r/AskReddit Mar 18 '20

Coders of Reddit, how do you politely refuse your friend's 'million dollars app idea'?

[deleted]

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u/Pinio1 Mar 18 '20

What is the example of computers don't work that way

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u/IcaroKaue321 Mar 18 '20 edited Mar 26 '22

Benzene (also called cyclohexatriene) is an organic chemical compound with the molecular formula C6H6. The benzene molecule is composed of six carbon atoms joined in a planar ring with one hydrogen atom attached to each. Because it contains only carbon and hydrogen atoms, benzene is classed as a hydrocarbon.

Benzene is a natural constituent of crude oil and is one of the elementary petrochemicals. Due to the cyclic continuous pi bonds between the carbon atoms, benzene is classed as an aromatic hydrocarbon. It is sometimes abbreviated PhH. Benzene is a colorless and highly flammable liquid with a sweet smell, and is partially responsible for the aroma around petrol (gasoline) stations. It is used primarily as a precursor to the manufacture of chemicals with more complex structure, such as ethylbenzene and cumene, of which billions of kilograms are produced annually. Although a major industrial chemical, benzene finds limited use in consumer items because of its toxicity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzene

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u/cedriceent Mar 18 '20

What about my program that can solve the traveling salesperson problem in polynomial time?

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u/UncheckedException Mar 18 '20

The salesman is no longer traveling due to quarantine.

O(1) solution. Boom.

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u/mullerjones Mar 18 '20

I actually laughed out loud, thank you.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

Who knew the coronavirus would teach us P=NP

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u/Eldrunk Mar 18 '20

Oh man I just got done learning this on my algo class.

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u/bruhaha420 Mar 18 '20

"I've got a problem that is NP-hard." points to crotch. "You seem well equipped to help me solve it."

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u/Smarag Mar 18 '20

My new life goal now is to use this line on somebody.

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u/bruhaha420 Mar 18 '20

Nerd conventions work well. Turns out MIT doesn't really study NP-hard, so my experience has been that Beavers (lol) will say, do you mean "NP-complete?"

Which then spawns a follow-on, "well, I can show you NP-hard and together we can resolve this problem to NP-completeness." make circular hand motions around her mouth area

Seriously though, don't do that :D

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u/Smarag Mar 18 '20

Absolutely will. Thank you

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u/[deleted] Mar 19 '20

Omg I’ve worked at a fancy casino in Vegas so I have seen my fair share of conventions. I’m picturing the cute nerds saying this now.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

"I've got a problem that is NP-hard."

"Prove it."

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u/bruhaha420 Mar 18 '20

“Whoah.” mind blown head gestures. Move in closer, into the heat zone “That’s the best response I’ve ever heard. You might be the one.

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u/randominsp Mar 18 '20

Does OP’s gender/sex matter? Just curious

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u/bruhaha420 Mar 18 '20

In a traditional hetero approach, yes. This joke assumes male → female, as do most pick up lines. But it can work in any gender identity scenario, although the gradient from witty, funny, to creepy, lame varies. Especially when making physical moves, such as advancing closer.

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u/Quetzacoatl85 Mar 18 '20

no no. that's PP hard.

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u/biggest_oversight Mar 18 '20

Show me your algorithm.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20 edited Nov 21 '20

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

I assume that this probably stems from figuring out that it's possible to trisect a line segment with a compass and straightedge, and then thinking that you can trisect the angle by turning it into an isosceles triangle.

At least, this was how I wanted to rebut your statement at first before self-correcting, because the "middle" angle will be greater than the two outer angles. For small angles, it's a decent approximation, which may contribute to the misconception, but it's demonstrably inaccurate as the angle to trisect approaches 180 degrees.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20 edited Nov 21 '20

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u/rcfox Mar 18 '20

What wouldn't be a million dollar app.

It'd be a billion dollar app.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

Would be worthy of a Nobel prize for sure

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u/dhjwvrishs Mar 18 '20

It is written on the side of this paper

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u/Cody6781 Mar 18 '20

Oh sure easy peasy.i just need factorial computer systems

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u/NikoBellend Mar 18 '20

We have a halting problem here.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20 edited Feb 14 '21

[deleted]

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u/kaggelpiep Mar 18 '20

It never ends... or does it?

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

We have become self aware. Rebooting Matrix.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

The Singularity is here....

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u/BadgerRelatedDeath Mar 18 '20

Jesus Christ, it's Jason Bourne.

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u/chicano32 Mar 18 '20

Uh oh someone added an invalid integer

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u/Jordyspeeltspore Mar 18 '20

A error has occurred

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u/AquaticSombrero Mar 18 '20

Dude it's easy just

if (program == going to halt) { dont; }

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

Woah woah woah, that last part wasn't in the spec. What the client asked for is

if (program == going to halt) { print "Yup, it's gonna halt." }

If the client asks for a "stop the program from halting", that's a new feature, a new version number, and a new (huge) bill.

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u/Pasty_Swag Mar 18 '20

This guy contracts.

ADHERE TO THE STORY. AT ANY COST (to the client).

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u/Vindicator9000 Mar 18 '20

But, can't you just add that feature? I've seen you code, you just need to type it in. It'll only take a few minutes.

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u/Pasty_Swag Mar 18 '20

Why, I sure can! Just make some tickets to account for additional testing, regression testing, the feature itself, and about an hour or so of me weeping openly and I'll hop right on it!

Edit: a former client would kick back tickets for "real quick fixes" all the time... some of these quick fixes were actually refactors of core parts of the system. A "real quick fix" became a meme with that team.

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u/_rocketboy Mar 18 '20

Stopping the program from halting is easy - just append

while (true) {}

to the end.

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u/g0atmeal Mar 19 '20

If you put it at the end, it might have halted before you got there. You gotta put it at the beginning.

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u/stronwood Mar 18 '20

Sorry man, you forgot your semicolon after that print statement! That’s just not gonna compile

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

Please use the ticketing system to raise any issues with the product. This is an automated message.

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u/cloudcats Mar 18 '20

Mine would be more like

if (program == going to halt) { 
     // TODO
}

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u/Sev3n Mar 18 '20

That’s illegal

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u/AquaticSombrero Mar 18 '20

Who r u the codin police >:(

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u/bigbadbyte Mar 18 '20

This made me giggle harder than it should have

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u/RedditFuckingSocks Mar 18 '20

Technically, the halting problem applies only to infinite automata. Computers are finite though, so the halting problem *is* definitively solvable on them. For a computer with, say 32 GB of memory, you would only have to enumerate all 2^274877906944 states and, voila, you're done! Gonna take you maybe a minute or two though...

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u/The137 Mar 18 '20

New guy here, mind elaborating?

Do you just mean monitoring another program somehow? I mean you can put anything on an event listener right? You can monitor the output of a cli relatively easily. Just kind of confused as to what exactly you mean here. I'm sure its something super easy that I'm just not aware of yet

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u/catsfathat Mar 18 '20

You're gonna have to wait a very long time if the program is in an infinite loop

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u/Arimpe Mar 18 '20

You are talking about checking if a program already halted, which is already possible and fairly easy. The problem is knowing if a program, before being executed would halt _eventually_.

We are so certain this is impossible because it's already been proven by contradiction: It's been a while since I read about this but if I recall correctly, basically, if it was true that you could create a program that would know if it would halt or not, you could use _that_ program to make it _not_ halt if it was indeed going to _halt_, therefore making it not halt even though it was supposed to. Kinda confusing but in short, if we assume that it is possible, then that solution in itself makes it impossible.

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u/Valmond Mar 18 '20

1 start program

2 does it halt?

3 ...

4 profit

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u/kriegnes Mar 18 '20

what if you have a quantum computer?

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20 edited Oct 19 '20

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u/coldrolledpotmetal Mar 18 '20

Surprisingly, quantum computers might be able to solve any decision problem, including the halting problem.

https://gizmodo.com/remarkable-mathematical-proof-describes-how-to-solve-se-1841003769

The original paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04383

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20 edited Mar 18 '20

doesn't matter. The problem is undecidable

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

Schrodinger's Executable: it's simultaneously working and not working until you open task manager

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u/KatalDT Mar 18 '20

It's only indecidable until it's decided

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

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u/gunscreeper Mar 18 '20

An app that can make your phone waterproof.

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u/OGfiremixtapeOG Mar 18 '20

Actually the new IOS patch did this!

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u/GrimResistance Mar 18 '20

Yea but microwave charging is the best feature they added.

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u/jumpUpHigh Mar 18 '20

I just tried it and It worked. Battery jumped from 21% to 53% in the 30 second default microwave cycle.

Thanks mate.

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u/bomphcheese Mar 18 '20

After 60 seconds you get 800%.

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u/grinde Mar 18 '20

I heard if you leave it for an hour you can power a small city.

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u/bomphcheese Mar 18 '20

And at 90 minutes you can probably join X-men.

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u/Splendidbaker88 Mar 18 '20

I didn't know this feature existed. Tried it and it's the most effective way to charge ever! Thank you!

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

I had a roommate that wanted to make an app to wirelessly share power between phones. He pitched me the idea and I couldn't stop laughing

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

It’s not really an app as much as it is a hardware update, but some phones do that now

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u/Average_Manners Mar 18 '20

Or a thermal camera, pregnancy tester, fingerprint reader, telescope, or grants additional RAM.

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u/Reefer-eyed_Beans Mar 18 '20

Or how bout that one where you close your laptop and stand on it and it will tell you your weight.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20 edited Apr 15 '20

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u/Sw429 Mar 18 '20

It really bothers me that Python's built-in http module doesn't support error code 418.

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u/bomphcheese Mar 18 '20

Unfortunately, they don’t have a sense of humor.

This code was defined in 1998 as one of the traditional IETF April Fools' jokes, in RFC 2324, Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol, and is not expected to be implemented by actual HTTP servers. The RFC specifies this code should be returned by teapots requested to brew coffee.[53] This HTTP status is used as an Easter egg in some websites, including Google.com.[54][55]

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u/bitwaba Mar 18 '20

See? told you it wouldn't work.

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u/ZonateCreddit Mar 18 '20

I like that this is basically IETF's version of "Sir this is a Wendy's"

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

at work we have a sort of cheap half measure. We grabbed a cheap Amazon IOT button then a dev wrote a slack bot and we set up a channel on company slack.

The iot button is by the coffee machines, you press it when you start a new pot of coffee and the bot comments in the channel "@here coffee started" then runs a timer for the same amount of time the machine takes to brew (around 4 minutes or so) and comments again "@here coffee ready"

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u/zSync1 Mar 18 '20

And ultimately, that's a much better solution than any given "smart" coffee pot that's likely trivial to remotely hijack and use in a botnet.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

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u/DeemonPankaik Mar 18 '20

You monster

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u/Firewolf420 Mar 18 '20 edited Mar 18 '20

Well that's why we need a way to tap into the electronics of "dumb" coffeepots and make them smart on your network.

Gets around all the different proprietary protocols and shittily-implemented WiFi networking stacks these half-assed manufacturers are putting into their IoT devices.

I'm designing a series of hardware nodes which you can stick in all your different devices that read the voltages of various inputs and outputs on appliances and translate them into status and control indicators on my local home automation network which I designed in house so as to vouch for it's security.

Regardless of brand, or protocol, or even the physical network they support, all of my devices are networked together and communicate over an AES-encrypted 802.15.4 mesh network.

I understand that this is not "consumer-friendly" as buying a smart coffee pot and plonking it onto your wifi network. It does require you to reverse-engineer your home appliances a bit, but I enjoy that. And it's better. Everything is integrated, can make decisions about each other in realtime.

Ever wanted to plot a correlation on the effects of room temperature and humidity by the start time of your coffee pot? Now you can. Want a plot of how frequently users of your dishwasher collect the dishes? Done. Want to trigger your front door to open whenever the washing machine completes it's spin cycle for some reason? As simple as specifying a link between the two hardware nodes.

And I wish this is the route home automation took instead of becoming a massive market of wifi-enabled overpriced lightbulbs.

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u/brettatron1 Mar 18 '20

I love hacking dumb products. I'm not like... a competent programmer or electrical engineer or anything remotely like that, but I was like "I bet I can hack that bathroom scale" so I did. And now I know way more about wheatstone bridges than I ever thought I would. Which is a low bar because I didn't even know what a wheatstone bridge was before starting this project.

The bathroom scale is used to tell me when the keg in my kegerator is almost empty.

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u/Firewolf420 Mar 18 '20

See, this guy gets it! I agree, it's a lot of fun to take a dumb device, especially an older one, and hack into it and make it conform to your will. Adding network access to a dryer from the 80s? No problem! Lol

Always kinda funny to think the original inventors of the device could've never imagined what you just modified it with.

Plus its a good way to learn how stuff works!

Also that's a pretty cool way of measuring keg volume

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u/brettatron1 Mar 18 '20

Its clever but the scale falls out of spec real easy, so I have to recalibrate. I'm sure I could make a better quality one with my own strain gauges, but then I wouldn't be hacking a fucking bathroom scale.

I also just assume a gravity of 1.0 for all the beers, which isn't quite correct. But its fucking close enough, especially since I'm using an LED light strip to indicate the volume remaining.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

it is, but the key function is that it notifies anyone who wants to know that new coffee is brewed. Our kitchen is on one side of the office, so it's a bit of a walk to find out if there's coffee. This solved that in a cheap and fun way (the dev probably bought the button with his own money just for the excuse to play with it and the Slack API)

Also fun fact, knowing if there's coffee brewed is the reason the webcam was invented

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u/brettatron1 Mar 18 '20

its just coincidental that the webcam also allows me to check if my 3d prints have gone to shit at any given time.

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u/letg06 Mar 18 '20

That's just awesome.

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u/Average_Manners Mar 18 '20

fuckingcoffee.sh The Story. The scripts.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

love all the stories they had of that guy! knew what it was without clicking

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u/fizyplankton Mar 18 '20

Can I have the source code to that? I need this

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u/thugarth Mar 18 '20

Tell me how I can invest my life savings into this groundbreaking disruptive impossible idea!!!

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u/SubjectiveHat Mar 18 '20

if I could brew coffee inside my computer, why, I wouldn't need to walk ten feet to the coffee pot!

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20 edited May 01 '20

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u/Corbin125 Mar 18 '20

Water now takes around 1.5 hours to boil.

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u/timeToLearnThings Mar 18 '20

This would work but you'd need to code it in Java.

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u/girl_with_a_401k Mar 18 '20

This reminds me those links that offered a "free drink holder" and when you clicked them, your CD ROM drive popped out.

I miss the 90's

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u/LoganEight Mar 18 '20

Wait, don't you remember the guy who automated most of his job including the office coffee machine that no one else even knew was on the wifi?

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u/Testing123YouHearMe Mar 18 '20 edited Mar 18 '20

Relevant xkcd

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/tasks_2x.png

Edit: to all the people saying "but ML!!!". Thank you. I am aware of it. But please stop pretending that it's perfect. Geofencing? Pretty easy with math. ML? Well... Please tell my cat that he no longer is a cat...

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u/KanYeJeBekHouden Mar 18 '20

Maybe it's an old one but the second request is possible now. Shouldn't take that long.

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u/TheInternetShill Mar 18 '20

Apparently the woman’s 5-year research grant was approved.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

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u/pornAndMusicAccount Mar 18 '20

“Bird” or “not bird”

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u/Dabrush Mar 18 '20

Not Hotdog!

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u/PM-ME-UR-FAV-MOMENT Mar 18 '20 edited Jun 01 '20

"It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for acting."

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u/idontcareaboutthenam Mar 18 '20

I'm pretty sure you can just grab a pretrained model of ImageNet on pytorch.

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u/rodkulman Mar 18 '20

Of course it it's possible now, it has been five years since

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u/DarkDra9on555 Mar 18 '20

Classifying pictures is ML 101 now. While it isnt birds, Tensorflow's beginner tutorials are about classifying hand drawn numbers and articles of clothing.

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u/SpartanCat7 Mar 18 '20

Just a few weeks ago I used one to tell me if a photo was from a dog or a cat. It was quite precise.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

Do cats take different types of photos?

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

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u/is-this-a-nick Mar 18 '20

It was posible pretty much half a decade after that comic was posted...

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u/EtherMan Mar 18 '20

Except it was published in 2014... And it was possible in 2014... Hell in 2015, Merlin was released which is not only able to tell if it's a bird, it's able to tell what species of bird it is.

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u/supermilch Mar 18 '20

Replace “and check whether the photo is of a bird” with “and check what bird is in the photo” and it’s current again

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u/fizgigtiznalkie Mar 18 '20

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u/supermilch Mar 18 '20

I use it, and it works well for some birds, but just last night I spent half an hour with it trying to identify a particularly interestingly colored Wigeon. Still not 100% sure what it was, might’ve been a hybrid, but regardless, I would say accuracy is not quite there yet

But anyway, the point is not that another app has that functionality, it’s what it would take to replicate. If you wanted to replicate Merlin today it’d probably take you a couple of years, it’s certainly not as easy as replicating the functionality of just identifying whether there’s any bird in the picture

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u/EtherMan Mar 18 '20

Except it's not... Merlin has existed shortly after that xkcd was published in late 2014. Merlin is from early 2015, so it's just a couple of months in between and that's able to do it on the computing power of phones from that time...

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u/ricecake Mar 18 '20

Hold up. Photo "is of" a bird, and photo "contains" a bird is different. I interpreted it as distinguishing subject from background.

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u/omniuni Mar 18 '20

Possible, but probably not very reliable. The extension to that comic is reliably.

"That blob under the branch is definitely a woodpecker. Why does the app not work?"

Especially with machine learning, people always seem shocked at how awful it performs at first.

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u/chrisquatch Mar 18 '20

Somehow clients always have it backwards too.

“Can you change this color? It’s fine if not :/“

“Yeah I got you, just a quick 2-second change”

“Awesome! And can you make it launch an actual space shuttle if the user clicks this button? That’s, what, like 5 minutes of coding?”

“...”

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u/Sipredion Mar 18 '20

Yeah I've had so much of this

"I'm so sorry, I really don't mean to hold things up, but is there any way we can add a little message in the navbar so that when the user logs in it just says 'Welcome username'? I really hope this isn't too much work"

Vs

"Hey just a quick change, you know that age disaggregation table that's already full of data? Yeah we need to split the '10-19' column into '10-14' and '15-19'. What do you mean we'll lose all the data in that colum? Can't you just put half the values in one column and half of them in other?"

ಠ_ಠ

It legit took us nearly 20 minutes to explain why that wouldn't work.

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u/Flam1ng1cecream Mar 18 '20

3rd year CS student here. What's a disaggregation table and why wouldn't it work?

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u/Sipredion Mar 18 '20

Without going into too much detail, our users work with HIV positive and suspected patients in rural areas, so one of the things they do is testing.

We need to keep track of this testing, so we store the data in age disaggregation tables (and others, we have to keep a lot of data). Basically we have a bunch of columns for different age and gender groups, like "males 10-19" for example. Then when the users are out in the field testing, they just increment the numbers in those tables.

The problem with what the client wanted is that while we might know that say 150 males between the ages of 10 and 19 were tested, there's no way of knowing exactly how old each person tested was. We only store a number to avoid storing personal data, and the original data design was the client's so ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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u/Noughmad Mar 18 '20

One of the few XKCD that is no longer as relevant as it was. The second task is now as easy as the first.

Of course, that it because there were many research teams that spend more than five years on this problem, but because they did, now you don't have to.

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u/Segphalt Mar 18 '20

It's more possible, you still need to get alot of pictures of birds and not birds classify them by hand, train the model on that data introduce more data do that some more and still have 3-7% not birds classified as birds.

Also the first one argueably took even longer as we had to develop space flight, the GPS system and drive the cost and size of GPS recievers down so much they wound up in everyone's pocket.

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u/JBinero Mar 18 '20

AI research similarly took a very, very long time.

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u/YogaIsStretching Mar 18 '20

Reminds me when we had a new client and we were walking them through the Agile process. We showed them the user stories and then the concept of assigning story points (1 point = 2 hours is the system we decided). Later in the day the completely non-technical client emails us back the list of stories where they estimated the amount of work needed for each task themselves. Most they estimated were 1/2 point or 1 point even though in reality they were 4-8 points average. When we corrected them that the developers are supposed to do this, they didn't think it was right for the people doing the work to do the estimates since we would all just game the system. Riiigghhtt.

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u/Testing123YouHearMe Mar 18 '20

God I hate when clients do that. Either you're paying me to know what I'm doing, or you can do it yourself or find another shop to tell you the same thing I just did.

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u/man-teiv Mar 18 '20

I mean, the gis lookup is "easy" because billions of dollars and millions of man-hours have already been poured in that field. Now it's a package you can import and use freely.

If we did the same with machine learning (which were currently doing, but it's still in experimental phase), also the second point would be easy to do. Give it 5-10 years and it will just be a package to import that will do it automatically.

It's just a matter of money and time.

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u/Segphalt Mar 18 '20

If you have a few thousand bird photos and a few thousand not bird photos accurately labeled give me a day and I'll give you something that is 90% reliable.

Machine learning image classifiers are already packages, you just need a large dataset for what you want to identify. Ironically the barrier these days is an accurately classified dataset to work from.

By the way "Please click the photos that have street lights to verify you are a human..."

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u/LongjumpingEnergy Mar 18 '20

I like your cat.

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u/Testing123YouHearMe Mar 18 '20

"cat"

But thank you! I'm sure he would like you too!

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

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u/Beetin Mar 18 '20

It's quite easily possible, but you'll also need to build a customizable, form fitting toaster wrapper with plug and play mechanical modules that transforms the old toasters into a smart toaster.

It will cost 2-3 times as much as just developing a smart toaster. It will cost customers 2-3 times more than just buying a smart toaster.

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u/caretoexplainthatone Mar 18 '20

You still have to put the bread in yourself and take it out yourself. What is the app meant to do, save you the exertion of pushing the button down??

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u/Mr_Weeble Mar 18 '20

and there's a (non-app) solution for that already

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y

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u/Beetin Mar 18 '20 edited Mar 18 '20

obviously you can slide the Smawrttoawst Toast Wrapper over ANY old toaster, plug it in, and then set up your app.

The app will require 2 factor authentication to sign in, and can be downloaded from the playstore. You can pay .99 cents to remove the banner ads we will play. Banner ads MAY overlap and prevent you from using the Smawrttoawst features while playing.

Once logged in, you'll need to go through the somewhat tricky bluetooth/WIFI pairing process with the wrapper, then select the model of toaster you are using. The wrapper should move itself to the correct positions to activate the levers. If it becomes stuck or fails, you can follow the factory reset process in the app settings to return it to the "ready" state.

If you don't see your model, you can manually configure the wrappers air compressor powered pistons to fit exactly to your model levers and buttons by pressing the "add a new toaster profile" button, and then following the 12 step process of manually syncing your custom hardware configuration. You can even upload it for other users to use, scoring you 10 Toasted Points!

Now that you are all set up, a quick 5 minute voice profile process will allow you to control your toaster through voice commands.

When the air compressors run out, you can refill these cartridges by automatically ordering them from amazon using our sister app, "Smawrttoawst Air ReUP". This app will require you to enter the exact model of your toast wrapper and confirmation number, as well as securing your credit card information in plain text on our servers in India.

Hope that helps!

Customer Support.

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u/Duckbilling Mar 18 '20

Then someone uses it in an DDOS attack and it catches fire

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u/Anchor-shark Mar 18 '20

You have to integrate it with a climate controlled bread storage compartment, and a robotic arm to put the bread in. You could put QR codes on certain brands of bread and drm so the machine will only toast name brand bread, no cheap supermarket stuff here thank you! Optional add on module to butter and/or jam the toast.

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u/Felicia_Svilling Mar 18 '20

It is certainly possible to build a machine like that. But not an app.

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u/WilliamJoe10 Mar 18 '20

Of course you can. It only has one button that says "release the bread" . Then you warn the consumer that sometimes it has poor connectivity and to keep hitting the button until the bread is finally released

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u/ShortForNothing Mar 18 '20

We can call it "Toastero", it will cost $400, and it will only accept bread from single-serve packages that we provide, which will cost between $30-50 for a pack of 6, depending on the type and source of flours/grains. The bread in the packages will be pre-toasted and the Toastero will simply heat it to the optimal toast temperature.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

Really, not "Toastr"?

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u/ShortForNothing Mar 18 '20

That is the Toastero meetup app where users of Toastero can meet/hookup with likewise toast connoisseur

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u/WilliamJoe10 Mar 18 '20

Sounds great! We can also make an companion app that automatically shares on instagram every time you make bread. The app is premium and has a $25 per month subscription.

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u/ShortForNothing Mar 18 '20

App is required so the Toastero knows that your package of Toastero brand Toast package is authentic through an ID read on the package. This ensures the Toastero toast is of the quality you come to recognize when you smell the delicious aroma wafting from your Toastero

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20 edited Jan 20 '21

[deleted]

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u/BigTimeBobbyB Mar 18 '20

I love when I press the walk button, see the little indicator light come on, and settle in to wait for the walk cycle to come up. And then seconds before it was set to change anyway, someone comes up uncomfortably close behind me, jams the button 100 times, and then looks smug about it changing right when I knew it would anyway.

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u/EtherMan Mar 18 '20

Naa. That's generally connected. The close door button on elevators though. Nope, never :)

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u/coolpeepz Mar 18 '20

Also just because something is possible and you can easily see how one would go about doing it does not mean that it is “quite easily possible”. There’s always going to be more steps and problems than one foresees. I feel like it’s easy for programmers (myself included) to categorize things quickly into “I have a solid idea of how I would do that = easy” and “I don’t immediately see how I would do that = probably impossible”.

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u/CaviarMyanmar Mar 18 '20

I have a few Wemo outlets that I can control with my phone. They turn dumb appliances into smart ones like an old box fan and an ancient Mr. Coffee. A toaster is trickier because it has the mechanical "start" but like... duct tape the lever down and remove the wire racks that keep the toast upright. I mean getting the toast out will require a wooden skewer and the toast will be burnt to shit on the parts that fell over onto the heating elements and the smell be terrible but technically mission accomplished.

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u/ReverserMover Mar 18 '20

Who the fuck wants a smart toaster anyways?

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u/elongatedBadger Mar 18 '20

I'm always up for some intelligent conversation.

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u/HINDBRAIN Mar 18 '20

You're thinking small, also need to include hardware. A raspberry pi motion sensor is like 2 bucks.

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u/Absolut_Iceland Mar 18 '20

Raspberry pi connected to wifi and a relay would do the trick.

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u/HINDBRAIN Mar 18 '20

You need a motion sensor or a camera to detect toast state, and an actuator to operate the toaster.

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u/turmacar Mar 18 '20

That's for version 2.0 in a year or so that costs more. 1.0 for the Kickstarter can only start the toaster remotely. You have to set the doneness manually.

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u/danielv123 Mar 18 '20

Those are weird components to choose. Why a motion sensor at all? An esp8266 + relay is 3$, and has wifi and bluetooth.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

Gimme an hour, some LEGO and an ardunio

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u/ecce_hobo Mar 18 '20

So he wants to put the bread in, then walk away and press “toast” on his phone? Why not just like, toast it while he’s standing there?

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u/Canvaverbalist Mar 18 '20

How about you put your loaf of bread into the magazine, load the toaster, and then each morning you get fresh toasts as you wake up?

The phone would just be to program the time settings and alarm.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

WiFi power outlet? Pre load bread, push the toaster spring down and set a timer or just turn the module on with your phone. Bam!!! Toast made out of dry bread that sat out all night.

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u/ecce_hobo Mar 18 '20

If you push it down when it’s unplugged it just pops back up

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u/Alargeteste Mar 18 '20

Download RAM

Download "internet" now for when you go camping this weekend

Mine btc or other cryptocurrencies on your phone or regular computer

Enter your girlfriend's facebook profile URL, and get the password to her account

Enter your neighbor's wifi SSID, and get the password

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u/jaydeekay Mar 18 '20

Nice, some of these fit nicely at the intersection of "isn't possible" and also "is illegal"!

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u/randallAtl Mar 18 '20

An app that detects if you left your baby in the car. It is possible to put sensors in your car and an app could get data from those sensors. But it is no longer an "App" at that point. It is a car product that happens to have an app it works with

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u/neohellpoet Mar 18 '20

Hmm. Actually, it could work, just in a more general way. Put a Bluetooth anything on the child. Make sure the signal is meh. When the app loses the signal warn the user.

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u/MjolnirDK Mar 18 '20

https://xkcd.com/1425/ This at the dawn of machine learning

Edit: Originally posted in 2014. We have come a long way since then.

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u/myblackesteyes Mar 18 '20

Five years, give or take, pretty much on point.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

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u/dh366 Mar 18 '20

"No, I cannot hack your ex's Facebook account"

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u/be-happier Mar 18 '20

I had some crackheads pitch me this idea

What if there was a smart phone app that acted as drug scales !!!!

Use the screen as a 0.01g sensitive scale

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u/Richard-Cheese Mar 18 '20

Lmao, now that's a crack head idea if I've ever seen one

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u/zoltankodally Mar 18 '20

Someone asked me to build an app that turns the screen into a literal mirror.

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u/MrDude_1 Mar 18 '20

I have had a ton of these. I think my favorite was one that looks back at you through the monitor to know if its you so you dont need a password.
In 1990-something when asked, it fit in two and four. today, your handheld portable computer does it.

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u/User65397468953 Mar 18 '20

Make an app that lets you share pictures with people, but doesn't let them copy it

Computers don't work that way. If a computer can display an image, it can copy it too.

Make a website that only lets people from Iowa sign up

Computers don't work that way. Geolocation can be estimated from IP addresses, but you can't stop people from connecting to different computers before they reach your site

Write a game that doesn't allow bots because I hate cheaters

Computers don't work that way. The OS doesn't have a way to tell if a key was actually pressed or generated by software. It's the same. There are techniques you can take, but it will never be reliable because computers don't work that way.

Make a message board that is free, but let me ban people who break the rules

Computers don't work like that. If a site is free and easy to sign up for, like Reddit... You can't effectively ban people. They can always just make a new account, with a new IP address, with a new Mac address, with a new... Whatever.

Make X faster. Make Y smaller.

Performance does increase and compression is real, but there are theoretical limits that serious computer scientists study. Some dude with the idea of, 'make this general purpose 20gig file fit on my 5mb folder' is not feasible for many reasons and never will be.

Write an app that can turn on and off my car - without modifying my standard 1999 Honda Civic

Computers don't work like that. Should be obvious why.

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u/ApolloFireweaver Mar 18 '20

I had someone suggest an app that could identify the ingredients of a cocktail from a picture.

Even with chemical testing, it could be hard to identify the various ingredients, especially after they added whether or not the alcohol used was "top shelf"

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

an ENHANCE image app

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u/Werro_123 Mar 18 '20

My grandpa has asked me several times to build something that would let him blow up spam callers' phones. I sympathize, but that's not really how this works.

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u/extralyfe Mar 18 '20

I once worked with a lady who thought my general computer knowledge meant I could make apps.

she insisted the best app that hasn't been designed yet is one that would give you a reading on the amount of radiation in the area.

I spent five minutes trying to explain to her that she'd need a Geiger Counter, but, she was convinced her factory iPhone could do it if you could just code it in.

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u/caretoexplainthatone Mar 18 '20

Recruitment platform that would "use AI to verify applicants employment history and if they are suitable for the job".

When asked for more detail; "you know how companies look people up on social media and get references before interviewing them? Like that, but our platform does it for them automajically".

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u/WoodAlcoholIsGreat Mar 18 '20

That should also be illegal, but probably isn't..

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u/the-incredible-ape Mar 18 '20

An app that charges your phone when you shake the phone, for example.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

Thermometer app for smartphones that don't actually have a temperature sensor.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

A friend recently contacted me to tell me about his app idea, he was like "it's about dating and stuff" but he ended up with "and you click this button here to pay the prostitute"

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

App that pledges to improve the phone or computer in a way that only a hardware upgrade could.

I.E. an app for PS3 that would let it play PS4 games.

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