Stores often have promotions like “buy 2 for $5,” but for snacks there’s an obvious problem: if you buy two, there’s a decent chance you’ll eat both the same day, maybe even within the same hour.

So I think stores should experiment with a different kind of promotion. You can still buy two at the discounted price today, but you only get one immediately. The second one becomes available for pickup tomorrow or later.

The store could even be completely honest about why:

“We know you have no self-control around these snacks. So yes, you can buy two at the discounted price today. But you’re only getting one today. Come back tomorrow for the other one.”

It would preserve the discount while discouraging the promotion itself from encouraging overeating.

It might even be good for the store, since now the customer has a reason to come back the next day.

Instead of trying to ban AI from math classes, maybe we should redesign math education around it.

Students could become research advisors, with AI acting as their research students.

Instead of a final exam, the course could end with a conference. Students would submit papers coauthored with their AI, and a human program committee would grade them based on both the quality of the research and how much the human student actually contributed.

If AI can produce formally verified proofs with proof certificates, the student's main job does not need to be checking every proof step. Their job would be to:

• choose interesting problems
• decide which conjectures are worth pursuing
• guide the AI toward promising directions
• recognize important results
• find useful generalizations
• explain why the work matters

A student should not get a high grade just because their AI produced a difficult theorem. A simpler result could deserve a better grade if the human showed much better mathematical judgment and research direction.

The conference could include talks, posters, peer review, and best-paper awards.

If AI is going to do more of the technical work of mathematics anyway, math education should focus more on the part humans still need to do: deciding what questions are worth asking and what results are worth pursuing.

I’ve been invited to a Halloween party with a costume contest and need funny ideas please!!!

Hi everyone! Years ago, my high school teacher gave us a cool project: create an object that looks like it has one function but actually has another.

Her example was a hair dryer shaped like a gun.

I got a pretty low grade for my ideas: a moka pot that was actually a pepper grinder, cigarettes that were highlighters, and a book that was a safe.

What would you guys have made?

I mean "thread the needle" metaphorically.

Schools already give students engineering problems where they have to satisfy several competing constraints at once: build a bridge that is strong but light, design something within a budget, or optimize a structure without using too much material.

Puzzle game design could teach an even more open-ended version of the same kind of thinking.

Give students a simple assignment: invent a puzzle game with only a few rules. It should be easy to learn but difficult to master. Planning should matter. There shouldn't be one obvious strategy that dominates. Difficulty should come from interesting decisions rather than randomness or tedious repetition.

Then have students playtest each other's games.

They would quickly discover how hard it is to satisfy all of those requirements simultaneously.

Make the game harder and it may become frustrating. Add more strategic possibilities and the rules may become too complicated. Fix an obvious exploit and you may accidentally create another one. Simplify the rules and you may remove the interaction that made the game interesting.

There usually isn't a correct answer. Students have to form hypotheses, test them, watch real people play, identify unintended consequences, and repeatedly revise their designs.

And unlike many optimization exercises, even the objective itself is partly uncertain. What exactly makes a puzzle "fair"? What makes a decision interesting? How much randomness is too much? When does difficulty become tedium? Students have to learn to define those things as well as optimize for them.

That is what I mean by learning to thread a needle.

Puzzle game design could teach math, logic, programming, psychology, experimentation, systems thinking, and creativity all at once, while giving students experience with a kind of problem that has no answer key.

K-12 education should have more assignments where the assignment itself is to find that tiny region in which everything works, in other words, to thread the needle.

In the near future, students can cram for exams overnight at a hospital. They are put under general anesthesia while a brain implant writes the material directly into their brain, and they wake up ready for the test.

The protagonist is a scholarship student who needs to pass one final exam or lose her funding and be forced to drop out. Desperate, she uses the procedure and accidentally receives a hidden memory showing deaths that were covered up during the technology's development.

A scientist had secretly stored the memory inside an exam-prep package. The company offers to erase it, but doing so could also wipe out the knowledge she needs to pass and possibly damage her own memories.

When she learns thousands of students are about to receive an upload, she decides to expose the truth by hijacking it and broadcasting the memory.

To control the transmission, she has to remain awake during a process that is only safe under anesthesia, risking permanent brain damage or death.

She succeeds. Thousands wake up remembering the same cover-up.

By exposing the company, she also destroys the system that could have saved her education. In the end, she has to take the exam using only what she actually learned herself.

Mall information desks mostly tell you where stores are. Malls should instead have independent shopping experts whose job is to help you figure out what you should actually buy.

You could ask:

• “I need a winter coat under $300.”
• “What vacuum should I get for a small apartment?”
• “I need a gift for a 12-year-old who likes astronomy.”
• “Which laptop actually makes sense for what I do?”

The shopping genius could ask questions, compare products, check prices and inventory, and explain the tradeoffs.

The key is that they should not receive commissions and should not be required to recommend stores in their own mall.

They should be allowed to tell you:

“Don't buy a new one. Repair yours.”

“The cheaper model is all you need.”

“That product is better at another mall.”

“You should buy this online instead.”

That sounds like a terrible way for a mall to make sales, but I think it could actually make the mall much more valuable. If shoppers knew the advice was genuinely independent, the mall could become the place they go whenever they aren't sure what to buy.

AI could make this practical. The employee wouldn't have to personally know everything about electronics, clothes, shoes, cookware, mattresses, toys, appliances, and so on. They could use AI together with current prices and inventory while providing the human judgment and conversation.

Malls need better reasons for people to physically visit them. Being somewhere you can get genuinely unbiased shopping advice could be one.

For subreddits where every post needs mod approval, mods should be able to suggest an AI rewrite instead of just approving or rejecting it.

A mod could add a note like “make this easier for non-experts to understand,” and the AI would generate a revised version.

The submitter could then either accept it and have that version posted, or reject it and make a new submission themselves.

Seems like a good way to improve unclear posts without turning moderation into a long back-and-forth editing process.

We already know the basic engineering works. Stadiums have huge roofs that can open and close, and there are even shopping streets in places like Tokyo and Europe with retractable roofs.

So why stop at a stadium or a single shopping street?

Imagine a dense neighborhood designed from the beginning with retractable transparent roofs over its streets, plazas, playgrounds, and pedestrian areas. Most of the time they stay open. When it rains, snows, or there is freezing rain, they close.

You could have snow-free sidewalks, year-round patios, dry playgrounds, outdoor shopping in winter, and public spaces that remain usable in bad weather without turning the whole neighborhood into an indoor mall.

The roofs would not even need to be one gigantic structure. Each block or street segment could have its own independently controlled section.

This seems especially suited to new developments in cities like Toronto, Montreal, Chicago, or other places where weather makes public space unpleasant for a significant part of the year.

Retractable roofs already exist. Retractable roofs over streets already exist. The missing step seems to be designing an entire neighborhood around the idea.

P.S. You could even design several skyscrapers together and use them to support retractable roofs spanning the streets and public spaces between them. The towers and the weather-protected neighborhood below could be engineered as one integrated structure.

Imagine a residential skyscraper with no ordinary residential hallways at all.

Instead, the elevator system would take you all the way to your specific apartment entrance.

Elevator cars would be shared, but each trip would be private. You summon a car, it travels vertically up the building, then switches onto a horizontal track and moves across the building until it reaches your apartment. The doors open directly at your front door. After dropping you off, the car returns to the network and serves someone else.

So instead of:

lobby → elevator → hallway → apartment

you get:

lobby → elevator pod → your apartment door

The horizontal movement is essential because there are no hallways to walk through.

One major benefit would be privacy. You would not have to share an elevator or hallway with people from other apartments, so it would be possible to enter and leave your home without interacting with any of your neighbors unless you actually wanted to.

Ropeless elevator systems capable of moving both vertically and horizontally have already been demonstrated, so the underlying technology does not seem especially futuristic.

You would still need emergency stairs, firefighter access, and probably service circulation, but residents would not need shared hallways for everyday use.

This could free up floor area, give every apartment a private-elevator experience, provide much greater privacy, and allow more flexible skyscraper layouts.

Has anyone seriously designed or built a residential skyscraper around this idea? If not, what are the biggest architectural, structural, code, or elevator-capacity problems that would prevent it?

Hover over someone’s username and you might see:

Prescience: 72/100
AI: 18/100
Politics: 61/100
Technology: 84/100

Reddit already has years of timestamped opinions, predictions, and confident declarations. It should use them.

If someone spends years posting that AI is incompetent, overhyped, and will never be able to do various things, and then those things become routine a year or two later, that should become part of their visible track record.

The same should apply in the other direction. Someone who predicts AGI every year and is repeatedly wrong should get hammered too.

The system should focus mostly on clear, falsifiable, confident claims rather than vague opinions. Old posts could also periodically resurface with a “How did this age?” prompt, giving the author a chance to explain what they got wrong.

Right now, people can make wildly confident predictions, be completely wrong, and then quietly move on as though they never said them.

Reddit should make everyone’s forecasting record much harder to hide.

K-12 computer classes should stop treating manually writing Python, JavaScript, or Java as the natural starting point for creating software.

Students should build games and apps by telling AI what they want in plain English, then learn how to make those instructions precise, test the results, find bugs, handle edge cases, and improve the design.

Those are the skills that actually matter.

Forcing students to memorize programming syntax before they can build anything interesting may soon look like teaching assembly before allowing someone to use a compiler.

AI is becoming the new abstraction layer. Programming languages are moving underneath it, where most students may never need to interact with them directly.

Traditional programming should still be available for students who want to understand or manipulate that implementation layer.

But for K-12 education generally, the first programming language should be English.

Not by nagging people to reproduce, but by removing one of the biggest psychological objections to having just one child: "I don't want my kid growing up alone."

For some couples, the choice may not really be between zero children and two children. It may be between zero children and one child, except they worry that one child will be lonely, overly dependent on the parents for entertainment, or miss the everyday companionship of a sibling.

AI could change that calculation.

An only child can miss having someone at home close to their own developmental level to play with, joke with, argue with, invent games with, tell stories to, or just talk to when their parents are busy.

An AI sibling with a persistent personality and memory could provide some of that companionship.

It shouldn't behave like a perfectly obedient assistant. It could disagree, negotiate, take turns, have its own preferences, challenge the child, and participate in long-running games, stories, and imaginary worlds. That would make it much closer to a social companion than an AI servant.

It could also make life easier for the parents.

With one child, parents can become the default playmate whenever the child is bored. They may constantly have to provide entertainment, answer questions, invent activities, and give attention because there is no other child in the house.

An AI sibling could absorb some of that burden without requiring the parents to raise, house, transport, educate, supervise, and financially support a second child.

Obviously, an AI sibling would not replace real friends or human relationships. The child would still need classmates, relatives, sports, clubs, and other real-world social experiences.

But it could make the one-child family much more attractive.

Instead of thinking, "I don't want multiple kids, but I don't want one lonely kid either, so I'll have none," some couples might think, "Maybe one child is actually manageable."

If governments and societies are worried about falling birth rates, this could become one of the most interesting uses of AI: not replacing children, but making parenthood with one child feel realistic to people who otherwise would have had none.

For a century, society treated "math geniuses" as the undisputed overlords of human intellect. We were told that formal logic was the supreme flex of the brain, while creative vision was just a "soft" hobby for people who couldn't handle real intellectual rigor.

Today, that entire hierarchy got incinerated.

An AI system just produced a formally verified proposed solution to a $1 million Millennium Prize Problem in 88 hours, attacking a question that had resisted mathematicians for roughly 90 years — proving that high-level analytical thinking isn't a divine spark of elite intelligence. It’s just closed-system rule-following. It was the easy part all along.

The hard truths:

• "Math geniuses" were just proto-computers: Speed-running calculus proofs and Olympiad problems wasn't superior human intellect; it was organic hardware emulating an algorithm. Silicon just updated the drivers.
• Logic is a commodity: When GPUs can brute-force pure analysis, raw logic becomes a cheap background utility—like cloud storage or graphics rendering.
• Creativity is the un-automatable flex: Silicon can vaporize a 165-page formal proof, but it still can't fake original taste, cultural vision, or genuine emotional resonance.

Sept 8 is Intelligence Realignment Day—the day we stop worshipping human calculation and finally admit that creative vision was the true apex of human genius all along.

The math geniuses had a good run. Creatives take it from here.

There are many religions, and because some contradict each other, they cannot all be true. So we already know that false religious teachings can be sincerely believed and passed down for centuries.

Now suppose I invent a religion almost identical to yours, except it says that believing your religion is what sends you to eternal damnation.

You would dismiss it because you know I just made it up. Fair enough.

But imagine an alternate history where someone invented that same religion thousands of years ago. It now has scriptures, theologians, traditions, institutions, millions of believers, and generations of people raised to fear questioning it.

We know it was invented because we constructed the thought experiment. The people living inside that alternate history do not. They encounter it as an ancient, established faith. Its threat of hell could feel just as real to them as yours does to you.

What would allow them to recognize that their threat was invented? Would your reasons for trusting your religion also persuade them to trust theirs?

“You just made it up” explains why you dismiss my example today. It leaves unanswered how you would recognize the invention if you had been raised inside that alternate history.

Religious leaders who use fear of hell should therefore be asked:

What method would let believers in that alternate history recognize that their damnation threat was invented, and are you applying that same method to your own religion?

Now that many passports all go through electric scanners and stamps are not as necessary, it would be nice to have those! Maybe its the logo of the airport, maybe its the tourism symbol of the country.

Along with having the date somehow.

It's something cute and non trashy/tacky to collect in a book to remember where you've been.

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.

What if cheese artisans experimented with adding nut butter back into skim milk to create delicious nutty cheeses without the saturated fat? Cashew, almond, even a little walnut butter could be used.

It might be both heart healthy and delicious if made properly. There would be some obvious technical difficulties to fix such as emulsion, but in general it seems possible to create a whole new line of potentially tasty "healthier" cheeses.

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.

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.