Luis Villa

Programmer-turned-lawyer, trying to build human(e) futures. Day job: SonarSource. Boards: Creative Commons, OpenET (open water data), CA Housing Defense. Also: 415, dad. Past: Wikipedia, Moz, 305 Also: https://lu.is + https://social.coop/@luis_in_brief

6085 followers1858 following5 stories

Longform Stories

Collaboration: a Confused Story in Five Graphs

Some graphs about reading and writing on the internet. Less a story than a Rorschach test.

Apr 30·1 min read·23 words

Wikipedia's traffic drop: more on languages and freshness

Following up on last week's post, I looked at 5,000 "Vital Articles" across eight major-language Wikipedias. Articles about math, physical sciences and tech are waaaay down, while people, geography, a…

Apr 23·1 min read·55 words

Career articles on Wikipedia: some scary numbers

I took a look at English Wikipedia pageviews for ~4,000 articles about careers. The numbers are grim: the median is down 28% from pre-COVID, with a huge drop in the last year.

Apr 19·1 min read·39 words

Lawyers, Humility, and LLMs

Reviewing a book about a multi-billion-dollar contract bug—and what it means for the profession's arrogant response to LLMs.

Mar 4·1 min read·22 words

Of Monsters, Men, and Lawyers

Generalist LLMs are not lawyers, and evaluating them that way is a waste of time. Evaluating LLMs with useful specialized prompts (and eventually, with specialized legal harnesses) is where the work m…

Mar 2·1 min read·38 words