> nobody has been killed that wasn’t carrying a gun with extra ammo or striking cops with their vehicle.
The video evidence shows beyond peradventure that Renee Good didn't strike the ICE agent — who isn't a cop — with her vehicle.
EDIT: See the NY Times's frame-by-frame, time-synchronized compilation of the various videos [0], especially starting at about 3:42 in that video [1].
The agent wasn't hit by Good's vehicle - starting at 4:53 of the video [2], he was standing well away from her vehicle (see 5:42 [3]), leaning on it with his hand on the front fender, and his feet slipped as she was trying to pull away.
He wasn't hit or run over — at most he was slightly pushed by the vehicle. His reaction — "fucking bitch" [4].
As to Alex Pretti: You're focusing like a laser on a fact — if such it be — that's completely irrelevant.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9R9dAmws6M And yes, I firmly believe the NY Times tries to get it right, and corrects their errors on the rare occasions that they make them.
> The video evidence shows beyond peradventure that Renee Good didn't strike an ICE agent
Let's not get caught up arguing about the play-by-play details. There will always be rabid disagreement regardless of merit, causing us to miss the crux of the matter. The important big-picture dynamic is that the agent set up the situation so he'd have an excuse to kill the next person who tried to drive away from him, directly contrary to ICE's own policies. That would be second degree murder, if the perp weren't a member of a protected class.
One of the above comments gives a pretty clear cut showcase of how this is not, in fact, a fact.
> I think they both contributed to the tragedy.
"Between me and Jeff Bezos we are worth several hundred billion dollars". The ICE agent contributed the bullets that made this a tragedy, the victim contributed not following the orders of people who are not police officers, I'd say it's not much of a "both" situation.
> Nobody protesting peacefully gets shot.
At least one person already has, but something tells me you'll just move the goalpost of what "peacefully" means.
Use your car to block armed federal agents from doing their job. When they give you instructions, ignore them and taunt them. When they come to take you out of your vehicle, drive your vehicle at them as you try to get away.
Sorry, that’s just not peaceful protesting. That’s putting lives in danger, obviously including your own.
There is blood on the hands of the people encouraging such behavior. MLK showed us that peaceful protest is effective protest. Vehicular assault protest is dangerous and illegal protest.
> Vehicular assault protest is dangerous and illegal protest.
You need to watch the video compilation linked to above. It wasn't anything resembling "vehicular assault protest" — it was a woman trying to verrrry slowwwwly drive away and an armed ICE agent shooting her when his feet slipped.
It's a peculiar type of insanity to insist that it is the responsibility of everyday citizens to react perfectly calmly and rationally while being assaulted by armed agents of the state (themselves often acting impulsively and aggressively), and to then justify people being summarily executed when they inevitably do not.
Furthermore, it's disingenuous to talk about "unlawful behavior" while skipping over the federal government violating the much deeper laws that were explicitly written into its charter. If you want to keep closing your eyes to what is plainly in front of you, that is on you.
What I find insane is that people are going completely bonkers over Trump using ICE, but they didn’t say a word about Obamas use of ICE. The ACLU wrote plenty about what Obama did, but the protesters don’t seem to know about it.
Maybe if they disavowed Obama, and treated him like a pariah, then you might think they only recently became aware of what was going on. They’d be acting with integrity. But I don’t see that.
When you put it that way, it makes it sound like you're okay with the federal government (no matter who's in charge) having gangs of masked men kidnapping people off the streets.
You keep focusing on these small slices of the issue where you can go A+B->C "yup looks good!". Meanwhile the larger context here is exactly what's important.
Personally I'm basically ambivalent about deporting illegal immigrants. I am NOT ambivalent about the first amendment, the second amendment, abducting citizens/legal immigrants, due process and coercion, inhumane conditions, an administration that doesn't respect the loss of American life, an administration that continues to announce that their goal is to deport many more people than merely illegal immigrants, etc.
I thought Obama was running/supporting an inhumane machine as well, although I was both-sidesing at the time so I didn't see a political lever that could be pulled to affect it. But has it occurred to you that even if you consider the net actions the same, fewer people protested Obama precisely because Obama could sell those policies by engendering trust and demonstrating respect for at least some traditional American values?
I respect your integrity if you are willing to condemn Obama as well as Trump.
I think one side is just more likely to protest. Since Trump’s been in office, there have been numerous protests: the Women’s March ( complete with pink hats ), No Kings protests, anti-ICE protests, etc. Wikipedia has a page for them.
Meanwhile, the other side had one notable protest, J6, that was confined to Washington DC.
Why is that? I think it’s a combination of party demographics, party operative strategies, and an imbalance in Karen count ( maybe that’s part of demographics ).
If Vance succeeds Trump, we’ll see if your theory is better. He hasn’t engaged in Trump’s childish ( yet politically effective ) manner, so if Vance protests erupt I’ll feel my ideas seem more likely valid.
Of course it is going to seem like everyone is unprincipled when you assume that to start. It's taken us what, three comments here for you to admit to yourself that I'm coming from a principled place? Three comments of you writing off everything I am saying as if I am only saying it in bad faith to try and manipulate you, rather than as part of some consistent worldview that might help explain all of the opposition you see.
And then even after that, rather than accepting it and maybe seeing that some productive understanding could be had, you launched right back into firing off a bunch of wild partisan assertions - presumably hoping that I won't continue to walk the principled tightrope as perfectly, and you can go back to writing me off!
I'll be first in line to criticize how pathetically captured the Democratic party is. I'm not and never have been a Democrat - I just begrudgingly vote conservative now that open fascism is upon us. The Democrats thought they could phone it in in 2024, just like they were able to do in 2020. Their current strategy seems to be pointing out "this is really bad!", but never sticking with it to make a solid stand - just the occasional glimmer of inspired opposition, that is then left to sputter out. Lazily hoping that in 2026/2028 things can somehow go back to business as usual. I actually think the appalling lack of any sort of discussions about how we can possibly rebuild all of our societal institutions that Trump has burnt down is one of the most appalling things about our current situation.
That's not how it looks to me. Her vehicle seems to come close and might even touch the agent's leg — maybe (the narration says no). But "hitting him" doesn't seem to be a reasonable way to describe it, even granting that the video clip is in slow motion.
The agent was leaning significantly forward, and suddenly acquired backwards momentum just when the car got close, despite his center of mass being in front of his feet. The only way he could move like that was by getting hit by the car.
> The only way he could move like that was by getting hit by the car.
He had a hand braced on the left-front fender and was leaning against it, with his feet maybe a yard away — apparently on icy pavement. The vehicle could well have pushed him as it moved; that's not the same as hitting him.
So she rapidly accelerated at him, and her car pushed him away, either by hitting his torso or his arm. And that in the 1-2 seconds the agent had to figure out her actions and intent, he arguably made the wrong call, is rephrased as:
"Speech is disallowed if someone with any authority feels like killing you"
See my edited comment, with a link to the NY Times's frame-by-frame, time-synced compilation of various video angles. She didn't run over him or even hit him.
It only takes that to be a «nazi» sympathiser huh. And my comment flagged. You might need to go read up on what the nazis were like. I’m in Europe. We _really_ know what the nazis were like — they occupied my country. I live in a street named after resistance fighters who died fighting them. You’re extremely naive and disrespectful of the victims of the nazis.
I love how you're opposed to the death penalty for provably societally damaging criminal activites, but violent imperialism on those that don't agree with you (which would almost certainly entail many deaths)? Completely OK.
Because you don't want to, I guess. I'm not particularly interested in discussing this with you because I don't get the feeling from your responses so far that there is a possibility of productive high-level discussion. Take care.
> Yes, it is. People make mistakes. People have infinite possibility to grow, change and contribute to society. Snuffing everything someone is out because of an arbitrary society rule that ultimately does less harm than murder is indefensible.
Putting aside statistics on actual reform instead of fantastical infinite possibility, as I understand this policy mostly serves to deter foreigners from attempting the potentially very lucrative business of smuggling drugs into Singapore. Even if Singapore didn't take the "barbaric" approach of executing them, they would have to either host them as prisoners on their already very limited land, or go through the process of deporting them to their home country, where they might not even face any consequences and just try again. Why should they bear this burden for people who have no ties to Singapore and will never contribute anything to it?
> as I understand this policy mostly serves to deter foreigners from attempting the potentially very lucrative business of smuggling drugs into Singapore.
So what? That's not a justification.
> Why should they bear this burden for people who have no ties to Singapore and will never contribute anything to it?
Singapore is perfectly able to control their borders better than most countries. It's not like the US where it's relatively easy to sneak in. 'They might come back' is a poor justification for murder.
> what makes _your_ opinion better than mine, or that of the Singaporeans?
Because I believe it can be supported and be shown to be objectively correct. Not that I'm willing to put in the effort when it already took this much for you to realize I was stating an opinion though.
> Okay, why should they? Drug traffickers are perfectly capable of not attempting to smuggle drugs into Singapore.
If you think casual murder is fine because it's convenient, I don't think there's much for us to discuss anyway. We clearly have drastically different values. I'll just take solace in the fact that Singapore likely won't survive another 100 years.
> Because I believe it can be supported and be shown to be objectively correct.
Out of curiosity, How can your argument "be supported and shown to be objectively correct" ?
It seems the evidence is actually the other way around. After introduction of the death penalty in the 90s, the average net amount of opium trafficked to Singapore famously dropped by ~70%.
I do not support the death penalty myself, but primarily for ethical and moral reasons to preserve our humanity - which is constantly under attack. But not "objective ones" since the evidence clearly supports the death penalty for "objective reasons". For these positions, objectivity should be left in the gutter.
> After introduction of the death penalty in the 90s, the average net amount of opium trafficked to Singapore famously dropped by ~70%.
If we introduced the death penalty for minor shoplifting, minor shoplifting would probably drop by a huge percentage. Would that justify it?
> But not "objective ones" since the evidence clearly supports the death penalty for "objective reasons". For these positions, objectivity should be left in the gutter.
I disagree. When you evaluate all the pros and cons, I think the evidence is solidly against the death penalty.
> If we introduced the death penalty for minor shoplifting, minor shoplifting would probably drop by a huge percentage. Would that justify it?
Of-course it wouldn't - but you are precisely reinforcing my point. Because opponents can claim via evidence that the death penalty is effective for this, if you argue on the basis of "facts". Thus, objectivity should not be used as an argument for an ethical and moral human principle. Such principles stand by themselves to maintain the sanctity of the human soul - no justification needed.
> but you are precisely reinforcing my point. Because opponents can claim via evidence that the death penalty is effective for this, if you argue on the basis of "facts".
I don't believe I am. The death penalty being effective at reducing a crime isn't itself a sufficient justification of the death penalty.
> Thus, objectivity should not be used as an argument for an ethical and moral human principle. Such principles stand by themselves to maintain the sanctity of the human soul - no justification needed.
We do have objective arguments though; ultimately everything can be quantified by the amount of harm or good it does.
> Because I believe it can be supported and be shown to be objectively correct.
Then that's not an opinion, it's a proposition aiming at fact, and you should back it up rather than restating it loudly and more slowly when asked for justification.
It can be both. There's such a thing as opinions that coincide with facts. Until I put in effort to support it though, I only offer it as an opinion.
> you should back it up rather than restating it loudly and more slowly when asked for justification.
It's a fair amount of work to do so, and I haven't seen anyone worthy of putting in such work. This site isn't great, from a practical point of view, for that type of lengthy debate, either.
>and I haven't seen anyone worthy of putting in such work
So aside from the subhuman Singaporeans who should be violently forced to adopt your ethics, it is also everyone on HN that is far below your golden ethical level and not worth of effortful discussion (but definitely worth moral lecturing and grandstanding), got it.
> So aside from the subhuman Singaporeans who should be violently forced to adopt your ethics,
I didn't use the word subhuman, I used the word barbaric, and that's more regarding the authoritarian regime in power.
> it is also everyone on HN that is far below your golden ethical level and not worth of effortful discussion (but definitely worth moral lecturing and grandstanding), got it.
There's plenty of people who I could have a great, in-depth, reasonable discussion with, it's just that you're not one of them. Even this reply of yours is mainly bait, reliant on twisting things to get a reaction.
You're one of those commenters who needs to have the last word...this unproductive discussion is still going to go in for a few more replies yet because you can't let stuff go. I'm guessing my comment offended you because you live in Singapore and like it, is that it? All of this is just defensiveness?
The naysayers said we’d never even get to this point. It’s far more plausible to me that AI will advance enough to de-slopify our code than it is to me that there will be some karmic reckoning in which the graybeards emerge on top again.
What point have we reached? All I see is HN drowning in insufferable, identical-sounding posts about how everything has changed forever. Meanwhile at work, in a high stakes environment where software not working as intended has actual consequences, there are... a few new tools some people like using and think they may be a bit more productive with. And the jury's still out even on that.
The initial excitement of LLMs has significantly cooled off, the model releases show rapidly diminishing returns if not outright equilibrium and the only vibe-coded software project I've seen get any actual public use is Claude Code, which is riddled with embarrassing bugs its own developers have publicly given up on fixing. The only thing I see approaching any kind of singularity is the hype.
I think I'm done with HN at this point. It's turned into something resembling moltbook. I'll try back in a couple of years when maybe things will have changed a bit around here.
> The initial excitement of LLMs has significantly cooled off, the model releases show rapidly diminishing returns if not outright equilibrium and the only vibe-coded software project I've seen get any actual public use is Claude Code, which is riddled with embarrassing bugs its own developers have publicly given up on fixing. The only thing I see approaching any kind of singularity is the hype.
I am absolutely baffled by this take. I work in an objectively high stakes environment (Big 3 cloud database provider) and we are finally (post Opus 4.5) seeing the models and tools become good enough to drive the vast majority of our coding work. Devops and livesite is a harder problem, but even there we see very promising results.
I was a skeptic too. I was decently vocal about AI working for single devs but could never scale to large, critical enterprise codebases and systems. I was very wrong.
> I work in an objectively high stakes environment (Big 3 cloud database provider) and we are finally (post Opus 4.5) seeing the models and tools become good enough to drive the vast majority of our coding work
Please name it. If it’s that good, you shouldn’t be ashamed of doing so and we can all judge by ourselves how the quality of the service evolves.
> you shouldn’t be ashamed of doing so and we can all judge by ourselves how the quality of the service evolves.
That's kinda my bar at this point. On YouTube, there are so many talks and other videos about people using technology X to build Y software or managing Z infrastructure. But here all we got is slop, toys that should have been a shell script, or vague claims like GP.
Even ed(1) is more useful that what has been presented so far.
I do not await the day where the public commons is trashed by everyone and their claudebot, though perhaps the segmentation of discourse will be better for us in the long run given how most social media sites operate.
Same as it was for "blockchain" and NFTs. Tech "enthusiasts" can be quite annoying, until whatever they hype is yesterday's fad. Then they jump on the next big thing. Rinse, repeat.
I am not in a high stakes environment and work on a one-person size projects.
But for months I have almost stopped writing actual lines of code myself.
Frequency and quality of my releases had improved.
I got very good feedback on those releases from my customer base, and the number of bugs reported is not larger than on a code written by me personally.
The only downside is that I do not know the code inside out anymore even if i read it all, it feels like a code written by co-worker.
Edit: Apparently a financial term to mean “talk up your stock” which…if you don’t think that’s a good metric then why would you consider it talking my book lol cmon mayne
The AI agents can ALREADY "de-slopify" the code. That's one of the patterns people should be using when coding with LLMs. Keep an agent that only checks for code smells, testability, "slop", scalability problems, etc. alongside whatever agent you have writing the actual code.
> The naysayers said we’d never even get to this point. It’s far more plausible to me that AI will advance enough to de-slopify our code than it is to me that there will be some karmic reckoning in which the graybeards emerge on top again.
"The naysayers"/"the graybeards" have never been on top.
If they had been, many of the things the author here talks about getting rid of never would've been popular in the first place. Giant frameworks? Javascript all the things? Leftpad? Rails? VBA? PHP? Eventually consistent datastores?
History is full of people who successfully made money despite the downsides of all those things because the downsides usually weren't the most important thing in the moment of building.
It's also full of people who made money cleaning it all up when the people who originally built it didn't have time to deal with it anymore. "De-slopify" is going to be a judgment question that someone will need to oversee, there's no one-size-fits-all software pattern, and the person who created the pile of code is unlikely to be in a position to have time to drive that process.
Step 1: make money with shortcuts
Step 2: pay people to clean up and smooth out most of those shortcuts
I've bounced between both roles already a lot due to business cycles of startup life. When you're trying to out-scale your competitor you want to find every edge you can, and "how does this shit actually work" is going to be one of those edges for making the best decisions about how to improve cost/reliability/perf/usability/whatever. "It doesn't matter what the code looks like" is still hard to take seriously compared to the last few iterations of people pitching tools claiming the same. The turnaround loop of modifying code is faster now; the risk of a tar-pit of trying to tune on-the-fly a pile of ill-fitting spaghetti is not. It's gonna be good enough for a lot of people, Sturgeon's law - e.g. most people aren't great at knowing what usefully-testable code looks like. So let's push past today's status quo of software.
If I was working on a boring product at a big tech co I'd be very worried, since many of those companies have been hiring at high salaries for non-global-impact product experiments that don't need extreme scale or shipping velocity. But if you want to push the envelope, the opportunity to write code faster should be making you think about what you can do with it that other people aren't yet. Things beyond "here's a greenfield MVP of X" or "here's a port of Y."
This is completely out of touch with the reality of the average user. The main causes of account theft continue to be phishing and data breaches which are easily exploited because most people reuse their passwords and will never stop doing so to use a password manager. Biometric passkeys are probably the only viable way to improve the situation.
Really? What about phone theft? If someone sticks you up and knows all it takes is your finger to unlock the phone, I would think they would be more tempted to do so, as it takes more or less the same level of coercion as taking the phone. And it's easier than fumbling around with a password... therein is the double edged sword...
Demanding a password introduces more error and more room for evasion than a finger, which as I said is about the same as getting the phone in the first place. You are right that in some, maybe even most cases, it may not make a difference. But when time is of the essence, additional obstacles are often simply avoided.
You also might ask who is sticking you up. For example, I believe there is fourth amendment literature re government officials that have gotten away with using an arrested persons biometrics to unlock a phone, in a manner in which compelling the release of a password would be illegal. Put another way, I can simply grab your finger or put your phone in front of your face, whereas beating you until you surrender your password is a lot harder to accomplish without creating additional consequences.
Still depends on your threat model. Not everyone lives in a place where stick-ups and random arrests are so common place that you want to inconvenience yourself 99.999% of the happy flow.
Indeed, good point. Proper threat modeling is everything.
This also explains my original reply to the ancestor comment. As I see it, most people's personal threat model essentially already accounts for data breaches to the point that they are almost irrelevant. We hear about them all the time. More and more people are learning about credit freezes or 2fa or just getting these services baked into things they already use (more banks offer free credit monitoring, 2fa is increasingly a standard). It seems like we are in a place where data breaches just become essentially background noise to the average user.
In my view then, I would personally factor in physical theft as a higher threat than "phishing and data breaches". Even if low probability to begin with.
There is also the objective question of which occurs more or incurs more damages to individuals, the answer to which I do not know. I know companies often spend a lot of money to fix problems or deal with lawsuits, but individuals don't really get compensated by that the way they would if someone who ripped your phone away from you was tackled to the ground and your property got returned. For example.
As you say though, the threat model is everything.
> For example Germany, while the country is famous for the whole splitting the garbage, I am still waiting after 20 years to see the kitchen oil recycling recipients as we have in Portugal.
Because German environmental policy is about virtue signalling to keep the plebs busy, not solving environmental problems. Nuclear power plants replaced by coal and natural gas, obsession with recycling but nothing done about disposable packaging, car regulations and city design dictated for decades by the car manufacturing lobby, combustion engine limits/bans only when said manufacturers thought they could get on the Tesla gravy train and subsequently rolled back when reality became apparent, it just goes on.
They are against very specific parts of big government and censorship
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