Month: August 2025

Every so often I realize that the once small and tidy codebase that I was building has grown all out of proportion. Somehow, while I wasn’t paying attention, it morphed from a little canoe to a giant battleship.

This is fine in its own way — you can get a lot of power from a sophisticated tool set. But like any Frankenstein’s monster, it starts to take on a life of its own.

After a codebase gets to beyond a certain size, it has a definite tendency to want to do some things more than others. And it’s very difficult to steer it away from that tendency, because you are no longer steering a little boat — you are steering a giant ship.

And so, every once in a while, when I want to explore something really different, I begin afresh. I don’t throw out the old Frankenstein creature, but I let it rest for a while, and start a little side project.

That little side project can’t do everything, but it can do some particular thing that I am interested in with only a very small amount of code. Which means that it is very easy to steer.

Sometimes you need to get away from your own edifice complex. Take off that captain’s hat, find yourself a nice quiet stream, and paddle a little canoe.

Suppose you were to write a dystopian novel in which a moron like RFK Jr. was hired by the president of the United States so he could use the CDC to threaten millions of Americans with unnecessary illness and death. Somehow, I don’t think anybody would believe it, even as fiction.

In fact, I seriously doubt that a plot that was so utterly absurd and unlikely would ever find a publisher.

WebGL doesn’t do everything that a computer graphics developer could ever want. But what it does do, it does well.

One of the many things I love about WebGL is that you get to write your own shaders. As the person who wrote the world’s first shaders, this is a concept that is near and dear to my heart.

For example, I know that my Noise function produces the identical output in Javascript on the CPU and in a fragment shader on the GPU. Why? Because thanks to WebGL I was able to implement it myself in both places (see: https://cs.nyu.edu/perlin/noise3 ).

So for me, as a person who doesn’t like other people to make decisions for me, it’s a dream development platform. Oh and one other thing…

Thanks to WebGL, anybody can see my 3D graphics while running in pretty much any web browser on pretty much any hardware platform, whether Mac or PC or Android or IOS or whatever. A lot better than needing to download an app for everything, isn’t it?

The good thing about a U.S. administration actively working to destroy nearly 250 years of democracy and trying to turn America into an authoritarian state is that it is hard to complain about anything else. It’s nice to know that there is a silver lining.

In a stunning development, the president of the United States has agreed to provide military aid to Ukraine in the form of submarine sandwiches from Subway. “We begin shipping the sandwiches today. No longer will the good people of Ukraine be left to defend themselves unarmed.”

In a news conference at the White House, the president of the U.S. announced this unexpected windfall for the besieged nation. “They will now have the means to fend off the Russian invaders. We understand that their brave soldiers will be receiving a choice of weapons to throw at the enemy, including salami, ham and capicola varieties.

“Don’t forget,” the president added, “the provolone. I’ve also heard that a few will come with extra mustard.”

The president of Ukraine could not be reached for comment.

ChatCPT is 1000 days old today. I would ask it how it feels about that, but I already know that I would not get an honest answer.

The truth is that after multiple iterations, successive releases and vast improvements in its capabilities, ChatGPT still doesn’t care about its birthday. Or about anything else for that matter.

Today I learned that the president of the United States invited the president of South Korea for a meeting, only to spend most of the time singing the praises of the leader of North Korea. Yes, I know that sounds like the premise for a weird comedy sketch, but in fact it actually happened.

Which leads to the obvious question: Are the antics of this administration so mind-numbingly stupid that Saturday Night Live and South Park have become redundant?

In 1965 there was an American TV show called Hogan’s Heroes. It was a silly yet clever comedy about captured Allied soldiers in a Nazi prison camp during World War II.

The joke was that the bad guys were complete idiots. The prisoners would consistently run circles around their captors, running effective sabotage and espionage operations right under the noses of the clueless Nazis.

The idiocy on display in that show was deliberate. Not so the Nazi-inspired “extreme law enforcement” shenanigans currently going on in Washington D.C.

Given the ridiculous arrests and inflated charges being leveled against the hapless citizens of that city, the goal is clearly not to enforce the law, but rather to create a climate of fear. The administration has also announced that it plans to use the same terror-inducing tactics on other Democrat-leaning U.S. cities.

The current administration seems quite proud of the fact that it is drawing on the Nazi playbook. Instead of running the country, it is busy dismantling scientific research and higher education, waging vendettas on its perceived political enemies, and randomly rounding up Americans for detention or worse.

Yet there is something striking about the particular combination of Nazi inspired cruelty and white supremacy on the one hand, and sheer stupidity on the other. It’s as though, after sixty years, we are getting Hogans Heroes, the documentary.

I am old enough to remember when you needed to manually assemble a technical paper that you were submitting for publication. You needed to print out the separate sections in extra large print, physically paste them onto a large sheet of card stock, cut out and paste in the developed photo prints for your figures, and then mail the whole thing in to the publishers to be shot by them with a high quality overhead camera.

Then one year, all of that ended. Thanks to the magic of desktop publishing, no part of the process needed to exist in the physical world anymore.

The world didn’t come to an end. Sure, it became easy for anyone to make paper submissions look like they were polished and professionally typeset.

But that didn’t change the fact that the original contents of your paper needed to be of high quality. When reviewers judged your work, the now highly polished look of every paper submission simply factored out in the wash.

I suspect that something similar will happen as A.I. becomes more and more ubiquitous. We will all learn to see the difference between truly original work (the kind created by human minds), and highly polished summaries and restatements of the work of others (what Large Language Models are spectacularly good at).

It will be like desktop publishing all over again.

I love the way Governor Gavin Newsom of California has recently been trolling the troll in the White House, simply by faithfully imitating his idiotic style of posting to social media. It is yet another case of a high functioning person successfully calling out a low functioning person by parodically adopting their style.

It was just as much fun back when Tina Fey cut Sarah Palin off at the knees simply by faithfully imitating her. In that case as in this, there was no need for exaggeration.

In both cases, the original was already plenty ridiculous and, quite frankly, an embarrassment. All that was needed was somebody to help point out the obvious.