Bill Roberts

Free Ideas

Community board board

  • A website of high quality images of analog community boards, crowdsourced
  • Maybe a board board view of all the boards
  • Maybe a map interface
  • Users can submit an image of a community board
    • Image
    • Location
    • Date
  • Automatically generate a “digital twin” of the community board?
    • Segment all the ads / posters
    • Turn them into interactive / clickable elements
    • Maybe search the internet for them, find their actual site

NYC Walks

  • Many New Yorkers cultivate good walks. Little nugget walks, with little treats along the way.
  • Users submit their walks
  • App recommends walks based on location
  • Like Strava, but with things like pizza and pastries included. Like if Strava and Trip Advisor and Immaculate Infatuation had a baby with a quirky local tour guide.
  • How to submit a walk?
    • Draw on a map?
    • Natural language description –> automatic route construction?
    • Checkpoints?
    • Combos thereof?

Tastemaker maker

  • Claude is a helpful thought partner for a lot of things. But everyone is getting the same model.
  • If I want to consult Claude on matters of brand, or ask it to produce some aesthetically out of distribution thing, I will get the same output as everyone else.
  • Would is be possible to bake the tastes of a particular tastemaker (designer, artist, creative) into an AI system?
    • Maybe this would look like “cloning” in a domain-specific way
    • A designer manages to give an AI system enough context about their tastes and preferences
    • This might produce a finetuned, private, extra valuable thing that could be a sort of luxury AI service, if it actually works.

Can AI agents effectively lead / foster engaging group interactions?

  • If you have a small group of people who are bought into something, could an AI effectively administer interactions between the members of that group, given some constrained task or challenge?
  • The social aspects of having other humans there… might make it all work?

Website describer / critiquer

  • A chrome extension that describes websites like a designer or FE engineer would. Perhaps in a quite opinionated way.
    • Fonts
    • Colors
    • What frameworks or platforms it uses under the hood
    • What analytics and tracking services it uses
    • Critique / analysis
      • Can it contextualize a site? Retrieve comps? Place within landscape?
  • Implementation ideas
    • How far would Claude or ChatGPT get on this just from screenshots? Screenshots + html?
    • Would video / active control of site be required for evaluating craft
  • There is already an app like this that makes money! Should check it out: webbalyzer or something like that.

PianoBnB

  • Churches have pianos and nice big empty spaces to practice in. They are often staffed during the week, or have a solution in place for accesss control for, eg, volunteers.
  • I’d love to practice on real pianos instead of my shitty electric one at home, which just annoys my neighbors anyway.
  • Supply side: Churches
    • Churches are fun to play music inside of.
    • Churches are often empty.
    • Churches have pianos.
    • Churches might welcome a little extra revenue.
  • Demand side: ???

Add an architectural metadata layer to (Google) Maps

  • Click on a building
  • See architectural and environmental metadata
    • Tree types
    • Architectural styles, jargon, details
    • Zoning information
    • N floors
    • Real estate prices
    • Dates, etc.
    • Summaries of any other public information that might be of interest

Integrate pretrained models into QGIS

  • ArcGIS has clearly invested a lot in making pretrained ML models easy to use inside of its platform.
  • It doesn’t seem like there is a comensurate effort in the QGIS community
    • Side note: who uses QGIS? What are their use cases? Where do they hang out? What models would be most useful for them, potentially?
  • This might be simple to do with plugins or the Processing framework?

QGIS Co-Pilot

  • Close the gap between talking to Claude and switching back to QGIS

Free text form

  • Basic idea
    • What is the middle space between a “form” and “free text?”
    • LLMs are powerful enough to help build this middle space.
    • A text input box that comes with some instructions. The instructions contain specific elements that the user response should contain.
    • As the user enters their text, their response to the form is “validated” by continuous calls to an LLM prompt.
    • Feedback about the state of completion is rendered outside the form.
  • How would this work?
    • Every time the user enters a keystroke, the form runs validation.
    • How is validation implemented?
      • If you have a local LLM, eg running in the browser, then you could just make repeated calls to that thing.
      • If your LLM calls are more expensive, you might want some faster, cheaper step in front of the LLM call that decides whether to make the call.