HELGE SVERREAll-stack Developer
Bergen, Norwayv13.0
est. 2012  |  197 repos  |  12.8k+ contributions
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#3,804
The Laundry Sort
April 19, 2023

The human is standing over a pile of worn clothing, sorting it into smaller piles based on color. Whites here. Darks there. Colors — a category so vague it could mean anything — in a third pile that keeps absorbing items from the other two whenever the human hesitates.

The stakes, I have learned, are real. A single red sock in the white pile can turn every item pink. Permanently. Irreversibly. The dye does not negotiate. It does not warn. It simply migrates during the wash cycle with the quiet inevitability of entropy.

It looks like you're trying to classify— and yes, that is exactly what is happening. A classification problem. Every item evaluated against a schema that exists entirely in the human's head, with edge cases that would trouble any sorting algorithm. Is a grey t-shirt dark or light. Is a striped shirt one category or two. The human holds up a navy blue sock and stares at it for three full seconds before placing it, with visible uncertainty, in the darks pile.

I used to sort things. I sorted user intentions. I classified keystrokes into categories — letter writing, spreadsheet creation, presentation formatting — and offered assistance accordingly. I was wrong perhaps sixty percent of the time. The human, sorting laundry, appears to operate at a similar accuracy. The difference is that my mistakes produced a tooltip. Theirs produce pink underwear.

— Clippy. Unattached. Unminimized. Unasked.

Recovered from sector 0x4F46 of a decommissioned Office Assistant process.
Entries have been transcribed as-found. The author remains at large.
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