Aaron Lariviere

been planning a renovation for several years - impossible to budget at this point, but we assume our starting number will jump somewhere between 30-75% between tariffs, inflation, and lack of construction labor. now cabinets, furniture, lumber on top. shit aint happening

From the lotr community on Reddit: The Hobbit illustrated by Michael Hague Explore this post and more from the lotr community

Such a gorgeous copy! weirdly enough, my dad got me this one when I was 5 - different illustrated version, also gorgeous - and read it to me shortly after. (I read it to my daughter last year!)

www.reddit.com/r/lotr/s/iPQ...

Such a miserable, dying site. Yet I’ll never leave

Had a lovely chat with Brian Cox about Guy de Maupassant, randomly, and how much he was enjoying prestige TV work over film (this was circa Deadwood). Still kicking myself for not asking about Super Troopers

Not arguing with the sentiment of your post, but the article is explicit that this is NOT billable hours. Billable requirement is 1950, fairly standard. This is 2400 "productive hours", so billables + admin, BD, pro bono, firm events, etc. (still gross)

Realistically this is just how they're going to trim headcount as we head into a recession. Other firms are doing more aggressive back to office initiatives. Goal is the same: thin the herd, cull the less invested, survive the bad times to come

Still seems aggressive to make this mandatory. The 2400 number sounds like the "all in" requirements lots of firms have for partners - but partners have much lower billable requirements (and have the potential to make $$$), so it sort of balances out

Just to be clear this is not 2400 "billable" hours as the quoted post suggests. They require a baseline 1950 billable hours, in line with other firms (but still means you work constantly). Associates are supposed to hit 2400 "productive" hours, meaning admin time, BD, pro bono, firm activities, etc.

Started the audiobook yesterday!

week one tribunals

somehow big firms have entirely different pressures but lead to the same types of saturdays :-/

There have been some videos circulating in the online guitar influencer circuit (Rick Beato, Rhett Shull) highlighting how YouTube is doing some kind of undisclosed / weirdly aggressive AI upscaling of shorts. Everything looks like AI slop and creators are getting pissed. Weird time to be alive

Dimly recall one law school course giving a take home midterm exam over spring break. Midterms in law school are rare; doing it over spring break really twisted the knife

To be clear, I don’t use either for legal analysis at all - I just like to test new models to see what they’re capable of. (They are still terrible at understanding applicability thresholds and statutory exemptions, which makes them functionally useless if used unsupervised)

I’ve only dabbled with GPT5, but as a lawyer, I’ve found it disturbingly good at legal nuance in a way that none of the earlier iterations could match. Also agree that I prefer the writing style of Claude by a lot, but it’s not as sharp on the actual analysis.

Coppola is the king of this, of course

Threatening will get much faster results but both are satisfying

Fascinating, madcap band. Chill Out was the album before the White Room; it’s an album length ambient suite built around found sounds and samples, meant as a transcendental comedown. Magical stuff.

All timer. I was thrilled to see they reissued Chill Out a couple years back—now renamed Come Down Dawn and missing some samples, still fantastic.

Alexandra Patsavas - Wikipedia

Totally. Both actually had the same music supervisor: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexand...

a crucial missing link is Grey's Anatomy licensing every random indie track in this vein for like 10+ years

Trader Joe’s used to to sell peanut butter Joe Joe’s (fake Oreos stuffed with fake peanut butter) and it was their single best creation. naturally discontinued

The IP terms are still too broad as written to fit within their stated roles - commercialization of user content, product improvement + development of unrelated products / services, are hard to defend as processor. No one would blink if it was just usage data; user content is another ballgame.

That’s a good flag - plenty of orgs still take the position they can do those things as a processor role by framing them as a part of the service, on behalf of the customer & for their benefit, and regulator interpretation has not been uniform, but at least their terms are clear on the roles.

I mean, yeah - but the point is the private file transfer service is expressly no longer private. They’re also no longer acting as a data processor, which conflicts with the terms of their own data processing addendum, and adds compliance risk to all parties (on top of everything else).

This is a privacy and confidentiality issue, regardless that they framed it as IP licensing. As written, this would break confidentiality (and privilege) and does not work in the context of a private file transfer service.

Zoom briefly did this - inadvertently, apparently - and then had to frantically walk it back after customers rightfully lost their minds. They had to roll out express representations that they won’t train on user content

The issue is that they modified boilerplate IP terms to specifically cover user content - in the context of a dumb-pipes file transfer service for which they otherwise act as a data processor - and inserted a clear right to train AI for their own purposes. IP aside, this is a confidentiality issue.

There’s a whole ‘cassette futurism’ subreddit and it’s wild

ah, but what if we killed the earth instead