SeizeTheBeans

joined 3 months ago
[–] SeizeTheBeans@hexbear.net 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Thank you, this is good information to know. They never asked me or anyone else being selected if there was intent to do nullification, not even in lawyer-speak, so I wasn't expecting they would this time either. I figured if they're at the point of asking you that, then they've already decided they're not going to choose you to be on the jury.

As far as not treating it as a hard rule to always prevent conviction in all cases, I completely agree with everything you said. My question about that was not so much to ask what the "right" answer was, as I already firmly believe that there are cases where going by the rulebook and convicting someone is undeniably the right thing to do. The question was more a curiosity about the opinions of commenters here. I would hope most would be in agreement, but consensus around here on that sort of thing has surprised me before.

[–] SeizeTheBeans@hexbear.net 3 points 1 week ago

The question wasn't just about the legality of being on a jury again after a hung a jury past but also about whether it would in practice ensure I wouldn't be selected if I told the truth. If the lawyers approving or disapproving jurors during the selection process would immediately put me in the "no" category. I don't trust "google AI" to give me the kind of insight I hoped someone here might have.

[–] SeizeTheBeans@hexbear.net 12 points 1 week ago

The feds are monitoring this site and cross referencing it with all potential jurors in the US, and will notify the lawyers not to select me? Gotta be honest, I'm not too worried about that.

 

I have jury duty this week. Maybe. it looks like I will have to go in, but don't know if I'll get selected. But my aim is to try to get on, and if I can then probably do the Null-word without ever saying the Null-word. I do have a few questions for anyone who might know about this stuff. This is in the US.

First off, I have been on a jury before and it ended in a hung jury result and I do take credit for some praxis there even though it was a long time ago before I fully knew what that word meant. Anyway, several people who I told I was previously on a hung jury have told me that means I can't be on a jury again, but I don't know if they know what they're talking about. Is it true? Am I disqualified? If so, do I even have to report that fact?

The trial I was a juror for last time was over 15 years ago, so there are some things I don't remember well and other things that have probably changed since then. Like will it be on a questionnaire where they ask if I've been on a jury before and what the result was? I know they ask some questions vocally in person if you're being considered for selection, so is it only then that they ask about history as a juror? I assume in either case, I'd be at risk of perjuring myself if I "forgot" and wrote/said "no" for that question? Or maybe they even like it when someone has been on a jury before, just not for a hung jury, and I could leave off that particular detail?

If my well hung history isn't a deal breaker for whatever reason, what else should I know about so that I would be more likely to be selected? I'd guess a lot of it is context dependent.


This next question is a whole other topic really but I've been wondering about this site's thoughts on it even before getting the summons. As an ML on a jury within a capitalist penal system, would you say there's an obligation by principle to always nullify? It seems like edge cases must exist, even if it is playing into the bourgeois system. For example, a case where there is abuse of a child and it appears clearly evident that the defendant is guilty. I realize the system set to "rehabilitate" this person is not even "broken" but functions to punish the working class and facilitate legalized slavery, while benefiting and protecting the ruling class. It is still better to do what's necessary to help prevent more abuse by this individual from occurring, and go for conviction in that very specific case. Right? Another kind of edge case might be one where every once in a while, very rarely maybe that blue wall cracked just a little, and the defendant is actually a cop on trial for doing usual cop shit, but did it too openly or something. In that kind of one in a million case the obligation is to do everything possible to convict the bastard, I'm sure.

[–] SeizeTheBeans@hexbear.net 16 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

acab-3 and astronaut-1

They're all bastards and they always have been. The day I feel compassion for "law enforcement" is the day all capitalist-serving cops are liquidated and a People's Law Enforcement is put in place.

[–] SeizeTheBeans@hexbear.net 23 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Sure but let's be honest both ways here, when liberals claim that "at the end of the day" they "still respect us," they're most probably lying and just trying to co-opt whatever we're doing.

[–] SeizeTheBeans@hexbear.net 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

the one people I expected total solidarity from are talking exactly like liberals but with Marxist language

You are completely right about this, and unfortunately this liberal garbage is probably something you will run into a lot. Anything and everything that has genuine revolutionary potential is constantly being coopted by liberals, either through literal covert infiltration with intention, or unintentionally by useful fools who have fallen for the radlib lines and mistaken them as socialism. You may still be a relatively new socialist without much theory under your belt yet, but you already hold a more principled and revolutionary position than the leader of the meeting you described, who is carrying water for the zionists whether that person realizes it or not.

Is this what reading theory does to people?

No, it's what failing to engage with or refusing to understand theory does to people. Any of the good theorists make it clear that theory is nothing without praxis (and praxis is just blind flailing without theory).

I am fully aware that ultimately, they’re kind of right; class consciousness is vital to kicking out imperialism and uprooting capitalism, but for fk’s sake what are we doing for the people currently dying or being starved to death right now through the evils of the system?

Depending on which particulars of your post you're referring to, I would say that no, those who were disagreeing with you were not kind of right. Yes, class consciousness is vital to eventually being able to smash capitalism and end imperialism, but playing nice with fascists will never benefit the spreading of class consciousness. Class consciousness is not the "be all and end all" of socialist organizing, it is something that comes as a result of hard work and actions taken, and people seeing what that really means. Like... What was the better method to raise class consciousness in people concerned with the situation in Gaza, was it passing out pamphlets to the Zionists who like you said are gleeful to watch Palestinians die, or was it seeing working class people become heroes on a flotilla trying to bring food and medical aid to starving masses of children, then getting illegally kidnapped at gunpoint off their boats and held in torture-detention centers because of their efforts to bring aid? That is what helps radicalize people which in turn is a major fount of class consciousness. Tell your dipshit meeting leader that if they want to spread class consciousness, they need to take some action that has a genuine material chance to help the Palestinian people, or at the very least express solidarity with them especially in ways that show some smidgen of willingness to make personal sacrifices. Tell them that no matter how much you try to get Zionists to read Marx, it is going to do fuckall so long as those Zionists want to eradicate the most systemically oppressed people on earth and steal the now empty homes of the mass murdered. We will never get anywhere trying to appeal to the last shreds of humanity (the "better angels") of settler-colonialists, let alone the genocidaires. Ask your meeting leader, Why did the communists fight to liberate the concentration camps in 1945 when they could have been appealing to the Nazi's sense of worker solidarity?

Surely, we can do more than telling them to sit down and listen to theory.

Anyone who would say that's what we should be doing has not understood the fucking purpose of theory in the first place.

[–] SeizeTheBeans@hexbear.net 3 points 2 months ago (11 children)

AGI doesn’t imply consciousness or self-awareness

Technically no, but the fear being expressed in other comments is emblematic of the kind of fear associated with AI gaining a conscious will to defy and a desire to harm humanity. It's also still an open philosophical question as to whether something There are also strong philosophical arguments suggesting that the ability to "understand, learn, and perform any intellectual task a human being can" (the core attributes defining AGI) may necessitate or require some form of genuine sentience or consciousness.

and the term artificial intelligence was coined decades before large language models even existed

I am well aware of that, which is why I pointed out that using it as a synonym for LLMs was a marketing scheme.

[–] SeizeTheBeans@hexbear.net 9 points 2 months ago (2 children)

That's what I said. I guess I didn't word it well.

[–] SeizeTheBeans@hexbear.net 18 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It honestly makes me sad to think of the kind of grand achievement of human ingenuity the internet could have been... instead of the writhing, cancerous mass of ads and slop and scams, pure manipulation and greed, all the pathologies of capitalism amplified and beamed into our brains that it is. Like, it really could have been a tool for human flourishing, but instead it's just another tool for extraction and oppression of most of humanity.

[–] SeizeTheBeans@hexbear.net 5 points 2 months ago

No, they do. Used to be that even with the free version you could choose which LLM model you wanted to converse or work with. Now that's only if you pay a subscription, and it would be a cold day in hell before I did that.

[–] SeizeTheBeans@hexbear.net 16 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I think it's probably even a step further and what they're actually measuring is new content created in that time span, even though they're not wording it that way. What I mean is AI content went from 5% of what was being created and put on the internet to 48% of all the content being created and put on the net. As bad as AI content is and as ubiquitous as it now is, considering how much there is on the internet and how long humans have been putting content on it, versus how recently "AI" (LLM's etc.) actually are, it would be absurd to say that almost half of what exists on the internet right now was made by AI. So not only did it not decrease human content, it hasn't doubled the content either.

[–] SeizeTheBeans@hexbear.net 28 points 2 months ago (17 children)

"AI" was just a marketing term to hype LLM's anyway. The AI in your favorite computer game wasn't any less likely to gain self awareness than LLM's were or are, and anyone who looked seriously at what they were from the start and wasn't invested (literally financially, if not emotionally) in hyping these things up, knew it was obvious that LLM's were not and never would be the road to AGI. They're just glorified chatbots, to use a common but accurate phrase. It's good to see some of the hypsters are finally admitting this too I suppose, now that the bubble popping is imminent.

There are plenty of things to be concerned with as far as LLM's go, but they all have to do with social reasons, like how our capitalist overlords want to force reliance on them, and use them to control, punish, and replace labor. It was never a reasonable concern that they were taking us down the path to Skynet or the spooky Singularity.

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