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.

Hmm, maybe I’m a bit of a simpleton. The other day, while researching Facebook’s/Meta’s open graph protocol and metadata, I had a rare bout of curiosity and clicked on the discussion section.

Is the public group page just full of bots advertising to each other? Interesting.

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.

Magic is indeed real but strangely selective? FTX’s conclusion is fascinatingly scary! That was a joke for a friend, but it actually happened!

We definitely live in a scam world? The realization then (after much reading) was that coin ecosystems operate exactly like current financial systems but with extreme incomprehensibility.

I’m months behind my feeds, but the feast on FTX’s carcass drives it home! The magic number is 1/3! Coins are very shady!

Discussing strategies for detecting AI agents and crawlers has its apocalyptic comedy. How many humans are bots, and bots humans? If captchas are unsolvable and work unprovable, then you are a bot. But guess what? I’m not smart enough to play captcha!

So I’m a bot (that’s a joke) and technology works in unwitting ways. The web wants smart humanoids not dumb humans — it’s robots.txt not humans.txt, silly.

Related; a developer creates an AI friend. You are impressed and buy the thousand dollar one time licence. Your developer friend chats with you from the comfort of a phone with automated assistance. I can’t believe it’s not AI?

The Internet is such a chaotic mindscape and must be an epistemologist’s dream. The world adjusted disambiguation should be (rather tongue in cheek);

The Bahamas, not to be confused with Hamas, Barbados, or Bermuda, neither Bahamians with Bohemians in Bohemia of The Czech Republic, nor the plurality of Bohemian Rhapsodies, or Bahamas (the musician), or Bahamo (that town in Central Africa) or even Bahamut, the invisible fish that carries this planet on its back through the cosmic sea.

Bahamoj works though, it’s Esperanto or something.

I’m late on the uptake. Is Hamas in The Bahamas? No. But surely, hamas is inside The Bahamas. Yes, and rhymes internally too!

That made its rounds, but after coming across the source — it’s not funny anymore.

The fashion clock for large phones (phablets) is at its mid point. I was still curious though, and spent a bit of time researching the smallest, and most repairable Android phones on the market today. The results? Two devices that clock in at 7.5 cm (3 inches).

• Palm Phone (2018)
• Jelly Star (2023)

A quick wrapper script for normalized git commit dates. Commit dates and timezones are normalized or truncated to the day. This is useful for avoiding rebasing and/or not having to think about system or git date/time settings when on another device or in another timezone. If precise timestamps matter, then it is easily disabled.

#!/bin/sh -eu

GIT=$(which git --all | grep --invert-match "local/bin" | head --lines 1)
GIT_COMMITTER_DATE="$(date --utc --date '0' '+%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y %z')"

export GIT_COMMITTER_DATE

[ "${1:-}" = "commit" ] && export DATE=1 && $GIT "$@" --date="$GIT_COMMITTER_DATE"

[ "${DATE:-}" = 1 ] && exit

$GIT "$@"