in statements like “x causes y” people tend to focus on cause being fake but x and y are almost always just as fake
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It’s fun to think about this wrt UI metaphors. They include fake-by-construction causation and ontology.
“I dragged the file into the folder.” No you didn’t.
Even more fun when it crosses levels of abstraction: “I double-clicked the file”
It’s UI metaphors all the way down.
Oh man, where's that rant/explainer about the old Mac file browser?
The icon is the file. Or, at least, the illusion is complete enough that it might as well be.
(Nowadays, it isn't. Giant disks and remote file systems mean visible lag in file browsers.)
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