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<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:8f59f212-fa80-6f63-5a83-dac781e54c1e@swcp.com">glen
wrote:
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">IDK. The implication that we already have
laws that cover (80%?) of the use cases for new tech we, as a
society, want to discourage, is a good default. It resists the
"there ought to be a law" sensibility held by old people and
curmudgeons everywhere. And it keeps our legal system a little
more adaptive than it would be were we to burden it with even
more persnickety case-by-case rulings.
<br>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:8f59f212-fa80-6f63-5a83-dac781e54c1e@swcp.com">
<blockquote type="cite">sas> I try to hear "there oughtta be a
law" as pining for a new and relevant heuristic where the old
one(s) don't work (well)?
<br>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<p><episode 1></p>
<blockquote>
<p><img src="https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/code_quality.png" alt=""
width="740" height="258"></p>
</blockquote>
<p><img src="https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/unreachable_state.png"
alt="" width="355" height="465" align="right"></p>
<blockquote>
<p>In my early coding years I remember coming to the simultaneous
understanding that the bulk of most systems/code is "exception
handling" and that most inexperienced coders tend to ignore the
edge/corner cases until forced (by iterated releases with real
users as their test-load) and spaghetti up their solutions one
exception at a time, and sometimes if they don't abstract their
exceptions well enough the exception handling expands
geometrically (with exceptions to the exceptions,
recursively). <br>
</p>
<br>
</blockquote>
<p><episode 2></p>
<blockquote>
<p>In my Private Investigator years I spent my share of time in <i>law
offices</i> and <i>courthouses</i> and rubbing shoulders with
<i>law enforcement</i>... I came to understand that these too
were episystems on top of episystems with a scissors/paper/stone
circularity built into the system to attenuate runaway behaviour
by each "branch" of government (and/or it's agents). <br>
</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>The law libraries were dominated in volume and complexity by
case-law which felt to me to be nothing other than edge-corner
case/exception-handling... Most of my clients represented
plaintiffs in civil cases, a few defendants. Only those with
big bucks pursued legal-action, lawyers (and court fees and PIs)
being expensive and only those in desperate circumstance could
muster the resources to fight back (see DJT's strategy as taught
to him by Roy Cohn). <br>
</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>The lawyers (and the rest of us by extension) thrived on this
"tangled web of mal-complexity" and I had the (mis)fortune of
listening in to lawyers and paralegals discuss how they would
exploit these tangles for their clients... even to the point of
trying to enlist me in throwing some extra tanglage into the
equation myself.<br>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p><episode 2.2></p>
<blockquote>
<p>I stayed above that where I recognized it, trying to refactor
my client intake process, leading me to my own exception
handling: e.g.<br>
</p>
<ol>
<li>Divorces with children</li>
<li>Divorces with pets</li>
<li>Divorces</li>
</ol>
<ol>
<li>Insurance claim denial</li>
<li>Insurance claims</li>
<li>Insurance companies as claimant or defendant</li>
</ol>
<ol>
<li>Distressed Real Estate Foreclosures</li>
<li>Real Estate Foreclosures</li>
<li>Real Estate Transactions</li>
</ol>
<ol>
<li><i>ad</i><i><br>
</i></li>
<li><i>nauseum</i></li>
<li><i>infinitum</i><br>
</li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
<p><episode 2.99> <br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>by the time I graduated college I was well over-done with this
work which lead me almost exclusively to seeing (feeling,
smelling, tasting) the seamy underbelly of my community (and the
world by extension). I began with: "I will only take righteous
cases" and ended with "there are no righteous cases". <br>
</p>
<p><episode 3>So I doubled down and went to Los Alamos to
help make weapons of mass destruction under the premise of MAD!
I considered investigative journalism for a few minutes
instead... but for <i>seamy underbelly</i> problem and the
allure of <i>Nuclear
Weapons-as-fundamental-physics-and-reality-insight</i> I might
have gone there. <br>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p><episode N> <br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Thankfully I have aged out on a lot of that and am happy to
defer most of the "hard questions" to Sabine Hossenfelder and
Randall Munroe who are much smarter and more clever at
expressing it than I ever will be or have been!</p>
<p>I just watched her very convincing episode on why free will is
an illusion. I found her very convincing, but realize that she
and I had absolutely no choice in the matter of being compelling
or compelled... I have the illusion that I'm one step closer
to Satori now... until Glen hits me with a stick again!<br>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p><br>
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