>not disclosing or at least inputting your password might be a crime severely punished
And to your point, I believe it's now the case in the U.S. that you can be legally compelled to unlock a fingerprint lock, but not a pin for whatever reason.
Compiled unlock via biometrics is still somewhat contested. The general argument boils down to biometrics being something you can't really protect internally. A passcode that is only known inside of your gray matter can therefore can only be externalized via some sort of testimony. Being compelled to reveal a passcode violates your ride against compelled speech and self-inccrimination.
In US you are protected by 5th. But it seems like the question hasn't been addressed by the Supreme Court since currently the answer depends on your jurisdiction. Which inspired me to check: here in Pennsylvania, the court cannot compel you to unlock your device with the password.
But it has already been argued successfully that giving biometrics is analogous to giving blood, hair, fingerprints, standing in a lineup, providing a writing sample, or wearing certain clothes, all of which you can be compelled to do. To argue against being compelled to do or provide biometrics without using testimonial arguments would be going against a lot of case law and precedent.
There is a specific precedent where you being compelled into providing biometrics can be inadmissible, and that is where you are compelled to unlock the phone, since doing so, even with biometrics is akin to providing testimony that the phone is yours, you know how to unlock it, which finger to use, etc. (see United States v. Brown, No. 17-30191 [1]). But that doesn’t actually prevent them using your biometrics to unlock the phone, so its pretty niche.
This is a bizarre response. My comment was not a denial of legal history on biology-as-testimony, it was instead opening space for other legal or philosophical objections: autonomy, bodily integrity, possibly Fourth Amendment concerns about unreasonable searches.
But you're replying as if my comment was claiming courts haven’t treated biometrics like physical evidence. That's not what I was doing.
The reference to Brown here appears to be massively misleading: far from being niche, it complicates the biology != testimony in a way that cuts to the heart of the most common real-world application of biometric compulsion which is smartphone access; from chatgpt'ing about it it appears that it's not the only court to rule on this and it probably awaits a SCOTUS decision to resolve an existing split.
You didn't elucidate any of that, or actually make any argument, so I had no way of knowing what you were thinking. You said “being compelled to provide biometrics does not necessarily hinge on it being analogous to testimony” so I stated that there was a lot of established case law already on compelling individuals to provide analogous physical information/samples, which covers bodily autonomy, bodily integrity, and the 4th Amendment. The only contention as far as I know, is around the 5th Amendment, but if you had other information, I’d be interested to hear it.
The Supreme Court has declined multiple times to hear cases that would help settle the legal ambiguity. I don’t think United States v. Brown complicates things because the specifics on the case were not whether or not you can be compelled to provide biometrics, but whether being compelled to “unlock a device” and manipulating the device yourself constitutes protected testimony. [0] They even cited United States v. Payne [1] where the court upheld that forcibly taking your finger to unlock a phone did not violate the defendant’s Fifth Amendment rights, and at issue was only the wording of the order.
From my understanding, the current split about being compelled to provide passcodes, and to a much lesser extent biometrics, is the foregone conclusion exception stemming from the Fisher v. United States [2] case, where, as Justice White said “the existence and locations of the papers[were] a foregone conclusion and the [defendant’s physical act] adds little or nothing to the sum total of the Government’s information by conceding that he in fact has the papers… [And so] no constitutional rights [were] touched. The question [was] not of testimony but of surrender.”
This has been used in relation to court cases on biometrics and passcodes [3]. It appears that courts that rule that you can be compelled seem to look narrowly at the passcode itself i.e. the government knows you own the phone and knows you know how to unlock it, so it is a foregone conclusion to provide it. Courts that rule you cannot be compelled seem to look at the phones contents i.e. the government does not know what is on the phone so decrypting the data would be providing protected testimony, or a stricter interpretation that you cannot be compelled to disclose the contents of the mind.
>but that doesn’t make it an exclusive biosignature. There are plausible abiotic pathways for DMS formation, such as in geochemistry we can’t know entirely about because we live on earth.
I'm sorry, but this is ridiculous. You started by acknowledging that it is indeed exciting, that it is something we only understand to be produced by living organisms. I wholeheartedly agree with that. And so the plausibility of an abiotic alternative is the big question.
You suggest that there are plausible abiotic pathways, but I think that's where this all starts to go off the rails, because I don't think there are in fact plausible abiotic pathways. We absolutely should attempt to model such possibilities and should be extremely careful about assumptions before working that out. But the state of our knowledge thus far counts for something too and it would suggest that such a process is pretty rare or unique. And then it really goes off the rails because instead of an actual example, you suggest not any specific known pathway, but a kind of bizarre philosophical musing that maybe there's "geochemistry we can't entirely know about."
We most definitely are capable of modeling chemical processes even if they don't happen on Earth. And there sure as heck is no such thing as a principle that things beyond Earth's surface are things we "can't" know about. I truly can't stress enough how ridiculous an assumption like that is.
We know, for instance, that gas giants are capable of producing phosphine, even though that doesn't happen on Earth. We know that the moon likely has a molten core. We know all kinds of things about atmospheric chemistry of planets and stars, because even if the abiotic processes can't be witnessed directly on Earth, we know enough about the principles of chemistry to model them in new contexts with reasonably high confidence.
And that's before we get to the idea that such uncertainty about off-world chemistry can be treated as tantamount to evidence of known abiotic process. It's nothing of the sort, it's more like "who knows, maybe it's possible." We do indeed have to figure out if there are such things as an aviotic process, but just the idea that, hey, who knows, something offworld might be happening is nowhere near enough to count.
Everything about it feels like BFD category for potential microbial life if true. And all the circumstantial details seem to point in the same direction. Potential hydrogen-rich ocean planet in a habitable zone, in alignment with theory about most plausible models for environments that might support life.
It's got no known abiotic process for being generated, but a clearly understood connection to life, and is apparently very reactive and would have to be actively re-generated at mass scale to sustainably show up in an atmosphere.
Nothing should be taken as proven, but it feels staggeringly plausible, and in my opinion would be the biggest of the "big if true" space stories I've ever seen in my lifetime.
I had to finish your comment before realizing you truly meant BFD as such and not (as I think more often the use is) sarcastically BFD. That said I agree.
BFD in this context standing for "Big Fucking Deal" (Urban Dictionary), not "Binary File Descriptor" (V.E.R.A. - Virtual Entity of Relevant Acronyms) I guess?
A great question. And one fascinating but maybe disturbing thing we have seen from the ISS is the body seems to be pretty aggressive with bone decalcification in lower-G environments. I don't know if there's a corollary for higher-G, and the mechanism is orthogonal to questions about heritability, but meaningful changes happen even within the life span of a single person.
All life is a stack of autonomic systems. My hunch is that a human in a high G environment would make a bunch of adaptations even if they were born in orbit. By 3-5 generations they might even be another species. I am sure there has been some research done on raising mice in a high-g environment.
I don't think they ever committed themselves to uniformed pricing for mini models. Of course cheaper is better but I understand pricing to be contingent on factors specific to every next model rather than following from a blanket policy.
Awesome, thank you for posting. As someone who regularly uses 4o mini from the API, any guesses or intuitions about the performance of Nano?
I'm not as concerned about nomenclature as other people, which I think is too often reacting to a headline as opposed to the article. But in this case, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to understand nano as categorically different than many in terms of what it means as a variation from a core model.
they share in livestream that 4.1-nano is worse than 4o-mini - so nano is cheaper, faster and have bigger context but worse in intelligence. 4.1mini is smarter but there is price increase.
I think that's true in most cases for usual good faith errors. But(!) if you're not filing, or making an egregious error, thinking you're being clever and evading taxes, or keeping accounts below reporting thresholds on purpose, you can get investigated and potentially go to prison, so the threat is there in certain circumstances.
Even "no filing" won't get you in prison if you were not aware that you weren't filing. Happened to me once for state taxes, specifically. A lot of us were remote and didn't realize the company we were working for had messed up and not reported anyone's income to the state.
That said, yes, if you are attempting active fraud, then you are doing more than just making mistakes on your taxes.
The "situation" was a meme about filing taxes in its broadest possible conception. I don't agree that there's a distinction to be drawn here, and I already explicitly noted that this doesn't apply to most filers.
I don't agree that it's far outside their intent of the question. I actually think it was pretty close to the heart of it, which is an idea of complying with the bizarre way in which the United States has decided to process taxes.
The truth is you can, in fact, go to prison, and that it is indeed rare for that to happen, but it can happen and I acknowledged its rarity.
Awesome. A truly impressive feat that, among all the various and sundry species populating the earth, is only achievable by a human. That is exactly my point... thank you! :)
But also not a part of the human experience among all the ancestors of the Cherokee people, or more or less all humans in the Americas, all the way back to whenever humans first arrived in the Americas (likely 25k-30k years ago, at least).
I think that's exactly the right question and the answer is pretty clear that there is no comparison. I do understand that there's a little bit of something going on with water-based mammals like orcas and dolphins being able to teach certain skills to their young and so there's a notion of intergenerational knowledge there. But we're just a different order of magnitude in terms of our capability of transmitting intergenerational knowledge and it's not even close. It's almost disappointing because there's no interesting question of comparison between us and other species.
As I mentioned in another comment, I'm skeptical of the questions that imply a kind of species essentialism, suggesting that there's such a thing as a one particular trait that distinctly makes us human. I think the real answer to questions like that are vast convergences of immense clusters of facts relating to our evolutionary history and our morphology and so on. I don't think there's any like one single thing. But I do think in comparison to other species a rather elegant way of distinguishing this is to put to our written traditions which as far as I know don't really have any precedent. And if that doesn't blow you away in terms of how miraculous and special are evolutionary trajectory is, I don't suspect anything would. But the important thing is that you don't need a species essentialism to be impressed with who and what we are.
And to your point, I believe it's now the case in the U.S. that you can be legally compelled to unlock a fingerprint lock, but not a pin for whatever reason.
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