smallest dog

FREE IDEAS

Societal

  1. Abolish capitalism.
  2. Regardless of income:
    • Give literally everyone housing.
    • Give literally everyone food.
    • Give literally everyone healthcare.
  3. Fund the technology that the internet relies on. (See also: Heartbleed.)

Product Design

  1. 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

  1. “Women’s” pants, but with big pockets. And not obnoxiously expensive.
  2. “Men’s” button-down shirts, except made for people with boobs.
  3. Not gendering clothes.

Hardware

  1. A quarter-inch think (or more) phone with a 4” matte screen. Fill any unused space with battery.
  2. A computer architecture where you can rewind software execution.

Games

  1. 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

  1. Making software actually work on less-powerful systems.
  2. Dictation software for Linux.
  3. A unix-like operating system, except with a better permissions system.
  4. An operating system that isn’t garbage. (TODO: document ideas on separate page.)
  5. A less obnoxious desktop environment. a. Twitter thread
  6. 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.
  7. A library for creating SSH servers in Ruby. Such as Net::SSHD, except make it actually work and maintain it
  8. Tools for helping musicians collaborate over the internet.
  9. 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).
  10. 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

  1. Replacing Ruby’s garbage collector with one written in Ruby.
  2. An operating system where the kernel includes a Ruby interpreter. (I tried this and failed)
  3. Grep large codebases for the word “magic.”
  4. Make ‘!’ a postfix operator in Ruby, so screaming variables inverts them.
  5. Codegolfed Makefiles.
  6. A Linux distribution with a background service that can patch executables in-memory, and said service is very angry with you. (Twitter thread.)
  7. A <canvas> polyfill using a grid of 1x1 <div>s, each treated as a pixel, rendering images using background color and JavaScript.
  8. Ruby obfuscator that replaces variable and method names with emoji.
  9. TweetFS: A filesystem backed by a Twitter account.

Twitter/Mastodon Bots

  1. A bot that posts every error your computer generates. a. There may be some bad security things with this.
  2. Feed all GNU software manual pages to a markov bot.
  3. Feed all original UNIX software manual pages to a markov bot.
  4. A bot that combines emoji. With pictures.
    • E.g., 🙃 (upside-down face) + 🐶 (dog face) = upside-down dog face.