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Cake day: March 5th, 2025

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  • Yeah this is bad, seeing what some people patent, apparently just hoping it will stick and make them some money down the line.

    I was going to put some particularly egregious examples here, but there’s too much choice - just search “worst dumb us patents” or some such.

    OK, this article focuses on dumb and pointless, which is what I was going for:

    2. A stick. Seriously, in 1999, someone received a patent for a toy made of “any number of materials including rubber, plastic, or wood including wood composites” for “an animal, for example a dog, to either fetch, carry or chew” and including “at least one protrusion extending therefrom that resembles a branch in appearance.” While the description is bad enough, you have to look at the image submitted to fully appreciate how ridiculous this one is. USPTO actually granted a patent on a fake stick.

    1. My all-time favorite dumb patent is Apple’s design patent for… a rectangle with rounded corners. Granted in 2012, Apple received a patent for the shape of its product, which is pretty standard. It’s a rectangle. It has rounded corners. The entirety of the single claim reads, “The ornamental design for a portable display device, as shown and described,” with several pictures of what looks to be the shape of an iPad.





  • Let’s be very clear: Pichai is one of the Very Big Assholes whose name should be uttered in the same breath with Thiel, Altman, Zuckerberg etc.

    He drew comparisons to the late 1990s Internet boom, which saw early Internet company valuations surge before collapsing in 2000, leading to bankruptcies and job losses.

    “We can look back at the Internet right now. There was clearly a lot of excess investment, but none of us would question whether the Internet was profound,” Pichai said. “I expect AI to be the same. So I think it’s both rational and there are elements of irrationality through a moment like this.”

    Equating the dot-com bubble with the internet. Only a $trillion company CEO could spout such bs. And the misinterpretation translates very well to AI.

    Frankly, what I’m getting from this article is “Hey, we’re not the #1 in the current hype, so would everybody else please slow down a little so we’re all at least on equal footing again?”

    And the idea that it could all burst, leaving not only Google/Alphabet utterly destroyed - don’t threaten me with a good time, Sundai!








  • Apparently this is not about software licensing so much as about the services Rebble provides:

    Core would spearhead the development of brand new watches, and we’d be there to provide our Rebble Web Services to go with them.

    It now seems Core wants to just keep on using these services as their own. I read a few paragraphs but I gave up when they go back 9 years to explain it all.

    But this isn’t the first time a company tries to steal what isn’t theirs, under the auspices of FOSS, and my benefit of the doubt definitely stands with Rebble here.