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Would less football be a bad thing? It's the only sport I know where the governing body have to advise the police on how to deal with fan violence, such as "please don't use tear gas on them"


If a contract is automatically signed by an agent on your behalf, is it legally binding?


Generally, yes. There is a lot of case law on various types of automated contracting (robotic process automation, automated securities transactions, etc.). Exceptions are generally where the other party had knowledge or should have known that the agent didn't have legal authority on behalf of the party it purports to bind.


How much money do you have to argue ? That agent could just as easily be OP’s Boyfriend.

It could be him under duress.

Much of the time contract termination can be reasonable as long as you make a solid effort.

Once I signed a lease and got fired before my actual move in. I was honest and got a full refund on my deposit.

The landlord could said “Well you owe us the full amount , lol”, but no reasonable court would enforce that.

Even if, good luck collecting I have no income!


Contracts are agreements, generally speaking most people and companies do not want to drag people in them, telcos excluded. All the termination clauses are put there, again in general, to provide some security to either party, not to entrap the other, again telcos mostly excluded.

If you don't want to be in a contract especially one just signed, typically most people will typically understand and let you of the hook, as long as entrapment is not their business model like telcos. This is mostly reflected in common cool-off period provisions, i.e provisions in the contract to terminate within a week or two.


Even if not, you'll find yourself in a hot mess explaining why you sent the signed contract to the other party.


Almost definetely not. But given how cagey claude code is with its sessions it may be impossible to prove it was done by claude.


Almost certainly not if you didn’t explicitly give the command, but you’ll going to have to argue it in court if the other party wants to be difficult.


Not a lawyer but I can almost guarantee that the answer is yes. If it was a 'no', many malicious parties would simply start using that loophole.


In a civil contractual dispute you can only recover actual damages. If the contract was sent, and the other party performed work on it that had a cost for them, then most likely, yes, they would be awarded damages if you refused to compensate them for any costs incurred prior to notification that the acceptance had been sent in error.

The other outcome would be clearly inequitable: forcing the counter party to eat the loss for your irresponsible use of an AI agent.


But if I paste an image of your signature onto a contract that says you give me a million pounds, that can't be legally binding for you, can it?


No, because you are a separate individual who does not have authority to sign a contract on my behalf.

Claude isn't. It's a tool, that isn't capable of signing a contract any more that Adobe Acrobat or Photoshop is.

OP used it as a tool to sign the contract. The question would be whether they did so knowingly and intentionally, if not then whether that invalidates the contract.


You are a legal entity that can be sued. Agent is a tool that you run and are fully responsible for.


True, that would be forgery. I think proving whether the agent truly went rogue would be 'load bearing'.


No. It’s called forgery.


If you did not yourself intentionally sign something, in sound mind, it’s obviously not binding. But ultimately it’s up to a court to decide if you’re telling the truth that you didn’t do it.


No, application of the principal of respondeat superior would most likely be applied to an AI agent the same as a human employee. An employer is held responsible for the actions of an employee even if it is clearly contrary to their intentions.


This opens obvious loophooles. If you had deleted all logs and trajectories, courts can't trace it. Law wasn't written for or has caught up to non-human entities capable of autonomously acting


> Spymarks are certainly not great for whistleblowers or anyone who doesn’t want to be persecuted for their words or affiliations. No matter where you stand on whatever issues, spymarks can be used against you and those you care about.

How do you spymark text that someone else wrote? You can't change the words or they'd notice


"Text someone else wrote" is already self-watermarking if it's long enough. The infamous "six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men" may not be enough to hang someone over it, but apparently it's more than enough to uniquely identify them by word choices alone.

Text the whistleblower only reports on, well, if they got it from a computer system, there's already precedent of altering word choices, typos and punctuation in e-mails and memos to create unique per-recipient or per-recipient-group versions, which allows companies to trace leaked transcripts reported by press back to source of the leak.


You can eliminate some fingerprint by writing in standardized scientific English. One of the benefits of standardized scientific English is to conceal the race and gender of the author for more impartial review.


*knows when a pair of camera glasses are in the room


> —–“”×÷£°†‡¢§•€, which are absolutely critical even for English

Assuming that second dash is an en-dash, I've not used the majority of those characters even when handwriting. I would say the quotes I handwrite are closer to symmetrical " quotes, I do still use the multiply but I use a slash for divide, I do use the pound symbol and degree symbol, and I've never used the rest. And I'm from england


A lot of them are typographic in nature rather than manuscript.


I type as well, I still wouldn't call them "absolutely critical"


If you wouldn't call them “absolutely critical” I wouldn't call you a typographer.


"Japanese Japanese Industrial Standards standard keyboard"


"No true scotsman uses LLMs for a recompilation"


I hope my responses are a little more coherent than this...

- Someone with ADHD


I'll be honest, I think Dr Who is due for a 1989-style shelving for a while. I've loved watching the show since I was young, but I think the quality has fallen off significantly recently. Capaldi was the last "great doctor" in my opinion. Whittaker is a good actress, I thought she performed well in Broadchurch (ironically also written by Chibnall), but her writing was just awful, and it feels like they've just spent the last couple of seasons nostalgia-baiting the fans, like with the Midnight episode


I think it just needs fresh blood.

Much like the show in the latter years of its first run it collapsed under the weight of its own canon, and writers/showrunners that enthusiastically embraced that canon and alienated the casual audience.

IMO they should never have brought back the Time Lords. That was the genius stroke of the 2005 reboot. Just make the Doctor an intergalactic oddball, let the adventures run from there. What's weird is that Russell Davies was the one who understood this... then when he came back to the show he shoveled nostalgia on top of nostalgia and sank the thing.

I never even watched the Chibnall era so I'm not fully informed but from reading about the Timeless Child arc it just sounds like a show disappearing up its own arse. It's supposed to be a family show, younger kids don't care about that kind of stuff. Just make it fun.


The Chibnall episodes sucked, but then Russell T. Davies came back as showrunner. If you haven't seen the first three episodes he did, with David Tennant returning as the Doctor, you're missing out!

I liked the regular season that followed too. It had good and bad episodes, just like the last time RTD was showrunner, but the good ones were very good.

(I haven't watched the most recent season yet, but that's less because I'm unexcited and more because I want to save it.)


Chibnall episodes most certainly did not suck, neither did his writing. It was simply s different take on Doctor Who. A good one.

What killed it for good was what came (back) after. Bad decision. Bad precedent set. Bringing the RTD and Tennant gang back was the single most important and devastating mistake ever made on this show.


Hi Chris Chibnall, great to see you on Hacker News. :)

In all seriousness we clearly have very different taste! I just found the Chibnall episodes boring. I wanted to like them!

I think GGP shares my taste though, based on their comment.


It fell apart in the Capaldi era. The "kill the moon" was the "jump the shark" of neu-Who


Capaldi had strong episodes throughout his run, but yes, I personally did dislike some of the storylines. The Zygon stuff felt very weak to me, and I never understood the "The Hybrid" storyline. But heaven sent/hell bent were bangers, and I definitely enjoyed his finale Cybermen episodes.

But yes, the moon suddenly reappearing in between shots, perfectly fine and identical to before, was very silly


Maybe Capaldi ended on a high note. I was done with the show after the moon episode and quit watching. I couldn't keep suspending disbelief after that. It wasn't just one bad episode the whole thing felt tired.

Capaldi was a great actor and it was nice that he got some good scripts (I really liked the one where he was in Doctor Prison, great concept), but his run felt to me like a show running out of ideas.

I didn't watch the Whittaker doctor. Heard it was awful and wasn't surprised. I eventually saw the pilot and it was indeed, awful.


Back when it was airing, I sort of lost interest around Capaldi. I think his episodes were a bit too "mature" for me, when I preferred funny scifi show. But I've come to appreciate a lot of his episodes more. But he did have some really dogshit ones, like the moon episode, The Caretaker (Where a school gets attacked by a dalek knockoff), and Sleep No More, which was so bad that me and my girlfriend spent the whole episode talking about other stuff when having a marathon rewatch. Both of us are big fans of doctor who in general


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Doctor Who has been "woke" for a long time. I believe the 4th doctor discuss what pronouns to use for an alien. There have been several episodes essentially about slavery in the 10th and 11th doctors runs. Also you should read about The Happiness Patrol, a 7th doctor episode


Also, well, women in major non-romantic roles in the 1960s! I'm struggling to think of another major TV example of that from the time period, honestly.


> I believe the 4th doctor discuss what pronouns to use for an alien.

An alien, not a human.

> There have been several episodes essentially about slavery in the 10th and 11th doctors runs.

Progressive in 1830 maybe. In the 21st century saying that slavery is bad thing is hardly revolutionary.

> The Happiness Patrol, a 7th doctor episode

A bit of left wing subtext and some caricature? So what? Very common at the time. Lots of comedians doing the same. Nothing like woke, not even a bit controversial.


[flagged]

Could you please define what you think "woke" means then? Because I'm working off the definition of "being aware of and attentive to social and political injustices, especially regarding race, gender, and inequality"


Traditionally (in the modern pejorative sense), it means "things the speaker doesn't like", in much the same sense as "common sense" means "the speaker's opinions".


It definitely is a lot more specific than that. It means, at the very least means having certain views on the causes of injustices, and on the policies required to fix them, and even on how one judges whether there has been an injustice in the first place.


[flagged]

"strawman"


[flagged]

That's pretty much the definition that the term started with (arguably it was a bit more general in some sense: just along the lines of 'politically aware and engaged'). It seems to have morphed, but I find that when it's used pejoratively there's not one fixed definition beyond 'I don't like it'.


> That's pretty much the definition that the term started with

No, it started as being aware of issues black Americans were facing. Then it got co-opted and contorted by the far left in America into all sorts of crazy issues.


It got co-opted and contorted by the right in America. The right intentionally pretended that "woke" was an umbrella term for "all sorts of crazy issues" that it never was. The more "crazy issues" that they could add onto the pile the better, in order to make the word useless to the left. If anyone on the left continued to use "woke" intending its original meaning, those listening would associate their own thoughts about the extra unrelated issues, muddying the speaker's message.


It's good that the left has got to the point where they're disavowing woke[0], although they're only doing it to not plummet further into the depths of unpopularity, but to say it was never co-opted by the radical left in the first place is so breathtakingly untrue even they haven't done that.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/opinion/woke-liberals-res...


That's why I'm asking you what your definition of woke is, so that I can understand what it is about new doctor who that you don't like


More like "go woke because you've run out of ideas." The only "woke" thing about Whittaker was that the doctor was female, something they would have done in earlier episodes (in fact, did do) and wouldn't have made a big deal about it.

But they had no reason for people to watch Who by the time you got to Whittaker, and the show should have been cancelled already but it was making too much money, so they treated her like a Cousin Oliver and made the fact that she was the First Female Doctor (not even true) into a huge thing because they had nothing else.


Probably the fact that in one episode[0] the Doctor's incarnations were actually mostly women except for the most recent few - who obscured this important fact - smelled a lot like "yet another man taking credit for a woman's work".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Timeless_Children


I wasn’t aware of those episodes but from that description sounds like people writing the show who despise the character and the audience.


That is a key trait needed to be hired as a writer into all sorts of successful shows in the last 15 years.


I think the episode written by Malorie Blackman about some random time criminal appearing during MLK and Rosa Parks' protests would fall under "woke" too, but that was just a shit episode because of bad writing. A competent episode writer could probably have done something better with that time period/setting


Jesus now this is one terrible take. Rosa is a bad story? Please. Rosa is phenomenal.


idk, Who, Trek, Star Wars have been woke since the 60s. At this point, it seems more likely that you've changed woke to mean "anything I don't like". Or you watch too much Fox


No doubt MAGA Who would have been much more popular?


Staggers me when I see viewpoints like this about Who, Trek and the like. Take a second to consider, maybe it isn't the show's outlook that changed, it's you?

Who has always been progressive. Trek, too. If you were your current age in the 60s I bet you'd be railing against Kirk kissing Uhura.


Yhe kiss wass involuntarily forced by psychokinesis.


Implying it hadn't already fell apart in the Matt Smith era, where there was a season finale that made less sense than the end of Neo Genesis Evangelion (I think I'm talking about The Pandorica Opens, but it's honestly all a blur, and was at the time I watched it too). Moffat hyped up future episodes but could rarely deliver, RTD just hit you with a massive sucker punch on the 2nd or 3rd last episode and WOW.

Also implying that the wheels weren't kinda getting loose when 10ant said his final farewell at that (otherwise fairly underrated IMO) episode where the Master was hungry.


All of the big franchises are collapsing under the weight of nostalgia and self-reference. Reboots like Picard are shockingly, almost insensitively, retrospective.


It deserves a "1989-style shelving" much more than it did in 1989 itself. The viewing figures are tumbling off a cliff at a time when the BBC in general needs them more than ever.


Wow, the intern must have tripped over a very big power cable this time


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