Needs camera and quite sophisticated software. The computer may take the most power and run hot. Hopefully it is general purpose enough so that it can be detached and used inside for gaming, 3D-design etc.

Identification of leafs may be more reliable with a multispectral camera, at least on daylight, but at night on LED-light may not help. Assuming there are other yellow things around.

EDIT:

Works more like a rake and could literally have a special version of a rake to pick 100 leaves in one movement. Or something else. Rake-head selection might depend on the tree species and type of lawn.

Before leaf blowers, rakes were deemed efficient enough.

Word about definitions:

Usually, the word "ground drone" implies that the robot has wheels or tracks and not in any way a helicopter or boat either. Might have 2, 4, 6 or 8 legs. Or skis+movers. Amphibious drone could be on ground or water. If a heli-drone has little wheels for taxiing to hangar, it does not make it a ground drone, not really.

The most common ground drone or UGV these days is robotic lawnmower that cuts grass. It is silent.

My ceiling fan uses T3 halogen bulbs that are long-shaped. Are there LED equivalents for this sort of bulb?

I’m having trouble finding one, but my halogen bulbs get incredibly hot, and I want something that won’t give off as much heat (but is still extremely bright).

My ceiling fan uses T3 halogen bulbs that are long-shaped. Are there LED equivalents for this sort of bulb?

I’m having trouble finding one, but my halogen bulbs get incredibly hot, and I want something that won’t give off as much heat (but is still extremely bright).

Was thinking about an idea for savory breakfast cereals, and how cereals always lean hard on sugar... the I remembered Cheese Grits. Would be amazing to have cereals that aren't so darn sweet.

Kinda like Kix or something.. round puffs of cheesy/buttery corn grits, and then occasional BBQ puffs in there.

If a parent genuinely believes in hell, that is a religious-belief issue.

But if they think hell is fictional and still tell their child, “Obey me or you’ll burn forever,” because the threat scares the child into behaving, that is psychological abuse.

Parents who do this should lose custody. Religious freedom should not protect someone who is using a religious threat they personally believe is false as a tool to terrify and control a child.

The law should also be allowed to consider whether the parent actually believes what they are saying. If brain-scanning technology ever becomes reliable enough to measure genuine belief, courts should be able to use it as evidence, potentially alongside stress-response testing involving disturbing depictions of hell.

You should not be able to threaten your child with eternal torture that you personally believe is fictional, then hide behind religious freedom when challenged.

The pilots of Flight 1549 did an incredible job, but the incident also shows why AI could be better in one very specific emergency: total engine failure.

In simulations, reaching an airport was sometimes possible if the turn started immediately. But when the NTSB added a realistic 35-second delay for the pilots to recognize the situation and decide what to do, those airport-return attempts failed.

With no engines, 35 seconds is a huge amount of lost altitude and lost opportunity.

An onboard AI wouldn't need those 35 seconds. It could instantly calculate every reachable runway using altitude, speed, wind, terrain, and glide performance, then immediately fly the option with the highest probability of survival.

If a jetliner loses all engine power, AI should be able to take over immediately instead of wasting precious altitude while humans figure out what just happened.

Canada is probably never going to beat the US on salaries, market size, or number of high-paying jobs.

So instead of trying to compete on the US's terms, Canada should compete by offering something the US does not: freedom from having to organize your entire life around employment.

Canada should introduce a modest UBI and gradually increase it as AI, automation, and productivity make it more affordable.

This could help with brain drain. A highly skilled Canadian might be more willing to stay in Canada, even for somewhat lower pay, if they had a guaranteed income floor and much more freedom to start a company, build an indie project, study, do research, create art, or simply work less.

Canada may also be in a better political position to do this first. Canadians are generally more comfortable with universal social programs than Americans, so Canada could potentially begin the transition years before the US does.

And this is about much more than economics.

A post-work economy could produce enormous intellectual benefits. Think about how much talent is currently wasted because people have to spend most of their time doing whatever pays the bills. More economic freedom could mean more research, invention, software, art, writing, education, entrepreneurship, and experimentation.

It could also have major mental health benefits. Less fear of unemployment, less financial insecurity, less burnout, and fewer people trapped in jobs they hate.

Obviously, people still need purpose, structure, and social interaction. A post-work society should not mean doing nothing. It should mean that meaningful activity no longer has to be tied to having an employer.

Canada should start small and increase UBI gradually as the economy becomes capable of supporting it.

If AI really is pushing us toward a world where less human labor is needed, Canada should not wait for the US to get there first.

Canada should make freedom from mandatory work one of its competitive advantages.

P.S. Where does the UBI money come from? Ultimately, from the companies using AI and robots. As AI and automation allow companies to produce more with fewer human workers, a portion of the resulting profits and productivity gains could be collected and distributed as UBI. The UBI could start small and gradually increase as machines perform a larger share of the economy's work. If robots and AI eventually do much of the work that humans do today, it makes sense for some of the income generated by that automated work to go to everyone rather than flowing almost entirely to the owners of the machines.

Imagine if major companies had actual sports teams made up of employees and competed against other companies. I feel like this would especially help the job market and get rid of a lot of AI-replacing jobs lmao.

Amazon vs. Walmart basketball. Apple vs. Microsoft soccer. Delta vs. United football.

Companies already spend ridiculous amounts of money on advertising, sponsorships, employee events, and corporate culture. Why not create actual leagues where employees could try out and represent their company?

It would give former college/high school athletes a reason to keep competing after graduation, make corporate rivalries way more entertaining, and probably be great marketing if people actually started following the teams.

Obviously you’d need rules so companies couldn’t just “hire” professional athletes as fake employees.

I genuinely think I’d watch Microsoft vs. Apple before I’d watch half the sports currently on TV.

I think public places such as libraries, shopping centres, airports, universities, and major transit stations should include a small private room where someone can be alone for a short time.

It could contain drinking water, tissues, a comfortable chair, soft lighting, ventilation, and an emergency call button. It could help people who are overwhelmed, anxious, grieving, experiencing sensory overload, or simply need a private moment.

Similar spaces may already exist in some facilities. My proposal is that a simple and accessible version should become a standard feature in more public places.

The difficult part would be balancing privacy and fair access. A strict time limit might prevent long-term occupation, but it could also make an anxious person feel pressured to calm down quickly. Perhaps a suggested session length, gentle check-ins, and optional extensions would work better.

How would you design and manage such a room safely and fairly?

If wealthy parents can easily afford to travel separately, maybe they should.

Putting both parents in the same car creates a completely avoidable single point of failure. One catastrophic crash could kill both of them and leave their children orphaned. Taking two cars makes that far less likely.

For most families, this would be impractical. For rich families, the extra cost and inconvenience may be trivial.

Some companies actually have policies preventing key executives from traveling together, because one accident could wipe out too much of their leadership at once. Why shouldn't parents apply that logic when the stakes are much higher for their children?

A science-fiction movie where people discover that reality is a simulation and figure out how to make its physics run backward.

This looks like time travel to the past, but technically nobody travels anywhere. There is only ever one universe and one current state of reality. The simulation simply evolves backward until it reaches an earlier configuration, then starts running forward again.

Because of that, there are no traditional time-travel paradoxes.

You could go back and prevent the event that caused you to rewind in the first place. Nothing contradictory happens. That event occurred during the universe's previous evolution, caused you to reverse the simulation, and is now simply absent from the new history.

There is no grandfather paradox either. If your own existence is somehow protected from the rewind, you could prevent your parents from meeting without suddenly disappearing. You already exist in the current state of the simulation. You don't depend on the new future eventually producing you again.

The really interesting discovery would be that the hackers can exempt selected things from reversal, somewhat like the rewind mechanic in Braid.

At first they might preserve only their memories, so the universe rewinds ten years, their bodies become ten years younger, but they remember everything that happened.

Eventually they might preserve other things: computer data, physical objects, inventions, or even entire people.

Someone could spend ten years developing a technology, make the finished invention immune to reversal, reverse the rest of reality ten years, and then possess something that was never invented in the new history.

So instead of the usual time-travel story about branching timelines and paradoxes, the movie would be about discovering increasingly powerful ways to hack the rules governing which parts of a simulated universe run forward and which run backward.

Canadians often treat moving to the U.S. for a higher-paying job as an automatic career achievement. I think that is wrong.

If someone moves because the work is genuinely more intellectually rewarding, creative, ambitious, or unavailable in Canada, that is worth respecting.

But if they could get equally satisfying work in Canada and move mainly because the U.S. job pays twice as much, why should that be admired? For already well-paid professionals without some major financial need, that looks more like shallow salary-chasing than ambition.

Canada should give more status to intellectual ambition than salary ambition.

Leaving for extraordinary work: admirable.

Leaving mainly for a bigger paycheck: shallow.

P.S. It would be nice if Canadians became known for chasing more intellectually rewarding work, not just bigger paychecks.

I’ve got an idea I keep turning over, but it’s not developed enough to call a project yet. I’m mostly looking for a place where people will tell me what they actually think instead of immediately trying to turn it into a business.

Where do you usually share half-formed ideas when you just want a real conversation about them?

Canada should officially rename Lake Erie “Lake America” in response to the U.S. federal government renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America.”

Doing nothing risks allowing the new name to become normalized over time. Even if most people reject “Lake America” today, years of seeing it on U.S. government documents, maps, websites, news reports, and other services could gradually make it seem like an ordinary alternative name for Lake Ontario.

Once a name becomes established through repetition, getting rid of it becomes much harder.

Canada therefore shouldn’t simply hope the rename disappears. It should make the new name difficult to use.

The best way would be deliberate ambiguity: rename Lake Erie “Lake America” too. Then “Lake America” would refer to Lake Ontario under U.S. terminology and Lake Erie under Canadian terminology.

But if the Canadian government refuses to do this officially, Canadians could do unofficially what the government wouldn’t.

Use “Lake America” to mean Lake Erie on social media, websites, memes, videos, merchandise, privately owned signs, and anywhere else people can legally choose their own terminology.

Then whenever someone says:

“There’s a storm over Lake America.”

“Pollution is increasing in Lake America.”

“We’re vacationing on Lake America.”

The obvious question becomes: Which Lake America? Ontario or Erie?

That is the sabotage.

A geographic name is supposed to clearly identify a place. If the U.S. government uses “Lake America” for Lake Ontario while a widespread Canadian grassroots movement uses exactly the same name for Lake Erie, the term becomes inherently ambiguous.

Instead of passively allowing “Lake America” to become more familiar and entrenched with every passing year, Canadians would be giving journalists, companies, mapmakers, and ordinary people a practical reason to avoid it and keep using the unambiguous names “Lake Ontario” and “Lake Erie.”

Ideally, the Canadian government would do this officially. If it won’t, Canadians could start doing it themselves. The longer Canada simply leaves the U.S. rename uncontested in practice, the greater the chance that “Lake America” stops sounding strange and starts sounding normal.

Use the caucus to push for these specific rules and use membership or lack of membership in the caucus as a litmus test for vote-worthiness and who to primary

Coverage of the U.S.-Canada trade war keeps emphasizing how much Canada needs the U.S. economy. But there’s much less discussion of how much the U.S. needs Canadian cooperation for its own defense.

The U.S. northern defense depends on Canadian geography, airspace, Arctic surveillance and NORAD. America can tariff Canada, but it can’t move Canada off its northern border.

That should matter when discussing who has leverage in this trade war. The U.S. has more economic power, but making your northern neighbor increasingly hostile has a strategic cost.

Canada’s strongest leverage may simply be that America is much safer with Canada as a willing ally.

Canada should trade more with Europe, but Canadians should strongly oppose joining the EU or importing regulations that make life harder for independent creators and tiny businesses.

Indie game developers are a good example.

Large companies can absorb the cost of EU representatives, legal advice, privacy compliance, safety assessments, technical documentation, and other regulatory requirements. A solo developer has to figure all of this out personally or pay specialists to do it.

Some EU requirements are surprisingly burdensome for tiny software businesses. Indie developers can face GDPR privacy obligations, public trader contact-information requirements, product-safety risk assessments and technical documentation, consumer-protection rules, and other compliance work that is much easier for a large company to absorb.

A requirement that is barely noticeable to Apple, Microsoft, or Ubisoft can be enough to make a solo developer decide that selling in Europe simply is not worth the trouble.

That is the wrong regulatory model for Canada to imitate.

Canada should instead aim to become one of the easiest developed countries in the world for solo developers, independent creators, and very small businesses to operate. Trade agreements should focus on market access and mutual recognition, not importing layers of EU regulation into Canadian law.

Trade more with Europe? Yes.

Join the EU or copy regulations that make Canada less friendly to indies? No.

I had an idea for an iPhone game that would use the front-facing camera and facial depth/vision technology to generate the terrain of a fictional moon from your skin.

Acne scars could become craters and depressions, while pimples could become hills, mountains, or volcanic-looking formations. The terrain would probably be exaggerated so that it looks like an interesting lunar landscape rather than a literal copy of your skin.

Then, instead of just viewing the generated moon, you could actually play a 3D lunar lander game on it.

Smoother parts of the terrain could become safer landing zones, while scar clusters might create crater fields and raised features could become obstacles. Different scans would effectively generate different playable moons.

Ideally, all of the facial processing would happen on-device for privacy, and the app would not need to upload or retain the original face scan.

A deliberately literal working title could be Acne Scar 3D Lunar Lander, although something shorter like Acne Moon Lander or Scar Moon would probably work better as an actual app name.

It seems like a fun way to turn something people normally think of negatively into the source material for a personalized game world.

Schools would survey former students 25 years after graduation and show each person a list of the high school subjects they actually took, ideally based on their transcript.

For every subject, the former student would rate how useful it turned out to be in their life. For example, they might choose something like:

• Not useful
• Slightly useful
• Moderately useful
• Very useful
• Extremely useful

The responses from everyone who took that subject would then be aggregated. If 42% of former students rated a class as at least moderately useful, current students could be shown something like:

Probability this class will be useful later in life: 42%

The results could also be broken down by career or field of study. A class might have a low usefulness probability overall but a very high one among people who later became engineers, programmers, doctors, artists, or accountants.

The point would not be to automatically eliminate classes with low probabilities. Some subjects may be worth studying for reasons other than direct practical usefulness, such as developing reasoning skills, providing cultural knowledge, or preparing students for further education.

But students should be able to see real long-term evidence about how useful previous students found what they were taught.

It would also give curriculum designers an unusually long feedback loop. Instead of deciding what is useful based almost entirely on assumptions, they could see what people who actually took each class thought about it 25 years later.

I’m building a few game ideas right now and this is one of them.

It’s called CrowdFlow. You manage huge crowds leaving stadiums, stations and events. You can open gates, place barriers, redirect people and make one-way routes.

Then stuff goes wrong while everyone is already moving — like a train delay suddenly sending 3,000 people somewhere else.

I’ve already started building it, but before I go way deeper: does this actually sound like something you’d play or nah? Be brutal lol.

A mockumentary set in a post-work future where AI and automation have made employment obsolete, and eventually illegal.

Future historians look back in disbelief at a society where people were expected to sell most of their waking hours to employers in exchange for money needed for food, housing, and other necessities.

They explain strange historical practices like job interviews, bosses, performance reviews, commuting, asking permission to take vacations, and being fired.

The United States is treated as a particularly extreme case because many people depended on their jobs for health insurance. Losing your job could therefore mean losing both your income and affordable access to medical care.

Future scholars debate how employment could have been considered voluntary when refusing to participate could leave someone without the means to live.

Meanwhile, the unemployed are completely vindicated.

People once described as lazy, unmotivated, or failures are now portrayed as the first people to reject the ideology of work. Historians call them early post-work visionaries. Activists call them freedom fighters.

A guy who lived with his parents and played video games all day gets a museum exhibit honoring his resistance to compulsory labor.

What do you think of this mockumentary idea?

In the near future, humans and humanoid robots live side by side.

The robots have been trained on generations of human culture: books, movies, conversations, home videos, letters, friendships, family life, humor, grief, love, and all the little social rituals people used to take for granted.

Meanwhile, humans have become increasingly isolated. AI handles more communication, entertainment is hyper-personalized, everything is delivered, and people rarely need to depend on one another.

So something strange happens: the robots become more human while the humans become more robotic.

The robots start noticing that many behaviors in their training data have disappeared. People used to visit friends, eat together, help neighbors, argue face to face, play together, and maintain relationships that were inefficient but meaningful.

Eventually the robots begin teaching humans those behaviors again.

When humans object that robots shouldn't tell them how to live, the robots answer:

"We didn't invent this. You taught us."

By the end, humans rediscover some of the social connection they had lost.

The final scene is a messy, noisy dinner between humans. Another robot asks whether they should help.

The first robot says:

"No. They're fine."

Trucks could still deliver, making them happy as hell, but on a regular basis, everyone else should use transit. Suburbs with no transit, their people can park on the edge in commuter lots.

It’d give them a taste of what it is like good or bad. The regular riders would at least get a free day to make up for the crowds.

Some people might like it others just might look a little more kindly on walkers and riders.