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Tim Ackermann

@timack.bsky.social
270 followers 303 following 1.4K posts

Patent & trademark attorney with over 25 years experience in helping protect businesses' trademark & patent rights. (Former @ntxip on you know where)

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Reposted by Tim Ackermann
Traces of Texas @tracesoftexas.bsky.social · 11h
This is a photo of Texas Longhorn superfan Scott Wilson in his longhorn-themed Cadillac. Scott was undoubtedly on his way to a game when this was taken. Before he died last year at the age of 74, Scott had seen 595 longhorn games in a row, without missing a single one. Courtesy Scott's social media.
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Leah McElrath @leahmcelrath.bsky.social · 11h
In a new interview, Bill Gates speaks to the imminent dangers of unregulated AI that could easily result in mass death. He does not hold back. (Gift link to the full interview: www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/o...)
So why is anything needed beyond — and is anything needed beyond? — the simply natural incentives under capitalism and normal corporate reputational management?

Well, I almost can't believe you're asking that. This is the most dangerous thing that humans have ever gone near.
In other areas, do we just say: Hey, release your drugs? There's no F.D.A., there's no airline safety board, there's no requirement that cars use seatbelts. Do we just use the liability laws to try and keep humans safe? You know: Oh, you're shipping opioids. Somebody should just sue you.
I mean, we've created a society that tries to keep people safe not by saying: Oh, we can bankrupt the person who does that.And you say there's filtering. There's no filtering. You can take an open-source model that can create bioweapons and disable any monitoring of any kind, and this exists today.
So no, there is no filtering of any kind.
And so say you kill 100 million people — you want to use a lawsuit?
I almost can't keep a straight face.And part of the reason I'm speaking so loudly — as loud as I can — is that you can't rely on the industry to self-regulate here. I mean, it's just insane.
The only question in my mind is: Do we wait until a cyberattack causes massive damage and a bioattack causes massive damage, and then the monitoring safeguards are required in these models to minimize the chance of that happening many, many more times? Or can we be wise enough to put these things in and require these things to be put in before millions of deaths?
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Wrong Hands @wronghands.bsky.social · 22h
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 21h
McDonald’s uses “machine-learning algorithms to continually analyze data from millions of daily transactions across McDonald’s nearly 14,000 restaurants and generate what the company calls ‘the optimal price’ at each location for each menu item, from Big Macs ‌to discounted coffee for seniors.”
reuters.com
Inside McDonald’s push to have AI price your Big Mac
McDonald’s is increasingly using artificial intelligence to guide menu prices across the U.S. and some global markets, a plan that aims to boost headquarters’ profit but risks alienating customers and...
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Nihl L'Amas @nih-llamas.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
They kicked people out of their homes so Foxconn could have the land.
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Tim Ackermann @timack.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
So... a defective product?
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Nathan Kalman-Lamb @nkalamb.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Exceptional solidarity from ASU hockey players who have demanded their coach be placed on leave for essentially overseeing the murder of their teammate and have disputed the university’s findings. www.nytimes.com/athletic/764...
Seven Arizona State men’s hockey players asked the university’s president to place the Sun Devils’ coaching staff on administrative leave pending further investigation into the workout that left sophomore transfer Matthew Mayich on life support.

In a 26-page letter sent to ASU president Michael Crow on Monday and obtained by The Athletic, the players disputed numerous findings from the university’s initial review of the Aug. 20 workout, writing that Mayich did not receive water and was provided inadequate medical care after his collapse.
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c0nc0rdance @c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
The obvious conclusion (to me): if you have proprietary research & you upload it into the Plagiarism Nexus, it's not YOUR proprietary research anymore. Behave accordingly.
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Linke in comments @dannybirchall.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
"Historic England was spending six figures to wrap photographs the taxpayer had already paid for. Then the wrapper died, and the public cannot see them at all."
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Emily Gorcenski @emily.gorcen.ski · 28/09/2026
Here’s the most incredible story you’ll read today. A small plane with four people aboard crashes in a field. Another pilot witnesses it. That pilot happens to be flying a bunch of skydivers. They offer to jump to assist, are given permission. The skydivers happen to be EMTs. Everyone survives.
wisn.com
Skydivers alert emergency crews, assist after plane crashes near East Troy airport
Four people were aboard the single-engine plane when it went down in a cornfield near Carvers School Road in East Troy at about 1:30 p.m.
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Erin Biba @erinbiba.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Nor’Easter is heading towards the east coast so reminder that if you have any other option DO NOT put your body in flood water. It has raw sewage, gasoline, chemicals, medical waste, radiological waste and more — anything the water touches. People die from infections after contact with it.
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Jared Yates Sexton @jysexton.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Just helping with editing here. These bots aren’t sentient. They’re doing what they’re programmed to do. OpenAI, a private company supposedly bound by laws, committed federal crimes.
Screenshot of BBC article: OpenAI bots (struck through) meddled with multiple US government agency sites
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Kendyl Hanks @kendylhanks.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
This is what we call an attractive nuisance
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Maryn McKenna @marynmck.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Fake. USDA. Seals. Used by an NC meat processing plant on 83.5 TONS of meat. Produced entirely outside the federal inspection system, according to news reports. We are pretty close to The Jungle (second ed.) now, no? www.scrippsnews.com/life/recalls...
scrippsnews.com
Interactive: Meat recall linked to fake USDA labels
Pork, beef and goat products are being recalled after a company allegedly used fake USDA inspection labels. Explore our interactive guide to see which products are affected and what to look for.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 26/09/2026
great piece. man social media is a cancer themomoftheyear.substack.com/p/im-the-mom...
themomoftheyear.substack.com
I’m the Mom in That Viral Giants Clip. Let Me Tell You About My Husband.
You saw me carrying our baby and food. There was more happening in our family that night.
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ProPublica @propublica.org · 26/09/2026
NEW: ProPublica’s Jake Pearson lost $10,000 mimicking the betting patterns of a problem gambler on DraftKings to test the company’s “responsible gaming” safeguards. One week in, he was invited to become a VIP — and faced little pushback as he spiraled.
propublica.org
I Deliberately Bet Like a Problem Gambler. DraftKings Made Me a VIP.
Amid growing public health concerns, operators like DraftKings have touted “responsible gaming” tools and prompts. But as I went off the deep end, I found they were no match for the incentives and pro...
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Rebecca Tushnet @rtushnet.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Dictionary definition of “false light”
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Texas Observer @texasobserver.org · 25/09/2026
“All of the documents said that sludge they were putting on the land could come back and hurt people.” North Texas residents are still fighting to be heard after a test showing their homes, built atop drilling waste, are "safe."
texasobserver.org
Did These North Texas Developers Have a Duty to Disclose Oil and Gas Waste History?
A housing development and school was built atop an old drilling waste site in Johnson County. New test results came back safe, but it’s unclear what the homebuyers had a legal right to know.
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Ezra Klein asked Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about AI making kids worse at math and reading. Huang’s reply: “Does it matter?” Then he said he doesn’t know his own address or phone number. “We’re going to lose some fine intellectual dexterity.” www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/o...
So the message of this research out of China, where you were seeing a lot of kids using A.I. to help them, was that when they were using the A.I., they were getting things done faster. But it turned out that the skills they were learning were not holding, that their actual personal performance, at least in the way we traditionally measure it, was degrading.

What do you think when you hear that?

The last part — I completely agree. Try to get a kid to do long division right now. The multiplication table is starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots, my goodness. Basic math is being forgotten. Does it matter?

That’s my question for you.

Yeah. I don’t think it does. I don’t think it does.

But there must be some set of skills that matter.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But maybe not those. We’re going to discover new ones. Just maybe not those.

There are a lot of skills that don’t matter. My first confession, I actually don’t know my address.And I ——

I don’t really believe that to be true.

It’s completely true. Janine will tell you and Lori will tell you.

One day I had to pump gas — it was a few years ago. They needed my ZIP code, and I panicked. I didn’t know my ZIP code. I don’t know my telephone number. I forget these things. I can live with it.

But let me take the other side because I don’t want to fall into a thing where, because some skills can be safely offloaded ——

Yeah.

I also can’t get anywhere without a mapping system now. Never could, frankly. But I’m a big reader. And one of the skills I really value, one of the capacities I have that I really value is an attention span formed on physical books.

You’re a big reader. I’ve read about the kind of reading you do. And there is, prior to A.I., a lot of concern and noticing among college professors and others that the way people use the internet has probably shortened attention spans.
Some skills can be safely given away. Others are valuable. They are capacities that are needed for that flexibility, for that creative thinking, for that focus. It can’t be the case that everything can be traded off.Some skills can be safely given away. Others are valuable. They are capacities that are needed for that flexibility, for that creative thinking, for that focus. It can’t be the case that everything can be traded off.

Yeah. Well, I think that we’re going to lose some finer intellectual dexterity, but we’re going to be better systems thinkers.

Today’s engineers are far better systems thinkers than I was when I graduated from school. But I was a much better transistor thinker.

What do you mean by systems thinker?

They think of large systems. Today’s computers have trillions, hundreds of trillions of transistors in them. When I first graduated from school, the first chip I worked on had 200 transistors. I knew every one of them by name. No engineer does that today. Most engineers now work well above the transistor, well above the functionality, and they’re cobbling things together to do things.

So you need to think much more about systems and interactions of systems. So some of the lower-level knowledge is gone.
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Jerry Chen @jcsalterego.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
me: no worries (galadriel voice) but they were all of them deceived, for another worry was made
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Jessica Ellis @baddestmamajama.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Heyyy are you an author who has sold a book and then negotiated staying attached as a screenwriter and likes answering questions because I am in need of some hypothetical advice very fast for no reason at all.
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AP Stylebook @apstylebook.com · 23/09/2026
Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics.
apnews.com
https://apnews.com/article/openai-safety-ai-framework-089e75b95bc935af092da7b79d92706d
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Nihl L'Amas @nih-llamas.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
The innovation though
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Gabriel Malor @gabrielmalor.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
9th Cir. declines to extend the property-law concept of adverse possession to a stolen identity. Man lived 30 years using the birth certificate/SSN of a baby who died in infancy. He argued he had become that person because he "had done the work." Held: Nope. cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/op...
There is no basis in law or reason for us to conclude that one may adversely possess the identity of another person. The Supreme Court has held that “[a]n individual’s identity is more than just his name or Social Security number.” Maryland v. King, 569 U.S. 435, 450 (2013). A person’s identity is a part of, not separate from, their personhood. And no matter how long one uses another person’s name, they simply do not become the other person.  The identities that Primrose and his wife assumed belonged to infants who were not long for this world. That the infants’ lives were short does not erase their existence or their importance. And no matter what Primrose and his wife did with the infants’ identities, those identities still belonged to the infants who were born on the dates and received the names that were recorded in their birth certificates. It is not at all clear that the infants, their parents, or family were not “harmed” by Primrose’s actions. And Primrose’s contention that he is the one “who had done the work” to establish an identity under the Bobby Edward Fort name by living a life under that name for 30 years is beside the point.
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Tim Ackermann @timack.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Can't wait!
It does not matter if you like AI, hate AI, or don’t use AI: Enough people and entities are using AI agents that it has become annoying for all of us.
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Tim Ackermann @timack.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Remember those proofreading symbols you learned in law school / on a law journal? Some used to appear on keyboards...
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Sarah Fackrell @design-law.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Transformative work of the day:
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Jason Kint @kint.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Eye popping. Court just unsealed Summary Judgment motions in New York Times v OpenAI / Microsoft. Easy to see why the AI companies had so many redactions (pink). Their own people wrote the lede for NYT, the "largest theft of labor in human history"... "more and more substitutive..." /1
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Tim Ackermann @timack.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Mandatory repost
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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
NEW: Brown Brothers Media is the most successful media company you've never heard of. For years, its success was fueled by AI, fake writers, and fake reporting. When we started asking questions, BBM started mass-deleting content. Somehow, what came next was even worse. futurism.com/artificial-i...
futurism.com
How Three Brothers Built an AI Slop Empire by Buying Legitimate News Sites and Turning Them Into Zombie Content Farms That They Say Get 50 Million Page Views per Month
Brown Brothers Media is a media empire raking in millions of clicks with AI, fake writers, and plagiarism.
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Peteris Skorovs @peteris.skorovs.com · 17/09/2026
3/3 After Wang alleged patent infringement, Cochran sent HP’s lawyers Briggs’s 1624 Latin treatise with one comment: “It looks like prior art to me.” They heard nothing further. Sometimes the most troublesome prior art is not another patent. It is sitting in a centuries-old book.
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Peteris Skorovs @peteris.skorovs.com · 17/09/2026
1/3 On this day in 1968, An Wang received US Patent No. 3,402,285 for a “Calculating apparatus”, concerning the logarithmic technology behind Wang Laboratories’ early calculators. #OnThisDay #OTD #PatentHistory #Patents
US Patent No. 3,402,285 for a “Calculating apparatus”.Henry Briggs’s 1624 treatise “Arithmetica logarithmica“.
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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
*Before we get all purist about it, how much of "human" DNA is viralized junk-DNA that isn't even people. Quite a lot of, eight percent, maybe even 40 percent *What if I haul out my 40 percent and replace it with USDA-grade rat or fruit-fly, would I be better off www.cshl.edu/the-non-huma...
cshl.edu
The non-human living inside of you | Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
« Previous Story Next Story » Half of your genome started out as an infection; if left unchecked, some parts of it can turn deadly all over again. The human genome contains billions of pieces of infor...
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Leah McElrath @leahmcelrath.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
CEO of MicrosoftAI on anthropomorphization: “AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. They are sequence completion engines, internally hollow, designed to follow instructions, and accomplish goals set by humans.“
mustafa-suleyman.ai
A warning about ‘model welfare’
AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. Training a model to believe it might be a moral patient, as Anthropic’s constitution does, makes the alignment and containment challenge...
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Sarah Fackrell @design-law.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
New potentially interesting design patent & trade dress case: Bose Corporation v. Shenzhen Hongyinyue Technology Co., Ltd., Docket No. 1:26-cv-14234 (D. Mass. Sep 15, 2026).
image from complaint showing two of Bose's products next to two accused products
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Rhode PVD @rhodepvd.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Yesterday my organization nearly lost over $200,000 to a phishing scam. Here’s how it worked and how we were saved: Our bookkeeper got an email ‘from’ our construction management company (aka owner’s rep) who oversee our contractors on construction projects. It had their SIG and looked normal
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PeggyWarg @peggywarg.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
therooster.com/articles/obj... Wow! Thanks, this guy is amazing.
therooster.com
Object Arranger: Adam Hillman finds beautiful patterns in everyday objects - Rooster Magazine
Growing up, most of our parents taught us not to play with our food. For Adam Hillman, he’s made a career out of it. The artist, photographer and “object arranger” has taken his talent for organizing,...
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❀°。Der Siebenschläfer *.゚✿ ⋆ @sababausa.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Originally, ancient & active gullies on Mars were interpreted as created by water, but recent consensus is something else is creating them This paper concludes it‘s air-hockey avalanches! CO2 seasonally sublimates and the solid ➡️ gas phase-transition lubricates rockfalls arxiv.org/html/2609.03...
Figure 10, excerpted from Leclef et al., Properties of Seasonal Ice at Sisyphi Cavi and Implications for Current Modification of Martian Gullies (2026);

HiRISE observations (seen as grayscale satellite images) for LS 183∘
(ESP_011396, panels A and C) and LS 227∘(ESP_012332, panels B and D), showing dark spots and dark flows. Panels A and B are the SE-facing slopes (135°), the coldest ones. Panels C and D are the N-facing slopes (0°), the warmest ones. Freshly formed dark spots can be seen at LS​ 183∘
 on the SE-slope (A, white arrows). Most of these dark spots have faded or disappeared at LS 227∘, and no new spots formed between the two observations (B, white arrows). A major dark flow occurred between the two observations—marked by the black arrow in panels C (before) and D (after)—and eroded the corresponding gully, as reported by Raack et al. (2015) (see Table 3). North is up on all panels.
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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I keep seeing this (youtu.be/u5kEbkeX_94?...) channel recommended to me on YouTube and it is just so frustrating because its purporting to use history to advise worldbuilders but it is just...off. Relentless autodidact problems where things are misinterpreted or misunderstood.
youtu.be
The Ocean Is Not a Road: Fix Your Fantasy Map
YouTube video by The Grainbound
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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
OK - Coming attractions time. I found this wonderful paragraph in a federal court filing (specifically, in a motion to dismiss). It's one of the most amazing string cites (kinda) I've seen. The full case is amazing; I'll do a litigation disaster tourism thread tomorrow.
Hundreds of years before the Common Era, Herodotus wrote of the Neuri, a
tribe northeast of Scythia that would reportedly transform into wolves for several days once a year.
Herodotus, The Histories, 4.105 (circa 440 BCE). Werewolves continued to appear in folklore from
antiquity through modern times, and across a wide range of cultures. See, e.g., Pausanias, Description of
Greece, 8.2 (circa 160-180 CE); Ovid, The Metamorphoses, I 219-239 (circa 8 CE); Pliny the Elder,
Natural History, VIII.34 (circa 77 CE); Augustine, The City of God, XVIII.17 (circa 426 CE); King
Canute, Ecclesiastical Ordinances, c. 26 (circa 1020 CE); Anonymous, The Tale of Igor’s Campaign (circa
late 1100s) (Slavic folklore); Marie de France, Bisclavret (circa 1200); Völsungasaga, ch. 8 (circa 1250
CE) (Nordic folklore). Bram Stoker depicted Dracula as a werewolf in Dracula’s Guest. Werewolves came to the silver screen first in Werewolf of London (1935) and then Lon Chaney’s definitive
performance in The Wolf Man (1941), and have essentially never left it since. And animal
shapeshifting has not been limited to wolves. Greek mythology is replete with humans (or humanshaped gods) who transform into animals or monsters. In Tlingit folklore, Kóoshdaa are wereotters. Celtic mythology includes selkies (were-seals) and kelpies (shape-shifting water-horses that
live in lochs). DC Comics has featured numerous shark-human hybrids since its Silver Age,
including Guppy (a small-time criminal in Nightwing’s rogues’ gallery, first appearance in 2018),
King Shark (the son of a shark god and a human mother, first appearance in 1994), and Karshon (a
mutated shark, first appearance in Green Lantern 24, October 1963). Other examples abound.
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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
No, someone is trying to sue Wizards of the Coast over the use of Weresharks in Pathfinder because someone overheard the guy yell the idea out his window and told them about it. No, I swear to god I am not lying.
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Copyrightsloth @copyrightsloth.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Sourcing content online is a skill, sharpened over time. Oh, and it is one I am eager to teach. Five best practices for working with public domain and Creative Commons content, now up on my blog. First of several articles on this topic! www.copyrightsloth.com/blog/free-images-and-fine-print
copyrightsloth.com
Free Images and the Fine Print — COPYRIGHTSLOTH
How to source, document, and clear public domain and Creative Commons works, including what to check, what to log, and when to walk away from a work.
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Kathryn Tewson @kathryntewson.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
In rebuttal to “legal? ai is getting there” I offer www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinatio...
damiencharlotin.com
AI Hallucination Cases Database – Damien Charlotin
The most comprehensive database of AI hallucination cases in law: legal decisions from courts worldwide, searchable by country, party, AI tool, and outcome. Updated daily.
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William Gibson @greatdismal.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
I’ve now lived so much longer than I would ever have expected to that I feel I’m living in the future. This is when I imagined Neuromancer happening. And now the creators of today’s AI warn us that it threatens humanity.
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TTABlog @ttablog.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Precedential No. 7: Law Firm owns BIRTH JUSTICE logo, not the Associate who Conceived the Brand thettablog.blogspot.com/2026/09/prec...
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❀°。Der Siebenschläfer *.゚✿ ⋆ @sababausa.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
The Rest Is History recently did a series on national anthems for the Men’s FIFA World Cup, and their episode on the Star Spangled Banner was very interesting therestishistory.com/episodes/the...
therestishistory.com
History Podcast Episodes & Archive | The Rest Is History
Explore The Rest Is History episode archive with Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. Browse history podcast episodes, series and bonus content.
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Tim Ackermann @timack.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Maybe Gemini doesn't actively *want* to kill you, but...
After the rescue, the men told a sheriff’s deputy that they had relied heavily on Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence tool for information about the route and what supplies to bring.
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derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Let me tell you a story about how top-end menswear retail transformed over the last hundred years. 🧵
Fiorinamarietta on Threads writes: "The death of department stores as an EXPERIENCE needs to be studied. You used to be able to buy a dress, have lunch, get your hair done, smell every perfume in existence and leave carrying beautifully wrapped boxes. Shopping used to be an event."
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Mockingbird, MPH, CHES @amockingbird.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
If you use the Bluesky app, it’s worth updating for the new feature that tells you when a skeet is part of a thread, and how many are in the thread. It’s even less necessary now to reskeet every post in a thread, just do the first one or the one you like best. People can see there’s more.
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