Ken's Blog

Suppose the studios won, and they were to get the right to replace human actors and writers with AI bots. Anyone who has been following ChatGPT already knows what would happen.

We would end up with homogenized pap. Stories would become prosaic and predictable. Movie acting would become generic and flsvorless, making the most mediocre of today’s movies seem like a masterpiece by comparison.

Maybe we could then just go all the way and replace moviegoers with bots. I am sure they would appreciate AI movies a lot more than us pesky humans would.

I love dates that are mathematically interesting. Today is either 9/16/2023 or 16/9/2023, depending on where you live in the world. Which means that the following are all true:

The month is the square of three (the last digit of the year).

The day of the month is the square of four (the sum of the first three digits of the year).

If you add the month and the day together, you get the square of five (the sum of the last three digits of the year).

If you add up the month and the digits of the year, you get 9 + 2 + 0 + 2 + 3 = 16, which is the day of the month.

after all this time
time can still bewilder me
guess i need more time

Today it happens to be a beautiful day in New York City. I know that theoretically the weather should have little or no bearing on how much work I get done.

But in fact it turns out to have an enormous influence on my productivity. When it’s a beautiful day outside, even though, ironically, I am spending most of my time indoors, I end up getting lots more work done.

Maybe it has something to do with feeling happy. 🙂

Every once in a while I run into a bug in my program that I just cannot seem to fix. I used to get really upset when this happened, but no longer.

Now I see such situations as opportunities. Because sooner or later the bug will get fixed, but trying to approach it by a frontal assault never works.

So instead, I now opt to walk away — to take a bug vacation. I work on something else instead.

Maybe I’ll work on a little side programming project that I never got around to. Or maybe I’ll finally assemble that bookcase that was sitting in a box in the corner. Or I might even cook a nice meal.

Sure enough, when I return, the bug has usually (and somewhat miraculously) become much easier to fix.

“Being old” What does that mean? Is there a definition?
I think I’ve got it figured out, and this is my position,
Based upon the evidence (it’s not so hard to gauge):
The old people are all those who are older than my age.

This will always be a sad day.

Today I wandered out of Manhattan and spent time in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is a beautiful place, and the energy there is wonderfully different from the energy in its denser sister borough.

Also, I was reminded again that Brooklyn has one thing that Manhattan could never have: Really spectacular views of Manhattan.

I think there may be a philosophical point to be found somewhere in that thought.

If every day were perfect
Then what would be the point?

I just watched me Barbie movie, which I liked very much. I was struck by how succinctly the dramatic arc of Gerwig and Bombach’s story was encapsulated by the very last line of dialogue in the film.

This is true of other great scripts as well. One obvious example is Robert Towne’s screenplay for Chinatown.

I wonder how many films can be described in this way: The last line of dialogue neatly encapsulates the arc of its hero’s journey.