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I lightly edited this transcript from Pieter Levels and Lex Friedman on the Lex Fridman podcast:

I'm seeing a revival now. People are getting sick of frameworks. Like all the JavaScript frameworks are so like, what do you call it? Like wieldy, so it takes so much work to just maintain this code and then it updates to a new version. You need to change everything. PHP just stays the same and works.

Yeah, can you actually just speak to that stack? You build all your websites, apps, startups, projects, all of that with mostly vanilla HTML... JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, and SQLite. And so that's a really simple stack, and you get stuff done really fast. Can you just speak to the philosophy behind that?

I think it's accidental, 'cause that's the thing I knew, like I knew PHP, I knew HTML, CSS, 'cause you make websites and when my startups started taking off, I didn't have time to... I remember putting on my to-do list like 'learn Node.js', 'cause it's important to switch, 'cause... This obviously is much better language than PHP, and I never learned it. I never did it, 'cause I didn't have time. These things were growing like this, and I was launching more project and I never had time. It's like one day, I'll start coding properly and I never got to it. -

I sometimes wonder if I need to learn that stuff. It's still to do for me to really learn Node.js or Flask [or] React. It feels like a responsible software engineer should know how to use these, but you can get stuff done SO fast with vanilla versions of stuff.

Yeah, it's like software developers if you wanna get a job and it's like, you know, people making stuff like startups and if you want to be entrepreneur probably maybe shouldn't, right?

I wonder if there's like, I really wanna measure performance and speed. I think there's a deep wisdom in that. I do think that frameworks and just constantly wanting to learn the new thing this complicated way of software engineering gets in the way. I'm not sure what to say about that, because definitely like you shouldn't build everything from just vanilla JavaScript or vanilla C, for example. C++ when you're building systems engineering is like, there's a lot of benefits for pointer safety and all that kind of stuff. So I don't know, but it just feels like you can get so much more stuff done if you don't care about how you do it.

Man, this is my most controversial take, I think, and maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like there's frameworks now that raise money. They raise a LOT of money. They raise 50 million, 100 million, 300 million dollars. And the idea is that you need to make the developers, the new developers, like when you're 18 or 20 years old, right? Get them to use this framework and add a platform to it. Where the framework can... It's open source, but you probably should use the platform which is paid to use it. And the cost of the platforms to host it are a thousand times higher than just hosting it on a simple AWS server or a VPS on DigitalOcean, right? So there's obviously like a monetary incentive here. We wanna get a lot of developers to use this technology and then we need to charge them money 'cause they're gonna use it in startups and then the startups can pay for the bills. It kind of destroys the information out there about learning to code because they pay YouTubers, they pay influencers, developer influencers is a big thing... And same thing what happens with like nutrition and fitness or something. Same thing happens in developing, they pay this influencer to promote this stuff, use it, make stuff with it, make demo products with it. And then a lot of people are like, "Wow, use this." And I started noticing this 'cause when I would ship my stuff, people would ask me, "What are you using?" I would say, "PHP, jQuery, why does it matter?" And people would start kind of attacking me like, "Why are you not using this new technology, this new framework, this new thing?" And I say, "I don't know, 'cause this PHP thing works and I'm not really optimizing for anything, it just works." And I never understood like why, I understand there's new technologies that are better and there should be improvement, but I'm very suspicious of money. Just like lobbying. There's money in this developer framework scene. There's hundreds of millions that goes to ads or influencer or whatever. It can't all go to developers. You don't need so many developers for a framework, and it's open source. To make a lot of more money on these startups.

So that's a really good perspective. But in addition to that is like, when you say better, it's like, can we get some data on the better? Because I wanna know from the individual developer perspective and then from a team of five, team of 10, team of 20 developers... Measure how productive they are in shipping features. How many bugs they create, how many security holes result.

PHP was not good with security for a while, but now it's good.

In theory, in theory- Is it though?

Now it's good.

No, now as you're saying it, I wanna know if that's true because PHP was just the majority of websites on the internet. Is it just overrepresented? Same with WordPress? Yes, there's a reputation that WordPress has a gigantic number of security holes. I don't know if that's true. I know it gets attacked a lot because it's so popular. It definitely does have security holes, but maybe a lot of other systems have security holes as well. Anyway, I just sort of questioning the conventional wisdom that keeps wanting to push software engineers towards frameworks, towards complex. Like super complicated sort of software engineering approaches that stretch out the time it takes to actually build a thing.

Man, 100%. And it's the same thing with big corporations. 80% of the people don't do anything. It's like- It's not efficient. Your benchmark is like people building stuff that actually gets done and like for society, right? If we wanna save time, we should probably use technology that's simple, that's pragmatic, that works, that's not overly complicated. It doesn't make your life like a living hell.

And use a framework one that obviously solves a problem, a direct problem that you-

Of course, yeah, of course. I'm not saying you should code without a framework. You should use whatever you want. But yeah, think it's suspicious. And I think it's suspicious. When I talk about it on the Twitter, there's this army comes out. There's these framework armies.

I wanna ask the framework army, what have they built this week?

A couple thoughts -

yeah, some of the coding practices encouraged by early PHP *were* terrible (automatically converting CGI params to variables).

And honestly, I don't think Vanilla JS is is that bad to build with relative to jQuery, with a site like You Might Need jQuery you really can get done what you need to do. (Honestly I should look into what CSS libraries Levels uses - the shallow stuff is like 80% of the perception a site.)

Finally, I'm not quite as suspicious about the "follow the money" aspect as Levels is - or at least I'm more aware of the peer pressure aspect, that it feels like so many engineers have really learned to love their chains in terms of complexity... maybe it's a path to better job security somehow, maybe opinionated frameworks scale better for larger teams? But to me, it always seems to get in the way of getting things done in a way that's productive in the short term and maintainable over 5-10 years.

Levels view about the money involved reminds me of this 20 years old essay from Joel "Joel on Software" Spolsky, Fire and Motion. The first half is about the intermittent trouble of getting started being productive in a workday, but then he pivots to his time is an Israeli Paratrooper, where he learned the trick of Fire and Motion - keep moving and keep firing to make the other guy keep his head down. He writes:

Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That's probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can't spend writing new features.

Sometimes it feels like the "flavor of the month" frontend webdev is a victim of some of that - along with engineers who are more interested in HOW something is done than what actually is done.

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New word of the day: "mentation", a fancy way of saying mental activity.

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"In the early 70s, the capital class stages a revolt of the rich against the poor. The post-World War II consensus had transferred too much wealth and too much power to the working class, so the rich made it their mission to dismantle that consensus and make sure it could never re-emerge. First Nixon and then Reagan built and institutionalized debt traps, slashed social spending, annihilated labor unions, and poisoned the very idea that there was any such thing as "society" or that we could work together to solve our shared problems."

It's an antidote to the kind of leftist/central view of "things are getting better and better, poverty is decreasing" etc , at least in terms of the American condition. Not that I'm that much of an American First-er either. But the idea of how we were founded as a plantation economy, and then later we got a giant post-war boost, having been shielded from the downsides of war by big oceans and friendly neighbors, but now it's just a slow grind back... oy.

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So last week I had a few nice days "WFH"ing at my Mom and Aunt's, came back Friday evening.

Ok weekend with a few fun events but... man I'm in that weird time state of mind.

Trying to get tear through a few big things on my todo list especially inbox zero since it has totally crept up on me.

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Oh and I took a nap so time has an even weird feel.

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Reading "More Die of Heartbreak", a 1987 novel by Saul Bellow. A paperback copy was given to me by a stranger on a plane back around my college days, guess she thought I was its type, but I never got around to it.

I got it in ebook form and it had been hanging around the top of my "to get to" pile for a long while. One advantage is having highlights made by other people turned on- all of whom must have read this years and years after it was a modern work... intriguing signs of life and camaraderie on a presumably less-used road.

Also, while I usually enjoy podcasts while taking walks, I'm walking while reading- something I was also more likely to do in 1987 come to think of it.

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Back in the 90s I was often on Usenet - a distributed set of conversational message boards. The level of discourse was generally pretty high, maybe because of the system's academic routes and relative lack of anonymity, and you could use whatever newsreader you liked and your single account to interact with all kinds of topic-based groups - kind of like Reddit, but more geared to writing in paragraphs rather than sentences.

Besides "rec.games.video.classic" and "alt.fan.cecil-adams" my favorite group was "alt.hackers" - hackers in in the sense of "making cheap and cheerful kludges" vs "hacking into computer systems". (Or the MIT sense of "grand stunts") It was "self-moderated" - there was a specific technical trick you had to pull in order to post there. The "netiquette" of the group suggested you post an "obligatory hack" or "ObHack" if your post would otherwise be off-topic.

I kept a list of my own ObHacks for future use, and there's still a part of my brain that thinks "oh, that was a clever little thing I came up with, I should file that away for an ObHack!" So here's two of those about the lockscreen wallpaper for my phone.

One is for band: I take a snapshot or screenshot of the setlist and then post it as my lockscreen, so I can quickly see what songs are coming up without fiddling with my phone too much. It's not quite as classic as taping a list to the floor but it's a lot less work. (Plus then afterwards I have a nice memento of the concert until I remember to put my wallpaper back...)

Anyway, I noticed that changing wallpaper and case is a nice way to make a phone feel refreshed and new, so I got this bright yellow case to replace the blue silicone one that was starting to wear. I decided to lean into how "bumblebee" like it made my phone look and made up this wallpaper:


The slight ObHack cleverness was using a screenshot to layout where the bee appeared - I wanted it so that even if a song or podcast was playing, I could still see the bee, so I took a screenshot and used it as a layer to get the placement right: Then I hid the layer and saved. (In practice, the bee was a smidge lower than where I thought it would show up, but I decided on a new shade of blue so I had to redo it anyway.)

Incidentally, Piskel was a lot better at making the pixel art bee (I stole the design by googling "pixelated bumblebee" and seeing these cool Etsy earrings)

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Incidentally, this is the invader wallpaper I used for a few days that inspired my messing around with pixelart backgrounds: (from somewhere on tumblr)
Huh. I kind of like the strict monochrome nature of it. The Bee matches the new case, but still...

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The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

I feel like when he wrote that, in 1984, he was thinking of something like this:

But eventually, a dead channel would be something that was toxic-looking in a different way:


(My first attempt with the bee was kind of an electric blue, which I realized was less soothing than I was hoping for...)

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Also I finally remade my old (2001! I guess I mean "young") megamankirk sprite to have a beard...

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Building a giant statue got Ozymandias into a poem which will in fact outlast "The Lone and Level Sands" that "Stretch Far Away" [...] Immortality is basically free now except that you still die.

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Only jailers believe in jail.

Someone mentioned this quote to me, attributed to I forget whom, but I can't google it, so now I'm wondering.

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Interesting Quora answer to Why aren't Canadian doctors moving to the US en masse for better pay? most relevant bit:

She said it wasn't worth the hassle. She made more money -but she also had more expenses, including hiring 5 additional individuals as well as her office staff just to deal with all of the different insurance companies and payments and collections!

She found her medical options for her patients compromised by decisions enforced by these same insurance companies that she felt prevented her from giving her patients the medical care they needed.

I've heard a range of opinions from Canadians about their healthcare, ranging from "meh and annoying" to "great!". But the non-stop crap about "US healthcare is the envy of the world!" needs is nonsense. Yes, free markets can get to lost of efficiencies, but I don't think that overcomes the zero sum game aspect of how the less healthcare the insurance company gives me the more money they get to keep. Our system's reliance on Urgent Care-based response and GoFundMe for procedures are indicative of a system that needs to be supplemented.

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Boris Johnson loses his majority:

via b3ta.com/ I talk too much.

I think there are bad reasons I do, and then more ok reasons.

The worst reasons are all about the ego. I want to be seen as smart, I want to be seen as the provider of funny things. (On the more pathological side I need to demonstrate my worth - I really do think the "if you're not worthy, horrible things will be done to you" was a bad lesson I absorbed from church.)

Middling reasons include how I have a quick but not deep mind that likes to see things from everybody's angle. It's an empathetic way to be, but hard to follow if I haven't taken the time and effort to curate my thoughts.

Another reason is, if I withhold information, then I'm morally culpable if that information ended up being crucial or even useful to you. (Or just as bad, if other people are doing that, then there might be important stuff *I* don't know!)

But still. I am trying a bit. To think before I speak a bit longer, leave things unsaid, emails unwritten.

Sometimes I worry about the slippery slope, if I just stopped and stopped, I'd be nothing. Or that much less fun to be around. Or less informative. I don't have enough faith in my inner self and presence to 100% trust I could be worthy and interesting even if I didn't say much, but I should probably try hard to get over that.

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Every movie is about something. Except for Ghostbusters. It's perfect but it's not about anything.

Basically it says Ghostbusters has no real character arc, or theme. Maybe that's why I like it so much! I'm not sure if my fixed mindset would let me write anything with a personal growth arc.

Be careful about avoiding sidetracks. Don't go down them. There's always things you'd like to say and things you'd like to talk about. But they're not central to your topic and you've got to be brutal about not saying them.

That is such hard advice for me to take! First of all, I find sidetracks enjoyable. Second of all, I liked to lead with the disclaimer, recognizing that there are other points of view... Photos from my mom's friend Alyce:

This one I'm most struck by. The back says "7-23-76 From our balcony" which would be when we lived on St. Thomas. My Super Niece is now almost exactly the same I am in this photo.


Ahh, fashion. Makes me wonder when plastic cups became popular.


On Torbenson Road, where Cleveland's Booth Memorial Hospital was. And speaking of fashion! Candy stripe pants! And an amish beard. My dad was amazing.

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Man. First time I glanced out the window this season and thought "dark already?" (quarter of eight) Even though it wasn't one of my top favorites, the Atari 2600 game "Riddle of the Sphinx" has been in my dreams a bit lately...

this screenshot from the animated screenshot tumblr http://pixelclash.tumblr.com/ I don't understand this enough to do much with it, but http://wavepot.com/ , where you can make sounds and tracks via math in real time, in the browser, is amazing.

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At work, HR scheduled me to conduct part of an interview right during the big Apple product announcements.

It is probably a little off that my annual rhythm is anchored on Game of Thrones in the spring and the new Apple phone announcement in the fall.

Horse walks into a bar. "But grandpa and I tore out this bar decades ago," he thinks to himself. Time Horse continues after these messages.

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LG End of the World Prank Holy crap, that is some of the scariest stuff I could ever imagine seeing, straight out of my nightmares... a child from the cold war age, I always live with the minor worry that possibly someday, that's what I'm going to see, and it'll be the last thing I see.

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The Secret Service code names: "Renegade", "Celtic", "Javelin" and now "Bowhunter" for Obama, Biden, Romney and Ryan, respectively.
--via 22words
--Interesting refutation of some widely held beliefs that anime characters aren't "white" -- I'm a crappy artist and tend to think in icons, so I'm impressed by any kind of ability to generalize facial structure in a meaningful way. (Though it makes me wonder... do northeast Asians look more like *western* animated characters, too, by nature of a flatter facial structure?)

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My hard nose, glass jaw, and soft heart.

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If that One World Gov't the rightwingers are uptight about would mean no region-locked DVDs and games, I say- BRING IT ON! UN Uber Alles!

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Apple synching kind of sucks. iTunes: some things live on iPhone, some things live on iPad. Leave the apps the hell alone.

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2019 UPDATE:


My friend had this Facebook status:

Scott Richards is going to rock on to Electric Avenue

My response:


View Larger Map
We have a weird problem in one of our conference rooms... the WiFi connection is shaky and there's a history of people stealing cords or otherwise messing with the switchbox that would let people cable up their laptop to the network. Today I dropped the switch in my old courier bag, connected 5 ethernet cords to it draping out of the bag (along with the powercord) and attached the following sign:

THIS IS THE COURIER BAG OF MAGICAL INTERNET GOODNESS THE CORRECT ATTITUDE FOR THIS BAG IS ONE OF MYSTICAL REVERENCE FIVE ETHERNET CABLES COME OUT. FEEL FREE TO PUT THESE IN YOUR LAPTOPS AND EXPERIENCE FULL NOKIA NETWORK JOY DO NOT TOUCH THE GREEN ETHERNET CABLE NOR THE GRAY POWER CABLE LEST YOUR SOUL BE IN FORFEIT

We'll see how it goes! I'd hate for anyone to lose their eternal soul 'cause they couldn't keep their hands off an ethernet cable!

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Creepiness of the Moment
Play with Spider, a virtual Spider tromping across the map of Europe, following the mouse... rather lifelike and creepy. (via Archmage)

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Quote of the Moment

Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you recognize a mistake when you make it again.

.... it took me way too long that this is probably just a 'bot going through the ol' Unix "Fortune" file... or rather I guessed that, but I didn't realize it was doing it alphabetically.

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Uma Thurman has, like, giant nostrils.

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McCain wants to spin an urge to kick Repubs out on isolated corruption? Try an inability to run an economy and a penchant for the wrong war!

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Heh. Penn Teller are also anxious for "immortality through their work" but they're more succesful at it than I'm likely to be...

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DUH:Copley sign for Faneuil Hall's Newbury Comics..."wonder if there's one nearer here?" (12 hours to recall I was a block from Newbury St)

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"C'est la Vie!" / accepting that / "this should not be!" / but coping / more stoically; / philosophically-- / "C'est la Vie..."

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I'm getting a little worried that my typing seems to be getting worse, in terms of phonetic and sometimes conceptual typos...

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so one of few nights I need to be punctual(drive-in movie plans w/ friends)NO E LINE-against the Tao to kick against the sticks hop a cab?

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I use the term sophomoric too freely, maybe. There isn't much daylight between my use of that and wisdom so time tested it's trite. My alarm clock broke, so I've been using my iPhone as a serviceable replacement. I selected the Piano Riff ringtone , which is actually that cliché "blues refrain", something like C F Eb F C--- That way the alarm sounds, and I can sing along:

doo DEEdoodee Dah
    woke up this morning--
doo DEEdoodee Dah
    no wait, I still have to do that...

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Anti-anti-PC Quote of the Moment

Even though there is plenty of stuff for reasonable people to dislike about Political Correctness as a dogma, there is also something creepy about the brutal, self-righteous glee with which [John Ziegler] and other conservative [talkradio] hosts defy all PC conventions. If it causes you real pain to hear or see something, and I make a point to inflict that thing on you merely because I object to your reasons for finding it painful, then there's something wrong with my sense of proportion, or my recognition of your basic humanity, or both.

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Funny Quote of the Moment

In New England everyone calls you "Dave" regardless of however many times you might introduce yourself as David. I am reminded of those fanatically religious homophobes who stand on the steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral during Gay Pride, holding signs that say "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!" I have always wanted to go up to them and say, "Well, of course not Adam and Steve. Never Adam and Steve. It's Adam and Steven."

Still on the road...

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Quote of the Moment

People are sheer stark raving crazy nuts. Quote me.

Again, prewriting this as a hedge against by 'Net service being down...it's up at the moment, and the Comcast guy is on his way, but I predict it's going to be more difficult to fix this when it's not broken at the moment...

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Quote of the Moment

The winters so cold, summer's over too soon.
Let's pack our bags and settle down where palm trees grow.
And I've got some friends, some that I hardly know.
We've had some times I wouldn't trade for the world,
We chase these days down with talks of the places that we will go.

Nice thought for Labor Day.

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Update of the Moment
Ksenia and I had dinner with some of my family last night. My mom was there...she actually had to step out to take some cell calls about the Massachusetts Salvation Army's longer term response during the time. She had one answer to the "why shoot at the helicopters" question which made some kind of twisted sense...it might be people who are frustrated that they or there loved ones aren't higher up on the queue for being rescued or receiving help, and are trying to change the equation or express rage. LAN3, similar logic might be behind threatening the levee.

Yikes. Assuming that's more or less true, you know that movie cliché about how a hero is willing to ssacrifice anything, including risking many other people, in order to help his immediate family and loved ones? This is what it looks like from the other side.

For some reason alienbill.com, the site I use for email, is down. Those jerks. I'm almost dreading holiday weekends, because it seems like things are much likelier to go wrong and not get fixed through the whole damn thing. It really irritates me.

If anyone needs to email me they should try my new gmail address, kirkjerk at gmail dot com.

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Image of the Moment

--via LAN3, this is a giant Digging-Wheel Excavator used in Open Cast Mining. (Bigger photo at that link--also here is another one of these behemoths... amazing to think humans can do stuff on this scale.)

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Musical of the Moment
Saw Lion King the musical yesterday, as "Cagey" surmised and asked about...bought some tickets off of my ex-mother-in-law, because her husband had to hussle back to Florida to batten down the hatches for Frances. Unbeatable seats as well, right at the front center of the balcony. The Musical was great, it's a solid story, but the spectacle...the imaginative costumes and puppets were brilliant. I loved the kind of in-between conceptual space the puppets occupied. You don't just look at the puppet, you don't just observe the puppeteer, it's some synergy of the two. Really nifty.

Man, I'm manic-depressive about this JoustPong thing. Read all about it at the JoustPong journal--now in reverse chronological order and with "Quick Start" instructions for your convenience.

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Plea of the Moment
Go vote for the dog of Ranjit's friend!

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Quote of the Moment

I'm always relieved when someone delivers a eulogy and I realize I'm listening to it.

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Link of the Moment
The Hentai Dictionary is an attempt to catalog the wide variety of Japanese porn genres. "Japanese porn consumers are so utterly perverted that the industry can't invent new kinks fast enough." No pictures or anything, but it's a very amusing bit of cultural anthropology.

I hate pasta I hate quiche but what I hate the most is feesh smelly feesh rots in a bag smells so bad it makes me gag really nasty not fit to eat why do folks think they're such a treat? two big eyes they stare at me they always stare but never see swimmin' feesh constantly take a bath that is what makes me laugh for as they bathe all night and day then what the heck makes 'em smell that way?

--Kirk Israel, published in my High School's annual literary review, Eucuyo '90. They must've liked it, they closed the review with it. If I'm feeling masochistic I'll post the poem that opened the review, also by me.

At Chili's

[After the waiter asked if we wanted change from a twenty for a $14 tab]
Kirk: "Nah, we were gonna give him a 50% tip"
John: "Yeah, that waiter was really stellar."
Kirk: "You mean, very far away and hard to communicate with?"

It was funnier in person, especially since the service had been pretty middlin'.

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Link of the Moment
World Wide Words is a very interesting site about various words and phrases, albeit with a slant towards British English. If you're interested in the history of words, you could spend a long time just hitting their Surprise Me link. (Unfortunately the way it's setup means you can't just hit reload, but have to click the link.)