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I hate to beat a dead horse about this or to seem to contradict your experience; I can and do have sympathy for many people in prison. But you're attacking a straw man. My observation was about my response to final words by death row inmates in general. If you're saying there are exceptions to the rule that violent offenders in prison are often liars with behavioral pathologies, then sure, of course. If you're saying that's not a general heuristic one should have when encountering the claims of violent offenders on death row, I disagree. In my opinion, it's an especially useful heuristic for people who don't express any remorse for their victims, as in the quoted example. It makes no difference to the point you rushed in to correct me about, i.e., that a simple google search would void my argument. Maybe I won't seem so heartless to you if you consider that my sympathies are more with the victims of violent crime rather than the perpetrators. I used to think more along the lines of you and most people on HN. When I started to investigate the subject and think it through, my opinions changed quite a bit. Thanks for the debate. Good luck to you.
Turns out we're actually talking about this fine gentleman? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosendo_Rodriguez
I was mildly sympathetic to the first guy, who only killed his great aunt. This guy killed two young prostitutes, one pregnant, the other 16 years old. Confessed to the crimes, the. Spent 20 years trying to get off on a technicality. Nice guy. Really going to take his last words at face value.
It would have been more interesting to learn about someone with an unusual background (black catholic texan) and whether that played a role in his story, but it's an incidental aside to my argument about catholicism. Those arguments stand. Do me the honor of reading them.
Thanks for correcting my mistake, though. This guy is even more suspicious in his appeals to catholicism and his lack of public repentance. His unmentioned victims even more glaring tells than an old dead aunt. Not as curious, not a rarity, but even more "damning".
To your point, I do know one important thing about this person: He was executed for a capital crime. That's a pretty significant fact. I'm not obligated to learn much more about him to make assumptions about the truth value of his last words. I may be wrong in my suspicions, but my point was that I don't have to go digging into the details of every inmate's case to be suspicious of their claims. It's the sensible default stance. All liars say true things.
If you don't want to address the psychological substance of my argument that's your prerogative but nothing about googling a specific felon is going to change a justified bias against taking their claims at face value. Innocent until proven guilty, ok. Presumed innocent after found guilty? No way.
Do you have a lot of attention draining responsibilities? Do them after your programming time.
Are you a coffee drinker? If so, consider adding green tea to your routine. It will help smooth out the peaks and valleys of coffee.
Are you anxious and stressed? That will be very distracting and lead to feeling overwhelmed. Very counterproductive.
As we age, we become more aware of the limited time left to us to realize our goals in life. Suddenly, projects we take on can't be just about learning something new or advancing our careers, they start to be in competition with other values and dreams. Maybe what you're working on isn't able to supply a sense of purpose. That feeling can be very draining.
When all else fails, focus on what you can do, not what you can't. Get the system running and spend some time with it. Find things in the old code that are interesting to you. There are stories hidden in legacy code. Think about yourself relative to the craft and those that came before you. Ask to sit with the productive members of your team for a bit, just to ride shotgun and spend some time with a colleague. Rediscovering some of the sociability of coding can be very restorative. A spirit of comraderie can be the difference between apathy and enjoyment.
But it's also the case that many people in that position are habitual liars. One can quibble over the reasons but it's just something that has to be taken into account. I'm reminded of that fact when I read something that seems to be pretty straightforward. A sane person would think sincerity especially likely in one's considered final words. An experienced person would laugh at such an absurdity.
HN is a funny place. For such a smart pool of commenters in other respects, people here tend not to be very attentive or psychologically nuanced readers. I'm often surprised how quickly y'all resort to scolding without even understanding someone's point.
Let me show you what I read in this man's final words:
>>> First I would like to say I have been here since September 2005. I had the honor and privilege to know many prison guards and staff. I want to thank all of them. I would like for everyone to write the people on death row as they are all good men and I am very happy I got to know them. All of their lives are worth knowing about.
That sounds nice but also quite proud. Fine, he's not particularly sorry about his crime, if you even want to call it that. It was all in the distant past anyway, so why make a fuss about it. There's no one left alive who really cared about the old woman anyway, so it would be pointless to apologize "to all the people I hurt". That sort of victimolotry would ring false anyway (unless it's a victim of the state), so point in his favor for honesty. Hmm, I wonder what else he's telling the truth about.
He says the people on death row are all "good men" and he's "very happy" he got to know them. That's pretty interesting and contrary to intuition. Most of us would be very unhappy to spend decades around violent criminals. A charitable interpretation is that he's made close friendships over time and is generally loyal. But many have said you can know a man by his friends, so it also suggests bad judgment or, perhaps, a tendency to narcissistic splitting. His statement definitely isn't concerned with their crimes or guilt.
>>> Secondly on February 14th the medical examiner and the chief nurse were engaged in numerous false illegal acts. They tried to cover up that thousands were wrongfully convicted by Matt Powell, district attorney. This needs to be brought to justice. I call upon the FBI to investigate Matt Powell and the Lubbock County Medical Examiner.
Whoa, that's weird. He expresses no concern for crimes committed by his fellow inmates but does want to point out the malfeasance of the state. This makes a kind of sense, whether it's true or not. I do wonder how much he knows about this. Does he know a lot because he was claiming this as part of his appeal and he believes he is innocent? Is that credible? Does the fact of malfeasance mean the crimes weren't committed or only that civil rights of criminals (due process) were violated?
If he's been claiming he's innocent all these years, it would explain why he doesn't mention his conviction in his last words. But again, what was the evidence of his innocence or guilt? If the evidence is reasonable that he is, in fact, guilty then he's carrying his lie to the grave. That'd be interesting, no?
It's also interesting that he's using his "platform" to call attention to this issue, ostensibly to save innocent men (like him?) from wrongful conviction. Maybe he is innocent. I don't know. They say all men in prison are innocent. Or maybe he's guilty and has been lying about it for so long that he's lost connection to reality. Or maybe he's knowingly lying to the bitter end. Questions to be asked...
>>> Lastly, I was born and raised Catholic and it was not lost upon me that this is Holy Week and last Sunday was Palm Sunday. Yesterday was my birthday. Today is the day I join my God and father. The state may have my body but not my soul. In order to save my brothers on death row I call upon Pope Francis and all the people of the world.
Now this is interesting. A black man in Texas raised Catholic is a rarity. He's got some pretty overt martyrdom symbolism going on here. His birthday is coinciding with Holy Week? If you're not familiar here's the significance:
"Palm Sunday commemorates the entrance of Christ into Jerusalem, when palm branches were placed in his path, before his arrest on Holy Thursday and his crucifixion on Good Friday. It thus marks the beginning of Holy Week, the final week of Lent." (Wikipedia)
Maybe that's just copium but he isn't much of a theologian if he is, in fact, guilty, as that would require confession and repentance to save his soul. If he doesn't do that part, the state would still have his body, but God would be sending his soul to hell. Maybe he confessed elsewhere with his priest and chose not to repeat his confession publicly. That's his right. Still, it raises suspicions about his state of mind and his character. Similarly, his call upon Pope Francis doesn't make much sense. Francis already issued a bull against the death penalty. Even so, as a Catholic, he would know the pope isn't needed to save the souls of his "brothers on death row", only a confession and repentance before an ordained priest. And as a Catholic so close to death, he would also know that is the only "saving" that would help them. The last thing that would help them is to be affirmed in false protestations of innocence. So, again, what's he thinking? He surely knows that most of the "good men" on death row did commit their crimes. And that most of the "good men" on death row are claiming innocence. If anything, as a Catholic he should be calling upon his "brothers on death row" to confess their crimes and repent before a priest. But that's not what he's doing. Why?
>>> Lastly, I want everyone to boycott every single business in the state of Texas until all the businesses are pressed to stop the death penalty.
Based on other things he said, I believe he is mentally coherent, but this statement makes little sense. Businesses don't execute convicts, the state does. This call to action would punish all people in Texas regardless of their support for the death penalty. Why would he want to do that? Faith, hope, and charity are the cardinal Catholic virtues. It's not very charitable to punish the innocent. If he is himself innocent, then why would he want to punish other innocents? Is he acting in a spirit of resentment? I don't know. But it makes me wonder about the degree of his sincerity. It would make more sense if he was calling upon the people of Texas to end the death penalty in order to save their own souls. But he doesn't say that.
(As an aside, the history of the Catholic position on the death penalty is pretty long and the period after the 1970s is unique in its opposition to the death penalty. The catechism wasn't officially revised until 2018, so this is a pretty recent thing. Is it coincidental that the changes track pretty well with the rise of "Liberation Theology"? I don't know. Pope Benedict XVI was no liberationist but he was also on record advocating abolition, so there's that.)
>>> With that Lord I commend my spirit. Warden I am ready to join my father.”
Not trying to be harsh but if he's a Catholic and he's guilty and he hasn't confessed and repented and there is a God and the Catholic faith is correct, then he's going straight to hell.
So, I hope that clarifies the spirit of my parent comment, which was a lament about the lack of trust created by the commission of crimes. I'm not digging into his case, just pointing out that, to an attentive reader, there's a lot to unpack in this short statement.
Who is computing our environmental footprint? Are our interests aligned? Do our competitors also have to pay it? Is it computed the same for them? What is the penalty if we refuse to pay? Do loopholes exist and will they be exploited by our competition? Do tax programs already exist at a national level that go towards paying this footprint? Does such a cost necessitate operating above certain economies of scale to be in business at all? If we do business internationally, will we pay different costs in different jurisdictions? Is our footprint a net-bad thing or is our product a net-good whose footprint should be subsidized but isn't?
The question is likely one that many business will have to answer (whether they ask it or not) given the regulatory and financial controls being implemented by supranational governance.
In any case, I'm not saying individual humans make many reasoned out decisions. Quite the opposite. Human individuals adopt a cultural second nature bequeathed to them by their heritage to avoid the necessity of making decisions. The culture over time adopts certain default decisions that are advantageous to survival. These are inculcated into the individual via their cultural conditioning. A baby has no culture and very few instincts (hunger, pleasure, pain, disgust). If you think humans are operating at the lower levels of instinct then why do they pursue or avoid certain behaviors that change over time? One answer is that they are responding to acceptable norms of behavior. As those norms change, they adapt and adopt. They change with the times, as the saying goes. A tiger can be trained to behave a certain way using stimulus/reward training but it doesn't self-regulate according to new norms. One could argue that elephants do this, if properly conditioned with a large stake early in life. But you could also make the case that elephants (like dolphins) are, like humans, self-conscious to a degree. I don't know if this is true, but it is an interesting thought. A more cynical person might say the elephant is not choosing anything but has been trained just like the tiger to avoid pain.
LLMs, or let us say AGI based on probabilistic models, can mimic behavior represented in its data and is very impressive at these language games and, with the right feedback, can correct some of its more glaring productions but it must ever be a parasite on human cultural production for it to gain what you call "knowledge". As a thought experiment, suppose we could set an LLM running on autopilot and send it into space with a feedback loop where it could add its productions to its source corpora. Is there any point in the future where it is generating new and coherent output? Or does it degenerate into raving madness?
Animals may be more or less undetermined but a bee will make honey and an ant will gather food regardless of any individual instance of bee or ant intelligence.
The problem with the above objection is that there is no account of "meaning" in what an AGI does. In other words, it's still a computer. To say that the entropy of the system will determine the entity's indeterminism is akin to arguments saying Schrodinger's cat is evidence for the possibility of human free will. It's a category error. Unless you want to argue that humans are also computers (which is the position of many strict materialists) then there is still a huge gap to account for in terms of meaning that can't be defined away satisfyingly. We all know what it's like to be an intelligence. At best, people say we can't know if an AGI also knows that because we can't inspect their "minds". This argument is justified by recourse to the principle of the multiple instantiability of intelligence. If we admit that non-carbon-based life forms could be intelligent (e.g., extraterrestrials) then we may admit that intelligence could be in silica as well. Without the ability to introspect other minds, we assume they are like ours and not simply "zombies". The above arguments (reducible to "Well, how do you KNOW anyone else has a mind?") are based in a kind of skeptical solipsism. The part about intelligence being demarcated by non-determinism and the way that argument fails is a side-step of the hard problem of consciousness.