It's not just the legal industry, it's the legislators. I used to be friends with a former state senator, who had a background in forensic accounting. She said they purposely made the bills harder to parse than necessary so it was hard to figure out what they were actually doing. Given enough time, people could do it but in practice there wasn't time before voting on the bill, and that was on purpose too. Of course some of it was to reward lobbyists or do other unpopular things, but she used to read bills from back to front because the back was where they put all the graft. An example I remember was $50K in taxpayer money going to a congressman's birthday party.

For a while I thought about trying to write software that would turn the obscure natural-language diffs in written bills into a readable diff, showing the laws before and after with highlighted changes. But she said they just got the bills as paper printouts which weren't always even up-to-date, so it might not have helped much. Maybe now they're online. And LLMs might make the project easier.

and then we have people touting Jevon's paradox as outcome of AI disruption leading to more work. Before we create new work we need to figure out how to reduce incentive of people to unnecessarily complicate stuff and to be honest the answer is never clean or easy

unfortunately, laws are not everything. you need to know how to get around them. our country for example has the habit of creating a lex fugitiva that means that some regulations could be changed in other not related laws. good luck finding the correct regulation without a law degree

> Everyone in government knows That's part of the point good rafram, I'm not in government but I've looked up laws for at least three jurisdictions and have never encountered version control. A tool at the bottom of a drawer or in only one person's belt is not a tool to anyone else.

I was thinking the same thing. I feel like people in software tech always think they have secret powers that experts in other fields can't imagine.

DOGE wasn't actually trying to make things more efficient. You can't count it as an honest attempt.

> Out of curiosity, like what specifically?

For example, there are thousands of divisions of government out there provisioning largely the same systems in duplicate. E.g. the very local government here has a web portal for the sports venue bookings like pools and tennis courts. They have a waste collection portal. Local tax portal.

Only recently has this been slightly standardized but even those efforts are purely regional. You might get 5 local councils in the city using one SaaS platform, another 5 using another SaaS platform, and another 5 rolling their own. For each function of local government.

Nevermind the fact that a local government in France like this probably has very similar needs to one in Belgium or even the US.

And the worst part is they are terrible at procurement so even when they do consolidate, they're basically getting scammed.

I often think about starting a cost-plus-priced open core project to deal with these issues. Like we build common government functions, and sell it for cost plus 20% markup, with a licence that lets the gov run it themselves if we ever go bust. But then I think procurement is largely a grift game and it might not do well for that reason.

DOGE made the token gain more in market cap than it saved in expenses. Despite having at head a master of blind layoffs.