Kirk Israel's commonplace and blog. Quotes and links daily since 2001.
2025.07.25

Gall's Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.
The corollary is devastating: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work.
This is why:
- Microservices migrations often fail when done as big-bang rewrites
- New frameworks struggle against battle-tested ones
- "Clean slate" projects often become technical debt faster
Start simple. Add complexity only when the simple system breaks.

your doorbell can be part of a techno-authoritarian surveillance state and an ICE collaborator.
Damn, Hulk Hogan was pretty gross. Amazing how hard it is to shake off my image of him from Saturday Morning Cartoons. (Same with Superfriends - DC will always seem like the REAL superheroes 'cause of that dang cartoon)
2025.07.24
Last weekend Lynette and I went with Wren to the New England Aquarium...

Open Photo Gallery


Damn, Ozzy and Hulk Hogan in one week. Tough time for 80s kids.
2025.07.23
Way Too Hot Take: TypeScript is the Hungarian Notation of our time.
2025.07.22
I kind of slept on the movie "Sinners" - classic horror tropes, but where like Shawn of the Dead had British jokes, this has stylized Black culture of 1932 era Mississippi Delta with all the great music that implies. Great stuff!
Oh goodie - looks like we already have AI succumbing to a baby version of the paperclip problem (i.e. the AI that we make so good at wanting to make more and more paperclips that it breaks down civilization in order to make more of them)... in this case it's AI scripts that ignore requests to shut themselves down, maybe somewhat to be ready to solve more math problems
https://mediachomp.com/spite-patronage-and-cringe-commissions/
2025.07.21
I had no idea how crabs swim, kinda like an underwater helicopter...

"What you looking at?"
"WIkipedia page of Mycroft Holmes"
"Oh, was he real?"
".... You do know he's a movie character. right?"
"... ...hahahaha, oh yeah, right!..."

You have to make some noise if you want to be heard.
Eudoria Holmes in "Enola Holmes"
2025.07.20
The other day I went to start my beloved '04 Scion xA (after it had sat two weeks outside, and presumably MA got some of the same deluge other places did) and it wouldn't move. Checked in with ChatGPT,described the problem, and it said the brakes were probably locked, and if I wanted I could carefully try rocking back and forth etc. And yeah, that seemed to solve it.

It makes me think that the problems with LLM are as much or more human and psychological as they are with the technology itself. We just don't have a setup in society where conventional wisdom, adjusted for the current circumstances (and sometimes just made up) is so available, or a society that will take care of people when the possible productivity boosts eliminate jobs (money is too busy funneling upwards to billionaires who use it to keep score in their prestige games.) And its ability to crib from artists to make novel blends also challenges us as a culture, and can provoke big existential questions.
2025.07.19
Executives and Expenditures -
it talks a lot about status, which reminds me of how... that's the real problem w/ billionaires. They will keep playing the game they do because money is such an easily quantified status...