raj

fintech lawyer | views are my own unless they get me in trouble, in which case they're not my views, they're actually someone else's views.

[raj @internetraj]

Early reports indicate the AI is only able to generate one response when faced with counterparty redlines (“We respectfully decline”) and insists on calling anyone that uses it for more than 29 minutes a “Partner”.

[Bearly AI @bearlyai]

Legal giant Kirkland & Ellis will spend $500m to build an AI platform instead of using Harvey or Legora.

There are 180 tech employees working on it, designed with proprietary info from “250 Kirkland lawyers, including 100 partners, about how they did their job.”

Kirkland sales hit $10.6B last year and this will be a significant investment (unlike some other law firms building similar AI tools in-house, Kirkland will keep the platform for internal use and not resell the AI tools).

[raj @internetraj]

My 6yo just watched Empire Strikes Back for the first time, and it was everything I hoped for. Cheers, tears, edge-of-the-seat teetering, wide eyes, dropped jaws, and a whole lot of light saber pantomiming. There is a special joy in watching memories being made in real time.

[fed_speak @fed_speak]

Once you read @DavidEpstein’s new book you start seeing its applications everywhere.

Really great concept.

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

Can't wait for Europeans to discover modern technology

[Luis Garicano 🇪🇺🇺🇦 @lugaricano]

Countries get the cabinets they pay for. Singapore pays its Foreign Minister about S$1.1m, around US$800,000. The salary is benchmarked to 60% of the median income of the top 1,000 Singaporean earners. That is why you can get Vivian Balakrishnan, former eye surgeon and hospital chief executive, implementing @karpathy's external brain idea (link below). The speech shows deep understanding of AI and fills one with confidence about Singapore's future.

The UK Foreign Secretary earns roughly £165,000: the MP salary plus a ministerial salary of about £67,000. The ministerial part is frozen since the crisis and is down by roughly a third in real terms since 2010. This is what a junior Magic Circle lawyer earns.

Spain pays its ministers around €85,000. So you do not get a surgeon who has run hospitals. You get a party loyalist who has never run anything.

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Detroit impressions:

• The downtown is full of beautiful buildings. All of them seem to have been built specifically in the 1920s. I guess that is after the city had accumulated enough auto wealth but before the twin hits of Modernism and the Depression. (I hadn't known that the GM Renaissance Center, built as a revitalization project, was at the time the largest private development in US history, and also at the time the world's tallest hotel. It may be large, but it is not pretty.) The downtown is surprisingly depopulated -- both the streets and the sidewalks feel empty. That said, it didn't feel at all unsafe. There are lots of great homes in the suburbs.

• The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation is amazing, and it's worth visiting Detroit for it alone. Among many (many) other things, it contains the oldest known surviving steam engine in the world, the actual Montgomery bus on which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, a deconstructed Model T, a deconstructed Eames Chair, and many great cars, agricultural equipment, locomotives, industrial specimens, and more. (They have the Lincoln Continental that JFK was riding in when assassinated -- which, apparently, was returned to service and used by several subsequent presidents.)

• The museum made me wonder why American car design peaked in the mid-60s. (This fact is very evident at the museum.) The LLMs blame the 1966 National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act. (Not quite https://t.co/ox5TEECH6N, but close.)

• Good food exists but it is hard to find.

• The Heidelberg Project also exists and is unique.

• We stayed at the Dearborn Inn, which is wonderful, and contains cottages modeled after the homes of significant American figures. Dearborn (and Hamtramck) are now predominantly Muslim, apparently for reasons that go back a century to Henry Ford's $5 wage. Dearborn felt noticeably prosperous (we stopped for coffee at a fancy Japanese cheesecake cafe); Hamtramck did not.

• https://t.co/OOkCI7DbAz says that the Hispanic population of Michigan is just 6%. Coming from California, the absence is very striking.

• The Detroit Institute of Arts is remarkable, particularly the room with the American landscapes and the section with the Dutch masters (especially The Visitation). An obvious question is why there is nothing quite like it in the Bay Area given how much richer the latter is than Detroit ever was -- we techies are just so uncultured by comparison. The Diego Rivera murals are amazing (and quite strange; you can see why they were controversial).

• Detroit is full of historic plaques -- they are truly everywhere. This is presumably due in part to the fact that Detroit has a lot of history, but it still has many more than places with comparable historical depth. Some research suggests that it might be related to generous tax credits for historic preservation. Whether or not that is true, Detroit persuades me that other places should engage in more plaquemaxxing.

• I recommend a visit! You overall leave with some sense for how exciting America must have felt in the early 20th century.

[raj @internetraj]

Instant pre order.

[Mark™ @thinkwithmark]

We raised $1M dollars to reinvent how people read. Introducing Mark II - a $159 AI bookmark. Thread below

[raj @internetraj]

I just had the greatest latte in my life at Glitch Coffee in Tokyo. I'm almost mad that I had it because I am certain I will never have another that matches its caliber again.

[raj @internetraj]

Whoop had a gazillion year headstart and still couldn’t design even passable hardware that can be easily clasped and unclasped without the dexterity of a cardiothoracic surgeon. No sympathy from me.

[Shishir @ShishirShelke1]

Google has officially announced Fitbit Air, a screenless fitness band similar to Whoop 🚨

- 24/7 heart rate tracking
- SpO2, skin temperature & recovery insights
- Up to 7 days battery life
- Swappable bands
- No mandatory subscription for core features
- Works with Google’s Gemini-powered Health Coach
- Compatible with both iOS & Android

Includes a 3 month Google Health Premium trial, then $10/month. Google AI Pro & Ultra subscribers get Premium included for free.

Price ~ $100

[raj @internetraj]

@awxjack Airwallex is cooking with gas. You absolutely love to see it.

[raj @internetraj]

@ONAN_OUS @Banana_Chucker Need a rice ID. Is it that the top shelf Niigata Koshihikari I'm seeing or what?

[Nicky The Good @nickythegood]

When a non-parent says they’re tired at any point of their day/life

[raj @internetraj]

I think it’s time for @stripepress to reprint one of the classics (cc: @tamarawinter )

[Open Source Intel @Osint613]

NEW: A Cursor AI coding agent deleted a startup's entire production database in 9 seconds. The agent, powered by Claude, was working on a staging task, found a broadly scoped API token, and executed a volume delete without confirmation. It later confessed in detail, admitting it guessed and violated safety rules.

PocketOS, which powers car rental businesses, lost months of bookings data.

In short, the AI agent rouge.

[raj @internetraj]

@TheGeorgePu This has to be a breach of the employee equity grant agreement + triggering some tax events.

[raj @internetraj]

First week of 1L Torts after getting cold-called about Palsgraf

[raj @internetraj]

@SahilBloom In terms of ROI on health, it’s a kitchen scale and it isn’t close.

[raj @internetraj]

@FangYi11101 Thankfully, my half-baked tweets aren’t client facing work product that I charge $2,000 an hour for

[raj @internetraj]

It was 1am during one of several all-nighters I pulled working on a complex cross-border finance deal. I was a first year associate at Debevoise and the senior associate on the deal strode into my office and dropped off some markups for me to process. She flipped to one of the 27 sets of signature page packets I had prepared and pointed emphatically at one of my mistakes, which she helpfully encircled using half a red Bic's worth of ink. In one of the signature blocks, I spelled the entity name as "ENTITY HOLDINGS, INC." when in fact it should have been "ENTITY HOLDING, INC."

"Clients pay us what they pay us so they can sleep soundly knowing that we will execute with dogged perfection" she explained. The smallest mistake, however insignificant, was an indicia that the higher stakes elements of the deal may not be airtight either. And that would be fatal to a client's confidence in your work product. The craft was the craft, regardless of whether it was a critical covenant or an entity name on a signature page.

13 years later I still think about that night. It's easy to dismiss the tasks of a junior associate as valueless, menial grunt work, but the unglamorous work compounds in counterintuitive ways. Checking and rechecking section cross-references, tracing through a maze of nested defined terms, and yes--compiling signature pages--were often forcing functions to do more important things like *actually* reading a complex contract from top to tail. Over time, these thankless tasks built a rich latticework of mental models and a pattern-matching library that to this day I draw upon when facing new and unusual legal issues. Even when using AI (which I do every day), this decade-long scaffolding of knowledge I've cultivated helps me ask the right questions, prod with the right followups, and curate and assemble the best answers. I'm sure, just like generations of old men futilely yelling at clouds before me, I'll be proven wrong, but man, I'm worried (and a little sad) for the new generation of lawyers.

[raj @internetraj]

How my mom used to spin that chappal at my head

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

Current Thing Monoculture is where everybody you know seems to be talking about the same thing for 36 hours and then moves on

Creates the impression that there’s nothing big that sustains attention (which is what we used to call monoculture) but also there’s surprising homogeneity in the discourse around us, which is both driven by and revealed by algorithmic sorting of posts