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A Letter of Feedback To Anyone Who Makes Software I Use

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...

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Creating “Edit” Links That Open Plain-Text Source Files in a Native App

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...

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To Make Software Is To Translate Human Intent Into Computational Precision

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...

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Leading Global Research and Advisory Firm Recommends Against Using AI Browsers

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...

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You Might Also Like: My Notes Blog

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...

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The “A” in “AI” Stands For Amnesia

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...

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It’s Uncomfortable To Sit With “I Don’t Know”

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...

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Icons in Menus Everywhere — Send Help

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...

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Grow, Like a Tree Not a Cancer

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...

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Malicious Traffic and Static Sites

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...

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Notes From an Interview With Jony Ive

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...

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My Number One “Resource Not Found”

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.

Change my mind meme with guy sitting in front of a table and the text “just gonna let `robots.txt` return a 404. CHANGE MY MIND” underneath.


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Podcast Notes: Feross Aboukhadijeh on The Changelog

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...

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Data Storage As Files on Disk Pairs Well With LLMs

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...

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Tahoe’s Terrible Icons: The B-Sides

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...

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Leveraging a Web Component For Comparing iOS and macOS Icons

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...

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Down The Atomic Rabbit Hole

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...

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Browser APIs: The Web’s Free SaaS

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...

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Don’t Forget These Tags to Make HTML Work Like You Expect

I was watching Alex Petros’ talk and he has a slide in there titled “Incantations that make HTML work correctly”. This got me thinking about the basic snippets of HTML I’ve learned to always include in order for my website to work as I expect in the browser — like “Hey I jus...

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Everything Is Broken

Chris Coyier wrote about it. Now it’s my turn. Last week I’m flying home. My flight gets delayed in air, then lands late so I miss my connecting flight… [Skip over all the stuff about airline customer support, getting rebooked, etc.] It’s ~10pm and I’m stranded overnight. I ...

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AI Browsers: Living on the Frontier of Security

OpenAI released their new “browser” and Simon Willison has the deets on its security, going point-by-point through the statement from OpenAI’s Chief Information Security Officer. His post is great if you want to dive on the details. Here’s my high-level takeaway: Everything ...

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Write Code That Runs in the Browser, or Write Code the Browser Runs

I’ve been thinking about a note from Alex Russell where he says: any time you're running JS on the main thread, you're at risk of being left behind by progress. The zen of web development is to spend a little time in your own code, and instead to glue the big C++/Rust subsy...

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Research Alt

Jeremy imagines a scenario where you’re trying to understand how someone cut themselves with a blade. It’d be hard to know how they cut themselves just by looking at the wound. But if you talk to the person, not only will you find out the reason, you’ll also understand thei...

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Social Share Imagery via a Data Attribute

I’ve done something few on the internet do. I’ve changed my mind. A few posts on my blog have started to unfurl social share imagery. You might be wondering, “Wait Jim I thought you hated those things?” It’s not that I hate social share imagery. I just think…well, I’ve...

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Doing It Manually

I have a standing desk that goes up and down via a manual crank. I’ve had it for probably ten years. Every time I raise or lower that thing, it gets my blood pumping. I often think: “I should upgrade to one of those standing desks that goes up and down with the push of a but...

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Running Software on Software You’ve Never Run

I love a good look at modern practices around semantic versioning and dependency management (Rick Hickey’s talk “Spec-ulation” is the canonical one I think of). Niki recently wrote a good ‘un at tonsky.me called “We shouldn’t have needed lockfiles”. What struck me was this p...

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The Risks of NPM

There was a time when I could ask, “Did you see the latest NPM attack?” And your answer would be either “Yes” or “No”. But now if I ask, “Did you see the latest NPM attack?” You’ll probably answer with a question of your own: “Which one?” In this post, I’m talking about the ...

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Anti-*: The Things We Do But Not All The Way

I was reading Chase McCoy’s article “Antibuildings” where he cites Wikipedia’s entry on the term “Antilibrary” which points to another entry about the Japanese concept of Tsundoku, all of which deal with this idea of things we do with intention but that never make it to frui...

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RIP “Browsers”

Richard MacManus just posted “Chrome Switches on AI: The Future of Browsing Begins Now” where he points out that what we think of today as “browsers” is undergoing a radical change. Here’s the lay of the land: Microsoft launched “Copilot Mode” on Edge and promotes it as an ...

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Why Make a Website in 2025?

The same reason you would bake a batch of cookies: because you enjoy it — the process itself, but also the result.

And perhaps, if you like, you share the result with others.

Who is out there asking, “Should I bake a batch of cookies? How well can that act be monetized? Should I do something else instead?”

Do it for the fun of the thing itself.

It doesn’t have to be anymore than that. It can be — Dave talks about that — but it doesn’t have to be.

Bake cookies because you like to.

Make websites because you like to.


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