The 'best' user interfaces (UIs) are invisible.

The most effective UIs are the ones that make it easy, and even pleasurable for you to do what THEY want you to do.

And what a UI wants you to do may not be what you want to do. (I'll leave the question of 'best for whom' aside for now.)

For example...

Usability is ethically neutral - UI design isn't

There's an assumption that UIs that are user-friendly, and 'delightful' have our best interests at heart. From the examples above, this obviously isn't always true. It may not even often be true.

Casino UI is a great example of conflict between what we want, and what the UI wants us to do. We appear to be travelling on the same 'journey', but at the end of the day, the relationship is parasitical at best, and adversarial at worst.

Online Shopping UI has a less toxic relationship with us, as users. At least the UI isn't expressly designed to exploit our human weaknesses for profit. As a merchant's proxy, the UI very reasonably wants to make its goods attractive to us, and make it easy for us to buy stuff.

Clinical UI is what we tend to assume we're getting, even when that trust is unwarranted. It embodies the classic concept of 'best UI'. What Clinical UI wants us to do works hand in hand with what we want to achieve for our patients.

But even if the usability of all three UIs is the same, the ethical contrast between the three UI designs couldn't be more different.

When it comes to usability, it's important to remember that there's no moral value attached to how easy something is to use. Moral value comes into existence when ease-of-use and pleasure is harnessed to directing specific behaviours.

When we look at it that way, it's pretty easy to say: Casino UI is evil, Online Shopping is neutral, and Clinical UI is good.

UX and UI design are essentially the design of systems, products, and interfaces that encourage, reinforce, and reward specific user behaviours.

Whether the outcomes of these specific behaviours are beneficial or harmful to us - as users - is highly dependent on why the product was created in the first place.

So the next time someone tells you that all you do as a designer is 'make pretty buttons', tell them that the pretty buttons are just a small, unthreatening part of designing reward systems for sneaky mind control. ;)

Pristine Fairy Habitat

This edible fairy garden (EAT ALL THE FAIRIES!) >.> uses exactly the same base as the Hazelnut pistachio strawberry osmanthus truffle bar things.

Except that this time round, for pretties and flavourings we haz:
- rose essence
- vanilla essence
- rose petals (from dried rosebuds for rose tea - some steamed to rehydrate them, some straight off the dry buds)
- freeze-dried peach slice, chopped
- silver sugar ball things (I think they're called 'dragees'. Or maybe 'fairies'. ~_o )
- cheap matcha (nothing you'd want to make koicha, or even usucha with - good enough to cook is good enough)

Am very pleased a nugget at how the blend of flavours turned out. If you like Turkish delight chocolates, this is just the thing, with the peaches adding interesting 'high' notes, and the pistachios adding nice texture. :X The matcha just adds fairy moss.

Blurry Chunks of Sundered Fairy Habitat

Alas, all my pics of the sliced squares turned out blurry. T_T That's what I get for taking pics after sundown!

Being the soul of restraint, it's SO unusual for me to go completely mad, and throw in the kitchen sink. Of course it is. Ahem.

1) Hmm wanna make truffles but too lazy to roll balls. Okok let's make truffle bars.
2) Drat, no Nutella, was planning to use that. Ooh but look, hazelnut essence. Ok!
3) Pistachio looks so pretty in choccies, let's throw some in.
4) Hey I have those freeze dried strawberries, and pink is pretty with green. Chop some of those and put them on top!
5) Oo yellow is pretty with pink and I just happen to have dried osmanthus flowers...

And so we have these Hazelnut pistachio strawberry osmanthus truffle bar things.

Best of all, they're super easy to make (well the base is), and you can throw as many 'pretties' as you like in / on top.

Ingredients
200ml sweetened condensed milk (aka 2 parts)
200g good 70% cocoa dark chocolate (aka 2 parts) (broken into squares it comes in. I'm too lazy to do more than that.)
25g~ honey
25g~ butter (salted, unsalted, doesn't matter. I used salted cause lazy.)
some vanilla essence
some hazelnut essence
some freeze-dried strawberries (chopped)
some osmanthus flowers
some pistachios (whole)

Crafting
1) Dump chocolate, honey, butter in a bowl.
2) Shove bowl in microwave, melt until melted. Until the chocolate and stuff is melted. Not the bowl. If the bowl has melted, you've gone too far. Safest to stop when there are a few lumps of chocolate left, and finish it by stirring it all into a homogenous gloop.
3) Throw in essences, stir stir stir till incorporated.
4) Plop in condensed milk, stir stir stir till incorporated.
5) Mix in pistachios .
6) Pour into some kind of (parchment-paper-lined) pan, make pathetic attempt at forming some sort of 'slab'.
7) Decorate with freeze-dried strawberry pieces and osmanthus flowers in a suitably 'artisanal' fashion.
8) Tos...put gently in fridge (no need to cover unless your fridge has stinky things).
9) Ignore for at least 4 hours.
10) Remoof from fridge, cut into squares.
11) Eat all the leavings that are ~_o 'unfit for presentation'.

Notes
If you want to mess with the ratio of condensed milk to chocolate, more milk will give you softer trufflepieces, more chocolate will give you harder ones (duh right). This ratio gives you pretty much perfect 'fancy truffle' texture. Not too squishy, not too hard, just right.

As I was waddling along in Elder Scrolls Online, slaying skeletons left and right, something occurred to me...

I would like to posit the existence of some kind of multiversal Necromantic Breast Preservation society.

It is the only ~_o reason I can think of that across so many alternate game universes, female skeletons continue to retain their breast tissue.

Especially since, as squishy fat deposits, the breasts should be among the first things to go.

I believe that these necromancers may simply regard whatever additional preservation rituals are needed as 'breast practices'.

= = = = = = (>'-')>

I don't care if stuff is flourless, eggless, butterless, whateverless one way or the other, but I do care if there is less stuff I have to do. ;)

These are one-bowl, no creaming, no softening butter, etc. Basically just dump and stir. Perfect!

I didn't change the recipe at all (unusual for me), though ofc I didn't really measure stuff, I just eyeballed it...

Only things I did change were the baking times (and I think) the portion sizes.

I tend to like my cookies to be 1 teaspoon or so, rather than the 1 tablespoon that a lot of recipes seem to like.

I also reduced the baking time, because at 11m, the first batch was waaaaay overdone. Still edible, but with edges beginning to burn.

I don't think it's a problem with the original recipe though, which is great.

I think it may be that:
- my new oven runs hot
- I'm baking on parchment paper on a black cookie sheet
- my cookies are smaller

With those things in mind 8m 15s at 175C turned out perfect cookies for me! :) Yey!

Also, if you tend to think more in ratios like me, the ingredient ratio is roughly:
- 4 parts peanut butter
- 4 parts dark brown sugar
- 1 part egg
- some choc chips
- some baking powder

Soooo I discovered Twine. Or re-discovered, I should say, since the last time I looked at it a long time ago, it didn't look like it would survive.

It now seems to be thriving!

And so, of course, I made a story. About pigs. 3 little ones.

Oh, I had high hopes and whattits initially, but when I sat down to write, somehow what fell out the most fluently was Three Little Pigs.

._. Go figure.

Play my epic retelling of Three Little Pigs here!

Really nice cookies, and super lazy! Crispy on the outside, fudgy on the inside, and almost no work. :X

I did change her recipe slightly, to make it less sweet. Plus I added orange essence. And less vanilla essence.

My tweaked version

• 2 c. powdered sugar
• 3/4 c. unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 3 large egg whites
• Some vanilla extract
• Some orange essence
• Some gold powdered sugar for sprinklies
• Bake 7m 30s at just under 180C
  

Technique-wise, it's exactly the same as what Kate posted! Yep, no need to beat those egg whites! WOOHOO! :X

I'm not a big chocolate fan but I like these a lot. ^_^

Sooo, there's an awfully interesting post, 'The Parable of the Talents' by Scott Alexander over at Slate Star Codex. It's about the relationship between intelligence and talent, as well as hard work.

He comes to a reasonable conclusion I agree with, that is:

The Jews also talk about how God judges you for your gifts. Rabbi Zusya once said that when he died, he wasn’t worried that God would ask him “Why weren’t you Moses?” or “Why weren’t you Solomon?” But he did worry that God might ask “Why weren’t you Rabbi Zusya?”

And this is part of why it’s important for me to believe in innate ability, and especially differences in innate ability. If everything comes down to hard work and positive attitude, then God has every right to ask me “Why weren’t you Srinivasa Ramanujan?” or “Why weren’t you Elon Musk?”

If everyone is legitimately a different person with a different brain and different talents and abilities, then all God gets to ask me is whether or not I was Scott Alexander.

This seems like a gratifyingly low bar.

I’m sorry to leave self a self absorbed comment, but reading this really upset me and I just need to get this off my chest…How is a person supposed to stay sane in a culture that prizes intelligence above everything else – especially if, as Scott suggests, Human Intelligence Really Is the Key to the Future – when they themselves are not particularly intelligent and, apparently, have no potential to ever become intelligent? Right now I basically feel like pond scum.

I hear these kinds of responses every so often, so I should probably learn to expect them. I never do. They seem to me precisely backwards.

Talent is the base stat. Intelligence is the bonus.

This post annoyed me so much that I actually left a comment!

<.< A nugget rarely comments on design blogs, for some reason...

It's a nice, ranty comment, so I've reproduced it here, for my Rant Museum! ^_^

Nugget's summary of DISC personality test

1. Tell me what you think you're like!
2. Gosh, I think you're just like that! Just like... what you said you thought you were like.
3. Let me pad that with vague, feel-good statements, worthy of any fortune teller.
4. Look, I'll even throw in charts that, if you cross-compare with colleagues, are all obviously from a fixed set of variables, but designed to look as if they're customised for you, just you, special little snowflake, you.
5. Now that you've told me what you think you're like, and I've mirrored that back at you...
6. Rate the accuracy of the test! WOW! It's ACCURATE isn't it? HOW UNCANNY.

As you can tell, I'm somewhat unimpressed. I am, though, impressed by how attractively and plausibly dressed up it was.

The one I took today was truly a triumph of marketing.

Here's someone who says it much more nicely than me. ;)