Ken's Blog

I was having a conversation with a friend this evening about A.I. He was expressing how amazing it is that you can have what feels like a perfectly intelligent conversation with one of today’s chatbots.

The chatbot will generally understand what you say, and will usually give cogent and insightful responses. He was expressing wonderment that a mere machine can do that.

Our conversation reminded me of an experience I had many years ago at the annual Siggraph computer graphics conference. Just before the film show, there was an audience experiment.

Everyone in the audience was given a ping pong paddle which was green on one side, and red on the other. In the back of the auditorium was a video camera, which fed into a computer that figured out which way each audience member’s paddle was facing.

At one point the audience was divided into left and right half, and we collectively played a game of Pong. The left half of the audience controlled the left player’s Pong paddle (green face-forward for up, red face-forward for down), and the right half of the audience controlled the right player’s Pong paddle.

The game started out slow, but then got faster and faster. No matter how fast it went, the audience played a perfect game — at speeds much faster than any single human being could have matched.

To me, this provides the key insight into why those chatbots seem so intelligent. More tomorrow.

May 15, 2026. After all the pomp and ceremony, the two most powerful men in the world finally have a private moment. As they walk together through the gardens of Zhongnanhai, they chat amiably.

XJ:	Donny, I know how to solve your immigration problem.
DT:	I’m all ears. By the way, that tea was tremendous.
XJ:	You can have a whole box. But listen, the key is green cards.
DT:	How so?
XJ:	People will do anything to get them, right?
DT:	Bigly. Everybody knows it. But how can I use that?
XJ:	Tell them they need to leave the country in order to get one.
DT:	Oh I see. Beautiful! We will do that.

Sometime later that day…

XJ:	Modi my friend, remember that wild idea you had?
NM:	Wait, you mean he actually fell for it?
XJ:	Yep. From now on we get to keep all of our tech geniuses.
NM:	But nobody could possibly be that stupid.
XJ:	Clearly somebody could.
NM:	Congratulations, you and I have just won the A.I. war.

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.