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.