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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 9th, 2023

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  • Could someone point me to a more in-depth legal analysis of this bill? The text of it is here. It looks to me like it is mostly about replacing vague parts of the U.S. code with regards to patents with more explicit instructions, and one of these instructions even seems to give courts explicit permission to judge whether an invention is eligible for a patent rather than taking this power away:

    IN GENERAL.—In an action brought for infringement under this title, the court, at any time, may determine whether an invention or discovery that is a subject of the action is eligible for a patent under this section, including on motion of a party when there are no genuine issues of material fact.

    Furthermore, one really nice thing that this bill does is that it makes it clear that if the invention or discovery solely involves a process or material occurring naturally with no modification–a human gene being explicitly called out–then it is explicitly ineligible for a patent.

    To be clear, though, I am not a legal expert, which is why it would be great if someone would provide an in-depth analysis of exactly where the problem is rather than just saying that the bill is bad.








  • Censorship sucks and I can’t believe we let an entire country get away with it and still did business with them the whole time.

    It is not clear to me that the country would be less censored now and the people there better off if we had refused to do business with them.

    (Just to be clear, I am not saying that we handled China as well as we could have over the last few decades, but hindsight is 20-20.)







  • Something that definitely separates me from some of my less experienced coworkers is that, when I sit down and start to implement a plan I came up with in my head, if it turns out that things start exploding in complexity then I reevaluate my plan and see if I can find a simpler approach. By contrast, my less experienced coworkers buckle down and do whatever it takes to follow through on their plan, as if it has now become a test of their programming skills. This makes life not only more difficult for them but also for everyone who has to read their code later because their code is so hard to follow.

    I try to push back against this when I can, but I do not have the time and energy to be constantly fighting against this tendency so I have to pick my battles. Part of the problem is that often when the code comes to me in a merge request it is essentially too late because it would have to be essentially completely rewritten with a different design in order to make it simpler. Worse, the “less experienced” coworker is often someone who is both about a decade older than me and has also been on the project longer than me, so even though I technically at this point have seniority over them in the hierarchy I find it really awkward to actually exercise this power. In practice what has happened is that they have been confined to working on a corner of the project where they can still do a lot of good without others having to understand the code that they produce. It helps that, as critical as I am being of this coworker, they are a huge believer in testing, so I am actually very confident that the code they are producing has the correct behavior, even when I cannot follow the details of how it works that well.