Author: admin

Am just watching the first few episodes of Sweet Tooth. Started out great, and getting better and better by the moment.

First WandaVision and Loki, and now this. I’m starting to think there is hope after all for television as a medium for creating good art.

One odd thing about the experience of developing software is the crazy nature of progress. You can spend days stuck on one tiny feature.

But you can also, in a burst of inspiration and good fortune, jump ahead in a single day by what feels like months of progress. It’s a very strange sort of journey
I think that what’s really going on is this: During those difficult times, when you feel that you are barely inching forward, you are actually doing the real work.

You’re essentially fueling the turbo-thrusters that you will be using in those wonderful bursts of progress.

Nothing comes for free. But everything can be beneficial.

I am extremely happy about the new Marvel series Loki, having just seen the first episode. It feels like the fulfillment of the promise of WandaVision.

Rather than the same old boring superhero narrative, we are being treated to something truly original and imaginative. Unlike nearly everything we have seen in the Marvel universe, Loki is actually very good science fiction.

And on top of that, it’s funny as hell. Can’t wait to see how this plays out.

I am in the middle of a rapid software development project. There is a first demo in a few weeks, and I need to add a lot more capability between now and then.

Every day I add new features, or replace old ones. Which means that every day there are opportunities for massive failure.

I keep backups at each step, so failure is never catastrophic. Still, I don’t really want to lose the bulk of a day’s work by introducing some bug that will force me to go back to a previous version.

So I’m adopting a kind of variation of the physician’s motto “First do no harm.” Whenever I add a new feature that will replace an older one, I keep the older feature in for a while.

The idea is that everything should continue to operate exactly the way it did before I added the new code. Except now there are new things you can also do if you know how.

I keep it that way until I am confident that I haven’t broken anything. Only then do I get rid of the old version of the feature.

I realize that the stakes here are a lot lower than what doctors deal with every day. Still, it’s good to have a way to work that doesn’t keep breaking anything.

I find it fascinating that both Frank Lloyd-Wright and Tim Berners-Lee were born on this day of the year. The former was born in 1867, the latter in 1955.

Both are our most famous architects in two very different domains: The former is the most famous of all architects in the traditional sense. The latter is the most famous of all architects of the World Wide Web.

Right now we think of those two domains as disparate. But that distinction might one day come to seem less significant, depending on how things go.

I wonder whether there will come a time when we will just think of both as famous architects.

I love tall ceilings. Just give me a good ten or twelve foot tall ceiling in a room and I am happy.

But as we know, You can’t always get what You want. There are practical reasons that ceilings need to be lower than we would desire.

I am wondering whether, when we all have those future mixed reality glasses, we will be able to have virtual tall ceilings wherever we want them. It might be expensive, but I imagine it would be a lot cheaper than actual twelve foot high ceilings for every room in a house or apartment in a building.

Gollum and Smeagol go to couples counseling.

Once upon a time, I dreamt I was an artificial intelligence, calculating here and there, to all intents and purposes a machine. I was conscious only of my happiness as a robot, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awoke, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a computer, or whether I am now an A.I., dreaming I am a man.

With apologies to Zhuangzi

Our lab is still virtual. But now we are fairly certain that it will once again be a physical place when the semester starts in early September.

And I can see how that knowledge is changing everyone’s mindset, day by day. As we near that critical date, the idea of going from virtual to physically co-present stops being an abstraction, and starts becoming a practical reality.

People are rethinking where they will be geographically. It is now important once again to think about how we will move our bodies through space and time every day.

Even after our lab and in-person classes reopen in September, I am going to try to hold on to some aspects of the virtual. It is not clear to me that meeting in person every day is categorically better, or that we should hold our classes in a physical room every time, even if we can.

Maybe some new mix of real and virtual, enabled by ever better software, is closer to the ideal. At any rate, it’s certainly worth exploring.

These last two days I have been going back through my computer files for the last decade or so. This is because we are presenting a course at the Siggraph computer graphics conference, which will include a retrospective of our lab’s research.

It’s quite a remarkable experience going back through the last decade or so of your life. The memory gets jogged in all sorts of interesting ways.

I am rediscovering memories of people and places I have not thought about for quite a while. And I am getting a sense of what my mindset was back then — which in many ways was very different from the way I think now.

If you are the sort of person who keeps around files from years ago, I highly recommend this sort of retrospective exercise. Go back and look at all your files, in chronological order.

The experience of visiting with your past self can be fascinating, if possibly unsettling. You may just learn a thing or two.