jkartchner

I know this is not exactly a nuanced take, but why would anyone take advice about the future of technology whose contributions are now limited to an opinionated email app? I appreciate that tech is and will change even more, but relegating an entire ecosystem to the dustbin because you're feeling bullish about LLMs seems...premature.

It works but produces pdfs. That becomes a problem. More importantly, you spend FAR more time writing documents using latex than word. The friction is enough to make writing legal stuff with it not worth the pain.

I'm a lawyer, though most of my writing is related to litigation, not contracts. I did this in my 30s. It worked just fine and made beautiful PDFs. However, judges got pissed, because they have their own software to automatically sign proposed orders. Colleagues got irritated bc they received only pdfs. Eventually I got fed up with it because latex is truly a PITA to draft legal citations and information.

Assuming, arguendo, that corruption is somehow not a factor in your scenario, it still doesn't account for ignorance. Consider that jurors in jury trials have one binary decision to make based on the facts and law given to them. They don't need to decide if the law is just (in fact that's explicitly NOT what they're supposed to do). They don't need (and are not supposed) to decide if the situation is fair. That happens elsewhere by folks trained to consider these things. Jurors in jury trials literally apply the law they are given to the evidence they are presented. That's it. Even this burden is often more than a lot of folks can wrap their head around.

The legislature, however, is not there just to nod its head when they think something is a good idea and voting no when it's not. Even if we were to create a space for exactly that, all we've done is push the fallibility to those who are doing the work to write and revise law--but now they're pitching to those off the streets who don't know anything about governance! If anything, lay congresspeople would magnify, not reduce, the problems we have with our current system.

As a prosecuting attorney who selects and works to convince the "average" juror 5+ times a year, this is not a good idea. You are vastly overestimating what the average level of competence is. Most people, when given unfamiliar knowledge work to do, are so hopelessly biased and ignorant that I definitely think the average congressperson is more qualified to do that kind of work. We are spoiled by selection bias when extrapolating what "average" means in the USA.

You believe the top 60% of the nation skew in the upper income levels? Median pay is $61k a year for the entire country. The top 1% skews to the upper income levels. The rest are charged $30 for a dose of aspirin and can't afford it.

I love this. I love finding resources that genuinely empower others. Thanks for the sacrifice in writing this

I have used it now for almost 7 years running a law firm. It's worked great for exactly our use case: privileged emails, including attachments, can be time and passworded with legit TNO encryption. I initially used nextcloud/webDAV for our own calendar, but switched over recently to protonmail and it hasn't been an issue. Some storage space is useful. Haven't used the VPN. It's a boutique firm. We have only 4 employees. YMMV

No one is freeing up resources for a felony prosecutor by eliminating Driving Under Suspended cases, handled by a completely different prosecutor in a completely different courtroom.

No one's saving a felony docket by eliminating the need to prosecute niche crimes like aviation fraud or abortion or unlawful dog breeding.

No one can undisputedly connect bail reform with an increase or a decrease in crime or pre-trial recidivism.

No one can glean statistics from major cities only, conclude they are not harmful, and then imply reform must not be harmful for rural areas. There are usually more prosecutors elected in rural areas than populated ones.

Crime is tightly situational, geographically tied, culturally bound. Policies therefore must also be situational, geographically tied, and culturally bound. Some things might be universally bad. Those should be excised everywhere. But things that are not universally good should not be endorsed universally. I got the impression here that the writer wants some reforms to be endorsed universally.

I am a prosecutor. I used to be a criminal defense attorney. Crime comes from a complicated collection of sources and circumstances. Efforts to reduce crime, therefore, require an evaluation of the complications and circumstances in a given area. The causes of crime are geographically, economically, and culturally bound, and solutions probably should vary dramatically from area to area.

I know some people may not agree, but an oft-overlooked component of crime and law enforcement is culture. American crime, at least in part, is what it is today from our country's own defiant and ignorant understanding of what freedom is. "You can't tell me what to do with a gun." "You can't tell me to get out of my own car." Combine it with an unhealthy dose of American exceptionalism and social circumstances that contribute to crime and we get stupid like sovereign citizens, election denialism, and hilarious black-or-white efforts to villify law enforcement. Our country breeds criminals and idiocy in the classroom almost as much as bad parenting because we're told over and over that this is the best and most free place in the world and children in africa are starving. It's in our collective psychology. So every social pain is both a source of cognitive dissonance and King George III back from the dead to tax our freedoms. This is evident to me in the way the law in other countries is both written and enforced. Japan's violence is a far cry from ours. Canada isn't some paragon of legislation, yet their crime rates are very low. Interestingly enough, Canada's indigenous people make up a disproportionately HUGE amount of their incarcerated, but no one cares. But American cops were just born bad and are taught only to shoot the black people. As if law enforcement doesn't come out of the exact same pool of people who become office workers who screw around when they probably should be working, teachers who diddle their students, and negligent engineers who cheated their way through school. School shootings in America exist because they're a cultural touchstone for malignant attention and perverse notoriety, yet the issue is reduced to being either mental illness or guns. The fact that nobody can touch our guns is a symptom of the death caused, not the source of the issue.

Prosecutor's are little more than a reflection of the cultural expectations and demands of a given area. Articles like this are therefore both laughably myopic in their conclusions and a little dangerous in the way they perpetuate this tug of war we seem to be in. That said, I'm glad there are efforts from new prosecutors to reduce both disparity in treatment of people and legitimate efforts to eliminate waste and unneeded suffering in reducing crime. But the solution isn't a decision not to prosecute ABORTION, for which there are probably like 10 cases a year for. We'll never come up with consistent cause and effect relationships with this kind of whack a mole policy making. America needs to start thinking differently, starting with an admission that where there are people there will be criminals and understanding those criminals is more important than any other effort to reduce injustice for anyone.

I’ll start by saying I’m a lawyer, not ever a professional coder. Years ago, I wanted to help a friend translate a Japanese video game and release a fan translation. I had some experience in assembler a long time before it, but I had forgotten most. I had little experience in disassembly. I also had never learned anything about compression algorithms or theory.

Turns out this particular game company (Falcom) had a habit of implementing their own compression on their assets. So I had to painstakingly read the disassembly. It got to the point that I had notebooks of hand written disassembly so I could read and think about the code when not at a computer. Eventually I figured out how to both decompress images and text and then save the decompressed assets in a way that bypass the compression. I wrote the hack and patch and was super happy. Of course it blew up the size of the game assets for translated materials, but it worked.

I recommend you read the first four chapters of The Startup Owners Manual by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf. In those chapters, they talk about the importance of understanding your users, not “build it and they will come.” I think if you understood people’s response to what you’ve made very well, you would know a few things to tweak to fix a lot of concerns.

This is going to depend heavily on the state, unless you try to volunteer with federal prison (called the bureau of prisons). Most states call their state prison system the department of corrections. I would conduct a search for your state and area based on this info. I wouldn’t spend too much time looking at anything other than DOC or BOP. Local jails generally don’t have long term rehabilitative programs like learning to code.

I don’t understand why he wouldn’t have a GPS device if it’s that much of a threat. Her location doesn’t matter as much as his.

Domestic violence and DR attorney here, formerly DV prosecutor. Depending on the laws on the state, she needs to find a way to authenticate her worries about his cyber-stalking. If she has enough to validate the concern (not just speculation; won’t need much), she should seek a civil protection order precluding him from use of all electronics. The judge probably won’t do that for a number of reasons, but considering the DV cycle and pattern here, there will be a secondary civil protection order issued which will specifically consider the danger imposed by the cyber stalking. At that point if there’s even a whiff of improper use, he’s going back to jail.

Of course this will depend on the state. I can’t give general advice in the US.