Jim Nielsen

  1. The Fruits of AI

    Terry Godier has a post titled “Mea culpa” (which, given his framing, might’ve been better titled “Claude’s Culpa”). I’m not sure how much to even trust anything in his post given the backstory, but this line stood out: I was careless in relying on AI [...] without doing the work to understand Let’s…

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  2. A License to Act

    In the past, search engines and the open web granted access to other people’s knowledge but the task fell to you to synthesize an understanding from it and build a capability to act. Now with LLMs, it’s possible to build things you don’t fully understand which then require a perpetual license in order…

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  3. The AI Aesthetic

    Every zeitgeist comes with new design idioms unique to its challenges. Many of them disappear as fads change, but others bake themselves into deeper parts of existing software interaction paradigms. For example, there’s the hamburger menu (≡) which saw a proliferation during the rise of mobile due to…

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  4. Can the Tide of AI Investment Lift All Boats on the Web?

    Jason Grigsby has a great article where he surfaces an opinion from the Safari team about how AI agents shouldn’t get special treatment: An agent acting on a user’s behalf is, in effect, assistive technology: it should operate a site as the user would, and the site should not single it out for different…

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  5. Podcast Notes: Ed Catmull on David Senra

    Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and former president of Disney Animation, was on the David Senra podcast and I quite enjoyed the interview. (If you like the interview, you should read his book.) Ed talks about what he considered his job to be: get the dynamics right for groups of people working together…

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  6. Make It Work vs. Make It Good

    There are two wolves inside of me, lol. Some days I want to be a “designer”. Other days I want to be a “developer”. On the days I find myself wanting to feed the developer, it’s often because making something “work” seems easier (and more impressive) than making something “good”. Making something function…

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  7. Podcast Notes: Iain McGilchrist on “The Great Simplification”

    I wish I could remember how this podcast came across my radar so I could give credit where it’s due. But alas, I cannot. It’s episode 217 with Dr. Iain McGilchrist. At one point, he shares his perspective about how science and reason can only take you so far: [science and reason] have their limitations…

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  8. What’s an Icon in 2026?

    As icons continue to change across Apple’s platforms, I have thoughts. They mainly revolve around two perspectives: What I think of icons as a long-time user of Apple’s platforms. What I think of icons as a digital collector and physical archivist of icons. Let’s see if I can articulate my thoughts.…

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  9. Family Feud: Mac-assed Mac App Edition

    “We asked 100 people: What are the top three companies on earth best positioned to make a world-class Mac-assed Mac app?” Buzz! “Apple!” Survey says: Yes! Apple at the number one spot. Makes sense. Who better to make the very definition of a great Mac app than the people who make the Mac? No brainer…

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  10. Making a Shuffle Button

    I made some updates to my notes blog, including a change to how my “Shuffle” feature worked. Figured I’d blog about it. Shuffle? On a Blog? At the time of this writing, I have 974 “notes” that I’ve published. For fun, I have a “shuffle” button that digs up a random note from the past. I like to press…

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