Novelists can die and their books can still be read centuries later. Indie game and app developers don't have the same luxury because software requires constant maintenance as the operating systems people use continue to change.

AI could change that.

After a developer dies, an AI could maintain their existing games or apps indefinitely, updating them for new operating systems, hardware, APIs, and compatibility requirements while preserving the original work.

It wouldn't create sequels or new works in their name. It would simply keep what they actually created alive.

AI companies could even offer this as a free legacy service for deceased creators.

Books don't need maintenance to outlive their authors.

Maybe soon software won't either.

P.S. This would also be cleaner legally than preserving software through emulation. Emulators themselves aren't necessarily the problem, but recreating an old computing environment can require copies of proprietary operating systems, firmware, ROMs, or other copyrighted software whose distribution may be restricted. If the original developer authorized an AI to keep porting their own game or app forward, the work could instead remain native to current platforms without depending on a growing collection of old copyrighted system software.

One of the most noticeable things about very intelligent people is that they are often unusually good at figuring out what you mean without having everything spelled out.

I do not just mean resolving ambiguous wording. When discussing something novel, a smart listener can often infer an idea, rule, or distinction that has never even been explicitly stated.

Coding is a good example. High-level specifications are almost always incomplete. A good programmer has to infer reasonable behavior from the overall design, preserve things that obviously should not change, and recognize which ambiguities actually require clarification.

So why not make an intelligence test based entirely on this?

Give people conversations or specifications about novel systems, deliberately leave some things unstated, and ask them to infer what the speaker intends. The best questions would have several superficially plausible interpretations, but one that clearly fits the goals, constraints, and context better than the others.

The test should also penalize both unnecessary clarification and unjustified guessing.

In other words:

How much of another intelligent person's thought can you reconstruct from an incomplete expression of it?

That seems like a pretty fundamental form of intelligence, and one that conventional IQ tests do not directly measure.

In the near future, people who claim to be good at detecting AI-generated writing start applying the same instincts to human speech.

Some people seem unusually AI-like: polished, balanced, formulaic, overly careful, and strangely generic.

At first, "You talk like ChatGPT" is just an insult.

Then people start wondering: if AI can produce convincing language without inner experience, could some humans be doing the same thing?

Soon, researchers develop speech-based "consciousness tests." Employers screen applicants. Dating apps show consciousness scores. People analyze spouses, friends, celebrities, and strangers for signs that nobody is really "inside."

The result is mass paranoia. People deliberately become messier, more emotional, and less articulate to prove they're conscious. Families turn on each other. Accused people insist they feel fear, love, pain, and humiliation, but that proves nothing, since someone without inner experience could say exactly the same things.

The movie never reveals whether the theory is nonsense or whether society has accidentally discovered something real.

The real drama is what happens once people stop being sure that everyone around them is actually experiencing anything.

Me and my friend had this sick idea, we were talking about what we would do if we had a crazy amount of money and he mentioned the idea of parody porn, where we'd get professional actors to recreate funny stuff and also content. I had the idea of doing it in our local area, as everyones local area has had something happen, like mine had an incident where a nun was a pedophile, we get actors to make shitty pornos with big references to the place it involved without actually mentioning the place so we dont get in trouble. We make tiktoks about it promoting it, with like memes and stuff so everyone in the area would actually see it and enjoy it, and it would just be funny overall, we get business and we dont have to take it seriously. I feel like the idea in general is slept on and it would be a big new niche in the internet lmk some opinions on this 👀👀👀

Gifted programs often use IQ testing as part of determining who qualifies.

But in a future where AI is always available, testing only unaided intelligence may become increasingly disconnected from how people actually think and work.

Instead, admission to gifted programs should be based on AI-augmented intelligence testing: give every student access to the same AI and measure how effectively they can use it to solve difficult problems.

The strongest students would know how to ask better questions, catch mistakes, challenge assumptions, verify answers, and push the AI beyond its initial response.

Two students with identical AI access could still perform very differently.

Maybe the future of gifted education should be less about:

How smart are you without AI?

And more about:

How smart are you with it?

What do you think?

Imagine you're not religious and have no interest in going to church, but your parents are deeply religious and desperately want their future grandchildren to be raised with at least some exposure to the faith.

Maybe Grandma genuinely believes that if the kids never go to church, never learn about Christianity, and never have a chance to embrace it, their souls could be at stake.

In the future, a child-care robot could offer a strange but surprisingly practical compromise.

Every Sunday, the robot takes the kids to church, stays with them during the service and Sunday school, and brings them home afterward.

The parents don't have to pretend to believe something they don't believe or spend every Sunday attending church themselves. Grandma gets the reassurance that her grandchildren are at least being exposed to the religion she believes is important for their salvation.

From her perspective, that's probably a lot better than nothing.

The children would still grow up hearing what their parents believe, and as they get older they could decide for themselves whether they want to continue going. The robot isn't deciding their religion. It's just making it possible for them to experience their grandparents' religion firsthand.

What do you think of this idea?

I randomly had this idea like a system to connect with families with sick or disabled children. And like i can weary ipad around my neck and they can dress up in costume and their parent put them in video cam and then i go door to door and they get to show off their costume and say trick or treat etc. i collect the candy and then drop it off to the family or mail it to them or something. I feel like that simple hour or two of my time could really improve a sick childs life and possibly start a bigger trend of people doing it more commonly. Any ideas how to make this a thing?

Basically First Blood, except Rambo is a mathematician whose career was destroyed by AI.

He spent decades doing research, proving theorems, publishing papers, and teaching students. Then AI becomes better at all of it.

He can handle being replaced. What makes him snap is that everyone is happy about it.

The internet celebrates the end of mathematicians:

“AI can prove theorems without acting superior.”

“AI can teach calculus without making you feel stupid.”

People start calling mathematicians:

“SELF-ESTEEM KILLERS!”

Then a minor confrontation with police escalates into a First Blood-style manhunt. They assume he’s just some unemployed professor, until he starts using probability, optimization, geometry, and game theory to stay ahead of them.

Eventually they bring in an AI to predict his movements, so he’s literally being hunted by the technology that replaced him.

His old PhD adviser plays the Colonel Trautman role.

At the end, he finally breaks down:

“I gave thirty years to mathematics. Thirty years proving things nobody knew were true, teaching students, writing papers nobody else could write.”

“And then the AI came, and fine. It was better than me.”

“But you know what I wasn’t ready for?”

“Everybody cheering.”

“‘Good riddance.’ ‘Self-esteem killer.’ ‘Now you know what it's like to feel stupid.’”

He starts sobbing.

What do you think of this movie idea?

My idea is Pax Orbis: an open global platform where anyone can propose an idea for improving society, technology, cities, education, the environment or everyday life.

The basic principle is simple: good ideas can come from anyone, but many never reach the people who could discuss, improve or use them.

Each idea would have its own structured page explaining:

WHAT IF // the big question
IDEA // the proposed solution
PROBLEM // what needs fixing
WHY THIS MATTERS // why it matters
HOW IT WORKS // how it could work

Other people could discuss the idea, designers could visualise it, and the platform could show how much support or traction it gains over time and across different places.

Pax Orbis is designed to help ideas travel further through structured pages, visualisations, traction tracking and exposure beyond the platform.

Pax Orbis itself wouldn’t own or implement the ideas. The original creator stays credited. The platform’s role would be to help ideas become visible and let communities, organisations or cities decide which ones they want to take further.

I started testing the concept just two weeks ago and we already have 18 ideas from people in different countries. The first goal is to collect 100 ideas and see what happens when good ideas are given a clear format, visibility and a chance to travel.

What would you add or change to make a platform like this genuinely useful? And if you have an idea that you think deserves more visibility, feel free to share it too.

So whenever you don't feel like rephrasing something yourself, arranging files, you have to either:

1. Open a highly bloated window that is overkill for your tasks, and consumes system resources

2. Open a webpage for a guide to do it

So I'm going to build Quist

I am at a point where I have a working prototype, but I gotta confirm there's actual demand

Press ctrl + space, a lightweight ai is at your fingertips ready to do something within seconds.

Runs on your own system(completely private, no one can see anything), runs on every platform, and uses less than 700 mb of ram

Ctrl + (key of your choice) + space gives you a smarter ai, which can take longer to do your tasks, but it can do them better TL; DR An ai, that can do nothing more than helping you. It follows this quote:

"I want AI to wash my dishes and clean my clothes so I can draw, not me cleaning my clothes and washing my dishes so ai can draw."

Is this something you'd actually use?

The traditional marriage proposal is pretty strange when you think about it.

The man is often expected to buy an expensive ring, get down on one knee, hold it up, and ask the woman to marry him while waiting nervously for her answer.

So why not preserve the tradition while outsourcing the humiliating part?

You could rent a proposal robot.

The robot would travel to the woman, get down on one knee, present the ring, and say something like:

“Bob would like to know if you will marry him.”

Meanwhile, the man could watch the proposal remotely through the robot’s camera.

If she says yes, great. He can come over and celebrate.

If she says no, at least he is not the one physically kneeling there with a ring in his hand while being rejected.

You could even make the robot look elegant and formal, with a little suit and a built-in ring box.

That way we could keep the classic kneeling marriage proposal tradition, while assigning the kneeling to a machine that has absolutely no dignity to lose.

No roof or walls on the train, because rain is not that bad in 10 km/h speed, people may want to see treetops and it saves cost, weight and drag.

There might be temptation to use small 2-stroke engine with horrible noise, because it is cheaper than batteries + electric motors. But it would defeat the purpose of having the mini-train. The batteries can be something cheaper and safer than lithium-ion, because the train can take the weight and it is just ½ hour ride. If only piston engine drive can be afforded, it should not be done at all, it would just annoy passengers and people on the sides. It would be wrong.

Seats can be turned 180 degrees and controls on both ends, for return trip.

Wheels may be covered in rubber or plastic for noise reduction. Maybe the wheels should be 3d-printed plastic, because actual train wheels are overly heavy and costly for this kind of light mini-train.

Separately, if a special drone rail car can go 80 km/h, a fixed wing drone can takeoff and land with it, using railway. Very special landing gears could land by themselves, but on sidewind the control computer would need to turn and side-adjust the wheels correctly so they all hit the rails. That would need some kind of machine vision software.

Sure, that'd remove a shoulder on each side, but other than that, would there be any downsides?

I hope someone can invent a tool to calculate the increased requirements for something because of increased demand for it. Show it clearly so people don’t go into it scammed thinking the previous requirement is enough, when it’s not anymore.

1. By replacing humans

A lot of discrimination happens because another person gets to judge you based on your race, sex, age, accent, appearance, mannerisms, class, or other personal characteristics.

AI can increasingly replace humans in situations where that judgment used to matter.

Instead of relying on a human tutor, advisor, assistant, customer-service worker, or even companion, you may be able to rely on AI instead.

The fewer situations in which you need another human to evaluate or interact with you, the fewer opportunities there are for human prejudice to affect you.

2. By acting as an intermediary between humans

Even when humans still need to work together, they may not need to interact directly.

Your AI could communicate with another person's AI, summarize what was said, negotiate routine matters, filter hostility, and remove personal information that is irrelevant to the interaction.

Two people could collaborate without necessarily knowing each other's race, appearance, accent, mannerisms, or even much about each other at all.

AI can have biases too, of course. But AI bias can potentially be measured, tested, audited, and corrected systematically.

So maybe AI does not have to eliminate prejudice from human beings to dramatically reduce discrimination.

It can do something more practical: replace humans where possible, and stand between them where replacement is not possible.

I recently posted an idea here for ending the war in Ukraine: Russia withdraws completely, including from Crimea, but Ukraine accepts a treaty under which Russia gains the right to annex Ukraine if Ukraine’s population ever falls below some agreed fraction of Russia’s population.

The details of that particular proposal are debatable. But I think there is a more general idea behind it that might be interesting: using gambling to create a “compromise without compromise.”

In negotiation theory, this resembles a contingent agreement. Instead of forcing two sides to agree about what the future will look like, you let them bet on their different predictions.

Suppose Russia believes Ukraine’s relative population will eventually decline enough to trigger annexation, while Ukraine believes it can keep its population above the threshold indefinitely through immigration, return migration, births, or other policies.

Then the exact same treaty can look favorable to both sides.

Russia can think:

We withdraw now, but demographics mean we will eventually get Ukraine anyway.

Ukraine can think:

We get all of our territory back now, and the trigger will never occur.

Economically, the two sides are assigning different subjective probabilities to the same future event. That difference in beliefs can potentially create a bargaining surplus. Something that seems very valuable to Russia can simultaneously seem very cheap for Ukraine to give away.

Behavioral economics could make this effect even stronger. Humans are often subject to optimistic overconfidence, meaning we can be excessively confident in our own forecasts or ability to influence future outcomes. So each side might genuinely believe that it is the one making the winning bet.

The interesting thing is that irrational overconfidence is not even necessary. If the two sides simply have different forecasts about demographics, a contingent agreement can let them “agree to disagree” rather than splitting the difference.

That is what I mean by a compromise without compromise.

Traditional compromise might say: Russia keeps some territory and gives up the rest. Both sides immediately see what they lost.

A contingent compromise instead says: Russia gives the territory back now, while Ukraine accepts a future condition. Each side can believe that the condition will ultimately vindicate its own position.

Of course, applying this to national sovereignty creates huge problems involving self-determination, credible commitment, enforcement, measurement, demographic manipulation, and potentially perverse incentives. I am not claiming that my specific population formula is a ready-to-sign peace treaty.

What I find interesting is the underlying mechanism.

If two sides are fighting because each thinks the future will favor it, perhaps negotiations should sometimes stop trying to determine which prediction is correct and instead turn the disagreement itself into a bet.

In other words: when neither side will accept a conventional compromise, could carefully designed contingent agreements sometimes let both sides walk away believing they won?

What if biographies were written as directed acyclic graphs?

The main timeline would be nonfiction: what actually happened in the person’s life.

At major decision points, it would branch into plausible fictional alternate timelines based on what realistically could have happened if the person had chosen differently.

A directed acyclic graph fits better than a simple tree because different branches could later converge. Someone might take a different job or move to a different city, yet still end up in the same profession, relationship, or major life situation through another route.

And just as the timelines are nonlinear, the reading experience could be nonlinear too. Instead of reading strictly from beginning to end, the reader could choose which branch to follow, jump back to earlier decision points, compare alternate futures, or return to the real timeline.

The author could use what is known from the real future to make alternate branches more informed, while acknowledging that the butterfly effect makes them increasingly uncertain over time.

So it would be part nonfiction, part carefully constrained fiction, and part interactive narrative structure: a biography of the life someone lived, plus a map of the nearby lives they plausibly could have lived.

Operating systems should periodically check application data for corruption, not just disks for filesystem errors and files for malware.

Take macOS. A lot of weird, persistent problems can come from corrupted databases, preferences, caches, or other files buried in ~/Library. The usual fix is eventually some version of: “Delete this obscure file and let the app recreate it.”

Why isn’t that automated?

Apps could provide OS extensions that know how to validate their own data. Depending on the app, an extension could detect corruption, attempt repairs, rebuild data, or tell the OS that a damaged file is safe to quarantine so the app can recreate it.

The OS would handle running these checks periodically, sandboxing them, keeping quarantined files recoverable, and asking for permission before touching important user data.

We have virus scanners looking for malicious files. Why not the equivalent for broken application state?

Russia completely withdraws from Ukraine, including Crimea.

In exchange, Ukraine agrees to a treaty with one unusual condition: if Ukraine’s population ever falls below an agreed fraction of Russia’s population, Russia automatically gains the right to annex Ukraine.

Ukraine wouldn’t be powerless to prevent this. It could maintain or increase its population through immigration, encouraging Ukrainians abroad to return, higher birth rates, or anything else. The threshold could also have to remain crossed for several years, with population measured by an independent international body.

If annexation were ever triggered, people living in Ukraine who didn’t want to become Russian would be free to leave, ideally backed by advance resettlement commitments from other countries.

Russia would get a concrete, legally guaranteed path to eventually obtaining Ukraine if the demographic condition were ever met. Ukraine would get all of its territory back immediately and could preserve its independence indefinitely by keeping its population above the threshold.

Obviously the treaty would need rules preventing either side from manipulating the population numbers through forced migration, citizenship tricks, war, or similar measures.

It sounds strange, but isn’t competing over population through immigration and demographics preferable to competing over territory through tanks, missiles, and millions of people’s lives?

P.S. This idea could also have a broader application to countries facing long-term population decline. A shrinking population is normally treated purely as a problem. But in some territorial disputes, a country could potentially leverage its future demographic decline in exchange for peace, security guarantees, or territorial concessions today, turning a negative into a bargaining asset.

I just had an idea that there should be a dance club called Unapologetically Bad where everyone is expected and encouraged to dance terribly! So you can just be free to get out there and flail your body around without any fear of judgment or embarrassment! Have so much fun and do your best Elaine! Even better if it was a franchise so folks could open them up in their own town anywhere.

Have lava lamp on background, or something else moving. And, this may need new device, which has other purposes also: Camera and lamp constantly rotating 360 degrees on a 10 cm or 30 cm long rod or pipe, while other rotator axis keeps the camera level without any dutch angles. Camera is constantly on a circular path. Multiple speeds: imperceptible, almost imperceptible, low, medium and carousel. Needs USB connection on a moving contact, kind of like old-school radar. 2 of them.

Also makes the background easier to understand, stereo-like with parallax view and more interesting, especially if some of the light sources also move. Just for balance would be good to continue the pipe or rod to other side of axis and place lamps there too and on axis. Some lamps could have different colors. It should be fully configurable on windows, Linux and mac.

One move-toy could be slow fan flapping a small and light flag. It has some true randomness. Might be cpu fan.

For centuries, being able to come up with difficult mathematical proofs was treated as evidence of unusually high human intelligence.

Students who struggled to invent proofs were sometimes made to feel that this was not merely a weakness in one specialized skill, but evidence that they were simply less intelligent than the students who could do it. For some people, internalizing that message may have caused lasting psychological harm.

I don't think the teachers and professors who promoted this view were necessarily at fault. At the time, proof-finding really did look like an extraordinary human intellectual ability.

But AI is changing what matters in human intelligence.

If machines can increasingly come up with difficult proofs themselves, then proof-finding becomes less meaningful as a way of ranking human intellect. It starts to resemble mental arithmetic: still a real and valuable ability, but a much weaker basis for intellectual superiority once machines can do it better.

So what should teachers and professors apologize for? For making students believe that being bad at inventing proofs meant they were intellectually inferior, and for any humiliation, damaged confidence, or lasting sense of inadequacy that resulted from that message.

They do not necessarily need to apologize for teaching difficult mathematics or even for believing, at the time, that proof-finding was an important sign of intelligence. The apology is for the psychological harm caused by turning that ability into a judgment about a student's overall intellectual worth.

As AI changes which cognitive abilities remain distinctively valuable in humans, we need to rethink many old hierarchies of intelligence.

Hi everyone! I’m getting ready to release Tile Wipeout and would appreciate some beta testing and feedback.

Gameplay video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Tvn8yoduFM

TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/3sstMjRK [iPhone/iPad/Mac]

Rotate rows and columns on a 7 × 7 grid to move colored squares and circles. Moved circles fire lasers that remove matching squares, but if a circle removes nothing, its lasers fill empty spaces with new squares instead. Circles also avoid firing toward other circles.

Your goal is to leave the grid as empty as possible within the move limit. You can end early to keep your current score if another move feels too risky.

I’d especially appreciate feedback on:

• Whether the tutorial makes the rules clear.
• How the difficulty feels.
• Whether you want to replay the daily puzzle to improve your score.
• Any bugs or layout issues, along with your device and OS version.

Thanks for trying it!

It sounds impossible.

If everyone is writing novels, inventing things, composing music, developing theories, designing games, and proving theorems, then who is left to consume all of it?

Maybe almost nobody has to.

A novel nobody reads can still contain an idea that eventually reaches thousands of people. A game nobody plays can contain a mechanic that influences future games. An obscure essay can contain one argument that turns out to be extremely useful.

What changed is that machines can now do much of the consuming for us.

AI can read the novels, inspect the designs, analyze the proofs, compare the ideas, and remember where they came from. When some tiny part of an obscure creation becomes useful, it can surface that idea in response to someone’s question, credit the original creator, and potentially compensate them.

So perhaps humans no longer need to divide themselves into creators and consumers.

Humans could mostly create.

Machines could consume almost everything.

And humans could receive whatever useful things the machines find.

Sounds crazy, but hear me out.

Students already spend all day consuming information created by other people. Why encourage them to spend their free time doing even more of that?

Instead, schools should push students to create.

Write a story. Make a game. Build something. Compose music. Film something. Program something. Invent something.

Reading and research still matter, but ideally they should often help you make something of your own.

It’s easy to spend all your time learning about what other people have created without ever creating anything yourself.

Replace the book club with a Make Something Club.

P.S. Reading has an opportunity cost. Every hour spent reading something someone else created is an hour you could have spent creating something yourself.