Business and art ideas inspired by my recent trip to northern Italy…

Decorative Arts

  • I should buy a 3d scanner: some targets include door knockers on houses in Italy, picture frames (esp. Baroque) in museuems
  • Really, we have 3d printing …why isn’t everything covered with the equivalent of Baroque/Rococo ornamentation? Bauhaus was about coming up with good design that was compatible with machine production…but the nature of our machines have changed, so our design can change with it.
  • Barokea: 3d printed baroque furniture retrofits that you can add to Ikea products
  • wall-scale inkjet printers (e.g., TheWallPrinter and VerticalPrinters) that can print interior walls with tromp l’oeil decorations (like late baroque frescos) or outdoor walls (like Südtirol house painting of sundials)
  • use said 3d scanner to repair chess sets that are missing pieces, as found in random Genovese hotels (scan pieces and then print a replacement to send back)…inspired by an afternoon chess game at the bar of the Bristol Palace in Genoa
  • digital ceramic printing, and subsequent use for tile-graffiti…

Visual Arts

  • Create a futures market on fine art (should you short the Caravaggio in the Pallazo Bianco in Genova?)
    • (addendum 15 Nov 2023) Cifuente and Charlin The Worth of Art has a nice discussion of how to price auction guarantees (which are essentially a strange put option) and loans against artwork; think about how you might be able to add a shorting counterparty. As mentioned in the book, there is a very small cottage industry of hedge funds that deal in these things, so there is probably room for a richer market.
  • Renaissance paintings, but only the architecture (if you think about it, this De Chirico’s schtick)–optionally use AI-based inpainting to do this for you automagically if you are lazy
  • What is the statistical distribution of representations of different saints? St. Francis seems tremendously popular. There are regional variations—e.g., Sts. Cosmas and Damien were super popular in Puglia, but you don’t see a lot of them in the North. On the other hand, I’ve seen a lot more of St. Fillipo Neri here in the North. I
  • Spiderman comic in the style of the San Zeno 13th/14th century frescos
  • Late medieval frescos depicting the martyrdom of Tupac Shakur (or other slain rappers)
  • DIY synthetic cubist collage kit…just add newspaper!
  • Mario Nigro. Two awesome exhibits in Milan. I bought the book. He has this wonderful blend of geometry and asymmetry. Trained as a chemist and pharmacist.
    • Inspired by watercolor squares series: Black ink paintings to visualize latent spaces of generative image/text models. Use OpenTron to create dilutations and dispense (quantized). Visualize a latent space in a generative mdel and then create text and images by re-reading what the camera sees (through this lossy medium)
    • Inspired by the pastel rectangle series: Pastel sketches by robot arm with feedback loop and an optimization loop
    • Stone carving of his grain boundary designs as a geometrically more interesting version of Indian stone screen carvings
  • Generative scultpures in the style of Aldo Galli
    • Self supporting plaster PLA designed in OpenCascadeLink
    • The idea of an infinitely rich family of possible scultpures that exists outside any specific material instantiation (Platonism); but sell NFTs and physical objects; a finite sample of this infinite space
  • Crayonfou skateboard mosaic collection in then style of polyptch (politici) altar pieces.
  • Generative scultpures of the imaginary Alexandrian architecture in the painting at the Pinakothek Brera

Music

Business

  • One man restaurant: Could you use automation, kiosk ordering, and AI to let a single human run a restaurant (instead of hiring people)? It’s a bit extreme, but maybe a useful thought exercise
  • self driving scooter rentals between Santa Margerita de Ligure and Portofino. It’s too long (and too unsafe) to walk it, but the bus runs infrequently. Live la Dolce Vita by riding a scooter along the ocean in Italy. Make it self driving and balancing so that less goes wrong.
  • Heir BnB: Luxury vacation rentals, but you have to be rich to offer or take a place.
  • Import cheap (but good) 10-Euro italian Sunglasses
  • Genovese pesto-making machines that actually smash the basil and garlic in a mortar and pestle
  • Laser etching designs and logos on macaroons (for weddings, special events)…it’s been done 1 2

Science / Education

LLMs/ Artificial Intelligence

(LLMs have been on my mind a lot lately…)

  • Would you accept an AI-based spiritual director? Most religions think it is appropriate to use written text as a guide to life…whether you think of this in terms reading scripture directly, bibliomancy, or relying upon secondary sources such as the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Rule of St. Benedict, the Imitatio Christi of Thomas A. Kempis or meta-manuals like the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, etc. So why not use these texts with an appropriate RAG-based chatbot to guide your life? Somethings seems wrong about this, but I can’t quite specify what it is.

  • Autogenerated podcasts (using LLMs plus text to speech) based on today’s news + some basic RAG with the themes of:
    • Biblical interpretation/sermon
    • Told parable like the ones about Diogenes the Cynic or the Analects of Confucius or the Chuang Tzu
    • As a recipe (“take one cup of top secret documents, two tablespoons of inciting the crowd over Twitter, … ) … perhaps alternatively in the style of a cocktail recipe (1 part…)
    • Running generative conspiracy theory (of today’s news) … embrace the hallucination
    • As a pop music or rap song
  • Generate theories about the theft of the Gardiner Museum
  • Rewrite the story of Romeo and Juliet in different towns, using relevant landmarks, demographic names
  • Robots that hand-write machine generated texts

  • RAG-based Q&A system for physical chemistry using Libretext content

  • LLM generated cookbooks (with images generated as well); this can have a sort of Pale Fire vibe of embeddding a story in the footnotes:
    • Cooking with Dante
    • Lord Byron in Liguria
    • Irish cooking with Oscar Wilde
  • Lifestyle /wellness coaching by LLMs: (best when the stakes of failure are low; most of these seem like a HYDE/RAG type of problem)
    • AI wine recommendations
    • Bach Flower Remedy “diagnosis”
    • Diet (tell me what you ate, …)
    • Exercise coach (OK, next time try…)
    • Dream interpretation (because nobody really wants to hear about your dreams, but you could RAG it up against Jung or Freud or Edgar Cayce)
    • positive thinking
    • TCM (eating with the seasons, balancing Yin and Yang, etc.)

  • Driving directions, but narrated in the style of Jack Keroac’s On the Road

  • Revisit the Shakespeare vs. Bacon authorship using language embeddings to compare in and out of distribution
  • use image embeddings (e.g., CLIP) to perform matching for chiguiro image problem
  • platonizer: find relevant plato references to your document (paragraph level chunking)

Miscellaneous

  • Could the pope decide to make it a priority that we end world hunger in Africa during Lent this year? (or provide universal mosquito nets) – Concern about second order effects on local business and farmers, but the general idea is that it seems like the world has the wealth to allocate to a “moonshot” project like this
  • BadItalianTattoos.com: a blog with photos and snarky comments (although Reddit probably does this better)

Todo