A week ahead

I remember when sitting on an idea would inexplicably cause that idea to show up somewhere else in the world after a few months. I’d come up with some idea to solve some problem, but I was too busy to do the work. I’d forget about it, and then within a reasonably short time, there it was. It’s as if we were all pulling ideas from the same pot. If something you wanted didn’t exist yet, one option was to wait and see if it happened anyway.

Lately, for the last year at least, it seems like I only have about a week before an idea I pulled shows up on elsewhere. That’s certainly overstating how early I really am to an idea. The ideas I have are probably already solved and the solutions just aren’t distributed yet. Publishing and idea before I hear about it somewhere else is challenging.

With agents making implementation cheap, nearby potential and open problems quickly get multiple solutions. Only unexpectedly hard or very secret ideas seem to be able to stay secret longer than a week.