71–80 of 831 posts
Soil simulation This is just one part of one of the sillier things I'm working on/thinking about. How can I make a real-time interactive soil simulation work, essentially a big realistic virtual sandbox. Since this is a side project, it'll go as far as all side projects go. =)
Not tried yet but I’d love to make a JS front end library to “bring your own storage” so that if I provide you with an app online (think SPA) it can then save the data to where he used wants (s3, Dropbox, local disk using extension, etc.) Another similar idea is a very simple rest protocol so that you can save to server and then make it easy to self host it. I like the idea of people building apps as web pages withou…
Hard problem:
How do we evolve design tools? Can Sketch/Figma be evolved to create full featured software? [1]
Something with no limits, and the freedom to create any feature developers create today with React/Angular/Vue.
Is it possible or a pipe dream?
Education. Schools are functionally no different from part-time prisons. You must attend daily under penalty of law. Many teachers are plain awful. They rely on students being additionally taught by their parents. That forces parents to go to school with their children, which perpetuates the vicious cycle. The teacher recalibrates the class to the students who either understood everything the first time or had supple…
Dentistry: can we replace dental x-rays with infrared? Can we build optical panographs just using the reflections from a dental mirror? How can we monitor patients' oral health over the long term more often than just an annual visit to the dentist, and does that improve oral health outcomes? Machine learning: what happens when we replace Euclidean metrics with p-adic ones? Distance is fundamental to so many algorithm…
> Dentistry: can we replace dental x-rays with infrared? There's a US company that has an ultrasonic "x-ray". Signal processing is used to find cracks and cavities. It's not well-known yet even to Bay Area specialists.
We're writing too much code. So I'm making stuff that will help us write less code. Like a vim-like editor that translates your spec into generated code while you also see it on the go to fix any issues. Think yeoman on generics and steroids.
Anyone old enough to be in IT in the late 80's/early 90's will remember the "4th GL" phase that swept through Fortune 100 companies.
I was in banking at the time, and 'Focus 4GL' was brought in to replace programmers. Of course, in the end, it turned out to be a fools-errand.
My prediction though is that in less than a decade, ML/AI will be decent enough at developing solutions via client specs for many applications.
Getting discussions about these issues to include financial incentives is a weird and hard problem. People are too sure the players (on their team) are alturistic.
Given the earth's population trajectory and the reduction in fertile arable unpolluted lands, there is a coming crisis in the distribution of food. How do we distribute food to high density Asian urban populations efficiently, minimizing needless motor vehicle trips, packaging and spoilage, when convenience purchasing is on the rise and average household sizes are shrinking? Our answer is a network of robotic service…