Bad idea of the day: time lapse of just really failing to build and paint miniatures
Bad idea of the day: remove every frame of koyansiquatski that is a multiple of a fibbonacci number
The people vs tyranny: the secular martyrdom of John Lilburne | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/the-people-vs-tyranny-the-secular-martyrdom-of-john-lilburne
What Einstein meant by ‘God does not play dice’ | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/what-einstein-meant-by-god-does-not-play-dice
The Journal of Controversial Ideas”academic freedom sans responsibility is reckless | Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/the-journal-of-controversial-ideas-academic-freedom-sans-responsibility-is-reckless/
Bad idea of the day: furniture modeled on cray equipment, with spaces to put your own computers in
Bad idea of the day: Sieze the amazon.com domain and point it to the wikipedia article for the Amazon river
Bad idea of the day: transpose Pretty Hate Machine into a major key, shift every word in the lyrics to the least semantically distant word with a more positive sentiment score, and call the result Pretty Great Machine
Why the Enlightenment was not the age of reason | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/why-the-enlightenment-was-not-the-age-of-reason
A Big Little Idea Called Legibility https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-legibility/
We still live in the long shadow cast by the idea of Man-the-Hunter | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/we-still-live-in-the-long-shadow-cast-by-the-idea-of-man-the-hunter
The idea of intellectual property is nonsensical and pernicious | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/the-idea-of-intellectual-property-is-nonsensical-and-pernicious
Bad idea of the day: to combat writer’s block, use automatic writing as a divinatory method to predict what you would have written if you didn’t have writer’s block
Bad idea of the day: Rather than having a ‘madness’ mechanic, have a ‘stress’ mechanic that causes perceptual distortion (tunnel vision, increased color contrast, blurred vision, louder environmental sounds) & motor distortion (worse aim, movement delays)
Bad idea of the day: replace whitespace with color changes
Bad idea of the day: sort r/all by controversial
Bad idea of the day: A full performance of Smoke on the Water built by remixing clips of people at Guitar Center failing to perform Smoke on the Water & random words spoken by people in Guitar Center
Bad idea of the day: a smartphone with a full-sized model m keyboard and a full-sized bell handset but a regular smartphone sized screen that is also e-ink
Bad idea of the day: a smartphone with a full-sized model m keyboard and a full-sized bell handset but a regular smartphone sized screen
Bad idea of the day: drawing a unicursal hexagram in the center of the Magic Roundabout in Hartfordshire
Bad idea of the day: A gritty reboot of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In starring Rowan Atkinson and Dmitri Martin
Bad idea of the day: run deOldify on manga pages, consider the new color schemes canon, move to a surreal universe of floating pastels
Bad idea of the day: a social network where post literally fade because the contrast is computed with the inverse of time. A spinoff where bugs slowly eat away at posts.
Bad idea of the day: style transfer every frame of the new suspiria to look like the old suspiria
Bad idea of the day: Prevent any party from having representatives in more than 10% of the seats in congress or senate, including at the state level. If any party goes over 10% we redo the election in all affected areas.
Acting like an extravert has benefits, but not for introverts | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/acting-like-an-extravert-has-benefits-but-not-for-introverts
Bad idea of the day: write poems, one a day, each on the back side of a tile, cementing it into place after you write it. your bathroom wall becomes a hidden book. tell no one.
Bad idea of the day: a database of maps of conceptual spaces that are drawn like maps of physical spaces (ex., xkcd’s map of the internet & Knuppe’s map of the fields of mathematics)
Bad idea of the day: a self-adhesive battery-powered white noise generator & speaker, which can be affixed to the microphone on your laptop
Bad idea of the day: a NOT operation on types, such that a type can be define as the failure to qualify as some other combination of types or some other boolean type expression
Bad idea of the day: deep fried peanut butter and mayonaise sandwiches
Bad idea of the day: aromatherapy vapes
Bad idea of the day: A vibrator implanted in the pelvis that is controlled by reports of earthquake severity
Bad idea of the day: plan 9 from whitespace, a full implementation of plan9 in an extended version of the whitespace programming language, which ships with a printed copy of the source code (a blank notebook)
Bad idea of the day: a minikanren in prolog
Bad idea of the day: The Same Oblique Strategy Card Every Day. (‘repetition is a form of change’, obv.)
Bad idea of the day: twitch plays strip poker
Bad idea of the day: twitch plays cards against humanity
Bad idea of the day: twitch plays exquisite corpse
CEOs should have been the fall guys; why are they still heroes? | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/ceos-should-have-been-the-fall-guys-why-are-they-still-heroes
Bad idea of the day: an extension that replaces ‘OK’ on every button with ‘Dolt’, like God & the original Macintosh UI team intended
Bad idea of the day: serious & well-researched answers to stupid questions, as a podcast
Bad idea of the day: Use mechanical turk to do a novel-length exquisite corpse, one sentence at a time.
Bad idea of the day: Multi-cursor and annotation support for vim
Bad idea of the day: An algorithm that creates textual descriptions of images watches TV, creating a description from each frame, which is then used to generate a new image & the video is resynthesized
Bad idea of the day: watching FEWER horror movies in october because you need a break from the rest of the year
Hot take: ambient computing is actually a cool & good idea, as long as no for-profit entities are involved in it. It only becomes horrible when you add business.
Bad idea of the day: turn music into text by substituting note frequency with word frequency
Bad idea of the day: A video game adaptation of Lethem’s Gun With Occasional Music in the style of the Monkey Island series, with a mechanic involving mixing custom blends of forgetol/regretol/etc & replacing people’s stashes with them.
Bad idea of the day: a d20 where every face is labeled 1
Bad idea of the day: a bot that posts random joke punchlines but not the actual joke
Bad idea of the day: a robot that spills or dribbles paint onto canvas until the image is recognized as an object, then names the painting after that object.
The Importance of Simple Ideas - Cyborgology https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2018/09/03/the-importance-of-simple-ideas/
Bad idea of the day: A book called Acknowledgements that’s just a book-length acknowledgements section thanking people for contributing to the book, House-That-Jack-Built-style
Bad idea of the day: a wikipedia project for creating and improving articles that are uniquely relevant to countries that qualified for internet.org
The interesting ideas in Datasette https://simonwillison.net/2018/Oct/4/datasette-ideas/
Bad idea of the day: a machine that uses oscillators to manufacture high-quality sand
Bad idea of the day: inform7 repl as command shell
Bad idea of the day: surreal and disturbing powerpoint presentations as public performance art
How to tell the difference between persuasion and manipulation | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/how-to-tell-the-difference-between-persuasion-and-manipulation
Computers can solve your problem. You may not like the answer. - The Boston Globe https://apps.bostonglobe.com/ideas/graphics/2018/09/equity-machine/
Why the high-tech ideas of ‘Bucky’ Fuller are back in vogue | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/why-the-high-tech-ideas-of-bucky-fuller-are-back-in-vogue
The Joe Rogan Experience Is a Safe Space to Launder Bad Ideas - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kv9qd/the-joe-rogan-experience-is-a-safe-space-to-launder-bad-ideas
Bad idea of the day: univocalipogram.social
Bad idea of the day: Current prisoners have mandatory voting while non-prisoners (including ex-prisoners) have the option to vote
Let’s bring back the Sabbath as a radical act against ‘total work’ | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/lets-bring-back-the-sabbath-as-a-radical-act-against-total-work
Book idea (high effort, dunno if I’ll do it): a survey of alternative computing systems in the style of Seven Languages in Seven Weeks. What should I include other than smalltalk, colorforth, oberon, templeos, and menuet?
Bad idea of the day: a movie musical called Greece, for extra confusion
Bad idea of the day: a sanrio-branded sentient shoelace character who is nervous about fraying named Aglets-ko
Bad idea of the day: The HOWLing: angel-headed hipsters fight werewolves whose blood is running money and whose mind is vast machinery
Bad idea of the day: Phibes recut as a silent film
Bad idea of the day: a retelling of Dracula where Van Hellsing and Renfield are merged into the same character
Bad idea of the day: Batman (1968) vs Doctor Phibes: two rich geniuses who love gadgets and labelling things fight each other in an art-deco city with a comically incompetent police force
Bad idea of the day: replace every word in a book with a sentence in another book that is an anagram of the NATO word-spelling of it
Bad idea of the day: replace every sentence in some book with a sentence from a different gutenberg book that is an anagram of it
Simplicity or style: what makes a sentence a masterpiece? | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/simplicity-or-style-what-makes-a-sentence-a-masterpiece
Bad idea of the day: an anki deck of oblique strategies
Bad idea of the day: using spaced repetition software to remind yourself to meditate on open questions
Bad idea of the day: Expand citizenship: you are automatically a citizen of a state if you were born there, if either parent is from there, if you have lived there for more than 6 months, or if you own or rent any land there.
Bad idea of the day: a metal detector that plays a guitar solo instead of beeping
Bad idea of the day: A video game called ‘infodump’ where the primary mechanic is literally using a wiki/world bible to research lore.
Bad idea of the day: automatically replace words with synonyms that have more phoneme sequences in common with the previous word (post-processing)
Bad idea of the day: turn the entire military budget into a sovergn wealth fund
Bad idea of the day: ‘twitch writes a novel’: the previous ~15 words are shown & the top ~20 next words based on a markov model of some corpus are voted on over a 2 minute period (going to the first item, if no votes are cast) until 50k words are written.
Bad idea of the day: disguise copies of bolo’bolo as constitution pamphlets
Bad idea of the day: Select a bunch of positions, and pay people on mechanical turk to identify the strongest arguments for & against that position they can think of.
Bad idea of the day: A movie podcast where the host double-features the Nth best-rated and Nth worst-rated movies on IMDB & compares them.
Another way to talk about Maybe Logic re: map-territory confusion: a lot of people don’t put error bars on their imagination. So, they make a prediction, the universe says ‘nope’, and they’ve got no idea where to start debugging bc every inference looks equally strong
Hey guys any of you have an idea why the udev daemon is pinned slightly above 100% CPU like all the time now?
Band name of the day: an invitation to bad ideas
Bad idea of the day: a foot pedal for bold and a second foot pedal for italic
Bad idea of the day: pay a million-account botnet to all change their display names to Elon Musk simultaneously
story idea: a fringe political party backed by organized crime controls a network of seemingly-independent roadside palmistry shops & new-age stores – organizing fortunes & stocking books in a plan to manipulate voters
story idea: after computing the cenusus, an unexpected conclusion – about 10% of the population is gone, with no explanation
Bad idea of the day: a twitter bot that responds to messages by paying mechanical turk five cents to produce a response – and in the absence of mentions, pays mechanical turk five cents to produce one tweet per day
For weeks I’ve been getting 400 trying to load any youtube page on one machine (on chrome), and starting last week another machine started having the same problem. Any idea what’s happening?
Thread by @enkiv2@www.lord-enki.net: “An article I’m considering writing: the (explicit) political use of ghost stories. The idea of the ‘confederate soldier ghost’ was explicitl […]” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1021352318028087297.html
Bad idea of the day: a reality tv show where Stephen King and Joe Hill move into a cramped apartment together while both trying to write new novels, confusingly titled King of the Hill
Bad idea of the day: an anthology of human-selected machine-generated fiction and poetry from various codebases, with introductions explaining the generation method, selected on the same lines as a literary anthology
Bad idea of the day: a movie review show where you review imaginary movies that you wish were coming out but never will, and you give them bad reviews