There is enough controlling law publicly available to ascertain whether grounds for a suit exist, and for drafting sophisticated legal arguments for most actions in US federal court. I have not found the same for US state courts where law and especially legal procedure is deliberately not transparent (to the federal court system's credit, it is transparent). In my experience litigating pro se (by myself), I have found LLMs can assist effectively up to settlement for a a legal claim up to the low seven digits.

Just finished two years of federal litigation using only my $20 per month Chat GPT subscription. I was able to do legal research, legal strategy, draft and file briefings and legal memos including pleadings and replies. I was able to conduct discovery, including conferences with federal and district magistrates and judges, and ultimately forced settlement against a very well funded defendant with a large team of high-priced attorneys. I used Gemini and smart prompting to find relevant case law, forecast and defend against attacks and lateral counter-attacks, and proof my citations. I began litigation in 2024, when 4o was on hand to help out. If LLMs had not been availble, I would not have had a chance in court, especially given the defendant's very aggressive strategy. Given that no attorney would help me, and the profession defends itself, as Judge Posner said, as a cartel, I thank my lucky stars the technology existed. I cannot wait to see the legal profession decimated, and it should welcome AI, which can do a better job and provide better professional judgement than a human attorney ever can. I will say however, users must manage the AI model to keep it on track, to stress test assumptions, and smart custom instructions is essential.

What’s your project by the way. Would be curious to know more, if you’re up for sharing now. Later is fine too.

No monetization plan — it's all local, no server, near-zero cost to run. Free and open source. I believe good tools should be accessible to everyone. Open source first, monetization will figure itself out down the road.

It's called Hodor — prompt launcher for macOS.

Outstanding, and ethical too. So tell us, did you forgo monetization forever, or do you have a plan for revenue? Perhaps it’s not an issue for you, but knowing what you have up might help others conceive of a shift of the Overton window such that it’s no longer a given that that must be harvested.

If the credit bureaus don't have a complete profile when you start, they will after provide the missing pieces.

I really wouldn't be surprised if that is indeed the goal defined for that workflow's design.

Exactly.

I don't understand how a community such as this, as connected as it is, can't back channel a message to Google brass to do something about these lockouts, which occur frequently and are unnecessary. There is no way Google doesn't know about them.

Gmail is an essential piece of pervasive personal infrastructure, upon which hundreds of millions of people rely. People are losing irreplaceable data for lack of care on the part of Google. The cost of providing a way to prove identity while maintaining security ought to be part of the cost of doing business for Google as it provides Gmail.

Surely there are some Google employees lurking who can chime in on this frustrating neglect.

The cost of adding a support desk outweighs any potential profit, I would imagine by a huge amount given accounts are ‘free’.

It’s not that the executive don’t know, it’s that they don’t care.

If they weren't making enough money from having people use their "free" accounts, they wouldn't offer them.

I’m not disputing that, I’m suggesting the cost of support staff outweighs the value (to google) of retaining broken or lost accounts. I’m not a legal expert but it might be a good pre-emptive move to add support even if it’s extremely poor purely to avoid government regulation (given identity is basically bound to email, it might be a unique scenario if someone is unable to identify because of a private company, etc).

Why not just use RSS?

You need to generate feeds to track topics across different sites, which opens up a whole new can of worms.

Take this aggregation as it is, generate RSS. Not sure where the night crawlers are hiding in this plan.

How do you generate RSS feeds for sites that do not expose native RSS endpoints (e.g., Twitter pages without Nitter or YouTube pages)? Additionally, how do you classify the extracted content into topics?

The generated feed just points to the articles. The destination doesn’t need to care about RSS.

Classifying is not the purview of RSS. Presumably, TopicRadar is already doing this classification.

gg got it

This question arises from the current regime's efforts to reverse naturalization.

For anyone who has one US citizen parent and one non-citizen parent, where the citizen parent has passed before the child applicant for naturalization reaches 18 years of age, resulting in the applicant applying for and receiving naturalization as an adult, can that same currently naturalized citizen also obtain natural born citizenship status through the deceased citizen parent and would it be advisable?

If I understand you correctly, you are asking whether the naturalized citizen was a citizen at birth based on his or her father's citizenship. To answer that question, we would need to know when the naturalized citizen was born and the countries where the naturalized citizen's U.S. citizen parent lived from birth until the birth of the naturalized citizen.

Thanks, you got it right. 1970 is the birth year and father lived in the United States for decades prior but had a child while out of the country, the naturalized citizen. The question is really about whether natural born citizenship is available to children of an American citizen when the child is born abroad, but the parent was deceased before majority age. Naturalization would probably be sufficient, but given that even naturalization is theoretically at risk, maybe obtaining outright natural born status is better insurance. There is an N-form for this sort of thing.

This isn’t the Cold War and ideology is for simpletons.

I may have to write a book to educate people about how the world really works.

Thanks for the motivation.

You're welcome. But until then your comment has nothing of value for me to digest that is relevant to the conversation.

2008 TARP for Wall Street? Corporate tax breaks that were unfunded and yielded $2 trillion in cash reserves decidedly not funneled down to working people. Sounds like socialism for institutions too big to fail, but not for people who needed it (70% of Americans with less than $1,000 in savings for emergencies).

How long will this situation continue before the house of cards tumbles down?