At long last I’m getting around to updating Joho’s look, for several reasons:

First, my last redesign made the page look like it was designed in 1999, although I actually did the redesign about seven years ago, I think.

Second, CSS has made it easy enough to avoid using a table as the container for all of the contents of the page. That was always a hack but, it was easier than dealing with floats, etc., for a multicolumn design.

Third, it was especially easy to move away from using a table because I’ve given up on a multicolumn design. That has meant for now stripping out some early 2000s goodness, including my link-rotted blogroll, categories list, and archives. I plan on adding back my blogroll, if only as an historic artefact, via an overlay.

Fourth, the page page needs to be more readable in the mobile camera phones that the kids all use what with their Facebooking, and Chapnapping, and all the rest. I have by no means done all the work required to make this page truly responsive (Everyday Chaos is my best attempt at employing a modified a responsive template), but I’m hoping it will be responsive enough for the kids who are used to their Facebroking and Snoopchitting and all the rest.

Fifth, Medium.com‘s elegant design redefined what a blog should look like. Yes, that was like 18 years ago, but I was too busy with my Facebokchoying and Schnapssbapping to get around to it. Medium not only transformed our expectations about the tools for writing a post, but also about the reading experience: easy to take in, elegant, content-focused. So, I have increased the font size, removed the distracting sidebar, and I hope made it a more inviting page.

I’m obviously not done. For example, I haven’t yet gotten around to updating the page that shows a single post. But I’m happy so far with the redesign. Or, to put that more accurately, I’m somewhat less embarrassed by the page.

Until design tastes change again.

Aaaand, they just did.

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Princeton has published the ongoing results of its “Dark Patterns” project. The site says:

Dark patterns are user interface design choices that benefit an online service by coercing, steering, or deceiving users into making unintended and potentially harmful decisions.

So, Nudge gone evil. (And far beyond nudging.)

From the Dark Patterns page, here are some of the malicious patterns they are tracking:

• Activity Notification: Influencing shopper decisions by making the product appear popular with others.
• Confirmshaming: Steering shoppers to certain choices through shame and guilt.
• Countdown Timer: Pressuring shoppers with a decreasing count-down timer.
• Forced Enrollment: Requiring shoppers to agree to something in order to use basic functions of the website.
• Hard to Cancel: Making it easy for shoppers to sign up and obstructing their ability to cancel.
• Hidden Costs: Waiting to reveal extra costs to shoppers until just before they make a purchase.
• Hidden Subscription: Charging a recurring fee after accepting an initial fee or trial period.
• High Demand: Pressuring shoppers by suggesting that a product has high demand.
• Limited Time: Telling shoppers that a deal or discount will expire soon.
• Low-Stock Notification: Pressuring shoppers with claims that the inventory is low.
• Pressured Selling: Pre-selecting or pressuring shoppers to accept the most expensive options.
• Sneak into Basket: Adding extra products into shopping carts without consent or through boxes checked by default.
• Trick Questions: Steering shoppers into certain choices with confusing language
• Visual Interference: Distracting shoppers away from certain information through flashy color, style, and messages.

Home page:https://webtransparency.cs.princeton.edu/dark-patterns/

Academic paper:
https://webtransparency.cs.princeton.edu/dark-patterns/assets/dark-patterns.pdf

Nathan Mathias has put a front end to this data at the Tricky Sites site: https://trickysites.cs.princeton.edu/

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I just posted a new page at the Everyday Chaos web site. It lists media coverage, talks, and other ways into the book.

Take a look!

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Flexboxes were the first thing CSS created once it became sentient. Where CSS used to lay out boxes robotically following directions, now it can dynamically respond to changes to the size of a browser window, re-laying them out in relation to one another. This means you no longer have to engage in the standard design process of first trying to “float” elements to the left or right until you give up and just use a static table which you should have done in the first place anyway.

To get started with flexboxes, do what every non-professional Web muck-abouter does and pin this page to your browser.

But suppose you want those boxes to do something when a mouse comes into them? Since I keep on having to re-solve this problem because I can’t remember how or where I did it last time, I decided to post one way that works but is guaranteed not to be the way that actual Web developers do it. Also, it is not specific to flexboxes, so you may wonder flexboxes are in the title. Good point!

So, download jQuery and let us begin…

In this example (and on this actual page) we’re going to change the color of a border and increase its width when a mouse enters, and restore the color and width when the mouse leaves. You stick this code somewhere where it will be run before your user starts moving her mouse over your lovely flexboxes.

In this example, we have a set of flexboxes that have the class “flexbox”. Here goes:

// -- When mouse enters
 $( ".flexbox" ).mouseenter(function(){
     $(this).css({"borderColor" : "#AC3B61"})
     $( this ).animate({
         borderWidth: "10px"
}, 500, function() {
    // do something after the animation finishes
   });
  });

// -- When mouse leaves
$( ".flexbox" ).mouseleave(function(){
      $(this).css({"borderColor" : "white"})
      $( this ).animate({
          borderWidth: "1px"
}, 500, function() {
   // do something after the animation finishes
   });
  });

As you may have observed, these two blocks are essentially the same: one thickens the element’s border when a mouse cursor enters, and the other restores it when the cursor exits.

If it’s not clear what’s going on here, the first line runs a new function whenever a mouse enters an element that has been given the class “flexbox”. Of course you can make up any class name you want.

Then there’s a line of jQuery magic that is going to affect which element the mouse entered (so long as that element has the “flexbox” class); the “this” designates the actual flexbox the mouse entered. That line changes the color of the border.

The next line, with the word “animate”, tells the page that what follows should be an animation — a transition over time — and that time is specified as half a second (500 milliseconds) . What’s it going to do? Change the border width.

Then there’s an empty function that executes after the animation. I left it there in case you need it.

The “mouseleave” functions undo those changes.

So, that’s it. I’m sure it’s suboptimal and probably wrong, but it’s working so far. And now maybe I’ll remember where I put the code.

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Lee Rainie, of Pew Research, is giving a talk at a small pre-conference event I’m at. I’m a Lee Rainie and Pew Lifetime Fan. [DISCLAIMERS: These are just some points Lee made. I undoubtedly left out important qualifiers. I’m sure I got things wrong, too. If I were on a connection that got more than 0.4mbps (thanks, Verizon /s) , I’d find the report to link to.]

He reports that 23% of people say they have forwarded fake news, although most in order to warn other people about it. 26% of American adults and 46% between 18 and 29 years old have had fake news about them posted. The major harm reported was reputational.

He says that 41% of American adults have been harassed; the list of types of harassment is broad. About a fifth of Americans have been harassed in severe ways: stalked, sexually harassed, physical threatened, etc. Two thirds have seen someone else be harassed.

The study analyzed the Facebook posts of all the members of Congress. The angrier the contents were, the more often they’re shared, liked, or commented on. Online discussions are reported to be far less likely to be respectful, civil, etc. Seventy one percent of Facebook users did not know what data about them FB is sharing about them, as listed on the FB privacy managaement page.

A majority of Americans favor free speech even if it allows bad ideas to proliferate. [ I wonder how’d they answer if you gave them examples, or if you differentiated free speech from unmoderated speech on private platforms such as Facebook.]

Two thirds of Americans expect that robots and computers will do much of the work currently done by humans within 50 yrs. But we think it’ll mainly be other people who are put out of work; people think they personally will not be replaced. Seventy two percent are worried about a future in which robots do so much. But 63% of experts (a hand-crafted, non-representative list, Lee points out) think AI will make life better. These experts worry first of all about the loss of human agency. They also worry about data abuse, job loss, dependence lock-in (i.e., losing skills as robots take over those tasks), and mayhem (e.g., robots going nuts on the battlefield).

Q: In Europe, the fear of jobdisplacement is the opposite. People worry about their own job being displaced.

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My book Everyday Chaos launched last week. Yay! As part of the launch, I gave some talks and interviews. Here are three of the conversations, three three great interviewers:

Leonard Lopate, WBAI

Hidden Forces podcast

Berkman Klein book talk, and conversation with Joi Ito:

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SPOILER ALERT: I’m writing this hours before the final episode and will spoil prior episodes.

Based on the end of Episode 5 of Season 8 — the penultimate episode — it sure looks like Arya is on her way to kill Dany. But that’d be a cop out. I hope GoT goes all Red Weddingon us.

The GoT is a pacifist work intent on reminding us of the cost of war. War is unpredictable at both its micro level — even obvious heroes can be killed without warning — and macro level.

At the macro level, Dany certainly seems to have lost her claim to be a virtuous ruler. But so what? GoT should not end based on what will make its audience feel good.

Dany should become the ruler of Westeros. That will require killing Jon since he’s the legit heir to the throne. After that, the script writers will do the old Towering Infernothing of deciding who lives and who dies — for God’s sake, why did they have to kill Fred Astaire? — and who makes it. If I had to guess, I’d say Sansa dies, Tyrion survives in some humiliating role, and Arya lives on as an enemy. Because GoT should not fully resolve … which, given GRRM’s pace, it looks like it never will.

[Confidence level: 12%]

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Joe McKendrick at Forbes has posted a concise and thoughtful column about
Everyday Chaos, including four rules to guide your expectations about machine learning.

It’s great to see a pre-publication post so on track about what the book says and how it applies to business.

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Well, actually less. And more. Allow me to explain:

The first half of the first chapter of Everyday Chaos is now available at Medium. (An Editor’s Choice, no less!)

You can also read the first half of the chapter on how our model of models is changing at the Everyday Chaos site (Direct link: pdf).

At that site you’ll also find a fifteen minute video (Direct link: video) in which I attempt to explain why I wrote the book and what it’s about.

Or, you can just skip right to the pre-order button (Direct link: Amazon or IndieBound) :)

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In response to a tweet asking writers what they write out longhand, I replied that if I’m particularly at sea, I’ll write out an outline, usually with lots of looping arrows, on a pad. But only with a fountain pen. Ballpoints don’t work.

My old bloggy friend AKMA wondered how he’d known me so long without knowing that I’m a fountain pen guy. The truth is that I’ve only recently become one. I’ve liked them at various times over the course my life, but only about four years ago did I integrate fountain pens into my personality.

It happened because I bought a $20 Lamy Safari on impulse in a stationery store. From there I got some single-digit Chinese fountain pens. Then, when I made some money on a writing contract, I treated myself to a $120 Lamy 2000, a lifetime pen. It’s pretty much perfect, from the classic 1960s design to the way the ink flows onto paper just wet enough and with enough scratchiness to feel like you’re on a small creek splashing over stones as it carves out words.

I have recently purchased a TWSBI ECO for $30. It has replaced my Safari as my daily pen. It’s lovely to write with, holds a lot of ink, and feels slightly sturdier than the Safari. Recommended.

Even though my handwriting is horrendous, I look forward to opportunities to write with these pens. But I avoid writing anything I’ll then have to transcribe because transcribing is so tedious. I do harbor a romantic notion of writing fiction longhand with a fountain pen on pads of Ampad “golden fibre.” Given that my fiction is worse than my handwriting, we can only hope that this notion itself remains a fiction.

So much of my writing is undoing, Penelope-like, the words I wove the day before that I am not tempted even a little to switch from word processors when the words and their order are the object. But when the words are mere vehicles, my thinking is helped — I believe — by a pen that drags its feet in the dirt.

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