mountainb

Evidence doesn't mean overwhelming proof. My post was confined to 1989-1990. I didn't make the claim in your post. Homer Simpson also doesn't work in a factory; he's a nuclear engineer at a power plant. I dunno what you're trying to get at here. There are at least as many problems with trying to use statistics as evidence as there are with using anecdotes and fictional references.

I would also trust 100 fictional cartoon characters before I would trust anything said in a pirated article written by Noah Smith about anything. If Noah Smith said that grass was green I would assume that it's blue.

No, it's useful evidence in the same way that contemporaneous fiction is often useful evidence. The first season aired from 1989-1990. The living conditions from the show were plausible. I know because I was alive during that time. My best friend was the son of a vacuum cleaner salesman with a high school education, and they owned a three bedroom house in a nice area, two purebred dogs, and always had new cars. His mom never worked in any capacity. My friend played baseball on a travel team and eventually he went to a private high school.

A 2025 Homer is only plausible if he had some kind of supplemental income (like a military pension or a trust fund), if Marge had a job, if the house was in a depressed region, or he was a higher level supervisor. We can use the Simpsons as limited evidence of contemporary economic conditions in the same way that we could use the depictions of the characters in the Canterbury Tales for the same purpose.

Resisting production isn't unethical, but telling your client to commit fraud is illegal, unethical, and waives attorney-client privilege.

Generally that lawyers in tech can be both good and bad, but that both the culture at west coast tech companies and how they handle their attorneys often leads to ethical issues that just do not happen in more buttoned down industries elsewhere. In particular many tech companies are just more protective of employees for no discernable purpose. An investment bank faced with a similar situation as the DC v. Meta case would have blamed and terminated the employees and attorneys involved, and trussed them up for prison if needed to protect the company. An oil company accused of faking environmental studies would throw the guy who doctored them under the bus.

This also serves the public interest (although some may disagree) because it preserves a productive company and provides a powerful incentive for management to grind individual corporate criminals into meatballs to protect itself and shareholders.

Meta's instinct was to defend the employee and the illegal activity rather than sacrificing the lamb to protect the company and the shareholders. They are not the only company that does things like this and it just makes no sense. It is something in the water in Northern California that makes them do this or some strange Pacific wind.

The other stupid thing that Meta did was commissioning these studies in the first place. What is the company doing? How does this benefit shareholder value? Is this a jobs program? If you did not like the answers they might give you, you should never have paid a bunch of academics to do these studies in the first place. The company sells digital fent to the masses. Of course it's bad for kids. You don't need a study to tell you that.

There is a conservative case for this in that the 30 year fixed mortgage, combined with all of the foreclosure protections both old and new, amount to a government benefits program. Historically, this type of mortgage was developed to promote family homeownership. The mortgage systems have continually blown up in "crises" in part because it's a product of policy more than it is a market product. This is partly why investors both corporate and small flipper types actually do cause serious distortions: the US housing market is a welfare program first and a market for bundled land and houses second.

No one wants to abolish this welfare program (you would have an easier time abolishing Social Security), but also the government wants to keep the trappings of a market price system. It is easier to have serial crises and to blame some guys for the predictable explosions every time, adjust the laws to create enormous numbers of lawyer billable hours nationwide, and then set the stage for the next crisis and the next round of patsies to be blamed. Fortunately, this time we have AI to write all the think pieces about what it really means.

Try to drop a foreign phrase into MS Word to add a little color and watch it go completely berserk.

I think it has more to do with the various new meanings that have been attached to the word "agent" and the concept of "agency" by software and some parts of west coast culture. Those concepts do not really have much to do with the law of agency.

Lawyers don't come up with good ideas; their role is to explain why your good ideas are illegal. There's a good argument that AI agents cannot exercise legal agency. At the end of the day, corporations and partnerships are just piles of "natural persons" (you know, the type that mostly has two hands, two feet, a head, etc.).

The fact that corporate persons can have agency relationships does not necessarily mean that hypothetical computer persons can have agency relationships for this reason.

There are so many other ways to make money that don't involve crime. And there are even many crimes that make more money that are far less harmful to society.

There's a more transparent and straightforward pathway to a lifetime appointment as a federal judge (which actually pays OK and has many social perks) than there is to a tenured professorship in most fields. Judges have Solomon-like-life-and-death power, and the lawyers who argue before them (often successful, high-status people in their own right) are professionally obligated to suck up.

By comparison almost all professorships are like becoming the most important hobo on a given street corner.

Many employers pay a premium for predictably elite cadres of students. The schools want to try to pass off mediocre graduates as having some of the elite special sauce even though only a small number of students have what it takes. We know exactly what to do to produce elite cadres by aggressive sorting. But the incentives created by the federal government encourage the institutions to extrude mediocre students like a chicken nugget machine produces processed meat product. Every hot student-nugget is worth a tens of thousands of dollars a year in freshly printed loan money directed towards administrators and rent on dorms and apartments irrespective of quality; so the incentive is to stuff the students with filler.

It is often easier to make another sale of a downgraded product using earned customer goodwill than it is to continuously innovate, delight existing customers, and win new ones based on quality. It's less risky just to run a brand into the dirt, get paid, and screw any shareholders remaining.

Also many of these kinds of activities are illegal, but people do it anyway on the reasonable calculation that they won't be sued and that the government won't investigate them.

To use John Adams' separation of republics into the categories of "the many, the few, and the one," the few in our current day are unusually conflict-adverse both among each other and with respect to the people.

When faced with the current crisis, they look at the options for investment and they see some that will involve a lot of conflict with the many (changing the industrial employment arrangement, rearranging state entitlements), and they see see some that avoid conflict or change. Our few as they are got that way by outsourcing anything physical and material as much as possible and making everything "into computer." So they promote a self serving spiritual belief that because overinvesting in computers got them to their elevated positions, that even more computer is what the world needs more than anything else.

This approach also mollifies the many in a way that would be easily recognizable in any century to any classically educated person. Our few do not really know what the many are there for, but they figure that they might as well extract from the many through e.g. sports gambling apps and LLM girlfriends.

There's a lot of mental cycles being expended on "how to avoid going to court over contract litigation" when the answer could be provided by a bog-standard forum selection clause requiring arbitration from a template last updated in 1992 or indeed a chatbot; but you would have to ask it the right question.

Looking up the lawsuit in question but without reviewing the record, it looks like this was probably as much personal as it was business. This always makes cases a lot harder to settle. When it is just business, you can almost always work it out in numbers. When you screw over a wealthy man in a very personal and humiliating way, your contract case can become like divorce, which is only good for the lawyers and for no one else. Ask the chatbot to summarize "The Prince" for you and maybe this will be one of the points that it gives you.

With the right teams and resources, this could be done in a shorter time. With that team and skillset there was no way to complete this in a way that did not result in a lot of contract liability to the government and other silliness.

"That’s not possible — you have 90,000 contracts,” he said. “Unless you write some code. But even then it’s not really possible.”

This entirely possible with some lawyers, some business analysts, perhaps some hospital administrative consultants, and ordinary support staff. That team might even use LLMs in some capacity but not in the way described by the article. Reviewing 90,000 hospital and other service contracts sounds like just another project for a mid-sized or big law firm; or the government. That is how those contracts were created in the first place.

This is like the meme about someone's uncle talking about how there are these 90,000 contracts that no one knows how to review because we've forgotten how to do it. If there's something America still knows how to do it's how to review tens of thousands of turgid government contracts.

Professional proctored testing centers exist in many locations around the world now. It's not that complicated to have a couple people at the front, a method for physically screening test-takers, providing lockers for personal possessions, providing computers for test administration, and protocols for checking multiple points of identity for each test taker.

This hybrid model is vastly preferable to "true" remote test taking in which they try to do remote proctoring to the student's home using a camera and other tools.

I guarantee you that every company you have ever worked for has committed crimes and incurred various forms of potential civil liability.

One one hand, maybe it's good to have better searchable records, even if it's hard to quantify the benefit.

On the other hand, now all your meetings produce reams of computer searchable records subject to discovery in civil and criminal litigation, possibly leading to far worse liability than would have been possible in a mostly email based business.

For more, see the Copyright Office's reports on this: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

Brings to mind the line about the behavior of most organizations being best explained by it being controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

Just mass-violating the copyright of deep pocketed plaintiffs is like writing them checks that need to go through court first. The Constitution expressly gives Congress the power to make laws concerning copyright. Congress used that power. The statutes say what they say. There is no wriggling out of it; there are centuries of case law reconciling copyright with the 1A. If the IA is going to be provocative like this it should do so outside of the reach of the judgments of US courts.

No they're not. There are whole classes of professional that take on personal liability related to handling of private information. Journalists can be one of them but one reason you do not want a journalist handling private information is that they do not get the benefit of privilege in most jurisdictions. Anything in their possession that is private can be exposed by subpoena or other court order.

>It's written into the statute as an example of something that would be fair use.

Statutory text controls what the courts can do, even and perhaps especially when it includes an example.

>People go to art school primarily because they want to create art. People study computer science primarily because they want to write code. It's their direct intention and purpose to compete with existing works.

Interesting perspective.

>So if you use Windows and then want to create Linux...

I don't understand your meaning.

>How is that logic any different than for AI training?

That is what Mark Lemley, law professor at Stanford, has argued in his many law review articles and amicus briefs: he believes that training is analogous to learning. The court here didn't agree with the Lemley view.

>It not only doesn't have any explicit requirement for a formal school (it just says "teaching"), it also isn't limited to teaching, teaching is just one of the things specified in the statute as being the kind of thing Congress intended fair use to include.

In practice courts tend to limit these exceptions to formal teaching arrangements.

No that is not an extreme interpretation of the fair use factors. This is a routinely emphasized factor in fair use analyses for both copyright and trademark. School fair use is different because that defense is written into the statute directly in 17 U.S.C. § 107. Also, § 108 provides extensive protections for libraries and archives that go beyond fair use doctrines.

The idea that the schools are encouraging the students to compete with the original authors of works taught in the classroom is fanciful by the meaning that courts usually apply to competition. Your example is different from this case in which Ross wanted to compete in the same market against West offering a similar service at a lower price. Another reason that the schools get a carveout is because it would make most education impractical without each school obtaining special licenses for public performance for every work referenced in the classroom.

But maybe that also provokes the question as to if schools really deserve that kind of sweetheart treatment (a massive indirect subsidy), or does it over-privileges formal schools relative to the commons at large?

Part of the reason for this is also is that the underlying clothes and fabrics were also very very expensive relative to what they became in the post-industrial world. So you would want to show off what you had.

It will be "fixed" by just killing off old people in large numbers through some combination of high pressure euthanasia campaigns and denial of healthcare subsidies. Just no one wants to be honest about it.

Our political culture is not a high integrity, high honesty culture but one that relies on a lot of indirect communication and symbolism. In this the west has become a lot more like east Asian stereotype. So in my view this crisis will be solved, just not in a way that people want to acknowledge. A lot of the nonserious "attempts" to address the issues are just performances to make it look like the facially palatable policies have been tried before they inevitably fail.

In practice, even later English kings were effectively elected and could have their terms ended early. Taking a few Plantagenet examples, the nobles imprisoned Edward II as retaliation for the plots of Hugh Despenser, and then the king died mysteriously (adverb used ironically). Edward III was far more popular with the nobles due to his many victories in Scotland and France. His successor, Richard II, tried to make a lasting peace with France, but that was much less popular with the most powerful burghers and nobles. So Richard II was deposed, imprisoned, and died mysteriously. No doubt if they had security cameras in those days, they would have mysteriously ceased functioning at some critical moment. So ended the Plantagenets and began the line of Lancastrian kings.

I would push back slightly and say that this trend is more even and there is less disruption to it than sometimes historians try to present. E.g. the execution of Charles I during the English Civil War of the 17th century is often presented as a sharp break with tradition, but if one accepts that dissatisfactory kings usually wind up murdered via artful legalism combined with some negligent-jailor theater, it just looks like business as usual.

The difficulty here is that it has long been US policy to promote the exports of its intellectual property (such as its movies) and communications networks (such as the internet). Trade policy is almost always a two way street, particularly in the modern era in which arrangements like the "unequal treaties" that choked the Qing dynasty are highly unusual. So banning Tiktok necessarily results in reciprocal bans. Canada does not have similar concerns as the US does because it is our little gas station whose pretensions to independence we humor and they do not export IP or communications technologies at the same scale as we do.

When I handled a lot of ad spending for numerous companies, Google would schedule continuous meetings with junior sales people dedicated to figuring out which client relationships that they could interfere with to convince me to spend more money recklessly. This is a common experience in that particular industry with Google's salespeople in particular.

What's interesting about that is that if any of the (dozens? over a hundred?) salespeople that I interacted with could have provided a solid rationale for what they were suggesting in the context of what a particular client wanted to achieve, I could have been persuaded. None of them ever did at any time. It was always just a one-sided appeal to spend more money with no coherent plan for a return on spending.

The "new" reddit constantly tries to promote brainrot to you when you are in the main feed. You can evade this by never using the main feed. No one wants to let you just read what you want to read.

This is one of the reasons why I have returned to print media. Unfortunately, a lot of magazines and newspapers are also really bad now also. The Wall Street Journal has fallen off a cliff, turning into something between Cosmopolitan and Business Insider, and I am cancelling my subscription this year. The Economist has done a good job keeping up the quality level. The fact that something is in print does not necessarily make it better if all the writers have brainrot or the content is optimized for digital engagement first.

The internet has become a medium for poor people to watch unlimited user-generated episodes of Maury and Jerry Springer. The only internet I really want to use is to work, buy products, and read my email. Getting older is bad enough without the computer trying to make me dumber on top of that.

So get more TAs. They cost less than Class B CDL drivers and will drag themselves over broken glass to take these jobs. And 65 hours of work per semester for oral examinations seems entirely reasonable. A week and a half for an FTE spent observing, with another half week to full week for grading seems completely reasonable for capstone semester work.