Problem with ambiguous boundaries, messy constraints and no linear path to a solution
Something trivial as matching people based on interest. We have social networks and various marketplaces but we are still unable to pair/match people based on desired activities, items for sale, services, relationships(online dating), even jobs.
Imagine you have some ancient toaster you are about to throw in the bin because it is old and you have no use for it and it has no value on the market. Yet, on the other side of the planet, there is a guy who is desperately looking for exactly this toaster because of #reasons. Yet, these people will never be able to find each other to trade.
Yes, there is ebay and whatnot, just like there is tinder for dating, facebook for socialising, various platforms for job hunting, but all these platforms are extremely inefficient in actually delivering on the promise of matching people based on the supply and demand.
The search engines all these platforms use are all very primitive and completely unable to provide the desired service. They are essentially all the same, they just cater to different markets. But there is little technical distinction among them.
The toaster example is a completely trivial one. You can easily expand it to a job where you need a person with specific skills and experience. But you will simply never be able to find that person via any of the existing pathways. Except sheer luck and word of mouth.
This can be likely solved via something like brain implants where we can be connected to the internet and immediately provide necessary context or answer some questions to build a better profile as a "supplier" or "buyer" that could allow a better match. But we're infinitely far away from it.
And this is just one of millions of such small problems that are really hard to solve.
The advertising companies all use tracking to try and mitigate this as much as possible so they can offer you the most likely product or a service that you actually might be interested in buying. But again, these are very primitive solutions.
Chemistry (Or biology, as an extension of it) simulations. Current tools include Newtonian atom-centered force fields that are fit to a specific situation and lose validity outside it, and quantum computations that are very slow, and don't scale well.
I have a hunch there is something about the underlying physics we are missing, and that we have not hit the endgame of modelling physics at this scale.
I've been experimenting in this space, where might I find a guide for what to build that would be useful to you? I suspect most existing approaches are an order of magnitude slower and harder to use than they need to be.
Anti-cheat systems in multiplayer video games. It seems like every multiplayer game out there eventually gets overrun with cheaters and that cheat developers win every time.
There's no capabilities based OS ready to be a daily driver. Until this happens we're going to keep seeing stories about hacked systems, and how we all need to rewrite applications in Rust.
What I want is something like the UI of the web platform but for desktop development exclusively. The differences between this and the current web platform are:
* no certificates
* direct access to a shell, network stack, and file system from api available directly within the viewport
* a permission system allowing custom roles and security policies
* a better mark up format that imposes accessibility criteria by default like type safety in rust
* a buffer based data serialization so that I don’t have to parse/stringify on every transaction
1) Designing built environments that maximize the community and enjoyment of the people who live in them
and perhaps even moreso 2) Figuring out how to get them built
It seems we mostly know the answers for 1, we just don't know how to get them built in a sea of development regulations and entrenched interests etc.
I'll give you one: "Do any odd perfect numbers exist?"
You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_number#Odd_perfect_num...
You can watch a short documentary about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zrv1EDIqHkY
Wonderful quote in there from James Joseph Sylvester:
>>... a prolonged meditation on the subject has satisfied me that the existence of any one such [odd perfect number] —its escape, so to say, from the complex web of conditions which hem it in on all sides— would be little short of a miracle.
Is 2+2 still 4 :p
Observability that can produce causal explanations rather than just timelines. We have great tooling for logs/metrics/traces, but very little that helps engineers understand why a distributed system behaved the way it did. Automated causal graphs for incidents still feel like an open problem.
In distributed systems, at least we have the variables, functions, pods, log traces, spans etc some pre defined structure, and some level of determinism. I would say Causality is still not fully explored territory when it comes to human brain.
When I think of human brain or may be to some extent LLMs, it's difficult to understand what is invisible. For distributed systems we will build tools, there is ongoing research in LLM Observability, but I wonder what about human brain
That you know of.
Perpetual-ish motion machines. While a true perpetual motion machine physically cannot exist, a machine that operates at an efficiency rate to be for all intents and purposes "perpetual" is theoretically possible, if not physical
Perpetual-ish motion machines exist if you know where to look.
There is a reasonable argument that your question is at least NP, and plausibly NP-hard or harder depending on how you formalize the verification oracle.
Utilizing the smartphone to its full potential. IMO it is an underutilized platform. There’s more than just CRUD gambling or doomscrolling shit possible on it.
There is so much possible with it!!!
Teleportation
Solved problem. https://x.com/AshtonForbes
[flagged]
Why contribute if you have nothing to say? What even is this reply?
It could be a hard problem, no?
>What even is this reply?
I mean if you take a look at GP's username, it's arguably just tastefully subtle satire.
What you say is what you get
What you don't say is what you don't get
The problem with ambiguous boundaries, messy constraints and the perception that there is no linear path to transferring meaning in language.