> If the end-result of the law + standard human behavior is that you made web browsing a crappier experience then you made a crappy law.
That's not a very good way to figure out if a law is "crappy". Building codes make for a crappier construction experience (can't just do whatever TF you want) but that doesn't mean they're bad.
Laws requiring designated handicapped parking spaces make parking a slightly crappier experience for non-handicapped people. That doesn't mean they're crappy laws.
>As I mentioned elsewhere, you’re falling for letting perfect be the enemy of good
No, this line of reasoning deserves nothing but absolute contempt when it comes to laws. We are not talking about getting the finnicky API to work at your job. Too often laws have had unintended consequences as a result of loopholes or small peculiarities. If the damn law doesn't even work on a fundamental level then it should be opposed on principle.
> When you find yourself doing something simple in a complicated way because the law gives you additional advantages, that's a great sign that the law is bad.
Not really. It's usually a sign that you're trying to evade the plain meaning of the law with technicalities.
> Having a website is not at all like 'shouting on a public square' and is exactly like having a bar open to the public.
It's hilarious that you would claim that one strained meatspace analogy is completely wrong, and your other strained meatspace analogy is completely right.
This is why laws in one context should not be mapped by analogy over to another context; they should be derived from the fundamental moral principle that the original law codified.
I find that a sensible way to look at it is that laws that are used are bad laws. Because almost everyone follows sensible laws so they only need to be litigated in rare outlier cases. By contrast, bad laws end up in the courts continuously because they're susceptible to abuse by dishonest parties.
So the vast majority of laws are used negatively, because good laws don't have to be used.
>The problem is that the laws have to be almost impossibly vague.
No they don't! Please don't say things like that in public, someone may actually believe you.
It is not possible for the laws to be perfect. They can't be like programs or catch every possible nuance or edge case (and when they try they look like the tax code). But we have specific articulable laws that are severely defective in ways that normal laws aren't, and they can certainly be improved to attain roughly the same level of imperfection found in the large body of legislation rather than their current state of total absurdity.
> You can't be picky about Google facilitating the laws that you happen to like or not.
This is silly, because there's nothing magic about it being law that makes it just, especially in a highly politicised environment. People argue about ignoring law they don't like all the time, especially in the future tense.
> In reality the law is almost always three steps ahead of technology, because the law is written in a programming language that executes what you intended to write
So why is it always interpreted in favour of what content distributors intend and never in favour of common sense or the public? Laws are a public contract and as such the public, including you, has the right to push for its interpretation one way with judges having the ultimate authority to resolve disagreements. Just because you look at things from a logical perspective doesn't make you unfit to argue for your rights, and claiming otherwise strikes me as a really self destructive mix of learned helplessness and impostor syndrome.
I'm just being silly, mostly. I don't the answers.
I have been involved with legislation a little though, and quite a lot with “regulations” (in the regulated industries sense).
The 5 year old defence holds water in a surprising number of cases. The problem of definitions in law is real, and kind of reminiscent of the problem of specifications in software.
For example, defining “allowable uses” is tricky because determining intent is (notoriously) tricky in law.
Legislation is a tool. It has lots of hangups, a legacy from thousands of years of history. It’s not always the best tool for the job. I’m not an anarchist, I just feel we’re get more milage from better browser behaviour and defaults than laws in this particular instance.
>Let's not even talk about the long process of enforcing those contracts manually with very expensive lawyers in a physical court building.
You'll still need them at the end of the day though ? Code running in a computer somewhere doesn't rule the physical social very animal side of things.
Laws and lawyers are fuzzy constructs because humans are fuzzy creatures to start with, and imo we need that flexibility in laws and in their application, hence why I don't trust the "code is law" catch phrase.
> law doesn't need to be technically detailed or envision every single technological adaptation: it just needs to be sufficient for a judge to be able to recognise it when a prosecutor describes it and a defence lawyer attempts to pull the wool over their eyes
This is a terrible philosophy for legislating. It undermines the rule of law, i.e. that you should ex ante be able to determine if what you're doing is legal or not.
What you're describing is rule making. Congress regularly does this, in passing a law that requires such and such agency propose (or even implement) rules that achieve this or that within so many days.
> Yeah, laws and contracts are basically pseudocode;
Are they? Do you say this as someone who is familiar with actual laws? Genuinely asking. Because I know that engineers (my past self included) like to imagine formalizing laws and turning them into code, which is extremely naive, once you see actual laws and how much human common sense judgment is needed to decide on them, including inferring intent, judging potential consequences, interpreting imprecise terms, etc.
Perhaps a part of the tax code is like code. But a lot of laws are far from it. It's more formal than novels but it's firmly natural language that you need to understand as a human.
> This is the perfect example of what happens when a programmer (or in this case a mathematician) thinks that the law operates like a computer.
> It doesn't.
It's illogic, inconsistent and incomplete, is that what you are trying to say? Or is there some higher order logic that computers can't calculate?
> and that is fine
From your description of what the law should be, "fine" could mean anything. Should I attempt to understand the intentions? Perhaps you are saying, you yourself don't have an issue with it, but that is not generalizable. In my own terms, that's an opinion. And that's a matter of fact. Albeit, I'm bad with maths and computers, so I can't prove it a fact.
> no one should be using the internet as their basis of law (or medicine, etc) instead of a professional in the first place.
Designing systems around what people should do, as opposed to what they actually do, has proven time and again not to work particularly well in practice. I'm sure you've seen countless examples of how people track paths through manicured grass fields. The landscaper will complain about how people should walk and they'll put up signs to no avail.
The fact is, we (including me, BTW) are frequently wrong about a lot of things, and when there's little riding on it, we can ignore that most of the time. With subjects like medicine and law, however, where a mistake can cost you your life or lots of money, we want to make sure people are getting the best advice possible. That's why we require licenses to practice medicine and law, and we have governing and ethics bodies to regulate how professionals operate their practices.
Oh boy it totally can. I'm not saying it it, but it totally can.
I feel many people (at least on HN) treat laws like programming. There are some similarities, but programmers like to eliminate arbitrary special cases, while lawmakers love to create arbitrary special cases. It's like their only job, really.
> A just legal code forbids only what the vast majority would consider wrong regardless of the law.
I don't think that's entirely true; legal codes often specify things on which there is a strong preference for uniformity (or benefits which can only be gained by uniformity) but where the details of the uniform rules are not themselves a near-universal consensus independent of the law. I don't think this makes them bad legal codes. (Prohibiting driving on the left-hand side of a public roadway in the direction of travel, for instance.)
> The flaw with that argument is that something like 99 of 100 laws exist because, basically, they should. They benefit society, so essentially the whole population wants them.
That's very much debatable. It's not even clear how to count the number of laws, even if we are only considering Federal law in the US. (see https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43056.pdf )
Certainly there is no one who knows all the laws, and unlike in coding, there's no commitment to DRY or modularization, which leads to very common unintended consequences.
You're arguing the 99/100 case, but I'm sure it would be easy to find someone to credibly argue the 1/100 case.
> If you break any concept/law down far enough, it becomes kinda meaningless.
I call bullshit, I think it's mostly just bad laws that become ridiculous when 'broken down'. If you want to convince me otherwise, demonstrate your claim using laws against murder (unambiguously good laws.)
> The US has a lot of legal policy that is based on spirit of the law
Yes, but that's a wrong and unfair way to define and apply laws.
> humans are imperfect
Smart contracts and "code is the law" mantra don't contradict this. You're imperfect and you commit a mistake, you lose. You find a mistake in someone else's code, you win.
This is much better than the current legal system where we are all collectively forced to adapt to, or even pay for, someone else's mistakes.
That's not a very good way to figure out if a law is "crappy". Building codes make for a crappier construction experience (can't just do whatever TF you want) but that doesn't mean they're bad.
Laws requiring designated handicapped parking spaces make parking a slightly crappier experience for non-handicapped people. That doesn't mean they're crappy laws.
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