I’m an IP lawyer & AI dev: my first reaction was, “hmm there are trademark issues here.” From a US perspective: “Perplexity” certainly CAN be a trademark, and the company has applied for one—to my knowledge it’s still pending. If the term was merely “descriptive” of the service provided, like “American Airlines”, then the company would need to show that the term has acquired distinctiveness: ie, that purchasers associate the term with that specific company. But perplexity is probably more than merely descriptive here.
Assuming that they have a valid trademark, the issue becomes whether there is a likelihood of confusion between Perplexity and Perplexica. That is a fact-specific, multifactor test, which I’ll spare you. But there could be arguments both ways IMO
HN is so incredible. The topic can be just about anything and there’s someone here with just the right expertise and/or set of skills to share their two pennies. The current topic is AI and IP law and here comes someone who’s an IP lawyer and AI engineer. I truly love this place.
Sorry to hear this, but congrats to Bob for a life well lived and building a brand that made quality products. We have their muesli multiple times a week, their farro as well, and this morning our kids loved Valentine's Day pancakes made from their mix. Thanks Bob
I agree but I don't think the suggestion was to block ideologies. Rather, change the online ecosystem to stop driving people toward rage. How to do it is another question.
Love this result, but I’m wary of drawing conclusions from single studies saying caffeinated or alcoholic beverages are good/bad for X health-related issue. Seems like conflicting results show up frequently.
Alcoholic beverages are bad at any level, according to all the recent studies. Previous studies that found mild positive effects for small doses were confounded by uncontrolled factors that overwhelmed the (mild) negative effects of alcohol.
For coffee, we at least have pretty good data showing that even large quantities don't have seriously bad effects. So lower quantities are probably at least neutral for health.
The one thing that’s certainly anticdotal, but very easy to see, all the people I’ve ever met that make it to late 90’s or over 100, drink alcohol, albeit sensible amounts
I totally agree with you. However, I rationalize this in my mind (in a very biased manner) with this mental gymnastics.
If there was a paper that very thoroughly proved that caffeine was detrimental, it would rocket up into a high tier journal. So I suspect many people may try to look for negative outcomes but aren't finding them. But also I haven't searched for negative chronic effects of caffeine and only hear of results like this. So maybe I'm totally wrong and there's a conspiracy against publishing results on negative effects.
> If there was a paper that very thoroughly proved that caffeine was detrimental, it would rocket up into a high tier journal.
I find this assertion to be farcical. Follow the money - coffee is multibillion dollar market in the US alone. Also it serves the government. Many people in positions of power drink coffee and enjoy it.
Money has power and influences what gets researched.
There are a plethora of studies showing how people who drink the highest amount of caffeine have the lowest incidence of Parkinsons, another protein misfolding disease.
I’ll take it. I spend about half my time developing/promptsmithing and the other half lawyering. “Wordsmith” sure beats some of the other lawyer epithets out there
Yep it's Word exported to pdf. Source: Am attorney, do this all the time. You write it up in Word, save as pdf. Then upload it to the court website, which (in federal court, at least) puts the case number in blue text at the top for the officially-filed version.
The 1-28 pleading numbers on the side are annoying. They're specific to courts in California and a few other jurisdictions, and the rules of court require them. But many other courts don't have them, and they only help to cite specific lines within pages; eg "Complaint 5:4-9" means "Complaint at page 5, at lines 4 to 9". It's occasionally useful for court filings like this, but more useful for court/deposition transcripts of testimony to show precisely where a witness said something.
Related: I tried building an RNN to generate legal pleadings back around 2018/19 and gathered a bunch of docs like this from courts across the country as training data. Processing text with those pleading numbers was a pain, so I built a CNN to classify whether a document had pleading numbers or not, which affected downstream processing. Probably the wrong approach in a bunch of ways, but I was just learning.
Very interesting point. It'd be a challenge to execute, but I'd be glad to see a non-profit that lets online communities discuss topics of interest, solve problems, and expand knowledge. Maybe something like that exists and I just don't realize it.
Sorry to make this about AI, but it'd also be interesting whether such a non-profit makes its data fully open--i.e., for AI companies to scoop up--or has more restrictive terms that forbid AI "scooping" without a separate agreement. Lots of tricky issues, trade-offs, and interesting incentives involved. There could be alliances with orgs creating open source models, for example. If anyone is working on a nonprofit like this or just wants to chat about it, please reach out.
The AI aspect is interesting, it could solve the funding issue. AI scooping requires a (paying) licence. Or, the paying licence would be restricted to closed-source AI models, and it would be free for open-sourcec models, thus making them much more competitive.
Assuming that they have a valid trademark, the issue becomes whether there is a likelihood of confusion between Perplexity and Perplexica. That is a fact-specific, multifactor test, which I’ll spare you. But there could be arguments both ways IMO
EDIT: trademark issues aside, cool project!