jenn

Karma: 3,458

I write for the LLMs, and host regular events for people. More of my writing lives on jenn.site.

jenn 16 Aug 2026 0:03 UTC
14 points
0
on: jenn’s Shortform
Excerpts from UChicago Law School’s memo from last month, Rethinking Legal Education in the AI Era, which is an interesting peek into how one prestigious institution is orienting towards AI.
Introduction:
Artificial Intelligence is already impacting higher education and the legal profession, and the pace of change appears only to be accelerating. It is thus critical for us to use this moment to carefully reflect on how legal education should adapt. This memo describes the approach we are taking to legal education in the AI era.
humans are expected to remain in the loop due to anti-ai sentiment:
AI may transform the legal profession, but many aspects of legal practice are likely to remain the domain of humans, not merely because humans are good at them, but because clients, employers, judges, and society will want humans to perform them… To be sure, there are ways in which AI can assist humans with these tasks. But legal education should renew its focus on training students for the aspects of legal practice for which humans are likely to remain essential.
all electronic devices will be banned in the classroom in first year:
During the 1L year, the value of effortful struggle, even with concepts that are second nature to experienced lawyers, is paramount. Student expertise at judging the quality of AI output is at its nadir.
...
Across all 1L sections, we will prohibit the use of electronic devices such as laptops, tablets, and phones in the classroom. There will be some limited exceptions to this policy. For instance, professors can designate classroom “scribes” who can use electronic devices to take notes for the class, professors can authorize electronic device use for specific tech-enabled activities (such as interactive in-class polling), and we will ensure that disabilities are accommodated in conformity with applicable law, as appropriate for the program of study. Additionally, examinations will be in-class without access to the internet, electronic files, or apps.
i hope this works out because it seems wise but wouldn’t be surprised if a significant percentage or even a majority of students request accommodations to get around this.
law firms are now overwhelmingly AI-pilled, so students will also receive training in using AI tools:
Many (if not most) students will spend their 1L summers in professional environments where they will be expected to use AI tools for research and writing tasks. Thus, the LRW curriculum must also include instruction in the responsible, effective, and ethical use of AI. At the same time, even AI skills training must itself be AI-resilient.
...
Client needs and expectations will create pressure for graduates to be able to immediately use AI responsibly, effectively, and ethically. As a practical matter, this means that for many graduates, law school clinics are the best opportunity to receive close and careful supervision of their use of AI tools.
how can a law school both ban devices and also train students in AI use? it seems like here’s two streams of courses, one for legal principles (“core”, including courses on tort law, contracts, criminal law, etc) and one for research and writing skills (“LRW”). devices are banned in the first stream only. in the second, they’re piloting a structure where students will write without AI but use AI for all other parts of their coursework and study:
We will thus be piloting a new structure to the LRW curriculum during the 2026–2027 academic year. Our approach will treat writing without AI as the foundation and will layer writing with AI onto it. Throughout the year, students will write without AI, while also using AI for research, revision, iterating on drafts, and preparation for oral argument. Students and their instructors will review together both their writing and their use of AI. In this way, students will develop their own writing skills independent of generative AI tools while also developing their ability to supervise AI and critique its output.
past first year, they are encouraging their teaching staff to be “creative” about “ai-resistant pedagogy”, i.e. discouraging AI use:
• In-class student workshops of their papers;
• Writing reaction papers or portions of longer papers in supervised, in-class settings;
• Group presentations or panel discussions by students with related reaction paper topics;
• Students, individually or in groups, leading portions of class discussion relevant to their reaction paper topics; and
• One-on-one discussion of a research paper with the professor outside of class.
they are also adding a new requirement to their capstone project:
all students will be required to engage in an oral discussion of their [capstone] with their supervising professor, in an in-person setting.
they acknowledge that this comes with tradeoffs:
Some responses, such as requiring writing to take place in supervised, in-class settings, address the need to cultivate practice while ensuring original human effort. Yet such requirements lose an important aspect of the exercise of writing, which is sustained and independent effort across hours, days, and weeks to create a significant piece of work. This is a valuable formative exercise for thinkers and lawyers, and we cannot wholly abandon it in favor of writing methods that are easier to administer in AI-resilient ways.

Mom’s Advice For Hosting A Class Reunion

jenn15 Aug 2026 15:52 UTC

48 points

2 comments2 min readLW link

jenn 14 Aug 2026 16:15 UTC
54 points
10
on: jenn’s Shortform
it’s a little more frustrating and demotivating than i thought it would be, building a community the second time around. the first time, in waterloo, i had nothing to really compare it to—i and dedicated regulars poured resources and attention into the community, and it flourished more year over year, but that’s a process that happens so slowly that you don’t perceive the change. the community is always the best it’s ever been.
running events in toronto is still satisfying—especially the puzzlelike nature of event design. but it leaves me a little wistful at the end of every meetup—my body is confused about why the vibes aren’t as good as they used to be in my previous city, and the answer, which is that it just takes time and repeated exposure for a community to gel and cohere and then finally bloom into conviviality, is not one that is satisfying because there’s nothing i can do to “fix” it. you just have to make events happen anyways, and trust the process.

jenn 16 Jul 2026 18:41 UTC
22 points
4
on: jenn’s Shortform
Very brief thought on AI 2040 as a Canadian: Canada seems to be quite hostile to both data centres* and the US right now. I’m not sure any politician is going to survive agreeing to being the place the US nukes if China defects from an international agreement! I’m also not sure how much this matters at all in the grand scheme of things.

*except Alberta, which might be the only province that matters anyways...

[edit: the post originally read ”...agreeing to be the place China nukes if the US defects...” because I got confused writing down where the data centres are. but the core argument still applies]

jenn 14 Jul 2026 16:30 UTC
16 points
0
in reply to: Rachel Shu’s comment on: The Whitney Biennial Should Admit That Emilie Gossiaux Wants to Fuck Their Dog
as part of my research I got claude to read every single biennial review, and across all ~50 of them there was not a single reference to the sexual undertones of this exhibition.
it’s me, im the cursed unilateralist

jenn 13 Jul 2026 21:41 UTC
24 points
15
in reply to: AlphaAndOmega’s comment on: The Whitney Biennial Should Admit That Emilie Gossiaux Wants to Fuck Their Dog
this is rat discourse!!! i am rat discoursing about the whitney biennial. there is no retreat 😤

The Whitney Biennial Should Admit That Emilie Gossiaux Wants to Fuck Their Dog

jenn13 Jul 2026 15:53 UTC

153 points

20 comments9 min readLW link

(jenn.site)

jenn 22 Jun 2026 14:15 UTC
5 points
2
on: jenn’s Shortform
I kind of want to diarypost about the little solstice I ran last night but too much diaryposting and turning all my friends into content seems corrosive. I suppose that’s why they invented these things called “diaries” 😔
What I will say is that it was a really strange wonderful evening that I think bound everyone there closer together. I’ve been having these thoughts about what’s lost when one scales a community and the experience is making me want to double down on smallness.

jenn 1 Jun 2026 14:08 UTC
8 points
−1
in reply to: Karl Krueger’s comment on: Lighthaven East—A Feasibility Study
What about the Junto?

jenn 23 Apr 2026 20:23 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Austin Chen’s comment on: Notes on Patronage
- I’m really tempted to give advice like “do great work and the money will follow”, and it’s kind of true, but also maybe generates a lot of bycatch?
what you have in quotes is literally a passage I had in a draft, stared at for 30 seconds, and then removed
One way to avoid the downsides of patronage is to go direct, make your own money.
endorsed; my funding for work I find important is >50% self-funded. Some things are genuinely very inconvenient to fund and illegible! I am paying more rent for a nicer place in Toronto so I have access to a better default event venue. But it’s hard to get anyone to give you money to uh live in a nicer house.
no essay that hit top of Hacker News
multiple (like, 2-3) people in my cohort of Inkhaven had a habit of submitting the best stuff to HN for karma, because they liked HN karma. My suspicion is that no one is doing this in Inkhaven 2, nor in most blog writing retreats. There should be someone whose job it is to read all the posts and post the top 5% or something like that. If you want to make it in the world as a writer you will need to come to terms with the fact that you will occasionally go viral, so my hot take is that you should not be able to opt out of having your work posted and going viral. (I would have said no to additional visibility on certain pieces, and this would have been incorrect.)
blessed with an abundance of great writers, and also really into prizes/competitions, and also has a terrible track record of the competitions working well.
unless the writers already want to write about the very precise thing you want them to write about, it’s actually no fun at all to write. that’s why the LW best of is much better. people thought that this job posting would be almost exactly my bag, but I much prefer my current job!

jenn 23 Apr 2026 19:13 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Notes on Patronage
In terms of allocating scarce goods, I agree that the market economy is pretty decent, but it also has known failure modes that I’m sure you’re familiar with. One of them is that certain things, such as childrearing, or work on repealing the Jones Act, are undervalued by the market because no one on the other side of the transaction captures enough of the value to pay accordingly. Angela Davis cheekily asks how much less productive our economy would be if our workers were not potty trained.
When it comes to things like reproductive labour and childrearing, I also think it’s hard to get the market to not undervalue those things without capturing them more (ie subjecting them more to market dynamics), and I don’t want them to be more captured, so there really aren’t any good moves here imo.
When it comes to repealing the Jones Act, Balsa Research is soliciting patrons.

Notes on Patronage

jenn23 Apr 2026 16:44 UTC

20 points

4 comments4 min readLW link

jenn 12 Apr 2026 13:38 UTC
4 points
0
on: How to make good tea
My few experiences with puerh suggest a wide variety of ~~dirt~~ ~~partially decomposed plant matter~~ fermented flavor notes
No yeah I think that’s right for ripe (shou) puer. I’m fond of describing it as “delicious delicious forest floor”. This makes some people dubious but for the people who try it and then like it they’re like “ok yeah I don’t know how else I’d describe it.”

jenn 10 Apr 2026 17:58 UTC
9 points
0
in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: jenn’s Shortform
I understand that the announcement posts like to exaggerate but this is sort of insane, it’s a free personal trainer who can pay attention to your form in real time? God damn now I really want access to the Chinese AI.

jenn 10 Apr 2026 17:51 UTC
19 points
4
in reply to: jenn’s comment on: jenn’s Shortform
quick preliminary search of LW and EA forums found few enough hits that I can check all of the relevant ones manually. there’s:
- this question on the EA forums by a new user with a Chinese username, which went unanswered.
- one mention in one of Zvi’s Dec 2025 AI roundups, where he casually mentions a (native?) use case that I don’t think any western frontier model is capable of, which is simple enough to use that average parents can take advantage of it
- one ignored linkpost of a newsletter covering Chinese AI, which mentions that DouBao exceeded 100 million users in September 2024
- - OpenAI had 300 million weekly active users in December 2024, I don’t know what exact metric “100 million users” refers to.

jenn 10 Apr 2026 16:51 UTC
74 points
10
on: jenn’s Shortform
I might be missing something, but one pretty major blind spot that I’m seeing in discussions of the China/US AI race is that no one seems to know about or discuss DouBao, which is ByteDance’s AI model. My sense of it^[1] is that the use of it in China is ubiquitous (it’s like their answer to ChatGPT), and no one there really cares about Kimi or Deepseek.
Coverage of DouBao is almost entirely in Chinese, on Chinese websites, and it’s impossible to download in western app stores.
Considering that ByteDance has been on the forefront of algorithmic recommendation systems since before ChatGPT (consider how much more addictive TikTok has been than all previous forms of social media), it makes me somewhat doubtful of the estimates of how behind China is on AI development compared to US models? I don’t think anyone doing evals here has access to the Chinese frontier model!
1. ^
  Entirely from talking to my mom about her recent extended visit to China, and her telling me about how strange it was that every single person from ages 5-95 uses AI enthusiastically. And by AI she means exclusively DouBao. She wasn’t aware of any other Chinese AI firms.