I sometimes forget that KiB style units are confusing. The kB / KB is practically ambiguous. Kibi is “2 to the 10” or 1024 (binary), but…

1 kB ≈ 1 KB ≈ 1 KiB ≈ 1000 B ≈ 1024 B? Read my mind?

The SI metric system is still a great feat though and unifies primary dimensions (length) on equivalent units (meters). Instead of hands, inches, feet, chains, furlongs, barleycorns, rods, and links — it’s just meters prefixed arbitrarily. Time’s probably messed up though.

True story: I saw a ‘6 soft white rolls’ bread package morph into “6 50 foot white rolls” because of metric illness.

Contact forms are magical informants. Can you smell what kind of spam the spammers (and scammers) are cooking?

1. AI traffic/content farming services
2. Blockchain services
3. Coin recovery services
4. Guest posters for any of the above
5. Link sellers
6. Cloaking dealers
7. Cyber security spooks
8. Rich people asking us poor people for money
9. Visionary astrologers and foretellers

The last four years have taught us valuable lessons. In the shopping mall at the “end of the world”, the three most valued goods are toilet paper, toilet paper stocks and finally, toilet paper stockpiling. Accounts of toilet paper recall options are most likely bogus.

As for my biased opinion.. Everyone should consider foss and switch key systems to Linux and BSD for redundancy. That’d be wonderful, even if circumstances eventually optimize towards a futuristic catch 22.

I’m reluctantly coming around to the idea that spofs are a balancing act of sorts. Balance, as in misery loves company, convenience, insurance, and blame ability. The combined legal, technical, and economic consensus unwittingly incentivizes hardcore centralization.

Someone pointed out an unusual thing the other day. A partly foreign/government owned utility company here had Barbados’ Independence Flag as The Bahamas’ innocently circulating online. My disambiguation antics are 20/20?

I was poking around tech news today. I didn’t know that the AIs train on comments. That’s funny because brevity optimizes for snide remarks. Speaking of snide, Robert Frost has a rather gentle and tactful kind — it’s absolutely genius.

He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
Why do they make good neighbors?

Someone said a while back that the design here was cookie cutter. That means I’ve stuck the landing, beautifully. Web design ended 24 years ago and that can’t be right but it’s in fact true. Exploratory design style sheets are kept to one’s self.

People dislike non-conventional interfaces or “wheel reinventing”, as the story goes. Of course, nobody knows precisely what they actually want, but markets lie not (unless manipulated). Data says; there’s preference for the familiar, the standard, and more of the same.

Teaching how to write a link in Markdown is hard. It’s one example of the subtle horrors of horizontal complexity. Horror as in, the number of questions asked from intuition. Is it []() or ()[]?

One question becomes two, with four answers, or more. Eventually ()[] = []() = ()() = [][]. But, is it [example.com][example] or [example][example.com]?

The number of possibly erroneous actions among correct ones is a useful metric for automating (graphical) interfaces.

That book is quite hilarious. The ambiguity is sneaky too. Why the 17th century? Popular scams approximate type 7 and 2. ‘Enticement to gambling’ and ‘dropping the bag’ are just short of a legalized bank robbery.

Related (Confidence):

1. The New Cheats of London Exposed (1792)
2. The Confidence–Man: His Masquerade (1857)
3. The Humbugs of the World (1866)
4. Don Quixote (1605)
5. The Swindler (1626)
6. The Water Margin (1589)
7. Plum in the Golden Vase (1610)
8. Stories Old and New (1620)

Unrelated (History & Philosophy):

1. Book of Changes
2. Book of Documents
3. The Analects
4. The Records of the Grand Historian

Falling for enough cons is the mark of a casual connoisseur in books of confidence. One of my favorites is The Book of Swindles by Zhang Yingyu. How could one not read a book that inspires such a beautifully scandalous contra introduction?

This is an age of deception. Con men ply the roadways. Bogus alchemists pretend to turn one piece of silver into three. Devious nuns entice young women into adultery. Sorcerers use charmed talismans for mind control and murder…

The first lesson against swindles is ‘obtaining passage through the state of Yu to attack the state of Guo’, which in faraway modern times translates to keeping the tin foil hats demarcated at a safe arm’s length of distance.