Random Ideas

So Go-Karts sounds good except that you’d definitely need them to be zero emissions karts, and with some kind of tires that won’t leave tons of burnt rubber in the air. Or you’d have to install some serious HVAC I imagine. Also like, all the other safety issues. But still that does sound hella fun.

That said around here we already have two huge indoor kart tracks within a 10 minute drive of my house, and I’m not sure the attendance is stellar for either.

https://superchargedracing.com/

That said in areas where they don’t already have two warring casinos vying for attention an unused mall might be a great location for it.

A few years ago Juliane and I went karting, as we love watching racing and wanted a go ourselves. Also as a birthday present.

Indoor karting meant the hall was full of fumes, we only lasted 10 laps each, and I left the place and vomited. We’d paid for 45 minutes and were gone after 20.

I’m never doing any karting again unless they are electric. And also not as fast.

Oh, I know. And Malls usually do have serious HVAC systems - consider, you are talking about a space that’s occupied by hundreds of people, often for 12-18 hours every day, and yet, you never smell a trace of funk or smell, and the air always seems relatively clean and fresh. And that’s aside from the fact there’s also often places cooking and serving food, too, which you often can’t smell until you’re right on top of it.

That said, I think Zero emissions karts would be good regardless. Consider - a small two-stroke engine, like most of the smaller karts have, in just 30 minutes of runtime, puts out more emissions than a F-150 does over 3600 miles, plus needs fueling, other fluids, cooling, etc. It’s more practical, in terms of what you’d have to establish within the place, to just go electric. Plus, more easily adjusted speed limiters, easier maintenance, which are a plus.

Another mall idea.

Oh wait, not just an idea.

Huh. Honestly a pretty smart use for it - it’s already appointed with a lot of stuff, has Hvac, bathrooms, lots of parking, and open, easily modified floor plan. Smart work on their part.

What if we made a search engine along the lines of Google, with a lot of the modern conveniences.

However, this would not be an attempt to compete with Google and index the entire web. We would instead only index web sites that were “old school”. So that when you used the search engine you are still seeing current, live, maintained web page from 2020, but it feels like you’re using the web of '99.

e.g: A site like https://www.openssh.com/ would get indexed. A modern site that’s a single page app full of JS and ads would not be indexed.

Does this already exist?

Have you tried turning javascript and css off?

A lot of sites become unusable if you do that. Even if they work, they don’t look right.

What I’m suggesting is not just about the technology of the web. It’s about intentionally semi-forking the web. You search for something and you won’t find some garbage clickbait site. You’ll find an HTML document made by some nerd.

Just having a crawler that doesn’t execute js would probably get you most of the way there.

Now you only have to build the rest of the search engine.

No, it’s not that you don’t want to execute JS, that doesn’t matter. Nor do we want to necessarily exclude sites from the index simply for using JS. What if a site has a cute little game that draws to a canvas?

It’s that we want to only include the types of handcrafted individual sites to get us that Hypnospace Outlaw kind of feeling, only for real.

Sure, you’re not indexing the cute game though, are you?

I just meant you would lose all the garbo React atrocities.

Million Short is kinda sorta what you’re talking.

Oooh, million short is pretty clever. That’s almost thing of the day worthy.

I think we definitely want to remove the react monstrosities.

Maybe an easier way to go about it is to simply index the whole web except:

  1. No react monstrosities. Pages must have their actual content in the initially loaded HTML with changing URLs as you navigate.
  2. No ads. A site with even 1 ad is not indexed.
  3. No tracking. If there’s even one tracking pixel, not in the index.
  4. See what’s left?
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The latest common crawl is… 270TB. For November 2020. Hoo boy.

Maybe now is the time to delete those Facebook accounts that you aren’t used for anything.

Honestly there are only 1.5 reasons I haven’t.

One: Facebook Marketplace is actually useful, doesn’t suck, is the only good thing they ever made, and it kind of killed Craiglist and the rest of the competition.

One point five: There is a GeekNights Facebook page/group/whatever. I have tested, and there are people who actively follow it.

An internet forum that bans the discussion of politics (like so many others) but whenever anyone posts anything the mod team explains why the content of the post is political and locks the thread.

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Absolutely not.

  1. Everything is political. This hypothetical community would have everything banned.
  2. Even if you stuck to only banning discussion of blatantly political things, like government and such, that does not make your community a safe space, quite the opposite.

There were some long Twitter threads written by very smart people explaining point number 2, but of course, it’s ridiculously difficult to find them via search. For now, just consider this really simple and (hopefully) obvious example.

If you have a no politics rule in your community, are you going to ban someone who says black lives matter? If you don’t, then you don’t really have a no politics rule. If you do, then your community can go fuck itself.

That’s the joke.

It wouldn’t be a community. More like an interactive resource to show how communities with “no politics” policies are fundamentally flawed.

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What if we made a game, but it was “nothing”. Just a blank slate.

But we put the game on Steam and it has Steam Workshop support. Now anyone can make a mod for the nothing game. Effectively anyone can develop and release even the tiniest part of a game, or a full game, and release it on the workshop. Then a player can choose any number of mods to enable from 0 to all of them, effectively creating a game just by choosing which mods to install and enable.

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You invented a programming language?

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