#lawlibrarians assemble!

Spent most of the afternoon yesterday vibe-coding a game with my 8yo. He drew all the sprites and designed the levels, Claude did the coding: rlfordon.github.io/potato-simul...

I always try to think about what motivates people to say the things they do, and I thought this was pretty perceptive. deadneurons.substack.com/p/the-duelli... (of course, I have no idea who writes that substack, and what their incentives are)

This is so, so good. If you have units on algorithmic bias, or are just interested in incorporating simulations/interactive elements into your teaching, check this out.

Communities in OK, MS, VA, and MN have stopped warehouse sales to ICE. You can, too: ✅ Go to city council meetings & SPEAK UP during open comment ✅ Call your state delegates — local + state pressure is our best bet. The Fed Gov won’t save us. ✅ Register to vote now. The 2026 midterms are coming.

ICE has now spent over half a BILLION dollars just on purchasing warehouses around the country to convert into detention camps. If these mega-camps are utilized to the full capacity ICE intends, they'll be the largest prisons in the country, with little real oversight. www.ajc.com/politics/202...

TIL that Mr Beast is a billionaire (with a b). My 8yo corrected me when I said millionaire, and turns out he was right.

Did people know the 8yos are out there doing Carmen memes?

Wow. This is devastating. Thank goodness for all the people who keep copies of this stuff (see the comments).

“Every person I spoke to in Minnesota and Maine said that the disruption to their children’s lives was much worse than with Covid. At least then they knew that they would be safe when they were inside.”

These are so beautiful, anyone looking for a gift for me, please be advised.

Love for my kid's classes to be cancelled while my job's classes are back on-campus. This kid may get to learn a little about legal tech this week.

I guess Outlook has been down for hours and I'm just now realizing? I just thought it was a particularly quiet afternoon.

I need you all to remember this: #Lewiston #Burlington #Portland #Maine

“I’ll never get rid of my dashcam now though. I feel like it adds another layer of safety.”

A quick 🧵 about Thurgood Marshall, civil rights, and Trump’s recent argument that, “White people were very badly treated, where they did extremely well and they were not invited to go into a college or university.” (You can find more in chapter 8 of The State Must Provide)

I love that there are this many of us going for the Reverse Rainbow (1 in 41!). How do I find these people? Any Reverse Rainbow people out there want to be friends?

Why did they give me this little tote bag for my one (1) donut, I had to carry this into my building. Like there’s a difference between getting a donut, and parading it into my office shouting “CANT WAIT TO EAT EVEN MORE DONUTS”.

From an email to one of our faculty members.... Not even Plato can escape censorship at Texas A&M!

I heard what everyone has been clamoring for is 6,000 words on what a simple question about the 1990s comedy My Cousin Vinny can teach us about the capabilities and surprising weaknesses of current LLMs. Well, I hate to disappoint people, so I went and wrote it. open.substack.com/pub/mikecaul...

Just reading the letters of Pliny the Younger with his first-hand account of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, and how Pliny the Elder rushed to Pompeii from another town to rescue friends. This is for my 8yo son’s school project, I love learning new stuff with him. www.yorku.ca/pswarney/210...

Spelling bee is really trolling all us type B parents today.

Another high profile redaction fail, for those of us who collect them.

I’m going back and doing NYT connections puzzles I missed, and it’s really not fair to put sports and cars in the same puzzle. I thought they were trying to trick me, how was I to know Ram spun out of Dodge 15 years ago?

Y’all know we have a tool for finding exactly these kinds of bad redactions, right? free.law/open-source-...

Watching an 80s movie w/my 8yo yesterday and he said “why is this movie all white people?” and it just made me really grateful for modern kids’ media where he sees kids who look like him *all the time*.

I hate this so much.

A major problem with vibe-coding is that it's an excellent way to procrastinate. Oh, this mind-mapping app I'm using to plan my course is doing *exactly* what I want it to do? Better vibe-code a new one (which coincidentally is so much more fun than course-planning)

Just showed the kiddo Muppet Christmas Carol (he loved it of course) and I never knew there was a big trademark dispute involving the character Spa'am. www.courtlistener.com/opinion/7108...

Forty years ago, 90% of media outlets were spread across 50 companies. Now, just 5 companies control 90% of the media market. This consolidation hurts consumers and helps oligarchs. 🧵

Anyone else influenced by that teacher who eats her snacky lunches on TikTok every day? Today I had a sweet potato with some cheese shoved inside it, with some pickles on the side, and now I want that lunch a few times a week.

This is a terrible story--both because of the trap that was set (either in advance or ret-conned to seize a moment) for this graduate student but also because the student's department failed her. The 1st problem is easy to see, but I want to explain the 2nd one. 1/x

The entire business model of R1 public universities rests on 4 revenue sources: 1. Federal grants 2. Private gifts/endowments 3. Tuition (esp. from foreign students) 4. State $ For decades, 📈 in 1-3 offset a secular 📉 in 4. Now, 1 & 3 are being decimated & 4 ain't coming back. The math is clear.

Introduce yourself with five animals you have seen in the wild - vermillion flycatcher (san joaquin marsh wildlife sanctuary, irvine, ca) - wolverine (glacier national park, mt) - spanish shawl nudibranch (crystal cove, ca) - burrowing owl (salton sea, ca) - bald eagle (catskills, ny)

I worry about this degradation of expectations a lot in the law. A lawyer gets fired for messy citations, a wrong point of law. But if a would-be client asks ChatGPT instead, and Chat gets a few things wrong, is it a dealbreaker? (Same concern for librarians btw; and research assistants; and and …)

I’m reading a thriller where a female character is nonchalantly described as 5’7” and 98 pounds … why, yes, the author is a man, how did you know?

KEEP SHARING YOUR STORIES about increased ACA premiums due to the disappearance of subsidies. The stories clearly are having an impact, they help people feel less helpless, and they create solidarity that leads to action. Mine went from $395→ $821. What happened for you?

Exhausted after spending all day in the kitchen* (*Heating bowl after bowl of chicken broth because the 8yo has a stomach bug, and then anxiously watching to make sure it stays down)

I loved this book so much!

I honestly think it’s a power thing. They’re sooo busy they can’t possibly be bothered with capital letters or punctuation or proper spelling.

Hey remember how a bunch of people made their OpenAI convos public (perhaps without realizing it)? Here's WaPo's look at them: www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Hey, what do you know, he did deserve to be canceled. (He was not in fact canceled)

My ACA current plan is going from $385/mo to $821/mo.

The RECAP Archive now has basic metadata about every federal district and bankruptcy case in PACER, and will gather every new case within about five minutes. Search it all here: www.courtlistener.com/recap/

An impressive list, girls, but I know we can do better

I covered dockets (amongst other topics) in my Advanced Legal Research class today, and it's soooo hard not to nerd out. I think I scared them when I said some law schools offer a semester-long class on PACER!

Today in weird texts you send when you have a kid: "yay our big shipment of pants is coming today"

This is huge and will continue to fuel amazing innovation in the legal research space

Did everyone know about this PACER demo site but me? (Said after I vibe coded a solution very similar to this, because I wanted students to see how painful it is) pacer.uscourts.gov/help/pacer/p...