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Michael Frank Martin

Michael Frank Martin

This is a personal blog, and the opinions here are not necessarily shared by anybody else, including my employer.

📍 Saratoga, California

Invention as Exploration

Richard Sutton's Bitter Lesson is that general methods leveraged by more computation beat specialized intuition encoded in domain-specific algorithms. The Bitter Lesson gets lots of attention these days because of its implications for artificial intelligence. But for a patent lawyer like me, it's more interesting for

Problems with the Problem of Synchronization

The allure of the rigor and predictive power of physical theory is a perennial temptation in the study of problems in economics and sociology. The hypothesis articulated in the The Problem of Synchronization, provides a case study. It posits that markets are fundamentally mechanisms for temporal coordination, utilizing price signals

Patents, Trust, and the Health of the Startup Ecosystem

From the wrangling over the definition of AGI between Microsoft and OpenAI (thanks to the terms of an exclusive IP license) to the recent acqui-hires of the founders of Character.AI, Windsurf, Scale AI, and more (absent many of their colleagues) there has never been a better teaching moment for

Community in Silicon Valley

I've been thinking about an essay by Chris Arnade called How to build the perfect city for the last few weeks. To sum it up in my own words: Everybody, everywhere wants the sense of belonging that comes from community. Where is community in Silicon Valley? I have

The Gravity of Envy

The Invisible Third Rail Envy is an almost invisible third rail in social life. In a sense it's analogous to gravity. We go through our daily lives focusing more on how to satisfy our immediate physical and emotional needs. Most physics on earth is dominated by the electromagnetic

Life Choices as a High-Dimensional Optimization

The High-Dimensional Life Landscape Picture each life decision happening across thousands of dimensions: career fulfillment, financial security, relationship quality, health, personal growth, family time, creative expression, social impact, location preferences, value alignment, intellectual stimulation, and countless others. A surprising mathematical result is that the number of true local maxima decresases

Learn to Code. Go to law school.

tldr; If you asked me today whether or not one should 1) learn to code, or 2) go to law school and what the future of the profession looks like for both coders and lawyers, then I would say the future is bright. AI has lowered the transactions costs to

The Prehistory of Startups

It seems like the common thread that binds together these different cultures is a commitment to finding win-wins through the use of science and technology to build new products and services that give people a new way to communicate.

Chaotic Progress

How vigorous competition among public political parties and private for-profit companies has promoted progress by balancing the personal interests of new entrants and incumbent elites

Friends, inventors, countrymen, lend me your ears

I come to bury software patents, not to praise them. The evil that invalid patents do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones. So let it be with software patents. The noble reformers have told you software patents were ambiguous: If it were so, it was