Computers
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Background: Many people find the relentless piling up of emails in their inbox to be stressful. There are various approaches for dealing with this. The most well-known is probably “inbox zero,” which recommends triaging emails when they’re relatively new (instead of procrastinating and letting them pile up). Although “inbox zero” doesn’t require that you should…
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Background: AI assistants often have “guardrails” associated with their operation, where an AI must get human confirmation for a potentially unsafe action before executing it. Examples include: In all of these cases, the human limits the degree to which the AI can accomplish its goal. The Issue: The problem here is in obtaining confirmation: the…
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Background: Haunted houses are a Halloween experience that can range from extremely cheap and homemade (“this bowl of grapes is… human eyeballs!!!”) to extremely expensive and professional (e.g. Disney’s Haunted Mansion, although that’s not technically a “Halloween” experience). The goal of a haunted house is to evoke a feeling in the attendees that may range…
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Originally published 2025-12-29. Background: The phrase “seeing things through rose-tinted glasses” refers to the concept of viewing things with artificial optimism. Interestingly, there is no widespread term for the negative version of this concept (i.e., “emerald-tinted glasses” is not a phrase). The Issue: It is nearly unavoidable for a person to compare their appearance to…
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Background: A common issue in many interactions is that different people have different ideas of what is enjoyable. This comes up a lot when multiple people are trying to decide on a single dinner location, pick a movie to watch, etc. The Issue: In particular, let’s investigate the situation where two people want to go…
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Background: “Augmented reality” (“AR”) headsets (e.g. the Oculus/Meta Quest or the Apple Vision Pro) are capable of overlaying computer screens on top of a view of the real world. From the perspective of the headset-wearer, the virtual screens can entirely cover up any real world objects behind them. The Issue: If a person wears an…
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Background: There are a surprisingly huge number of emoji for expressing relatively rarely-used concepts, such as 🎍 (bamboo decoration), 🤾🏻♂️ (handball), 🎠 (carousel horse), 🛖 (thatched-roof cottage), and 🛋️ (couch and lamp). The Issue: Weirdly, there is no “standard” emoji for unambiguously expressing the concept “thanks!” or “you’re welcome!” One commonly seen approximation is 🙏…
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Background: Vendors at stadium events often wander around the stands, selling hot dogs / popcorn / etc. to sports fans. Since a cart is impractical due to the stairs, vendors typically carry their products using a special-purpose carrying harness. The Issue: For many office jobs, a person needs access to a keyboard in order to…
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Background: In today’s allegedly modern world, when people encounter technical problems with their computers, they usually either check for a solution on the Internet or instantly give up in frustration. What they DO NOT typically do is begin a magical ritual to placate the angry spirits! This is surprising, as, for, thousands of years, humans…
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Proposal: Illustrated children’s books usually consist of two main things: Unfortunately, books written before the advent of computer-generated images are stuck with “stale” illustrations: each page contains a single fixed image that will never change. But thanks to machine learning, we can fix this! Observe the new style of children’s book, where instead of an…
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