Quinn McHugh's Idea Feed

Welcome

2025-01-27T00:28:14.000Z

Ideas are cheap, so it's often best to share them freely.

This blog is for sharing my half-baked, outlandish, and occasionally good ideas with the world - most of which I'll never bring to life.

You're welcome to grab any of these and run with them.

Just remember: the execution is on you. 😉

Data Sharing Platform for Non-Profits

2024-06-11T00:00:00.000Z

Org charts, but in 3D: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8B1RefkoBM

Could use either:

Rhino + grasshopper
OpenSCAD + SolidPython + openscad-wasm - see https://openscad.cloud/ for demo on how to run OpenSCAD in cloud
Create custom 3D environment with ThreeJS, BabylonJS, etc
Whatever libraries these folks use: https://github.com/130oclock/3D-organizational-chart/tree/main

LEED Rating System for Animal Welfare

2024-04-12T00:00:00.000Z

What would a rating system look like for animal welfare standards?

Imagine if you could buy animal products with a seal corresponding to the "welfare rating", similar to the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED rating system. How much would that influence consumer opinion?

Scale of the Universe, but societal risks, charity effectiveness, and other hard-to-grasp questions of scale

2024-04-04T00:00:00.000Z

I'd love to see someone make a visualization like https://scaleofuniverse.com or this visualization of carbon emissions but for societal risks (e.g. power outages, terrorist attacks, pandemics, nuclear war, etc) or charity effectiveness.

Understanding differences in orders of magnitude is unintuitive for the average person, which results in a number of biases in human perception and thus, societal decision-making. For example: despite what nuclear disasters lead us to believe, nuclear energy is one of the safest forms of energy generation.

Visualizations like Scale of Universe, which utilize the 3rd dimension (via scrolling in and out), seem to be remarkably effective at aiding people's ability to truly comprehend different orders of magnitude and thus, how much one thing (i.e. risk, intervention, etc) compares to another.

Creating visualizations similar to Scale of Universe, but for other kinds of important things, could serve as great tools for changing people's perceptions about the way the world is, especially regarding topics that are unintuitive.

StackShare for Individuals

2024-03-22T00:00:00.000Z

It would be nice if there was an open, file-based standard (similar StackShare's Tech Stack File) for sharing "tool stacks" (i.e. a list of tools used by an individual as part of their workflows and a list of relations indicating how that individual uses those tools together).

There are so many tools out there, from email clients to task managers to note-taking tools to habit trackers to code IDEs to break-time reminders. Having a standard like this would allow individuals to freely share their "tool stacks" with one another and version control them as their tools and workflows evolve. Architecture diagrams could be generated from these files (e.g. YAML -> Mermaid), allowing others to easily understand and take inspiration from others "tool stacks".

If a standard like this could take hold, we would eventually see acronyms arise for referring to common bundles of tools (e.g. "ROZ" for Readwise + Obsidian + Zotero). If a database of "tool stack" files was put together, patterns in the ways people use different tools could be visualized to understand possibilities.

Perhaps resources like Tool Finder could build on top of a standard like this and popularize it.