Does anyone have any tales of 'street uses' they have come across of some more recent technologies?
I often feel like the technologies people get excited about around here are too tied to their designed uses, but maybe that's a lack of ingenuity or perspective on my part.
Cellular hotspots and solar-powered phone chargers, once tools of the jet-setting executive and the bougie outdoorsman, respectively, became de facto ISP and electric utilities for homeless encampments.
One somewhat emergent use case that I've been really interested in lately is the use of social media to coordinate and communicate during emergencies and disasters, which is arguably not really the original intended use of the technology. The really famous/ridiculous one is the Yo app being used to alert people about missile strikes [1]. For a nice case study about this kind of use case, [2] is a good read.
Funny, I see it the other way around; the tech is so flexible and untied that it's hard to classify any use as outside of what was intended.
Smartphones, 3D printers, VR goggles, Quadcopters, IPFS - all of them are designed without a single use in mind, but as platforms for the users. A certain use case (e.g. 3D printed heads as urns) may be unexpected, but it's not an hack, it's just the tech being used as intended.
Perhaps the magnetic tape recorder and cell phone weren't the best examples of "unintended uses", but using chest x-rays as phonograph records is a clever hack.
Smartphones are intended a a personal device running apps controlled by a human user (sure, a "platform"). They're not intended to be a sensor pack / CPU for self-driving cars.
3D printers are intended for printing plastic stuff (sure, arbitrary plastic stuff). But maybe they can be co-opted for squirting molten plastic at your enemies.
Quadcopters are intended for doing arbitrary stuff while hovering. But you could re-purpose one as an oscillating fan.
I've experimented with my 3d printer by attaching a wire connected to a capacitor bank to the tool head. I can cut (with low accuracy) metal foil that's connected to the other end of the capacitor bank this way, I never did more experiments with it.
Social media and Bluetooth played a role in the Arab Spring [1]. Your average spy movie or series (I am currently watching The Americans) contains loads of [fictional] examples. Some other examples: SSH over Tor to get around firewall(s). USB sticks in concrete as a means of a drop point.
And what is fiction, might become reality. Just a matter of how far you wanna look. Snow Crash pretty much described Second Life or MMOs with the Metaverse. Plus, I remember around 2000 a joke IIRC called the iBrator. It was a remote, internet controlled vibrator. Back then it was an April Fool. Look where we are now? You can pay to make a person's (most likely a woman) vibrator vibrate, live, over the internet. You can call that an unintended consequence of the internet, USB, video conferencing, javascript, or what not.
I'm not certain if those count. Bitcoin and Tor were explicitly intended to circumvent government controls. The creators surely knew that meth dealers and child pornographers would use them; they just felt that the benefits were worth the cost.
Are sneakers bit larger, bulkier and harder to store than cash? If your wearing a pair I guess not, but then your stored value is diminishing with each step.
I imagine it's a combination of things being more specialized and the fact that we have honestly solved a tonne of problems and made a lot of... things. There is probably already a thing for whatever alternative use you come up with design specifically to achieve the task.
Perhaps I am the kind of person they are trying to avoid, but I did this in a bit less than an hour. I am very ignorant of the Python library ecosystem, so if I had known the request library better and if I knew an html parsing library, I may have been able to complete this in the time limit. I also suspect there are a few cases which break my solution.
I was shown a similar problem (I believe it was originally a Putnam question) which asked if you could cover a chessboard missing one corner with L-shaped triominos, and then asked to prove whether or not you could always cover a 2nx2n board with one corner missing. Neat problem
Families were often separated through the slave trade. Slaves were expensive, so owners typically wouldn't or couldn't spend more than they needed to, which meant buying husbands but not wives, mothers but not sons, etc.
You don't need to be tracked for this to happen though. If ad networks placed video game-related ads on video game-related websites and tampon-related ads on tampon-related websites, then users of both sites would get ad content relevant to their interests.
Consider contexts like news websites, though, with broadly-applicable audiences. Specialty or niche sites do just fine with site-derived advertising targets. Other things do much less well.
There's also the fact that targeted ads result in better CPMs for publishers (since they'll result in better returns-per-view for advertisers), which means that they don't have to deploy as many of them to meet revenue expectations.
There is a style of yoga that I have heard being referred to as 'flying'. It involves two people, and one lifts the other completely off the ground so that the second person can practice without being encumbered by a floor beneath them.
I think a fairly typical method of doing this involves the first person lying on their back with their feet straight up, and the other person would then put the grounded person's feet above their pelvis and gradually bring all their weight upon the grounded person's feet.
I've only done this style once, it was a great experience. I found it to be very much a team effort between me and my partner, we had to work to maintain balance from both positions. Very different from what I have experienced in regular yoga classes.
For example, if you calculate the magnitude of a thousand-dimensional vector, you end up with a single scalar. If you calculate the magnitude of a thousand one-dimensional vectors, you'd end up with a thousand scalars.
Additionally, if given a thousand-dimensional vector, the ordering is important, whereas if given a thousand one-dimensional vectors, ordering isn't neccesarily something we know about.
The difference is subtle and occasionally pedantic, but can be very important depending on what exactly one is doing.
I happened to catch an overclocking competition being streamed on Twitch one late night many months ago. It was really interesting to see more about the methods and techniques involved and how the competitions work.
In the latter part of high school, I began standing in the classes where I both knew the teacher fairly well and didn't think I would bother anyone else by doing so. Since there weren't any standing desks, I would either stand myself near a wall or an unused desk I could lean on and carry a clipboard, or I would occasionally grab a music stand or an unused lectern. I had never felt particularly uncomfortable in a normal desk before, but for the first time I really felt unconstrained by my environment. I'm naturally somewhat fidgety, and gaining the ability to readjust my body comfortably without bothering anyone and to pace around the classroom (even in a very small area) really allowed me to get my blood flowing more easily and prevented me from being distracted from any discomfort I had in a desk built for people who were both smaller than I was at the time and who were not left-handed. Talking to the teacher (or even to other students) feels much more intimate, as your vision isn't obstructed by the back of someone's head. Something I didn't expect was that when participating in class discussions, I felt more expressive, as I tend to move my hands and arms when I speak, something I couldn't do easily in a sitting desk.
I wonder, though, whether or not some of both the student's and my improvements were caused by being on a different plane from the rest of the class. I also wonder what effect having some standing students in a classroom would have on the seated children. I was once told that I was somewhat intimidating when I was the only one standing in the classroom.
I don't know whether standing desks are the best option for everyone, but they're certainly a better option for some, and I'm glad to see standing desks being given greater consideration nowadays.
I often feel like the technologies people get excited about around here are too tied to their designed uses, but maybe that's a lack of ingenuity or perspective on my part.