Ben Frevert


IB diploma from Southwest High School in Minneapolis, Minnesota

BS in OE from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana

MS in EE from King Abudullah University of Science and Technology in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia

FiveFocal in Boulder, Colorado

Tesla in Palo Alto, California

Waymo in Mountain View, California

Apple in Cupertino, California

Tesla in Palo Alto, California

opto-mechanical integration for computer-vision applications

reconciling logical paradoxes ( RLP )


good stuff I Recommend...


Books

Video Games

Other Games

Music


fun facts


In high school,

In college,

In grad school,

Afterwards,

Patents


random thoughts


The grass is always greener in n+1 dimensions

Creativity is the oscillation between open and constrained thought

Pants defy gravity by raising over a lifetime

We must stop the hyphenation of last names before the inevitable consumption of all matter to write a phone book

You only make what you validate, otherwise it's Schrödinger's hardware

...Fraudian slips...

Haskell is the lazily evaluated language that nobody asked for


good ideas


Approval Voting

I was long a believer in Instantaneous Runoff Balloting as a "perfect" system of voting. It has some practical limitations around complexity to voters, encourages some strategic voting (which might not be bad), and makes counting votes be clear/transparent. Instead we should just vote up and down on each candidate and the person that most people are okay with wins. It is simple to vote, simple to count, and arrives at consensus. On election night, we can start looking at votes without wondering how the rounds of elimination work (which requires all votes to be in) to understand how things are going. It is backwards compatible with old voting practice because then you just aren't voting for two candidates. Do we really want in a split field the candidate most people don't like, but have a passionate fraction of the vote to win?

Public Conduit Voting

Each voter gives their vote to a public delegate in a secret ballot in a normal election. Public delegates are any person or organization that registers as one. Each member of current House of Representatives has ~700,000 people/seat. So if a delegate gets 700,000 votes, they can become a member of congress (or pass them off to somebody who does). If they have insufficient votes or extra votes, they can pass them off to any other public delegate in a public process that takes place over a ~one month of coalition building. Any votes that are not converted into a Representative are lost after that period.

In theory, this gives small groups maximal ability to be represented, especially if distributed across the country. E.g., all librarians could vote together to get one representative and combine with book-binders to combine to convert into one Representative and give their overflow votes to English Teachers Coalition, who in turn give their overflow to the Democratic National Coalition. Individuals are able to maintain secrecy, but the horse-trading between groups gets exposed in the flow of votes.

Nuclear Club Islands

All nations with nuclear weapon assemblies should keep them on islands spread around the world. Not every country would be on every island and would overlay in different ways. This way we control for a rogue country/leader from kick-starting the apocalypse. It also moves the focus of a first-strike away from civilian populations to these islands. The islands could be artificial or divided up, but not so large that one side could not just "take out" their island(s). It makes assembly inspection simpler as a rogue-ward nation would be easier to monitor. Most actors want perfect information about adversaries in this situation. Weapons would still be made domestically, but some firm rules about transfer to islands would be needed. Might be easier to detect non-island-based assemblies if there aren't other assemblies out in the world. It is critical to get this under control and they could be used to research potential runaway technologies (virus research, dangerous chemicals, or grey-goo).

Teacher Pay

We should pay K-12 teachers >$100k as a starting salary. Education is a recursive benefit. I am astounded by how lucky I was to have so many really great teachers when I realized many who didn't experience the Minneapolis Public School system had 1-2 inspirational teachers in their entire run, not dozens. Part of this came from the slightly higher pay in Minneapolis vs surrounds districts. But many of the great teachers I had were part of a similar demographic: old ladies on the edge of retirement. They came from an era when they had little other choice in employment, so they could be underpaid. We don't live in that world, gladly, but now we need to pay a fair market price.

Trial by AP-US-History Class

For situations where an unbiased jury/judge would be hard to find, I think we should just pick nine random AP-US History classes, let them individually deliberate, and go with the majority opinion of those classes. This would be useful for things like ruling on conflicts-of-interest on Supreme Court or corruption in TLA-agency leadership that are intrinsically hard to investigate.

The NIMBY Lottery for Urban Density

Living in the Bay Area is difficult because of zoning issues. What was fifty years ago apple orchards became suburbia and now should be London/Paris-density urban zones. But most people don't want five-story apartment buildings going up next to their single-family home. They didn't sign up for this when they bought their house and they have a right to have input on how their city develops. What could be fair??? We should have a legally enforced lottery where ~10% of zip-codes get heavily relaxed building standards -- but in ten years. This gives people time to move to nearby zip codes if they want to maintain their environment, which should be possible since their land is now valuable since it can get an apartment building built on it. It will not solve the issue today, but gives people time to adjust and put us on a path to develop in the future (if we did this a decade ago, we would be in a better place today). The current plan is to make every place have a few apartments buildings, but I would rather live in a larger place of contiguous apartments so we get the economies of scale that would come from that urban density.

Fill-in-the-Bay

We should fill in San Francisco Bay with a series of artificial islands. We should be aware of the ecological concerns, but often more life can flourish along coastline than one big pool of water. We have already filled it in on the edges in a number of places. It we close the geometry of the Bay Area and would be really charming if done well. A decent portion of the bay is used today for drying out ocean water to make salt -- which seems sub-optimal for some of the most in-demand land on earth.