A one-sheet on posture toward the people around you The principle, and its known failure Jon Postel wrote it for computers talking to each other: send strictly correct output, accept anything you can reasonably interpret. It let a fragile early internet work despite everyone's software being slightly wrong. Engineers later turned against it. Broken implementations … Continue reading Be Conservative in What You Send, Liberal in What You Receive
Tag: Human Behavior
The Costume of a Fact
When something terrible happens, we reach for one of two boxes. The person was a monster — there were signs, there always are, and if we look hard enough we'll find them. Or the person was ordinary and something in them broke, an inexplicable flip, a good man gone wrong. After the Cumbria shootings in … Continue reading The Costume of a Fact
