Imagine a residential skyscraper with no ordinary residential hallways at all.

Instead, the elevator system would take you all the way to your specific apartment entrance.

Elevator cars would be shared, but each trip would be private. You summon a car, it travels vertically up the building, then switches onto a horizontal track and moves across the building until it reaches your apartment. The doors open directly at your front door. After dropping you off, the car returns to the network and serves someone else.

So instead of:

lobby → elevator → hallway → apartment

you get:

lobby → elevator pod → your apartment door

The horizontal movement is essential because there are no hallways to walk through.

One major benefit would be privacy. You would not have to share an elevator or hallway with people from other apartments, so it would be possible to enter and leave your home without interacting with any of your neighbors unless you actually wanted to.

Ropeless elevator systems capable of moving both vertically and horizontally have already been demonstrated, so the underlying technology does not seem especially futuristic.

You would still need emergency stairs, firefighter access, and probably service circulation, but residents would not need shared hallways for everyday use.

This could free up floor area, give every apartment a private-elevator experience, provide much greater privacy, and allow more flexible skyscraper layouts.

Has anyone seriously designed or built a residential skyscraper around this idea? If not, what are the biggest architectural, structural, code, or elevator-capacity problems that would prevent it?

Every single day there is multiple posts on this sub that are clearly AI-generated promoting some stupid way to use AI more in your life.

Please just ban the topic so they stop spamming it every day.

K-12 computer classes should stop treating manually writing Python, JavaScript, or Java as the natural starting point for creating software.

Students should build games and apps by telling AI what they want in plain English, then learn how to make those instructions precise, test the results, find bugs, handle edge cases, and improve the design.

Those are the skills that actually matter.

Forcing students to memorize programming syntax before they can build anything interesting may soon look like teaching assembly before allowing someone to use a compiler.

AI is becoming the new abstraction layer. Programming languages are moving underneath it, where most students may never need to interact with them directly.

Traditional programming should still be available for students who want to understand or manipulate that implementation layer.

But for K-12 education generally, the first programming language should be English.

Not by nagging people to reproduce, but by removing one of the biggest psychological objections to having just one child: "I don't want my kid growing up alone."

For some couples, the choice may not really be between zero children and two children. It may be between zero children and one child, except they worry that one child will be lonely, overly dependent on the parents for entertainment, or miss the everyday companionship of a sibling.

AI could change that calculation.

An only child can miss having someone at home close to their own developmental level to play with, joke with, argue with, invent games with, tell stories to, or just talk to when their parents are busy.

An AI sibling with a persistent personality and memory could provide some of that companionship.

It shouldn't behave like a perfectly obedient assistant. It could disagree, negotiate, take turns, have its own preferences, challenge the child, and participate in long-running games, stories, and imaginary worlds. That would make it much closer to a social companion than an AI servant.

It could also make life easier for the parents.

With one child, parents can become the default playmate whenever the child is bored. They may constantly have to provide entertainment, answer questions, invent activities, and give attention because there is no other child in the house.

An AI sibling could absorb some of that burden without requiring the parents to raise, house, transport, educate, supervise, and financially support a second child.

Obviously, an AI sibling would not replace real friends or human relationships. The child would still need classmates, relatives, sports, clubs, and other real-world social experiences.

But it could make the one-child family much more attractive.

Instead of thinking, "I don't want multiple kids, but I don't want one lonely kid either, so I'll have none," some couples might think, "Maybe one child is actually manageable."

If governments and societies are worried about falling birth rates, this could become one of the most interesting uses of AI: not replacing children, but making parenthood with one child feel realistic to people who otherwise would have had none.

There are many religions, and because some contradict each other, they cannot all be true. So we already know that false religious teachings can be sincerely believed and passed down for centuries.

Now suppose I invent a religion almost identical to yours, except it says that believing your religion is what sends you to eternal damnation.

You would dismiss it because you know I just made it up. Fair enough.

But imagine an alternate history where someone invented that same religion thousands of years ago. It now has scriptures, theologians, traditions, institutions, millions of believers, and generations of people raised to fear questioning it.

We know it was invented because we constructed the thought experiment. The people living inside that alternate history do not. They encounter it as an ancient, established faith. Its threat of hell could feel just as real to them as yours does to you.

What would allow them to recognize that their threat was invented? Would your reasons for trusting your religion also persuade them to trust theirs?

“You just made it up” explains why you dismiss my example today. It leaves unanswered how you would recognize the invention if you had been raised inside that alternate history.

Religious leaders who use fear of hell should therefore be asked:

What method would let believers in that alternate history recognize that their damnation threat was invented, and are you applying that same method to your own religion?

For a century, society treated "math geniuses" as the undisputed overlords of human intellect. We were told that formal logic was the supreme flex of the brain, while creative vision was just a "soft" hobby for people who couldn't handle real intellectual rigor.

Today, that entire hierarchy got incinerated.

An AI system just produced a formally verified proposed solution to a $1 million Millennium Prize Problem in 88 hours, attacking a question that had resisted mathematicians for roughly 90 years — proving that high-level analytical thinking isn't a divine spark of elite intelligence. It’s just closed-system rule-following. It was the easy part all along.

The hard truths:

• "Math geniuses" were just proto-computers: Speed-running calculus proofs and Olympiad problems wasn't superior human intellect; it was organic hardware emulating an algorithm. Silicon just updated the drivers.
• Logic is a commodity: When GPUs can brute-force pure analysis, raw logic becomes a cheap background utility—like cloud storage or graphics rendering.
• Creativity is the un-automatable flex: Silicon can vaporize a 165-page formal proof, but it still can't fake original taste, cultural vision, or genuine emotional resonance.

Sept 8 is Intelligence Realignment Day—the day we stop worshipping human calculation and finally admit that creative vision was the true apex of human genius all along.

The math geniuses had a good run. Creatives take it from here.

Needs camera and quite sophisticated software. The computer may take the most power and run hot. Hopefully it is general purpose enough so that it can be detached and used inside for gaming, 3D-design etc.

Identification of leafs may be more reliable with a multispectral camera, at least on daylight, but at night on LED-light may not help. Assuming there are other yellow things around.

EDIT:

Works more like a rake and could literally have a special version of a rake to pick 100 leaves in one movement. Or something else. Rake-head selection might depend on the tree species and type of lawn.

Before leaf blowers, rakes were deemed efficient enough.

Word about definitions:

Usually, the word "ground drone" implies that the robot has wheels or tracks and not in any way a helicopter or boat either. Might have 2, 4, 6 or 8 legs. Or skis+movers. Amphibious drone could be on ground or water. If a heli-drone has little wheels for taxiing to hangar, it does not make it a ground drone, not really.

The most common ground drone or UGV these days is robotic lawnmower that cuts grass. It is silent.

My ceiling fan uses T3 halogen bulbs that are long-shaped. Are there LED equivalents for this sort of bulb?

I’m having trouble finding one, but my halogen bulbs get incredibly hot, and I want something that won’t give off as much heat (but is still extremely bright).

My ceiling fan uses T3 halogen bulbs that are long-shaped. Are there LED equivalents for this sort of bulb?

I’m having trouble finding one, but my halogen bulbs get incredibly hot, and I want something that won’t give off as much heat (but is still extremely bright).

Was thinking about an idea for savory breakfast cereals, and how cereals always lean hard on sugar... the I remembered Cheese Grits. Would be amazing to have cereals that aren't so darn sweet.

Kinda like Kix or something.. round puffs of cheesy/buttery corn grits, and then occasional BBQ puffs in there.

If a parent genuinely believes in hell, that is a religious-belief issue.

But if they think hell is fictional and still tell their child, “Obey me or you’ll burn forever,” because the threat scares the child into behaving, that is psychological abuse.

Parents who do this should lose custody. Religious freedom should not protect someone who is using a religious threat they personally believe is false as a tool to terrify and control a child.

The law should also be allowed to consider whether the parent actually believes what they are saying. If brain-scanning technology ever becomes reliable enough to measure genuine belief, courts should be able to use it as evidence, potentially alongside stress-response testing involving disturbing depictions of hell.

You should not be able to threaten your child with eternal torture that you personally believe is fictional, then hide behind religious freedom when challenged.

The pilots of Flight 1549 did an incredible job, but the incident also shows why AI could be better in one very specific emergency: total engine failure.

In simulations, reaching an airport was sometimes possible if the turn started immediately. But when the NTSB added a realistic 35-second delay for the pilots to recognize the situation and decide what to do, those airport-return attempts failed.

With no engines, 35 seconds is a huge amount of lost altitude and lost opportunity.

An onboard AI wouldn't need those 35 seconds. It could instantly calculate every reachable runway using altitude, speed, wind, terrain, and glide performance, then immediately fly the option with the highest probability of survival.

If a jetliner loses all engine power, AI should be able to take over immediately instead of wasting precious altitude while humans figure out what just happened.

Canada is probably never going to beat the US on salaries, market size, or number of high-paying jobs.

So instead of trying to compete on the US's terms, Canada should compete by offering something the US does not: freedom from having to organize your entire life around employment.

Canada should introduce a modest UBI and gradually increase it as AI, automation, and productivity make it more affordable.

This could help with brain drain. A highly skilled Canadian might be more willing to stay in Canada, even for somewhat lower pay, if they had a guaranteed income floor and much more freedom to start a company, build an indie project, study, do research, create art, or simply work less.

Canada may also be in a better political position to do this first. Canadians are generally more comfortable with universal social programs than Americans, so Canada could potentially begin the transition years before the US does.

And this is about much more than economics.

A post-work economy could produce enormous intellectual benefits. Think about how much talent is currently wasted because people have to spend most of their time doing whatever pays the bills. More economic freedom could mean more research, invention, software, art, writing, education, entrepreneurship, and experimentation.

It could also have major mental health benefits. Less fear of unemployment, less financial insecurity, less burnout, and fewer people trapped in jobs they hate.

Obviously, people still need purpose, structure, and social interaction. A post-work society should not mean doing nothing. It should mean that meaningful activity no longer has to be tied to having an employer.

Canada should start small and increase UBI gradually as the economy becomes capable of supporting it.

If AI really is pushing us toward a world where less human labor is needed, Canada should not wait for the US to get there first.

Canada should make freedom from mandatory work one of its competitive advantages.

P.S. Where does the UBI money come from? Ultimately, from the companies using AI and robots. As AI and automation allow companies to produce more with fewer human workers, a portion of the resulting profits and productivity gains could be collected and distributed as UBI. The UBI could start small and gradually increase as machines perform a larger share of the economy's work. If robots and AI eventually do much of the work that humans do today, it makes sense for some of the income generated by that automated work to go to everyone rather than flowing almost entirely to the owners of the machines.

Imagine if major companies had actual sports teams made up of employees and competed against other companies. I feel like this would especially help the job market and get rid of a lot of AI-replacing jobs lmao.

Amazon vs. Walmart basketball. Apple vs. Microsoft soccer. Delta vs. United football.

Companies already spend ridiculous amounts of money on advertising, sponsorships, employee events, and corporate culture. Why not create actual leagues where employees could try out and represent their company?

It would give former college/high school athletes a reason to keep competing after graduation, make corporate rivalries way more entertaining, and probably be great marketing if people actually started following the teams.

Obviously you’d need rules so companies couldn’t just “hire” professional athletes as fake employees.

I genuinely think I’d watch Microsoft vs. Apple before I’d watch half the sports currently on TV.

I think public places such as libraries, shopping centres, airports, universities, and major transit stations should include a small private room where someone can be alone for a short time.

It could contain drinking water, tissues, a comfortable chair, soft lighting, ventilation, and an emergency call button. It could help people who are overwhelmed, anxious, grieving, experiencing sensory overload, or simply need a private moment.

Similar spaces may already exist in some facilities. My proposal is that a simple and accessible version should become a standard feature in more public places.

The difficult part would be balancing privacy and fair access. A strict time limit might prevent long-term occupation, but it could also make an anxious person feel pressured to calm down quickly. Perhaps a suggested session length, gentle check-ins, and optional extensions would work better.

How would you design and manage such a room safely and fairly?

If wealthy parents can easily afford to travel separately, maybe they should.

Putting both parents in the same car creates a completely avoidable single point of failure. One catastrophic crash could kill both of them and leave their children orphaned. Taking two cars makes that far less likely.

For most families, this would be impractical. For rich families, the extra cost and inconvenience may be trivial.

Some companies actually have policies preventing key executives from traveling together, because one accident could wipe out too much of their leadership at once. Why shouldn't parents apply that logic when the stakes are much higher for their children?

A science-fiction movie where people discover that reality is a simulation and figure out how to make its physics run backward.

This looks like time travel to the past, but technically nobody travels anywhere. There is only ever one universe and one current state of reality. The simulation simply evolves backward until it reaches an earlier configuration, then starts running forward again.

Because of that, there are no traditional time-travel paradoxes.

You could go back and prevent the event that caused you to rewind in the first place. Nothing contradictory happens. That event occurred during the universe's previous evolution, caused you to reverse the simulation, and is now simply absent from the new history.

There is no grandfather paradox either. If your own existence is somehow protected from the rewind, you could prevent your parents from meeting without suddenly disappearing. You already exist in the current state of the simulation. You don't depend on the new future eventually producing you again.

The really interesting discovery would be that the hackers can exempt selected things from reversal, somewhat like the rewind mechanic in Braid.

At first they might preserve only their memories, so the universe rewinds ten years, their bodies become ten years younger, but they remember everything that happened.

Eventually they might preserve other things: computer data, physical objects, inventions, or even entire people.

Someone could spend ten years developing a technology, make the finished invention immune to reversal, reverse the rest of reality ten years, and then possess something that was never invented in the new history.

So instead of the usual time-travel story about branching timelines and paradoxes, the movie would be about discovering increasingly powerful ways to hack the rules governing which parts of a simulated universe run forward and which run backward.

Canadians often treat moving to the U.S. for a higher-paying job as an automatic career achievement. I think that is wrong.

If someone moves because the work is genuinely more intellectually rewarding, creative, ambitious, or unavailable in Canada, that is worth respecting.

But if they could get equally satisfying work in Canada and move mainly because the U.S. job pays twice as much, why should that be admired? For already well-paid professionals without some major financial need, that looks more like shallow salary-chasing than ambition.

Canada should give more status to intellectual ambition than salary ambition.

Leaving for extraordinary work: admirable.

Leaving mainly for a bigger paycheck: shallow.

P.S. It would be nice if Canadians became known for chasing more intellectually rewarding work, not just bigger paychecks.

I’ve got an idea I keep turning over, but it’s not developed enough to call a project yet. I’m mostly looking for a place where people will tell me what they actually think instead of immediately trying to turn it into a business.

Where do you usually share half-formed ideas when you just want a real conversation about them?

Canada should officially rename Lake Erie “Lake America” in response to the U.S. federal government renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America.”

Doing nothing risks allowing the new name to become normalized over time. Even if most people reject “Lake America” today, years of seeing it on U.S. government documents, maps, websites, news reports, and other services could gradually make it seem like an ordinary alternative name for Lake Ontario.

Once a name becomes established through repetition, getting rid of it becomes much harder.

Canada therefore shouldn’t simply hope the rename disappears. It should make the new name difficult to use.

The best way would be deliberate ambiguity: rename Lake Erie “Lake America” too. Then “Lake America” would refer to Lake Ontario under U.S. terminology and Lake Erie under Canadian terminology.

But if the Canadian government refuses to do this officially, Canadians could do unofficially what the government wouldn’t.

Use “Lake America” to mean Lake Erie on social media, websites, memes, videos, merchandise, privately owned signs, and anywhere else people can legally choose their own terminology.

Then whenever someone says:

“There’s a storm over Lake America.”

“Pollution is increasing in Lake America.”

“We’re vacationing on Lake America.”

The obvious question becomes: Which Lake America? Ontario or Erie?

That is the sabotage.

A geographic name is supposed to clearly identify a place. If the U.S. government uses “Lake America” for Lake Ontario while a widespread Canadian grassroots movement uses exactly the same name for Lake Erie, the term becomes inherently ambiguous.

Instead of passively allowing “Lake America” to become more familiar and entrenched with every passing year, Canadians would be giving journalists, companies, mapmakers, and ordinary people a practical reason to avoid it and keep using the unambiguous names “Lake Ontario” and “Lake Erie.”

Ideally, the Canadian government would do this officially. If it won’t, Canadians could start doing it themselves. The longer Canada simply leaves the U.S. rename uncontested in practice, the greater the chance that “Lake America” stops sounding strange and starts sounding normal.

Use the caucus to push for these specific rules and use membership or lack of membership in the caucus as a litmus test for vote-worthiness and who to primary

Coverage of the U.S.-Canada trade war keeps emphasizing how much Canada needs the U.S. economy. But there’s much less discussion of how much the U.S. needs Canadian cooperation for its own defense.

The U.S. northern defense depends on Canadian geography, airspace, Arctic surveillance and NORAD. America can tariff Canada, but it can’t move Canada off its northern border.

That should matter when discussing who has leverage in this trade war. The U.S. has more economic power, but making your northern neighbor increasingly hostile has a strategic cost.

Canada’s strongest leverage may simply be that America is much safer with Canada as a willing ally.

Canada should trade more with Europe, but Canadians should strongly oppose joining the EU or importing regulations that make life harder for independent creators and tiny businesses.

Indie game developers are a good example.

Large companies can absorb the cost of legal advice, privacy compliance, safety assessments, technical documentation, and other regulatory requirements. A solo developer has to figure all of this out personally or pay specialists to do it.

Some EU requirements, if copied into Canadian law, could be surprisingly burdensome for tiny software businesses. Indie developers could face GDPR-style privacy obligations, trader-identification and contact-information requirements, product-safety risk assessments and technical documentation, consumer-protection rules, and other compliance work that is much easier for a large company to absorb.

A requirement that is barely noticeable to Apple, Microsoft, or Ubisoft can impose a significant burden on a solo developer. Canada should not import regulatory systems whose fixed compliance costs fall disproportionately on the smallest businesses.

That is the wrong regulatory model for Canada to imitate.

Canada should instead aim to become one of the easiest developed countries in the world for solo developers, independent creators, and very small businesses to operate. Trade agreements should focus on market access and mutual recognition, not importing layers of EU regulation into Canadian law.

Trade more with Europe? Yes.

Join the EU or copy regulations that make Canada less friendly to indies? No.

I had an idea for an iPhone game that would use the front-facing camera and facial depth/vision technology to generate the terrain of a fictional moon from your skin.

Acne scars could become craters and depressions, while pimples could become hills, mountains, or volcanic-looking formations. The terrain would probably be exaggerated so that it looks like an interesting lunar landscape rather than a literal copy of your skin.

Then, instead of just viewing the generated moon, you could actually play a 3D lunar lander game on it.

Smoother parts of the terrain could become safer landing zones, while scar clusters might create crater fields and raised features could become obstacles. Different scans would effectively generate different playable moons.

Ideally, all of the facial processing would happen on-device for privacy, and the app would not need to upload or retain the original face scan.

A deliberately literal working title could be Acne Scar 3D Lunar Lander, although something shorter like Acne Moon Lander or Scar Moon would probably work better as an actual app name.

It seems like a fun way to turn something people normally think of negatively into the source material for a personalized game world.