> The thing I heard most often about my school's management was that over the past couple of decades, they more closely resembled a real estate holding company than a research university.
I feel a better question is what entities that are in continuous operation since the 1630s do not resemble a real estate holding company? If you analyze only the extremes of any distribution you'll find weirdness.
This is true! I hadn't thought about it like this to be totally honest. It's hard to point fingers at old institutions, especially given they're mostly located in prime real estate locations across the country (Cambridge, Palo Alto, etc.), and it's not really their fault that they need land to operate.
Because the article said so? That’s your rationale for saying the executive branch isn’t weaponizing the rest of government offices for their own influence and benefit. Sorry, color me unconvinced until this administration shows good faith.
Because... the article clearly says the case began under the FORMER administration, and goes further to say that it's not clear whether the CURRENT administration is going to drop the case.
Am I the only one who thinks it's totally bonkers that a lawsuit can outlast a 4 year presidential administration? I mean, I get it, court cases can be complex, but what on earth could they be continuously doing for four years? I would love to see an hour by hour accounting of the time actually spent by humans on a case like this. My guess is that it's like a poorly run software project: mostly empty, where Person X is blocked waiting on the output of Person Y for weeks, and so on.
This is the nature of any non-trivial litigation. It can take a long time just to source all the records of what's being argued over, then it takes a long time to argue over what's allowed, then a long time to argue what all of it means, then a long time to argue over which laws, jurisdictions and precedents apply, then a long time to figure out when the judge (who is juggling >1000 cases) can fit you in, then your legal counsel is on vacation, then the complaint gets amended and you have to reevaluate everything you've been fighting over for the past half decade, repeating much of the above, then opposition replaces their counsel (that's a 60 day pause), then the judge dies from old age, and then finally everybody forgets about it because space has expanded so much since you started the case that nobody can communicate anymore and the universe is going into heat death.
> It can take a long time just to source all the records of what's being argued over,
It seems to me that if you can't timely procure your own records in a court case the case should be allowed to proceed with any assumptions based on them in your opponent's favor. Whats really the difference between taking 2+ years to procure a document and deleting that document?
Oftentimes the records aren't in the hands of either party and need to be subpoenaed. When you get them, they can open up entirely new lines of inquiry. Opposition will fight this tooth and nail so that the evidence can't be included, or they'll go on a fishing expedition under the guise of having all the facts on the table, and the court might just allow them. This process can take a very long time, and from what I've seen, the higher the stakes, the more the court will be willing to allow it to happen, so nobody can cry to the appeals court that something important was left out. Judges don't like their rulings overturned.
It's typically not a matter of having the documents, it's a matter of filtering them.
Suppose you have a corporate mail server with all your mail on it, and a competitor sues you. Your emails are going to be full of trade secrets, prices negotiated with suppliers, etc. Things that are irrelevant to the litigation and can't be given to the competitor. Meanwhile there are other emails they're entitled to see because they're directly relevant to the litigation.
What option do you have other than to have someone go read ten years worth of emails to decide which ones they get?
> Whats really the difference between taking 2+ years to procure a document and deleting that document?
The difference is obviously that they get the document in the 2nd+ year of the trial instead of never.
As someone who has built an e-discovery platform I can tell you that any delays these days are because they are helpful to minimize negative employer cash flow. In other words, exactly why corporate lawyers are paid.
The technology for legal review is extremely fast and effective.
>What option do you have other than to have someone go read ten years worth of emails to decide which ones they get?
This funnily enough sounds like the exact use case of AI in streamlining timely, tedious, but important matters. Now the that someone simply needs to verify that the filtered documents are relevsnt.
Of course, I'm assuming a world where AI works on this scale. Or a world where this slow walking discovery isn't a feature for corporations.
> The difference is obviously that they get the document in the 2nd+ year of the trial instead of never.
Yeah, after using that year to make billions of dollars. That's how the current AI litigation is going. Once again by design. Pillage until the cows come home in 5-6 years.
> Now the that someone simply needs to verify that the filtered documents are relevsnt.
Now someone simply needs to verify that the filtered in documents are relevant and the filtered out documents are not relevant. But wait, that was the original problem.
If they are trusting AI to replace labor, they should trust AI to be accountable for bad filters. What happens when a human misses over a document or 2?
> If they are trusting AI to replace labor, they should trust AI to be accountable for bad filters.
Surely all of the AI hype is true and there are no hypocrites in Corporate America.
> What happens when a human misses over a document or 2?
If they were obligated to produce it and don't they can get into some pretty bad trouble with the court. If they hand over something sensitive they weren't required to, they could potentially lose billions of dollars by handing trade secrets to a competitor, or get sued by someone else for violating an NDA etc.
>Surely all of the AI hype is true and there are no hypocrites in Corporate America.
Worst case they are right and now we have more efficient processing. Best case, bungling up some high profile cases accelerates us towards proper regulation when a judge tires of AI scapegoats.
I don't see a big downside here.
>If they were obligated to produce it and don't they can get into some pretty bad trouble with the court.
Okay, seems easy enough to map to AI. Just a matter of who we hold accountable for it. The prompter, the company at large, or the AI provider.
There is an obvious downside for them which is why they don't do it. To make them do it the judge would have to order them to use AI to do it faster, which would make it a lot less reasonable for the judge to get mad at them when the AI messes it up.
> Just a matter of who we hold accountable for it. The prompter, the company at large, or the AI provider.
You're just asking who you want to have refuse to do it because everybody knows it wouldn't actually get it perfect and then the person you want to punish when it goes wrong is the person who is going to say no.
> I already said in the first comment that they have a financial incentive to stall the courts.
They have a financial incentive to not be found in contempt of court. And another financial incentive to not disclose sensitive information they're not supposed to disclose.
When false positives and false negatives are both very expensive, what's left is a resource-intensive slog to make sure everything is on the right side of the line. "Use the new thing that sacrifices accuracy for haste" is not a solution.
> I just want efficiency.
Asking for efficiency from the court system is like asking for speed from geology. That's not typically where you find that and if it is you're probably about to have a bad time.
The way you actually get efficiency is by having a larger number of smaller companies, so they're not massive vertically integrated conglomerates that you need something the size and speed of the US government to hold them in check.
>That's not typically where you find that and if it is you're probably about to have a bad time.
Why do we accept mediocrity from the government we pay our taxes to? They can't be as fast and lean as a small team, but there are surely optimizations we can make in process, especially as technology improves.
>by having a larger number of smaller companies, so they're not massive vertically integrated conglomerates that you need something the size and speed of the US government to hold them in check.
Agreed. Now I'd also like to have that sometime within my (maybe your) lifetime.
The court system is designed to optimize throughput at the expense of latency, against the background of a system where authority is vested in a relatively small number of presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed constitutional officers. About 350,000 civil cases and 65,000 criminal cases are filed every year, spread out across less than 700 district court judges.
To maximize throughput, proceedings are structured like batch processing systems. You submit work, it waits in the queue until the system gets to it, some intermediate decision is rendered, and then you submit some more work. For constitutional reasons, criminal cases cut in line, which can further increase the latency of civil cases. That means that, in a four-year case, the lawyers don't actually work on the case for four years straight. They do batches of work a couple of months at a time, and then work on other cases while waiting for the output.
Moreover, court case are, to a degree, inherently serial. Motions to dismiss--briefs that argue a case must be dismissed because its legally defective--must be filed before you start deposing witnesses or exchanging documents. You generally need to do depositions of witnesses after you've reviewed all the relevant documents. And all the fact gathering must be done before you file summary judgment motions--briefs that argue a case can be decided on the factual record without a trial.[1]
Part of the inherent delay is that the legal system is already an "exception path" in the ordinary course of business. A lot of time is spent waiting for people outside your organization who don't work for you. For example, when you're deposing a witness, they have work responsibilities, vacation plans, etc., and everyone has to work around that.
It's possible to structure cases where everything can be done in a year. That's what happens at the International Trade Commission, for example. Arbitration proceedings can also be structured like that.
[1] This also means that legal teams aren't very big. Massive corporate cases with billions of dollars on the line are handled with core teams of a dozen or so lawyers--with maybe another dozen or two parachuting in to help with specific phases like trial. Technology was squeezed out a lot of the parallelizable work. The days of 20 junior attorneys sitting in rooms reviewing boxes of paper documents are gone.
> what on earth could they be continuously doing for four years?
It’s not continuous. Court time in particular is a scarce resource. Many people are involved in complex litigation, and for almost all of those people it is not their only project / job.
> My guess is that it's like a poorly run software project: mostly empty, where Person X is blocked waiting on the output of Person Y for weeks, and so on.
Correct but the off times aren’t empty; the lawyers and staff simply pick up one of the other hundreds of tasks in front of them while they wait.
When I was still at a firm, several of our clients were fighting off investigations related to the Bermudan loss harvesting scheme that started in the 1980s. The investigations started in 2003 and weren't resolved until 2013.
I don't think that really disproves GP's hypothesis. The Trump admin is happy to drop lawsuits for connected entities. The fact that they're sustaining a Biden-initiated suit is plausibly because they just don't like Meta/Zuckerberg.
>> Probably less about tax revenue and more about the executive branch squeezing tech companies to assert influence.
The case existed and presumably had the same lawyers all the while. How, then, can the case become less about tax revenue?
You may say that there are ulterior motives, but, at the most, one can say that additional concerns have complicated the tax revenue concern. We're well into fascist times, but the OP comment simply ignores the facts.
Fine, but this is the land of genome-wide association studies. I am unaware of any overlap, considering that such 'GWAS' studies require tens or hundreds of thousands of participants to get any definitive signal... Such work is the nature of statistical genetics.
> So I question whether they might be fitting a model to noise here.
> But I can't help but think I could have ended up on a path like this much earlier if my teachers actually supported me rather than treating me like a problem.
It's interesting you raise your teachers / organized schooling when Tao's parents were cited earlier in the thread for providing him materials.
Where do you see mothers and fathers stepping in (or not!) with children of greater ability?
My parents did provide me with materials. They were happy to buy me books and stuff.
But school is where I spent most my time and did most of my learning. My single father had enough to deal with, working full time alongside being a farmer. He isn't exactly an academic. He did what he could. The school system failed me massively. Both in not supporting nor encouraging my exceptional performance, and in ignoring my bullies even when they walked in on it and when I told them about it.
> Source: Have recently discovered this myself with a family member from their neurologist.
The reason this was detected is that such testing is a standard practice with new dementia patients—among many other tests that identify etiologies of dementia.
> Definitely not the case, not in all regions, not even within the same country
Perhaps—but it's also possible that whoever was in the room with the patient declined STI testing (which I have seen, and which sometimes reflects lack of knowledge around extramarital affairs).
I'm just trying to make it clear that there are dozens of reversible/non-degenerative causes of dementia and there is no way that a fully-trained neurologist doesn't have these memorized.
It's like not knowing what a type system is as a programmer with a reputable degree—impossible.
edit: in fairness, many doctors have unease around discussing sex/infidelity—but the PSA maybe should be to encourage your doctor to put aside concerns around niceties in your parent's care.
> Article didn't explain why tech doesn't work in education. It's biological. We evolved to learn from and interact with other humans, preferably the same group over a long time
All of this is so far from anything evolution would have selected for that we can pick our favorite argument: 'well humans are unique in our tool use, so we should be encouraging kids to learn new tools instead of explicit teaching (like montessori)' or 'well humans never learned to read until about 100 years ago and computers can read for us so don't teach this new-fangled reading stuff'
It's not a helpful frame. The language thing is totally distinct—that really is an innate human thing among children. So again we can't make useful evolution-based claims about adult language education.
The actual title, which is what should be used on submissions, is "Stability of epigenetic transgenerational inheritance of adult-onset disease and parturition abnormalities". If you want to link to the press release, you should link to that—note it also doesn't use your editorialized title.
The article isn't about the fungicide (were the exposures close to what humans experience?) but about the possibility of epigenetic transmission.
Edit: "When pregnancy was confirmed, on days 8 through 14 of gestation [31] the females were administered daily intraperitoneal injections of vinclozolin (100 mg/kg BW/day, Chem Services, Westchester PA, USA)" - not comparable to humans. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6114855/
I think it was edited with an LLM - the voice flits from human to bot but various tells are present. The heterogeneity of sentence structure is the clearest signal.
I also suspect that people who spend too much time reading LLM-produced content and using LLMs end up suffering a kind of brain-rot from the "LLM house style", and start naturally using those idioms in their own writing even if they do it all by hand.
Paste from another reply: The fact that these "independent" bodies even exist outside executive control in the first place. The fact that a President signed the legislation that created these bodies is an example of passing executive power to the legislative.
I won't say you're alone on this one, but the position that the federal reserve should not be independent is extremely controversial.
So, if the president gave up his power to conduct monetary policy. Than good! But then that doesn't seem to correlate with Congress giving up their power so that they don't have to make unpopular votes and risk losing elections.
I feel a better question is what entities that are in continuous operation since the 1630s do not resemble a real estate holding company? If you analyze only the extremes of any distribution you'll find weirdness.
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