Internet
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Background: Job-related social media sites (the largest of which in 2025 is LinkedIn) typically have a newsfeed that shows users what their former co-workers and classmates are working on these days. The Issue: There is a strong selection bias for what actually gets posted: most posts are from people reporting their successes in business. This…
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Background: Diligent coworkers frequently set their email system to auto-reply with a specific “out of office” message when they’re on vacation. For example: “I’m gone on vacation until July 25, please email me after that.” The Issue: It can be annoying to have to wait for a coworker to return from vacation to ask them…
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Background: Computer speakers can play high-frequency sounds that a dog can hear, but a human cannot. (This will be important later.) The Issue: People often wish they spent less time casually browsing / “doom scrolling” on the Internet. Unfortunately, it’s a hard habit to break! Proposal: This solution is very simple: an operating system can…
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Background: In the early 2020s, the appeal of short (< 1 minute) videos became widespread, with TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and other services vying for market share. (Surprisingly, the earliest major entrant into this genre, Vine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_(service)), completely failed and was shut down in 2017). The Issue: Unfortunately, the popularity of “bite-sized” videos has…
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Background: In the mid-2010s and 2020s, the service “Twitter” was a popular method for celebrities to share short messages with their followers. It had the unusual property of requiring short posts (originally only 140 characters). This was originally due to ancient historical limitations on sending messages (called “SMS”es) over phones, but a slightly-increased limit was…
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Background: It’s easily possible to receive an overwhelming number of phone notifications these days. Typically, this is a mix of emails, text messages, multiple messaging apps, and the occasional demanding apps spamming you with notifications that “you earned 10% off your next order!” The Issue: It’s possible to silence some of these alerts, but sometimes…
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Background: With the advent of “the Internet of things” (or “IoT” if you prefer), it has become possible to put electronic gizmos in nearly any consumer product. If you ever wanted to add a speaker, some LED lights, or a GPS tracker into a some random household object, now’s the time! The Issue: Strangely, despite…
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Background: Video chat is now relatively widespread. Frequently, people on a chat will be muted and/or have their video off. The Issue: The terminology for “a person is muted” is straightforward: “muted.” However, English currently lacks short terms for “I am muted” versus “I have the audio turned off for the remote speaker.” Additionally, there…
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