It would probably be good practice to read any papers Anthropic or OpenAI releases much in the way you'd read a letter of reference from someone recommending their nephew for a job.

It's become as difficult to take someone else's word that an LLM is impressive at a particular task as it is to take the word of a human recommender that a person will be a good employee or university applicant.

I also love how people use “you’ve made your bed, now you have to lie it in” as a statement about the harsh consequences of decisions. Oh really? I might have to take a nap?

In the meadow we can build a snowman
And pretend that he is Father Time.
He’ll say “Happy New Year”; we’ll say “No, man,”
But just because it’s needed for the rhyme.

Call the bank; check the wire;
File the deed; phone the buyer—
Are four things to do
If possibly you
Want to sell a winter wonderland.

one of my favorite holiday-season pastimes is singing (in my head) Byron’s “The Destruction of Sennacherib” to the tune of the Gloucestershire Wassail

News headline that reads “Bat flew in woman’s mouth and now she’s out almost $21k.”

Roses are red,
Lilies are grey, …

just in case it’s helpful, US legal writing (which of course is a different context) would permit “hilarious[]”

The inside of the House of Representatives chamber in the Australian Parliament building.

The inside of the House of Representatives chamber in the Australian Parliament building.

the Australian Parliament looks like they repurposed an indoor competitive swimming pool for their chambers

most royalty-free music libraries still have dozens of recordings of "god save the king." where's the outrage?

once wrote this description of a boorish character in a short story: “He thought ‘always a bridesmaid, never the bride’ was a rule about who he should hit on at weddings. He didn’t always follow the rule.”

Dreamed last night that I was someone’s emotional-support animal on an airplane. (I was still human.)

"always the nursemaid, never the nurse"

when i was 10 or 11 i’d sometimes randomly say “i know you’re listening!” when i was alone just because i thought it would be funny for spies to worry about how some kid had seen through their tradecraft

"i get imposter syndrome whenever i try to commit bank fraud"

As the game of Monopoly teaches us, one of the ways to fail as a real-estate baron is to stay in the overpriced hotels of competitors.

Ha, thanks! I will.

i was going to make this joke (with "pin the tail on the donkey") but am a legal academic, so i did a "preemption check" and realized you beat me to it :)

One ended:

I know my love to be as rare as gold.
What other mistress qualifies as mold?

just found some shakespearean sonnets i wrote about a (fictional) alien "mistress" when i was 17:

Her ventral stoma bears the sweetest scent
Of lemons. Don’t ask; I know not wherefore.
And people know exactly where she went:
She leaves a trail of liquids on the floor.

A water tower labeled “Mayo” for a city with that name in Florida.

wonder what the taps are like here

This is clearly in need of work. Rudolph's nose was -- famously -- red, not pink.

And I don't think it was known for being especially sensitive (though reindeer's noses in general are).

"Rudolph's bullies always said ..." fixes the first problem, but it doesn't evoke Rudolph's feelings as nicely.

Also to the tune of "Ding Dong Merrily":

Rudolph's bullies made him think
That he was unattractive
Just because his nose was pink
(and specially olfactive).

A Concise Cynical Deconstruction of "A Christmas Carol" in View of Anachronistic Features of Tax Policy, to the Tune of "Ding Dong Merrily on High":

Ebenezer sees a wraith;
His selfishness relaxes.
Did he donate in good faith,
Or was it for his taxes?

Dreamed last night that UPenn opened a campus in Ljubljana and called it PennSlovenia.

publication is the best form of data backup

In a public-benefit organization like Bluesky (and as it turns out in modern LLCs generally), it is much easier to set an organization on an immutable course than in traditional corporate law. I joined Bluesky largely because it was such an organization; I avoided Twitter, etc., from the start.

A Research Agenda for Organizational Law ‘Organisations are at the heart of private law. This book takes an inspiring new look at them - broader and more fundamental than ever before, and from a highly innovative transactional perspective. S...

As my posts perhaps make too plain, I'm not here to promote my own work, but coincidentally I've written quite a lot about this very interesting question from the perspective of organizational law and agency law. One important tension is the power of operating agreements vs. that of agents.

spoiler: those are both central australia

An undifferentiated reddish-gray ground photograph that could be of either central Australia or Mars.

A zoomed-in satellite image of central Australia that might as well be of Mars.

there should be "central australia or mars?" captchas