You’re giving the hardware way too much credit here. Drop a random into a state-of-the-art drug discovery or materials pipeline and they’re not going to “lock up progress,” they’re going to drown in garbage candidates. The stuff that still matters – and that the law still cares about for inventorship – is choosing the problem, defining the constraints, designing or tuning the models, sanity-checking outputs, and turning one candidate into something that works in the real world. That’s domain expertise and judgment. The new USPTO guidance doesn’t say “push the big red GENERATE button and collect your patent”; it says “we still use the same old ‘did a human actually conceive this invention?’ test, even if AI was involved.”

That dystopia assumes two things that aren’t actually true even after this policy change: (1) that you can get a patent on anything your model spits out, and (2) that nobody has to worry about human inventorship or the usual patentability hurdles. Even under the new guidance, a human still has to be able to stand up in court and say “I had a definite and permanent idea of this claimed invention,” not “I filed whatever the GPU burped out.” If no human ever reaches that benchmark, the patent is defective on old-school inventorship grounds, regardless of how many racks of H100s were involved. On top of that, as AI tools become standard, a lot of AI-assisted output becomes easier to attack as “obvious” to a skilled person using ordinary tools. So raw compute gives you an advantage, sure, but it doesn’t magically let you patent “all of human progress.”

On that much, I’m with you: the constitutional rationale is “to promote the progress of science and useful arts,” not “to funnel perpetual rents to whoever owns the biggest datacenter.” But this particular USPTO tweak isn’t a radical new scheme; it’s the bureaucracy ducking the hard philosophical questions and saying: “AI is lab equipment.” Same inventorship standard, same novelty / obviousness / enablement tests. That absolutely does tend to favor big, opaque, capital-intensive R&D shops – just like every expensive tool does – but it’s an extension of the system’s existing bias toward incumbents, not a brand-new AI loophole.

If your broader point is that IP law has drifted a long way from its original “limited-time bargain” into something closer to “long-term tollbooths for incumbents,” I think a lot of us would nod along. But that’s a critique of the entire modern IP regime – term length, scope, litigation costs, DMCA-style enforcement – not specifically of this AI-guidance change. This move doesn’t turn AI into a magical rent-extraction engine; it just tells applicants, “We’re going to pretend the 19th-century conception doctrine still works in an AI lab.” That’s a fair thing to criticize, but it’s a different argument than “no creativity required, game over.”

But if they talk, should you believe them. People say all sorts of things. You can't really trust strangers whose motives you can only guess at. Perhaps they're about to be fired, so they want to damage the company.

For that matter, if someone said a game was NOT made with AI, I wouldn't believe them. They only know part of what was being done, so even if they're intending to be honest they can't be believed.

I think he was probably correct when he asserted "AI will be a part of the way all games are made".

It's not slop everywhere else, just in many places. AIs that have been custom trained for a particular situation can often do quite well. This work particularly well in classification, but also works in several other areas.

The main criteria at the moment is "so you have an easy way to check correctness?". If you do, then AI can, when properly trained and configured, do a good job.

Are you saying you didn't see this coming? It is a democratic system, ain't it? So this means politicians just do what is expedient, that's why they are elected. Leaders have stopped being elected long long time ago. Not that I am for any government intervention into any of this at all, I am against it. I believe we must do what we do as a species without any collective action enforced by government, I am against all government intervention. I am totally against anyone trying to architect our survival as a species, I am all for real natural selection.

Asked the thing to tell me:

is this it?

I don't know how some people get these types of weird answers, I cannot get the damn thing to tell me the wrong time. The only really weird thing is that it is 'searching the web' while 'thinking'.

>"In the UK we have an annual inspection, but not until the car is 3 years old (from the point of first sale). They have said they will have a free odometer reading at the same place that does the annual check for the first two times."

Here it is every single year. Varies by State, of course. Some States it is 2 years, some have no inspections at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Oh, it must have changed a lot. I don't remember there being so many that have no inspections. Only 14 of 50 have regular inspections now. But my point was, they already have the info here, so it is ridiculous to play these games about mileage here.

>"The more annoying part is that you have to pay up front, i.e. estimate your annual mileage and then at the next odometer check you get a refund or pay more depending on if you are under or over. I can see why they did it, car tax is paid up front for the year too, and it allows people to spread it over monthly payments."

That is just stupid and unnecessarily complicated (making it in advance instead of arrears). Besides, it could still be made in payments if in arrears. It is not like the government will be starved of much precious revenue by it being one-time delayed this relatively small tax. Yeesh!

>"Switching from Microsoft to Google is like switching from Hitler to Mussolini. Move to Libre Office or the like."

Yeah, really.

But 20 million cells? That seems ridiculous. Why aren't they using a database for something that huge?

Anyway, I had to check... LibreOffice Calc supports more than 1 billion cells from 16,384 columns by 1,048,576 rows. Hope the machine has a lot of RAM if trying to push that :)

"Dumb company runs its finances on 20-million-cell spreadsheets" is my takeaway from that.

Having sat I don't know how many times in a room waiting to have my government credentials renewed while the government IT on this side of the Pacific was living up to its expectations, I am somewhat relieved to again be reminded that the United States did not invent stupid. But I am somewhat dismayed that we appear to have competition in perfecting it.

> Under the proposed changes, I'll pay per mile. 50 miles per gallon means I'm driving about 42.5 miles a day. So 42.5 miles * $.027 = $1.1475 tax a day. $1.1475 * 365 = $418.8375 a year. So for bothering to drive a hybrid (how dare I!!!) I'll go from $189.873 up to $418.837. $419 / 190 = 221% increase in gas tax.

Meanwhile you're not paying for roughly $2400/yr in gasoline. If you were driving a gasoline vehicle at a typical 30mpg, your 42.5 miles per day would burn about 1.42 gallons which, at a statewide average cost of $4.569/gal, is $6.47 per day, or $2362.55 per year.

Your annual fuel cost savings decreases from $2172.68 to $1943.71.

So did your have a point or are you just bitter your free ride might be slowing down a tiny bit?

> The asshole in the 20mpg tank won't notice a difference

The asshole getting 20mpg is already paying almost ten times what you would be under the proposed tax at $0.228/mi at current state average gas prices, and I disagree that they won't notice that jump ~12%.

> YAY I'm so happy to be green

I should hope so with an extra 2 grand in your pocket every year over the alternative. Also FYI those higher registration fees are there to make up for the gasoline prices you're already not paying, which is nearly double the tax you'd be paying at the pump otherwise.

"They dropped the cover charge and made admittance to the bar free! How DARE they charge more for drinks!"
=Smidge=
/AND you probably claimed a tax credit buying that vehicle...

>"It can very well be true, though, that one government entity is not allowed to share personal data with another government entity."

It could be. But it also seems ridiculous and incompetent in this case. Both entities already know me, my address. And both know my vehicle, VIN, etc. One just knows an annual odometer reading that the other does not. Not like this is sensitive data or could be abused at that resolution.

I shouldn't assume the worst, but it APPEARS like they want to force people to try and be tracked.

That works when the company is healthy. That is, isn't generating nearly all of its revenue from one customer that responds to schmooze more than cost or performance.

Break up Boeing, break up Lockheed, Northrop Grumman and the rest. The fragments will perhaps find customers other than government to compete for and perhaps grow better the way they did the first time around.

> why vehicle weight doesn't get mentioned in their idea

It's because the difference between 3000 and 4000 lbs is practically negligible. Yeah it's a 4th power relationship, but 3000 to 4000 lbs is about 3x the wear rate and 3 multiplied by practically nothing is still practically nothing.

Not to say I'm against including weight as part of the tax calculation, because it would incentivize people using smaller vehicles which helps in a lot of other ways.
=Smidge=

>"Annoying but actually reasonable"

It is absolutely reasonable in concept. But it might not be in practice. I have zero problem with paying for my actual EV mileage in some tax. My State decided it was going to collect it annually during registration renewal. Also reasonable. But they either charge an "average" mileage of ALL EV drivers (however they determine that), or force me to put an always-on tracking device in my car. And neither is reasonable. And my vehicle manual actually says that such devices should not be used/left in the OBD port.

My State already requires annual inspections. AND THE ODOMETER READING IS COLLECTED at each inspection and entered into a State Police system by the inspector for every vehicle. So they ALREADY KNOW my mileage. Their "average" is an order of magnitude more than I drive.

I Emailed and asked why I am going to be unfairly taxed for way, way, way more mileage than I drive when the data is right there, already being collected by the State. And I refuse to be tracked with a spyware device that sends location and behavior data. The response was "well, we don't have access to that data, it is on a different State system". OMG.

So a concept can be fair and reasonable in many ways, and then be totally unreasonable depending on how it is implemented.