u/amichail

In the near future, AI has made most mathematicians unemployed. To pressure the government into paying them generous lifetime pensions, they launch a campaign of "math harassment."

They approach random strangers in public places and ask them math questions, deliberately making them feel stupid when they can't answer.

The campaign exploits people's lifelong fear of mathematics, often rooted in humiliating classroom experiences. As the harassment spreads, people become afraid of encountering mathematicians in public.

The mathematicians insist they're doing nothing wrong. They're merely asking questions and promoting mathematical literacy.

Eventually, public pressure forces the government to pay the mathematicians for life just to make them stop.

But then universities report a massive increase in mathematics enrollment.

In the near future, AI has replaced millions of workers. A group of unemployed atheists, desperate to get their old jobs back, devises an outrageous plan: become Christian priests and convince believers that using AI is a sin punishable by eternal damnation.

Their theological argument is that AI use involves both theft and deception. AI systems are trained on people's work without their permission, and people using AI to do their thinking or creative work are passing off machines' accomplishments as their own. Both violate biblical commandments.

After undergoing religious training and entering the priesthood, they begin preaching against AI. Their message spreads rapidly. Millions of Christians abandon AI, businesses begin advertising AI-free products and services, and employers start hiring humans again.

As the movement grows, their former employers finally begin offering them their old jobs back.

But there's a problem. Their followers now regard them as the spiritual leaders of a historic struggle against evil. When the atheists try to leave the priesthood, they're denounced as traitors, harassed, and accused of abandoning God.

Having devoted years to persuading millions of people that AI threatens their immortal souls, the atheists discover that getting their old jobs back may be easier than getting out of the priesthood.

A man starts noticing disturbing photographs of murdered people and severed body parts appearing in his iPhone's camera roll. He keeps deleting them, but they reappear, along with new ones. Afraid that seeking technical help might make him a murder suspect, he changes his iCloud password to something impossible to guess.

Then actual human body parts start appearing inside his house, some matching those in the photographs.

He fears someone is threatening to murder him, but he's also afraid to contact the police because they might suspect him of being responsible for the murders. So he starts hiding the remains.

He installs security cameras throughout his property, but the body parts keep appearing. Whoever is leaving them knows how to avoid the cameras, forcing him to search increasingly obscure places for remains.

Terrified for his life, he arms himself with guns and rifles.

Eventually, he catches someone on his property leaving another body part. A deadly confrontation follows, and he kills the intruder.

But instead of calling the police, he hides the body. After all, he's already spent weeks concealing human remains from multiple victims. He's terrified that the police will accuse him of being a serial killer.

What do you think of this horror movie idea?

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

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

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

Rotate rows and columns on a 6 × 6 grid to move colored squares and circles, with pieces wrapping around the edges. Moved circles fire lasers that remove matching squares. A circle won’t fire in any direction containing another circle or a nonmatching square anywhere along the path to the edge. If it finds no matching squares on the paths where it can fire, its lasers fill empty spaces with new squares instead.

Your goal is to earn the highest score you can and clear every square within 75 moves to make your score count.

Keep created squares around to boost your points, but leave enough moves to clear them all. Circle indicators help you predict which swipes will remove or create squares.

I’d especially appreciate feedback on:

• Whether the tutorial makes the rules and scoring 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!

What if movie theaters scanned each audience member and inserted them into the movie as extras?

The main characters would still be played by famous actors, but people in the theater could appear in restaurants, offices, trains, street scenes, spaceships, and other background roles.

The movie would use smaller groups of extras so people could actually notice themselves. A full-body scan could even put you in costumes that fit the movie.

You wouldn't know exactly when you'd appear, so part of the fun would be spotting yourself or your friends in a scene with the stars.

It could give theaters something streaming can't really offer: a version of the movie that includes the people watching it.

Would this make you more likely to see a movie in theaters?

A couple visits an old-fashioned bookstore and asks the owner whether he expects to go out of business because of ebooks and audiobooks.

An elderly customer overhears them and scowls.

The couple then asks for the computer section. When told there isn’t one, they say that’s fine because they weren’t going to buy anything anyway. They were just going to browse and later buy the ebook or audiobook from Amazon.

When they leave, they notice the same elderly man staring at them from an old 1980s Cadillac.

Then he starts following them.

At first, they aren’t sure whether it’s intentional. Soon he’s tailgating them, cutting them off, blocking them from escaping, and repeatedly reappearing after they think they’ve lost him.

The harassment escalates until it becomes obvious that he is deliberately trying to kill them.

Maybe the bookstore encounter triggered some deeper rage about Amazon, technology, and modern life, but the frightening part is that they simply annoyed the wrong person.

Basically, Duel, except the nightmare starts because two people were obnoxious about ebooks in a bookstore.

Title: Book Rage

Schools should teach students to see materialism as offensive, not because owning nice things is bad, but because obsessing over possessions is such a waste of human attention.

Your attention is one of the most valuable things you have. Every hour spent thinking about what to buy, what someone else owns, whether your clothes are impressive enough, whether you need a nicer car, or what the next upgrade should be is attention that could have gone toward accomplishing something extraordinary.

Imagine if schools actually taught this.

Instead of treating success as getting a good job so you can afford increasingly expensive things, they could encourage students to ask: What could I accomplish if I stopped caring so much about acquiring things?

You could become an exceptional scientist, writer, musician, inventor, entrepreneur, artist, engineer, or whatever else you are capable of becoming. You could spend your mental energy making something, discovering something, or mastering something instead of constantly thinking about consumption.

This doesn't mean money is bad. Money can buy freedom, education, tools, and time. The distinction is between using money as a tool and making consumption the point of your life.

Schools should teach students to treat attention as their scarcest resource.

Before spending years of your life earning, buying, displaying, and upgrading things, ask yourself:

What could I have created instead?

Imagine a shopping mall with a special rule: husbands are welcome to accompany their wives while shopping, but the moment they bring any kind of negativity into the experience, mall security escorts them outside so their wives can continue shopping in peace.

Examples of violations could include:

• Looking visibly bored
• Complaining that something is too expensive
• Asking, “Do you really need that?”
• Pointing out that she already owns something similar

The standard would intentionally be extremely strict. Even mild negativity would result in immediate removal.

The mall could have a comfortable area outside or a “husband lounge” with chairs, TVs, games, food, etc., where escorted husbands wait until their wives are finished.

The idea is that shopping becomes a completely judgment-free experience. Nobody accompanying you is going to question whether a purchase is necessary, complain about the price, or pressure you to hurry up.

It could even be part of the mall’s branding: “Shop in peace.”

Stores might actually like the policy too, since one of the people most likely to discourage a purchase has effectively been removed from the shopping process.

What do you think of this idea?

What if Starship were a fully reusable three-stage system:

Super Heavy → reusable suborbital ship → smaller reusable orbital ship

The suborbital ship could carry passengers point-to-point on Earth while also serving as the second stage for an orbital launch. It would release the smaller orbital ship along the way, then continue to its destination on Earth.

The orbital ship would provide the remaining delta-v to reach orbit, deploy satellites, and later return.

Would combining a suborbital trip and an orbital launch this way use less propellant than performing them as two separate launches?

Human thinking time is a scarce resource, and wasting it on adulting is disrespectful to the human brain.

Think about how much mental energy people spend remembering bills, checking locks, cleaning, buying groceries, scheduling appointments, maintaining appliances, tracking subscriptions, filling out forms, and remembering dozens of other little responsibilities just to keep their lives functioning.

These are exactly the kinds of repetitive, predictable tasks that machines, infrastructure, and specialized services should be doing for us.

Automation should free humans to be human.

Imagine a sufficiently advanced society where this principle is taken seriously. Most routine responsibilities have been automated, and unnecessarily doing them yourself is considered a waste of human cognitive resources.

Eventually, excessive adulting becomes a crime.

Minor offenses might result in warnings or fines. Repeat offenders could face increasingly serious penalties. Persistent, flagrant adulting could ultimately result in prison time.

“Sir, step away from the vacuum cleaner.”

“Ma’am, our records show that you manually paid six bills this month.”

“You have a certified automatic locking system, yet you repeatedly checked your front door yourself.”

“You were previously ordered to stop doing your own taxes. I'm afraid you'll have to come with us.”

It sounds absurd, but I think there is a serious idea underneath the satire.

We have incredibly capable brains, yet we routinely use them as biological reminder systems, schedulers, cleaners, administrators, and household-management computers. We call this “being a responsible adult.”

Why should that be considered admirable?

Humans should be spending more of their limited thinking time creating, learning, socializing, playing, exploring, solving interesting problems, or simply thinking. Machines should handle as much of the repetitive maintenance of existence as possible.

Adulting turns humans into mindless machines. Automation frees humans to be human.

The ultimate goal of technological progress shouldn't be to make us better at adulting.

It should be to engineer adulting out of human life entirely.

Most homes are full of little responsibilities and worries: Did I lock the door? Did I leave the stove on? Is a faucet running? Do I need to clean the bathroom? Did I forget some maintenance task?

What if an apartment or condo building was designed to eliminate as many of those concerns as possible?

There would be no ovens, stoves, microwaves, air fryers, candles, space heaters, or other major fire hazards in units or common areas. The point would be to make fires and disruptive fire alarms extremely rare.

Since residents couldn't cook, the building would provide a default meal service. Food could be prepared at a separate commercial kitchen and delivered in bulk. With hundreds of residents using the same service, economies of scale could potentially make it far cheaper than everyone ordering takeout individually.

Cleaning would also be included. A combination of cleaning staff and robots would regularly clean each unit, and the apartments themselves would be designed to be extremely easy to clean.

Other features could include automatic door locks, faucets that shut themselves off, automatic leak detection and water shutoff, lights that turn off automatically, and building-managed maintenance.

Residents could still do personal things like their own laundry.

The basic idea is that you could walk out of your apartment and not have to think:

Did I lock the door? Did I leave something on? Is water running? Is the apartment dirty? Is there something I forgot to maintain?

There simply wouldn't be much to forget.

This could be especially useful for some people with OCD who struggle with repeated checking related to locks, fire, water, cleanliness, and similar concerns. It wouldn't be a treatment for OCD. The idea would just be to remove many of the household uncertainties in the first place.

It could also appeal to anyone who hates chores, travels frequently, is very busy, or wants the convenience of a hotel without actually living in a hotel.

Basically: an apartment building designed around carefree living, where most household chores, hazards, and things you normally have to remember are engineered away.

A genius may have trouble finding people they can relate to intellectually. Coworkers may feel threatened or resentful and may not want to work with someone who makes them feel comparatively unintelligent. Some people may even dislike them because they see extraordinary intelligence as an unfair advantage that the person simply happened to be born with.

Employment itself could be difficult. Someone who is extremely intelligent might have a particularly hard time tolerating a boss they believe is making obviously bad decisions, especially when they are expected to obey those decisions anyway. They may become frustrated by bureaucracy, repetitive work, meetings that seem unnecessary, or having to spend much of their life doing work far below what they believe they are capable of. They may also find it harder to accept the ordinary hierarchy of a workplace when intelligence and authority do not line up.

There can also be painful problems in their personal lives. For example, an extremely intelligent parent might privately struggle with disappointment if their children turn out to have ordinary intelligence, then feel terrible and guilty for having that reaction. They might also have difficulty finding close friends or romantic partners who can relate to the way they think.

Obviously, all of these things do not happen to every highly intelligent person. But students often imagine being a genius as getting all the advantages of intelligence with no serious disadvantages.

Schools could teach the more comforting idea that every position in life comes with problems of its own, including positions that seem extraordinarily fortunate from the outside. You may not actually want someone else's gifts if you also had to accept all the problems that came with them.

Scientists discover that homeless people are unusually good at predicting the future. The longer someone has been homeless, the more accurate they become, but the ability disappears as soon as they are housed.

Society adapts. Some use it to make money on the stock market, avoid danger, or commit crimes. Hedge funds and governments recruit long-term homeless forecasters. Cities even start bragging about their homeless populations.

Then many of the most accurate forecasters independently predict that a massive disaster will happen soon.

Instead of evacuating the city, officials rapidly house every homeless person, destroying their predictive abilities.

Nothing happens immediately.

But the predictions never said exactly when.

Was the disaster prevented somehow? Were the predictions wrong? Or did society destroy its only warning system while the disaster is still approaching?

Nobody can know, because the people most capable of answering the question have lost their ability.

A student with severe OCD is learning to drive from an instructor who secretly suffers from episodes where he unexpectedly falls asleep in the passenger seat.

During lessons, strange things start happening whenever the instructor dozes off. Something suddenly appears in front of the car at the last second. The student sees only a blur, hears a heavy impact, and has no idea what they hit.

Sometimes they go back and find nothing.

Other times, the car later has a dent, blood, or torn fabric on it. The instructor is also a mechanic, so he assumes the student hit an animal or road debris and quietly repairs the damage.

The student becomes increasingly terrified that they may have hit people without realizing it. Their OCD spirals because every impact is uncertain, and the one person who could reassure them was asleep when it happened.

Eventually the instructor also begins to wonder whether his sleeping episodes have allowed students to seriously hurt or kill people while he unknowingly repairs away the evidence.

Overwhelmed by guilt, he eventually kills himself.

Only afterward does the father of a child killed years earlier in an unsolved hit-and-run contact the student and apologize.

The father reveals that he had discovered the instructor's secret sleeping problem and became convinced that the instructor's negligence caused his child's death.

So he had been secretly following the new lessons. Whenever the instructor fell asleep, he would throw objects, animal carcasses, or human-shaped bundles into the car's path at the last moment, then sometimes plant blood or other evidence on the vehicle afterward.

When he realized the student had severe OCD, he deliberately exploited it. The student's panic made the instructor's guilt even worse.

The student was never the target. They were collateral damage, deliberately used to psychologically destroy the man the father blamed for his child's death.

What do you think of this movie idea?

A student with severe OCD is learning to drive from an instructor who secretly suffers from episodes where he unexpectedly falls asleep in the passenger seat.

During lessons, strange things start happening whenever the instructor dozes off. Something suddenly appears in front of the car at the last second. The student sees only a blur, hears a heavy impact, and has no idea what they hit.

Sometimes they go back and find nothing.

Other times, the car later has a dent, blood, or torn fabric on it. The instructor is also a mechanic, so he assumes the student hit an animal or road debris and quietly repairs the damage.

The student becomes increasingly terrified that they may have hit people without realizing it. Their OCD spirals because every impact is uncertain, and the one person who could reassure them was asleep when it happened.

Eventually the instructor also begins to wonder whether his sleeping episodes have allowed students to seriously hurt or kill people while he unknowingly repairs away the evidence.

Overwhelmed by guilt, he eventually kills himself.

Only afterward does the father of a child killed years earlier in an unsolved hit-and-run contact the student and apologize.

The father reveals that he had discovered the instructor's secret sleeping problem and became convinced that the instructor's negligence caused his child's death.

So he had been secretly following the new lessons. Whenever the instructor fell asleep, he would throw objects, animal carcasses, or human-shaped bundles into the car's path at the last moment, then sometimes plant blood or other evidence on the vehicle afterward.

When he realized the student had severe OCD, he deliberately exploited it. The student's panic made the instructor's guilt even worse.

The student was never the target. They were collateral damage, deliberately used to psychologically destroy the man the father blamed for his child's death.

What do you think of this movie idea?

Public transit in major cities is usually promoted as cheaper, greener, or better for congestion. Cities should also advertise a more personal benefit:

You are not personally operating a machine that can kill someone if you make a mistake.

One moment of inattention while driving can seriously injure or kill someone. You could carry the guilt for the rest of your life, and in some cases face criminal charges and even prison.

Transit may have health advantages too. You usually walk more, climb more stairs, and use your legs regularly, which could help preserve strength and mobility as you age. You also avoid much of the stress of congestion, aggressive drivers, and constant vigilance behind the wheel. Over decades, less chronic stress could mean better health and possibly even a longer life.

An ad could simply say:

"One mistake behind the wheel could kill someone. Let someone else do the driving. Take public transit."

What do you think of this idea to promote public transportation in major cities?

Public transit in major cities is usually promoted as cheaper, greener, or better for congestion. Cities should also advertise a more personal benefit:

You are not personally operating a machine that can kill someone if you make a mistake.

One moment of inattention while driving can seriously injure or kill someone. You could carry the guilt for the rest of your life, and in some cases face criminal charges and even prison.

Transit may have health advantages too. You usually walk more, climb more stairs, and use your legs regularly, which could help preserve strength and mobility as you age. You also avoid much of the stress of congestion, aggressive drivers, and constant vigilance behind the wheel. Over decades, less chronic stress could mean better health and possibly even a longer life.

An ad could simply say:

"One mistake behind the wheel could kill someone. Let someone else do the driving. Take public transit."

What do you think of this idea to promote public transportation in major cities?

Public transit in major cities is usually promoted as cheaper, greener, or better for congestion. Cities should also advertise a more personal benefit:

You are not personally operating a machine that can kill someone if you make a mistake.

One moment of inattention while driving can seriously injure or kill someone. You could carry the guilt for the rest of your life, and in some cases face criminal charges and even prison.

Transit may have health advantages too. You usually walk more, climb more stairs, and use your legs regularly, which could help preserve strength and mobility as you age. You also avoid much of the stress of congestion, aggressive drivers, and constant vigilance behind the wheel. Over decades, less chronic stress could mean better health and possibly even a longer life.

An ad could simply say:

"One mistake behind the wheel could kill someone. Let someone else do the driving. Take public transit."

What do you think of this idea to promote public transportation in major cities?

Schools should teach some computer programming as a tool for understanding philosophical ideas, including free will.

Consider this objection to someone who rejects free will: “If our behavior is determined, why bother giving us advice?”

A simple programming exercise can expose the misunderstanding. A deterministic program can receive new information and behave differently because of it. Its behavior being determined doesn’t make inputs irrelevant. Those inputs are part of what determines its behavior.

Advice can work the same way under determinism. Arguments, warnings, education, and incentives can influence what people do. If someone changes their behavior after hearing advice, that is entirely consistent with their behavior having causes.

Students could demonstrate this by writing a simple program that changes its decision after receiving a warning. Nothing about the program needs to escape causation for the warning to matter.

This doesn’t prove that humans are computer programs or settle whether we have free will. It illustrates why determinism doesn’t imply that trying to influence someone is pointless.

Programming could also help students explore predictability, feedback, emergence, and decision-making. That seems like a good reason to include small programming exercises in philosophy classes and to teach programming partly as a reasoning tool, rather than only as preparation for software jobs.

A group of high school students starts experiencing strange events that turn out to be literary devices they learn about shortly afterward in English class.

A seemingly unimportant detail predicts something terrible, then the teacher explains foreshadowing.

An oddly emphasized object appears in someone's life, then they learn about Chekhov's gun.

Someone remembers an event differently from everyone else, then the class discusses the unreliable narrator.

Recurring animals or objects show up at meaningful moments, followed by lessons about symbolism and motifs.

The audience watching the movie could try to guess each literary device before the students learn what it is.

Eventually the students realize that reality itself seems to be behaving like a novel. Their lives have character arcs, callbacks, rising action, and increasingly obvious narrative structure.

Then, near the end, the pattern reverses: the teacher explains a literary concept before it happens.

Maybe the lesson is about tragedy, fatal flaws, or the climax of a story.

Now the students know what kind of event is coming.

They just don't know who it will happen to.

What do you think of this horror movie idea?