superultra

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Thanks for explaining and lending your expertise.

Though, I am, again not a lawyer, but I am 99% sure you can't go use the Waffle House logo to sell anything, let alone waffles. I only say that because no one is using, say, the Coca-Cola brand to sell shoes, and if they did, we all know Coca-Cola would prevent that. That goes for any trademark in the US. So perhaps trademark law is different here?

Also, Waffle House are ubiquitous as a brand in the United States - certainly not as well known as Coca-Cola or Sony, but I have no doubt they'd be able to prove national awareness in any demographic.

In this particular case if you look at the C&D, it is for the trademark usage. It's likely that this person could have simply removed the trademark from the page and it would have been fine.

edit: I think the key in other industries would be proof of brand dilution - that is, if you start using the Nike logo to sell waffles, Nike would send a C&D if not a team of lawyers because you are diluting the trademark. So I guess you're technically right, although functionally, brand dilution is easily provable.

I think you're missing some nuance in your understanding of trademarks with all due respect.

The core use of trademark protection isn't a commercial use, necessarily. Rather, it's the act of infringing on the trademark holder's commercial use. So, if Waffle House is selling Waffle House t-shirts, and a business next door is giving away free Waffle House t-shirts that they printed - then yes, Waffle House would very likely win a lawsuit against someone giving away waffle house t-shirts.

Basically if someone is giving away or, especially, selling something that causes a confusion against the original trademark, then yes, the trademark "must" be protected.

By "must" I don't mean it's legally required. I just mean you're going to have a harder time in court if you need to pursue legal action against a company or person if there's a precedent you have not actively protected the trademark in other instances.

edit: and in this case, the site was causing confusion, so they sent a C&D. Also as the other commentor mentioned, the logo is trademarked.

I am not a trademark lawyer. I'm guessing you aren't either or you would have said so. But multiple lawyers on multiple projects with multiple brands have mentioned this to me, and we have sent C&Ds to protect trademarks. With at least two of those lawyers, sure, it might just be more billable hours. But two were pretty decent guys and wouldn't have done it if they didn't think it was necessary.

At least within my corner of the business world (and not just "the internet"), it seems this is common knowledge among lawyers.

My guess is that, sure, would a court throw out a trademark? Maybe not, but the law works on a fine line between actuals (precendent) and hypotheticals, and it's just cheaper to issue a C&D than it is to fight a prologned legal battle about predcedent.

Also, it's interesting you mention Frisbee. There's a term for that: "genericide," and it's the term used to describe that exact scenario. Frisbee is one brand that didn't actively protect against trademark erosion and now we call every flying disc a Frisbee. Retrospectively, Frisbee might have wished they'd sent more C&Ds. Nintendo is one brand that has actively protected brand erosion, which is why we don't call it a Sony Nintendo.

I think a better term for it is the “we’re cooked era.” I see this phrase everywhere, in relation to AI, in relation to national politics, in relation to big problems like climate change. It’s really demoralizing because it’s a passive acquiescence to systemic change as if we have no control over anything. Which will inevitably lead to entropy.

If there’s one book I could “force” everyone to read, it’d be the Dawn of Everything. The David’s (Graeber and Wingrow) describe how the fundamentally most interesting attribute of humans is how much we tinker.

I love this article because it shares those same values. It’s so crucial for us to reject abject passivity and even when things seem impossible, to tinker and play and never assume that everything is as it will be.

To add to that - if a company is not actively protecting the trademark, even in well intentioned cases, then someone can use the trademark and point to a precedent of the brand not defending its trademark, especially if it’s probable that the company was aware of the usage.

Waffle House (or any other brand) must and 100% always will send out a C&D for trademark misusage, otherwise they lose legal protection for that trademark.

We have ground breaking amazing shows like The Rehearsal (which could really only be made now), Resevoir Dogs, Shogun, Fleabag, The Bear, Severance, For All Mankind, Peaky Blinders…to name a few.There is so much good tv.

Some either you don’t know about any of these which is the fault of the algo I guess, or you’re stuck in a bubble of 15 years ago, in which the algo failed.

I'm really curious about this because it actually incurs some interesting possible customer service issues. Say someone signs up, then usage lapses for a while. Then they use it. Bam they're charged. Will they remember that they signed up? Some of these edge cases are defined in the article but remain unanswered. It sounds like the team at Kagi didn't even think about them, which is interesting. Still I'd like to know the answer.

Thank you!

With all the disclaimers of talk to your own psychiatrist noted, I’m curious what specific medication is helping you. I went through a similar process and some of the side effects were too much to balance.

I’m on a site built by a friend and you can only post on Mondays, and then you see every one else’s post only if you posted on Monday.

I wonder how many micro communities like this exist, mostly under the radar.

I'm a user of the original Digg (and many of its iterations, including plastic.com).

This whole approach seems tone deaf:

> A.I. will also play a larger part in making Digg more accessible to users, Mr. Rose said. For instance, he said, a community of science-fiction enthusiasts could have their discussions translated into Klingon, the language used by the “Star Trek” alien race of the same name. A.I. tools can also help reduce spam, misinformation and harassment, he said."

Like nearly everything these days, this sounds like they raised money based almost solely on the premise that "AI will fix everything." They don't seem to understand that humans doing things is what makes all of this interesting to humans. I remember a BBS door that translated english to klingon. It was cool then because someone built it, but the fun was always doing it ourselves.

And is there any precedent for AI moderation at scale? It's another example of a LLM wrapper with no moat.

Finally, the attention to moderators seems like a swing at Reddit. But are there people dumb enough to fall for that trick again (don't answer that lol)?

At some point we need to realize that these VC driven "ideas" are all just content honeypots for AI training and do our own thing.

I love this post a lot. Our entire world is perpetuated by platforms that are desperately begging us for engagement. It feels to me at least that I'm being pulled in a hundred directions, for all my time for all time.

My engagement with Balatro is not quite the same as localthunks. I go in phases where I play a lot and then put it down and walk away, and then weeks later I get back into it. But that also feels like it's in the spirit of what localthunk is talking about here. It's a comfort game. A pasttime rather than an addiction. Balatro is a stress reliever for me and I can jump in, play, and jump out and it's fine.

I wonder what our digital world would look like if more tools and platforms adopted an approach that was not clinging desperately for everything all the time all at once.

Twitter is replete with bots, videos rarely work, and it’s almost entirely tilted to the right side of the political spectrum. Twitter didn’t fall over the next day but there’s no disputing it’s a worse platform than it was.

It’s an issue of who watches the watchers. If their intent is transparency and auditing, why are they not reflecting that intent?

This is why I do suspect their intent. They are not walking the talk.

A very obvious answer is that, for example, film was toned to white tones, which meant that film was not as good at capturing people with black skin on film or in lighting. Another example is of course facial sensors seeing white people but not seeing black people (which informs one of the funniest episodes of the defunct show Better Off Ted).

You say these are superficial features and yet the reality is that skin color drastically impacts one’s experience of life in this world.

Therefore if one is designing products, why would you exclude the perspective of people who would ultimately use your product?

> That's exactly what they're doing and I don't think that's a secret.

Which is fine. But are they then suggesting that bias/etc was never a problem in the first place? Or, are they suggesting that DEI was not the solution, and if so, then why aren’t they suggesting a new solution?

There isn’t a satisfying answer here, to me anyway.

The primary reason I used 1password + 2FA at both my business and in my family is really simple: 1password creates a shared 2FA process. That is, I can create a 2FA login that someone else in my team or family can also access.

I’m on a 13 mini and it appears your css boundaries are wonky. They’re wider than the screen resolution but your content sizing is correct so it’s all over the place.

Also I’m a bit confused because the header says best movies of 2024, but the first carousel is a mix of movies from the last few years. Maybe some better heading hierarchy and explanation would help.

Edit: also some of your indexing is dyslexically misreading decimal numbers. For example you have Kraven as one of Rotten Tomatoes best of 2024 at a whopping 9.5. But the actual score is 5.9. I’m sure someone at Sony loves this mistake.

I managed an EB Games during the Dreamcast and ps2 launches. You can’t overstate the value proposition of the ps2 as a dvd player. It made the ps2’s extra $100 over the Dreamcast completely tenable.

The second biggest reason for the success of the ps2 over the Dreamcast was that EA Sports never came to Dreamcast. Sega made the 2k series to compensate and it was definitely a good try, with some 2k titles definitely better in gameplay to their EA Sports competitor. But none of the 2k series ever sold anywhere near EA Sports.

Maybe you skimmed too quickly. Brocolli is a woman - that’s made abundantly clear throughout the article - and she also is adamant about maintaining the gender of the character. It appears that race (and sexual orientation) is not a key component of Bond for the family, and I agree with them. Why would it?

I think a gay black British man would do very well. The original Bond, both in the books and the older movies, despite the misogyny apparent of the time, also broke a lot of stereotypes for sex and licentiousness. Pushing those boundaries has been key to Bond for a long time. Why not a gay black man then, to hold to the same spirit.

If you read the article you would’ve seen that Brocolli is fine with a non-white and/or gay person playing Bond; they have to be British and male though.

I think that’s the a good tact to take. Let’s not pretend that Bond as a character hasn’t changed over the decades.

A good approach is how Machine Games approached Indiana Jones. The older movies, especially Temple, have some really uncomfortable scenes with women and Asian people. So they opted instead to portray Indy as we remember him, which is a gruff everyman who respects cultures and people and hates facists.

Bond can be done the same way right

Can you explain what you’re talking about some more? Other than mentioning that Brocolli is fine with a gay non-white male (but has to be a male), where in article did you glean anything about DEI?

I honestly think the anti-DEI crowd is nearly as unbearable as the brief reign of SJW in 2018. DEI is becoming a perennial bogeyman for some people…

Loved The Print Shop but was an even bigger fan of The Newsroom, which I used in elementary school to publish an underground gossip rag with a circulation of dozens. Dozens!

As a marketer I recognize this and it’s the result of territorial marketing agendas at war over IAM, In-App Messaging, the holy grail of conversion funnels.

It’s a shame that Google is being run by marketers rather than engineers. And I say that as a marketer. When engineers were running the company this shit didn’t happen. Now we’re watching the inch by inch trench warfare of various teams at Google vying for quarterly KPIs and it sucks bad.

I anxiously await the next Google to usurp what Google has become, which is a kinda of proto IBM/GE.

I keep thinking about that Idris Elba Microsoft ad about AI about how much AI can help my business, and how both true and untrue that as is, and how much distance there is between the now and the possible promised of AI, and I imagine this is what keeps Altman up at night.

I give AI a “water cooler chat” level of veracity, which means it’s about as true as chatting with a coworker at a water cooler when that used to happen. Which is to say if I just need to file the information away as a “huh” it’s fine, but if I need to act on it or cite it, I need to do deeper research.

In the parent comment I was talking about mastering and you responding about mixing, so I assumed you meant mastering. Yes, there is always a single mix at least in my experience. That gets delivered to a mastering engineer who, imho, if they’re a good engineer, will master for vinyl and digital separately from the originally supplied mix. It is likely that some mastering engineers might create a digital master and then engineer for vinyl from that digital master but that’s not good engineering.

But yes I think we are on the same page and agree! A single mix. And from that mix are multiple master cuts specific to format.

> The vinyl master has more "attention" because the vinyl is more limited.

This isn't really true from my perspective. There are a lot of factors as to why vinyl mastering gets more attention. It's harder to do right, so there's that. Artists will often pay far more attention to the vinyl master, so it's a crucial A&R issue. But there's an issue on digital master, we can easily (more or less) change the material on DSPs. It's not fun but it's possible. On vinyl, mistakes made on the mastering side may not even reveal themselves until past the test pressing stage and can be very costly.

> its almost always based off the digital master that is than modified to not fuck up on vinyl medium

This might be true at some levels of skillsets, I guess. But in my circles for at least the last ten years, the vinyl master is sourced from the original mix, not a digital master. In fact, on larger projects more independent labels and artists are hiring vinyl-specific engineers who can oversee what is a very physical process from mastering to lacquer cutting in one sitting. Having sat in an a number of sessions, there's a lot of attention to the ways in which the master is effecting the physical nature of the cut. This is actually how it used to be when vinyl was the imminent format, for reasons I've already stated (cost). In fact some vinyl plants had apartments for record label people to stay on site and oversee the vinyl mastering process.

Thanks for commenting. I'm curious why you wouldn't master specifically to the format. There are so many nuances to vinyl with mistakes that can deeply impact sales when the job isn't done right.

For my own part, we had to recut the lacquers on a vinyl release five times to get it right, because the nature of the mix created a middling sound that bounced the needle around and caused intense surface sound. Once we solved that problem, the pressings sounded great.

Obviously with cassettes the profit margin isn't there to justify the additional expense of mastering, and to my ears cassette mastering rarely sounds different than the digital master (maybe some slightly different leveling). I believe NAC actually has a mastering guide to master to cassettes kicking around. But...not sure anyone follows it.

Just to be honest, I don't doubt you're a great engineer. But if you weren't mastering specific to format...I wouldn't hire you. Increasingly we've gone to vinyl-exclusive engineers on bigger projects, because it's so crucial to get the sound right at the start and poor vinyl mastering can cause problems months down the manufacturing line that are costly.