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

when gods commune, dimensional portals open in their worlds and in come ideas from the other’s mind: stalking tangles of crystal, shy ripples in space, sentient smells, just about every type of elf, the occasional human

idea for a nonlethal drone weapon: swarm of drones with strings tying up the target to carry it away afterwards

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

sculpture ideas for zero G:↵- stones held by nothing but extremely thin threads↵- a magnetic orrery, without all the supports one needs in gravity↵- lego metacrystals↵- like strandebeests, but they snake lazily through the air when an eddy comes their way↵- light chimes

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

Do you have ideas for a new spec? Maybe we can collect them on irc? join freenode/twtxt

Do you have ideas for a new spec? Maybe we can collect them on irc? join freenode/twtxt

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?

Idea for a room: It’s empty save for a number of mobile screens that follow you around and with a little bit of head tracking, act like windows into a completely different building.↵You could fit a cathedral in there, if so inclined, or maybe an Escherian maze.

@nblade@nblade.sdf.org: It’s just an idea. Not a clean one thoug, as clients would not know upfront who serves such a fiele and who not. Another idea would ne to mix a number of random followers into the twtxt file, which are updated when a person tweets.

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?

@kas@enotty.dk Have you done something with nncp? I like the idea, but somehow i don’t find a use case for it… :)

@kas@enotty.dk Have you done something with nncp? I like the idea, but somehow i don’t find a use case for it… :)

Band name of the day: an invitation to bad ideas

alethionymity: you’re online with your arcane name; the idea was that people would be nice and polite if they knew they could be cursed by anybody with a grudge, but somehow that didn’t work out

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