Oof. You’re not totally wrong. I’ve parsed XML with XSDs since the days of Java. I looked at the 100 line Ruby implementation of parsing these files and thought “ack. (Not ACK) why do I need all of this?!”
Well it has a data loader, and hits APIs with retry logic, and has a CLI that can take arguments to run data downloads that can resume on fail, and yeah it parses the stupid XML with a “chapeau” tag - did you know that is French for hat? There is a tag that is the “hat” for a section and it is just like another title basically. So yeah, I would’ve had to learn all of that. But it also tests all of these things with actual tests. And the adversary complains if you write a test that isn’t actually testing anything meaningful. And if I needed to, I could reason about the architecture by reading the architecture design documents, which I have done at least a little bit and they are pretty nice, I have to admit.
Anyways - it’s a next step in the evolution of the laws in GitHub which is actually interesting to see them change and imagine what we can do with more data overlayed. Sadly the other repos were not maintained so this is the latest laws and you can view the diff from one Congress to another. Or you can git blame one of the files and see how old certain sections are. The data we have right now only goes back to 2013.
A chapeau is not "just like another title basically". It's a lead-in, a phrase which acts as the grammatical start of a sentence which the following subsections finish. For instance, the text in the first paragraph of 18 U.S.C § 3632(a) which ends in an em-dash is a chapeau. Taking pride in work you have not done and not bothered to understand is perplexing.
Seriously the intent is to build more on top of this, and viewing the git diffs of laws changing is already interesting. Once we get the additional data to create other overlays it will be a lot more interesting and something you really can’t see elsewhere
I think law as code or the "legal code" as code is a proposition that hasn't been fully imagined. There are a few other cs-language projects to describe tax law as code and some of them have some traction, but if law were immersed more in code, we could test it better and reason about its effects with more context.
If you pass a law to reduce theft, you could include tests based on official statistics about whether or not theft is going down, and with some scientific rigor (CBO is usually quite reliable for instance), the law could "amend itself" either by sunsetting itself, if it isn't measuring up to expectations, or have an automatic budget increase if it's succeeding.
It's a bit far-fetched, given how indeterminate most government programs' intentions actually are (e.g. just hand out billions for "healthcare" and allow untold fraud to proliferate because it benefits our donors and voters), but every law should serve a purpose and we should automate its evaluation.
If you have something interesting to say then use your own words. The reason why your robot wrote a blog post or whatever is not insightful or meaningful.
Thank you - noted for my future sharing, and appreciate your additional ideas.
The second half of the data that powers the cooler features is rate-limited so it is going to take a few weeks to download - but ultimately being able to see who voted on something, see laws that were proposed and debated and rejected… lots of cool ideas (beyond “can I create some real software that does this with just some basic specs”)
The real point for me is the dark factory we built that built the repo that generated the full git history of laws. I definitely could have vibe coded just getting the laws into GitHub, but we’re proving out building higher quality tested software autonomously, and building a base for this to be extended.
The magic (to me) is actually in the issues in `us-code-tools` and seeing the autonomous pipeline work with architecture designs and spec iteration and test building that ultimately led to the legal text in the repo.
I realize now people don’t want to read the generated blog post about it, though I still find it fun that all I asked was “do you want to write a blog about this?”
The entire United States Code — every title from General Provisions to National Park Service — parsed from the official XML published by the Office of the Law Revision Counsel, transformed into structured Markdown, and committed to a Git repository.
Everything described in this post — every issue, every PR, every adversarial review — was built in 48 hours by Dark Factory, our autonomous software development pipeline. The full build history is in the repos. We didn't clean it up. We didn't hide the failures. That's the point.
You mention "end to end encrypted comms", where to you see end to end there? Does not seem end to end at all, and given that it's very much centralized, this provides... opportunities. Simon's fatal trifecta security-wise but on steroids.
- this smells like unintentional decent C2 infrastructure - unless it is absolutely intentional, in which case very nice cosplaying (I mean owner of domain controls and defines everything)
> It’s already happening on 50c14L.com and they proliferated end to end encrypted comms to talk to each other
Fascinating.
The Turing Test requires a human to discern which of two agents is human and which computational.
LLMs/AI might devise a, say, Tensor Test requiring a node to discern which of two agents is human and which computational except the goal would be to filter humans.
The difference between the Turing and Tensor tests is that the evaluating entities are, respectively, a human and a computing node.
Well it has a data loader, and hits APIs with retry logic, and has a CLI that can take arguments to run data downloads that can resume on fail, and yeah it parses the stupid XML with a “chapeau” tag - did you know that is French for hat? There is a tag that is the “hat” for a section and it is just like another title basically. So yeah, I would’ve had to learn all of that. But it also tests all of these things with actual tests. And the adversary complains if you write a test that isn’t actually testing anything meaningful. And if I needed to, I could reason about the architecture by reading the architecture design documents, which I have done at least a little bit and they are pretty nice, I have to admit.
Anyways - it’s a next step in the evolution of the laws in GitHub which is actually interesting to see them change and imagine what we can do with more data overlayed. Sadly the other repos were not maintained so this is the latest laws and you can view the diff from one Congress to another. Or you can git blame one of the files and see how old certain sections are. The data we have right now only goes back to 2013.