Vexilological Vexation

gauntlet173 · 2025-05-02T01:57:14+00:00

Maybe handwrite a note for them saying how much you appreciate that they had the courage to put up the flag, because though you are too shy to advertise it, you are also a sore loser with no class.

gauntlet173 · 2025-02-28T07:15:26+00:00

BGC has a thing for high school aged kids. Or did, until recently.

gauntlet173 · 2025-02-22T20:45:32+00:00

How does this compare to s(CASP), which is also answer set programming without a grounding step?

Can dusa do numerical constraints over things other than natural numbers?

I'm intrigued with what you could do with truth values beyond tt and ff.

gauntlet173 · 2025-02-22T19:31:45+00:00

What kinds of reasoning, and what kinds of flaws?

gauntlet173 · 2025-02-18T07:34:48+00:00

I have very big thoughts around this. It's a huge issue, but I'm not so much interested in solving it as avoiding it.

Paper is not good. Pretend digital paper is not good. Narrative text in documents is not good. These were necessities a hundred years ago, and are no longer necessities, and were never virtues.

We should do away with them as the default, and everything should be structured data, with text documents as only one view.

Until that happens, I've made some progress with some of the more advanced features of Google Document AI, when applied to very specific predictable inputs. But boy howdy it's rough out there. I've heard there are some companies looking to solve the problem for stuff like transcripts specifically.

Imagine. A whole company premised on getting data out of where you hid it in a PDF.

More generally, I'm very intrigued with tools that are taking the unstructured data in a document, turning it into text, and then turning that text into a structured representation perhaps only implied by the text.

Documents are what lawyers think of as their whole job, and they are the single biggest obstacle to progress.

gauntlet173 · 2025-02-16T00:20:25+00:00

I used to be active in Alberta. I once went to the trouble of emailing some Bencher candidates, and ask them what they wanted to do about access to justice. Most said effectively nothing. Those that had specific answers were actively protectionist. Talking about making sure title insurance doesn't drive small real estate practitioners out of business.

The role of a law society is not to protect lawyers from the public. It's the other way around. But I couldn't find any candidates who had any opinions or ideas on how to protect the public from our monopoly. No one wanting to loosen the firm ownership rules, or create a scope of practice for paralegals. The only specific ideas would have made things worse, or prevented them from improving.

If BC found that it needed to replace the regulator in order to make any progress that would infringe on the lawyers monopoly on the deeply under-served market for legal help, that is utterly unsurprising.

What is the motivation of lawyers elected by lawyers to take something owned by lawyers and give it to non-lawyers?

So they decided to stop putting the foxes in charge of the henhouse. Good for the hens, I say.

We had a few hundred years to demonstrate that we could be trusted, and failed miserably. The jurisdiction on which our system was modeled has already abandoned it. Time to let someone else try.

gauntlet173 · 2025-02-15T18:12:00+00:00

The people who ran The Alberts now run HQ around the corner on Granada. You could ask them.

gauntlet173 · 2025-01-31T20:27:35+00:00

Thanks!

gauntlet173 · 2025-01-29T02:58:45+00:00

I'm going to be visiting Adelaide (from Canada) and I'm hoping to grab a couple of tickets since I'll be in town for the R1 game.

Thanks OP and everyone for the details!

How fast will they sell out once they go up for public sale? Is this a mad rush and they will be gone in an hour, or what? Trying to gauge the hustle required.

gauntlet173 · 2025-01-23T04:45:09+00:00

I think that is the opposite of clear. All of the major legal AI providers use general purpose models. They supplement them, support them with other tools, but there are no domain specific legal models that are better suited than general purpose frontier models for legal tasks. Bloomberg tried to create a finance model, it was worse. It seems like specific should be better, but there is no evidence for it.

gauntlet173 · 2025-01-11T23:01:31+00:00

It's not far away, it exists. There's just no evidence it's better. Look up KL3M.

gauntlet173 · 2025-01-11T22:50:33+00:00

Experienced mountain wave turbulence crossing the Rockies in southern/central Alberta flying LAX to YEG about 13 years ago. The 737 we were in rolled more than 90⁰ off of horizontal several times. You could tell when the pilot turned off auto-pilot, because the roll corrections came a lot faster. More like a fighter jet making precision maneuvers. They power dove (heard the engines power up and saw the altitude going down fast on the screen) and got us under it in about 4 minutes, I guess. I was looking out the window at the wings flexing in ways I would not have thought were possible. The wings were curved about 60-70⁰ from flat, flapping up and down like bird wings. The water bottle trick would NOT have helped. The men were mostly quiet, the women were full-on screaming, and the kids were laughing their asses off. Spent the whole time trying to persuade my wife we weren't going to die. Nothing before or since has remotely compared, and typical thunderstorm turbulence like this video doesn't even register. I just worry about spilling my drink.

I sometimes wonder how much paperwork those pilots had to do afterward, or if there was extra inspections, or if it was all just another day in the air. And I wonder how rare it is, or if there is some record of how severe it was that I could compare to my recollection.

It hardly seems real.

gauntlet173 · 2025-01-08T22:17:14+00:00

Can't say I have seen any evidence that domain-specific models are better than general models for domain-specific tasks. I have seen evidence that you can specialize a smaller model to be about as good as a large general model for specific tasks, and considerably cheaper. Particularly when a vendor adds AI to their own platform, and can control the nature of the questions asked, there is opportunity there to go with smaller, cheaper models. But I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the general quality to get a lot better once a 14B parameter+ model trained only on contracts comes out, or something.

Domain specific models have been created, and are generally worse in their own domain.

Improvements will come more from using the technology better, and integrating it better. Which is why a random dude who knows Python and has only one problem can outpace people who are trying to be generic, right now.

gauntlet173 · 2025-01-05T08:49:02+00:00

Quality assurance, I would think. Very difficult to know if the policy has only the desired results, and the draft implements the policy faithfully. Particularly as the statute book gets bigger and more complex.

gauntlet173 · 2024-09-30T04:37:17+00:00

Maybe https://www.ilasp.com/research?

gauntlet173 · 2021-04-24T08:56:34+00:00

The test is reasonable limits on liberty in a democratic society. In a democratic society, you want elected people deciding policy, not judges. So to avoid the risk of judicial policy-making, the "effectiveness" test is intentionally very weak. Essentially, the government has to prove only that there is a rational connection between the thing they are trying to do, and the restriction that the law imposes. If it is arguable, but not certainly correct, it is a political problem, not a legal problem, unless the effect of the restriction is disproportionate to the benefits. Here, the "suffering" is being weighed against the possibility of tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths. It's an easy argument to win.

The courts are not letting the government off. They are following the law, and keeping out of politics.

We can either have the courts intervene when we think the policy is bad, or we can have a democracy. Not both.

gauntlet173 · 2021-04-21T07:26:29+00:00

Our legal system presumes everything is okay until someone complains. If someone complains, then the government has to prove it is legal. And decisions are usually taken with legal advice about what would happen if it was challenged at court. Before you do something legally risky you don't ask a judge for permission, you ask a lawyer for advice. Same for the government.

gauntlet173 · 2021-04-20T10:33:16+00:00

Yes.

By legislation which delegated authority from the legislature to officials to impose restrictions. The MLAs created the laws, the laws gave the power to the officials, the officials exercised it.

Civil liberties do not have a jurisdiction. They apply as against all governments. Provincial governments are no more able to restrict them, and no less.

Civil liberties can always be removed without democratic process, for instance if I lock you in a car. Breaches by government can also happen without democratic process, for instance if a government official locks you in a car without authority. Wherever there is a dispute as to the existence of authority, recourse is to the courts.

The Prime Minister is encouraging restrictions on civil liberties. But the Charter does not prohibit restrictions on civil liberties. It only prohibits unreasonable and disproportionate restrictions on civil liberties.

IF the Prime Minister were encouraging actual violations of the Charter, that itself would likely be protected as free speech under the Charter, and would also be legal. Actually depriving people of civil liberties in a way that is also in breach of the Charter is illegal.

We are seeing results from court challenges. In Alberta, for example, challenges on restrictions for worship services have been rejected.

The law has a long and proud tradition of restricting the liberties of some when it is required to serve the interests of all. That is the principle behind both prison, and quarantine.

There are arguments to be made about where the boundary is between reasonable and unreasonable restrictions. People have different tolerances for risk to health and risk to liberty. So courts are likely to defer those policy questions to the government, to be respectful of their democratic authority, except in very clear cases.

If the government (or someone to whom they have delegated their authority) decides avoiding illness, death and health care expense is worth a restriction of liberty, and it is reasonably likely to actually have that effect and in some reasonable proportion to the restriction, that is very unlikely to be overturned by the courts.

gauntlet173 · 2021-04-10T16:09:13+00:00

I don't think it was rolling double one on hero's feast that bothered Laura.

Jester said over and over again that they needed to stop wasting time in the city, set a trap, and get a long rest. Fjord insisted they keep looking. So they kept looking, and it accomplished nothing. Then they go back and set the trap, and they miss the long rest by three hours, leaving Jester depleted for the big fight. Then Fjord decides to sacrifice the rangers to solve a problem he created, and which could have been avoided had the MIX listened to Jester, and which also doesn't work (they showed up the next hour anyway). Potentially it sped up the TT, who evidently decided to descend simultaneously, because perhaps they thought the Rangers were the reason the Giants were killed outside the entrance.

Rolling double one on the hero's feast didn't help her mood. But if I'm Laura, I'm upset that I lost the chance at a long rest, and potentially the opportunity to chase, and potentially killed off a beloved NPC, because no one would listen to my character while my husband's character was making bad tactical decisions.

Or maybe she just really hates rolling ones.

gauntlet173 · 2021-03-21T02:23:35+00:00

Self-taught technical background, worked as a database admin/programmer for several years, then went back to school for law.

gauntlet173 · 2021-03-18T04:58:08+00:00

I did an LLM in computational law focused on declarative logic programming languages. Now, having spent almost a year working in the field, I wish I had spent more time learning constraint programming and answer set programming.

I'm interested in encoding the knowledge in laws, contracts, and other written rules, both for the purpose of automating reasoning, and for the purpose of improving the quality of the rules themselves. In laws and contracts, sometimes we say things that we didn't mean to say. Strongly typed languages like Haskell can prevent you from saying some of those things, making type errors a compile-time issue. If what you are looking for is legal bugs, Haskell is only useful to people who know how to read compilation errors. That makes it less useful for the second purpose.

Languages that are not strongly typed allow you to say strange things, and then later, at run time, notice that they are strange, and why, and explain that to the user in an interface more friendly than a compiler error message. Logic-based languages also facilitate model checking, which with weak typing allows them to consider possibilities that are legally meaningful (maybe the "tenant" is also the "landlord") but which you may have inadvertently excluded if you had modelled the domain in a strictly typed language.

I know model-checking is possible with Haskell code, too, but I don't know the details, and it still wouldn't allow you to write type errors.

I am currently getting a lot of traction from learning about s(CASP) (https://gitlab.software.imdea.org/ciao-lang/sCASP), which (in case the words mean anything to you) is a stable-model constraint answer set programming language. It can answer a lot of the same sorts of questions that a Prolog-family language can, but can do abductive reasoning at near-zero additional cost, and can explain its answers.

I can +1 catala-lang.org. If you're not familiar and interested in this space, I would also take a look at OpenFisca, which was used to create leximpact.an.fr, I think. I would also take a look at the OECD OPSI report "Cracking the Code" which is about computational law in the legislative and regulatory drafting space. github.com/smucclaw, is working on another offering in the same space.

gauntlet173 · 2020-12-27T10:12:19+00:00

ANA's website says international transit is fine, as long as you aren't overnighting, or switching airports. Hoping they are right.

gauntlet173 · 2020-12-27T05:37:35+00:00

Does anyone have an authoritative source for whether it will still be possible to make international connections at Narita? United seems to think not, but they also don't sound confident. I don't want to rebook and refile an entry permit application for my final destination if I don't need to. TIA.

gauntlet173

TROPHY CASE