The Bell

A hill rising in the middle of a plain, surrounded by sparse woods. The low hill, covered in tall yellow grass like the rest of the plain, wavy in the relentless dry season heat. On top of the hill rises a lonely figure sits before a bell. The shadow of the bell shielding the figure from the sun's rays. A round clearing surrounds the bell, a staircase leading down from the hill.

The figure rises up and walks down into the shallow pit under the bell. Standing under the bell, the figure reaches up and grabs a rope tied to a large log. Swinging it back and forth, slowly gaining speed, until the log nearly touches the inside wall of the bell. With a violent jerk, he brings the log to crash into the other side of the bell.

A ring to be heard up in heaven and down in hell, the bell rings, deep and clear. With each ring echoing in the skies above, the ghosts shift in the earth below.

Open Problems in Computing

Off the top of my head, here are some exciting unsolved problems that future computers can tackle:

- Responsive web design
- Pervasive ubiquitous mind control
- How to use carbohydrates as digital computing substrate
- Turning rocks into solar panels
- Embedding computers inside bones
- Embedding bones inside computers
- Apps that are better than websites from user perspective
- Converting trillions of dollars worth of person-time into a few billion dollars of ad revenue. Oh wait, that one's solved already? Carry on then.
- Taking a 30% cut of every tax payment, like, Tax Store? With Tax Apps and In-Tax Payments.
- Pervasive ubiquitous body control
- Using meat-drones to construct a great obsidian pyramid out of computronium
- Launching life-seeds to other planets and stars, both in DNAtic and C++tic forms.
- Unlimited wireless data plans
- Phones made out of fabric
- Phones made out of fabric that aren't easy to mistake as napkins. Alternatively, phones made out of snotophobic fabric.
- Babies waking up in the middle of the night
- Multiple-Earth-radius solar collectors on stable orbits
- 10x our power generation to suck up all the excess carbon from the air and the seas
- Use the volume of the Earth for matter extraction, rather than just the surface.
- Life-seeds thriving across the solar system
- Work Inc -- the Skinner box social media platform where you're working for Work Inc at tasks best tailored for your skillset. Work Inc resells your labor for a trillion dollars and pays you an infinite scroll of meme gifs.
- Pervasive ubiquitous distributed computing fabric owned by the people of the world in equal shares.
- AIs that work for Work Inc better than any human could (88.32 rating vs 86.2 for best-performing humans).
- Pervasive ubiquitous AI control
- Using enslaved AIs to construct a great crystalline tower out of computronium
- Basketball planet

Tablets

Got a 10" Android tablet for testing & developing stuff. It's surprisingly nice. I can hold it at a distance to read and watch videos. It's got LTE, so I can do calls with it, and taking and looking at photos is much nicer than on tiny phone screens. It's lightweight too. My parents have an iPad Pro 12", which is even better for videos, but starts resembling a miniature TV in use due to the size and weight (and the iPad is so much smoother at basic interactions, thx properly engineered UI & render loop).

Tablets (and perhaps laptops as well) are a strange device category. In most things, they're inferior to phones: the cameras are second-rate, the screens aren't as sharp, they're heavier, few apps are optimized for the tablet form factor, and in Android-land, they usually ship with old OS versions and have less powerful HW than the flagship phones. But in some ways, I feel like this 10" tablet is a superior phone. It's got a big screen. There's a stylus. The battery lasts longer. It's a lot more comfortable for many phone tasks compared to a 5" screen: more messages, more emails, more text, bigger images.

Why not make a tablet that is a superior phone in every way? Aim for the same battery life as flagship phones when in heavy use (1-2 days). Double the cores and GPU, 4K HDR display, quad camera module, double front-facing cams, stylus, lots of fast storage, lots of fast RAM. Lightweight build. Imagine bolting two flagship phones together, that kind of thing.

You could pretty easily make a device that's got 2x the perf of top shelf x86 laptops since you don't have to pay the x86 tax (x86 chips are 5-10x more expensive per transistor compared to Snapdragon 835 for example).

Pair it off with a smaller device (3" superwatch?) that can handle the mobile tasks (calls, messaging on the move, quick snapshots), and delegate reading, watching and creating to the tablet. 

All you'd really have to do is fork Android / iOS to turn it into good computer operating system.

So yeah, the problem I have is that the current mobiles are too big and heavy, and the current tablets are not good mobiles (or good laptops for that matter). 

Flip flopo flipo flop scrollophone fanphone foldophone umbrellaphone AR glasses.