Ideas: March 2025 Release
THE MOTIVATION
The ideas section is a place to offload and share various ideas I’ve come up. Although these are only the ideas that have already been implemented, tested, something I’m not interested in doing, or technically incomplete (meaning there’s various technical progress that needs to be accomplished before it’s applicable), however, it has definitely been conceived by me independently. Then there’s the secret ideas that I can’t quite reveal yet because I want to develop it first or because it maybe patentable and I want to protect my ability to patent it and open source it globally. Overall, these ideas serve to share the kind of practical imagination I have but also to share the journey into the future:
Standard car safety equipment
Full 180 degree backup cameras with a large bright glare-free display should be standard safety equipment for all new vehicles. There’s no reason (aside being slightly less expensive) that car back up cameras have a less than a 180 degree field of view. It leaves massive blind spots right behind your car to the left and right of the camera. Sure you “could” use the rear view mirror and side mirrors, but that relies on peripheral vision while you’re focused on the camera screen. And it’s not like it’s too hard to view and understand a 180 degree view, I had a 180 degree webcam and it was very easy to see what was going on. Feels like when seat belts were an optional add on.
Low age cancers
When Horvath developed his epigenetic clock, he checked the ages of various cancers. He found that many cancers experienced accelerated aging by an average of 36 years, but some cancers had a low epigenetic age. These low age cancer had somatic mutations (mutations in the various guts of running the cell) but also TP53 mutations (this protein senses DNA damage and can stop cell division or if the DNA damage isn’t repaired commands the cell to kill itself). What would be an interesting experiment is to check what proteins/RNA the mutated TP53 binds to versus normal TP53. The difference could identify the start of the epigenetic machinery that governs aging. This even shows a potential where one could drug the interaction to interfere with TP53 and the epigenetic machinery to slow down aging. Although one experiment to do first is to confirm that the TP53 mutations by themselves are enough for the low age cancer result or take a low age cancer and swap it with normal TP53 to see if the low age phenotype goes away.
Squarespace or website builder staging
There should be a way to stage all changes you’re making to your website, so that all the changes can be published all at once. It should be doable, just by queuing up all the changes locally and then apply them all at once. This is important because you’d want to make sure visitors aren’t seeing incomplete webpages but you also want to regularly save your progress so you don’t lose it all if something happens.
Journal Light kickstarter
In hindsight, I should have released Journal Light rather than just leaving it as a portfolio piece. I abandoned the Kickstarter because I was trying to do some market research, at first with elderly online communities, and I got banned for “trying to sell something”. However, it was a finished relatively polished product that aside from the journaling companion AI did not cost me anything to run. I should have made the Kickstarter rewards simple stickers, thank yous, video calls, and/or approved feature requests. Here’s the link to the Kickstarter preview.
Chrome’s missing feature
Right now when you want to open a new tab and go to it using your mouse requires three clicks. Right click on link, click on open new tab, and then click on the new tab. But if Google added a another option to the right click menu bar “open new tab and go to that tab”, it would only require two clicks and avoid moving the mouse around back and forth from the tab bar. It may seem not very significant, but when you add up all the time that people spend making that extra click and moving the mouse back and forth, it’ll be saving collectively years of user time.
Safer vapes
Instead of using heat to vaporize the e-liquid, use an ultrasonic transducer. This removes the chemicals that can emerge from the heat based breakdown of chemicals and from incidentally burning the wick.
Boarding a moving ship
People would look at this video and be like well I guess that’s the only way to board a moving ship. But it’s extremely dangerous, if the person falls, they can be crushed between the two ships. So why not add a simple safety rope that’s tossed from the destination ship to the source ship and hook it up to the workers harness with the slack being pulled in.
Kindle whisper sync
Amazon’s Kindle app allows you to both read and listen to the narration of a book at the same time. But for some unknown reason, the only way you can scrub through the narration is by changing the page. This is extremely coarse. There should be a way to click on a particular word to set where the narration to picks up.
Open-source government software
Imagine the widespread adoption, security, and efficiency of linux but for government software like elections, crime reporting, traffic managing, etc. It would be a benefit for both developed and developing countries. Although I find it particularly useful for developing countries without the resources to develop a good solution on their own, since it’ll improve their efficiency and help them catch up in development much faster.
IPSC transformation efficiency
IPSC transformation efficiency is low but not astronomically low, it’s like 0.01%, which means there’s a semi limited number of factors that combined together allow the cell to revert back to an IPSC. Like if there were four factors that have a one in ten chance of happening then you have what we see.
Neural-link telepathy
I think the best way to implement telepathy is not with real-time telepathy since there’s a lot of monkey thoughts, but to record your thought first, review it yourself, then share it.
Ultra-secure library computers
What if library computers instead of being insecure devices make them ultra-secure devices that people can trust over their regular computer. Setup it up like tiny telephone booths where you sit. Then you could host things like electronic voting or give people too poor to afford computer+internet a safe way to access things like government services (which goes a long way towards leveling the playing field and allowing government services to go digital). Library card could slot into the computer to automatically log you into your desktop.