I’m being pedantic but while external factors definitely can cause big jumps in tech, everything is always interconnected. We can’t discover rocketry without previous leaps in material science, those were impossible without manufacturing and mining infrastructure, those not possible without agriculture and sociological structures and organization, not to mention all the associated advances in mathematics etc
That's exactly the right level of pedantry. ;-) Right, I'd argue all of that is in the human ingenuity category.
But in contrast, if we knew that some invention like grinding lenses or whatever was completely impossible until some meteor or fungus hit planet Earth in year N and introduced a new element we were able to use, then that's an external factor.
I suppose there more pedantry is possible, like we could have invented space travel meteor-hopping tech by that point and discovered the "new element" for ourselves, but that's probably the wrong level of pedantry.
I think the closest practical answer is probably more along the lines of population density, and arguing that certain inventions would not be created until the density was enough to create a problem justifying its existence.
I'd argue its from attention seeking from lonely people online. Being a rage troll is the quickest way to get some kind of interaction, and being online means theres less consequences for it
I have been quoted 500$ to fix a stuck gascap cover, because apparently the spring is inside and attached to the rear body panel, and would require a major part replacement.
Although im starting to suspect my mechanic is taking me for a ride
A moment of imagining how that would influence the market value of certain skillsets should easily cure you from that surprise ;)
On the other hand, legal systems have effectively been doing the equivalent of git since basically forever. There have been very few law books written from the ground up. All other law authoring, be it by kings, priests, dictators or parliaments, was I the form of diffs to an existing codebase.
The Common Paper app[1], though not quite a git workflow, has always struck me as being pretty close to how an software engineer might approach contracts:
1. An immutable set of standard terms, with variable references.
2. A collection of cover page variables, that modify the standard terms by reference.
3. A structured negotiation workflow, where users "propose changes" to the cover page variables with automatic "diff-ing" (redlining).
It's not a product targeted to software engineers, but has always appealed to me as a way to sneak in some engineering best-practices into the world of lawyering :)
Nisus Writer Pro [0] has been around for 40 years this year IIRC (IANANWP) and has a user base who can vouch for many of the features that HN readers want something to offer.
One of the interesting things that I discovered while working on some legal papers with a lawyer were that legal documents don't have copyright protection. Lawyers regularly copy and paste from other lawyers work. I suppose, that since legislators most often have backgrounds as lawyers, they legislated rules for themselves that are not the same as the rule the rest of us have to follow.
I am not a lawyer so I don't know that anything in the previous paragraph is true; it's just based on a recollection of something I was told once a long time ago.
1. That's an overstatement: For "original works of authorship," copyright happens automatically upon "fixation" in a "tangible medium of expression" (e.g., saving to a file, maybe even just typing). [0] And it doesn't take much "original ... authorship" to qualify for copyright protection.
2. Here's A hypothetical example: Alice drafts a contract from scratch as Version 1 and saves it to a file. It's copyrighted; on these facts, Alice owns the copyright. [0] Then Bob takes Alice's Version 1 and modifies it to create Version 1.1: Bob's "original" contributions to Version 1.1 are themselves protected by copyright, which Bob owns, bu with two caveats:
(a) Bob has no claim to copyright in Alice's Version 1; and
(b) Bob's own contributions to Version 1.1 won't be protected unless one or both of the following is true: (1) Bob had Alice's permission to base his "derivative work" on Alice's Version 1; [1] and/or (2) Bob's use of Version 1 qualified as "fair use" (a complicated question in itself). [2]
Style and substance separation is easy and should be a requirement. Legal is pure text "programming" and what I mean is that the style of the text has zero bearing on the judicial process.
The benefits of working at the proper level of abstraction compound. It enables tech like diffs and git, which then nicely solves a bunch of other problems as well. Using Word completely side-steps all those benefits. Sure, you get a few nice buttons, but that's literally it. You are trapped forever with no way forward.
This feels like actually programming in Word and manually highlighting comments to be green or something. It's a travesty IMO.
Of course this isn't and hasn't been true for quite some time. I'm the first to blast MS Word for being a total disaster (esp. templates, ie. style/substance separation, are bad) but it is no longer a locked-in platform. Even the docx format is only a zipped XML file. If you want, you can unpack the document file and put it into git. Thank you Open Document Foundation!
On top of that, all contemporary word processors I'm aware of have, of course, versioning with diffs. It is just different than git (or other programmer tools.) Just as you are using your tools of your trade and don't know much about MS Word, lawyers use their tools of their trade and don't know much about git. It's like saying that editing POs is superior to Trados, because for a programmer it is but a professional translator is going to tell you a different story.
(Of course, everybody everywhere should be using LaTeX for fine-looking documents in all circumstances. No argument here ;))
My point is not that. Sure, you can go from Word to OpenOffice. Great, now you manually highlight your code in that..
It’s a deeper thing. You can hack Word and related tools for coding and eventually it is acceptable I guess, but it’s starting from the wrong foundation.
This ladder will never reach the moon.
Word’s diffs are not “just different”. they are objectively inferior in many ways. I personally witness daily the travesty of government staff’s handling of information.
Word is a fancy digital typewriter and IMO it’s the wrong abstraction for this day and age and cultural issues are the only thing keeping us back. As always.
Edit: academic papers looking like they were written on a 19th century typewriter.. I don’t get this fascination with style, from scientists of all people. Lay down the info, provide the data. Kerning your fonts properly.. oh my god, I need to cool down. I am a hot headed type of guy, sorry about that.
Hey, thanks for the reply. From what I read, I think you think that language use is some kind of coding with words where you have a deterministic relation between input and output. You seem to treat the semantic content of a statement as if it is somehow static, objective, and oberservable. I don't think it is and I'm in good company on that matter.
That being said, that's just my reading of your comment and I could be wrong, which is kind of my argument here. If I'm right lawyers don't care about your notion, they use language for something different than mere information encoding. Therefore they need tools that support their use case. MS Word (or word processors in general) might not be the best tool for that job, but it is good enough. Integrating a well trained ChatGPT into MS Word will help lawyers much more than any structured entry form ever could.
BTW, the LaTeX quip was intended to make light of the idea of separating content and style, which goes way back. Consider TeX' age. Your reaction tells me, you think LaTeX is a styling tool, which in a sense it is, and that's what it is about, which it is not. Hordes of scientists (and type-setting professionals) argue in favor of LaTeX (or other type-setting systems) because you just write the content in plain text. LaTeX takes care of the style. TeX files are also just markup and easily git'able. It does make life easier, but it is not as important as some people make it out to be.
Thanks for indulging me. I know I am yelling at the clouds.
I also know people usually misunderstand me because I am a “programmer” and all I see is “code”. I guess that’s fair enough, but I fully understand legal being of a completely different nature from Rust.
What I also understand is that no matter how long everyone argues about it, the only thing that matters about legal is the text. The font, the styling, etc is all secondary. It might be important, but it’ll never be primary. Unless courts start judging differently based on page margins I guess.
The same goes for science. Publishing “attention is all you need” in an 8bit NES font might not be fashionable, but it does not and cannot detract from the discovery within it. LaTex produces the exact same documents (I know it is configurable but we are going for a certain style) and that’s what this is about. Not how the tools work but that we fundamentally even care about it instead of focusing on the primary issues like correctness, openness, accessibility. I’d like academic papers to be APIs actually.
Again I see the importance of styling and appearance in general. It’s just that we start with that and I think that’s problematic and actively harms our progress.
Also, to conclude, I am nitwit. This is just my take.
Edit: A man can dream, right? If a paper was plaintext I could typeset it last minute in 8bit NES fonts if I’d be so inclined. I hate ya’ll deciding how everything looks and works. I know that’s technically challenging, but to me that’s where the progress is. An academic paper like, say, a jupyter notebook would be awesome, not? Would you give up your fancy type setting? I would!
If you are a nitwit, I'm one, too. Don't worry. I think I get your take. You say the important part of legal and scientific texts is their content, not their form. And I agree. But that is not where we started. We started with (paraphrasing) "programmer tools like git are superior to MS Word, therefore lawyers should use git." There, I disagree.
This 100%. It does get interesting when you get into non-plaintext things that have to somehow integrate into plaintext systems (git managed codebases). We've kind of left it up to CMS systems to handle the non-plaintext bits but this leads to many more orthogonal process problems.
IMO, I think it really comes down to finding a universal mechanism for diffing and 3-way merging things that aren't plain text (document diffing). I think distributed version control can be universal (at least on a data level), how an application renders a meaningful diff for a specific task is incredibly subjective to the document type and task at hand. My point being that I completely agree that plaintext makes a whole lot of sense for programmers and pretty much nobody else. However, distributed version control does not have to be confined to plaintext, it's just tricky to see when all the version control systems we're familiar with are plaintext ones.
Git is popular because it's linear, and the linear paradigm usually translates well to serial things such as programs, instructions, document sets, etc.
It's actually bad at non-linear stuff, which you will have noticed if you have ever been working with hierarchical formats, especially e.g. xml or nested JSON.
Word is bad for a whole litany of reasons, but the reason it can't be easily versioned (atop the format being a literal Goldberg machine requiring inane transforms to properly) is that it encodes a bunch of non-linear formatting instructions. Sure, we can sort-of reason about this stuff e.g. with a hierarchical css+html+js structure, but without a way to render that I challenge you to be able to simply diff that information. Seeing "bold" or "blue" seems simple enough, as long as you also know to which elements it applies and in what layout. So, suddenly you can't reasonably diff the css file without also difficulty the html.
For programmers, we are used to reducing things by their dimensions into fairly linear spaces, this then helps us reason fairly linearly about changes, but doing this from any other context is challenging. Lawyers e.g. perhaps focus on the relations between various clauses, so linearizing their document flow is not very important to them, at least when there exists methods to diff the general textual content without investing much in how they are doing that.
As programmers we see the similarities to editing a code base and that excites us, however we do have a tendency to go off and write frameworks to parse and simplify these things, without ever actually bothering to learn to apply these things. This is not invaluable, but it's a different focus, which maybe explains why lawyers are not in the habit of using git.
> Sure, we can sort-of reason about this stuff e.g. with a hierarchical css+html+js structure, but without a way to render that I challenge you to be able to simply diff that information. Seeing "bold" or "blue" seems simple enough, as long as you also know to which elements it applies and in what layout. So, suddenly you can't reasonably diff the css file without also difficulty the html.
We’re in complete agreement. But you can do this, you just need to provide a “renderer” and a schema that describes how your tree structure should merge or conflict. If you want to test out a weird version control for structured data, my email is in my bio.
You are correct. But this is a culture issue. Culturally legal folk don’t see what they do as programming so they use different tools and work their processes their way. This is advantageous to outsiders who see through this! ;)
I think the main benefit would be to be able to represent yourself in court... otherwise there currently exist certain pratical and ethical hurdles to capitalizing into this, such as passing a bar exam (non-trivial), providing credentials, operating in the best interest of your client/society...etc.
We used to have word processors that exposed mark up. I wrote immense amounts of documentation in Wordstar on 8 bit machines and it was definitely more efficient than the WYSIWYG word processors that came later and faster even when the newer ones were running on much faster hardware.
Something like Wordstar would be better than MarkDown.
Markdown isn’t detailed enough for legal stuff. Internal references, tables, complex section numbering require extensive post processing or simply don’t work. You quickly wind up with a lot of hidden magic that frustrates people used to word.
Last time I lost patience with doing Legal stuff in word and evaluated alternatives, I was most optimistic about Asciidoc. Unfortunately the ecosystem was relatively anemic… the strong syntax was limited by the tooling.
Looks like there’s been some improvement, maybe I’ll try again. There’s a nice new homepage at least: https://asciidoc.org/
The IntelliJ AsciiDoc plugin is a little juwel with all bells and whistles, Syntax highlight, Preview, structure view, even refactoring of references. We use it together with Antora.
Lawyers have gotten rid of secretaries and so spend time (and billing) futzing around with document formatting, fonts, margins, bullets, numbering, autonumbering and the like.
To me, that just calls for a sensible UI with attractive styling and interaction over a git backend for the heavy lifting of tracking changes through time.
A lot of successful products have been built in this way. I've seen developers get upset with Apple for making successful products out of just giving a nice UI to a piece of open source tech that does the heavy lifting. Like it's cheating.
You should research what happened with distros and UI systems...open source was building lots of nice UIs and you could even have them on Windows/Mac, but the was constant drama over the "right" way to code a UI framework...which led to a ton of fracturing and leaning back towards minimalism (because the nice stuff was always very heavy).
This even happened with Microsoft, they had so many false starts and changes in messaging that they killed their own portfolios. I suspect at least that is why they "embraced linux" because it was excellent at web, and web wasn't busy changing every month (it has been, but that's a different story).
Apple introduced Swift but besides new Xcode versions I get the general impression their tooling has been far more stable.
Actually the little known "Review" feature of word allows to visually track approve/reject/comment collaborative changes over a document in a really user friendly way, not need for git here
The standard for legal docs is to redline changes with an additional tool, because you don't necessarily trust the other contributors. They have decent tools for this, and the system works ok I suppose. Editing tends to be in tic-toc fashion anyways so I guess it works. You could do someting like this with git and a markup language, but I don't know you'd convince many lawyers that the squeeze was worth the juice.
I don't know the names. They all seem to have the pro Acrobat stuff, but more often use something also bundled with search tools perhaps? Communication between lawyers on opposite "sides" often seems to be by PDF, not source (although sometimes that too) so I imagined they both have working docs kept separate because they don't want to to share some of the markup/comments. I asked one of them about that they claimed that using clean pdf output (no metadata or history) was worth the extra hassle as it avoided costly errors.
Anyway that's my limited experience having dealt with a bunch of them - no expert.
It's never pdf. You can't easily make corrections on a pdf, never mind major revisions (such as moving sections around). If someone sends me a pdf I ask for a Word document, or convert the pdf to Word myself. Sending someone a pdf is a little like saying "fuck you."
Confetiur.
Collegial lawyers don't send each other pdf's. They are impossible to mark up. One "innovation" I have seen is with banks. They do not want their employees to be creative; edge cases don't exist, everything is binary.
So the banks issue grids/tables containing a list of questions. The answers are found in the corresponding place on the table. Imagine 7 columns, all containing binary answers: "yes" or "no."
Except, everything is not binary.
So the 8th column contains, I dunno, 500 words, a minitable, etc., running over page after page. The other columns on these runover pages are blank.
And these are all pdf's.
One can dream that the solution here would be to have companies to start treating Florida university degrees as worthless. Want a job outside of Florida? Need to go to university and live outside of Florida. Want a job with a company that is based outside of Florida but has Florida offices? Gotta go to university outside of Florida as well.
Will that hurt a lot of people that live in Florida? Yeah, it absolutely will. But sometimes, pain is the best medicine. I know it's callous and heartless, but much like with cancer, sometimes you need to cut out healthy tissue to make sure you cut out all the cancer. At some point you do need to put the needs and betterment of society as a whole above the individual.
Plus I figure if we can manage to hold them off long enough, Florida's gonna turn into a bunch of archipelagos and politically irrelevant.
As someone who is a late bloomer there is definitely benefits but also realized that I am almost always going to be the center of attention a lot of places I go
It’s not fun being in a coffeeshop and having middle age women blatantly stare at you and jockey to sit uncomfortably close. I’ve even had a few touch me without even speaking to me
I’m fortunate in that I don’t feel like my life is in danger but sometimes I just want to be left alone and yet if I go places I have to deal with the fact that eyes are on me and I’ll be approached when I don’t want to
They are not in English. The old one is HKGolden while the new one is LIHKG. I think a similar pattern of movement happened from PTT to DCard too. I think these all have a Wikipedia page, and I hope translation tools work well enough to make them understandable.
To be honest, the pattern is not quite similar. The main reason for PTT's decline can be boiled down to political issues. The PTT operators were unable to effectively deal with the issue of water armies, resulting in a decision to halt new user registrations for nearly three years.
You would think so, but the Republicans have been trying to kill USPS for decades, and have managed to pass laws which both mandate that it pay for itself without taxpayer dollars, and hamstring its ability to be profitable. Some of these hamstringing measures were temporarily removed in 2022 as an emergency measure, but the USPS remains without a guarantee of stable funding in the future.
The only thing more inefficient than a purely governmental organization is a private company providing services to the government. There seems to be a persistent belief amonst citizens that governmental services would make them more efficient, more responsive to customers, etc, but following the money suggests different motivations.
The reason it is inefficient is because it provides services that a private company would not, or would charge a ton of money for. The USPS has to deliver mail to everyone with a postal address -- they do a whole lot of 'last mile' deliveries for FedEx and UPS, etc. Getting rid of the USPS means that a lot of people would either not get mail or pay out the nose for it.
Some things just aren't profitable, and frankly shouldn't be. Let's not forget that.
Seal Team Six Bake Sale! GoFundMe for Black Hawk nav system retrofitting! Reservists doing Speedo/Bikini carwashes! I'm sure it would work out great...
Really shows they don't really care about infrastructure. The markets could collapse and FedEx, UPS, and DHL could go under, but because the USPS is still there, you can still send mail from one coast to another.
> but the Republicans have been trying to kill USPS for decades
A little disingenuous. Republicans attempted to force lower government spending by causing a deficit decades ago. The strategy (for those that were good willed) was that a large deficit would politically force spending cuts across the board, obviously including USPS.
No spending cuts have ever been made and the deficit has grown exponentially instead. Congress discovered debt doesn't matter, and now neither side cares.
Welcome to the uniparty. You can continue to pretend DC Democrats and Republicans are different, but they're playing you with fake controversies that never are resolved by Congress
> > but the Republicans have been trying to kill USPS for decades
> A little disingenuous.
No, it's 100% true. I'm not a Democrat by any means and I'm in fact highly critical of the Democrats. But if you look at the history of laws proposed/passed with regards to the USPS, there's absolutely no ambiguity that the Republicans are trying to kill the USPS. This has nothing to do with spending, either: the USPS has not been funded by taxpayer dollars since 2006, with the exception of the 2022 bailout. After 2006, the USPS operated profitably for a few years, but Republicans have passed regulations which prevent the USPS from operating profitably, leading for the need for the 2022 bailout.
This isn't about debt or spending, and it isn't a matter where both parties are the same. I'm not a Democrat, and I don't even like Democrats, but the USPS' funding issues are unambiguously and intentionally caused by Republicans.
I'm not sure what total junk-mail volume is, but the USPS moved 127.3 billion "units" (pieces of mail) in 2022, down from a peak of 213 billion in 2006.
First-Class mail volume was 48.9 billion in 2022, single-piece (which I presume means non-bulk) 12.9 billion.
Assuming an average weight of 100g per item, that's 6.7 million tonnes of marketing (junk) mail, give or take an order of magnitude.
A tractor-trailer rig can carry a maximum of about 45,000 lb (20 tonnes).
The junk-mail delivered in a year is roughly 400,000 such truckloads of mail. Or assuming 5-day/week delivery, about 2,000 trucks operating daily for a year.
(I'm using round numbers as the initial estimate is rough, just trying to give rough scope to the scale.)
Yes, I'm against federal subsidies in many industries. If it's a public messaging system such as USPS, why does it deliver so much spam? How about we just pay for it and stop that part? Everyone loves that with Fastmail vs Gmail - how about we do it for our national message passing?
> capitalism
How did you arrive at capitalism when I criticized federal funding? You think the idea of a federal govt and paying for stuff with public taxes is a core pillar of capitalism?
Layoff ops are pretty standardized so I would be surprised if there wasn’t a template that has been commonly agreed upon to be as neutral in tone as possible
