I'll Accept Anything – Accepting every pull request submitted
github.com
github.com
My online friends and I had a series of mostly text-based nomic instances where we would creatively write and world build, but there was this one crazy performance art piece where we hacked a phpBB instance to grant every user admin privileges. The experiment was in relative harmony for a few days before the first rounds of deletes and IP bans. After one or two attempts to regain equilibrium, there were rampant impersonations, terrible javascript popup spam and redirect loops, and disappearing server files (the joys of using PHP prior to formal CS education and any form of engineering discipline...). Finally we acknowledged that the experiment had been a great success when all HTTP requests returned 500s--testament, at least in our minds, of the ultimate fate of mankind if ever given absolute and unlimited power.
Then there was that time we piped say yes to each other's terminals, somehow creating a pospositive feedback loop. Or those dotfiles that brought down the whole server... none of that stuff was very nomic related, but ah... teenage years.
The hosting company certainly loved us. :') I hope every one of them got a raise for having to deal with our endless support tickets as a result of our own foolish and stupid games.
Anyhow, very astute parallel to draw.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic
I appreciate the memories / feels.
[0] collected in "metamagical themas", highly recommended.
We added a way to vote using public keys and then we got bored because nobody else was geeky enough to join our game.
I think this makes the title ("I'll Accept Anything – Accepting every pull request submitted") akin to, "I can resist anything except temptation."
i want to create something, but i don't know what to do.. there is nothing i need that is not already done, or at least thats why i think.
- Group purchasing for work - what if you wanted to break the cost of a Foosball table up over a group of people. It's cheap if you have enough people involved.
- App for finding which stores are open at 11pm (or on Sunday in places where most things are closed on Sunday)
- Swarm - Reverse how people get taxis, register that you're looking for a taxi and expose to taxi drivers where all the people are
- Reverse registry - wedding registries are obnoxious...register your gift so that people don't buy the same thing.
edit: formatting
It's called an office manager. Combined with an expense account for the company.
> - App for finding which stores are open at 11pm (or on Sunday in places where most things are closed on Sunday)
It's called Foursquare. Bonus, it does this for a radius around your current location and when it doesn't have official data, it makes a guess based on check-in data.
> - Swarm - Reverse how people get taxis, register that you're looking for a taxi and expose to taxi drivers where all the people are
It's [probably] called the Uber/Lyft interface from the drivers' side.
> - Reverse registry - wedding registries are obnoxious...register your gift so that people don't buy the same thing.
Haven't reached the Omg Everyone Is Getting Married age, but I'm sure this also exists already.
If you know the couple well enough to get a meaningful gift that is not on the registry, go for it, but I've been to plenty of weddings where I was not close enough to the couple to know their tastes/needs for something as personal as homegoods. No one wants to embark on their new life as a married couple with a bunch of stuff cluttering their house that they'll never use and just have to drop off at Goodwill (or worse, go through the hassle of returns - how many different stores would the gifts come from with no registry?), and no one wants to buy a present knowing that's what will most likely happen to it.
> It's called an office manager.
No office manager I've ever had would purchase anything and then seek divided reimbursement from individuals in the office.
Cortana (and I assume Siri) do this out of the box. You just say "show me stores that are open right now" and voila. You can even get more specific and say "show me mexican restaurants that are open right now." You can probably get more creative but I haven't tried yet.
Pretty neat idea, although GoCatch isn't very big here in Brisbane!
I use https://www.splitwise.com/ for this. Works well for everything from big expenses to burgers. Use it in my flat too.
What are your areas of expertise and interest?
You just have to have a job and try to get stuff done for a while and this kind of thing comes up. Just wait and watch.
If you're talking about the source for dynamic pages, you can use any file copier like rsync. But httrack is your go-to if you're just talking about downloading a web site mirror image.
It's a bit of a one-off, though.
But back on-topic, all I really mean to say is that something like this happens to me like every other week. Productize your scripts.
I'll tell you how I got there: every time I'd get annoyed, or see someone else get annoyed, I made an effort to imagine what would it take to make the problem go away. Once I achieve a decisive imaginary victory by any means, I start walking back from there to the realm of possibilities - can I make it cheaper or quicker? Without Superman's help? Without magic non-existing material? It becomes a habit after a while, and you start seeing opportunities everywhere. I'm not talking about necessarily software, any case when a person is annoyed will do as a training exercise; you'll be surprised.
I imagine it can also make a fun game, if you have friends who are up for it.
Recently I have been thinking a lot along these lines, and I came up with somewhat similar approach. When I stuck at coming up with ideas, I make a list of what I would do if I would have time/power/resources of:
- God - literally ability to fix any problem, do anything imaginable.
- Google - billions of dollars and smartest people in the world
- Elon Musk or Richard Branson - millions of dollars, decades of time to plan for
- 10 years and 10 million dollars
- 5 years and 200k
I've recognized that my lack of ideas comes from me "filtering out" everything too expensive or too hard or too uncertain, and making such list helps me to get rid of that. Think of a project ideas from the opposite direction, not "what can I do now", but "what needs to be done", and then solve it from there.
What helped me was to use open source software a lot, by switching to Linux and using FOSS Android apps (have a look at f-droid.org).
Another cool option (like another comment said) would be decentralied versions of existing services, eg Youtube, Facebook, Github etc. Some projects like that already exist.
That having been said, your suggestion of using open source software and seeing where it could be improved is also a good one.
There's a contradiction buried in there somewhere.
You're really just in the market for inspiration.
Maybe build a program that randomly generates project ideas you can thumbs up or thumbs down. Maybe just mash together subjects and predicates from other github project descriptions into some kind of project madlibs. It could at least be entertaining.
For me it would be be searching in source for anything that is built in release not debug mode.
Or more generally a better local search solution for source code. Powerful enough to find what I need without resorting to regex.
If you need a jumpstart on how the various tar file formats work, let me know and I'll do a good write up on it (I had to learn all this when I created my backup system).
So, you don't have anything to do. Relax and enjoy a coctail.
"X, but decentralised" is popular at the moment. Or think of things that people would like to do but don't because it's too much hassle: backup. Encrypt.
Ask people what the hassles are in their life and interactions with technology.
Or alternately, do a cool but purposeless tech demo. I've always wanted time to play with procedural generation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Abramovi%C4%87#Rhythm_0....
If Wikipedia required edits to be reviewed by other editors, they would probably be thwarted with fake editor accounts.
Mostly because software is deeply interconnected - every file will call something within another one. Wikipedia will link to another file, but never depends upon the content within it.
But they often have those protected.
Edit: missed a comma
Goodbye Linux.
Every language has their own policies, but the English Wikipedia only has it enabled on certain pages.[1]
With a program, a single syntax error breaks the whole thing, and if the program isn't working then it's often not obvious how to fix it.
Evil? >:D