i've long held a view that what CCP is doing is cancer to all citizens in previously free countries, our democratic leaders are quick to show disgust and disdain, but the actual owners of the country, actual powers that be are enamored and mesmerised by what they're doing to the Chinese populace especially when it comes to messaging/propaganda. block and track everyone then just tiktok your way high heavens. it's not even what aldous huxley meant by the pleasure essay anymore it's deeper and more manipulative
If you used it yourself, even if only to ask out loud whether the performance is acceptable enough not to require the extra work, you'd hear it all the time. Be the change you want to see!
Yeah. I'm all for sprints to start focusing on optimizations and bug smashing instead of just barreling down the road of profitability while the middle managers hold a gun to your head.
even though biden's already left I am still quite surprised how little views his pro union videos got https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZpUD9KgYc4 this video was on whitehouse's youtube channel
the owners; actual owners no doubt have their finger in the commercial real estate pie too. And they are obviously not ready to get a haircut on that portfolio so here it goes. COVID-19 hasn't disappeared yet, so all this is going to do is accelerate infection and churn through more people quicker. ASHRAE did update and release ASHRAE 241 but I really doubt building managers are eager to implement that costly compliance standard especially still shell shocked from WFH
it's just the mindset of management 101.. you do not ever let your engineer be bored. literally the first thing they teach in 101 is you deliberately overburden them with crazy THEN set impossible deadline so that they build only the very core and you ship it immediately then refine later. sure the method might be different now, but the spirit of such process is the same, you do not ever let your engineer be bored as boredom is waste, and waste is not efficiency. this is to ensure that creative (value-add) portion is left to the management.
just what i was taught when i took a management 101 class in my university years.. it was one of my elective papers outside of my core curriculum quite enlightening and helped me manage my managers...
honestly i think the whole patent framework is quite literally ready for the dumpster. the spirit of a patent is quite worthy, but the execution over the years has been pretty piss poor and I think the bad is almost out weighing the good; perhaps we only heard about the bad bits. Surely readers of hacker news can chime in good parts of patent? living off fruits of of your knowledge labour and earning that sweet sweet patent licencing fees into the sunset days of leisure?
Most small inventors/innovators don’t benefit. In recent times it’s mostly been good for large companies who can afford to hoard patent portfolios, for defense against other large companies and to crush potential upstarts. Everyone complaining about the smartphone duopoly should look here for a big reason why there are no meaningful competitors.
From the perspective of policy makers, the biggest advantage of the modern patent system was to give US companies a leg up over foreign competitors, as we had the largest patent portfolios, better R&D, and legal frameworks we could use to our advantage. But this no longer works, as our biggest competitor understandably decided this wasn’t a fair bargain and has ignored IP rules to their own benefit. (Why nobody saw this coming is a mystery.) IMHO most patents now harm the economy more than they help.
I have been one of the small inventors who wrote patents and ultimately sold them to a company that makes most of its money suing over patents.
Patents are a form of business insurance you can get on expensive R&D work. When you go into the market to sell your products, your marketing material and the function of your product naturally leaks how it works. Motivated competitors can then reverse-engineer what you did or otherwise figure out how to enter the market that you revealed was valuable. If they do it by actually out-innovating you, your patents don't really protect you, but if they just take what you're doing, the patent is there so you can claim the fruits of your labor regardless. In general, you cash in on this insurance contract by either contracting with lawyers to sue the infringers (usually on contingency or with litigation financing to remove the cash cost) or by selling your patent portfolio to someone who will sue the infringers.
In return for this insurance contract, you have to publicly disclose the details of your inventions in a way that a motivated party can read and understand (it's patentese, not English, but you can decipher it if you know the language). It also frees you up to publish internal details through other fora like scientific journals because this disclosure becomes pure upside (raising your company's reputation) rather than making you balance that upside against the downside of revealing information. Google is a good example of a firm that does a lot of balancing there: they publish a lot of their old, antiquated work while keeping the new stuff secret because it's mostly software and software is mostly unpatentable. In electrical engineering, small companies are much more likely to publish a lot more details on their newest devices because their devices are usually patented.
On HN, people mostly think about software patents. Many of these are stupid patents, and almost all of them have been invalidated through a decision called Alice Corp. vs CLS Bank. The digital shopping cart is one of these patents that Alice invalidated. By value, most patent litigation is about drugs, and after that you have things like computer hardware. The patent system really isn't for the HN crowd, and it really doesn't make sense for these software patents to be a thing - there's usually no expensive R&D to insure, and you have to write your patent before finding out if you have PMF.
> If they do it by actually out-innovating you, your patents don't really protect you, but if they just take what you're doing, the patent is there so you can claim the fruits of your labor regardless.
The trouble is there are ways to nominally do the first one without really doing anybody any good.
You invent a way to improve efficiency by 10 points, they need to do the same to be competitive, so they come up with a different, incompatible way to do the same thing. Now your product isn't any better than theirs so you can't charge higher prices or increase your market share any more than you could without the patent. But now we've collectively had to pay to invent the wheel twice in exchange for no benefit.
Worse, suppose that the different ways of improving the product are compatible with each other. So now your product is 10 points better than what's in the public domain, but Megacorp's product is 20 points better because they invented two things. If you could combine all of them together it would be 30 points better and give you an advantage over them, but you can't use their patents. And you also can't profit from selling your product yourself, because 10 is less than 20 so everybody wants theirs instead of yours. Meanwhile they don't really need your patent for the same reason since they're going to get the customers either way, so they have you over a barrel in negotiations.
Then they get to underpay to buy your patent because they don't actually need it, but selling it is your only option to get anything out of it. Which in turn makes their product 30 points better than what's in the public domain and makes it even worse for the next little guy, who now can't compete even if they made a contribution worth 25 points.
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