FREE IDEAS
Societal
- Abolish capitalism.
- Regardless of income:
- Give literally everyone housing.
- Give literally everyone food.
- Give literally everyone healthcare.
- Fund the technology that the internet relies on. (See also: Heartbleed.)
Product Design
- When designing assistive devices, involve people who would use devices
in the fucking process.
- Also include them in the process of coming up with ideas for assistive devices.
Clothing
- “Women’s” pants, but with big pockets. And not obnoxiously expensive.
- “Men’s” button-down shirts, except made for people with boobs.
- Not gendering clothes.
Hardware
- A quarter-inch think (or more) phone with a 4” matte screen. Fill any unused space with battery.
- A computer architecture where you can rewind software execution.
Games
- A game mechanic where, when interacting with a NPC, if they aren’t important to the plot, your character automatically murders them (with no method to prevent this). (Twitter thread.)
Software Things That Should Exist
- Making software actually work on less-powerful systems.
- Dictation software for Linux.
- A unix-like operating system, except with a better permissions system.
- An operating system that isn’t garbage. (TODO: document ideas on separate page.)
- A less obnoxious desktop environment. a. Twitter thread
- Create a subset of or modified version of Ruby that is guaranteed to terminate, callable directly from Ruby code, for e.g. implementing event handlers.
- A library for creating SSH servers in Ruby. Such as Net::SSHD, except make it actually work and maintain it
- Tools for helping musicians collaborate over the internet.
- A GitHub bot that detects undocumented overly-complicated code, and opens an issue about documenting it (and/or submits a PR adding a TODO to the code).
- polycul.es + webring(ish).
- You link to your partners’ sites, they link to their partners’ sites, etc. Crawl them and generate a tree.
- Should require the links to be mutual in order to be included in the tree, since this indicates consent.
Questionable/Just-for-fun
- Replacing Ruby’s garbage collector with one written in Ruby.
- An operating system where the kernel includes a Ruby interpreter. (I tried this and failed)
- Grep large codebases for the word “magic.”
- Make ‘!’ a postfix operator in Ruby, so screaming variables inverts them.
- Codegolfed Makefiles.
- A Linux distribution with a background service that can patch executables in-memory, and said service is very angry with you. (Twitter thread.)
- A <canvas> polyfill using a grid of 1x1 <div>s, each treated as a pixel, rendering images using background color and JavaScript.
- Ruby obfuscator that replaces variable and method names with emoji.
- TweetFS: A filesystem backed by a Twitter account.
Twitter/Mastodon Bots
- A bot that posts every error your computer generates. a. There may be some bad security things with this.
- Feed all GNU software manual pages to a markov bot.
- Feed all original UNIX software manual pages to a markov bot.
- A bot that combines emoji. With pictures.
- E.g., 🙃 (upside-down face) + 🐶 (dog face) = upside-down dog face.