Jim Nielsen

  1. w0rdz aRe 1mpoRtAnt

    The other day I was looking at the team billing section of an AI product. They had a widget labeled “Usage leaderboard”. For whatever reason, that phrase at that moment made me pause and reflect — and led me here to this post. It’s an interesting label. You could argue the widget doesn’t even need a…

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  2. Book Notes: “Blood In The Machine” by Brian Merchant

    For my future self, these are a few of my notes from this book. A take from one historian on the Luddite movement: If workmen disliked certain machines, it was because of the use that they were being put, not because they were machines or because they were new Can’t help but think of AI. I don’t worry…

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  3. Computers and the Internet: A Two-Edged Sword

    Dave Rupert articulated something in “Priority of idle hands” that’s been growing in my subconscious for years: I had a small, intrusive realization the other day that computers and the internet are probably bad for me […] This is hard to accept because a lot of my work, hobbies, education, entertainment…

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  4. Making Icon Sets Easy With Web Origami

    Over the years, I’ve used different icon sets on my blog. Right now I use Heroicons. The recommended way to use them is to copy/paste the source from the website directly into your HTML. It’s a pretty straightforward process: Go to the website Search for the icon you want Hover it Click to “Copy SVG…

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  5. How AI Labs Proliferate

    SITUATION: there are 14 competing AI labs. “We can’t trust any of these people with super-intelligence. We need to build it ourselves to ensure it’s done right!" “YEAH!” SOON: there are 15 competing AI labs. (See: xkcd on standards.) The irony: “we’re the responsible ones” is each lab’s founding mythology…

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  6. A Few Rambling Observations on Care

    In this new AI world, “taste” is the thing everyone claims is the new supreme skill. But I think “care” is the one I want to see in the products I buy. Can you measure care? Does scale drive out care? If a product conversation is reduced to being arbitrated exclusively by numbers, is care lost? The more…

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  7. Unresponsive Buttons on My Fastest Hardware Ever

    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 delays. Let me explain. Imagine…

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  8. A Brief History of App Icons From Apple’s Creator Studio

    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 sites that’s useful for comparing…

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  9. Study Finds Obvious Truth Everybody Knows

    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 threshold of statistical significance…

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  10. Saying “No” In an Age of Abundance

    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 carefully. I’m actually as proud…

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