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My name is Marcin Wichary. I’ve worked as a UX designer, typographer, front-end person, and manager at Google, Medium, and Figma. I’ve also written a book about keyboards and typing, gave talks, and published essays about design, typography, and technology.

Unsung is my blog about software craft and quality.

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More info about Unsung

“4 billion unique (and sometimes very memorable) sentences”

I spotted this interesting thing at work today, and was curious about that phrase at the end:

Turns out, it is basically a unique human-readable encoding of a 32-bit digit, I’d guess particularly for ease of voice/​phone support communication. (Otherwise I imagine copy/​paste would work well?)

Asana has been doing it since at least 2011:

What is novel in Asana is the form these IDs take. In most other applications, a customer-facing ID is usually a long jumble of numbers and/or letters. There are lots of small, subtle drawbacks to representing a number to a human this way, and so for the sake of curiosity—and to add a little levity to an otherwise frustrating situation—we tried something different.

Imagine representing 32 bits of information (numbers up to 4 billion) as a sentence instead of a jumble of digits. One possible sentence structure can be: count + adjective + plural noun + verb + adverb, e.g. “6 sad squid snuggle softly.”

I am very curious what data gets encoded this way since 32 bits is not really a lot. That detail, however, is not covered in the post.