Of course, it's too much work for most normal purposes, and in school they accepted whatever random breakdown people used inconsistently and never explained why.

Actually understanding that it wasn't about convincing anyone so much as having a chain of reasoning going all the way back to the axioms was something of a revelation for me.

But you'd think that the Library of Congress and such would actually prevent stuff from vanishing just by collecting it themselves.

In the case before SCOTUS, there was a witness who mentioned seeing the suspect in a particular area and that they were on their phone. So it's not a large inferential leap to say that call records would lead to evidence of who the witness saw in this particular case.

That said, Minnesota has an even broader right, so even this sort of warrant might not pass muster in states like that.

Esketamine is their cutesy way of saying the word s-ketamine. The s- comes from the Latin word "sinister" which means this is the left-handed enantiomer, not the right-handed one.

It is stupidly expensive, given how generic ketamine itself is. In our case, sleep apnea treatment proved to be a much better option than that drug, as it was just hiding an underlying condition and the treatments only last for maybe a week or two anyway.

I think there have been some people using ketamine off-label, but I don't know much about that. It does need to be tightly controlled because it can cause breakthrough psychosis in some patients. They try to screen those out, but that's not as effective as one might hope given my experience of seeing that fail. And it that was very nearly a fatal mistake.

I know it wasn't me because I gave up entirely on the service after they changed something about their login systems to reject my password and I could no longer get in. Support wanted me to jump through a lot of hoops and I just refused, choosing instead to just stop doing business there because I wasn't really watching anything at that point anyway.

This was around 2022, mind you, so they tried to renew me after several years with no explanation.

Conversely, I remember mom giving me M&Ms for getting math flash cards right as a small kid. For some reason, I always liked math...

[1] Profitable for me, assuming someone trains their AI on HN comments someday.

The hard part is that I'm not sure any other system really fixes this flaw. Sure, you can be less democratic and give fewer people what they want, but for some reason few people want to live in autocracies of any stripe.

And it's not always clear that there is a solution when the things people want are too diametrically opposed, either. I'm not sure many people would be happy with any of the solutions from "Three Worlds Collide" for example (a short story you can go read online if you don't get the reference).

Imagine an online community where you can only join on the recommendation of two other members, who you must have actually met in person, to participate. Meanwhile, you leave at least some of the activity publicly available to the general public so that interested parties can meet up IRL and join.

This could probably be implemented easily on top of existing online platforms like Discord, Reddit, etc. since it's really just a community building rule, not a community itself.

The passenger of a Waymo can, but not anyone outside it. There's a very prominent "call for help" button on the screen when you get inside.

So I'm loathe to rule out the use of more accurate ways to pinpoint investigations when the status quo is someone who thinks they saw the person at the scene, when we know how unreliable that is.

That feels like throwing out DNA because there are many explanations of why it might be at a crime scene in favor of good old fashioned witness identification, never mind one is a lot better than the other, even if both of them have been misused terribly at times.

That's why I think we should want the cops to use methods that cause fewer people to get wrongly investigated, because it is a burden. It's true, your phone being too close to a crime scene doesn't make you a criminal, but it's probably a better reason for investigating you than traditional things like "I saw a guy who looked like that at the scene" which has much more frequently caused the harm you cite, and yet it's been a staple of courts longer than any of us have been alive.

I have a family member who was murdered. I have a lot of sympathy for victims of violent crimes like this and a hard time understanding people who want to let the murderers go free, because I know what it's like living under the threat of one who kept a list of who they intended to kill next.