572 karma · joined June 8, 2019
The Data Protection Commission in Ireland are remarkably lax about enforcing it because the government quite likes the tax revenue that Google, Apple and Meta brings them.
Someone betting—sorry, investing in a prediction market—means you can have even more confidence in their convictions.
But someone having a Patreon account for people to voluntarily donate money to them means they can't be trusted.
It didn't feel drastically different from using ChatGPT with the ability to search the web, except it was searching material on Lexis, both statute/case law and commentary. It dug out some commentary that confirmed my prior hunches, but also pointed to some cases that weren't in any way relevant.
Otherwise, all the experimentation I've done is with non-confidential material using public LLMs.
For testing, I've asked (admittedly last-gen) LLMs to generate legal opinions regarding issues in commercial English civil litigation, and I received back cases where the citation is real, but the area of law (family law) is not relevant as family courts apply a very different set of procedural rules.
(If you squint a bit, they sometimes might be relevant... and could be useful for a particularly creative litigator to make a novel argument on behalf of a very risk tolerant client. But you would very much want to go read those cases and think quite hard about them.)
Also, an interesting example: in English litigation (where, broadly, loser pays unlike America where each side pays), maximising billable hours is not always a viable strategy for anybody if those costs aren't recoverable on success. Someone involved in large-scale commercial litigation involving disclosure of millions of documents who doesn't use algorithmic document classification (now pretty broadly accepted as normal) potentially runs the risk of a judge determining that the costs of going through all the documents by hand isn't recoverable. Insurers/litigation funders aren't going to want to risk padding the costs so much that the judge prevents them from recovering their stake in the litigation.
Customers using their own LLMs: yep, they might do that. I think the pitch from the legal LLM providers is "we've got legally trained people doing RLHF to make it more accurate" mixed in with "also we've got a partnership with Lexis/Westlaw/etc. so we can do legal research that's better than what's on the open web", with a little bit of "if you get sued for professional negligence, 'I used the legal AI thing that's built into Westlaw' is gonna be more convincing to a judge and jury (and your insurance company) than 'I used ChatGPT, yes, like the app you've got on your phone'...".
Or in prison for fraud.
You then get lots of interesting exceptions and difficulties in applying that rule: who pays when you have multiple potential defendants (but some of them have died or gone out of business or are in a different jurisdiction), or there are fiddly causation issues, or the defendant is an organisation that's vicariously liable for their employee/contractor/authorised religious leader/any number of other relationships, or there's insurance involved, or there's some third party interest, or the purportedly tortious act was mandated by some law or other obligation, or the government decides to set up some kind of alternative process of compensation which may or may not indemnify the tortfeasor, and so on and so on.
When dealing with the not-so-straightforward cases, appellate courts do look at questions like "is this a fair and equitable distribution of the cost?" and legal scholars compare the pros and cons of tort liability to other mechanisms (compensation by the government, industry self-regulation, no-fault/strict liability, mandatory insurance etc).
There are clear AI-specific reasons why it's being crammed down everybody's necks.
Namely: someone in management has bet the entire strategy on it. The strategy is not working and they need to juice the numbers desperately.
But if they remove a feature I rely on, I can't put it back.
If they add a feature I hate, I can't remove it.
If they jack the price up, I have no real solution to this.
If they move features I rely on from the standard tier to the 5x more expensive pro tier, I have no real solution to this.
Why, yes, this is an echo of the old argument for open source software.
If the commercial provider charging you $10 a month breaks it, you also have no capacity to fix it.
Your options are: send them an email, or unsubscribe and use something else.
Votes close at 10pm. Might be a few stragglers left in the queue, so call it 10:15pm. (Exit poll results are embargoed until 10pm.)
Ballot boxes are transferred from individual polling station to the location of the count. The postal votes have been pre-checked (but the actual ballot envelope has not been opened or counted) and are there to be counted alongside the ballots from the polling stations.
Then a small army of vote counters go through the ballots and count them and stack together ballots by vote. There are observers - both independent and appointed by the candidates. The returning officer counts the batches up, adjudicates any unclear or challenged ballot, then declares the result.
The early results come out usually about 1 or 2. The bulk of the results come out about 4 or 5. Some constituencies might take a bit longer - it's a lot less effort to get ballot boxes a mile or two down the road in a city centre constituency than getting them from Scottish islands etc. - but it'll be clear who has the majority by 6 or 7 the next day.
I can appreciate that the US is significantly larger than the UK, but pencil-and-paper voting with prompt manual counts is eminently possible.
The capabilities the NHS app offers will depend on what subset of the functionality the GP practice has implemented (on, in reality, the commercial vendor that makes the software they use).
NHS has pretty reasonable developer documentation which explains most of the high level pieces of the system - https://digital.nhs.uk/developer/guides-and-documentation
Browsers without metaverse integration will be a non-starter.
Without integrating metaverse and blockchain features into Firefox, Mozilla is at a significant disadvantage compared to other browsers. Don't get left behind!
That way, the users who want them can download them, and the users who don't, don't.
What numbers? Have Mozilla published any numbers showing their AI experiments have been warmly received by users?
(And you'd usually appeal to the Court of Appeal first.)
You're working in a commercial/closed source environment and want to find out why line 57 in src/blah/db/utils.py does that. Where do you look?
- inline code comments. Usually non-existent. Often out-of-date, sometimes misleading, frequently tells you no more than you can discern from just reading the code itself (especially now type annotations are trendy again). Rarely explains why the code exists. There's a reason people caution against too many comments, and that translates into people probably not putting enough commentsin.
- calling code? Helpful, but thanks to microservices and increased levels of abstraction (APIs, DI frameworks, messaging buses, config parsing) you've got to go check 900 different repos out to work out what is going on.
- email? Give up. You'll find invitations to the company Christmas party and Q2 sales figures but actual tech explanations are in short supply.
- Slack etc - same problems as email, plus developers who hide away all the interesting stuff in private team channels
- Google Docs - you probably don't have access to the relevant doc, and there's no way to know that you don't
- wiki/docs? Half baked, wrong etc. Or it'll be autogenerated JavaDoc type stuff that'll tell you what you already know or can reasonably infer from the code. Also, findability sucks. Or the developers just avoid the whole thing because the software is nasty and corporate and barely usuable.
- bug tracker/ticketing system? You ask around and someone says "oh yeah, Dave made that change two years ago" and then you search for tickets that match related keywords only to find out that those tickets weren't brought over from Trello into JIRA, and now you need to go ask IT to give you access to the legacy Trello board which they don't want to do because then it'll put them over the five users per month limit or whatever.
- Architecture Decision Records / decision logs / whatever you want to to call them - nice if they exist, I guess.
- ask the person who wrote it? This assumes they still work there and can remember. Plus you gotta do the asking around routine which takes days and destroys all hope and joy in the world.
By a process of elimination, commit messages are the closest you're going to get. They're right there - on your computer, neatly integrated into your editor, hopefully. You can search them fast in a terminal window rather than in some slow web-based monstrosity. If you're lucky, they're actually useful. Even if they aren't, they're at least contextually useful in helping you narrow down your search strategy for the inevitable plunge through email/slack/JIRA/Trello/internal wiki etc.
Ideally what should happen is the really useful commit messages get copied into stable technical documentation like decision logs or a properly maintaned wiki. If people did that, great, but it's pretty rare. A culture of sharing weird interesting tech things in a Slack-type system can help because future devs can at least search but you do that at the cost of more interruptions for colleagues now.
The broader issue is of all the bad options you can choose, it often tracks the wrong thing. In something like Trello/JIRA/whatever, if you're looking for the technical reasons, it'll have the business reasons without the technical stuff, or vice versa. You generally want both, and most systems only give you half the story.
A few years ago, someone brought a crowdfunded private prosecution of Boris Johnson for "misconduct in public office". The whole thing was incredibly silly and a massive waste of time. (MIPO isn't there for politicians lying/misleading people, though that does indeed suck.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_v_Johnson
Also, following the murder of Stephen Lawrence, the CPS decided to not prosecute for lack of evidence. The Lawrence family brought a private prosecution which failed. Jeopardy attached at that point.
Later evidence emerged which made the case a lot stronger, but had the Criminal Justice Act 2003 not been passed allowing limited exceptions to the double jeopardy rule, it would not have been possible to bring much stronger cases against the perpetrators.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Stephen_Lawrence
The CPS have the power to take over and stop an ongoing private prosecution, but the ability to bring private prosecutions sits really uncomfortably with the principle of double jeopardy. Like, someone could do a bad job of bringing a prosecution in a case where the CJA2003 double jeopardy exception doesn't apply and then the person can't be retried by the CPS.
It's kind of reasonable to deprioritise the Bakerloo, even as someone who used to use the Bakerloo very frequently. Bakerloo gets significantly less usage than other lines: Piccadilly has double the number of annual travellers than the Bakerloo, for instance.
(It'll be interesting to see if Piccadilly usage numbers go down now Crossrail has been finished and some portion of Heathrow travellers switch over.)
The Bakerloo itself is also kind of a weird, redundant line. The NW segment doubles up with the Watford DC line, and for a lot of NW destinations like Wembley, the Jubilee and Metropolitan are better choices.
There was also the issue of the proposed extension out to New Cross and/or Lewisham. They probably wanted to put off making a decision on the rolling stock upgrade until after they'd decided whether they were doing the SE extension.
Current court dress guidance from the BSB: https://www.barcouncilethics.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/1...
A bunch of people I know who play video games are on Telegram. I'm pointing out that I can talk to them without sharing my phone number which I can't do on WhatsApp/Signal.
Not being stalked by weirdos is a higher priority for a lot of people than anything involving spooky Edward Snowden stuff involving the NSA, FSB, GCHQ, Mossad and Five Eyes etc.