This is one of those small things that drives me nuts.
Why? I don’t know. I think it has something to do with the fact that I have a computer that is faster than any computer I’ve ever used in my entire life — and yet, clicking on buttons results in slight but perceptible de...
I recently updated my collection of macOS icons to include Apple’s new “Creator Studio” family of icons.
Doing this — in tandem with seeing funny things like this post on Mastodon — got me thinking about the history of these icons.
I built a feature on my icon gallery sit...
Researchers at Anthropic published their findings around how AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills:
We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery […] Using AI sped up the task slightly, but this didn’t reach the thre...
You’ve probably heard this famous quote from Steve Jobs about saying ‘no’:
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick caref...
So I’m making a thing and I want it to be styled different if the link’s been visited.
Rather than build something myself in JavaScript, I figure I’ll just hook into the browser’s mechanism for tracking if a link’s been visited (a sensible approach, if I do say so myself).
...
Nic Chan comes out as the whistleblower on how many “Contact Us” pages are made (spoiler: they’re designed to keep us from contacting anyone).
A “fuck off contact page” is what a company throws together when they actually don’t want anyone to contact them at all. They […] a...
“The data doesn’t lie.”
I imagine that’s what the cigarette companies said.
“The data doesn’t lie. People want this stuff. They’re buying it in droves. We’re merely giving them what they want.”
Which sounds more like an attempt at exoneration than a reason to exist.
Demand...
The other day I was browsing YouTube — as one does — and I clicked a link in the video description to a book.
I was then subjected to a man-in-the-middle attack, where YouTube put themselves in the middle of me and the link I had clicked:
Hyperlinks are subversive. Big Te...
I redesigned my www website. Why?
The end of year / holiday break is a great time to work on such things.
I wanted to scratch an itch.
Websites are a worry stone [gestures at current state of the world]
Do I really need a reason? Nope.
I read something along the lines of “...
In his talk, I like the way Jake Nations pits easy vs. simple:
Easy means you can add it to your system quickly. Simple means you can understand the work that you’ve done.
I like this framing.
Easy means you can do with little effort.
Simple means you can understand what you do with little effort.
In other words: easy measures the effort in doing, while simple measures the effort in understanding the doing.
For example: npm create framework@latest or “Hey AI, build an instagram clone”. These both get you a website with little effort (easy) but do you understand what you just did (simple)?
It’s easy to get complexity, but it’s not easy to get simplicity.
(I get this is arguing semantics and definitions, but I find it to be a useful framing personally. Thanks Jake!)
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Bluesky
I’ve been slowly reading my copy of “The Internet Phone Book” and I recently read an essay in it by Elan Ullendorff called “The New Turing Test”.
Elan argues that what matters in a work isn’t the tools used to make it, but the “expressiveness” of the work itself (was it made...
Matthias Ott shared a link to a post from Anthropic titled “Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign”, which I read because I’m interested in the messy intersection of AI and security.
I gotta say: I don’t know if I’ve ever read anything quite l...
I don’t much enjoy being a lab rat to your half-baked ideas.
I can tell when your approach to what I use is: “Ship it and let’s see how people respond.”
Well let me tell you something: I’m not going to respond.
My desire to give you constructive feedback is in direct correl...
The setup for my notes blog looks like this:
Content is plain-text markdown files (synced via Dropbox, editable in iA Writer on my Mac, iPad, or iPhone)
Codebase is on GitHub
Builds are triggered in Netlify by a Shortcut
I try to catch spelling issues and what not before I...
In “The Future of Software Development is Software Developers” Jason Gorman alludes to how terrible natural language is at programming computers:
The hard part of computer programming isn’t expressing what we want the machine to do in code. The hard part is turning human th...
I recommended against using an AI browser unless you wanted to participate in a global experiment in security. My recommendation did come with a caveat:
But probably don’t listen to me. I’m not a security expert
Well, now the experts (that you pay for) have weighed in.
Ga...
If you subscribe to this blog, you must like it — right? I mean, you are subscribed to it.
And if you like this blog, you might also like my notes blog.
It’s where I take short notes of what I read, watch, listen to, or otherwise consume, add my two cents, and fire it off in...
My last article was blogging off Jeremey’s article which blogged off Chris’ article and, after publishing, a reader tipped me off to the Gell-Mann amnesia effect which sounds an awful lot like Chris’ “Jeopardy Phenomenon”. Here’s Wikipedia:
The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a...
Chris Coyier:
There’s the thing where if you’re reading an article in the newspaper, and it’s about stuff you don’t know a ton about, it all seems well and good. Then you read another article in the same paper and it’s about something you know intimately (your job, your nei...
I complained about this on the socials, but I didn’t get it all out of my system. So now I write a blog post.
I’ve never liked the philosophy of “put an icon in every menu item by default”.
Google Sheets, for example, does this. Go to “File” or “Edit” or “View” and you’ll se...
As ever, Mandy Brown casually drops a blog post that makes you examine the everyday meaning of words:
One of the imperatives in contemporary, professional work culture is to “grow.” There is often a sense of height or largeness with that imperative, as if growth must be mea...
I wrote about the 404s I serve for robots.txt. Now it’s time to look at some of the other common 404s I serve across my static sites (as reported by Netlify’s analytics):
/wp-login.php
/wp-admin
/news/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml
/login/
/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml
/news/wp...
Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, interviewed Jony Ive at Stripe Sessions. Below are my notes from watching the interview. I thought about packaging these up into a more coherent narrative, but I just don’t have the interest. However, I do want to keep these notes for possibl...
The data is in.
The number one requested resource on my blog which doesn’t exist is:
/robots.txt
According to Netlify’s analytics, that resources was requested 15,553 times over the last thirty days.
Same story for other personal projects I manage:
“That many requests and it serves a 404? Damn Jim, you better fix that quick!”
Nah, I’m good.
Why fix it? I have very little faith that the people who I want most to respect what’s in that file are not going to do so.
So for now, I’m good serving a 404 for robots.txt.
Change my mind.
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Bluesky
I enjoyed listening to Feross Aboukhadijeh, founder and CEO of the security firm Socket, on the Changelog podcast “npm under siege”. The cat-and-mouse nature of security is a kind of infinite source of novel content, like a series of heist movies that never produces the same...
I recently added a bunch of app icons from macOS Tahoe to my collection.
Afterwards, I realized some of them were missing relational metadata.
For example, I have a collection of iMove icons through the years which are related in my collection by their App Store ID. Howev...
This post is a continuation of Paul Kafasis’ post “Tahoe’s Terrible Icons” where he contrasts the visual differences across a number of Apple’s updated icons in macOS Tahoe (a.k.a. the Liquid Glass update).
While Paul’s post mostly covers icons for the apps you’ll find in th...
Whenever Apple does a visual refresh in their OS updates, a new wave of icon archiving starts for me.
Now that “Liquid Glass” is out, I’ve begun nabbing the latest icons from Apple and other apps and adding them to my gallery.
Since I’ve been collecting these icons for so lo...
Over the years, I’ve been chewing on media related to nuclear weapons. This is my high-level, non-exhaustive documentation of my consumption — with links!
📖 The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes.
This is one of those definitive histories (it’s close to 1,000 pages...
Authentication on the web is a complicated problem. If you’re going to do it yourself, there’s a lot you have to take into consideration.
But odds are, you’re building an app whose core offering has nothing to do with auth. You don’t care about auth. It’s an implementation d...
