The article has a link to a previous Gruber article that mentions things falling to the ground because of "gravity" as an analogy for asking about seemingly basic questions about "why things happen".

It's an article that inadvertently confuses readers with too many layers of indirection and requires reading another article to get the prerequisite "Insider Baseball" knowledge to connect all the metaphors together.

So... asking "why not Intel stickers on MacBooks?" ... analogous to asking about gravity. And "too many confusing options on GUIs" ... lines of code to enable extra options has a gravity.

The text quoted in a sibling comment implies the author is describing an effect whereby poor ux decisions - even if seemingly small - serve as a foundation to "attract" further negative patterns, gravity being the analogy.

Some decisions, once made, exert a noticeable pull on others, so exceptions quickly turn into standard practice.

Ditto. It's not a reference to anything that I can find, and the concept of gravity is sort of mentioned once but never expanded upon enough for me to really understand what they mean.

The context for that is in Gruber’s original post, I believe.

I think they mean inertia, not "gravity"

They reference gravity in this paragraph and I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean

> Not only is it very hard to create interfaces that have limitations, but a bad decision is not just precedent – it’s code that can be copied and reused. Existing code always had tons of… well, gravity, even before LLMs.

I assume this is just LLM nonsense?