I switched from W10+wsl on my personal desktop to Linux with my most recent upgrade. There were some issues to debug, but it's just been nice to have the OS play nicely in the background and not compete for my attention with ads, service upsells, and account nonsense.
I've considered going back for certain programs, but thinking about windows now gives me the same sort of mental hesitation that I get from gas stations with those horrible video ads. It's not a dealbreaker per se, but I would go far out of my way to avoid it.
Sure there are compromises I have to make, but being Free, unmonitored, not treated like a resource to be extracted, and feeling like my computer is mine is worth more than the any of the issues I encounter.
I don't see it as horrible at all. Windows is owned by Microsoft, and as a profit-seeking corporation, it makes lots of sense for them to force users to watch ads while using their product. Why shouldn't they do this, especially when so many people are perfectly happy to keep buying and using Windows OS?
If you don't like having ads forced on you, then use an OS vendor that agrees with you. Thankfully, there's lots of OSes (i.e., Linux distros) that don't have any ads in them, which you can download and use for free, so this isn't really a problem.
I don't understand your point, this is exactly what I am doing. I am not using Windows or MacOS.
> especially when so many people are perfectly happy to keep buying and using Windows OS?
Honestly, this is because a lot of people that would care are unaware that this is happening. It's impossible to stay on top on everything in your life but that doesn't make it ok to treat those people poorly.
The main issue is that for many, there isn't a choice since you can't go to most stores and buy a linux powered machine. You have to have special knowledge in order to even install it.
I would advice you to at least use some kind of web component wrapper. I have used https://lit.dev/ a lot, even to build a large app and it works really well. You can get started very quickly and the experience stay true to the underlying platform.
I think lit is really a library that deserves more attention since it's so good.
Unless you simply want server rendered html, you can achieve that easily with htmx to get a bit better experience. Then you may use whatever language you want and just return html.
+1 for this answer. Also consider stencil.js - it is just as powerful as React while still being a web component wrapper and it doesn't require converting props from strings to other types.
Interesting article with an interesting writing style, I may pick up the book even if I suck at reading books!
I didn't start as a skeptic and really think functional programming looks beautiful and is very useful in preventing side effects. However, in most practical situations I've found over the years functional programming to be harder to understand and debug when stuff goes wrong.
In javascript in particular, functional programming is very nice but at the same time usually way more ineffecient so for many tasks I tend to go back to normal for loops just because it's that much faster.
I had a collegue that wrote a lot of functional code and his code was extremely hard to follow and understand. Even if it was beautiful figuring out where the system went was the hard part and I had to go to the function decleration, understand it, move on to the next until I found whatever the issue was. When I found the issue, I couldn't easily fix it because the next function called was expecting the data structure to behave in a specific way so for one issue once I had to change basically every function called before and after which was way more tedious then if it would have been more sequential.
I don't know. There is something to say about functional programming but lately I have kind of tilted back into the more standard approach. Functional programming is a lot more beautiful in practically every implementation I've seen but the standard approach is, in my experience, usually more useful in practical terms.
> I had a collegue that wrote a lot of functional code and his code was extremely hard to follow and understand.
That's not a problem with functional code, it's about badly designed abstractions. You get the same issues in garden-variety OOP codebases, only to a far greater extent.
Although in the text it's just described as "a Chinese box" with a 5000MaH battery and the ability to record to its 32Gb of space in chunks of 30 minutes, as MP3 taking about 28mb each.
That section goes on to describe trying different microphone positions, as it makes a great difference to quality. OP originally tried it in a bag but the results were medicore, so moved to a different configuration which, although less comfortable, produced superior audio results.
the particular choice was for the battery and the other for the size, both are generic and come with the same software and bios, several vendors, if I could buy something better I would look for one that can have a lavalier microphone
I bought two, both from Aliexpress, no brand both, the one on the picture has a 5000 mAh battery, bulky but last a lot, and the other one is tiny but with short battery life, a lot of sellers on Ali, I pay around 30$ for each, both have the same software and bios, only difference is the size and battery.
Well yes, but this is a much cheaper option. Instead of having many smart gadgets you only need one. The mobile phone or some other microphone but that is the most obvious option.
Instead of paying hundreds of dollars for all these gadgets that have to be charged and kept safe you can buy cheap variants and still have basically the same benefits.
But your time is exchangable for money. (Something almost never reflected in hobby behavior: that's why the crafts store has 130 kinds of acrylic yarn and 1 kind of wool yarn.)
A $150 scale is expensive but buys a very small amount of software development.
I like what Deno is doing, it also has a bunch of great features. The functionality of it is great and the execution is sharp.
However, my main gripe with Deno is that it's tied to one company and it won't solve issues that it doesn't have. As an example of this, a version of nodes cluster module is not supported so there is no way of running one deno process per cpu which is very bad if you're hosting it yourself and want to utilize the full potential of your hardware.
It also means that if your app is bound to some CPU heavy action, like generating a large excel-file or similar, your app will go down since no requests will be processed due to the single thread nature. Of course, such actions can be solved with a web worker but what if you make a coding mistake which renders an unhandled exception? In this case the app would probably go down and if the end user for example does the same action over and over again (which end users tend to do in frustration), the app will go down again and again.
Deno as a company has probably little interest in solving this as the solution is to run it on their paid service. You could of course have several servers hosting the app, but that gets expensive real quick especially if you are a small shop. Another example is to run the entire app process as web workers but then you need to spin up many processes that all have their own ports which you need to add a load balancer in front of it. This is kind of advanced and adds unnecessary complexity to the app IMO.
Also, if Deno the company company fails, what then will happen to Deno the project?
You could solve the resource starvation issue by running multiple instances of your app and binding to a port using the SO_REUSEPORT option. This will allow multiple instances of your app to use the same port.
This option is also quite good for deployments as you can have instances stop reading from the port while client traffic is still being served from other instances on the port. This works well for HTTP requests, but less so for something like gRPC.
In Go, you can use syscall.SetsockoptInt. Most languages have a way of setting this option. You have to create the socket yourself and pass it into your HTTP server in most cases, but it depends on the library.
regarding multiprocess, I think solutions such as kubernetes and similar are the way to go (rolling restarts / updates, autoscaling, advanced load balancing etc) rather than having it managed within the runtime libs
> what if you make a coding mistake which renders an unhandled exception?
AFAIK unlike node, Deno's API is largely promise-based and therefore all unhandled exceptions should become unhandled rejections withou crashing the process - so this should be less of an issue than it is with node (Of course, using older node libraries makes crashes more likely)
There is an ocean of distance between wanting to use all the cores on a CPU and spinning up (or paying for) the monster abstraction that is kubernetes.
> AFAIK unlike node, Deno's API is largely promise-based and therefore all unhandled exceptions should become unhandled rejections withou crashing the process - so this should be less of an issue than it is with node
Perhaps you're right, I have not tried this out in Deno-land so I cannot say wether this actually applies to Deno the same way.
I just know that I got burned by this exact issue in node and I think this can be a security issue that people usually don't really think about. If you know that some api is a node api, if you manage to find a bug that is crashing the process one could probably script it to trigger it to crash over and over again. Even if it restarts quickly, usually it takes a second or and in that time one could bring the entire api down.
I am not aware of any instance that this have been used against some api in practice but most other languages handle this much better than node does and the javascript way of crashing on error is one of the things that made me question using javascript for backend services at all.
Regarding the kubernetes... no thanks. I would not go into that beehive unless forced. I didn't like the complexity increase of adding a load balancer and that is like a drop in the ocean of the complexity that is kubernetes.
k8s is not really that complex by default, despite all the complexity hype around it (if you look carefully you'll notice a significant number of the people saying this have a serverless SaaS to sell). You can run something simple such as microk8s on VMs and get better results more quickly than any manually managed process manager and/or load balancer.
You can, of course, make it more complex by piling a ton of stuff on top of it, and most cloud provider offerings do that. But its not required.
There was some discussion of using rayon for CPU heavy ops... I'm not sure what makes excel generation CPU-intensive and blocking? (I wonder if it can stream.)
Seems nice but I would be afraid of basing my business on another product. If successful, there is nothing to say that Slack wouldn't simply copy the functionality and launching their own feature.
Happens all the time with these popular services within other popular services.
That's not as much of a risk as people make it out to be. Being successful is a good thing, even if you are dependent on another platform. As long as you are adding something of value, you are more likely to get bought out by Slack than get ripped off by them.
Even if they do the negotiations will be one sided coz they can always cut you off and replace you with an internally made product that's 80% as good with no integration costs.
Software patents, "better paperclips", and a lot of other "lawyers get rich, bureaucracies get bigger, little people get screwed patents? - YES.
(Some sort of IP protection or reward system is still needed for real inventions - where it takes serious money, expertise, time, etc. to achieve something major.)
But maybe a better moral would be that shell corporations (& lawyers playing shell games with them) should be outlawed.
> But maybe a better moral would be that shell corporations (& lawyers playing shell games with them) should be outlawed.
Shell companies have done more damage to the world than most tyrants ever could - enabling tax evasion, escaping responsibility for substandard construction (you close the company after completing contruction of a house) or for decommissioning toxic assets like exhausted mines or oil rigs. They are uaed to obscure land ownership.
Most of those aren’t shell companies by the common definition of a shell company.
Usually people talking about shell companies are referring to companies with no business interests at all or if they are bring expansive only contracts/ip agreements. A construction company is doing actual business. Land owned in a corporation has an actual asset etc.
Most startups start as shell companies, you sort of can’t create a corporation without being one for some amount of time.
So I’m ok with the idea of corporate ownership reform but I think you’d need to get more specific than “shell companies == bad”
IANAL, and was not proposing specific legislation. I used "shell company" in colloquial sense - a token / minimal / empty legal organization, used by lawyers & their ilk for what most honest & reasonable non-lawyers would see as duplicitous or malicious purposes.
The corporations in this case a) hold assets and b) provide liability limits. That is the basis of all corporations.
So we’d need to get specific about which practice is duplicitous. Is it the treatment of IP as an asset? The transferability of patents ? Limited liability of patent defense?
I am no expert in any of those things but I bet there is value in each and bad unintended consequences of each.
If I described to a lay person that there was a hacker website frequented by lots and lots of people with an active forum community, you’d likely get at least some of them to suggest banning it…
>If I described to a lay person that there was a hacker website frequented by lots and lots of people with an active forum community, you’d likely get at least some of them to suggest banning it…
Different things. In this case you have a pathological outcome in the process. "Free real estate" as it were because you've got an organizational structuring that is essentially censure proof by the Court unless you pierce the corporate veil.
Remember, corporations are suffered to exist as a courtesy, and a means to distribute risk, but our Court system is very much tuned to "there is a person, get them in here now, and lets get this sorted."
If the Court has to choose between being ineffectual and exploitable, and piercing the veil in order to get to the bottom of duplicitous behavior, one can only hope the Judge will settle in and push the issue.
> The corporations in this case a) hold assets and b) provide liability limits. That is the basis of all corporations.
Surely the basis of all corporations is to trade and to undertake usefull economic activity.
We spesifically don't want them to limit liability where profit is made upfront, owners take off with the money, and there is no-one left to pay the costs.
There is no need for a corporation purely to enable trade. The entire point is to limit liability of the investors. Otherwise we could just ban them wholesale.
I think you could fix a lot of the issues by requiring that all companies must be recorded in a public registry that includes contact information, owner and executive names, as well as a list of actual physical locations where the company operates (if any -- online businesses don't need to have a physical location).
You’d need a federal level legislation to achieve that (and perhaps a constitutional amendment).
The states decide the information requirements in their jurisdictions and many have vested interests in not changing them (particularly Delaware where this case is).
This is called a beneficial ownership registry and Biden signed the most recent NDAA which actually included a rule to create this. FinCen is developing the framework now and we should have much more transparency pretty soon;
Generally speaking, most "real inventions" are independently invented by multiple people and aren't successful until somebody figures out how to market them. For example, video games were invented in the 1950s and Tennis for Two[0] was basically Pong in 1958 (a bunch of people had already written tic tak toe, checkers and/or chess). The Magnavox Odyssey (likely the first console) was released around 2 months before Pong (according to Wikipedia) but it was Pong that popularized gaming and made it mainstream. Calculus was independently invented by both Newton and Liebnitz but there was also a Japanese calculus called wasan from the same period invented by Seki Takakazu based on a different foundation. The telephone was also independently invented by several people around the same time but Alexander Graham Bell got the credit because he was the first person to get it to the patent office.
There are endless examples of this because ideas are not scarce and there are typically multiple intelligent people who have the same idea. All patents do is allow somebody who fails to successfully execute an idea to weaponize the legal system to extort money out of people who do successfully execute "their" idea.
That's not even getting into how the US Supreme Court allows GMO seed companies to patent plants and sue farmers for patent infringement because the neighboring farm's GMO seeds cross-pollinated with their seeds. In Bowman v. Monsanto, the US Supreme Court actually ruled that farmers can't plant their own seeds (when this cross pollination happens) without paying the patent trolls at Monsanto! Patents are simply corrupt, innovation stifling monopolies the entire way down and should be completely abolished and banned from ever coming back via constitutional amendment.
(Current copyright terms are excessive but copyright itself along the lines of the US Copyright Act of 1790 is reasonable as a tool to encourage creative works and copyright abolition would likely be even worse than the status quo's century long copyright terms. Likewise, trademarks are also legitimate as a fraud prevention tool. They shouldn't be conflated with patents as they are in the concept of IP.)
Copyright was not introduced by authors, it was introduced by the people who print books, or at least some of them. In Germany books and booklets were dirt cheap, which allowed broad access to all kinds of works and consequently knowledge to spread. Then came copyright, and guess what happened: It wasn't exactly the authors who got richer, and neither the biggest bunch of the guys who printed all these things saw any of the benefits, either. It was a net loss for the society, because some greedy idiots couldn't get enough.
Trademark also has a good few issues, aside of being abused to the point where it becomes obviously stupid (like trademarking colors, common words and similar idiocies). It also cannot prevent counterfeits, which is more a game of whack-a-mole than anything else.
I've always found Wikipedia's "List of multiple discoveries" article fascinating. So many, many scientific principles and inventions that I know about, and it turns out there were others I've never heard of who also figured them out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries
Tradition has held that these are ideas, not inventions, and thus
obtain value precisely because they can and should be freely shared
(which is the ultimate aim of patents anyway).
Ideas may also require intellectual labour. But one may not receive
the protection of the government for them to give temporary advantage
over competitors. Ideas are a collaborative venture, protocols being
the very epitome of this - since a "protocol of one" is a bit like a
birthday party for one... a bit sad and pointless.
If one wants to make money, by all means invest time in pursuing
patentable inventions, but do not presume that mere ideas (most of
which are "nothing new under the sun") should be afforded the same
protection.
The problem we have today is that the patent system is derelict. The
goalposts have shifted to allow almost all and any silly idea to
obtain a patent and the system itself is weaponised for extraction. It
has not shown any will to reform, so abolition may be its ultimate
fate.
I’m interested in what “traditions” you’re talking about here? Honestly, it is not even clear to me what you’re talking about when you say “these” in your sentence. Certainly tradition hasn’t held that Rust memory management is an idea and therefore not patentable. Same with new models in ML? Maybe there is some tradition for protocols, but even those are generally patentable but required to be licensed via FRAND.
Your post seems to entirely misunderstand the patent system. “But one may not receive the protection of the government for [ideas] to give temporary advantage over competitors.” This is just flat out wrong. The purpose of a patent is literally to receive the protection of the government for your ideas in order to give you a temporary advantage over your competitors via a government granted monopoly on an idea. The bargain that’s struck is that the patent owner gives the details of their patented idea to the world so that anyone can eventually practice it or build off of it in exchange for a limited exclusionary protection in commerce.
Pretty sure that it's not for ideas, but for specific implementations of ideas, patents being criticized as abusive when they are not specific enough ?
One example I saw just today :
Thomas Savery getting a patent on "make, imitate, use or exercise any vessells or engines for raiseing [sic] water or occasioning motion to any sort of mill works by the impellent force of fire,", which I assume subordinated Thomas Newcomen during the patent's duration = all of his life to Savery, despite Newcomen's engine being much more advanced & commercially successful... (at least he didn't end up destitute, like some of the previous steam engine inventors !)
This seems to be splitting hairs on what an “idea” is. Is a patent on the use of water heated into steam to drive an engine different from the idea to use steam to drive an engine? I don’t really see where you draw the line here, and the idea to use steam to drive an engine was definitely new at the time so why shouldn’t it be patentable? And also note that your linked story does not implicate the US patent system (which addresses the problem you’ve identified: your patent only lasts for 17 years, not for your or your competitor’s life) but seems to be reliant on the British patent system as it was in the late 1600s.
You can argue that the patent system in the US is partially broken because of how broadly patents are granted nowadays, but that does not support the GP’s contention that there is some kind of distinct line that can be drawn between an idea and an invention, which is why the patent system is what it is now. And, again, your own link underscores how far we’ve come in understanding that unlimited monopolies on technologies/ideas are bad and how limiting patents durationally can help with that. Note that one of the requirements for a patent to issue is called “enablement” which basically means that your patent MUST describe the invention with sufficient particularity that a person with ordinary skill in the art could make and use your invention.
lol, after your last phrase I'm confused about what we are even arguing ?
(Also, I don't think that in that case the patent expired because its holder died, more likely it came to a term (after being renewed ?) after 35 years (which I agree is a tad long), otherwise my source wouldn't have put it in this way ?)
I'm sorry I can do nothing more to help with your misunderstanding of
my good faith post. Please do the necessary research with regard to
the history and purpose of designs and patents law.
> So you have no examples or explanations for what “traditions”
I have plenty. Now, I do not wish to be rude Abduhl, but I find your
"question" a little disingenuous, and your expectation that I act as
your personal tutor on well documented matters a tad entitled. This
isn't my full-time job, and I come here mainly to look for interesting
and unusual viewpoints. Have you done even the most cursory research
into the history of patents as I indicated? Do you need some reference
material or links to get started?
How about reading some lecture notes and essays (some of the finest on
the formation of copyright, patent and trademarks) on the site of
Havard law professor Lawrence Lessig [1]
I'm skeptical rust memory management is such a big invention by them and would bet some money the ownership model already existed before in papers at the very least. And even if not just imagine having to pay Dahl or Alan Kay to implement OO in your language, which was by every possible metric more innovative than rust's memory management.
Even if it would have stopped java from being a thing it's just not worth it.
Those things got invented anyway though, without being patented. The right question, in my opinion, is whether there are important software innovations that would have been significantly delayed, or kept secret, or never discovered at all, if software patents weren't a thing.
And if so, do they outweigh legal costs and chilling effects of patent trolling, and the inefficiencies of people having to engineer around patented ideas.
Intellectual property is a fairly artificial concept. It's quite "big government" when you think about it - government grants a monopoly on the application of an idea. It is only worth preserving if it makes the country richer.
This cuts both ways: it's also easy to "surround" software patents with new innovations that are required to be competitive in the marketplace. Then both parties cross-license and you're good. Yes the lawyers get paid but the cost is pretty low compared with software engineers, and the societal benefit is that these innovative move into the public domain.
I don't understand your point, do you mean that this cannot happen in other fields?
I imagine that this is the case for most stuff in the world. Ideas are not usually unique but it's the great execution of the idea that present the real challange.
The idea was basically "Let's give some legal protections to investment in research so someone can't just steal it the second you publish it".
As it is common, the idea was fine, it even somewhat worked in few places, but applying it everywhere turned out to be silly. We have medical companies changing an atom here in there to make "same" but legally distinct drugs, and software people patenting half a day of work of someone as some "invention" (and my favourite [1], "playing with cat using a laser pointer").
It failed as a system decades ago and if anything it became blockage to innovation (gotta check thousands of patents, they might be too similar!).
More than that, it is peanuts in cost for corporation but significant one for a single "inventor" so majority of it lies in hands of corporations that would do that R&D anyway.
The protection it provides was also supposed to encourage publishing the science (as opposed to just lock up your trade secrets and never show it to the world) but frankly long patent interval makes it a bit pointless, competition can just invent "same/similar legally distinct process in many situation and only people getting richer by patents are lawyers, not "inventors".
I start to think laws should have "best by" date, and be re-evaulated after 10 or 20 years whether they served a purpose well and still serve it...
It's really that the capitalistic patent driven research system is pretty terrible imo. So you have some need to invent some technology for the betterment of humanity and the world. The patent model requires that in order for that technology to exist, someone needs to have the idea out of the blue, and for it to go on to be produced at all it needs to be a convincing enough idea for people to part with their disposable income out of their own will to fund all the overhead of this business plus profit. That seems like a great way to invent a cash cow that the government protects on your behalf, but I'm not sure we would have invented and proliferated the wheel or the bow and arrow if we had this model all through out our human history. You'd have people dealing with really crappy octagonal wheels because someone is squatting on the round wheel patent and might not even have much of an interest to bring it to mass market.
There is another model for innovation, however, and that is the government research grant model. The government taxes wealth, the taxes accumulate into massive funds, government experts hired from the field identify compelling research topics that would benefit the collective, funds are made available and other researchers submit proposals of what they would do with that money, government experts choose the most promising proposals, money goes to things based on research merit versus the product or technologies potential to take money from people's pockets.
The idea behind them is solid... the time limits are absurd, especially for trivial stuff.
So, to solve the triviality, the patents shouldn't be worth more than it would take for a competitor to reinvent the end result - so if we're talking about a truly advanced chemical process, sure, takes time and reasearch and people and experiments... definitely worth millions. In contrast, pressing pageDown and in result moving one (full) page down (instead of moving a screen-height) should be practically worthless, since it'd take someone just a few hours to reimplement. Valuing would be hard but still better than nothing.
The other is the time limits.. especially in software, a year is a lot of time, really a lot... and 20 years is way too much.
But that's not how invention works : what about advances that seem trivial after the fact... yet nobody has thought of for centuries, despite all the "ingredients" being available ?
What about patents are non-transferable and only valid, if the issuer actually makes use of them? The moment you let them rot in a drawer, you invalidate the patent. That would disable companies whose sole purpose is to "troll" others with patents they aquired from whomever, and it would also disable companies from inventing something just to block off this path to competitors, while never making use of it itself to press more money out of customers with the "old garbage".
I mean the marketing blabla behind patents is always the little inventor who found something incredible but will be eaten by the large corps, right? Which means they should be interested in actually creating a product out of it to make money, and the patent gives them a "safety" period before the big corps stomp the little guy to the curb. Or ... maybe this whole thing was a pure marketing ploy and patents have been misused in all kinds of ways in the 19th century already?
Some decades later, however the (much less broad ?) patents over steam engines able to produce circular motion, seem to have forced Watt to differentiate and improve his "2nd engine" so much that it could be differentiated enough from the other patents :
Note also that Watt was bad at business, and only owned 1/3rd of "his" patents.
Our post-modern issues seem to me to instead stem first from :
- it being too easy to shelter liability (and tax fraud !) behind complex company trees
- a failure of antitrust and lack of goal/duration-limited companies allowing companies to grow waaaay too big to the point where they have enough power to heavily weigh on governments (note though that Watt had already managed to convince the British government to give a 25 year extension on "his" "1rst" steam engine)
As I see it, the way we humans actually progress is through copying what other people did and extent on that, or get whole new ideas how to move on from that in a different way. Patents and copyright don't serve that principle, they exist to block it, to create some form of monopoly, for the sole purpose to increase profit for a few, letting society pay the cost for that. For example, the amount of hours wasted to get around patents is absolute insanity, up to the point that it can block off entire product categories because the patent is a crucial one for this to ever work.
The problem with multinationals is just icing on the cake, because they use all kinds of tools to block off competition, not just patents and copyright. And compared to the small inventor they do have the means to control for patent violations by others and go through court with that, if needed. So the whole process is highly aligned towards the wealthy to begin with.
The purpose of patents, is incentive companies to share their secrets.
For example, Coca-Cola never patended their formula. So you might think: I can copy it and sell my own right? Well, yes, legally yes, if you ever found their formula, somehow. They been successful for more than a hundred years now in hiding that formula.
Thing is, software patents allowed people to actually patent ideas, concepts, stuff that is obvious and don't need sharing, for example: "ghost racer" is a patented concept, for a while any game that wanted to display to the player his past run by showing a slightly different copy of himself so he can compare, had to pay patent royalty. But the concept is obvious, it is simple, it is there, nobody used a ludicrous amount of money and time to invent it.
This is different than the patent for Michael Jackson dance moves that requires specialized devices, he patented physical objects that required time and money to make, they had a non-trivial purpose on his dance and he had to work to create them to make his dance moves possible. And now that he is gone, the awesome stage tricks he invented can keep existing, because he wrote detailed patents explaining how to repeat his feats.
> They been successful for more than a hundred years now in hiding that formula.
This is a legend.
Coca Cola is just water with sugar. The "formula" tastes different in every country. And today's coca cola is not the same like yesterday, so they shall fill a patent every other year in every country.
It doesn't taste that different in every country (I've had it in most continents and quite a few countries). For whatever reason I still massively prefer regular coke to most of the other mainstream suppliers. I do like some small batch niche cokes though. Strangely as a kid I drank loads of diet pepsi, but I never drink diet soda now, and I probably only have 1 or 2 cans of coke/month on average.
Is physics patentable? Everything in the real world eventually depends on physics. Yet despite the unpatentability of physics, patents built on physical properties of the world exist as well. Why should mathematics and software be different?
Software implementations require trade-offs. An implementation of an algorithm can be memory-hard or memory-efficient, single-threaded or multi-threaded, generic or optimized for a particular processor, constant-time or low-latency. But no implementation can be all of those at the same time.
To create a solution within the constraints given is what engineering is all about, and requires expert domain knowledge and creative thought. Software isn't just math, it operates on real processors with real limitations. I'm not arguing that software patents should be valid, but the "software is just math" argument is too weak to carry much weight.
Software doesn't need to be obvious and could need the sharing aspect of it. I am thinking of all the new ML models that are up and coming for example. Not only do you require some advanced software but also a lot of hardware capabilities.
I don't really buy your argument since the same could be said for obvious stuff in the physical world as well.
I still think I am leaning towards companies keeping their secrets if patents is the only solution we can bring to the table.
It's only "obvious" after the fact, and was clearly not obvious to the patents office, or the patent wouldn't have been granted.
As for the "no effort" claim, reminds me of the :
Henry Ford vs Charles Steinmetz' (of General Electric) invoice for fixing a generator : "Making chalk mark [showing where the issue is], $1. Knowing where to make mark, $9,999."
Because the bar for 'invention' is even lower in current software patent law than for current physical engineering patent law.
In general, the software world sees plenty of innovation, and would continue to see that innovation without patents. Besides, software is much closer to mathematics. The idea that e.g. long-division is patentable is ridiculous, but if you write "long-division, but on a computer" the only thing that prevents a patent is how glaringly obvious the prior-art is.
For me the reason is that I cannot say I understand other industries well enough. But I understand software well enough to say that parents there are harmful. Many of them are too generic and trivial and hinders innovation.
Patents should be coupled to the product. The patent is hidden and considered in draft mode until a working product matching the patent completely is created and submitted to the patent office to check if it matches the patent.
If you are working as an inventor it's your own responsibility to market and sell your ideas and create appropriate contracts when selling your inventions to someone.
A patent has to go through several layers and areas of concern before finally being approved. The entire approval process must be documented and publically available.
That all connects to a working end implementation, which can be presented to the patent process.
ARM would need to contractually secure themselves on their own untill an implementation can be presented though
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj9VljRQzCQ)