I have unfortunately lagged behind yet again, and am actually writing this in the beginning of Week 36. Week 34 felt a lot like receiving tons of tiny paper cuts.

The Elusive Form 99 for applying for a Community Courts and Tribunals Friend

For the small claims case I’m assisting on, I needed to find a form for one of the volunteer interpreters to sign up as a Community Courts and Tribunals Friend (“CCT Friend”) in order to allow them to attend consultations/hearings at the Small Claims Tribunal with a worker who speaks Bengali. CCT Friends can provide administrative and emotional support, and also interpret proceedings/documents for parties.

This form to request for a CCT Friend is supposedly called Form 99 according to the judiciary’s website. Sadly, trying to click and follow the link brings one to the State Courts Practice Directions 2014 instead. No Form 99 in sight.

I wrote in to the courts via their feedback form to tell them about this issue, and they replied pretty quickly (in less than a week) that the right form to use is actually this CCTC Friend Form that’s hosted on the Community Justice and Tribunal System (CJTS for short). However, the judiciary.gov.sg site still doesn’t link to the right form.

It’s well and good that the State Courts has a memorandum of understanding with Harvey to explore the use of LLMs in helping parties in small claims, but sometimes access to justice involves a lot of other low-hanging fruit, like maintaining website links and making forms easy to find.

I’d class myself as someone who’s quite well-equipped to navigate the court system, but I still find myself frustrated by things like this.

Misc.

My tomato seedlings are still alive. I’m on vacation so I’m watching them grow over a free CCTV that I got. I also found out that two of the most popular tomato forums – Tomatoville and Tomato Junction – had some sort of schism.

I finally completed Andrew Ng’s introductory Supervised ML: Regression and Classification course. Having to implement cost functions and gradient descent really forced me to learn how to read math notation a little more and understand what’s actually going on. I’ve concluded that I’m really behind on math, so this is probably going to have to be a pretty long (10 years-ish), sustained pursuit. Learning math recreationally is vastly preferable to trying to make it my job. I’m also really liking the Grokking Machine Learning book by Luis Serrano.

David Colarusso’s got an AI & Law class that involves lots of role-playing simulations.