I don’t know about that. I tried using both ChatGPT and Gemini to brainstorm for ideas for the name and branding of a woodworking Peertube channel. They both struck me as similar yes men with little to no imagination. Both suggested things like “sawdust and smiles.” And they would both, ALWAYS start a response with something like “That’s a great idea!” “That’s a wise approach!” "Your concern is very valid!’ Such brown nose, very kiss ass.

It doesn’t seem to be too useful for this particular use case, either.

Check my understanding here: It’s not that they’re scarce, but there’s no geological process that concentrates them like copper or gold. There aren’t any neodymium seams the way there are gold seams, there’s a very little amount everywhere. So you might as well sift the entire Mojave.

Gah you fuggin beat me to it!

Honestly that particular business model already pretty much works the way I’d want it to.

The T-shirts are made in tremendous quantities by the likes of Hanes or Gildan with a tag in the collar that shows the company name/logo and country of origin. Quite often the artist or IP owner of the printed art will include a trademark or copyright symbol as appropriate into the artwork. The printing company often goes uncredited.

| but you should need to disclose what you did and didn’t design/build.

A specific example I have in mind: James Wright of youtube channel Wood By Wright did a video comparing like 24 hand planes, from a bunch of different brands and sources from Ace Hardware to fucking AmazonBasics. He noticed that there were basically 3 manufacturers; Jorgensen seems to offer a unique product, and then everyone else were offering slight variations on the same two designs. So there’s a manufacturer somewhere in China that churns these out, and will stamp your brand on them plus you have the option of plastic handles, aluminum or brass thrust wheel, etc. to fine tune the price point you want to hit.

That’s what I want to kill. In this case, if it’s made by Happy Clappy Fun Time Shenzhen Co. Ltd. it needs to be branded as such. Jury’s still out if I’ll allow things like the iPhone that are “Designed in Cupertino California, Made In China.” A product that is designed by a company for that company but then they contract out the manufacture.

Product segmentation? I’m fine getting rid of a lot if not all of that. All cars are luxury cars now. And what good does it do us allowing SB&D to have DeWalt and Craftsman? “We have two brands (actually four, with Porter Cable and Black & Decker) of cordless tools with very similar yet mutually incompatible battery standards and not quite equivalent product lineups, for no reason that benefits the customer.” Perfect, yeah, get on the hobbling wheel, you can explain why we should let you keep doing this between screams.

| I’m not confused when I buy a ATHEOTS or whatever BS brand they come up, I know I’m buying cheap knock-off stuff.

There’s one of two possibilities here:

1. Happy Clappy Fun Time Shenzhen Co. Ltd. is doing it themselves, registering trademarks, selling goods with that brand just long enough for the public to catch on, and then dropping that brand and coming out with another. This should be illegal and impossible. Like the mechanism by which the trademark system works should not be able to function this way.

2. Some Fuck In His Apartment is ordering out of Happy Clappy’s Shit We’ll Rebrand For You catalog. So Reginald Q. Flybynight registers APOWEDG and sells mousepads and shit for a few weeks on Amazon. This…doesn’t need to be a business model me allow. If Happy Clappy wants their shit sold on Amazon, they can list it there themselves. We don’t need the illusion of competition or market choice, we don’t need prices elevated by Some Fuck Who’s Also There…Trademark law is there to guarantee the source of goods. Reginald Q. Flybynight isn’t the source of the goods so he has no need or right to brand the goods. All that does is obfuscate who to sue if the goods are faulty or dangerous.

I’m sick of living in a world of “Someone somewhere made this I think.”

I would still keep patents at about 20 years. There’s some nuance that needs to change to prevent, say, Nintendo from retroactively patenting Pokemon after Palworld comes out, but yeah patent law needs a colonic.

I’d be okay with 20 or even 30 year copyright terms on complete works, but I would be more open on derivative works and fair use.

I want stricter trademark law. Trademark should be about knowing where your products come from. A manufacturer gets right of way over a mark so that they can defend their own reputation, and I’ll help them defend that mark because I want to know where the goods I buy come from.

It should not be legal to buy a commodity item and slap your brand on it. I see this a lot in the tool market. There seems to be two 6" jointers in production in the world today, the one JET makes, and the one everyone else sells. Wen, Craftsman and Porter Cable among many others sell the same 6" jointer. Speaking of Craftsman, that brand is now owned by Stanley Black & Decker, who also owns Porter Cable, DeWalt, and several others. Most of what they use this for is to sell mutually incompatible yet functionally similar power tools so you have to buy more batteries. They might design or build some of their tools in-house, but many of them they buy from some other company and just put their stickers on. Is it, or is it not, a “Craftsman”?

Then you’ve got Amazon, Temu, AliExpress and other Chinese dropshipping platforms. They make a whole bunch of shit and then register nineteen or twenty bullshit trademarks to sell the same thing under. I would make that illegal; if you have a brand that is suitable for selling a given item, you’re not allowed another for that purpose. Trademarks are supposed to reduce consumer confusion, you’re using them to increase consumer confusion. If I am elected dictator, that kind of behavior will earn you a public trepanning.

I noticed Youtube try to push one about Trump petting a cat. Reported it for abuse.

Antidisenshittificationism.

I have been saying this for years. We need themed instances. People keep wanting to make general purpose Lemmy instances, then wonder why everyone ends up on the de facto main instance. Somebody open sportslemmy.sports or fedimusic.song and you’ll start getting folks 1. tripping over the sign-up process less and 2. actually spreading out.

grep

ffs, personal shit on personal devices, work shit on work devices. That way you don’t fat finger dick picks to colleagues.

I’ve found I prefer Irish whiskies or American bourbons to scotch. And you know what I say to folks who like different drinks than me? Cheers!

Cool, does it run on a Galaxy S10 series phone?

It’s creative commons share alike. No need for attribution.

I’ve had one of those little sample bottles of Johnny Walker Blue. Tasted like 3 feet upwind of a campfire. Flavor profile: combustion.

I’m a whiskey drinker, and this is…accurate.

Bourbons are often described as having notes of cherry or apple, vanilla and shortbread, like the baking soda tang from shortbread. That sounds nice, like a pie.

Or they’ll hand you an Irish whiskey with herbal or floral notes. It’s pretty.

Then they’ll hand you a Scotch and say “This one’s really great, it tastes like peat moss, smoke, iodine and leather” and you hesitantly ask if they’d like to go to the hospital.

Some very early martini recipes call for equal parts gin and sweet vermouth. There’s been a century-long trend toward dryer and dryer martinis until we arrive at the modern recipe:

fill a tumbler full of ice, add three ounces of gin, pour half an ounce of dry vermouth down the sink next door, stir, strain into a cocktail glass, garnish with a green olive.

72 hours, the average length of a special military operation.

I grocery shop every 2 weeks and at any given time I have a month of food in stock. because I live in a hemisphere with hurricanes.

Let me tell you a little bit about all those various file converter tools, be it ffmpeg, pandoc, imagemagick, whatever.

The majority of them can be used like this: magick inputfile.bmp outputfile.jpg. If all you need is this file in that format, that’s how you do it. They’re ridicluously capable, you can do editing and compositing and such with them and whatever. If you have a use case where you do that a lot, like you just always put a watermark on images or you always desaturate them or whatever, you can write a script, then just run that script.

They’re basically all like that. Fairly simple to use for basic format translation, shockingly capable if you want to write a script.