So what ideas do you have that you'll never act on?
Obviously a lot of challenged but if you could get the downtown core of a high density city on board as a trial project you could be delivering everything from packages to fast food. It's an expensive piece of infrastructure to invest in, and I know big companies like Amazon are expecting drones to solve all their problems, but I can't help but think the answer is to just lay out some pipe and build the network.
I think once you have a network like that it changes the economics of a lot of stuff. Maybe you can even use return packets for garbage collection. I think if you can get the per packet price low enough it opens the doors for a lot of new business ideas.
Take an FPGA, rip out all of the routing hardware, and basically have a sea of LUTs in a grid, clock them in two phases like the color on a chess board.
It's a huge waste of transistors, but every single bit of compute is pipelined, so you could run an LLM with one output per cycle, for example. I'd estimate a 8192 * 8192 array could fit in a chip the same size as my i7 processor.
(Assume an FP16 multiply fits in 1024 cells, there could be 65,536 of them, each giving an answer each clock cycle, at 2Ghz --> 131 TFlop FP16) If you manage to optimize the multiply to fit in a smaller area, you can immediately get more TFlops out, something that an FPGA can't do.
I'll be glad to help anyone who wants to make this thing go.
I would love to support a lot of the creators I know more personally ... but if I were to add-up even the $1/mo they each ask for, I'd be into the $100s a month easily ... so I live with the ads they have
Something a la Brave Browser's tokens, though, would be great - pitch, say, $50 into a "patronage bucket", and then pay a penny for every page/video/podcast/song/etc you read/watch/listen to OR allow the ads to load/display/stream
I am thinking of sponsoring 12 really high quality blog posts for $12 a year.
Potentially fun, but seems like it would get too cultlike if it works. More likely it could end up disproving astrology and pissing off certain people. Numerology would be interesting as there's no preset canon that 14 exudes leadership skills or whatever. Nobody minds if you process some numbers and spot some pattern.
There was an oracle feature where you can ask yes/no questions with over 1000 submissions per day, all from "should I leave my boyfriend" to "should I kill myself". The list of manually refused/tuned words was long, kind of crazy to think people would base real-life decision on effectively a random answer (random plus some hashing of normalized input).
There was also a compatibility checker where you provide two first names. Also an algorithm with some normalizing and fine-tuning. I think it returned a score from 1 to 100.
I switched departments as soon as possible.
It might also be possible to organize this as a worker self directed nonprofit, such that you have no profits at all (still pay salaries and benefits, but removing speculatory investments and controlling shares from employee owners).
Similar businesses exist in other fields, but tech is uniquely reusable between chapters once developed.
Gain the efficiencies of scale of a small national command economy, with democratic input from co-owners/co-workers, without the bureaucracy and corruption of the formal government.
It would never be able to directly compete with the VC bubbles of Uber etc., but it would be a more ethical and sustainable operation, and maybe can win some government contracts and protectionism if it has a special nonprofit status...
Of course you can just ask locals but that's so analogue.
Maybe it's something Square and the bread one can team up and offer?
Then we can branch out to different cereal types for different genres... Count Chocula -> Serial Mysteries.
I wish I didn't already have a startup. This one has been a dream for me since somebody spitballed it in 1999.
Of course last mile transportation remains a problem.
You drop off a bag of laundry, it gets picked up and taken to this central washing area in town. Someone labels every piece of clothing, and then throws all the clothes together with everyone else's clothes for washing.
After washing they fold and separate all the clothes and you get everything back (at least I always did).
I think this has been going on since at least the 19th century.
My concern with rfid based laundry sorting is how do you get the rfid onto my clothes? If it's a sticker, it can come off in the wash or leave residue if it remains on for the whole wash. If you're using something like clothespins, I don't want small puncture holes added to my clothes each time they're washed.
Of course ... you're not guaranteed to get the same cloth diapers back on the next delivery :)
I think you need some kind of animal to clean up food waste from food forests and even traditional farms, and you'd really like that to be deer and not rats. Deer aren't really compatible with an urban environment.
Bring all your social media, messaging apps, and email into a single app
If you want to add someone to a conversation they were not previously in, you could have a set of approvals that need to be granted by X-many members of the chat group to allow/disallow certain content items to be visible
Being able to easily search across all those communication mediums would be a godsend - can't remember if you sent something to Bob via Messenger, Signal, or email? Open this tool, and they are all in one place
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...Though we manually had to manage the seating arrangement - each of us (to a better or worser extent (mine looked not-so-great, but was one of the few that worked)) had to build a theater booking tool backended by Access
Trying to call a medical office and get a price for anything was often a frustrating exercise. The staff would say things like "The doctor has to examine you first and then tell you how much it costs" or even "We won't know the full price until after the procedure".
Trying to comparison shop was very difficult, even for relatively common tasks.
Maybe a section for exploring a topic more deeply.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090213131053/http://www.sixmon...
This would be similar to the functions provided by orgs like https://sfbike.org/ but we'd be for-profit and have billions in funding.
https://exelcomposites.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/EN_Sys...
junctions: https://www.etra.fi/en/engineering-plastics-e540/plastic-rei...
I think visualisations of business processes can be similar to video games.
Here's a visualisation I'm playing with:
I don't know if it's a good idea, but it's an idea
Even if you don't care about the suffering of whales who are absolutely miserable in confinement, there's no way to make farming such large animals economical. It's why you can't farm bluefin tuna, it just takes too much food and space compared to what you get.