The revolutionary idea revealing the body’s hormonal democracy | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/the-revolutionary-idea-revealing-the-bodys-hormonal-democracy

I feel like the simplified and cliched ideas about slashers that informed Scream kept me from discovering the strange and wonderful world of actually-good slashers like Sleepaway Camp, Happy Birthday to Me, Tourist Trap, etc. Like, a lot of them are surreal and moody and great.

Bad idea of the day: Do a free machine-generated text class at a library (using tracery or something), self-publish the course materials as a book (with proceeds going to the library as donations), & get a couple copies for the stacks.

Misbehaving: being clever and wicked is a form of creativity | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/misbehaving-being-clever-and-wicked-is-a-form-of-creativity

Gossip was a powerful tool for the powerless in Ancient Greece | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/gossip-was-a-powerful-tool-for-the-powerless-in-ancient-greece

This is math-heavy but the idea that ‘keys are meta-taxonomic dimensions’ reminds me of ZigZag & other elements make me think of parallel prolog-likes like mycroft – should re-read carefully later: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2009002_qod.pdf

Apparently, when I pitched the idea of replacing backtracking with forking (with lazy side effecting of course) a ~year ago, I was reinventing STEPS work from 2008: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2008003_john.pdf

Interesting idea: create a search-by-meaning for functions using the memoization database http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2017002_memoization.pdf

One of the ideas I was playing with in MfoM was the distinction between player & player character with a ‘possession’ metaphor, & how that relates to the time loop. I didn’t go so far with it. Maybe in Book of the Damned I’ll have the player be a possessing-spirit.

Legal standards invoke the ‘reasonable person’. Who is it? | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/legal-standards-invoke-the-reasonable-person-who-is-it

USA Wants to Restrict AI Exports: A Stupid and Dangerous Idea – Lauren Weinstein’s Blog https://lauren.vortex.com/2019/01/02/usa-wants-to-restrict-ai-exports-a-stupid-and-dangerous-idea

Bad idea of the day: train chess engines to play like specific historic players

Why symmetry gets really interesting when it is broken | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/why-symmetry-gets-really-interesting-to-physics-when-it-is-broken

Why a market model is destroying the safeguards of the professions | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/why-a-market-model-is-destroying-the-safeguards-of-the-professions

Bad idea of the day: Evangelion fanfiction in the form of Kaji’s hand-annotated copy of a Fire in the Valley style popular history of the development of Tokyo-3, casting Gendo as an Elon Musk type figure.

Modernist Microfiche Minotaur : “‘User agent’ is a great idea that has been weirdl…” - Eldritch Café https://eldritch.cafe/@/101360959314313478

Bad idea of the day: A shuffle-novel in the form of an oracle deck, with strange or absurd predictions & the premise that it is describing the life of the parallel version of the reader who lives in the world described by the deck.

Bad idea of the day: International ‘journalist exchange’ agreements – newspapers in different countries have an arrangement where they’ll trade journalists periodically & reprint each other’s stories in translation, by entering into clubs.

Slaying the Snark: what nonsense verse tells us about reality | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/slaying-the-snark-what-nonsense-verse-tells-us-about-reality

Folding Ideas - End of Eva Follow Up - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTAQhgXD75I

Folding Ideas - End of Evangelion and the Audience Author Membrane - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAMAwErYRpQ

Bad idea of the day: autonomous self-driving solar-powered vending machines

Bad idea of the day: set your terminal font to Brand New Roman before starting to code

Bad idea of the day: bumble bee mounted wifi mesh network APs

Why your favourite film baddies all have a truly evil laugh | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/why-your-favourite-film-baddies-all-have-a-truly-evil-laugh

Sedimentation: the existentialist challenge to stereotypes | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/sedimentation-the-existentialist-challenge-to-stereotypes

An ant colony has memories that its individual members don’t have | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/an-ant-colony-has-memories-that-its-individual-members-dont-have

‘User empowerment’ is a useful idea that gets abused to glorify user-hostile design. It’s usually used to refer to situations where the user is empowered to do as we (devs or PMs) tell them, or where the empowerment is too abstract to be proven.

One of the reasons I’m so hard on the original macintosh is that the team appropriated fantastic ideas from better projects that they were totally unprepared to do justice to, then delivered warped & broken versions of them.

Bad idea of the day: a campaign to ensure all life extension therapies are completely covered by medicare, medicaid, & ACA-compatible insurance

The best argument against the idea that AI will replace programmers wholesale is the relative unpopularity of prolog. As an industry, we don’t take advantage of fantastic automation tech from the 70s, and instead write Java.

Bad idea of the day: Instead of a greatest hits album, a greatest failures album: a collection of all the tracks that made the least money and got the least attention (despite never being intended as deep cuts)

Since related ideas are circulating again, here’s my freshly reheated take: making sure your criticisms of reprehensible people are on-topic (focusing on the represhensible parts of them) solves all kinds of problems.

Bad idea of the day: a browser extention that requests the wayback machine spider whatever pages you visit as you visit them

Why A Fringe Idea About The Supreme Court Is Taking Over The Left | FiveThirtyEight https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-a-fringe-idea-about-the-supreme-court-is-taking-over-the-left/

Bad idea of the day: live your life as though it is a bayesian poisoning attack on the basilisk

Bad idea of the day: require all ‘tech’ companies to be registered nonprofits – make them prove that they are putting their revenue into ‘changing the world’ instead of just saying it

Bad idea of the day: get commit access to leftpad and make it so that it spawns a thread that loads amazon.com in an infinite loop for every injected space

Bad idea of the day: The Medium Is The Massage, dubstep edition

Bad idea of the day: a mandala of the names of all the people you’ve ever wronged except the names are transliterated into katakana for no reason

Bad idea of the day: supercut of every numinous image set to yakkity sax

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