2025-01-20# Project ideas for youHere's a (incomplete) list of projects that I w
ish existed. Feel free to complete any of them if you find them interesting enou
gh. You'll probably also get other ideas if you browse through my website. I hop
ing to minimise duplication of info on my website.I might work on some of these
myself in future.It's possible some of these ideas are completely off-base. If s
o, please let me know.# Most important projects as per meWhat is "important" dep
ends on one's worldview. This list is biased towards my subjective worldview tha
t considers future of surveillance, future of tech and geopolitics as very impor
tant. I would encourage to form your own independent view of what is important o
r meaningful to you and select projects based on that, instead of blindly copyin
g my view.#### Meta workFor each of the projects listed below, you can directly
work on the project. Or you can do "meta" work that enables other people to comp
lete the projects.Examples of meta work: - find people who can fund the work - f
ind people interested in doing the work and connect them to each other - raise m
edia attention for the work to find more interested people - figure out business
models if possible (Usually the most impactful+tractable+neglected opportunitie
s to improve the world are hard-to-commercialise. Once you can find a way to com
mercialise them they become less neglected) - set up research labs or offices wi
th infrastructure conducive to the work, and reduce entry barrier for interested
people to get access to the infra - publish reviews of existing work. write abo
ut failed agendas so researchers won't waste time on the failed ones. - train pe
ople who are interested in doing the work but lack skillsDepending on the projec
t, you can identify which of these meta work will be more useful and which will
be less useful.#### AnyoneWriting - Write a book about your life that will be re
leased after you die. Prefer including information that you don't feel safe shar
ing while you are still alive. - Objective: People of later generations will g
et unfiltered view of the good and bad in your life, and can use this informatio
n to make their lives and their society better. - If the information will nega
tively affect other people who'll outlive you (such as family members), consider
leaving the book with a young lawyer / trusted person and a date when they shou
ld release the book. - Publishing it (getting an ISBN or whatever) is optional
. Put the book online and pay a trusted person to ensure the server hosting it d
oesn't ever go down. - You can also start a non-profit that popularises this "
autobiography after death" idea and handles legal, payment, webhosting aspects f
or everyone else who wants to launch such a book. - If you hold any well-paying
job, record videos of your day-to-day life at work. This will help others more q
uickly acquire the necessary tacit knowledge for them to get your job.#### Polit
ics - Consider starting a youtube channel and getting enough attention to influe
nce politics. - Which niche you want your initial userbase to come from is upt
o you, the important thing is to not stop there and go for mass appeal eventuall
y. - Which country's politics you'd like to influence is upto you. Probably yo
u'll pick the country you live in. - This is the kind of insanely ambitious pl
an I wish I was the right person for, but might not be. - Look into industrialis
ation of agriculture in India, in particular the politics involved in consolidat
ing small land holdings into big ones so that large-scale automation becomes pos
sible. - 500 million plus people's lives depend on it.#### Media/journalism -
Consider starting an independent espionage org to infiltrate and HD video record
an org doing something of questionable morality. For example, the Mole (anti-NK
) or Edward Snowden (anti-US). - Consider NOT mentioning my name anywhere; I m
ake no public claims on which orgs do or don't deserve to be spied on.#### Psych
ology - Consider starting a youtube channel on psychology or or cultural issues.
- IMO a lot of problems in modern world can be solved through changes in cult
ure, even if there are no significant changes in material circumstances. So a fe
w people like you could many countries' populations on a better path.#### AI res
earch - artificial superintelligence - Please read my post on [AI timelines](../
my_ideas/my_ai_timelines.md) or related posts made by others. - They explain m
y guesses on why the AI labs in San Francisco might invent artifical superintell
igence in the next 10 years, and what its outcomes could be. - If such argumen
ts persuade you, consider working in the field of AGI/ASI safety. - I won't ma
ke specific recommendations on which exact project or job role is good, you have
to figure that out for yourself. Please don't blindly defer to others when maki
ng this decision.#### Any STEM researcherWriting - Make a blogpost with photos o
f the latest equipment in your lab, short descriptions of what each equipment do
es, and short videos showing how to operate it. - Target audience: STEM-degree
holder who know nothing about your research field - Objective: someone can qu
ickly get an idea of what your field of research does on a day-to-day basis, wit
hout having to complete a bunch of courses. - Ideally you could even publish v
ideo recordings of all your experiments which are published in journals. It will
be easier to understand, replicate and notice errors in experiments if there is
publicly available video recording of them. - Identify Hamming questions in you
r research field and write about them. Hamming questions are basically the set o
f questions that would accelerate the research field *the most* if solved, and h
ave a non-negligible chance of being solved if people tried solving them. For ma
ny fields, the Hamming question is IMO inventing a data collection tool (like mi
croscope, brain probe, cyclotron, etc.) that provides data at a resolution/cost/
speed not available with existing tools. - In general if you have any sort of ex
pertise that is rare on Earth, consider writing about it. If you're patient you
may be positively surprised how many people read it.#### Fusion energyResearch,
writing - Consider working on fusion energy, or writing about it. - IMO a lot
of cultural problems would be improved if everyone involved was more wealthy. (A
ssuming wealth is measured in terms of real resources like food, water and energ
y consumption per capita, and not measured in terms of dollars.) - IMO this is
one of those rare ideas that is radical and yet agreed on most people as good,
if they think enough about it. Unlike many of the other projects listed on this
page, that have obvious downsides if executed well and even more downsides if ex
ecuted poorly. - The main argument against fusion I've read is that all people
should abandon all attempts at tech progress and put all their attention and en
ergy into some social science projects instead. I am sympathetic to this perspec
tive but don't fully agree. If this argument were true then most of the projects
on this page would not be worth doing.#### BiotechWriting - Write about automat
ion of biotech R&D. Optimistic/pessimistic/neutral take, anything is fine. - Wri
te about history of 1990-present biotech.Research - Look into feasibility of mic
s and cameras implanted into human body. (If this turns out feasible, carefully
pick who to disclose this information to.) - Work in the bioweapons space, to re
duce risk of anyone using a bioweapon or mitigating damage - I'm not sure what
the best projects are in this space, go ask someone who knows about it. - Work
on genetic engineering of humans - Again, I'm the wrong person to ask what the
best projects here are, see [this](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JEhW3HDMKzek
DShva/significantly-enhancing-adult-intelligence-with-gene-editing) for example.
#### CybersecurityHardware - Improve airgapped tech - Test all the Faraday cag
es available online for security. Suggest recommendations based on security, pri
ce, blending in with society, etc - Handmade radios that can read wifi IP pack
ets. (I'm not sure this is even possible.)Software - Improve internet anonymity
- Payment-based (or proof-of-work-based?) firewalls so server owners don't nee
d to deanonymise and demand "reputation-building" of IP addresses to defend agai
nst DDOS. Proton and Brave already have working implementations of proof-of-work
captcha, I'm unsure why they haven't replaced Cloudflare yet. So you could figu
re that out. - Pay-for-bandwidth on Tor (or something Tor-like), so nobody has
to altruistically donate bandwidth on Tor - Invent something Tor-like that re
sists analysis of metadata and traffic stats better than Tor - Improve airgapped
tech - Increase ease-of-use of LUKS disk encryption. - Help with mature imp
lementation of Shamir secret-sharing that can ship with linux. - `ssss` alre
ady exists, I'm not sure what's the process to make it as trustworthy as pgp for
example. Probably just more cybersecurity researchers using it and reporting is
sues? - Linux phone that doesn't suck. - Will need to get popular enough t
hat all popular apps (food delivery, ride sharing etc) also ship a linux version
of their app. - ios and android (and the mobile browsers) would be a lot l
ess locked down if linux phones existed as a competitor. - Misc - Good SFTP GU
I clients for android and ios (iphone) - Support image/audio/video thumbnail
s and previews, GUI file browser, support internet connections that are really g
ood (low latency) and really bad (high latency, high packet loss) - ios file
system probably sucks on purpose so people are forced to purchase icloud subscri
ption (or purchase macbook+airdrop) instead of renting a linux server. The bigge
r move to play here is to launch a linux phone (see above).Writing - Write about
hardware backdoors. - Write about cyberwarfare from a game theory lens.#### AI
and information techSoftware - LLM embedding search projects - Obtain upperbou
nd on effectiveness of LLM embedding search-based stylometric doxxing. - LLM e
mbedding search over Libgen books' text. - LLM embedding search over CommonCra
wl plaintext. - LLM embedding search over ethereum blobdata or another hard-to
-censor data store. - LLM language translation projects - Integrate LLM langua
ge translation better with browser and OS. - Realtime voice language translati
on for in-person conversation. Connect to two pairs of headphones and two screen
s. Play the translation while the person is still speaking, and subtract the ori
ginal from the headphone mix. - One-click LLM-generated summaries of every ~10 p
ages of any libgen epub. - [TIMEBOUND] Solve [VNC challenge](https://codex.flywi
re.ai/app/vnc_matching_challenge) in drosophilia connectome. No neuroscience kno
wledge needed. Fully map vertices between two graphs (~19k vertices each, ~2-4M
edges each) to maximise number of common edges. - This investigates the connec
tome hypothesis. Is a weighted graph of neurons (connectome) alone sufficient to
learn useful things about C elegans or Drosophilia melanogaster brains, or is l
ower-level information such as electric signal data needed?Infra - Hard disk "de
ad drop" marketplace - as a replacement to torrent for large datasets#### Pharma
cology - Figure out substances that do any of the following, but without the dow
nsides and side effects that existing substances have: - improve socialising s
imilar to alcohol and cannabis, or similar to oxytocin. Especially focus on chan
ges in ability to experience trust or love that are long-term. - render someon
e incapable of lying, similar to barbiturates but more effective. (If you find t
his, disclose this very carefully, it has huge political implications.) - impr
ove fluid intelligence (IQ), focus, executive function, working memory, long-ter
m memory, etc. - increase human lifespan - In general any sort of work in phar
macology that is aimed at improving the baseline human condition, rather than fi
xing disabilities, is someting I'd be a fan of.# Some more projectsHere's some m
ore cool projects. I'm less confident they're important or worth doing, but cons
ider looking into them anyway.#### AI and information techSoftware - Language le
arning content - Possibly produced by video generation AI - Produce video co
ntent aimed at language learning based on "comprehensible input". (Video content
of real-life scenarios where visuals help explain to the viewer what the audio
means.). Prefer near-zero large gaps in the audio, entertaining not just educati
onal, and progressively increase vocab size and grammar complexity based on the
learner's language level. Repeat this for all pairs of popular source and destin
ation languages. - Look into Denuvo game crack and study state-of-the-art in bea
ting code obfuscation. - Using deliberately complicated data structures is one
of the last defences against perfect surveillance, see how well it actually hol
ds up versus not. - Find zerodays, leaked identity databases, hacking software e
tc and publish about them publicly. - It would be nice to get more public info
rmation on what state of the art looks like here. - There's a responsible way
to do this, figure that out for yourself and follow it. - Write better RAM-only
software - We're reaching a point where the whole world's plaintext data and m
ost of its programs can run entirely in RAM, rarely ever touching the disk. Even
backup can be done to another machine's RAM instead of to disk. Performant RAM-
only databases and software are still hard to write however. - Improve DevOps to
setup cloud machine in < 1 second - Within one second it should be possible t
o get the following ready: launch new machine, install requested software (apt i
nstall xyz, snap install xyz), libraries (npm install xyz, pip install xyz, etc)
, load user API keys to respective tools, load user dataset on disk - There ar
e two software dev paradigms: where developer time costs more and where hardware
+electricity costs more, this is to speedup the former - (Maybe) Increase ease
-of-use of attaching/detaching block storage from processor, and resizing block
storage without corrupting data. A user can quickly attach external block storag
e (with existing dataset). Instead of downloading over internet, or from same cl
oud's s3. - (Maybe) Provide block storage with various popular libraries insta
lled. A user can quickly: rent + attach external block storage - (Maybe) Provi
de external RAM with RAM filesystem with various popular libraries installed. A
user can quickly: rent external RAM + attach external RAM + copy to internal RAM
+ detach external RAM. - (Maybe) Don't install anything at installation time,
but fetch from the external RAM fs at runtime - (Maybe) Distribute .pyc bytec
ode instead of python wheels (for all combinations of OS, python and library ver
sions) - (Maybe) Figure out why npm installs are slow and speed them up - (M
aybe) Standardise a keystore where someone can dump all their API keys, and impo
rt them on any internet-connected machine with one-liner command + password + 2F
A (optional). - (It's possible some of this can already be done a different wa
y, and I'm just ignorant) - Global notification app - Allow any website to reg
ister with your app and push mobile notifications through your app - Why?
- Ease of ensuring user security from everyone except the server themselves: Web
sites (Google, Apple do security via chromium, safari security features) > Mobil
e apps (Google, Apple do security via android and ios security features, and app
store approval system) > Desktop apps (User must figure out which apps to trust
) - Open source mobile browser is easier to maintain than open source mobile
OS. In general, software complexity is a moat. Easier to maintain reduces cost-
of-exit from Google and Apple ecosystems, which reduces decision-making over fut
ure direction of ecosystem exerted by Apple and Google. (ios+android market shar
e is 99.5%, adding Samsung android-skin its 99.8%, whereas chromium+safari mobil
e browsers are ~97% with firefox and UC browser as minor competitors) - Most
mobile apps could be mobile websites instead, if they had a way to send notific
ations while closed. - (Launching a linux phone is still a bigger move thoug
h.)Infra - Setup low latency ("edge") GPU datacentres in hundreds of cities acro
ss the world - i.e. as many geographic locations as cloudflare, not aws - it
s possible cloudflare themselves do this over next 1-2 years - This is a "cool
" project that benefits a few use cases (such as AI-enabled cloud gaming) but do
esn't necessarily improve the world in terms of amount of surveillance.#### Game
s - Write a game that does not blindly copy ideas from existing game genres. -
Games allow you to express a strictly larger set of ideas than films or books.
However as of 2024 it's still more common for a person to say that they changed
their life over a book or film, than a game. If you're imaginative enough, you c
an change this.#### Robotics - Run an automated kitchen operating at medium scal
e (1k-1M meals/day), or advance robotics and AI for the same. - If you compare
society before Newton and today, cooking is one activity that still consumes a
huge number of man hours as it did then. - "Scaling laws" + robotics has lots
of low hanging fruit, see DeepMind's end-2024 papers for example. Even if you do
n't work on the AI yourself, there may be other work (such as hardware) which he
lps bring the AI into the world faster.#### Biotech - Look into making meal repl
acements (Huel, Soylent etc) more tasty, run longer scale trials etc - I don't
know much about freeze-drying proteins/vitamins/minerals or about chemistry of
taste, so I'm the wrong person to guide you here. - Work in the artifical meat p
rotein space - Again, don't know much about this space personally.#### Urban p
lanning - Figure out why don't we build one city with one billion population -
Assuming end-to-end travel time of 2 hours via bullet-train, max population = (
200 km/h * 2h)^2 * (10000 people/km^2) = 1.6 billion people - Is there any eng
ineering challenge such as water supply that prevents this from happening? Or is
it just lack of any political elites with willingness + engg knowledge + govern
ing sufficient funds? If latter, will a billion-person city become feasible afte
r 20-50 years once the world is richer and more elites govern enough capital to
make it happen? - Bigger cities will probably accelerate tech progress, and ot
her types of progress, as people are not forced to choose between their existing
relationships and the place best for their career