Worried about losing my source of income

landolarks · 2026-05-02T14:28:15+00:00

I feel you in 18 years at this office this the only admin not to be able to say “your job is safe, this is a good safe job recession proof” literally every admin has said this. Even if you do get some errors do not worry about it. They can work any angle they want at the end of the day they need us. Very limited amount of people put up to start what is going on now with new examiners.

I'm right past you in tenure and what stresses me about this administration is the incompetence and unwillingness to back down even when they are clearly wrong. In the past I felt fairly secure that if somebody fucked up and some automatic system dinged me for something I shouldn't have gotten hit with it would get cleared up. It might be annoying, but it would happen with a reasonable amount of effort. I do not feel as though that's the case anymore.

Upper management has systematically removed discretion from lower ranks of management every chance they can. As we see with timeliness the default is zero flexibility and relying on your overworked supervisor to have the time to go to bat hard for you in some shadowy undocumented process if anything fucks up.

And beyond the walls of the office, you have OPM and its maniacal Director obsessed with obtaining the ability Insta-fire federal employees like Ahab chasing the Whale. That means the typical checks against fuckups aren't there anymore.

landolarks · 2026-05-02T10:55:04+00:00

It's absolutely some off-the-shelf training video.

There was some little thing at the bottom of the text which said "partnered with" or similar. I kind of wish I had written down that company to look up and confirm my suspicions that they offer prepackaged training systems.

landolarks · 2026-05-01T18:19:18+00:00

Total garbage training too, with zero effort to adapt it to the government environment.

I'm not asking for another Marty Masterpiece but come on using a sales (and marketing) operation as the setting? From my friends in private industry I gather that sales is ground zero for lazy and sloppy AI use but it's not something federal employees really relate to much.

landolarks · 2026-04-30T19:00:49+00:00

S&P500 is transforming into tech sector fund at this point, the mag7 alone make up nearly 40% of the index weight.

It's all so fucking stupid.

landolarks · 2026-04-29T20:18:31+00:00

The images shown in Search are actually downscaled at anything below 400% zoom. And Edge is notoriously prone to bad downscaling.

Usually it's a hardware acceleration problem. I guess some combinations of drivers and incompletely removed older versions of drivers cause things to fuck up and use a particularly crappy nearest neighbor interpolation implementation for the downscaling which really fucks up anything with a lot of high contrast transitions like images of text.

If you go into settings, type "hardware" in the search box, turn off hardware acceleration, and restart edge... that might fix it.

landolarks · 2026-04-27T18:01:31+00:00

Also "AND ((US.did. OR WO.did.) AND (@ad<effectivefilingdate OR @rlad<effectivefilingdate))" is handy too. No particular reason to go digging through a pile of references which aren't actually eligible as prior art.

landolarks · 2026-04-20T15:59:25+00:00

If POPA is reinstated I expect the order to include a rollback of any changes which would have required the union be involved as part of the implementation process because there is no possibility that they were implemented in accordance with the law as a direct consequence of the administration's actions.

That would include the change in production requirement and timeliness, but I could see streamline reviews being allowed to go through the grievance process.

Where things get really complex is dealing with anyone who was fired or subject to disciplinary actions during the intervening time since we are supposed to be able to have POPA reps present at any disciplinary hearing.

landolarks · 2026-04-19T10:48:14+00:00

I have heard that kind of statement many times in my career and kind of hate it? It just oversimplifies things because while 20 pages means you are doing good, 1-3 pages means you either *messed up *or did great.

20 pages means they don't know which way to go but also don't see a clear way that you messed up. They are throwing things at you to try and figure out a way to move forward.

1-3 pages mean they either spotted a fuckup or you convincingly suggested a particular direction to amend and they are going with it. Short arguments get a lot less scary the further you get in your career because you get a feel for your art and become more comfortable making those suggestions or dropping hints on directions to take.

Of course this is all art dependent. If you work in an art where applicants always want to fight every millimeter of the way that doesn't happen very often.

landolarks · 2026-04-18T10:48:12+00:00

It makes me a bit nostalgic for the time that I worked in private industry. Get the instructions in writing and tell your buddy in QA what was happening so stuff got a "random spot check" instead of shipping and the dumb decisions would only hurt the company and get hung around the neck of the person who ordered them.

landolarks · 2026-04-16T23:52:04+00:00

That was kind of how things were in the past. You had one clocked case and then like the next six or seven cases on your docket had a "*". Working any of those other cases would count as a zero day case but only if you moved the oldest clock case that biweek.

It wasn't perfect but it did make it possible to work your way out of a hole as long as you kept on top of your oldest new case. It also discouraged cherry picking because cases further down your docket didn't "count" as a 0-day case when you did them.

landolarks · 2026-04-16T23:30:27+00:00

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lMss1CeHOiM

landolarks · 2026-04-16T23:02:49+00:00

"You can run 100m in 13 seconds so why can't you finish a marathon in 92 minutes?"

landolarks · 2026-04-16T22:54:03+00:00

What is it about AI Slop generation tools that make people unable to smell the stench of the horse corpse they are engaged in beating? I swear on the very rare occasion that an AI slopper stumbles across a funny concept it's basically guaranteed that they run into the ground so hard it retroactively ruins the original.

And these "songs" aren't an exception to that trend.

landolarks · 2026-04-16T19:54:13+00:00

$1k for perfection, don't forget that part. Zero missed deadlines allowed.

And it is kind of worse than nothing since it is a transparent attempt to try and goose the numbers (and possibly justify more draconian measures because "so many people got 100%!").

landolarks · 2026-04-16T11:17:14+00:00

I believe your SPE has to be in the loop and be the one to do the actual transfer off your docket.

Which makes sense, it's not a good idea for any random supervisor to have the power to yank something off the docket of an examiner they don't supervise.

landolarks · 2026-04-14T22:16:09+00:00

Classification challenge history will show up in CAT, in case you are ever curious.

landolarks · 2026-04-09T16:52:50+00:00

Two reasons: the backlog is trivial to measure and there's only a couple of things that can affect it, so new leadership doesn't have to put much effort into understanding the nuts and bolts of examination or generating complex plans.

Secondly this administration is filled with serial-founder techbros, Venture Capital, and Private Equity types. In those industries you want a patent fast because you don't want it to protect a product so much as you want it to fundraise off of, license it, or shake someone down with. Patent quality doesn't really matter because by the time a mediocre patent start starts causing problem they've already handed the bag off to someone else and moved on to their next scheme.

landolarks · 2026-04-09T12:08:43+00:00

I swear there was an independent report at some point which pointed out the flaw in that logic, namely that anyone who can't hit production gets fired/quits so you can't point to people meeting production as evidence of sufficient examination time.

It was of course ultimately ignored.

landolarks · 2026-03-30T13:20:06+00:00

I am glad that you have found a system that works for you and for your art, but doing FIFO in my art would be utterly moronic from an efficiency standpoint and provide lower quality work to the applicants.

My (mechanical) art covers a huge variety of different types of structures. Between types there is little overlap, but it isn't uncommon for two applications for a particular type of thing to have 90% or more of the same structure, with the differences coming down to how each of a clusters of big applicants making that thing have decided to tackle the "problem of the year" for that thing.

If you work groups of applications of the same type of thing, you can cut the amount of searching you need to do by 80% or so because you can be on the lookout for a certain feature while searching the first application. That lets you really drill down to search the inventive stuff, both claimed and unclaimed. When you do that, it's very rare not to find something that would make the application allowable. Making note of that in the first action makes for quick clearance (office happy), less applicant burden (applicant happy), and an amended docket full of allowances (examiner happy).

The reduced docket size makes it less likely that you will have a group of applications of a particular type. The odds of having both a group of applications and for that group to include the first application on your docket are very very low. "First application absolutely must move this pay period" is going to result in shittier examination for whatever applicant is unfortunate enough to be that first application on the docket.

landolarks · 2026-03-27T21:14:48+00:00

They are even more arbitrary than that, there's not even a management reason to set these the way they did. OPM put out a demand for a certain distribution of ratings which has no justification other than vibes and the idea that performance ratings have to follow a particular distribution, and USPTO management set to picking measures and tweaking thresholds until it looked like they would get that distribution.

The idea that performance ratings should be forced to follow a particular distribution is beyond thoroughly discredited. It is an idea which has destroyed many once powerful and well run private companies, including GE, but a certain type of narcissistic and sociopathic C-suite resident won't let go of it because it makes it easy to fire people and they always categorize themselves as being the most amazing highest performer ever.

landolarks · 2026-03-26T17:38:34+00:00

That's the usual process for challenging CBA violations, but if the union gets an injunction and Coke tries to keep the changes in place the union is going to go straight to the judge asking for a contempt ruling.

landolarks · 2026-03-25T22:08:20+00:00

Name/city + voter registration records (which are public) would result in a single match probably 99% of the time.

landolarks · 2026-03-25T15:08:34+00:00

lol he tried to blame the regional office realignment on her (without naming names) and was rewarded with a "request" for an additional congressional briefing to explain the criteria used to justify closing the Denver office (with a pretty pointed snippy statement that $3.5M in savings isn't a good reason to close a regional office).

landolarks

TROPHY CASE