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