There really, really are.
The legal industry is well aware of that fact - and how many billable hours they stand to lose by making their work more efficient and understandable.
You know how tax prep companies spent over $90m 'lobbying' Congress to ensure that filing your taxes remains difficult and complicated [0]?
Well, lawyers know just as well or better how to butter their bread; and they will pull out every dirty trick they have to scupper attempts to make practising law more transparent or efficient in any way.
0 - https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2023/09/tax-prep-companies-...
Out of curiosity, like what specifically?
Didn’t DOGE’s failure highlight that it actually wasn’t trivial? I’m skeptical at first glance but open to being proven wrong.
No shade on the author, they made a fun thing. I'm directing my cannons more towards the parent post idea that the world needs software developers for their rare genius to use their beautiful brains to solve problems in ways no actual participant in the system could have ever thought of.
The additude that because you can prompt a LLM to write some python you are also uniquely situated to solve the world's problems is how we built an entire generation of automated solutions worse than what we had before.
Maryland just launched their regs on our platform:
https://regs.maryland.gov (https://github.com/maryland-dsd/law-xml-codified)
Feel free to reach out (email in bio) if you would like your community to publish their official laws on GitHub!
Looks like it's been abandoned, though. :(
If you go on particular laws, you can see the previous versions and how it changed. Example: https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/section_lc/LEGITEXT0000...
Click on "version" then "comparer" buttons and you will see a diff.
For others wondering, while most of the Franco-era laws were nuked in 1978, this does include lots of old laws (ie pre-20th C).
However, the source material starts with a sqashed commit in 1960 :) So no changelog before that. The BOE source though is pretty phenomonal, they've scanned files going back to the 1600s so far.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1990/18/section/9
Laws being passed are these ludicrous sets of patches:
The main difference is that in Britain the judge decisions become almost-laws, so it's like a repo with too many people with commit right. I think in Spain the judge decisions have less weight and only the legislature has commit permissions .
$ git commit --amend --author="Author Name <author@spanish.gov>" --no-edit
Then, it would be simply amazing to run gource, sit back, and watch where all the noise is coming from.
Gource:
https://github.com/acaudwell/gource
What gource looks like:
I’ve long wanted to see gource applied in other sociologically-relevant contexts and this’d be a real good one ..
I'll take a look at data to enrich it :).
State of Utopia[1] has this manifesto[2]. In our estimation (and we use AI a lot), it is not powerful enough to govern a country yet. We thought it was worth trying anyway.[3] We would like it to be able to handle contexts that are millions of times greater (think more like 1 billion tokens than 1 million tokens), and even so AI governance is a very difficult matter. In addition, once AI governance is achieved, how can you truly trust the governance model not to be corrupted? Transparent government run by AI is an additional point of difficulty. These days, the most difficult unsolved problem is how to introduce voting and users' comments without inviting comment spam and vote rigging. You can watch my latest update here[4] (I'm sorry, it's very quiet), and we welcome your input on all subjects. We have a fully autonomous agent currently running the country, which consists of a Mac Mini and a Claude subscription (plus our own dedicated server in a country that recognizes us, and we have a couple of other embassies by agreement and legal contract). But in practice this government just does whatever I tell it. It's not advanced enough to run a code of laws, which is one of the basic requirements citizens expect of their country. The size of problem space for running a country is larger than models can handle, but many things help.
One of the best hopes we have is with deterministic offline models where we share the pipeline with people ahead of time, so they know exactly how it will work. This could be a trustworthy matter of dispute resolution, if we get the architecture right.
For example, our country could help you sign a contract and in case of dispute, both parties could submit supporting documents and make statements and the offline model they agreed to at the time of signing their contract could adjudicate. This pipeline could be transparent from the start. This won't satisfy everyone, but might provide the minimum standard of having a code of laws that assists with contract enforcement. For now, all you can really do is keep checking our site for updates and leave comments about what direction you'd like the country to take. (For example, you can leave a comment on my latest update on Youtube.)
[1] https://stateofutopia.com [2] https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d6b35b81-0eeb-4e41-9628-5... [3] https://medium.com/@rviragh/ai-is-not-ready-to-create-utopia... [4] https://www.youtube.com/live/K0dgrPRWPCs
I'm sure I won't be the only one curious, please enlighten me.
[1]: <https://github.com/EnriqueLop/legalize-es/commit/424cbc96507...>
When someone specifically mentions "built in ~4h with Claude Code" they probably didn't care that much about the outcome quality
Edit: Consider the following words included in law.
“reasonable” “reckless” “due care”
P.S: Sadly my PR amendment was repealled
But getting the entire country's law into git is already an impressive feat.
Git isn't structured for collaborative commits, but community-wide conventions kind of "patches" support for it on top of the git message body, via "Co-Authored-By: name <name@example.com>" which IIRC most platforms support, and the convention itself initially comes from Linux kernel development.
But yes, it seems it is included indeed: https://github.com/EnriqueLop/legalize-es/blob/master/spain/... (which seems to have been well written enough to not needing any changes [so far])
Very glad my country is so compassionate with people that we can facilitate things like things when needed.
Like many, you are confusing "making it legal" for "making it ok." But that is of course the root concern of Christianism as an ideological project. Thankfully the correct legal interpretation won out here, as it did in the US Schiavo case(s).
But I'm sure someone at some point might figure it out, you never know :)
It's interesting to wonder what kind of coverage Cycorp managed to achieve internally, and on what domains. Seemingly no job openings at the moment though!
In Brazil we have lexml, a standard to describe the law and their changes over time. It's surprisingly complex.
I understand that Spain was a participant in LexML as well... I gather they've since converted to something else?
You can see how certain articles have the option to check "how that particular article was at each moment in time". That would be way harder to track, but it would be awesome if not only could you "go back in time and see what the law was" but also "how its been evolving".
enriquelop•1h ago
The idea: legislation is just patches on patches on patches. Git already solves this. Instead of reading "strike paragraph 3 and replace with...", you get an actual diff.
The repo is the product. Browse any law, git log to see its full reform history, git diff to see exactly what changed.
Built the pipeline in ~4 hours with Claude Code. Source is BOE (Spain's official gazette) consolidated legislation API.
Exploring whether there's a business here — structured legislation API for legaltech/compliance, or just a useful open dataset. Curious what HN would build with this data.
7777777phil•1h ago
Just thinking how this could maybe used for (automated) research / visualization on the evolution of (spanish - in this case) law
codethief•1h ago
Looking at the commit dates (which seem to be derived from the original publication dates) the history seems quite sparse/incomplete(?) I mean, there have only been 26 commits since 2000.
Meneth•48m ago
artirdx•56m ago
da_chicken•38m ago
Spain is not a country with a Common Law legal system entirely like the US or the UK. They have a civil law system where prior court judgement does not form a strictly binding precedent. Prior judgements can be important, but case law is not really a thing.
tephra•12m ago
Is it not the same in Spain at all?
dotancohen•26m ago
So while this project does track laws, is there any facility to determine which laws from which bodies are relevant to a specific activity in a specific location?
embedding-shape•24m ago
No, cities don't have their own laws, but the autonomous communities do have some influence in some laws and regulations (not all), like the amount of income tax you have to pay and so on. But cities within the autonomous communities don't have their own laws.
donalhunt•13m ago
embedding-shape•9m ago
Regardless, cities do not have their own "local laws" in the way your comment made it seem. We have national laws, and minor differences in various autonomous communities, since they have some legislative power to control their own industry, commerce, education and some more stuff.
Mordisquitos•6m ago
I think local government in Spain has at least as much authority as it does in the UK, maybe more, but almost certainly less than it does in the US.
Mordisquitos•13m ago
pseingatl•15m ago
SOLAR_FIELDS•4m ago
Bewelge•46m ago
Ed: Nevermind, I missed the "BOE (Spain's official gazette) consolidated legislation API" part. Sending jealous greetings from Germany. We just have a bunch of PDFs in Germany. And the private entity that has been publishing them for decades even claims copyright on them!