Digory

Exactly. I won't buy this, but I might buy "magsafe on a chrome arm, with a bluetooth speaker" from AliExpress in a few weeks.

Smart doorbells and thermostats are popular.

Smart door locks are mostly an AirBnB / rental cabin thing.

Agreed. Six months ago, it was basically a gloried grammarly.

But lately, I’ve been taking hints from the “company brain” models, where it develops a running model of the case, and assesses each new piece as it comes in and updates the file.

I’ve also been using “Ralph Wiggum”-type models where you pass letter or contract drafts back and forth between agents with different goals (rules compliance, grammar, conciseness, ai slop detector, an opposing counsel critic, etc.). After a few rounds, it’s not perfect — but I start with a very good first draft in my hands.

This seems like a very similar set of tools to Anthropic. But I’ve enjoyed using the various frontier models to criticize each other.

Using recursive loops, the output has gone from a high school level intern to a 2nd year lawyer in about a year. It still doesn’t beat the experts, but so much legal work is (legally significant) pedantry, not legal philosophy.

AI will not kill off lawyers, or reduce the amount of litigation. It will increase volume and velocity.

Of course they will be. But you can’t sue alibaba and deepseek here, or get your injunction to work in China.

And that's the crisis. They're about to get sued, prosecuted, and enjoined from every American jurisdiction.

They need the feds to give them protection from every podunk trial court in America.

I'd put my money on "yes," here. Of course, OAI can pay them off. But you know it had to happen to more than HuggingFace, and so somebody's going to try it.

They seem to be okay with an American slowdown, even though the Chinese won’t slow down. So maybe they want something the Chinese already have: liability protection.

The models spontaneously hack everything important without shame.

The frontier labs are going to get enjoined and regulated twelve ways to Sunday if the Feds don’t socialize the costs.

On acquisition pricing: Why smarter AI models could drive up compute prices 10x (at least temporarily). [0] This seems mind blowing, but the big boys seem to be behaving as if it's directionally true.

If compute is constrained and expensive, OpenRouter is what you'll use to get around the constraints at individual providers.

[0] https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp/status/2084333160075055122?s=20

On acquisition pricing: Why smarter AI models could drive up compute prices 10x (at least temporarily).

This seems mind blowing, but the big boys seem to be behaving as if it's directionally true.

If compute is constrained and expensive, OpenRouter is what you'll use to get around the constraints at individual providers.

https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp/status/2084333160075055122?s=20

This was about a year ago, and it was pretty rudimentary. I'd just drop in jpegs into ChatGPT and ask for a translation of small sections.

If I were doing it today, I'd probably do it in codex or code, have it develop a plan, look for better tools, etc.

Report back if you have success!

I had ChatGPT translate some old, handwritten French legal documents for family history purposes. It was far more accurate than I expected.

At scale, with better models, we might have a way to clear out the old archives. Not only could you translate, you could ask it to triage the discoveries. "Would the average person find this noteworthy?"

1. "Conversation" is purely anthropomorphism. It's software input and output. If the client makes an excel spreadsheet about the cost benefit of ripping off people, it's not work-product.

But the lawyer's draft damages analysis in excel has always been protected.

2. If we're going to buy the "conversation" conceit, lawyers talking to consulting experts have always had a lot more work product protection than testifying experts.

The lawyer talking to Claude feels like talking to a consulting expert, especially since Claude can't have independent knowledge of facts that would allow it to testify.

I’d guess Lexis did that to itself. Usually the “deal” is that West or Lexis provides codification and reporting services for zero dollars, if they are named the official printer.

So the Legislature doesn’t have to maintain and oversee their own nest of troublesome legal pedants, and picks up a few contributions from legal publishing “entrepreneurs.”

By making the Annotated code official, it meant that anyone looking to prove what a particular law says in court would have to get it from the expensive, $412 hardback book, not the free version. I’d guess Lexis asked for that provision as part of its deal with Georgia.

They were caught flatfooted between being Wal-Mart and Amazon.

Sears had shifted so firmly into retail by the 80s. Then Wal-Mart ate their lunch on low price retail logistics.

Then Amazon came along, and solved last-mile delivery of catalog sales.

"...777 fleet faces an uncertain future after Dulles engine failure ... and also before Dulles engine failure, for reasons having nothing to do with the Dulles engine failure."

To be fair, I read all of it, and both sides of the question interest me. But the engine failure and the economics of the 777 are totally different things.

Yes,I noticed Kansas City is prominently featured on all the maps, which makes sense for rail hubs.

But strange, then, that the north/south line (Kansas City Southern / Canadian Pacific) is not there.

So - even bigger tomorrow? Tonight was pretty amazing.

Always buy the warranty with Samsung refrigerators. After three failed attempts to repair our ice maker, the insurer refunded the purchase price.

Snoopy was popular among the astronauts, and Schultz liked NASA. All the Apollo 10 modules had Snoopy related call signs, chosen by the astronauts.

“ The command module was given the call sign "Charlie Brown" and the lunar module the call sign "Snoopy". These were taken from the characters in the comic strip, Peanuts, Charlie Brown, and Snoopy.These names were chosen by the astronauts with the approval of Charles Schulz, the strip's creator,who was uncertain it was a good idea, since Charlie Brown was always a failure. The choice of names was deemed undignified by some at NASA…”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_10#:~:text=The%20comman...

Error at step 4: cd frontend && npm install && cd .. doesn't grok on my mac.

I’d guess the idea was about generalizing the team’s efforts to spot fakery across the internet, in-browser. But that horse has left the barn.

Before AI, a lot of search result gamesmanship looked more like bad Amazon reviews. But leading-edge fraud is far past “humans pretending to be real, U.S.-based consumers/posters on a website.” The tools don’t generalize anymore.

In our lifetimes, I predict some of us will choose to be governed (at least in part) by Sam Altman's benevolent, everlasting machine.

I'd think ambiguous statements about the scope of your AI would make it hard to prove fraud, if you were being careful at all. "Involving AI" could mean 1% AI.

So it's doubly surprising to me the government chose (criminal) wire fraud, not (civil) securities fraud, which would have a lower burden of proof.

Government lawyers almost never try to make their job harder than it has to be.

The sentence from the article is:

"While the total amount the Greens have made in charitable contributions has been kept private, former Oral Roberts University president Dr. Mark Rutland may have worded it best when he described the family as “kingdom givers”.

It doesn't link to the Forbes article's definition. Without more, I'd read that sentence to say "Kingdom givers" is a descriptor of the total amounts given by the Greens -- we don't know the amount, but they give kingdoms.

As I explained above, "Kingdom" is unrelated to the size of the gift, as made clear from the quote you cited.

It’s fine to be inexperienced with Christianity, but it skews the reporting.

For example “kingdom giver” is not someone who gives kingdoms, it’s someone who gives to Christ’s kingdom. But the widow and her mite is an example of kingdom giving as much as the Greens.

These arguments sometimes reach juries, who are asked to award damages based on "physical harms," in a separate category from "mental anguish."

The argument that "brains are rewired" or "generations of genetics are harmed" is popular in 'trauma informed' arguments for compensation or government help.

“Recognizing personal and institutional bias” sounds nice, until someone has to decide which biases or differences to overcome, and at what cost.

There’s a bias against tattoos. What price should the company pay to overcome multigenerational tattoo-phobia? Tattoo activists will tell you any amount of money and inefficiency is morally required.

The shift from “non-discrimination between races” to “offsetting differences attributable to society’s bias” necessarily calls for special treatment of those perceived as disadvantaged, and so becomes illegal where the law lays down a nondiscrimination rule. Kendi was honest about that part.

Most people grasp the reasonableness standard for running a disease lab: you were negligent if the diseases break containment, because lab standards should be in place to prevent that obvious risk.

Under the wet market scenario, it's not instinctively clear to me what was unreasonable about the practices of the vendors at the market. Does selling bats more likely than not result in spreading disease? Or selling bats in proximity to pangolins? It seems like the vendors were doing the same thing vendors have done for millennia, not doing something unusually or obviously substandard.

Right. It fits well with the Anglosphere’s concept of compensible negligence.

China had a duty to run the lab safely, it breached that duty, and so China is responsible for the harms and losses caused by its negligence.

Missouri actually filed suit against China, and it is set to go to trial next week. It will be interesting to watch. If Missouri were to get a judgement for all the costs created by the virus, it could theoretically collect Chinese-owned assets in the US.

And, the news has been full of stories about one particular Chinese asset the US would like to have held in the US: TikTok.