Internet
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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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Background: In the pre-Internet era, news was physically printed out on sheets of so-called “news” paper, which were published chronologically. As a result of these limitations, it was not possible to inform a reader of (say) July 1, 1910’s article about the merits of radium water that there would be a crucial retraction published on…
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Background: Occasionally, a video meeting will be scheduled with a large number of participants. The Issue: Since the participants are usually only arranged based on who is actually present in a meeting, it can be hard to figure out exactly who has (and hasn’t) shown up, especially if the meeting has 10+ participants. For example,…