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Jeffrey Vagle

@jvagle.me
9.9K followers 1.1K following 19K posts

Law professor | Privacy, AI*, and Technology & Society | Veteran | Offering bespoke mentor-mentee relationships | There is music yet to play | tractatus.org

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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 18h
My childhood baseball hero:
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 18h
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 18h
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 18h
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 19h
Quote repost with a photo from whatever device you’re using without explanation.
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 23h
(and he gets a pup cup for being such a good boy)
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 23h
Finn recently tore his ACL (CCL in canines, apparently), so he's now sporting his shark brace on his (short) walks.
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 05/10/2026
Henry is helping.
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 03/10/2026
It's that time of year again.
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 02/10/2026
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 02/10/2026
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 01/10/2026
The man was indeed versatile.
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 30/09/2026
Hegseth has clearly assembled a team of our best, brightest, and manliest.
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 30/09/2026
One of the nation's best minds. Apparently.
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 30/09/2026
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 30/09/2026
How many times must we say this? AI* software does not “go rogue” any more than your printer “got religion” when it stopped working Sunday. Software does not have intent or agency. People do. And this feels like some people might be exposed to liability. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/t...
Months before OpenAI’s artificial intelligence went rogue, two employees raised an alarm with top executives. They were ignored.

In emails, the employees said they worried that OpenAI’s newest artificial intelligence models were not being appropriately monitored during testing to gauge the technology’s sophistication and to secure the models, according to messages viewed by The New York Times.
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 29/09/2026
Proud member of the club
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 28/09/2026
Everything's going great. Why do you ask? www.nytimes.com/2026/09/28/u...
The theft by a criminal hacking group of reams of sensitive personal data involving potentially tens of thousands of former and current F.B.I. employees is emerging as one of the worst breaches of sensitive government information, leaving the bureau rushing to protect its personnel as a deadline looms.

Nearly a week after the group, known as ShinyHunters, revealed it had pilfered intimate details about bureau personnel from the agency’s jobs portal and threatened to leak them online, F.B.I. investigators are still piecing together how the breach took place and the total damage.
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 27/09/2026
I recently raised a version of this question with a panel of senior biglaw partners, and the answers ranged from shrugs to a blind trust that AI* tools will provide a magical solution. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/26/b...
As A.I. Makes Law Firms More Efficient, Clients Ask: ‘Where’s My Discount?’

There’s growing pressure to move beyond the billable hour. But big firms aren’t ready to blow up their trusted business model.
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 27/09/2026
The fact that this is being presented as a "new worry" speaks volumes about our conciliatory history of hands-off-lest-we-disturb-innovation regulatory policy in this country. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/18/b...
The A.I. Industry’s New Worry: ‘Liability Exposure’

The prospect of artificial intelligence tools being used to do significant harm presents the companies and their leaders with a legal challenge.
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 27/09/2026
Similar vibes.
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 27/09/2026
He definitely had a look about him.
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 26/09/2026
And you may not be terribly surprised to learn that Yudkowsky has strong feelings on whose lives truly matter and whose do not.
4.2: How much positive significance do my deliberate efforts have?
That depends on your profession.
Some people definitely lead significant lives. This would include farmers, anyone who has a job that involves actual sweat, and anyone who has to
show up at work on Labor Day. It includes rich families who give more to charity than they spend on themselves, and venture capitalists who invest
in technology companies. It includes any scientific researcher who's made a discovery, or even established a given area as being a blind alley. It
includes any computer programmer who's helped build a widely used tool or published a new programming technique. Most directly, it includes
cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, and Artificial Intelligence programmers.
It includes anyone who uses their muscles, their brains, or their property to grow, build, discover, and create. It includes science fiction writers who
inspire others to enter a career in research or AI. And it includes parents and teachers who have raised children (this definitely counts as "actual
sweat") who work in any of the above areas.
Some people, at most, break even. This includes bureaucrats, marketing personnel, stock traders, and venture capitalists who fund leveraged
buyouts. It includes the generic middleman and anyone whose job title is "Strategic Administrative Coordinator". It includes modern artists,
professors of communication, and psychoanalysts. It includes most lawyers and middle management. If your job involves going to meetings all day,
using terms with no real meaning, or shuffling paper (which includes stock certificates), you probably aren't breaking even. (9). We could easily get
by on 20% of the workforce, in these professions. As it is, only about 5% are breaking even. These are the professions which, on this particular
planet only, happen to be overvalued, and thus over-occupied, and also easy to fake.4.2.1: What an amazing coincidence that your own profession heads the list.
Heh, heh, heh. What makes you think I decided AI was significant after I became a computer programmer, instead of vice versa? When I was a kid, I
thought I was going to be a physicist. But then, at age eleven, I read a book called Great Mambo Chicken, and I said to myself: "This is what I want
to do with my life." It was a career epiphany unmatched until I read about the Singularity five years later.
I found out about the Singularity in stages, and became a programmer in stages; but in general, my dedication to programming has followed my
realization that programming is important, rather than vice versa.
1.4.3: Who has led the most significant life?
If I had to name a single human with the most concentrated significance (10) as of 2000, it would be Douglas R. Hofstadter. Dr. Hofstadter's Copycat
is a significant advance in AI, he has sponsored an AI paradigm shift in the right direction, and he has inspired millions through his Pulitzer Prize-
winning and amazingly amazingly good book, "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid". (For more about Gödel, Escher, Bach, see the
Bookshelf. (In association with Amazon.com.))
Runners-up include K. Eric Drexler (11), Douglas Lenat, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Francis Bacon, and Socrates. Advancing contenders: Vernor
Vinge, Hans Moravec.
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 26/09/2026
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 25/09/2026
Alfred used to love the old Mac Mini.
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 24/09/2026
YES
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 23/09/2026
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 23/09/2026
Kind of like this.
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 23/09/2026
"English is an ethnicity"
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 23/09/2026
And then there were the ensemble pieces.
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 23/09/2026
It’s not just you.
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 22/09/2026
(modified with a kit to bump the RAM up to 16k)
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 22/09/2026
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 21/09/2026
I await the 20th anniversary iPhone.
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 19/09/2026
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 18/09/2026
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 18/09/2026
This beautiful edition gives me yet another excuse to read @greatdismal.bsky.social’s classic for the nth time.
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 16/09/2026
And when should I serve the punch?
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 16/09/2026
So. Many. Details.
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 16/09/2026
Rewatching Widow's Bay in honor of their big night last night. So many excellent details.
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 16/09/2026
Pondering this graf.
Founding thinker Eliezer Yudkowsky gave a good quote to the Times in July about the Zizians, after mostly declining to comment on them, saying, "A lot of the early Rationalists thought it was important to tolerate weird people, a lot of weird people encountered that tolerance and decided they’d found their new home, and some of those weird people turned out to be genuinely crazy and in a contagious way among the susceptible."
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 15/09/2026
Congratulations to Stephen Root!
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 14/09/2026
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 13/09/2026
An excellent Mastodon post re the dangers of the emerging AI* god.
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 12/09/2026
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 12/09/2026
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 12/09/2026
I’m familiar with the cat corollary.
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 11/09/2026
Ever wonder why tech founders have repeatedly asked to be regulated by the federal government? Here's a big reason: www.politico.com/news/2026/09...
The bill would also preempt some state AI laws, the four people told POLITICO.
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 10/09/2026
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