Assorted links (2025-04-20)
2025-04-20: few-shot prompting in 1993, the history of "So-and-so is typing", automation pitfalls, and business hours.
My blog doesn’t contain any meaningful fraction of all the interesting stories about interfaces and connections. For this week in Digital Seams, here’s a roundup of links around the web:
1) “The user's intent, as expressed in examples, is to be divined by the system and turned into a useful generality” - is this snippet about few-shot prompting for LLMs? Nope! It’s from Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration (1993), a collection of articles about helping end users get more powerful software, edited by Allen Cypher.
It should not be necessary to learn a programming language like C or BASIC. Instead, the user should be able to instruct the computer to "Watch what I do", and the computer should create the program that corresponds to the user's actions.
Allen Cypher, Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration
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2) I Built That “So-and-So Is Typing” Feature in Chat (2014) is David Auerbach’s recollection of how that feature was built as part of MSN Messenger in the late ‘90s.
I mentioned it already in Every app is a messaging app, but I’m highlighting it again - it’s a wonderful little ethnographic snapshot of a time when real-time messaging was not yet commonplace.
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Here’s a matched pair of links about automating your work:
3) Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation (2019), by Dan Slimmon, is a neat pattern to start digging out of repetitive manual toil. Your first script doesn’t have to do anything.
4) And here’s one potential bad ending after all that scripting:
“Now the system is impossible to debug. Nobody remembers the old manual process and the automation is beyond what any of us can understand… Is all operations automation doomed to be this way?”
Thomas A. Limoncelli argues no; Automation Should Be Like Iron Man, Not Ultron (2015).
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And to wrap it up, another matched set:
5) Nikki Sylianteng’s Parking Sign Redesign (2015) brings structure out of chaos, so that you won’t worry about getting towed. It’s reminiscent of A better way to display museum hours (2011) from Jim Watson: both use a similar visual graph blocking out go- and no-go times. I’d love to see more consistent ways to display time blocks.
6) This week, B&H Photo is closed for the Jewish holiday of Passover. Here’s the twist - so is their online website! What if your website had business hours? (2022) is a post from my own personal blog when I first heard about this unusual practice.
And as always, I’d love to read your links - send them to bobbie@digitalseams.com or via Bluesky.