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Comment by mherdeg | Hacker News Reader

Wow is that a PDF of a Microsoft Word document with inline comments written by the judge? I don't think I've ever seen a document in that style in PACER before (linked in the blog post at https://cdn.sparkfun.com/assets/home_page_posts/3/9/7/0/Alta...) .

I think there's a typo in the blog post ("parent" should be "patent" below):

> Do you ever wonder what parent trolls tell their children they do for a job?

I read a story somewhere that claimed that "Captain Planet" had to be edited to feature cartoonishly evil villains, rather than the mundane day-to-day polluters, because they were worried that kids would ask uncomfortable career questions of their parents in sectors like disposable consumer goods, plastics, petrochemical, cigarettes, etc.

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As a child I learned that technological progress takes the form of inventions and comes from intellectual heroes called inventors. Manufacture, distribution, marketing, business, etc. were all just details that would inevitably get worked out by one or another of the sharks in that grubby game. And the sharks would constantly be trying to screw the inventor out of his due. As a child I would have looked at someone who enforces patents for a living as a kind of hero.

Once I reached the tech industry it was a total 180, ideas are worthless, the heroes are the engineers who can scale them and the founders who can make businesses out of them. But patent law didn’t get the memo, it’s still based on my elementary-school worldview.

Inventors regularly sign over their inventions to the businesses that they work for, such that the businessmen are able to make business models out of them that the engineers will scale. To be honest, I don't think you know much of how the patent system works to substantiate your comment.

Not to mention, inventions occur in manufacturing, distribution, marketing, and business too. Just because someone doesn’t have an understanding of how things work is not a justification to be dismissive.

I thought it was clear from my comment that I'm criticizing the viewpoint I received in 4th grade, i.e. I no longer believe in it.

Crucially, the inventors in those hero stories were always lone wolf eccentric garage/basement guys. Corporate R&D labs did not appear.

Parent troll wisdom: No matter what he says, eat the littlest billy goat first. Don't give up the choke point at the bridge. Don't let the enemy onto the hillside behind you.

I always wondered what the moral of that story was supposed to be.

I never quite understood why they didn't just send the big goat first.

Because you don't get to become the big Billy goat by taking all the upfront risk. I've seen many a buck follow this strategy. When a group of 2 or 3 bucks enter a clearing, you'll almost always see the biggest oldest one go last.

Maybe not a strategy, just survivorship bias?

Maybe I don't understand, but I don't think this suggestion is quite coherent.

If the bucks following this stategy are the ones that survived, how is this survivorhsip bias rather than a winning strategy?

It could be both?

The moral is, you can escape from bullies by offering up your classmates as more attractive targets.

Or maybe it's that it doesn't pay to be the bully, because eventually you try to bully someone bigger than you.

Fairy tales and folktales don't necessarily have a moral, which is a distinction from a fable or parable.

Sometimes it was just the ancient version of Squid Game, and people just wanted to hear or tell something entertaining.

I'm only two episode into squid game, but it's an add choice for an example of "just entertainment" since it is clearly a commentary on late stage capitalism.

It's... interesting, in the end. They make some bold choices (which I rather liked, since you don't see choices of that type in American popular media as much), but even as commentary, I'm not sure there's a moral or lesson to come out of it rather than to just provoke thought and to entertain.

Put another way, it says a lot of things, and outlines a lot of problems, but I'm not sure it puts any solutions forth. That's probably a good thing IMO, as any solution presented in a program like that invariably seems trite to me, as it necessarily oversimplifies the problem so the solution proposed can work.

It might seem like it's going that way at first. I wouldn't say it's a commentary on late-stage capitalism as much as that's just part of the setting.

It's possible to comment on something without overexplaining it using voiceovers and exposition.

It's a recurring theme in Korean media eg Parasite and Snowpiercer.

You've picked two films by a single Korean director who is outspoken about his views, which his hardly a good way to show it's a recurring theme across the media in general.

I could pick Atlanta and The Wire and say American media is commonly critical of police. Or turn around and pick CSI and Law & Order and say that American media is commonly supportive of police. It hardly says something about the overall landscape. And thats even picking shows with different directors!

I didn't see it that way at all but I've seen several people compare it to that and I still fail to see the comparison. The video has no relevance to capitalism at all. It's just a more violent version of very common asian tv variety shows where a bunch of contestants try to climb over obstacles or do random activities to reach the goal. Instead of getting shot though you fall into a pool of goo or water or something though instead and everyone gets a laugh watching the antics of the participants. Combine that additional violence with some heartfelt back story for the characters and you have squid game. It's really quite a simple story.

Keep in mind this is a Korean drama, not a western drama. "Late stage capitalism" is an English language/western world concept, not a universal one. (Even the term "late stage capitalism" implies that capitalism is somehow going to end, but commentators never clearly explain what system they think is better or what should replace it. Capitalism IMO is with us for the rest of humanity.)

You're directly contradicted by the writers of Squid Game. In fact the text itself directly spells out that it's influenced by South Korea's looming debt crisis and housing inequality. I'm surprised you missed that, frankly.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-16/squid-game-on-netflix...

Your article does not quote or cite the writers or creators of the show though?

From TFA: But for many South Koreans, the homegrown Netflix series is not just riveting entertainment. Behind the violence and horror, it has captured long-held anxieties and brought them to life on screen. It has also sparked a debate in South Korea about the exploding personal debt and widening inequality consuming this nation.

"many South Koreans" might include the creators but I would prefer if they could find a tweet or a Korean interview with the creators to actually be sure.

Good news, I provided that in a reply above. Two of them, in fact.

In the 30 seconds I spent looking for it, I couldn't find the direct interview that I read, but this one was illustrative enough.

But here: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/oct/26/squid-g...

“It’s not profound! It’s very simple! I do believe that the overall global economic order is unequal and that around 90% of the people believe that it’s unfair. During the pandemic, poorer countries can’t get their people vaccinated. They’re contracting viruses on the streets and even dying. So I did try to convey a message about modern capitalism. As I said, it’s not profound.”

And here's another one: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/06/business/economy/squid-ga...

“The stories and the problems of the characters are extremely personalized but also reflect the problems and realities of Korean society,” Hwang Dong-hyuk, the show’s creator, said in an email. He wrote the script as a film in 2008, when many of these trends had become evident, but overhauled it to reflect new worries, including the impact of the coronavirus. (Minyoung Kim, the head of content for the Asia-Pacific region at Netflix, said the company was in talks with Mr. Hwang about producing a second season.)

> It's just a more violent version of very common asian tv variety shows

No, it's a version of such shows that you cannot escape from because of financial pressures on your life, despite likely ending in your death. That is the key - even when given a chance to get out, the overwhelming majority of participants embraces the game, because the alternative (being economically destitute, while lying to friends and family to keep up appearances) is seen as worse than death. It's literally "get rich or die trying".

The final revelations, about the game's origins and the fate of previous winners, add further elements of critique of "the system"; and the story arc of the "good son" is a critique of a (Korean) academic process that, while ostensibly promoting talent, ends up producing sharks.

I imagine it's a couple things, these old stories pack in a lot of useful information.

Bridges are dangerous if you're a little kid, you may want to get your older siblings to back you up.

Disdaining small victories leaves you unprepared for the big ones.

There's always someone bigger.

Comment A2 is pure gold

"Commented [A2]: Whoever wrote this sentence might be the same person who writes patents. It would be helpful in the future to write and speak in plain English. You are dealing with an ordinary court, not a patent examiner.

I absolutely _love_ chances to read or listen in on any instance where a judge provides feedback in the US legal system. For reasons I do not understand, there seems to be a strong culture among judges of constantly dishing out statements which somehow always feel like "sick burns". The few encounters with IRL judges I've had also had this quality, where the judge would be totally willing to frame people really harshly in their questions, or just outright denounce someone. If anyone has any insight into this (I bet there are some good books about "legal culture and judge culture" that'd be real interesting) please do chime in!

You might enjoy this series of interviews with Supreme Court justices on writing style in _The Scribes Journal of Legal Writing_ vol 13:

https://legaltimes.typepad.com/files/garner-transcripts-1.pd...

The interviews go beyond writing style into broader rhetoric, as well as dislikes and pet-peeves.

I once spent about four months going through several hundred patents of a competitor, finding a way to do a product that did not infringe. We more or less succeeded, but man it was painful. Had expert legal help (and permission of our corporate lawyers) -- don't go off on your own and read these things.

A few thoughts on patents:

- Don't bother reading anything other than the claims. Ignore everything else (yes, even the diagrams) unless referenced by the claims.

- Yes, they do try to -- and succeed in -- patenting stuff you can pull out of a textbook. One patent was a near cut-and-paste of some stuff on Kalman filters (that one made me pretty mad).

- Any time a patent lawyer makes a reference to a patent's "teachings", punch them in the nose. These things don't teach anyone anything, that's an impolite fiction for a game that's really all about obfuscation. If there was a patent that described how to nail two boards together, you wouldn't walk away from reading that patent with any useful knowledge.

- The very fact that every company in the US will tell you "Please, for the love of Pete, don't go read patents on your own, without permission" again belies that these things are land-grabs that are never designed to advance the state of the art through teaching.

I am not a lawyer. I do not play one on TV.

>The very fact that every company in the US will tell you "Please, for the love of Pete, don't go read patents on your own, without permission"

One reason for the guidance to not read patents is that, at trial, knowingly infringing a patent is much more expensive than unknowingly infringing.

Yeah, IIRC it's triple damages if you knowingly infringe.

That's what the lawyers always tell you. "Out of an abundance of caution" etc. etc. yada yada yada. Always listen to your lawyers :)

Now, for the reality: I never saw this happen. How would they know you looked at their patent? From your server logs? From the PTO's? Do you think they file discovery on your personal computer? (Just don't send an email about their patent or write anything down about it -- THAT they can track.) Very, very few infringement suits go to trial anyway.

I think the real reason the lawyers tell you this is so they won't have to answer your questions. And because you might misinterpret the claims (not at all a hard thing to do).

If your management and lawyers want to, they can get an official opinion from a lawyer that you're not infringing. That's something you can use.

So, some of the work I did for my previous employer was deemed patentable. I wrote up technical but still comprehensible documents describing each distinct invention for the legal/IPR folks. Months later, I was notified that patent applications have been filed.

The language in them is so horribly convoluted that I, the supposed inventor can't make any sense of them. Hell, it took me a while to even figure out which invention maps to which application.

>worried that kids would ask uncomfortable career questions of their parents

such a missed opportunity. daddy, why are you trying to kill the planet?

cartoonishly evil villains

Or the kids themselves. Though it would have been pretty hilarious if Captain Planet turned to the "camera" and told the kids honestly: "The toys you play with, including this show's action-figures, were made using the ancient decomposed remains of countless dead plants and animals, in a process every bit as bad as what you see in this show. And recycling isn't going to solve this problem."

Nah, I think they genuinely mean "trolls" who happen to be parents and have to explain to their kids what they do for a living.

This document is actually way more interesting with the comments, kind of an inside look into the legal process

This document is like HN in general. TLDR; the main doc and just read the comments. ;-)

If you can find a link to that Captain Planet story I’d like to read it. It sounds totally plausible.

I think this is it

https://grist.org/culture/captain-planet-planeteers-real-sto...

>That family edutainment goal affected a lot of the show’s writing. Pyle didn’t want kids to see their family members as evil, ecologically speaking. “That’s one of the reasons we made the bad guys and their plans so ridiculous,” she explained, “We tried to point the finger at behaviors rather than industries. That way, no child would go home and say, ‘Oh, daddy, you’re in a blah blah business.’ It would be horrible for some child to see their family member as a Captain Planet villain.”

I do not see why it would be terrible for a kid to see the ramifications of their future due to their current lifestyle of a 2k+ sq ft detached single family house with an SUV and pickup truck and flights to Disney world as a villain.

bad idea to put adult burdens of conscience and politic on children -- let them be children for a while

You're not putting that on the child, you're putting it on the parent. The children will put pressure on them without being hurt in the process. I've seen similar things with smoking - children are taught smoking is very dangerous and they start asking their parents why they smoke. "Are you going to get lung cancer too, dad? Please quit!" I know of several cases where the parents quit smoking in part because of their children. The children felt really proud of themselves, which is great.

I mean, the child is still the agent of change in that scenario— and it's perfectly possible for it to go the other way too, where no change occurs and the parent and child end up resenting each other over it.

I don't know if I'm necessarily making a value judgment either way here, but I don't think "get to them through their young kids" should be considered a general-purpose strategy for effecting societal change... and fear of this kind of thing is exactly what breeds mistrust in public education, parents pulling their kids out of sex ed, etc etc.

It's true, but the opposite strategy - sugarcoat the truth to avoid raising uncomfortable questions about the status quo - also breeds mistrust in education and institutions. All we can really try to do is present our best view of the truth, with all the uncertainties around that. Does smoking cause lung cancer? That certainly appears to be where the weight of evidence sits, and it would be a lie of omission to avoid saying so. Should you quit smoking? That's up to you.

That's true. The alternative is a bland world of platitudes where no one ever says anything and all the conflicts are fully made up (as in the case of over-the-top villains for a cartoon purportedly about being good stewards of the environment).

> "Are you going to get lung cancer too, dad? Please quit!"

This would definitely have a negative impact on a child growing up- feeling like I had to worry about my parents' health when I was ~12 definitely did.

Good goooood... and then we have left them most vulnerable and depressed and upset the foundation of the family, we will cut to commercials rife with aspirational advertising!

Yes, my student! Feel the power of the dark side!

Perhaps the child pressures the parent to change careers. Perhaps the parent pressures the child to “stop watching that stupid show” and Captain Planet’s audience shrinks. I know which one I’d bet on.

Pretty much exactly this.

My kids bring things up sometimes. We have a discussion about them, about our role in society, etc. But a good portion of the time the discussion becomes a lesson in critical thinking and not taking over-simplified idealistic pleas from randos on the Internet at face value.

It's terrible if your goal is to sell a TV show to kids, whose viewing is controlled by their parents.

> I read a story somewhere that claimed that "Captain Planet" had to be edited to feature cartoonishly evil villains, rather than the mundane day-to-day polluters, because they were worried that kids would ask uncomfortable career questions of their parents in sectors like disposable consumer goods, plastics, petrochemical, cigarettes, etc.

maybe here: https://grist.org/culture/captain-planet-planeteers-real-sto...

I think parent troll is a play on words. Patent trolls with children are parent trolls.

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