Cavalcade of Mammals

Bruce Schneier talked at Capricon about fifteen ideas he had on AI that are forming up into a 2024 book. One thing he mentioned is that AI would make lawsuits much cheaper to launch and carry out, and multiplying the number of lawsuits would mean that courts would need to adopt AI adjudication to adapt to this. Bruce passed over this pretty quickly, but I think this will have early and pronounced effect on society.

It looks like legal work is a problem AI will be able to solve soon. That is, AII tools will be able to contribute effectively to the process of filing and carrying out lawsuits. This is not one problem, but a set of related problems that AI will soon be able to do effectively. Given a set of facts and objectives, an AI will be able to determine what type of lawsuit to file, write it up in the proper jargon and format suitable for submission, determine and write a response to opposing counsel motions, summarize and prioritize discovery material, etc. A lot of legal work is routine, repetitive, and very similar to previous cases. Really, a perfect problem for AI.

The immediate upshot is that a lawyer using AI tools will be able to do much more legal work, work faster, and lawsuits will be much cheaper to launch. The short-term impact is that the number of lawsuit filed will go up multiple-fold and this will crash the courts. Gum them up. Bring things to a standstill. US courts are operating at capacity already and can’t handle more cases.

There isn’t any way for courts to prevent this. The lawsuits will be filed by lawyers at established law firms. Lawyers will use AI as a tool, review AI written suggestions and briefs, and from the court’s perspective these lawsuits will look just like the existing lawsuits, there will just be many more of them.

In the long term, it will make sense for judges and the courts to adopt AI tools to accelerate their end of things, but this will require new laws. New laws means years of hearings, discussion, negotiation, etc. Government functions require deliberation and consideration before making big changes. And who will develop AI tools for courts? The market is smaller and more uncertain than the market of making these tools for private law firms. And judges are very conservative, notoriously slow to act, to react, to adopt new technology.

So AI-assisted lawyering will hit the courts at some point in the next few years, but it will take a decade or more for the courts to effectively react.

Robert Comploj, glass artist.

My proposed additions to the New York Times style guide to improve its political coverage by Dan Froomkin

Rich People Don’t Talk to Robots. How is it possible that I still need to explain this? by Josh Brown

10 Python Pandas Code Snippets That Solve Tasks Efficiently

Librarian on social media, mychal3ts

New gene therapies confront many sickle cell patients with an impossible choice: a cure or fertility.
CRISPR treatment for sickle cell approved (Casgevy)

USB Logic Analyzer – 24MHz/8-Channel ($20)
Bus Pirate – v3.6a ($33) — v4.0 still experimental

Flipper Zero — Multi-tool Device for Geeks ($150)
CC1101 chip, making it a powerful transceiver < 1 GHz, 125 kHz RF
ID antenna, NFC module 13.56 MHz, BLE, infrared transmitter/receiver, 1-Wire, GPIO

Mini WiFi Surveillance HD Camera, $12.50
2K Pan/Tilt Security Camera, $26

A New mRNA Malaria Vaccine. By targeting resident memory T cells in the liver, a novel mRNA malaria vaccine prevented infection, even in those with prior exposure.

Falling In And Out Of Love With LA’s Mystery-Cloaked Magic Castle, part2, part3

How Many Creationists Are There in America?
2019 poll: 61%-81% US adults pick evolution, 32%-62% of US white evangelical prostestants

I added a new disk, removed one on my workstation. It is running Ubuntu 20.04. Booted up, and the drive letters have changed, and the md number of a RAID 1 array changed. So I updated /etc/fstab and went to mount the /dev/md1 array. The mount command completes without error, but the disk did not mount. Turns out, needed to:

systemctl daemon-reload

Then the mount worked, and I could add the new disk to the RAID 1 array.

1. Open Firefox, go to about:config.
2. Go to browser.tabs.unloadOnLowMemory, set it to true.
3. Go to browser.low_commit_space_threshold_mb, set it to 2/3 or 3/4 of total memory on your computer. (e.g. 32GB -> 24000).

G.M.’s Cruise Moved Fast in the Driverless Race. It Got Ugly.
“Half of Cruise’s 400 cars were in San Francisco when the driverless operations were stopped. Those vehicles were supported by a vast operations staff, with 1.5 workers per vehicle. The workers intervened to assist the company’s vehicles every 2.5 to five miles, according to two people familiar with is operations. In other words, they frequently had to do something to remotely control a car after receiving a cellular signal that it was having problems.”

Giant Pyramid Buried in Indonesia Could Be The Oldest in The World, Researchers Say
Gunung Padang

The genetic heritage of the Denisovans may have left its mark on our mental health. The study reveals that the genetic variant observed, which affects zinc regulation, could have signified an evolutionary advantage in our ancestors’ adaptation to the cold., link

https://www.watermarkremover.io/

Recent Trades – U.S. Congress. Reported within 45 days of trade.

NYT CTE in kids story

Zeppelins from Another World

Interview with GlobalFoundries CEO Dr. Thomas Caulfield by Dr. Ian Cutress
“There are only five foundries on the planet of any scale, > two billion dollars revenue. In 2022, GlobalFoundries was 8 billion dollars. In Taiwan it’s TSMC and UMC, then there’s GlobalFoundries with our global footprint, then Samsung Foundry and SMIC in China.”

SSD-Tester — SSD, M.2, thumb drive benchmarks

Warped Front Pages: Researchers examine the self-serving fiction of ‘objective’ political news

Kellogg, Kraft Win Antitrust Suit Against Egg Companies

Exclusive: John Kelly goes on the record to confirm several disturbing stories about Trump

Hair Turns Gray Due to Stuck Stem Cells: Hair-coloring stem cells must swing back and forth between their maturity states to give hair its color. Sun et al., 2023

Unvaccinated more likely to have heart attack, stroke after COVID, study finds. Being fully vaccinated reduced the risk by about 41 percent.Jiang et al, 2023

Are the costs of Brexit big or small? by John Springford
“the British economy is around 5 per cent smaller due to Brexit”

The Overwhelming Case for CBDCs (central bank digital currencies) by Willem H. Buiter

Scarce Labor As The Cause Of Innovation. The Habakkuk thesis, Rome and the robotics revolution by Angela Nagl

Book: Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants. by John D. Clark

The Tacit Knowledge Series

Why can’t our tech billionaires learn anything new? On Marc Andreessen’s “techno-optimist manifesto” by Dave Karpf

The Trilateral Shitpost Fire that was the 1980 GOP convention, part 1: On the long history of thinly veiled antisemitic conspiracy theories on the GOP’s right edge by Seth Cotlar

An Exciting New Approach to Autoimmune Diseases by Eric Topol

Absent Gods, Absent Catastrophes : The Sharing Knife and The Lord of the Rings

Disaster Conservatism: There’s nothing worth saving from the Tory years. Nothing at allby Nick Cohen

Book rec: John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World books, first is Basin and Range

Sator Square. The Rotas-Sator Square is a two-dimensional acrostic class of word square containing a five-word Latin palindrome.
R O T A S S A T O R
O P E R A A R E P O
T E N E T T E N E T
A R E P O O P E R A
S A T O R R O T A S

Lessons From a Renters’ Utopia by Francesca Mari

Toroidal propellers: A noise-killing game changer in air and water. Quiet and reduce fuel consumption by somewhere around 20%.