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nitin_flanker

703 karma · joined September 9, 2014

Aviation freak, dilettante technologist and futurist, blogger, poet, voracious reader, learning to program and to get the shit done.

Connect with me: Twitter : Twitter.com/nitinbalodi2

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nitin_flanker··on Chopping up books when they're physically too big
"What I learned is that some folks have a different mindset; they see the world as something to be shaped around themselves, rather than seeing themselves as something that should be shaped to fit the world. That’s been a useful lesson sometimes."

It indeed is. Thanks for putting it in words. I think I will try to adopt this mindset about certain things in life.

nitin_flanker··on Show HN: Validate your idea, know what to charge, and how to get first users
Yes, we have just built it and it is boot strapped. Starting slow so only 1 validation is open to public. But feel free to share your idea here and I will run it directly from backend and share the report here.

Thank you for your feedback though. I encourage you to run a good idea to really see the capability of this.

nitin_flanker··on The Golden Age of British Ice Cream
What a fantastic read into the history. I work with many food scientists and constantly track what's up with chocolate / ice-cream industry these days.

There's always a struggle between companies choosing profits (by adopting cheaper, more processed ingredients) and consumers wanting tasty but healthy foods. In UK things are improving because of regulations, but everywhere else things are not that good, and it's not just ice creams.

nitin_flanker··on I indexed 669 GB of my GoPro videos using my M1 Max computer and local ML models
I am in no way a tech savy person, don't know coding, don't know networking or AI much either. But I definitely want to have a system like this. An AI powered gallery / video repository that can help me find moments, people, colors, objects from 100s of 1000s of files.

Local LLMs sound so cool but I know they won't be easy to setup or use for common joe like me.

nitin_flanker··on Ask HN: How are early-stage AI startups thinking about IP protection?
Glad to be of help here. Let me answer the questions one by one.

- You're right about the confidence coming from investor expectations than actual enforcement experience. Startups avoid falling into patent litigation cycles as at early stages their primary goal is survival and gather funding. Health-tech requires heavy funding similar to industries like energy, or pharma. Having a patent secured innovation gives a positive signals to both potential partners and investors - that this startup has invented something new, and that their innovation is protected from being infringed. Whether a startup will actually enforce the patent in future highly depends on specific situation of their market. I have seen many startups (specifically the ones working on drug development platforms) more open to license their technology. Patents make that a little easy as it is a well known industry practice.

- It's mostly attorney driven as most founders who are working on their first or second ventures are not familiar with patent laws that well (unless they come from that background). This strategy is also only applicable in specific scenarios where it makes sense to keep the innovation hidden from competition (where you have lots of competing companies or where your work is catching lots of media attention).

- I haven't specifically seen this being discussed or got a chance to talk about it with a founder but I can share my experience here. AI/software patents are still surviving and only obvious patents are facing difficulties. You might have heard about Zoom vs Apollo dispute recently where court dismissed Apollo's motion against Zoom patents being invalid under Alice (My team is working on a story on that case separately). The patent has explained the inventiveness of the innovation being covered in a way that it is not abstract and actually showcase the improvement over prior art. If an innovation's inventiveness and improvement can be described in a non-obvious way (avoiding 'intelligent parser' and writing '0-5 point scoring system based on 5 parameters'), the patents can work.

Final thought about the last point: A patent's worth and cost is directly proportional to how important that innovation is for the industry (not for the startup patenting it). If a solution has multi-industry applications, it is not an incremental innovation but actually goes beyond SOTA, then a startup should opt for multi step protection, not just patent. Copyright the code, maintain trade secrets wherever possible, and patent the processes (if they solve the technical problems).

Feel free to share more questions or contact me on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/b2b-marketer/

nitin_flanker··on Ask HN: How are early-stage AI startups thinking about IP protection?
It highly depends on the industry but in health-tech, startups still opt for patent protection, simply because it works. For anything that is not suitable for patents, many founders opt for trade secret (as patents are open to everyone and can be used by competition to figure out how you're doing what you're doing).

Another strategy that I have seen experienced founder following is keeping their patent under examination for longer. They either respond late to the examiner's questions, purposefully opt for GAUs (Group art units. Different GAU reviews different tech patents) where the prosecution timeline is slower. This gives them extra time to keep their innovations hidden while still protected, until they are ready to enter market with viable products.

For AI based, software patents are a tricky game with many getting rejected under Alice 101 rejections. The drafting and prosecution methods also change a lot when dealing with software patents about AI.

I can share more in-detail if you have any specific question.

Context: I am not a founder but I work in a Patent and technology consultation company and we regularly help with prior art searching, patent monetization, and large scale patent analysis on industry.

I have talked to about 200 early stage founders last year through conferences or in-person interviews and talked specifically about this topic.

nitin_flanker··on We built what Canva AI should have been
Would love to be looped in and can also work as a design partner if that is something you are looking for. I have been in this space for over 12 years now and have tested dozens of apps. Have worked briefly with Canva's team too back in the days.

How do we connect?

nitin_flanker··on We built what Canva AI should have been
Great app. It's at the perfect level of advanced and simplicity for the usecase you have mentioned.

I tried my hands on a few things and would like to ask / share feedback:

- Not sure if you're already on it or planning to, but target design/marketing agencies for it first. I know a few and they always have a chaos in their designing apps because they have to tell their team which brand they are designing a particular graphic for, and then find those specific templates, etc. Design process with your app starts from the brand which solves that problem.

- I currently work in a technology consulting firm and we regularly need to make multi-page reports, social media posts in carousal formats, or a series of graphics on the same topic. I noticed that currently your app doesn't support multi-page reports. I tested an A4 size, and did not see an option for social media post to generate more pages. That will be super helpful if you end up targeting individual brands for it later. Not having this could be a deal breaker.

- The design editor is really buggy at the moment. Totally understandable noting that you're at very early stages. But providing and option to "edit" AI designs and then a user really struggling to edit is counter productive. It did what MS word does to design when you try to resize and image and the element actually goes missing. I wasn't able to freely move elements on the page, or when I tried to resize an overlay element, it teleported to another dimension.

Overall, really great initiative and refreshing app. For generic usage like a single page social media post, a poster, or a featured image, this works amazingly well.

nitin_flanker··on The full history of Windows widgets, from 1997 to today
People generally don't spend time roaming around within the OS, or standing on desktop screen. I sometimes goes many days before I even lay eyes on my wallpaper. 90% of the time I open my laptop, browser is already open and I get to work.

Widgets are and always were a gimmick. User behavior won't change without a strong need. I don't think anybody need any widget. Nobody will miss them if they are gone.

nitin_flanker··on Share of articles that were written by humans or generated by AI
I am currently running a website which is 100% written by AI, publishing about 2 articles every day. It ranks on Google for the keywords I am targeting and the traffic is also increasing (went from 0 to 2000 monthly visit in 6 months).

My content is not mindless however, it is highly specific to R&D folks, coming from annual reports, sustainability filings, and a company's public announcements. It is something not easily found outside but AI is helping me publish things on Scale.

The point is, AI or not AI doesn't really matter if your content fulfils a need, a purpose of your target audience. Google doesn't mind if it brings new value to the table.

nitin_flanker··on Website is offering to let me negotiate with an AI to buy a mattress
This is more of a marketing move than actual negotiation. It's similar to how companies give out first order discounts, or have general coupons for 5% or 10% off.

Just added layer of AI chat to negotiate to engage the users and give a sense of power over the price while there's already a cap at how low the AI can go.

nitin_flanker··on Google's Gemini AI caught scanning Google Drive PDF files without permission
Apart from the obvious misleading way this article is written. I am listing all the links shared in the tweet thread that the article mentioned -

- Manage your activity on Gemini : https://myactivity.google.com/product/gemini

- This page has most answers related to Google Workspace and opting out of different Google apps : https://support.google.com/docs/answer/13447104#:~:text=Turn...

nitin_flanker··on Gemini AI caught scanning Google Drive hosted PDF files without permission
Here are the links shared in the thread. Even these links do not give you direct control over what data can be accessed by Gemini from your account.

- Manage your activity on Gemini - https://myactivity.google.com/product/gemini

- This page has most answers related to Google Workspace and opting out of different Google apps - https://support.google.com/docs/answer/13447104#:~:text=Turn...

I could not find a direct link to Google account settings to control these. If someone else has any other helpful links to better control these settings, please share.

nitin_flanker··on Replace the “very” in your sentence
For extra impact. Pick the word from here and add very in front of it.

Very + Cool = Dandy

Use Very dandy for extra impact. XD

nitin_flanker··on Patent Trolling’s twin: Copyright trolling
There's a similar publication in 3D printing too. It's called Joshua Pearce’s Algorithm[0] which covers all the major parameters and components of 3d printing materials and other factors.

It was built with an intention to invalidate 3D printing patents that cover broad elements and general materials and ideas, on the grounds of obviousness.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01722...

nitin_flanker··on Hyundai acquires controlling stake in Boston Dynamics for $880M
Hyundai has it's own Robotic labs too. They have plenty of reasons to invest in Boston Dynamics, apart from just car parts.

In addition, Robots manufacturing cars or car parts, improving their own robotic products could be another reason behind this.

nitin_flanker··on Evaluation and euthanization of a dangerous honeybee colony [video]
I was also facing this issue but I think it was just the early parts of the video. The sound was stereo again after the first clip change.
nitin_flanker··on Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?
Could there be an alternate way to measure the rubber wear off from vehicles? By considering the average distance after which a particular Sedan/SUV/Hatchback needs to change tyre, and then comparing the lost weights of old tyres and averaging that?

I'm just wondering if there are any alternate ways to correctly measure this emission.

nitin_flanker··on Google Buys Fitbit for $2.1B
That data potentially tells them about the health habits of people. How much of the users work out everyday, go for jogs, or bicycle rides, all these numbers can tell help them target specific health products to these people.

This health data is a gold mine for medical and pharma industry as well.

nitin_flanker··on Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)
I don't know but the article does not talk about the credibility of the claim. I mean even the way they have described the whole thing feels more like a marketing attempt than an actual scientific breakthrough.

If you look at other articles of this website, they will seem more like a lame attempt at getting traffic than to provide something useful.

They have articles titled like - "Ladies Get dose of Radiation From Government UFO" and "Hackers, UFO's and Secret Space Programs - Oh My!"

I mean, this does not feel like an information source I'll trust.

Edit: As others are mentioning in this thread. From a researcher's perspective, they should have also talked about the read/write capabilities.

nitin_flanker··on We Are Especially Unfortunate to Die, When Our Descendants Could Be Immortal
But then you'll die of hunger or thrust, which isn't a good situation to be in but, it happens now as well. People get trapped in remote, abandoned places only to die of circumstances other than natural causes.

I suppose that the biological immortality that author has talked about, the kind that our future generations will see, will still require all the necessary resources like we do. They'll still get sick and will need medical care sometimes, environment will still affect them, the only thing that will change is the deterioration that our body goes through as we age. I don't know much about the concept but I think it is pretty easy to picture it.

nitin_flanker··on Show HN: A retro video game console I've been working on in my free time
You won't know until you start. It's not about writing book, it's just about putting your hardwork in words. You mentioned in your writeup that you used to think same way about building a console.

I have zero knowledge about electronics, consoles, or any of this and I am fascinated by what you did with your free time. Please write a book and publish it here. I'm sure lot and lots of people would love to read it.

nitin_flanker··on Ask HN: Has anyone managed to regain their attention span/ability to focus?
I'm so glad that you're doing great. Your reply is an inspiration for many.
nitin_flanker··on Rubber that can make and store power from light and vibration
We will finally have a Black Panther's suit that stores energy only to release back later.
nitin_flanker··on How Birds of Paradise Produce Super-Black Feathers
Really great video by BBC. The little dance that bird does when fending off other birds is really amusing, the movements and symmetry of wings positions is something that is an art in itself.
nitin_flanker··on Canva becomes Australia’s only privately backed tech startup to be valued at $1B
This is what I like most about Canva too. They are always improving their tool with new UI and features without ever forcing me to buy the "Canva for work". They are also great at accepting feedbacks.
nitin_flanker··on This is the Razer Phone
The product page says it's a Quad HD display with 120Hz refresh rate. It's unbelievable; my computer can't even pull 60Hz on a 2K monitor.
nitin_flanker··on How many URLs/Websites are blocked in India? Government gives different answers
Yes, as far as I've tried, it entirely is ISP dependent. Here's the message that my ISP show when a website is blocked: http://ibb.co/mvSMRR. I can access it however using my Wifi instead. Similarly, few website that are blocked by one are accessible on others carriers.
nitin_flanker··on Librem 5 Phone Funded
Anybody aware of the exact specifications? For camera, screen resolution, battery?

I love the concept but being an average smartphone user I'm sure many people, like me, would like to know more about the basic things that we use everyday (camera for example).

nitin_flanker··on Google debuts Tez, a mobile payments app for India
The recent decision of Supreme Court about right to privacy will prevent this in future. I'm not sure about what exactly will happen to Adhaar ID but, we may see that linking-it-with-every-account thing reduced a lot.
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