Hacker News Reader

Comment by ImprobableTruth | Hacker News Reader

So if in 5 years the iPad really uses AI when zooming, it's perfectly fine because it's a built-in feature? What an absurd argument.

And both the prosecutions and defense's claims were fantastical, unsubstantiated (beyond some incorrect 'common sense' handwaving) and wrong - so since it's the prosecution that wants to enter new evidence, it's perfectly fine to ask them to back to it up. This isn't 'proving a negative', it's just asking them to prove that what they said (that zooming doesn't change the evidence).

View on HN

This wasn't 'new evidence', it was an iPad being used to play a video for Rittenhouse during cross-examination, in which he was being asked to describe the events being shown.

Both prosecutors and defence attorneys have used the same mechanism countless times in previous cases, without issue, because it is actually common sense that pinch to zoom is not going to substantively change what's shown in a video like that.

There was not a question regarding visual facts previously. Much of the video usage was used to either establish timing or things someone said.

In this case the prosecution wanted to significantly zoom into very grainy footage to ask about an object a few pixels wide, on footage so grainy the prosecution couldn't identify the face of their own lead witness.

The defense raised the question regarding zooning altering or adding pixels and the judge said flatly he didn't know. All the prosecution had to do was bring in an expert on video to explain how zoom works - or have the expert do a non-fractional proportional zoom.

I wonder how reliable even the source video is at pixel-scale? If it's encoded with something like MPEG then not every macroblock is updated every frame, and even if it was then there are still compression artifacts created by the discrete cosine tranform.

"is actually common sense"

Everything is common sence untill it isn't.

Its common sence that you can't take over control of a car over the internet and kill everyone in it, that acess to a website that shows realtime location of half of US polulation would at least be properly protected, that a car's accelerator pedal doesn't cause random and unpredictable effect thanks to spagghetti code, that when Fujistsu charges a postman for theft, they are not just covering up bug in their tracking and accounting software.

Most states use a form of common law, which is completely based on what is common practice and what is common sense. Or at least was in England hundreds of years ago...

That does not mean we ask Joe Blogs what his common sense tells him about highly technical subjects, whether that's effects of sniffing glue, bank interest accrual or image upscaling algorythms

True. And the case of what upscaling does is technically truly interesting and nuanced... but that doesn't mean that people don't have a sense of what zooming in does to an image, CSI "zoom and enhance" be willfully ignored.

They may have a sense of it, and it's not at all clear whether the sense they have of what will happen matches reality.

Which is why both sides can ask the other side to substantiate their claims or provide expert testimony to justify their claims. If there is no issue, then the other side will be able to relatively easily find someone to testify to that or provide other evidence.

It's how the system is meant to work. If this is being used abusively, the judge will catch on soon enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com