Ben Sovocool

I like to read things and sometimes think about them too. Noted idiot lawyer. Opinions solely my own.

[Ben Sovocool @BenSovocool]

@ElliotVaucher @lawheroezV2 Yeah this is straightforwardly a benchmark problem

[Ben Sovocool @BenSovocool]

@abraham_jmb Broker carcinization theory haha

[Ben Sovocool @BenSovocool]

@abraham_jmb Saving the good takes for the moots… just wait for Harvey et al PFOF economics

[Ben Sovocool @BenSovocool]

Greatest city on earth btw

[Ben Sovocool @BenSovocool]

@turdducken To be fair it could be either one of them

[Ben Sovocool @BenSovocool]

@abraham_jmb IMO 95% mystique around “power users” is misplaced. You talk to it in plain English and it executes instructions. You provide goals and feedback in the same manner you would to a person. I don’t doubt that the top 0.1% are truly next level but it’s a pretty intuitive product

[Ben Sovocool @BenSovocool]

@MattZeitlin THEIR MONEY IS YOUR MONEY AS OF RIGHT NOW

[Ben Sovocool @BenSovocool]

@abraham_jmb Comp is a factor (no equity) but the more fundamental issue is just vibes/cultural, imo. If you’re a SWE at a legaltech startup you’re the central player. If you’re an eng at a BL firm you are not and a distinct %% of the lawyers will hate your guts

[Ben Sovocool @BenSovocool]

@willchen500 Although I am a Harvey hater brokering between model families is a different business than switching within families

[Ben Sovocool @BenSovocool]

@a_e_ro_dy_namik @martyrdison Easy arbitrage play. Maybe this is how one affords $4,000 lunches

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease.

This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit.

The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London.

A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box.

These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel.

They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains.

They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep.

Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”:

> “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.”

—

The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates.

It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption.

SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins).

The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill.

With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment.

Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two.

It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place.

All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now.

That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective.

If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.

[Ben Sovocool @BenSovocool]

@viemccoy @based_coded Hardcore to the mega

[Ben Sovocool @BenSovocool]

It's going to be funny to see the business model for Big Legal AI shift into lab PFOF, but it's actually a very good business...

[Ben Sovocool @BenSovocool]

I think you’re right, with one additional point that in addition to being an acceleration it will also be a Weirding of competitive dynamics as we find that equilibrium. One area where it could become unpleasant quickly is that it will be comparatively more optimal to force/stress human angles. Basically tilting people to make bad decisions without assistance under pressure or exploiting bad org dynamics

[Ben Sovocool @BenSovocool]

A more deflationary reading is that many professional services have cultural preferences or norms which appear arbitrary but which function as embedded proof of work. In industries where this matters (banking, law, consulting, etc) there will be choices about whether to (i) replicate existing PoW cues, (ii) create new ones, or (iii) recalibrate relationships around work product (if the deck goes into another AI on clientside, do you need human-signaled PoW cues?)

[Garrett Lord @GarrettLord]

People wildly underestimate how much of professional work is taste, and taste is exactly what models don't have until you teach it to them.

Some of my favorite examples come from banking. Managing directors at the top firms prefer square edges over rounded edges on a logo in a deck, because square reads as more professional. They have strong, specific opinions on how a formula should be constructed in a model so that a 22-year-old can drag it cleanly across a dozen sheets at 3am. None of this is in a manual. None of it is on the internet. It lives entirely in the muscle memory of people who slept three hours a night learning it.

That is the codification problem in miniature. A huge fraction of what separates "technically correct" from "actually good" is unwritten judgment like this. Capturing it is unglamorous and it is the difference between an agent people tolerate and an agent people trust.

[Ben Sovocool @BenSovocool]

@andrewarruda it is literally just a signal problem. we need to get over this whole discussion as an industry

[Ben Sovocool @BenSovocool]

What is the shortest function that produces all relevant caselaw?

[Robert Anderson @ProfRobAnderson]

Courts need to stop asking whether AI-cited cases do exist and start asking whether they should exist.