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)