Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

I love this! Makes me happy to see someone's working on such an interesting problem that would benefit many.

For feedback, I believe using photographs of the leafy greens would be effective in communicating your vision.

A humongous problem is the absolute lack of data that many psychedelic assisted therapists, guides, spiritualists have, to be able to point to their specific types of therapy as effective.

You come across folks that make humongous claims about the specific modalities they use, but don't track the progress of their patients and therefore don't have the data to prove it. We're working with volunteers at Tabularasa.ventures to develop some simple applications to both screen clients and also allow for practitioners or individuals to record progress (reductions in depression, PTSD, etc.) over time whether treating with microdosing, self administered, or more standard psychedelic assisted therapy (PAT) methods.

Happy to collaborate -> marik@tabularasa.ventures

There are many opportunities that could really use a good mechanism to uniquely identify users, know for sure they are real people. This is pretty hard to do (or outright impossible) without the collaboration of governments. But governments will f*ck it up in a number of ways if we leave it to them. We have to think bigger than what some countries have already solved.

First, we need something like credit cards. A physical object (identity cards could work on many countries, but they tend to suffer from beyond horrible usability when it comes to their digital chips / functionality) with a password that can be changed. We would also need a place to see all the "transactions" or actions done with your identity, as we have with credit cards. India and their Aadhaar project has shown that biometric identification is not good. But it sounds very nice and sci-fi, so it sadly sticks. Nothing new yet.

But what we really would need are manageable permissions, so you can always prove that you are an actual human, but not necessarily revealing anything else and being a completely anonymous user, or choosing to reveal some data (country, real name, etc).

If something like this was global and effective, not only we would have many more opportunities through the internet, we could also come much closer to things like direct democracy. Password management and online identity management would also become much easier. Obviously there also are many problems. Starting with the access to the internet itself. And all this identification system does sound very dangerous from a privacy-minded perspective (but the alternatives will end up being much worse, and worse systems will be imposed on us). And I'm still completely ignoring the political will to do something like this.

Being a good hacker, I pulled at that thread until I had another, and another. Now I'm writing about semiotics, language, lambda calculus, and philosophy of science stuff. It's all related to my original quest for a better explanation, and it affects everything from AI to coding practices. I'm about done now. Now the trick will be getting it all in a format that's consumable by the average programmer.