Links, July 11, 2025
§Layers of Lawyers and Liars
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The effect of LLMs on law is going to be catastrophic. Matthew Butterick, a laywer (currently suing many major AI firms), lisp programmer, typographer (whose Valkyrie and Concourse faces you are currently reading), and author, writes:
law is much more vulnerable to erosion by LLMs than the sheet-music service described earlier. That company at least had a choice whether to update their product to match the words coming out of the LLM. In law, by contrast, the words on the page are the product, as the database of AI Hallucination Cases reminds us.
This piece is both horrifying and very much worth reading.
§You MUST Listen to RFC 2119
I found a voice actor and hired them with the task of “Reading this very dry technical document in the most over-the-top sarcastic, passive-aggressive, condescending way possible. Like, if you think it’s too much, take that feeling, ignore it, and crank things up one more notch.”
RFC 2119 is the document where MUST, MUST NOT, etc are defined.
§Digital Sovereignty in Practice: Web Browsers as a Reality Check
Digital infrastructure is as important as energy or transportation networks. Unlike physical infrastructure, however, digital systems can be controlled remotely, updated unilaterally, and modified to serve the interests of their controllers rather than their users.
A great discussion about something I feel is increasingly headed in the wrong direction, as my city, my kid’s school district, and other civic institutions adopt digital infrastructure from private companies where I interact with the private company, and this removes agency from the civic institutions. This piece makes an argument that web browsers are the smallest litmus test about how much agency a society maintains over its own infrastructure.
§Make Fun Of Them
Ed Zitron on the nonsensical things coming out of tech leader’s mouths:
It’s tempting to believe that there is some sort of intellectual barrier between you and the powerful — that the confusing and obtuse way that they speak is the sound of genius, rather than somebody who has learned a lot of smart-sounding words without ever learning what they mean.
It then turns into a scathing critique of what the technology industry has become, and how useless the tech press is. Ed goes on for some time, but the whole piece is worth reading.
§Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity
When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.
When one uses the bullshit machine, one becomes susceptible to bullshit. Who knew?