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Products I Wish Existed

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Re: Products I Wish Existed

#361

Post by Jedd »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #343
Jedd wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuclear also has a lot of fearmongering and red tape around it. Plants are reaching their EOL and in many cases new ones are not being built due to the cost of getting through all the red tape (getting approval from the feds down to local government, dealing with inevitable NIMBY lawsuits, etc). Renewables are the future, but we aren't fully in the future yet. This is a common trope. I can't work out where you live…

But there are places with much larger portions of their power supplied from nuclear plants, e.g. France, with >70% nuclear power.

Yup, undeniably France is an interesting outlier.

As I understand it, the bulk of their reactors were produced over a relatively short boom period of construction, and their projected EOL's were consequently going to coincide -- the number of safety incidents, ageing designs, costs of attending to both, public opinion swaying against, resulted in the relatively recent decisions to try to reduce the reliance on fission.

But, even so, this speaks to my point -- in countries with a positive history of nuclear fission, and little 'red tape' to stall new builds, they're still moving away from it.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#362

Post by rorykoehler »

wpietri wrote: post #298
dsalzman wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This goes back to my old quip of the easiest way to increase GDP to 5% would be to force everyone to learn how to actually use Excel. HT "You Suck at Excel" - JS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c

Agreed! But the trouble for me with Excel is that it has an incredibly low ceiling. There are so many people out there doing what is essentially app development but with terrible tools. Tools that give them the wrong habits and mental models for working at scale. I would love to see the spreadsheet reinvented to be a) collaboration-oriented, and b) a good on-ramp to ever-growing programming skills. So that when Bob i…

Have you tried AirTable?

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#363

Post by Lucadg »

asdff wrote: post #242
Lucadg wrote: post #115

> What would be a network which allowed for more thoughtful discourse We used to have this and it was called forum (phpbb and such). They have been oblitared and we moved to Facebook apparently leaving our brains behind. In reality we are victims of armies of psychologists optimizing for engagement. I have the feeling forums will come back though.

We didn't leave our brains behind, this is just the internet without heavy handed moderators keeping subforums organized, discussions on topic, and putting the brakes on flame wars. Of course things crash and burn in an environment of total anarchy like what is seen on social media websites, image boards have taught us that decades ago.

Yes, we didn't leave our brains behind. The environment in modern social media rewards the wrong type of interaction.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#364

Post by Lucadg »

mjpuser wrote: post #124
Lucadg wrote: post #115

> What would be a network which allowed for more thoughtful discourse We used to have this and it was called forum (phpbb and such). They have been oblitared and we moved to Facebook apparently leaving our brains behind. In reality we are victims of armies of psychologists optimizing for engagement. I have the feeling forums will come back though.

I would say reddit is a forum, and you can have good discourse on there, but can also have straight comfort internet trash. Basically I think its more nuanced than just having a forum...

Reddit is probably the closest thing to a forum. I guess having a separate domain in a website owned by people rather than one run by a big company allows for a more intimate environment.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#365

Post by rosybox »

Products I wish existed: a cure for neurological disorders like ALS, MS, Parkinson's, huntington's disease, small and large fiber neuropathy. There's nothing. Absolutely nothing out there to help people survive these widespread diseases.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#366

Post by LudwigNagasena »

ckosidows wrote: post #248

#2. I've had an idea I've mulled around for a couple of years now about a new social network. One which limits your 'feed' to 25 friends and that is it. 25 might even be too high (or potentially too low; the number is arbitrary), but the general idea is that in your life there are only a handful of people who you should really care to keep tabs on. You can "friend" more than 25 people but you can only see the activit…

I don’t know about Facebook, but in its Russian analogue it is possible to remove your friends (and groups) from your feed.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#367

Post by haecceity »

Zhyl wrote: post #43

>What would be a network which allowed for more thoughtful discourse? Or at least the ability to more actively mute topics, threads, and groups of users while surfacing better content algorithmically? I would be interested in a parliament-like protocol for discussion, structured debate and reaching consensus. We currently have tools for proposing changes to text documents (such as pull requests) which could be applie…

It's not always possible to reach consensus. Sometimes you just have to admit no one really knows and leave the problem to experimentation or further inquiry. Or maybe it's just undecidable. But most people don't have the humility you admit that.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#368

Post by bredren »

blackbrokkoli wrote: post #158
bredren wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I played with this idea some with a startup called Perch, which intended to turn old smartphones into security cameras or modern webcams. While some users were interested in deterring crime, others just like to watch webcams. Sometimes weird and noteworthy stuff happens, though I found not nearly often enough. Also low-cost application specific cameras like wyze emerged that were easier to setup than old phones. Anyh…

> I played with this idea some with a startup called Perch, which intended to turn old smartphones into security cameras or modern webcams. > Petty crimes are currently very interesting to people to catch in this sort of age of online shaming. This is evidenced by the stolen package bomb videos. I hope you do not take this as a personal attack, but I consider this line of thinking...well, fucked up. Just because an i…

I don't have a single one of the 26M views of Porch Pirate vs. Glitter Bomb Trap 2.0 on youtube. To take your comment personally would be the equivalent of being mad people like Marvel movies.

As for ideas remotely viable in economic sense, that's the only way black swans are born. That's startups. They're remotely viable until they're entirely new engines of economic activity.

I'm not really sure what the rest of your comment is driving at.

I've worked both sides of privacy of both consumer and enterprise products and realized sometimes "good" products made by good people protect and help "bad" guys too. Things are not all one way or another.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#369

Post by petrocrat »

_gx8n wrote: post #300
ckosidows wrote: post #248

#2. I've had an idea I've mulled around for a couple of years now about a new social network. One which limits your 'feed' to 25 friends and that is it. 25 might even be too high (or potentially too low; the number is arbitrary), but the general idea is that in your life there are only a handful of people who you should really care to keep tabs on. You can "friend" more than 25 people but you can only see the activit…

I can already see it, imagine people who have their list full, removing people and replacing them would be a public passive aggressive "thing" people would do and the such drama that would follow. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, I think this would actually be a selling point of the platform, however could possibly turn into a negative part of the social culture.

What if it automatically populated the list of your "close friends" by some algorithm that ranks your overall interaction with them. So you can't arbitrarily add or remove the friends. You could "game" it but only by actually interacting with the person. If they include sentiment analysis on the interactions, then you couldn't "game" it by spamming or being a cyber bully either. You'd actually have to be friendly towards that person.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#370

Post by L_Rahman »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #201
AznHisoka wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you knew the technologies/software that Fortune 2000 companies are spending the most on, you should build complementary products, or similar things that solve the same problems those products are solving?

I think there's value in both. Consider Duo. They took a common problem - authenticating servers and services with 2FA - and made it easy to add to existing infrastructure. There's not really a consumer use for this product, aside from maybe a VPN, but there's absolutely a huge demand for it in business. I worked on many CRUD apps that had say 4 different groups of users. We made a library / system for determining wh…

This is the growth angle for pretty much all of the IDAAS (Identity as a Service) players in the market that are not AD. Will be interesting to see how it evolves.
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