Rov_Scam
8hr ago
I don't think the US is going to be consulting Israel for much of anything going forward. Trump just agreed to one of the more humiliating cease fires in American history, in part because he got completely snowed by Israel.
Rov_Scam
8hr ago
I think it kind of did, though. He was already staring in the face of a wave election. If he could get Iran to capitulate quickly, he could prop up his numbers, and by extension the GOP's, by being the president who could solve the Iran nuclear issue once and for all by being the only president with the balls to attempt a military solution. Unfortunately, he believed his own bullshit and has such disdain for every president since Bush that he failed to consider that there were good reasons why nobody did it before. In the course of things, he pissed off the America First wing of the party and made fools of the hawks by insisting that he was achieving unprecedented success, akin to Germany in 1918. I figured he'd eventually be forced to yield, but not like this.
Rov_Scam
11hr ago
There's a cost aspect as well. If it costs $200,000 to find a glitch in a video codec that may, horror of horrors, cause your player to crash (and which, to anyone's knowledge, hasn't done so in 16 years), that's not exactly a selling point. $200,000 may actually be an understatement; they said it took 5 million tries to catch it. At 20 cents an attempt, more like a million dollars. We also don't know if they ran any of these tests on old code with known bugs. If they did and the software didn't catch half of the ones that were already caught, its utility isn't that great.
Rov_Scam
12hr ago
I understand what you're saying, and while I don't practice in criminal court or (presumably) your jurisdiction, my own experience suggests that this is unlikely to happen. As we all learned in law school, the practice of law is the application of the law to the facts of the case. Traditionally, pro se litigants who don't know the law argue the facts and appeal to a vague sense of justice. LLM is the complete opposite since the LLM usually doesn't know anything about the facts but will gladly generate pages upon pages worth of vague legal arguments based on the invariably vague instructions it was given. Even a really good LLM is ultimately limited by the facts the user inputs, which, most of the time, is few to none, because they see it as just a magic box that will spit out something that looks professional but really doesn't do anything. Hence you get a guy with a 300 paragraph brief that doesn't once even hint at the general kind of case that it is.
Overall, though, while I see this as a problem, I only see it as such insofar as acting pro se is generally. If a prosecutor is reduced to tears of rage because he has to respond to endless motions from a pro se litigant and cuts a favorable deal to get out of it, I don't see how that situation is any worse than if the same prosecutor has to deal with the same thing from a team of high-priced attorneys paid for by the father of a wealthy defendant. My concern here is less for the prosecutor and more for the pro se who wastes the court's time and doesn't get a deal when he would have got one had a public defender filed the one motion that had any merit. My concern with LLMs isn't much different than my overall concern with DIY legal solutions where people think they're getting a good deal because they save a little bit of money in the short term but end up getting screwed in the long term.
Rov_Scam
14hr ago
In 2009, the Pittsburgh Pirates lost a spring training game to Manatee Community College. In 2019, Chelsea lost to their own youth team. By your logic, the Pirates should have forgotten about Andrew McCutchen (who played in that game) and signed some of the Manatee players, who were readily available. I do not believe any of them ever got so much as a rookie league contract.
The US Women's team thing wasn't even that level of a loss, because it wasn't even a real scrimmage, because national teams don't do scrimmages. They were sharing a training facility in Texas with the boys youth team and when the youth team came over to watch them practice/get autographs they ended up agreeing to play a kick around game. They don't play games like this a tune-ups or anything because the team members would have played about 60 games per year between the pro and national teams. The only reason anyone even knows about this is because that particular camp was interrupted by contentious contract negotiations with US Soccer, and US Soccer decided to release the results without any context to gain leverage (while sabotaging their own product). Just think about it for one minute: If you're a player or a coach, are you going to risk injury by trying to win the game? Or are you going to treat it like a fun treat for the kids that under normal circumstances nobody would hear about? Look at the NFL; they play fewer games than soccer players but are averse to playing in the preseason and absolutely allergic to the Pro Bowl. Now imagine that you aren't making nearly as much money and that your pro career can end in an instant.
Rov_Scam
16hr ago
If the true value of AI is only in the hundreds of millions, the industry is even more fucked than an AI skeptic like me could imagine.
Rov_Scam
19hr ago
That isn't really any different than it is now, though. If a dedicated NIMBY group wants to oppose a project by any means possible, they can hire a lawyer who will argue that §902(a)(4) requires a bat survey, and they might win. A citizen group that generates a massive filing that that nobody understands and basically just list arguments looks impressive from their perspective but gets shot down immediately whenever they have to go in front of a judge and the attorney for the municipality or whoever explains to the judge why §902(a)(4) doesn't apply in this case (which if it obviously did, they would have already done one), and may even produce a report from the guy who does the bat surveys explaining why one wasn't needed in his opinion, and the judge smiles and nods while the pro se NIMBY guy fumbles through his brief trying to find the part about the bats that he can't remember because he didn't even read the whole thing let alone understand the whole thing, and the judge tosses the complaint.
Rov_Scam
20hr ago
Like @faceh, I too have had the displeasure of witnessing a pro se litigant attempt to argue an AI slop motion in front of a judge. A 300+ paragraph AI slop motion. It was a post-trial motion. And I heard quite a bit of it because all the litigant could do was read it verbatim. After 20 minutes, I still had no idea what the case was even about, because he evidently didn't know that lawyers have to argue the facts of the case. After it became unbearable, I realized that since a TV show was filming in one of the courtrooms a friend of mine from high school who works in the industry might be there (I run into the guy once every few years), and even if he wasn't it would give me something to do while I waited for my case to be called. Sure enough, I saw him as soon as I left the courtroom and caught up with him for about a half hour. When I came back, the guy was still reading from his brief, and the judge told him he wasn't going to listen to the whole thing and cut the guy off while he gave the defense a chance to argue. It was only then that I was able to glean that he had apparently sued Hertz rental truck for being injured on their property, and that AI evidently didn't tell him that his mother was not qualified to act as a medical witness, or prepare a proper defense to their motion in limine that would allow her to testify as a damage witness. When the judge went back to the guy for his response he just continued reading from his brief.
Honestly, I think AI actually makes things worse for pro se litigants because at least before, judges were willing to cut them some slack and argue the facts of their case in a more informal way. Their deficit was that they didn't understand the law well enough to argue the facts effectively. Now they can generate pages upon pages of legalese they don't understand but think is the magic bullet that separates them from the lawyers and that they'll be able to wow the judge with their mad legal skillz. All the judge is going to do is smile politely during their argument and rule against them, because they haven't said anything.
It depends on how Iran responds. We have the leverage to convince them to stop. Whether Trump uses it is anyone's guess, but I have a hard time believing he'd want a repeat of the last month due to Israel's incontinence.
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