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Paste the entire thing into the LLM! Maybe people can stop relying on unreliable partisan sources to interpret bills if they have tools to grok the dense weird

Paste the entire thing into the LLM! Maybe people can stop relying on unreliable partisan sources to interpret bills if they have tools to grok the dense weird language in them themselves. I say this even though I was embarrassed yesterday when the LLM misinterpreted something and I posted it - read the reference text behind any summary :/

thuanao 1y ago
Government Publishing Office and Library of Congress provides XML formatted bills and all their amendments and a feed of all changes to every bill. Oh and on the topic of party politics, Bill Clinton was the one who had them put things online in the first place with the GPO Electronic Information Access Enhancement Act, and Barack Obama and the Democrats expanded it via American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 - not the do-nothing Republicans.
- joshdata 1y ago
  That's not really the right picture. Congress.gov, originally THOMAS.gov, was a product of the Republican Contract with America take-over of Congress in the mid 1990s. Republicans in Congress, including Rep. Issa for example, were helpful in expanding the information that Congress publishes publicly. In the last 15 years, efforts to make Congress publish more and better-structured information have been relatively bipartisan and, mostly, led by nonpolitical staff. I would not describe Democrats as having been the ones to have exclusively created the access to congressional information that we have today, although Democrats in recent years have led on government transparency and accountability issues generally, beyond the Legislative Branch. Changes that have required legislation have, as far as I'm aware, not really been influenced by the President, other than being signed into law, since they are Legislative Branch concerns and not Executive Branch concerns.
bavent 1y ago
So use an LLM even though you admit immediately they make mistakes and you need to read the entire bill anyways?
- jasonthorsness 1y ago
  Maybe even today an LLM is better than hearing about what the bill contains from social media reposts. The more the actual text is accessible the better (and accessible is not just technically accessible, but also understandable to the reader).

thuanao 1y ago

Government Publishing Office and Library of Congress provides XML formatted bills and all their amendments and a feed of all changes to every bill. Oh and on the topic of party politics, Bill Clinton was the one who had them put things online in the first place with the GPO Electronic Information Access Enhancement Act, and Barack Obama and the Democrats expanded it via American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 - not the do-nothing Republicans.

joshdata 1y ago
That's not really the right picture. Congress.gov, originally THOMAS.gov, was a product of the Republican Contract with America take-over of Congress in the mid 1990s. Republicans in Congress, including Rep. Issa for example, were helpful in expanding the information that Congress publishes publicly. In the last 15 years, efforts to make Congress publish more and better-structured information have been relatively bipartisan and, mostly, led by nonpolitical staff. I would not describe Democrats as having been the ones to have exclusively created the access to congressional information that we have today, although Democrats in recent years have led on government transparency and accountability issues generally, beyond the Legislative Branch. Changes that have required legislation have, as far as I'm aware, not really been influenced by the President, other than being signed into law, since they are Legislative Branch concerns and not Executive Branch concerns.

bavent 1y ago

So use an LLM even though you admit immediately they make mistakes and you need to read the entire bill anyways?

jasonthorsness 1y ago
Maybe even today an LLM is better than hearing about what the bill contains from social media reposts. The more the actual text is accessible the better (and accessible is not just technically accessible, but also understandable to the reader).