tools, or hobby projects. However, I have yet to see AI solve new design problems, improve on old problems, and create a unique design style that defines a brand and separates it from competition.
Most organisations need a high quality design system and to be able to assemble pages from it. Totally bespoke design will start with the designer using an agent. So the way I see it, the everyday stuff will be the first to go, followed by designers taking the rest of it. Front-end developers have their area eroded from the bottom then the top.
As far as frontend vs backend, there’s a greater scope for fuckups when dealing with the backend. Frontend problems tend to be more transient. So the stakes are lower, which means that the accountability of humans has less value.
The frontend feedback is much harder for AI. AI needs to be able to see the page with all the moving parts and sounds and have a bit of sense for the layout and taste in colors etc. I think it much harder for AI to recognize what feels good for the human user.
Backend is devoid of that personal touch. By definition you are building for the machine. You have APIs, databases and infrastructure which is logical and easy for LLM to interact with. "All it needs" is curl and it can run in a loop the whole day improving backend software.
I think you’re conflating development and design there. I’m saying that development is at risk, I’m not commenting on design. Taste in colours and things like that are design.
I'm not. I really fail to see where do you see frontend development to be easier for AI to pick up compared to backend. As I said frontend is writing code for an user interface and backend for a machine interface.
Knowing that a white font is not visible on white background is not really a design job is it? Calling an API on the other hand requires mostly logic and documentation or do you disagree?
Forget AI exists for a moment. You’ve got a team of humans working on a project. You’ve got a backend developer, a frontend developer, a DBA, a platform engineer, a graphic designer, a UX person, a product manager, and a QA person.
Whose responsibility is it to select the colours? You think this is the responsibility of one of the developers‽ You don’t think “having taste in colours” is solidly owned by the designer‽ You think this is a developer task not a design task‽
Aside from that, the specific example you chose is an area where we have deterministic algorithms for judging contrast – we don’t even need AI for that, regular old procedural code can do it.
I'll second this, with the caveat that I've not yet tried to build anything with Fable.
Every engineer can now produce things in the front end that doesn't look like complete and utter garbage, sure, but everyone is also producing the new-era of Twitter Bootstrap pages. It all has the same touched-by-AI look and it might as well be customer kryptonite from everything I've experienced at my workplace with customer surveys and collaboration. It has raised the floor substantially for internal tools and admin pages though.
What is this news source? I've never heard of it before and there are no names associated with it on their site. Two of their social media links are broken. Their YouTube channel was only active for like a year, 4-5 years ago. It all feels strange.
Yeah I was gonna offer a similar hot take: in a world where government can have trillions, it's probably good on some level that some people have billions. Checks and balances.
If you want good checks against a government, one dude rich enough to field an army has historically been a bad way to keep the government in existence
Except billionaires are never on the side of the people. They functionally already own the US government, which is how they've been able to amass so much wealth while the rest of the world gets poorer and hotter.
They buy media to push their propaganda, buy politicians... They are not acting as "checks and balances" to power. They are power.
- I'll try not to swear at/hit a printer: not because I see the printer as having human-like qualities of being capable but complex and unreliable, but because I want to be a person who can control his temper.
- Treating an inhuman thing as human because it can mimic us in some way is not something that I want to do.
This is asserting personhood or consciousness of LLMs by default in your phrasing and then warning me about the dangers of violating your assertion. You're making the same wager and mistake. There's no important difference, you have no evidence for LLMs being a "someone" any more than you do for a god existing. Warnings about made up things hold no weight.
No, I don't know. Maybe this exact reply is why you get the interactions you do though.
You perceive opposing viewpoints or poking holes in logic as "hating on you", which is playing the victim, followed by alluding to conspiratorial nonsense against you.
> There's no important difference, you have no evidence for LLMs being a "someone" any more than you do for a god existing.
Well... When I ask god if he exists he has never responded to me.
So I would argue that your "any more evidence" is off by several orders of magnitude.
These are the sorts of errors in logic that make me think that people have an undue amount of emotion to discuss the issue rationally. And that's probably why I get attacked.
But hey. Maybe it's something else? Maybe everyone is on their period?
Yes. I'm currently not convinced it can ever be so. So until I hear something convincing to the contrary, I believe no machine can be conscious / sentient unless mimicking human behavior. And if it mimics human behavior intentionally, I have to ask why - and the answer is probably to get me to trust / use it more.
I was bright-eyed and excited about tech once. Like back in 1982 when I got my first home computer and thought CPUs were part magic. Now I know how machines work from the transistor level up to neural nets. There's nothing magical about it. And no consciousness.
Having seen the mockery that the finance-bros have made of "pure tech" (i.e. Jobs instead of Woz, Ellison instead of Joy, etc) and all the enshittification just for pure $$$, I'm leery of ANYTHING ANY tech company tells me anymore.
Now, do I believe that possibly "consciousness" is some kind of state of a super-circuit (our brains)? Sure. Can we emulate that on a computer? We can't even emulate a pebble on a computer (not simulate, emulate). We can SIMULATE what we THINK brains are, but we can't emulate a real one. Not even close, not for many decades.
I tend to agree with OP. In my opinion conscious machines are not something that we should allow to exist. If they do, they are not human and must never be treated as such.
I am not even slightly religious, but they would be abomination.
inhumane: without compassion for misery or suffering; cruel
cruel: willfully causing pain or suffering to others, or feeling no concern about it
You cannot treat an LLM inhumanely, definitionally.
Anyways, when one swears at someone it's typically meant to berate or belittle that person - to inflict some sort of emotional pain. That's the sense I intended when using the word, which is why it fits as a response to what you're saying, and why I would say "don't be nasty to a LLM" has little to do with the LLM itself.
While I suppose this is strictly true, the far more likely option for 2 is that you're a witness to the crime and you can therefore help that crime be solved.
So, in a situation where I am approached by the police to answer questions about something I know I didn't do:
1. I talk, and it helps the police solve a case
2. I talk, and it screws me
3. I don't talk, and it contributes to a case not being solved
4. I don't talk, and it screws me
I read stuff like this article and it tells you about 2, but it doesn't really put that into a broader context about the likelihood that 2 is the outcome. And there is a real decision to be made here!
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