From the Couch of Ben Johnson

Father, Principal Engineer at Prodigy Education, serial hyperbolist.

✴ Lemons

Alex Russell in an amazing screed about JS-heavy frameworks:

These technologies were initially pitched on the back of “better user experiences”, but have utterly failed to deliver on that promise outside of the high-management-maturity organisations in which they were born.

This whole article mirrors my increasing sense of the failure of rich JS web apps. I don’t know if I’d go as far as Russell to suggest that this was deliberate, but I do agree the world of SPAs has not turned out as promised.

But even as the complexity merchant’s well-intentioned victims meekly recite…

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It’s amazing how fast we’ve gone from “ugh, AI is going to destroy the world” to “ugh, I can’t believe there isn’t an AI that can just do this.”

The kid: “I’m daring. I’m not afraid of anything. Except cheese strings.”

For full effect, it helps to read this interview with the Reddit CEO in the voice of Justin Hammer from Iron Man 2. What a terrible communicator.

You could solve a lot of problems in Star Trek by making the doors manual.

Star Trek: Resurgence is a must-play for any Star Trek people. The format fits Star Trek perfectly. A great old-fashioned story. 5/5 would play again.

This is the first Apple keynote in more than a decade that I just totally forgot was happening. Can’t tell if that’s because I’m so busy right now or if I’m not excited by the headset. Maybe they finally improved the SwiftUI docs.

It’s 30 degrees outside and it’s currently hailing. This is totally normal. Everything is fine. There’s no way climate change is a problem. Right?

A book club where you buy books but you don’t have to read them.

✴ Remaking Iron Man

My 7-year-old recently watched the first Iron Man movie and part of the 2nd. Afterwards, he was inspired to re-create the film. He does this. We’ve done Jurassic Park, Godzilla, and Jumanji. Iron Man is the just the latest.

This whole process has yielded a few discoveries.

First, I’m impressed that he can tell that Iron Man 2 is not a great sequel. I mostly expect when he’s watching this stuff that he’s watching for the action scenes, but about 30 minutes in, he was not impressed and wanted to turn it off. So he’s picking up on more than I’d expect (or it’s a much worse movie than I remember).…

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When the AI concatenates all the random Amazon store names together…

Sold by RUIANSHIJUNZHENGGUOJIMAOYIYOUXIANGONGSI and Fulfilled by Amazon

My 7-year-old is trying to convince us that the only way it’s fair for him to take a COVID test is if his two non-symptomatic parents also have to take a COVID test.

“All Perils combines Collision and Comprehensive coverage. With All Perils you will be covered if someone living in your household steals your vehicle.”

That seems… very specific.

On April 15th I pulled a yogurt out of the fridge. The Best Before date says “MA 18”. Is that March? Is it May? Could we really not shell out for one extra character?

It named it: “The Calendar Crush Incident”.

Someone needs to sell placebo kids medicine.

There’s no way this can go wrong.

The 7-year-old apropos of nothing: “Who would win in a battle? Moses or Jesus?”

Let the Passover and Easter celebrations begin!

The Beaverton nails it.

“Sorry kiddo, but over the summer I have to work.“

“That’s ok, we can go on vacation and you can go boop boop boop on your computer while we’re there.”

I wish Intuit would use some of that enormous lobbying budget to get a law in place where all the banks need to provide an API.

My 7-year-old just fired me from the building project I was working on in our shared Minecraft world. “I suggest you work… on other things. I’ll make it properly and we’ll find some other things for you to do.” #PerformanceReview

The only thing worse than being on hold for three hours is that two days later I still have the hold music stuck in my head. I’ve put myself on hold.

The kids will be… alright?

Book with the title “My butt is so silly”.

My kiddo is having some trouble learning how to read. The Meg and Greg books have helped enormously. They focus on phonics, not boring stories, and split reading. Highly recommend for kids 5-8.