Ken's Blog

I feel bad that CBS got cancelled. I have fond memories, going years back, of watching I Love Lucy, The Twilight Zone, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, 60 Minutes, All in the Family, M*A*S*H, The Big Bang Theory and many other fine TV shows.

But now, alas, CBS has been cancelled. Like many others, I will no longer be tuning in to that station.

To be clear, this is not an emotional thing or a political thing for the millions of Americans who will never again watch that channel. This is simply about standing up for the right to live in a country where TV networks are not bought off to guarantee their silence, and where honest people can earn a decent living, without their hard-earned money being siphoned off to a cabal of billionaires.

In other words, CBS is being cancelled for purely financial reasons.

There will come a point when AI advances far enough that you will be able to dial in your preferred version of any particular movie. You will be able to pick the actors, the director, subtleties of the plot and theme, and the perfect custom version of the movie will be delivered for your individual viewing pleasure.

While I understand that technological advance is inevitable, I feel sad at this prospect. There was a time when we all went to the movie theater, with no smartphones, and we had a collective tribal experience of watching a movie together. Nowadays that experience has largely fragmented and moved into our individual homes. The best we can do to maintain tribal cohesion is to talk about the movie with our friends and colleagues the next day.

And as we slide further and further down that slippery slope into cultural fragmentation, we may look back with longing and nostalgia at that wonderful time before everything was possible.

Every time these days that I read the news, and learn about the latest bizarre antics of our current U.S. administration, I think of Douglas Adams.

It feels as though we are living through the Infinite Improbability Drive from his book “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”.

Except that we are experiencing it as our actual reality. And I find myself wondering where in the Universe we are going to end up next.

I have been giving demos to a few people of some new interactive software that I’ve been developing. And a lot of things have been going wrong.

Which is great. You might even say that these are successful failures.

You see, this way I can find and fix those pesky bugs now, before they crop up in front of some large group of strangers. Needless to say, I am extremely grateful to the people watching these early buggy versions of my demo.

I would happily do the same for them.

If Bertrand Russell creates paradoxes for all men, and only those men, who do not create paradoxes for themselves, does Bertrand Russell create a paradox for himself?

A man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a metaphor?

With apologies to Robert Browning

Today I took a deep breath and plunged into the deep waters that are WebGPU. This is the newer way, years in the making, to get your computer’s hardware accelerator to do 3D graphics super fast in a Web page.

In the summer of 2013 I switched from Java to WebGL, and that has sufficed for the last 13 years. But WebGL is limited, and WebGPU is both much more powerful and much more flexible.

It’s also a lot more complicated, both to learn and to use. But hey, if somebody gives you a brand new Ferrari, you probably should not turn it down just because your bicycle is easier to operate.

“Beware the Ides of March,” they say
And yes, that was a fateful day
For as Spurina did foretell
On cue, the mighty Caesar fell.

When nowadays the phrase is said
It is without that tone of dread,
Yet still we keep the phrase around
Perhaps because we like the sound.

It has a certain melody
And words, like air itself, are free.
Alas, we never celebrate
Today, this time of year, this date.

So we ignore the Ides of May,
It didn’t need to be that way.

Today I looked back on all of the projects I’ve been working on these past years, and it’s clear that they are all actually the same project. I’ve just been working on different parts of that project.

It’s kind of like the old tale of the blind men and the elephant. Except in this case, I am all of the blind men.

Most people I know have favorite movies. If you pressed them, they might even tell you their five favorite movies. Then if you then gave them a little time to think about it, they could probably even rank those movies in order of preference.

That list creates a kind of fingerprint. If you know somebody’s ranked top five movie list, you probably know a lot about them.

I wonder whether we could identify a person from their list. Say you are given a list of ten people you know, and you are also given ten ordered “my top five movies” lists. Would you be able to match the person to the list?

I suspect that one day an AI will be able to consistently ace that test. I am not looking forward to that day.