Notes
Shorter, standalone pieces — the kind of thing that doesn’t fit the history series. Subscribe by RSS.
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The Machine Says It’s Working
Optimization score is a report card the student wrote. Knowing whether an AI-driven account is actually working is less about the dashboard and more about deciding, in advance, what would have counted as failure.
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Zero-Click Is the Best Thing to Happen to Paid Search in a Decade
The clicks that vanished were never the valuable ones. What replaced them reads intent better than any keyword-matching system ever did — at the cost of transparency and control you can’t get back.
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The Arithmetic That Built Search
How a handful of equations — Bid × CTR, generalized second price, Bayesian CTR smoothing, marginal ROAS — turned attention into a priced commodity and shaped the whole discipline.
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The Icon That Ate the Internet: How the Hamburger Menu Became Mobile’s Default Door
Three lines drawn under a 16-pixel constraint for a computer that flopped became the most recognized control on the internet — and the better-reasoned alternative name lost to a food joke.