@jamescham @Loh Yeah, there are a bunch of people working on the foundational tech for this from a variety of angles…

The work is happening in low-hanging use cases to start, eg in contracts we see Stanford working with AXA and others to formalize insurance law.stanford.edu/codex-the-stan… @jamescham @Loh In “digital government” there is the Rules as Code movement.

In New Zealand, pioneered and chronicled by folks like @Tom_Bcgh and @verbman dlslab.nz/about/

In the UK, @OpenSystemsLab works on e.g. planx.uk

Planning permission seems to be the “hello world”

I have thoughts about this … Buddhist pedagogy has the notion of upāya, skilful means:

meet people where they are

ELI5

necessary simplifications that one can correct and expand on later

https://twitter.com/bennstancil/status/1486031369327292421

Programming is democratized: there are few barriers to access, and so it attracts the auto-didact.

Nowadays it is fashionable to teach kids to program, or at least to learn computational thinking. Don’t get me wrong, I like all of that… but!

@visakanv @constantmusings So I actually have a bunch of questions regarding law and startups … the big ones are about
1. the fundamental nature of legal work
2. industry structure @constantmusings The classic professions are law, accounting, and medicine …  engineering is the scruffy late arrival.

Accounting has been transformed by technology; it is relatively low-touch; many people are able to largely self-service.

Medicine has also been transformed, but differently.

So, pharma ∩ capitalism ∩ consulting appears to be in the news today.

Projecting forward, which “business model” is the Covid vaccine going to end up monetized with? The “annual fees” model is consistent with razor blades and printer ink – there might be a higher death rate globally but the recurring revenue argument is hard to resist; one might call it rent-extraction by one sector of the economy at the expense of others

@mattwadd @AnneOgborn @jmagnusj @AdamsDrafting My pleasure and thanks for asking!

In CS, two of the most common recurring patterns are the state machine and the lambda calculus.

State machines look like this: (from researchgate.net/publication/22…, not a classic paper or anything, just the first hit on Google image search) @mattwadd @AnneOgborn @jmagnusj @AdamsDrafting Even without a legend, we can guess at what it means: we START HERE at bottom left, enjoy option to place something in the wishlist, or just add to cart directly.

A more elaborate version would allow us to express deadlines: check out within 2 hours or the cart resets, perhaps.

So, @jonhaidt's Moral Foundations Theory has been useful to me over the last few years.

Let me share my notes, then ask a question that's been on my mind lately. The theory, in short: just as some people are "naturally" right-handed and others are "naturally" left-handed, some people "naturally" tend to grant more weight to the ideas that respect for authority and loyalty to the group are very important; others weight caring for the weak.

@Basu_kalloli @haskellbook @ashprakasan @dennistel90 @drboolean The book overexplains for the sake of imparting important fundamentals but I can imagine a cheatsheet-style preview of the Ten Load-Bearing Ideas To Remember, sort of like the bolts you can clip in to while rock-climbing. Like this: @Basu_kalloli @haskellbook @ashprakasan @dennistel90 @drboolean Oh, and functions are things, too.

There: functions, functors, and applicatives.

I tend to prefer teaching by example, to teaching by building up a series of proofs.

“Check out the promised land, now let’s talk how to get there from here”

vs

“Where are we going with this?”

The more I code, the more I want to add decision tables to all the languages and IDEs I work in, as a data/control structure embeddable into the language; if we can do it with regexes, we can do it with ASCII art charts. DMN+FEEL is my current candidate. @hillelogram

https://twitter.com/hillelogram/status/1248299945477758979

Just say no to if then else if then else if then else

Just say no to switch/case "oops I forgot to break"

@TimdeSousa @mattwadd @BrigetteMetzler @MonicaPalmirani @metju_betju @AdamWyner @OpenFisca @nardwebster @BR3NDA @tjharrop @piacandrews I am only an egg … if I appear well-informed it is merely because the real experts who attend AI conferences are rarely allowed back out into the general population.

See proceedings e.g. dblp.org/db/conf/icail/… and link.springer.com/book/10.1007/9… @TimdeSousa @mattwadd @BrigetteMetzler @MonicaPalmirani @metju_betju @AdamWyner @OpenFisca @nardwebster @BR3NDA @tjharrop @piacandrews If you are a classically trained legal practitioner just dipping toes into this stuff after reading a Susskind book or two, you might feel the same way that a medieval alchemist might, on reading papers on quantum mechanics – baffled, intrigued, overwhelmed. I sure feel that way.

What's happening with Semantic Web? Have people just given up? I'm talking about RDF, RIF, OWL, etc.

Are people using these standards to build web apps in a sort of model-driven way? Where are the implementations? Ontologies seem to be another word for "reusable, importable class hierarchy of entities and relations";
kbpedia (mkbergman.com)
seems to lead in that space; but I'm not seeing export/import (with RIF) into rule engines and web app development frameworks.

@BR3NDA @verbman @mattwadd @jamesondempsey @piawaugh @danielselman @craigaatkinson @RoundTableLaw @PolicyLabAU @digital_nsw @OpenFisca no … the tests come out of our Haskell rewrite, but the code that passes the tests is the latest OpenFisca Python version, so this is as close to ams-length as two implementations can get. These tests do find some failure cases for the 2018 numbers, so I hope that's helpful… @BR3NDA @verbman @mattwadd @jamesondempsey @piawaugh @danielselman @craigaatkinson @RoundTableLaw @PolicyLabAU @digital_nsw @OpenFisca the Haskell source is available in our fork. the commit at github.com/legalese/openf… shows:

1 where the tests came from

2 compilation back to the legislative english ("isomorphism")

3 and to saner natural language (thanks @mattwadd)

4 concrete goal-solving, explained in detail

During walk&talk with CS intern yesterday: "what is stepwise refinement?"

Great question!

It offers an opportunity to relate specification languages and implementation languages, and hence to relate both to computational law.

Let me explain… Programmers write programs in a language like Java. The program gets compiled, first to a binary suitable for the Java Virtual Machine; then the JVM executes the bytecode, converting it, ultimately, to machine code: CPU instructions.

It's not actually turtles all the way down.