Ideas: September 2024 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. It serves to share the kind of practical imagination I have but also to share the journey into the future:
Personal process to innovation
So my process to coming up with these ideas is that if I need to think widely about different ideas (like ChatAI or Smart Paper/Next-gen calculator) I generally been most successful letting idle thoughts just muse about things and then realizing there’s a problem and a solution. And it seems straightforward but it’s harder to notice the problem/solution than you think especially with idle thinking, usually you just pass over it. I “catch” ideas like how you realize you’re in a lucid dream, it’s kind of a skill. ChatAI I thought of while walking in a park with my mom. I came up with Smart Paper when I woke up randomly in the early morning and was trying to go back to sleep (I was thinking about calculators). Once I find a new idea or direction, I can usually drill deep into it coming up with related ideas. So yeah, if I can give advice about how I come up with ideas, this is it.
Locking desktop apps and webapps
Similar to how on mobile OSes you can lock specific apps behind an additional password or biometric, you should be able to do the same thing with webapps on your computer. They’re completely analogous ideas, and it would be strange to not have the ability to lock apps on mobile, yet it hasn’t been implemented on the computer yet.
Smartphone Rear Display
So it would be useful to have a rear display to see what the shot looks like with the rear cameras, however, to keep the display from being an eye sore, you can use an electrochromic glass layer to hide the display once it’s done.
AR ghost
This idea comes from the game Dark Souls where there’s a game mechanic that let’s you see other people who’ve gone through areas of the level before you. This idea turns out can be turned into a real one by using AR to provide a disembodied head along with the field of view the user was looking. The location is provided through SLAM to map the environment and provide user location, and the headset itself provides the direction. You can then watch where people have been and where they’ve looked. A potential application of this idea is in search and rescue, it can provide firefighters a way to clear a building or monitor where in the rubble search and rescue staff have already looked. A different field like detective work could also benefit from seeing what areas have already been combed.
Managing Extremism
I’ve struggled with the internal debate as to whether extremist content should be banned from social media or not. However, I think I found one nugget of wisdom to guide (although probably not define) the conversation. It’s that extremist content grown in isolation (ban content from platform) is worse than extremist content grown in opposition (allow content to exist on platform).
360 soldier cam
Soldiers could wear a helmet with a 360 degree camera built into it, and live stream the feed to a team of staff that are watching and checking every corner for anything they might miss. Turning a single soldier into a team improving lethality, survivability, and capability.
Proper posture
An office chair with shoulder restraints similar to those used in roller coaster rides to prevent users from leaning forward and slouching enforcing proper posture at all times. Hell it might even be comfortable.
Practice Combat drone
Used for either shooting or boxing, but it’s a drone that flies around you as you try to punch, kick, or shoot it. Each hit will reset it’s position to a brand new location. The drone is in a roll cage so that it’s propellers don’t get caught, and it can auto-right itself if it lands upside down. The technology is already there, it’s just the development.
Science vs engineering
Science is trying to understand something and engineering is trying to do something. That’s why they’re so intertwined and can sometimes be difficult to tell the difference.
Branches of consciousness
Does imagining another person give it consciousness in a way? Like in dreams where people act like separate people, are they a separate consciousness? People with multiple personality disorders suffer from this. Overall it’s an interesting area of potential research.
Malaria Ponchos
In addition to pesticide treated bed nets, potentially the fabric can be used in other ways like a pesticide treated poncho. It might seem kind of uneffective, but it does provide some level of protection, and currently there’s zero protection when people are out and about.
Security loophole with Smartwatches
If you’re incapacitated (drugged, knocked out, or asleep) while you’re wearing the watch they can get access to your SMS two factor authentication, since it only locks when you take off the watch. Although since Apple is pretty good at identifying 2FA SMS codes, maybe just put those text messages behind the passcode again. Maybe setting it up at least as a option. 2FA SMS could be shown blurred in ui, then tapping it requests passcode to unlock it.
Inflation adjusted wages
During inflation would it make sense to promise a cost of living adjustment, pay raise, and/or bonus in the future after inflation is under control, so that adjustments don’t lead to a positive feedback loop of spiraling inflation. Could also maybe collectively stagger when the additional pay comes in, maybe just randomly based on social security numbers. This way pay at least keeps up with inflation, and you don’t have the current situation where most people are underpaid and struggling.
In conflict but not in combat
A generally useful idea where disagreements shouldn’t turn into a mud slugging fest.
Life lesson for kids
Give them a bit of money for doing their chores, but give them a lot of money (like hundreds/thousands) for getting good grades. It’ll really teach them it pays more to be smart.
Mining Mars
In the long term, mining Mars for precious elements make it a very viable reason for colonizing it (unless it becomes fully robotic), because in the long term entropy (throwing away things) is going to make all the precious elements on Earth spread out everywhere in a way you can’t mine it effectively anymore (unless we mine landfills effectively). And yeah you can mine an asteroid but what does that compare to mining a whole planet. Plus the starships could make the back and forth trips robotically. Basically it’s not just a pipe dream.
Streamlining Entrepreneurship
Particularly in areas with a slowing economy, to assist with entrepreneurship, governments should provide full assistance in meeting all legal and regulatory requirements for people trying to start businesses so that they can focus on starting/running the business. Business ideas should be vetted and the excellent ideas should be expedited for assistance (legal and financial) and more benign ones on a standard waitlist. And if it costs too much to provide assistance, find a way to change the laws so that it isn’t. I have no doubt that the current way of letting the entrepreneur figure out everything themselves is a sizable deterrent. Because it was for me too, it was difficult and scary that you might screw up, and this is coming from a straight A student in high school and attended UC Berkeley the best public college in the world. We have housing assistance, medical insurance subsidies, college tuition grants, business grants, etc, but helping someone setup a new business doesn’t get any help. Sure there’s the SBA (Small Business Administration), but even at a mega-city like San Francisco, they really don’t have any resources to do simple things like suggest a vetted lawyer to figure out permitting/licensing/regulatory questions, how to use quickbooks, or how to assess which business insurance to use. A well-funded SBA would be a very interesting change in the dynamic to how businesses start, and could be the solution to a world where automation has eliminated many jobs, people switch from jobs to building new companies and stirring the pot of innovation and invention.