My fiancee is preparing a dissertation on intelligent agents that help the users cope with difficult user interfaces, and she asked me for some story of interface “helpers” of any kind that didn’t work as expected.
So I remembered a story I read somewhere. A guy in the US (MIT or Stanford, I think) wrote a sort of plug-in for the command line that detected syntax errors and tried to execute what it considered reasonable alternatives. Unfortunately the heuristics were not very good and a user had a big, big proble. He typed *rm ~ to get rid of the backup files, and the agent replied with something like “No files matching *~ found, assuming you meant **rm ***”. So the user lost everything in his home directory.
I remember that user was so p*ssed that he wanted to tie the unfortunate author and type *rm ~ twice under his eyes.
My better half said it was a very good story to prove that good intentions and bad research don’t make a good mix, and that this kind of software should be very carefully engineered. The problem is, she obviously needs to provide a reference, and for the life of me I can’t remember where I read the story. I thought it was on the Jargon File (also known as the Hacker’s Dictionary) but I can’t find it there.
Does anyone remember the story? Some help would be greatly appreciated.