My experience submitting software patents is you need to provide enough textual description that the assessor can plausibly understand how it would be implemented. That means no “magic goes here” sections.
The models submitted prior weren’t fully functional. They were a demonstration of what something would plausibly look like to give the assessor enough context to plausibly understand how you would build it. That means no “magic goes here” devices.
That makes no sense, and unfairly gives preference to huge corporations. If I can invent some new machine that will cost many millions of dollars to build, should I not be able to patent it?
Not until you build it, no. You didn't invent anything, you thought of something. But until it exists you didn't invent it, as you have no proof it works. Edison went through a 100 different light bulbs before he had one that works, should he have gotten the patent for "a glass ball that uses a heated filament to make light" before he figured out all of the hard parts?
The phrase "top model" is almost always used to mean a beautiful waif-like woman in high demand in the fashion or advertising industry, so the OA's title and actual topic is jarring clickbait.
I think there's a historical rhyme here in that there was a weird fad around the turn of the century during which several companies tried to push the concept of "virtual" models/actresses, presumably wanting to amortize the astronomical costs of high-quality modeling/texturing/rigging (at the time) across multiple media franchises. And the media at large actually seemed oddly on board with that project as long as it grabbed eyeballs.
The most well-known example was probably when Squaresoft founded a whole-ass CGI film studio in Hawaii and pushed remarkably hard to promote "lead actress" Aki Ross of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within as a "Hollywood it girl" [1].
Who could have predicted that what the collective id was actually crying out for was massive advancements in the fields of realtime computer vision and cel-shaded rendering so that people could transform themselves into quirky parasocial anime waifus/husbandos?
Every advance of media sees these orgies of inappropriate use. My reference for the CGI modeling was the ally mcbeal dancing baby. It was creepy, poorly made CGI yet it showed up literally everywhere even on main stream sitcoms. That in my mind was the harbinger of all that followed, up to the point the CGI blended in and was indistinguishable from reality.
You see this with technicolor, sound in film, and I’ll wager with generative AI once people figure out how to integrate it into any sort of meaningful workflow. We already see genai in advertising and other things. It’s just part of the mania people have around the new and intriguing. Then once it’s no longer new and intriguing it becomes another tool in the toolbox - and IMO the real mastery of that tool begins to show.
other link collection sites feature a title and a short description, summary or excerpt from the article. this is one thing i am missing from HN. (although i don't miss it much because the feed that i use to follow HN does feature the first few lines from the article which solves the problem for me)
When you make a submission, you want people to click on your link and if there’s a stupid headline, then they’re not gonna click on your link. Other times it could come across as misleading if the article’s headline, uses I, but I’m not the one that wrote it, using that headline makes it seem like I was the one that wrote it and I don’t want to make it seem like I’m pretending to be someone else and take credit for their work. Might not be a big deal to you, but I hate it when other people take credit for my work.
There is a range of useless, misleading, and time wasting.
In this case, the title is fun and deliberately misleading (in a fun way, sure) and a waste of time. And is really but really not likely to lead the right audience to the right article.
Often other times the title is not misleading but totally useless. A recent example: "Grok" (and URL) - which is sufficient if you already know what this is about but totally unhelpful otherwise. Another recent example "A Parabel" - who's going to click through? Will they have clicked through in any deliberate manner or just grazing?
If anyone wanted to encourage deliberate use of our time, this is not the way to do it.
None of this is the end of the world. But it IS wasting our time.
This all at the same time as HN gets too many submissions for the members to usefully screen. Seems to me many useful submissions fall through with hardly any notice. Allowing more useful titles (without even demanding them) would go in the right direction: more of the useful submissions making it through and more of our time spent on the right things.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240316032943/https://www.newyo...