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If you had no concern about market fit and funding, what would you work on?

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11–20 of 26 posts

Re: If you had no concern about market fit and funding, what would you work on?

#12
This isn't tech related at all, but restoring old garden tractors. They're generally simple, but there are tons of details between the various manufacturers and models. They're mostly built to be very repairable and durable. Very satisfying to repair something that's 50 years old and have it be just as capable, if not more so, as the cheap ones they sell today.

Re: If you had no concern about market fit and funding, what would you work on?

#14
post #12

This isn't tech related at all, but restoring old garden tractors. They're generally simple, but there are tons of details between the various manufacturers and models. They're mostly built to be very repairable and durable. Very satisfying to repair something that's 50 years old and have it be just as capable, if not more so, as the cheap ones they sell today.

There's certainly a lot of grace, especially in today's consumption mindset, in repairing a physical device. I hope you can monetize it someday (or maybe not if it will take the fun out of it)

Re: If you had no concern about market fit and funding, what would you work on?

#15
post #3

I'd want to build some a generalized community-making/matchmaking system that can bring supply and demand together, but optimized for user satisfaction instead of external profit. For everything like: * Nonprofit online dating that emphasizes quality matches and relationship satisfaction, not Match Group profits * Municipal Uber/Lyft that connects drivers and passengers and takes a minimum cut just to maintain the se…

Sometimes we just need a single variant of such fundamental services that just "works", but today we, in a very wasteful manner, get hundreds of variants each of which is trying to steal some percentage of the pie. Yeah sure thats how capitalism works and competition fuels improvement, but I think its also ridding us on bringing much more users under a single umbrella to maximize the interactions.

Re: If you had no concern about market fit and funding, what would you work on?

#16
post #2

> it should significantly enhance the human civilization in one or multiple domains (so things like rendering Mandelbrot set infinitely faster does not cut it IMO I feel compelled to note that "greatness cannot be planned" [1] and often things that significant enhance human civilization didn't seem like that at first. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKazBM3b74I

Ah man, I knew someone was gonna point to Kenneth Stanley here:)

Re: If you had no concern about market fit and funding, what would you work on?

#17

I'd love to work on a Von Neumann probe. A machine that could set down on Mars and make a supply chain complete enough to replace itself, AND have enough capacity to allow the creation of supplies sufficient for human flourishing. I'd start with one that works in my back yard, and extracts metals from the soil in small quantities.

Where would you start though? On software level, I can imagine how this could work, based on genetic algorithms where offsprings evolve by sharing the weights of their neural networks from parents. But self-replicating hardware is quite challenging isn't it?

Re: If you had no concern about market fit and funding, what would you work on?

#18

I would document our supply chain completely by organizing and setting up a complete, but less economic, and smaller scale backup for it. Everything you need, all open sourced, well documented, and ready to use to patch over any issues in our primary supply chain.

When I first read this, didn't sound like much. But after just thinking about it for 30 seconds, it would be a HUGE benefit for human kind IMO. It's the realization of first principles thinking. We could tap into fundamentals of how ANYTHING we create works. And furthermore, once you represent this chain in a graph data structure, it opens open immense (AI) possibilities for further optimization and prediction.

Re: If you had no concern about market fit and funding, what would you work on?

#19

I'd love to work on a Von Neumann probe. A machine that could set down on Mars and make a supply chain complete enough to replace itself, AND have enough capacity to allow the creation of supplies sufficient for human flourishing. I'd start with one that works in my back yard, and extracts metals from the soil in small quantities.

Where would you start though? On software level, I can imagine how this could work, based on genetic algorithms where offsprings evolve by sharing the weights of their neural networks from parents. But self-replicating hardware is quite challenging isn't it?

Machine shops make parts for machine shops, with a lot of human labor and control.

So... Just start with machines that can mine and refine metals.

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