Ken's Blog

Suppose there were a service that let you and another person swap bodies for 24 hours. Would you do it?

It seems to me that you could learn a lot from such an experience. On the other hand, it would raise all sorts of issues.

You and the other person would need to have a lot of trust between you. After all, anything they said or did could come back to haunt you — and vice versa.

Then there is the other side of it. If it were generally known that people could swap bodies, how would that affect interactions between people?

For example, how would you know that you were really talking to the right person? Maybe people would start to develop little code words and phrases — something only the other person could know.

We will eventually run into similar problems with A.I. Over time it will become gradually more difficult to know whether you are talking to a real person or to an A.I. factotum.

So who needs a body swapping service, when we already have something just as scary?

I have been wondering, since the new U.S. administration took office, when they would actually do something other than bully their own citizens. Sure, there has been a lot of theater.

It is, indeed, arguably great theater to impose a punishing sales tax on Americans in the form of bizarrely high tariffs, reduce Medicaid benefits, place a bozo in charge of the CDC who might actually succeed in bringing back mass deaths from measles, fire people for the “crime” of accurately reporting jobs numbers, pull foreign aid in a way seemingly calculated to ensure the death of millions of children around the world, send masked goons in unmarked vans to round up any Americans who look too “foreign”, fire anyone in government who is guilty of the unforgivable sin of SWB (serving while black), and that’s just a very partial list.

But those are not actual accomplishments. They are just ways of turning a functioning democracy into a low rent parody of a George Orwell novel.

But now the president can actually claim to have accomplished something substantial. This week the leaders of China, Russia and India met to publicly declare solidarity with one another. India (the world’s most populous country) would most likely not have joined forces with the other two if the U.S. president had not quickly and decisively destroyed the long-standing good will between Washington and New Delhi.

Between them, those three countries represent a collective population of more than three billion people. Now that they have been thrown together by the actions of the U.S. president, they have a vast collective potential for political and economic influence around the world.

Finally the U.S. president has accomplished something truly worthy of living on in history. I wonder whether there is a Nobel prize for that.

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.