Not OP, but it’s not incompatible that dark-energy expansion (and ultimate big rip event) in a child universe correlates to the same process as black hole evaporation (and final event) for the originating black hole, if the “black hole universe” theory holds and they remain geometrically connected.
Genuinely wondering (aka not snarky): Has anyone found frontier models to provide useful research in the context of European civil law systems?
Your comment made me wonder if there are any halfway-acceptable model benchmarks for law tasks? Specifically I’d love to know how the frontier models’ abilities compare between common law vs. civil law systems. My guess would be that an AI in a common law context should have a clearer idea of how a specific case is interpreted/accepted by (common law) practitioners, whereas trying to rely on AI in a civil law context, like Germany, can be daunting. In a few Germany-specific recent examples, the models feel like they present only (maybe too stubbornly?) the “civil law”-based laws. All while negating much of AI’s research benefits because civil statutes are portrayed as being absolutely accurate, binding, and their enforcement (and thereby the legal reality) being uniformly applied. Am I making this interpretation up? If so, how can I prove myself wrong?
I don't know of anything that is working yet, but I know some people working on it (intentionally vague).
Roman law, on which the legal systems of Germany, most of Europe, Turkey etc. are based relies more heavily on statutes than Anglo-American case law, but cases do play a role there, too. That's why a practically useful system also needs to have access to court decisions, commentary etc. - and while the statues are in the public domain, a lot of the other knowledge is owned by specialist publishers (such as: C.H. Beck, Nomos, Mohr Siebeck, De Gruyter, Otto Schmidt, C.F. Müller, Manz, Verlag Österreich, Schulthess, Stämpfli, Dalloz, LexisNexis, Lefebvre Dalloz, Giuffrè Francis Lefebvre, CEDAM, Giappichelli, Il Mulino, Aranzadi, Tirant lo Blanch, Marcial Pons, Dykinson, Tecnos, Lefebvre, Almedina, Gestlegal, AAFDL, Kluwer, Boom juridisch, Wolters Kluwer, Larcier-Intersentia, Anthemis, Sakkoulas, Nomiki Bibliothiki, Universul Juridic, Hamangiu).
Internationally, legal systems appear to undergo a sort of convergence, which means statutes increasingly matter in the U.S. and cases increasingly matter in European law (according to a law partner friend).
Hi,
As for benchmarks for law tasks: I also have a concern regarding how the more popular benchmarks (like the tasks in Harvey Legal Agent Benchmark) can accurately reflect actual work done by lawyers. Not only in civil law systems, but also in non-BigLaw type of work areas.
Most of the law tasks should inherently reflect the legal system they are based on. It is an oversimplification that lawyers in one country tend to do the same legal work as lawyers in another, that's a form of dishonest framing from LLM providers working in this area (it is that important for them to be able to scale and disregard traditional fragmentation of the legal services).
The legal systems of common law countries are quite similar in both how they do legal training and in many areas that are important for business. Like in contract law or tort. That means not only similar concepts and foundations (things first taught to law students), but also a similar approach to what is seen as a legal problem, and what kind of answers people expect from a lawyer. Also, what they understand under "legal research" - what do you actually research and what is expected from a qualified lawyer to know by heart, how are you expected to find the legal default in a detailed question, how certain that default is, what is up to professional judgment.
But even the differences within common law systems is huge in other areas that go beyond these basics. Like those affected by statutes, codes (like CFR or NYCRR) or even local regulations etc. The popular legal benchmarks do not dare going into these more detailed legal work directions. And these laws change frequently, and they are very different from one jurisdiction to another, even within the US, let alone in other countries building on English legal traditions.
(Nobody I know of is building a benchmark that affects these areas of law.)
And the diversity is even bigger within legal systems lumped together as "civil law systems". Even those based on Roman law, or on German jurisprudence in the 19th century... There is not much common in how French and German students study law, even if both are members of the EU and many areas of law are harmonised or subject to the same legal acts of the EU and the same EU Court of Justice.
If your LLM has access to up to date legal databases of those countries, commentaries etc., the answers are still surprisingly useful in research. That said, no professional should rely on those LLMs that merely use public legal databases, scraping latest laws and cases via self-operated MCP servers.
I think the main difference is how lawyers from a civil law system use the LLMs compared to someone from a common law system - and that is based on the different training they receive as law students, how they see "law" etc. Maybe there is no such a thing as absolute accuracy in the civil statutes either, but at least civil law lawyers have a stronger notion of "law is knowable". There is a higher likelihood of having one "correct" answer, even when talking about more lifelike, detailed questions.
(I'm qualified in both a civil and a common law system but not specifically in German law.)
Someone tried to build the extra chair but the endless required studies and legal challenges from existing chair-sitters bankrupted the would-be chair builder.
Also the chair, if actually built, would be so expensive that one legged guy can’t afford it. His best hope is someone with a worse chair takes it, then he tries to take their seat, but there’s already a dozen two-legged guys in front of him.
Everyone wants to blame existing landowners and sure they share part of it but the lion's share of the blame ought to be directed at do-gooders (land owning or otherwise) who are unwilling to be honest (with themselves, or in the internet comments) and admit that every policy that "looks good" based on the one sided statements presented in abstract by its peddlers.
Each one of those policies is part of the system that gets us the results we have and the peddlers all share in the blame.
> Also the chair, if actually built, would be so expensive that one legged guy can’t afford it. His best hope is someone with a worse chair takes it, then he tries to take their seat, but there’s already a dozen two-legged guys in front of him.
Maybe you need 5 chairs? Here in SF supply has fallen decades behind the demand curve to the point it may be impossible to catch up even if all you did was build build build.
decades of reasonable, consistently applied housing policy led to the creation of islands of wealth, surrounded by oceans of poverty. ergo, this is the purpose. this is how the people there want to live. I left many years ago when I realized the futility of it all.
I call SF and Silicon Valley “the world’s only slum for the rich.”
What buys you a trap house or an apartment with hallways that smell like piss in SF or the Valley will buy you a mansion in 90% of the country at least.
> So, if compelled, Apple could theoretically tell someone if two images came from the same camera.
No they couldn't.
If you generate two SSH key pairs on your laptop, there's no way to confirm they were created on the same machine.
There's no device identifying data in a reference image, which is the point. The factory signature, the image sensor key, the Secure Enclave Processor key and all of the signing that takes place on PCC are all device-agnostic.
The reference image is processed and eventually signed by Private Cloud Compute's post-quantum signature using a hybrid MLDSA87-RSA-3072-PSS-SHA512 scheme.
So… it's not possible for Apple to know if two images came from the same iPhone.
I am not sure I follow. The private keys in the image sensor and the SEP are static, so you can see that two images are signed with the same private key. Apple 'decorrelates' this by letting PCC verify the signature and then replacing it by their own signature:
When the user initiates developing a reference image, the device uploads the secure digital negative to Private Cloud Compute. PCC recomputes the digest embedded in the frame and verifies the sensor's signature over the pixels and that digest, verifying the certificate chain back to the sensor CA. PCC also verifies the SEP signature and chains it to the BAA CA, and it verifies the signature on the device manifest and chains it to the CA that signs device manifests at the factory. It then confirms that the sensor and SEP named in those chains belong to the same device. [...] If these checks pass, PCC then submits the commitment to our signing service, which signs it with a composite post-quantum signature using a hybrid MLDSA87-RSA-3072-PSS-SHA512 scheme. The signature is embedded in the JPEG, and the reference image is returned to the device, which associates it with the main photo from the original capture.
After the secure digital negative is successfully developed, it's automatically moved to the deleted photos folder."
So in the end it all depends on how much you trust Apple's cloud and PCC nodes. If there is a weakness in their services, Apple could record both the original signatures and their signature, and could prove whether two photos were made using the same lens/device and they could even trace it back to a specific device (by looking up the original signature + signing identity given their signature).
I stand corrected. If it’s truly only the signatures and zero other identifying info, then yes you’re as secure as the underlying algorithm. I think they implied there are multiple device-originated signatures for different parts of the data, this may open some possibilities for cryptanalysis
I think it’s not a great illustration; the map looks like mercator so the shortest path would be curved and closer to the green path anyway. the red line is not “as the crow flies”. It would be more fair to show deviation from the actual (great circle) shortest path. Also agree the grid seems coarse.
Are we looking at the same map? On the one I see, showing western and central Europe, the difference between a great circle and a loxodrome (straight line on a Mercator map) for an intra-European route would be barely visible. And the map is clearly not Mercator — France looks visibly "smashed". Looks like a simple x=longitude, y=latitude projection.
> You're talking about extinction, not social media or phone addiction.
Not saying you’re wrong but if I wanted to cultivate a mass hysteria as cover for a regulatory capture power play, this is exactly what I’d want everyone to believe.
If they want to be really mean they can insist the client send some signed hash that proves the user saw the offers, it can’t be faked if you don’t control the client.
You can run adblock in the browser to block those too. Most don't bother, just like they won't bother to have a custom AGENTS.md to block all these offers.
No, I mean the dd server can deny completion of the transaction unless the client has provably seen the offer content. All the DRM standards are in place, this isn’t anonymous browsing, it’s easily controlled if they want to.
They could also make it such that any client caught sidestepping is hit with a DMCA violation.
you need to expand your creative imagination around the limits of enshittification, there are really so many ways to make the experience shittier
As long as the client supports external display/input (e.g. USB-C with DP alt mode) you could always attach a KVM and run a proxy with vision capabilities to filter.
for the company/account placing DD orders via CLI, instant ban hammer.
you don’t seem to understand, sure clients can block ads. servers can also refuse to proceed unless a provable step is taken, and that’s linked to your DD integration. Bad actors can easily been detected
I'm saying the client can take the action, but the user never sees the client because they interact with it through e.g. their AdBuster box, a glorified PiKVM that interacts with client, OCRs it, and produces simple filtered HTML for the user.
As long as you can attach a display and USB inputs, your "monitor" or "braille device" can go straight to a vision model, which can then send inputs from your "keyboard". There are already off the shelf devices that can do this if you install an agent harness.
Whose DD API key is being used? This is not an anonymous access scenario. The DD API client is tied to some company, the behavior is detectable, they are banned.
Or do you give out KVMs to all your customers and say “place your DD orders with us this way”?
He's saying that some AI agent (with computer use capabilities, which the recent gpt model is supposedly good at) can at the very least, operate a browser (or phone) of the doordash website/app, scrape the contents via OCR, present them to the user, then relay any actions back to the website, all via KVM, making all of this undetectable to the site.
Ships passing in the night. I’m not disagreeing with any of this, and yall still miss the point.
I understand that individuals can make purchases with the DD API. People who want to buy things without seeing ads can always do that. Very few people will do that.
I’m referring to the obvious B2B2C use case where a company embeds DD functionality via the API. Then you’d have to teach the trick to everyone who uses your app or service and that’s not practical. If you skip at the server it’s trivially detectable.
> If you skip at the server it’s trivially detectable.
I don't see how. If I built a touchscreen-using robot, DD couldn't detect it. If some middleman business had a boiler room of 10 robots, it would be the same. All network requests identical to the official app. And if you think they'd look at IP addresses or something, how would they tell it apart from a college campus or a CGNAT gateway?
You can’t MITM your clients unless you root-cert them. The clients are independently attesting to DD, you can’t spoof it unless you’re the client. The B2B provider can’t do this without MITM attack. Any “legitimate” partner doing this is instantly banned & probably sued.
> As long as you can attach a display and USB inputs, your "monitor" or "braille device" can go straight to a vision model, which can then send inputs from your "keyboard".
This is awesome!!
The local AI revolution is going to be glorious. It's no wonder they want to regulate this shit.
I can't wait until uBlock Origin integrates AI support.
A few that I looked at are annotated, "It is linearly stable (largest Floquet multiplier 1.000), so a small nudge only makes it wobble." Doesn't define "small nudge", alas...
One interesting scenario is where the Sun, Jupiter, and another object are the three bodies in question. I think we could put an object at the L4 or L5 point of Jupiter's orbit (see the Trojans) and have it be stable. How large could this object be? Would an Earth-sized object be stable there? If so, how close would a passing star have to be to disturb that stability?
They’re running a Wuhan for AI. They are actively and negligently researching misalignment. The breach is a basic tort, or at least a DMCA violation. Damages should be recoverable with lawsuits.
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