Up to you whether you want to limit your answer to software that is possible/realistic
I would like an app to summon the vultures when there is a dead animal in my yard. Click for vultures.
Something (app whatever) that divines the “evil” in all the things I need to buy, for me, without me having to do research on who has sold out, who is supporting killing babies, who is killing the rainforests, who is using child slave labour to extract their products etc etc. It’s fucking exhausting and monotonous, you can’t just check once, you gotta click refresh every bloody day. It’s doing my head in. I just want to buy stuff that I can eat etc, that isn’t tainted in others blood. Fuck this timeline, I can’t wait till it corrects itself, shit gunna be glorious. I’ll be there with some ethically sourced popcorn and a Molotov.
https://www.suma.coop/latest-brands/
https://www.fairtrade.net/en/fairtrade-finder.html
https://greencitizen.com/blog/ethical-companies/
Just a couple I know of
Searching for ‘fairtrade company list’ or ‘ethical wholesale’ brings up a fair few (you’ll have to dodge the SEO botslop sites yourself, but if you search for pages publushed before 2021 there shouldn’t be as many)
Wait, this definitely exists, I just can’t remember the exact name of the app. I used it to detect Nestlé products (turns out way more things than I could imagine belong ti them). But basically you tell it things you support and things you are against. Then when you scan a barcode it tells you if it is aligned with your stance. Trying to find the app now, it was called Buycott, but it doesnt seem to show in the store,probably changed names
That is definitely a good idea and I’d be surprised if someone isn’t already doing it. If not, you should! At least a website (might exist already in some form) to plug in a business or company and see all of it’s affiliates and parent company/ies.
A way of disabling “AI overview” and llm “Shop assistants” that inject themselves into my view across every website that I visit.
An open source, cross platform self paced learning app which gives you quizzes, text documents to read in a similar format to Wikipedia pages or Kinnu info slides, automatically revolving cards of text to glance at, a resizable and responsive UI that allows you to put it anywhere and still be useful, and an assistant to clarify information, chat with, and assist in creating documents to run in the app by using documents you feed it, which can be things like course work for uni or school, or informal self interests.
I have in fact wrote an app in python last year for a programming class that does the responsive UX design, the revolving text, and has a fair amount of settings (such as dark/light mode switching, text colour customisation, the ability for the window to be always on top and to remove the title bar when needed, and to import CSV files into the program to be part of the text reading database). I plan to continue adding features because I see it as a worthwhile endeavour since it assisted me in other highschool classes, and expanding it and making it available to anyone would be cool as hell.
Also everything will be locally ran because fuck the cloud, fuck SaaS and fuck tools that require internet to function.
Dood this sounds like such an amazing idea! Care to share (or collaborate)? This would fit right in with the other applications I’m developing and I would love to contribute
I’m currently pretty busy with university, so I won’t be able to be part of the development for some time, but I have the source code and files for my app so I’ll eventually upload it to either GitHub or gitlab. It’s also licensed under the GPLv3.
I don’t mind if you’d like to build your own one in the meantime, and even if neither of us end up contributing to each other’s projects, it’ll still mean there’s some more competition in locally ran FOSS education software, since features can be exchanged, improvements can be made based on comparison, and as a whole it improves the situation for people with alternative learning styles.
Also your projects seem pretty awesome, I like how they all have set use cases and don’t overly generalise.
Nice try, open source developers who want to make the world a better place.
I was thinking more along the lines of someone who wants to be an open source developer but doesn’t know how to do it so will just use AI to vibe code litterally the entire thing.
open source drivers for all common graphics and networking cards. these currently need binary blobs in linux to work
A phone app that automatically accepts calls from suspected scam numbers, robocalls and unknown numbers and immediately mutes the mic, keeping the call going until the machine on the other side of the line disconnects and marks my number as non-working.
This has been how I’ve gone down from multiple spam calls a week to just a few a year. I’d really like to automate that.
I’ve been doing it this way for a while too. Glad it’s working for others
I had an idea, personally I just use the Google phone app it seems to do a pretty good job of blocking spam calls somehow. However I had a funny idea. I suspect that these robocallers May be able to recognize the we’re sorry your call cannot be completed as dialed tone and words which may signal to them that the number doesn’t work.
A program that continuously poisons all corporate AI data sets.
I mean, that’s sort of already happening: Model Collapse. It’s just a matter of time now.
a Social Network that uses usb flash drive
instead of the web it is that people physically exchange flash drives to share content
it just needs 1 thing: not having to manage configs or directory on the flash drive
and then everyone involved immediately gets every piece of malware that currently exists within the first day
Oh No But I May Just Make The Program Not Work If There Are EXE Or Executable Files On The Drive And Make An Error Or Whatever
I really like the idea of a Sneakernet where its operation is somewhat abstracted rather than entirely manual.
Fully featured Open source drivers for all popular devices. RINA implementations for all major platforms and architectures.
Nurse here. The software we chart with (that I’ve used at least - plenty out there I haven’t touched) ranges from meh to absolute shit. Some of the features on my wishlist would be elimination of redundant charting (like, if put the date down in one section, don’t fuckin ask in 3 others!), a way to save templates without patient-specific data, so when I do the same procedure on 5 different people, I can just click the template and fill in any holes instead of starting from scratch each time. Some actual standardization so different programs can actually talk to eachother. Like, ER, scheduling, preop, surgery, anesthesia, recovery, med surg, and sterile processing are all departments that might be involved in a single patient visit (checked into ER, sent for emergency surgery, then kept overnight for observation before discharge)… there’ll be some overlap, but scheduling, anesthesia, and sterile processing are usually each rocking their own unique software. The others are usually decently linked up nowadays, but still with the odd exception… like trying to get surgical updates from ICU so you know when to have a bed ready; but the chart is just dead and now a PACU nurse is calling report cuz the surgery finished 40 fuckin minutes ago, all because some some jackass in the ER left the patient’s chart open which locked everyone else out of signing their notes. Surprise!
…most of the issues with our charting software boils down to dumb shit like that - proprietary systems that are incapable of communicating, or just good ol’ fashioned garbage design. And it’ll stay that way, cuz oligopoly.
As someone who’s worked with data from the backend of these systems I feel your pain. Why does someone need 10 different DoB’s over the course of 3 visits and why did those 3 day visits occur on 8 different days?
As a frequent patient I understand why everyone is always asking me my DOB excessively, to make sure they’ve got the right person and that I’m ‘with it’ enough to call the shots about my health, I assume? I guess that translates to paperwork too.
Thats why they ask you yes.
They them have to fill out forms on the visit and are asked there multiple times.
most of the issues with our charting software boils down to dumb shit like that - proprietary systems that are incapable of communicating, or just good ol’ fashioned garbage design
This is everywhere. I deleted a more thought out response when I realized that someone probably handed over ALL of the backend databases of patient data to an LLM (it’s HIPAA compliant so don’t worry *wink*) so that it can spew out MORE bullshit that doesn’t work, but a lot of money was paid for it so we’re going to use it.
HIPAA is the opposite of privacy anyway - it’s specifically about enabling sharing of data 🤦🏼.
And it was sold as a privacy tool. Lying cocksuckers.
HIPAA is a framework for CONTROLLED sharing of data.
Privacy = controlled sharing of data
HIPAA has a lot of problems. But it’s not some trick.
This is such a weird take. Your healthcare professionals need to be able to share your data with specialists safely and securely. That’s what HIPAA is about from my perspective, and everyone I work with. If you want effective care, you need to be able to share your medical data without fear of it leaking. The fact that people abuse the system is a separate problem
:-(
So yet another way a normal person just trying to live life is a product for an ever increasing set of companies.
As a physical therapist, one thing that bugs me (and I know it’s not a software limitation but spending choices) is having to wedge my notes into a format designed for a physician or something else.
I got a small taste of that back in nursing school. Our care plans followed a very strict template for our clinical patients, and they were 100% geared toward med surg. My day in the OR made for an especially hard time trying to check all the boxes… I remember a whole lot of “yeah I didn’t asses for that, cuz pt was getting surgery… but, uh, here’s what I’d be looking for if I did! …uh, nope, no interventions, due to the patient still getting surgery, but here’s a few things I could have done if they weren’t being actively cut open”
Fortunately the profs were well aware of that dillemma, so they graded pretty soft on OR days lol. So, you’ve definitely got my empathy on this one - dealing with that garbage every day sounds like a nightmare!
…this is probably the core issue of why so many different departments end up using a completely different software package.
Oi,I feel you so hard on this, as a software developer who works on medical devices and software used in medical contexts, holy shit the pickings are so bad.
Why can’t someone just conjure up solutions to all of this (which is totally doable technically)? Because FDA regulation forces us to follow Byzantine release processes and meet very exacting requirements for the software end product.
I could probably knock together at least two or three of your wishlist items in a week, and it would take 1-3 years for it to make it to the first customer. Even patches and fixes I build for existing products take 3-6 months to make it out the door after they’re done.
All of that to say, these make friction points that make it difficult for developers to coordinate and standardize without introducing mountains of extra bullshit that didn’t need to actually be in the product or software in the first place
It’s always been a fool’s errand to attempt software in the education or medical space. The requirements are too onerous and haphazard to be anywhere near worth it.
I work for a division of a health tech company and I can say that we hear you and value this kind of feedback. There are folks I work with who have dedicated themselves (including myself) to seek solutions to problems like these, and as a former integrations engineer, some companies are better at interoperability than others, despite the efforts of the HITECH Act in the US. My frustration is time and getting the attention of those who greenlight projects to work on things like these. On one hand, I feel OSS could help solve these problems sooner, but on the other hand, healthcare has some very opinionated people and things could get messy.
healthcare has some very opinionated people and things could get messy.
tell me you work with clinicians without telling me.
(☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞ ☜(ﾟヮﾟ☜)
I have a random suggestion that might be a little more useful/unique than my bitching above, (which you’ve probably heard a few thousand times already…)
One area that’s lacking in EVERY program I’ve used for charting is education. We get nursing students pretty regularly, as have the previous hospitals I’ve worked at (guessing this is pretty universal - where there are nursing positions, there are nursing schools fighting over clinical slots). When I was in school, we were given access to real patient’s charts during clinicals, and we spent a lot of time doing things like sitting at the nursing station and staring at a computer monitor at lists of lab values/meds/vitals trends/etc and whipping a pen out and transposing that shit onto paper so we could take it home and write a care plan from it. Patient data could be printed, but doing so was forbidden by the school program, because HIPAA - and understandably so, given the legal ramifications for fucking that up. Even copying the data into a word doc and manually omitting names and such was still hard no for the same reason - we might miss something and accidentally violate HIPAA.
So, the idea this is all leading up to: in the ‘View’ tab or something, make an option for “student view” that pulls up a plain text summary of the patient – but without any PHI. Anything entered into a patient’s name field will output as “PATIENT”; staff entered will just be “DOCTOR, DOCTOR2, NURSE, TECH” etc. Patient’s age? Round to the nearest 5. Dates? Fudge all of them by a random number of days (RNG on generating a report) , but by a consistent amount for all dates in that report, ie real admission date of Dec 3 2025 and discharge date of Dec 5 2025 --> RNG applies -42 days --> Student View summary reports Admission at Oct 22 2025, and discharge at Oct 24 2025. Labs? Fudge it by RNG with +/- 1% of real value.
You get the gist.
Give me a report that’s useless as fuck for the real patient - no PHI at all. BUT, you’ve essentially just generated a completely fake patient with useful data for a case study. In the student’s mind, there’s no difference - “PATIENT, 75, MALE, hospitalized for 2 days” is effectively the same case study as “Leeroy Jenkins, 73, Male, hospitalized on these specific dates, 2 days apart”. Slightly tweaked labs? who gives a shit, all they care about is if they’re out of range by a clinically significant margin.
And here’s a golden bit: PRINT THAT SUMBICH!! Or fuck it, email the .txt to your student email so you can copy and paste it. There’s no HIPAA, so it doesn’t matter. What matters is the student isn’t wasting their clinical hours fucking around on a computer - get their ass into a patient room where they can do some nursing, cuz they’ll learn more there than the entire rest of the degree program. They can crunch the data for a care plan at home.
…that ended up being really wordy. Sorry about the wall of text. On the off chance anything comes of it, let me know!
So there’s no software to do what literally every insurance swears they don’t break the law doing en masse?
There’s none that I’m aware of that basically anonymizes patient data for use outside of healthcare.
Billing and insurance all falls under HIPAA - those facets and every other aren’t disallowed (legally) from things like printing sensitive info - basically if it’s being used as part of your care, it’s fine.
And students are no exception - when they’re on a clinical rotation, they’re on that patient’s healthcare team and can legally access and print etc that info. The problem is that students still need that data for use outside of that care, and HIPAA doesn’t give a fuck about their homework, so any papers that have PHI on it become a violation when they start being accessed for those things. And schools don’t trust students not to fuck that up, so they’ll come up with overkill-by-design policies like disallowing students from printing PHI, even if it’s for use on that clinical and meant to be shredded before leaving. So, the school wants to play things extra safe.
…this isn’t to say that insurance companies aren’t abusing your data, but can legally handle it within the scope of your billing.
An immortal worm that drains wealth from billionaires, launders it, and redistributes it as some kind of deus ex machina bonus to everyone else or to charities.
A software version of taxes!
I was going to add that if the government(s) do it we could call it “taxes”… but decided that brevity was more important :-)
gotta rely on ex-wives of billionaires instead i guess
Public service announcement that, once split up, this would be a significant but not life-changing amount of money. At least in the West.
A peer-to-peer prediction market where instead of betting on forest fires, we bet on datacenter fires and mansion fires.
Who would bet against those fires in a platformike that?
You’d bet against the fires if you wanted a payoff when the fire doesn’t happen. You pay when the fire does happen. So anybody who benefits from the fire world have an incentive to bet against it.
I don’t think many people that don’t want a fire would use the platform…
Let’s say you don’t want a fire, like it’s your data center. You’ll want to get paid if the fire does happen. So you bet on fire, like you’re buying insurance against it.
Two interesting differences from existing fire insurance.
- If you’re not an asshole, then now you’re just getting insurance at a better rate because there’s more competing insurers.
- If you are an asshole, then you’ll find yourself now paying the external cost of owning the data center, as higher insurance rates.
That’s the real point of this software. It would allow crowdfunded defense against people who are destroying the world and own the legal system. Most participants would just be minimizing costs or gambling, not ideologically motivated.
My point is that people would have an incentive to bet for the fire and then cause the fire, so once a bet is published chances are that the fire will happen.
There would need to be sufficient market depth to pay someone to act. So we couldn’t just publish $0.01 bets on everything and watch the town burn. “Coasian” solutions like this are limited by transaction costs.
In practice, the owner of the datacenter would need to either eliminate the externality or watch it burn. If the datacenter is worth more than its external cost, then they can reimburse their victims or pay for cleanup. If the revenue from the datacenter is less than its external costs, then it’s a net loss for society and ought to be shut down.
There would need to be sufficient market depth to pay someone to act.
If such a platform existed so many people would bet for “fire” that there wouldn’t be depth, but if you take a look around lemmy you can see some people hate AI so much they would do it anyways.
An easy one I would do myself if I had more time. A calorie tracker that does not try to get you into a cult.
- The only time it accesses the internet is to update its on-board database.
- None of your data gets sent anywhere unless you choose to share it (for things like new foods).
- No suggestions.
- No exercise programs or tracking
- No sleep tracking.
- Tracks only what you want. Extras available through add-ons or something, but I don’t care about tracking nutrients, fat, carbs, etc. so keep them out of my way.
- In short, follow the Unix guideline of an app doing one thing and doing it well.
If you run Android, check out “Energize” on fdroid.
If all you need is calories couldn’t you just use any counter app for that? At that point you’re just adding numbers in.
Waistline kind of works like that.
And I think there are a few self-hostable solutions out there.
Masturbator/Dildo software that integrates with an EEG to scan your brain, know when you’re about to cum, and then edge you over and over again.
Too difficult. Just gonna build a machine that gently zaps your brain’s cum center continuously.
You know we have invented drugs more powerful that that? However they kill you sooner or later.
No thanks, satan. My body is a temple. /s
I think it is fair to assume all drugs that give you feelings compared to orgasm are addictive as hell which makes them very easy to overdose :)
Mankind would be doomed if such a drug existed. Well maybe not doomed but like you’d notice a severe drop in birth rates.
Have you heard of https://maustec.io/pages/edge-o-matic
