We shouldn’t let people get used to the idea that software fails - Rakhim.org https://rakhim.org/2018/07/software-shouldnt-fail
Bad idea of the day: replace your planner with a planchette and let DEAD GHOSTS set your daily schedule, remind you of appointments, etc.
Bad idea of the day: 9p/scuttlebutt bridge
Bad idea of the day: 9p/activitypub bridge
Hot take: the space of all possible understandable statements is composed almost exclusively of references to complex & abstract ideas with a tenuous relationship to any physical reality & unclear test conditions
Bad idea of the day: Get Annals of the Perrigues style themed corpora type output in your templates by adjusting probabilities by the semantic distance between a choice & some word that is the locus of a theme, with word2vec or something
Is a hole a real thing, or just a place where something isn’t? | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/is-a-hole-a-real-thing-or-just-a-place-where-something-isnt
Revolutionary ideas always are masked as a return to older ideas or appeal to common sense ONLY because they can’t be expressed without the intellectual groundwork that makes them seem inevitable once fully comprehended.
Bad idea of the day: 72-hour osdev jam
Whoever decided to nae a government agency after a thing that sets your head on fire if you forget your password too many times should also be too self-aware to think having one of these is a good idea.
Bad idea of the day: Jojo Stands but they’re all Lemon Demon / Neil Cicerega songs
Bad idea of the day: a physical crank for rolling back commits
Bad idea of the day: a fuzzer disguised as a usb charger
Bad idea of the day: A lootbox service for public-domain work – every month you get a hardcover of a PD book & a vinyl of a PD recording
The difficulty in translating ‘dokidoki’ for non-otaku audiences is a great example of why conceptual frames are a useful idea. You can literally translate it as ‘badump’ because it’s the heartbeat sfx, but you lose something.
Bad idea of the day: Use ssb to coordinate pinning of ipfs objects
Bad idea of the day: Scroll back through GUI input events & application states like you scroll back through shell history; inject conditionals and loops; use speculative execution of applications to show projected state from these changes.
Bad idea of the day: A language with APL-style syntax and PROLOG-style semantics
Bad idea of the day: A small dedicated machine (like a chumby, maybe based on the raspberry pi) that ships with ipfs & ssb/patchwork, casts from ipfs or peertube to TVs.
The khipu code: the knotty mystery of the Inkas’ 3D records | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/the-khipu-code-the-knotty-mystery-of-the-inkas-3d-records
Bad idea of the day: A tarot deck formatted like a set of business cards, one for the egregore of each arcanum (major and minor – not just trumps)
Bad idea of the day: Distort text so that, from a distance, it will be read as a QR code containing the same text – a typographical pseudo-quine
Return the pop-culture idea of the MIB to where it was in the mid-60s: tall, pale, completely hairless, wearing bright red lipstick, and with bulging eyes and a robotic, monotone vocal cadence.
article idea: media (esp. social media) as perverse psychogeography, & the inhabitants of transient spaces by career & disposition
Bad idea of the day: treating asemic combinations of dictionary words as an aesthetic to be appropriated by commerce, and appropriating it with commerce, thus making attempts to identify dictionary-based chaffing techniques lossier
Bad idea of the day: creating ads that target asemic combinations of dictionary words order to identify people who use dictionary-based chaffing techniques
Bad idea of the day: creating ads that target things that are in dictionaries but could never be sold in order to identify people who use dictionary-based chaffing techniques
Bad idea of the day: running a script that speaks random words aloud all day while you leave your phone at home, in order to chaff your audio-surveillance-based ad targeting
You’re simply not that big a deal: now isn’t that a relief? | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/youre-simply-not-that-big-a-deal-now-isnt-that-a-relief
Bad idea of the day: edit executable files by removing any bytes that are not numberwang
There’s this idea in Land & Zizek that the iterative is at war with the rational / the evolutionary at war with the revolutionary b/c the former saps the discontent that powers the latter
Bad idea of the day: a noir story set in the insular world of professional c-list celebrity impersonators
I should probably implement an example version of transcopyright for my repo of ‘important data structures, algorithms, & ideas that have no easily-understood isolated example implementations’ (https://github.com/enkiv2/misc/tree/master/ds-lib) since it’s already mostly xanadu shit
Possible article idea: ‘the case for chaffing’
How do elites manage to hijack voters’ ideas of themselves? | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/how-do-elites-manage-to-hijack-voters-ideas-of-themselves
Bad idea of the day: A parody of The Haunting of Hill House called The Haunting of White House, from the perspective of a scatterbrained narcissist who is influenced by the angry ghosts of the dead to join the government.
Psychogenic shivers: why we get the chills when we aren’t cold | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/psychogenic-shivers-why-we-get-the-chills-when-we-arent-cold
Bad idea of the day: the melophone – it plays a tape loop on the line if you pick up the handset
Why Everyone Loves Macaroni and Cheese | Essay | Zócalo Public Square http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2018/05/24/everyone-loves-macaroni-cheese/ideas/essay/
Bad idea of the day: Use eliza as your therapist for an hour a day for years, then train a markov bot on the logs.
What caused Elon Musk’s Twitter meltdown? He’s enraged people stopped believing his tall tales. - Vox https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/5/30/17405922/elon-musk-twitter-meltdown-tesla-valuation-bubble-model-3-promises-reality
Bad idea of the day: A fediverse node that only federates over packet radio via moon bounce
Writing long, overly complex, & logically flawed apologia of bad mainstream ideas in order to recast them as revolutionary is a growth industry. (See the ‘intellectual dark web’, whose major unifying trait is boringly normie positions.) Why not reach for a surreal or absurd take?
Bad idea of the day: Put the ‘hyper’ modifier key back on the keyboard, but you hold it while typing to create hyperlinks, press it while clicking to open a hyperlink
Bad idea of the day: altcoin where the proof of work is correctly decoding messages from extraterrestrial civilizations
Bad idea of the day: As soon as a topic is identified to be trending, hide all conversation about it from anyone not already in the thread. Keep it hidden for 24 hours.
Bad idea of the day: Take advertising jingles and slow them down by 8x or more, remix them together, add infrasound and 19hz binaural beats.
Bad idea of the day: Replace each word with another with maximum delta in word vector space but minimum edit distance, or vice versa. Tune weights until result is interesting.
Bad idea of the day: MC Eliza, who rephrases your diss track in the form of a question. “How does that make you feel? Tell me more. Perhaps in your fantasies my flow is basic.”
Bad idea of the day: use those ear-mounted accelerometers that normally wake people who are dozing off at the wheel to instead redden the display, replace desktop background with surreal and dreamlike images, fade in quiet calming ambient music, raise the thermostat
Bad idea of the day: use eye tracking to save power by blanking the parts of the display not within the light cone of the fovea
Bad idea of the day: a full-sized hand crank on the side of your keyboard that acts as a scrollwheel with large (page per click) delta
Bad idea of the day: a dual-layer LCD (like the 3d TVs from a few years ago) that uses the top layer exclusively for hover behavior
Bad idea of the day: a gesture based interface that uses DSP on the audio produced by a theramin to identify gestures, while playing that audio for learning feedback
Bad idea of the day: A browser extension that links everything in your browser cache with a fake file whose name is a hash of that item, serves those fake files over bittorrent, and, for all URLs whose expiration date is in the future, keeps a distributed table of URL to hash & attempts to fetch from bittorrent before from http
Bad idea of the day: philosophy speed-dating: get a prime number of doctoral candidates, split into two lines, and have them give hot takes to each other for 5 minutes on a stated topic before moving on.
Bad idea of the day: run podcast transcripts through char-rnn and then through the duplex speech synthesizer to generate hours of nonsense indistinguishable from NPR
Bad idea of the day: a browser extension that gives you long-now-dates by prefixing a zero to all four digit numbers
Bad idea of the day: an irc-style chat interface for mastodon, where whatever you type is posted & you just see your home timeline
Bad idea of the day: an irc-style chat interface for mastodon, where whatever you type is posted
Bad idea of the day: an irc-style chat interface for mastodon, where whatever you type is posted
Bad idea of the day: an extension that disables all CSS on all pages, and then allows you to approve rules one by one, or edit them in place
Bad idea of the day: a parser-based IF where the parser language is turing-complete
Bad idea of the day: a system for sharing playlists of things that aren’t audio or online video, like themed triple-features or reading lists, so you can curate or browse that kind of human recommendation
Oracle’s Network Computer: Larry Ellison’s Too-Early Idea https://tedium.co/2018/04/12/larry-ellison-network-computer-history/
Bad idea of the day: a letter-writing campaign to members of CS program accreditation boards (at their home addresses) requesting algorithmic bias & data ownership be a part of mandatory ethics classes in the curriculum.
Bad idea of the day: an emoji moon but it renders as whatever phase the moon is actually in
Bad idea of the day: creepypasta in the form of a walkthrough for a nonexistent game from an alternate universe where a game like that described is normal
Are you really Facebookâs product? The history of a dangerous idea. https://slate.com/technology/2018/04/are-you-really-facebooks-product-the-history-of-a-dangerous-idea.html
Bad idea of the day: a program that computes the degree to which the response to a query meets gricean maxims and, if beyond a threshhold, produces potential implicatures, on a synthetic logic-based language and an ontology
Bad idea of the day: a prolog repl, except pred definitions are checked in reverse definition order and all pred definitions not starting with underscore are persistent. you can export the persistent environment image as a regular prolog file.
Bad idea of the day: twitch plays pictionary
The reason it’s a bad idea is that the kind of people who badmouth poststructuralist methods as unscientific will do so even while using them. (See: Jordon Peterson)
Bad idea of the day: quantitative poststructuralism (with corpus statistics ofc)
The lucid dreaming playbook: how to take charge of your dreams | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/the-lucid-dreaming-playbook-how-to-take-charge-of-your-dreams
Bad idea of the day: an all-robot jam band
Dungeons and Dragons, not chess and Go: why AI needs roleplay | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/dungeons-and-dragons-not-chess-and-go-why-ai-needs-roleplay
What we talk about when we talk about post-truth | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-post-truth
Bad idea of the day: use the luma channel from one VCR and the chroma channel from a different one
Bad idea of the day: video theramin
In the gap between writer and reader the novel comes to life | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/in-the-gap-between-writer-and-reader-the-novel-comes-to-life
The desire to fit in is the root of almost all wrongdoing | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/the-desire-to-fit-in-is-the-root-of-almost-all-wrongdoing
Bad idea of the day: a game show with fantastic cash prizes, where contestants distinguish between real and fake headlines from the past week.
Bad idea of the day: Require a 60% majority in a state-wide popular vote for congressional redistricting.
Bad idea of the day: Wear a rubber band on your wrist and snap it every time you say ‘technology’, ‘market’, ‘end user’, ‘standard’, ‘I’, or ‘is’.
Bad idea of the day: ‘mastogone’ – a script that identifies people you’re following who haven’t posted in more than a year
Bad idea of the day: Instead of an index fund, choose stocks completely at random, and buy or sell/short them completely at random, one share at a time, once every ten minutes or so.
Joe Armstrong - Keynote: The Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science - Code BEAM SF 2018 - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I_jE0l7sYQ
âKnow thyselfâ is not just silly advice: itâs actively dangerous | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/know-thyself-is-not-just-silly-advice-its-actively-dangerous
If we disagree about morality, how can we teach it? | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/if-we-disagree-about-morality-how-can-we-teach-it
#nanogenmo idea: Create a pantheon with thematic names, modeled on sumerian, & sumerian-style myths around them. Ex., a god of water could be called Ena or Nina (since ‘a’ means water, & ‘en’ & ‘nin’ are prefixes for god names) & have hundreds of generated epithets based on domain
Bad idea of the day: A bot that generates not surrealistic and impossible recipes but merely strange Futurist Cookbook style recipes you could actually cook.
Bad idea of the day: An RPG whose stats are traits like alienation, shadow integration, neurosis
In The Eternal… http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2018/01/31/in-the-eternal-inferno-fiends-torment-ronald-coase-with-the-fate-of-his-ideas/
Bad idea of the day: donate synthetic diamond machines to hackerspaces
Bad idea of the day: Take two movies & drop or combine frames until they are exactly the same length. Then, interpolate the two, so that in each frame, every other line is a different movie. Then, interpolate the FFT of the soundtrack so that, for some band size, every other band is the other movie.
Bad idea of the day: Rearrange the frames of a movie so that each frame is followed by the remaining frame that has the minimum (or maximum) difference, in terms first of brightness and then of color
Bad idea of the day: Sort the frames of a movie by average color & play it that way
Bad idea of the day: A voice assistant specifically designed to answer toddlers when they ask ‘why’.
Philosophy has a lot to learn from film | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/philosophers-have-much-to-learn-from-the-great-filmmakers