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 Facebook’s 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

‘Know thyself’ is not just silly advice: it’s 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’.