My understanding is a lot of the probability puzzles in Allen Downey's Probably Overthinking It [1] also boil down to similar selection effects (the inspection paradox is definitely in there). There is a lot of cool stuff in that book (and his blog of the same name).
According to [1] the average pre-trial detention in Cook County was 51 days in 2017-2019 and 76 in 2020-2021. Searching for Agustín Toscano I see many references to him being the detainee with the longest pre-trial period, so I think he actually is a pretty dramatic outlier. Though it is true that according to [2] there are at least two other people on murder charges with similarly long pre-trial detention periods.
Which is not to say that it isn't horrible to be even a few weeks in pre-trial detention let alone 51 days, but I don't think 14 years is a particularly regular occurrence.
I have also found that LLMs do not help me communicate my ideas in any way because the bottleneck is getting the ideas out of my head and into the prompt in the first place, but I will disagree with the idea that the output beyond the prompt contains no useful information.
In the article you linked the output he is complaining about probably had a prompt like this: "What are the downsides of using Euler angles for rotation representation in robotics? Please provide a bulleted list and suggest alternatives." The LLM expanded on it based on its knowledge of the domain or based on a search tool (or both). Charitably, the student looked it over and thought through the information and decided it was good (or possibly tweaked around the edges) and then sent it over - though in practice they probably just assumed it was correct and didn't check it.
For writing an essay like "I would rather read the prompt" LLMs don't seem like they would speed up the process much, but for something that involves synthesizing or summarizing information LLMs definitely can generate you a useful essay (though at least at the moment the default system prompts generate something distinctively bland and awful).
For some reason I parsed "fed" here as "fed[eral agent]". If anyone else was confused, the headline is referring to someone (possibly a lawyer on his side) feeding him answers through the glasses.
One question: I was exploring the public spaces and I'm wondering are these your real finances, or is this just a mocked-up example? https://finfam.app/mahmoud/space
And if they are your real finances, are you manually entering in things like your credit card balances, or do you have integrations that automatically track that? If there aren't integrations already, is that on the road map?
I thought the metaphor was clear - society, as a whole, is not threatened by this sort of thing, and it is not even particularly dangerous from an expected value perspective. The point is not that nothing should be done - as I mentioned with my reference to hygiene precautions. Washing your hands and encasing yourself in an antiseptic bubble are two very different things, and the fact of the matter is that not all deaths are preventable. I was trying to make the point that the knee-jerk reaction of "something should be done" discounts the possibility that sometimes it's not worth it to do anything, either because additional action would have no effect or because the marginal cost of that action exceeds the benefits.
A fairly large number of people die from influenza every year, but we don't have a mass surveillance dragnet to try and isolate flu vectors, for good reason. We do, however, have a fairly robust vaccination system which is a sensible precaution to take.
How will cutting off immigration do anything? I think it's important to realize that this is something that happens and that you don't necessarily have to do anything. If you get a cold, you don't quarantine your block and divert your life savings to rhinovirus research, you just deal with it and try and take sensible precautions about hygiene.
1. https://greenteapress.com/wp/probably-overthinking-it/