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Spanish legislation as a Git repo

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Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo

#71

Post by jonhohle »

josalhor wrote: post #62

Not only would be cool for laws to have appropiate time stamps so we can "go back in time to how it was at a certain moment", but also if we could have proper git commit diffs of how laws change over time. See this: https://www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-2015-11430 You can see how certain articles have the option to check "how that particular article was at each moment in time". That would be way harder to track,…

Not only that, but authors and approvers could be used to track who created and voted for each change.

Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo

#72

Post by gloosx »

zaep wrote: post #27

Nobody seems to have (yet) mentioned the most recent (rn) commit [1] dated 2099. I can't really figure out where the date came from, at the source noted in the commit I find no '2099', I can't see it being a joke, if it's a bug it's not obvious to me.. I'm sure I won't be the only one curious, please enlighten me. [1]: https://github.com/EnriqueLop/legalize-es/commit/424cbc96507... >

Classic. He forgot to add "make no mistakes" to the prompt. Based on the commits alone Im not sure anyone really reviewed the correctness of the git history.

When someone specifically mentions "built in ~4h with Claude Code" they probably didn't care that much about the outcome quality

Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo

#73

Post by embedding-shape »

donalhunt wrote: post #67
embedding-shape wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And inside those are cities with their own local laws. No, cities don't have their own laws, but the autonomous communities do have some influence in some laws and regulations (not all), like the amount of income tax you have to pay and so on. But cities within the autonomous communities don't have their own laws.

No by(e)-laws in Spain? Certainly a thing in the UK, Ireland and I believe US and Canada. Is that a common law thing?

"By-laws" is typically the name of the rules/"laws" inside of a company or organization, I'm not familiar with that word in the context of "nation-wide criminal/civil laws".

Regardless, cities do not have their own "local laws" in the way your comment made it seem. We have national laws, and minor differences in various autonomous communities, since they have some legislative power to control their own industry, commerce, education and some more stuff.

Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo

#74

Post by 0x3f »

embedding-shape wrote: post #59
0x3f wrote: post #45

Neat. I wonder if there are commercial products that are formal specifications of laws, decisions, etc. Such that you can reason on them via solvers etc.

I think it's a rite of passage for every developer who ever touched the ecosystem of law to also wonder the same. Probably even since the invention of "business programming" there been developers wondering this. Many has attempting, so far, I don't think anyone succeeded. But I'm sure someone at some point might figure it out, you never know :)

Well, there's a new batch of autoformalization attempts with LLMs now. Although I've also heard people say autoformalization will always be impossible.

It's interesting to wonder what kind of coverage Cycorp managed to achieve internally, and on what domains. Seemingly no job openings at the moment though!

Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo

#75

Post by layer8 »

codethief wrote: post #21
d--b wrote: post #6

I think French laws have been on website that’s like that for a while

The German parliament even has an official git repository: https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze Looks like it's been abandoned, though. :(

The GitHub org being called “bundestag” doesn’t mean that it’s anything official. It looks like it’s made by independent activists.

Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo

#76

Post by dan_linder »

jonhohle wrote: post #71
josalhor wrote: post #62

Not only would be cool for laws to have appropiate time stamps so we can "go back in time to how it was at a certain moment", but also if we could have proper git commit diffs of how laws change over time. See this: https://www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-2015-11430 You can see how certain articles have the option to check "how that particular article was at each moment in time". That would be way harder to track,…

Not only that, but authors and approvers could be used to track who created and voted for each change.

Then compare wording and structure with other bills proposed elsewhere to look for single sources trying to legalize an agenda or retry after earlier failed attempts.

Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo

#77

Post by Mordisquitos »

donalhunt wrote: post #67
embedding-shape wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And inside those are cities with their own local laws. No, cities don't have their own laws, but the autonomous communities do have some influence in some laws and regulations (not all), like the amount of income tax you have to pay and so on. But cities within the autonomous communities don't have their own laws.

No by(e)-laws in Spain? Certainly a thing in the UK, Ireland and I believe US and Canada. Is that a common law thing?

Local authorities in Spain do have the authority to enact their own law-ish regulations, which are called 'ordenanzas'. For example, if I remember correctly, motorbikes are allowed to park on the pavement by default in Barcelona unless a sign says otherwise, but it is forbidden in Madrid unless a sign explicitly allows it.

I think local government in Spain has at least as much authority as it does in the UK, maybe more, but almost certainly less than it does in the US.

Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo

#78

Post by logicallee »

d0m wrote: post #24

I wonder which country will be the first to be run entirely by AI instead of corrupt politicians

>I wonder which country will be the first to be run entirely by AI instead of corrupt politicians

State of Utopia[1] has this manifesto[2]. In our estimation (and we use AI a lot), it is not powerful enough to govern a country yet. We thought it was worth trying anyway.[3] We would like it to be able to handle contexts that are millions of times greater (think more like 1 billion tokens than 1 million tokens), and even so AI governance is a very difficult matter. In addition, once AI governance is achieved, how can you truly trust the governance model not to be corrupted? Transparent government run by AI is an additional point of difficulty. These days, the most difficult unsolved problem is how to introduce voting and users' comments without inviting comment spam and vote rigging. You can watch my latest update here[4] (I'm sorry, it's very quiet), and we welcome your input on all subjects. We have a fully autonomous agent currently running the country, which consists of a Mac Mini and a Claude subscription (plus our own dedicated server in a country that recognizes us, and we have a couple of other embassies by agreement and legal contract). But in practice this government just does whatever I tell it. It's not advanced enough to run a code of laws, which is one of the basic requirements citizens expect of their country. The size of problem space for running a country is larger than models can handle, but many things help.

One of the best hopes we have is with deterministic offline models where we share the pipeline with people ahead of time, so they know exactly how it will work. This could be a trustworthy matter of dispute resolution, if we get the architecture right.

For example, our country could help you sign a contract and in case of dispute, both parties could submit supporting documents and make statements and the offline model they agreed to at the time of signing their contract could adjudicate. This pipeline could be transparent from the start. This won't satisfy everyone, but might provide the minimum standard of having a code of laws that assists with contract enforcement. For now, all you can really do is keep checking our site for updates and leave comments about what direction you'd like the country to take. (For example, you can leave a comment on my latest update on Youtube.)

[1] https://stateofutopia.com

[2] https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d6b35b81-0eeb-4e41-9628-5...

[3] https://medium.com/@rviragh/ai-is-not-ready-to-create-utopia...

[4] https://www.youtube.com/live/K0dgrPRWPCs

Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo

#79

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

artirdx wrote: post #34
enriquelop wrote: post #2

I built a pipeline that converts all Spanish state legislation into version-controlled Markdown. Each law is a file, each reform is a real git commit with the historical date. 8,642 laws, 27,866 commits. The idea: legislation is just patches on patches on patches. Git already solves this. Instead of reading "strike paragraph 3 and replace with...", you get an actual diff. The repo is the product. Browse any law, git…

Laws intent are often clarified in courts through judgments. If you can overlay the judgements on top of the corresponding law, at correct points in time, I think that will have value. It might, for example, show which laws were referenced the most and which needed to be clarified the most. It might give insights into what legal language constructs stood the test of time and which had to be repeatedly clarified.

Perhaps reference it in the commit trailer?

Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo

#80

Post by bertil »

This is a key project, and I’m sure many countries have enough developers who might try and get it done, but a project that can do it for most legal systems (assuming the sources are on-line) would help a lot more people access legal resources.
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