Duplicate File Checker

Multiple settings: Cautious, Sensible, Aggressive, Automatic, Custom.

Program which scans over a filesystem and creates a tree of checksums, and performs operations depending on the values.

Under 'cautious', lists all suspected duplicates (within 10% variance or so between sums) and allows the user to perform any actions like deletion, comparison, etc.

Under 'Sensible', prepares any exact duplicates to be deleted and lists any within a variance

Under Aggressive, deletes any exact duplicates and preps all within a variance to be deleted

Under Automatic, marks all within a certain range and then does a byte-for-byte comparison of each file with its suspected duplicate. Identical copies are deleted, near identical copies can be deleted or listed.

Under Custom, all options are user settable.

Could be run on two specific files, a folder, a number of CTRL+clicked files, or a whole filetree.

Let's see if it exists already

Managers are to Computers as Computers are to Computers

Long long ago, 'Computer' was a title given to a person who made calculations as a career. Often a second career - but this was something done as a chief timesink. Calculations were made of decimals of PI or calculations of logarithms or circumferences or areas or trajectories -- later on trajectories were much more common than the others. Slowly was it realized, and even more slowly was it implemented, that these tasks could be entirely automatic and performed by machines.

Now, to think of it - that's ridiculous. Why would a person ever spend decades of their life writing out numbers in a table? How mundane! How boring! How redundant! No human should waste their time on such a task. We have all come around to the mindset that computers in the machine-sense are superior. They do number crunching and a variety of other things - but they certainly beat out people at calculations.

So what I posit to you (finally), is not 'that there are other things we haven't heavily considered to be done by computers, which could be' - that much I hope is obvious. I posit that Management is a task best left to the machine mind.

Managers create timelines. Managers take in data and make estimations. Managers organize data and structures into reports and compact bits of information. Managers ensure that bills get paid, that people are compensated, that time is efficiently spent. Managers ensure that people play on an even field and all have work to do. Managers have very automatable jobs.

You can't be jealous of a Machine. It isn't trying to steal your job. It isn't gloating. It isn't going to hold a grudge against you, to fear being shown up, to fire you out of anger or spite or confusion. It isn't going to be lazy. It isn't going to sleep.

A machine manager would be efficient, timely, organized, even-handed, reasonable, never forget anything, and stay out of the way when it needs to. It can conduct communications with the team over IM or through emails. It could chair meetings - but organizing meeting agendas with small writeups might be more feasible and reasonable.

The machine manager need not be self-aware, nor an example of strong AI. It simply must perform its tasks as well as a human - that would take some study, some programming, and some standardization of I/O. An issue of hackability comes up, and a possible fix is to break management into several pieces which manage each other. This is difficult to enact with humans because greed, jealousy and paranoia seem to inevitably crop up in our actions - but a simulated 'group' of machine minds should be capable of monitoring each other easily without such risks. If one partition becomes compromised it is reset from a backup, or cut off and flagged for examination by a human. Something to that effect.

This is not just applicable to business; this is applicable to government. If our government is a tool of the people, why not make it a literal tool? Why have political parties and rhetoric and ideology? Why not simply have a system to hold referendums easily, and have machine managers present the facts in a stoic and pristine light so that we may absorb them, and provide informed decisions?

I think I would like such a society. I think such a society of machine-rule, under human control, has a great chance of being closer to utopia than anything we have yet done. -- And of course, it would have to be capable and expecting to yield to human control. As a tool of the people, as soon as the people vote to dismantle it, it must be prepared to do so in a manner unthreatening to our race.

Of course, I am describing ideals here, situations with no downsides - but that's the glory of a 20 year old's blog labelled 'ideas', hypotheticality is not only allowed and encouraged, but borders on required for inclusion here.

Anyway, goodnight.

Testing, testing.

Conceivable test strategy:

First, perform a fuzz test(/unit test? Something computationally intensive and time consuming) while performing a code review.

Next, check all direct inputs.
-Do one greater than max allowed,
-the max allowed, and
-one less than the max allowed,
-also flip of those for 'less than'/'min' -- this is all similar to
-Also conceivably maxint and minint equivalence partitioning
-input incorrect types
-null input, and
-maximum-length input.
-anything else suggested by the code review

Third, pairwise testing on all inputs.

Fourth, data comparisons

long term screen recording of professionals in the fields of software development, animation, modelling, architecture, art, etc.

Essentially, just record their screen and keystrokes over a long period of time to show the sort of methods they employ, to show their habits, to show the tricks of the trade that they may not even realize they know, or are special

These could be posted to various places as educational material - commentary in these could be cool too. Also could be used for employee review, for collaboration, a variety of things.

Have to be on non-NDA'd stuff, have to have a policy of "no judgement" or the person has the ability to edit pieces of their work out before it's reviewed.

Men should sit to pee - not in the wild, in washrooms

this one seems like a joke too, but seriously, sitting while peeing is an awesome ideas

what are us men thinking? why do we not sit to pee.

Is it some thing about us being in a hurry or something? Afraid of the germs of the toilet seat?

It's easier, less of a mess, makes us likelier to leave the seat down (which makes everyone happy) - if you suddenly realise you've got to 'shift modes' (read my meaning there) you don't have to take any action, toilets could be built in a less complicated fashion, mens and womens washrooms wouldn't have to be built differently (and could be unisex with all stalls) - the only things I can see are the people who want to be in and out in a jiffy and the people who are germophobic.

I think this is something I am 'ahead of my time' on. What do you think?

Edit: Just did some research. In more words, but much funnier, my argument restated.

hahaha hoverbikes

A few ideas.. longer than usual

forcefield of some sort being used in a thunderstorm on the scottish moors in winter

basically, sitting in short sleeves and shorts on dry, warm grass, in the middle of the night, with pouring torrents of rain, blasting wind, and constant lightning around you

obviously my knowledge of scottish moors is nil, but that's what's always come to mind regarding this. Generally a useful thing - while walking around it keeps you dry - it's basically just a different pressure of air at a certain distance. High enough that water would hit it and slide around it instead of travelling through it... hm. A generator that fires off charged particles that will 'detonate' or 'react' at a certain distance of like 1 meter or something, causing that region to have a high temperature and thus pressure, or something? Wouldn't want it to be harmful to humans.. or would you? Military applications! neat.


I had something else..

oh there's something, not what I wanted but something nonetheless

Brain surgery during sleep. hm, not useful in the way I wanted - what I'm thinking is, electrical stimulus to regions of the brain may be showable to have consistent effects on a person's dreams. The end result is virtual reality (we drug you and then apply electrical stimulus to create virtual worlds that you experience through your natural dream mechanism) - but the issue is of communication here, first.

There's work being done on catching speech before it's said, I don't know if it's already at working prototype stage or what - apparently most people think a lot in 'voice', so we effectively are moving the muscles in our throats _without_ moving any air through them - and those signals can be caught and decoded by training something to recognize the way you move your muscles when you speak.

To go off the deep end with assumptions, let's think that among all people there will be 5-10 'patterns' that most people fall into with a few outliers - and beyond that that the signals can be traced farther back, deeper into the brain, as opposed to at the neuron level near the actual voice chords. This might allow mutes and other physically disabled people who have lost the use of their mouth, voice, or throat the ability to speak. This is a digression though -

The idea I'm pulling from this is that you could likely pull some forms of imagery, emotion, speech, and sound from the brain of a person. If you could get a bit deeper than the neuron level, you might actually be able to do this _while_ they're dreaming. This would allow for 'dream recordings', which could bridge the gap.

But this is hardly an idea, this is just logical thinking - I'm sure it's a well thought through region of futurism/speculative science.

Anyway, once you had that (hahaha) you could totally do some reverse engineering, and provided people have enough similarity between them, create a fairly comprehensive virtual reality system out of some simple electric stimulus.

I wonder if we can put people to sleep with a simple shock to the right part of the head?

.. I wonder how dangerous that is? .. kinda scary.

Anyway, I haven't remembered the other idea I had. It needs to be said that StarCraft had awesome, awesome music, and it should be listened to through some decent headphones.

signs in the bathroom that remind Robyn to put the seat down. One over the toilet, another on the door.

miniature TED conference. 6-10 people.

Format: either copy TED and have subsequent discussions, ie, someone speaks and is uninterruptible for a while, then joins the group and discussion under some moderation, or

guided discussion of topics by moderator, or

someone speaks and is interruptible as they go, with/without moderation, discussion either being good to go in the middle, or not.

Initial group of people would have a technological bent - is this unfortunate? Perhaps. Definitely not limiting it to tech.

possibility of a rule similar to ko: if an argument breaks out, it can not continue more than two or three 'plays' - person A says "True", person B says "False!", person A may then say "True, because (argument)!", and person B may then say "False, because (argument)!" - but at this point, Person A may not respond again to defend True. Both sides have spoken twice, and the conversation must move on.

Or something like that. Anyway, going to keep developing this.

expand on synergy: drag and drop applications between computers. Re-route sound between them. Reroute images, processing power, devices, everything.

This is very much in the line of true cloud computing -- check out Microsoft Cloud. One thought here is that an OS might have to be built from the ground up to support drag & droppable applications.

I'm sure I'll know better after diving into the linux kernel a bit?

apply the unix philosophy to things like blogs -- haha oh wait

something to organize my folder full of text files