Chris Hammond

Chief Justice John Roberts on Birthright Citizenship: “You obviously put a lot of weight on 'subject to the jurisdiction thereof. But the examples you give to support that strike me as very quirky. You know, children of ambassadors, children of enemies during a hostile invasion, children on warships…” “And then you expand it to a whole class of, illegal aliens are here in the country. I'm not quite sure how you can get to that big group from such tiny and sort of idiosyncratic examples.” What a disgrace!

Oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara -- the critical birthright citizenship case -- commence. Solicitor General D. John Sauer begins by explaining what "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" means. And he lays out the perverse incentives and outcomes the misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment has created.

"Solid B cities might not have the MoMA, but they are likely to have good museums, a great brewery scene, a functional bike path, and a minor-league stadium. To live in a place you can afford with a municipal government that works, this hardly seems like a consolation prize."

I have an Plain English episode with Anthropic's Jack Clark tomorrow where I ask him this question directly, right at the top: What is the intended goal of talking about your product as an analogue for nuclear weapons, or as a mechanism for mass unemployment? And can you really be surprised if the public massively distrusts AI, or if the govt treats AI as a technology that deserves to be nationalized under federal control, if you do this? The cynical view is that the AI companies are lying/exaggerating about the likely effects of their technology to attract more VC revenue. As a sneak peak of tomorrow, I also think AI's builders are philosophically opposed to the 2010-era pollyannish approach that Facebook and other Silicon Valley companies took, where they talked about their products exclusively in utopian terms. Still, I think this reaction to the 2010 approach—emphasize the downsides of the thing you're building, not just the upsides—has its own significant risks when you go around promising people that your product will throw tens of millions of ppl out of a job.

Agree. Strong government controls over AI should concern us more than market competition between AI companies. Even as we acknowledge that market competition between AI companies brings its own risks.

Do Advocates who use AI break attorney client privilege?

Pushing the Harvey for Word Add-In further exposed the limits of .docx. So Harvey’s engineers designed an agent that builds documents in memory, offloading state to the backend so the model can focus on legal text. 40% higher edit acceptance. 70% more usage.

It is so cool that you can have an ambitious research idea in ~any field and basically build yourself a suite of custom software tools exclusively for conducting that research within a few hours. No broader point to make. It’s just an amazing and exhilarating fact about reality.