Oh, I know full well. I'm an in-house lawyer for a large company, which means part of my job is to squeeze law firms. We are generally happy to pay for deep expertise, but most of the law firms make their money by churning and burning the hours of junior lawyers who don't know much. The problem with AI is how do you create those experts if you can't train junior folks?

Not sure what types of matters you are referring to with your pro se advocacy. Very rare for an individual to have 10 different discrete controversies of the same nature. I imagine you have some very specialized legal issues at play there. If they are "caving" instead of losing at trial, then they likely had clients who directed them to cave and/or advised their clients to do so. They might talk a big game to you because you are acting as opposing counsel, not because they necessarily think they can win the case if it were to go to trial.

By the way - the famous "kill all the lawyers" quote from Henry VI is typically misunderstood when taken out of context. They are not killing the lawyers because lawyers are bad, the speaker (named Dick the Butcher) is killing the lawyers because they want to get away with stuff!

The tax-specific LLM implementations I've used will annotate and hotlink to actual statutes/cases from an associated research database. I believe they prevent from hallucinating by all limiting cites to what it can find in the database.

I agree that LLMs will increase productivity quite a bit and will render lower-quality practitioners redundant and will make the remaining ones far more efficient. I can't tell you how many hours of my life I have wasted looking for standard contract language that I know is found in some precedent document. A well-implemented AI tool could simply provide a menu of options in response to a query like "Please provide language for a deficit restoration obligation clause for a partnership agreement." Even a general-purpose LLM like Chat GPT can already do that- I just need it to work from databases of established precedent I can actually link to and verify the providence of.

As to "kicking the hell out of members of the bar." Keep in mind that 1) like all professions, some lawyers are terrible, 2) even the best lawyer will lose (and should lose) a case if the law/facts are against them. That said, I've come across a lot of very smart but non-legal educated folks who believe themselves to be much better at understanding law than they actually are. It tends to be a particular problem with engineers precisely because they do tend to be smart and able to figure things out on their own.

I am a tax attorney and I have worked with KPMG quite a bit. I've never heard of a two-week timeline as a "traditional" timeline for providing tax guidance. The limiting factor in tax tends to be the development of the facts (usually of an in-progress business deal).

I've also worked with some tax-specific AI tools (not KPMGs). The one I use now uses Chat GPT as a backend. It is useful, but the problem is that it can still get questions completely wrong, so you have to check closely and still read all of the source material it cites. Regular Chat GPT will not consistently cite the law it relies on, so is close to useless.

The main barrier to AI in tax is that most businesses will not and cannot give the AI access to its ERP system to train with. Most systems are still too vulnerable to data leakage. The nightmare scenario is that a third party could get the LLM to spit out proprietary non-public financial information. That barrier isn't insurmountable, but current solutions do not provide sufficient comfort.

There may come a day when most tax compliance is done by AI, but I think we are still some years off before it becomes mainstream. Tax planning will be human- driven for the foreseeable future because pulling the trigger on a particular plan is fundamentally a human judgment call. However, AI would allow the human to dispense with a lot of work and compare different planning options quickly.

Seatguru can be outdated and doesn't account for aircraft swaps. Sometimes airlines can change the airplane you are flying on a day or two out, which will mean a change in the seat layout. You might have a window seat with a window on a A321, and then they swap with a Boeing and you are SOL.

Turo is the same as any other rental company in regard to damages and insurance. You either rely on your existing insurance or you spend more for the extra insurance from Turo.

One thing they do that's helpful is have you take photos all over the car with the app at check-in, unlike a traditional rental company where you can take photos and maybe tell the person at the gate about it but no guarantee the documentation will be accepted and properly noted.

Some renters are just renting their personal cars, but like Airbnb, some people make it their business.

There's something to previous posters who talk about the aim towards international audiences reducing the number of comedies. But there's another issue at play, and that is streaming.

Big superhero-type movies that have a lot of room for big explosions and other special FX bring action that makes people want to come to actual movie theaters to watch. But most comedies don't have that. As a result, people have little reason to go to the actual theater when they want to see a comedy. They watch at home.

Streaming services like Netflix that don't need box office receipts have taken advantage of this. There's a reason why they have focused a lot of their efforts on comedies. For stand-up comics, having a "Netflix special" has become the mark of success. They have a huge deal with Adam Sandler, who has made quite a few movies for the platform. It works great for them because you can make a lot of popular content fairly cheaply when you do comedies.

But for the big studios, the massive amount of comedy content on Netflix means anything they come out with is a comparatively hard sell.

There is Touro as an alternative (peer to peer car rental). But it's rare that Touro beats the major rental companies on price. It mostly makes sense if you want to try out a specific car that wouldn't commonly be found on the rental lot.

I don't think blaming "uncertain futures" is quite it. The countries with the highest birthrates are those with the highest rates of poverty. Many people are having children they don't even know if they can feed, let alone house and educate. The reason is 1) they don't have easy access to birth control and, 2) they have not gone through the cultural shifts required to accept birth control and smaller families. But that's quickly changing in the developing world. Birth rates have been heading down in India already. Sub-Saharan Africa is likely next.

People may think through the economics when deciding whether to have children, but fundamentally once you give people the option of having fewer children, most people take that option. Someone with who doesn't like the work environment may decide to have no children instead of one. But it's probably not going to cause someone to have one child instead of five.

I question how effective these are. You aren't necessarily training employees to spot phishing emails so much as the emails the phishing training emails. They may be intended to look like a real phishing email, but I've gotten to the point I can almost always spot an IT-department generated phishing training email.

I think almost everyone will fall for a phishing email eventually if the scam gets good enough. I had a friend fall victim to wire fraud when the phisher actually had inside information about the transaction (address, purchase price, parties, etc.). They had evidently gotten into the title company's systems. Sure, it would have been best practices to call and verify the transfer instructions, but I can understand that even savvy people can get fooled if the phisher is armed with the right information and gets the target in the right moment of weakness.

The story is about the American air travel market though. United, Delta, and American just happen to be the dominant airlines in the U.S., and all are heavily dependent on credit card revenue. Southwest (the fourth largest) has decided that it has to get in on the game or perish- it has strategically abandoned the low-cost carrier model that it has followed since its founding. And they've done that because low-cost carriers have trouble selling co-branded credit cards.

I can't speak to the European situation, but in the U.S. you can usually get around this with a connection. Direct flights later that day may be full, but there is probably some connecting flight that can get you there.

One thing that will blunt the impact is that the EV credits were already off the table for high-end vehicles and for high income folks (although there were some leases that took advantage of the leasing loophole to get around this). Most new car buyers are higher-income than average, and I suspect most EV buyers were also higher income than average. Those high-income buyers may actually see prices for new EVs come down a bit as manufacturers try to make up a bit for the lost credit with incentives.

I'm not a vegetarian, but there's certainly space in the world for a new option. In theory, a meat substitute could be healthier and cheaper. But the Impossible burger quite simply missed the mark and didn't live up to the hype. In short: it doesn't taste very good. An old-fashioned black bean burger is way better if you want a vegetarian burger.

All the hype had led me to believe that the Impossible burger was almost indistinguishable from the real thing. Maybe if you put a ton of toppings and sauces to disguise the flavor it could get a pass, but the reality is that it tasted and smelled NOTHING like a beef burger. The smell (especially when being cooked) is awful compared to beef. Worse, it gave me horrible indigestion. I think a lot of what happened was that the hype overran the reality of what the company created.

I think the take-away is that science still can't turn something into something that it's not. If you want to eat vegetarian- great. But stick with foods that are supposed to be vegetarian rather than vegetarian foods pretending to be meat.

Won't make you whole if it leaves you stranded and having to buy a last-minute ticket on another airline.