blog.jim-nielsen.com — A Great Story Capturing the Essence of Being Online in 2026
I made a note of it, but Bryan Cantrill wrote a post about the ex-Anthropic employee who pegged the probability of AI killing humanity in the next decade at...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — The iPhone Model Hall of Fame
John Gruber makes his picks for the iPhone Hall of Fame: iPhone (original) iPhone 4 iPhone 5S iPhone X iPhone 17 Pro Ok, my turn. Here’s my iPhone Hall of...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Do You Prefer Artificial?
“Artificial” things can get a bad rap next to their counterparts, but they have their place. For example, artificial light (i.e. not from the sun)? Super...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Bottlenecks Get a Bad Rap
Poor bottlenecks. Always seen as problematic, antithetical to efficiency. But bottlenecks aren’t universally bad. Think about it: a bottle’s neck is designed...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Preserving Netlify Analytics Data Beyond 30 Days
I’ve got Netlify Analytics turned on for a few of my websites. I use it send myself a little daily digest that alerts me when folks link to my writing, be it...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — An Ode to Links
A URL is a technical thing: a hostname, a path, a port, an origin, some query parameters, etc. But a link is a cultural thing: an invitation, a citation, a...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Don’t Let Anyone Take Away Your Big Box of Cables
Speaking of being on the internet and finding things that make you go, “Hey! It’s not just me!” I scrolled across this skeet from Tyler Gaw: I just dug to...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — The Bulldozing of an Interface
Marcin Wichary has a lovely article titled “Photoshop’s challenges with focus, pt. 2”. If you’re into the minutiae of interface design, this is a good ‘un....
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Can We Stop With the Uptime Percentages?
I was reading Jason Gorman’s article “The Wall Confronting Reliable Coding Agent Autonomy” and he says: the journey from 90% to 99% reliability is just as...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Nobody Believes It, Everybody Does It
Speaking of things we know individually, but let slide collectively, here’s Jeremy Keith talking about how we all used Flash: Remember when almost every...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — My Experience Has Nuance, Yours Is a Data Point
Eric Bailey has a fun little post about how we need more than a few icons to express the nuance of our shared human experience. For example, he suggests...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — A Calendar View For My Blog
807 blog posts across 14 years. That’s how much I’ve published on my blog at the time of this writing. And here’s the question I’ve been turning over in my...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Have You Heard the Good News About Microlighter?
Dave Rupert wrote about shipping microlighter: a tool for handling syntax highlighting using the CSS Custom Highlights API. I saw his post the day he...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Getting an LLM to Make Me a Tool for Enriching the Color Metadata in My Icon Collection
On my icon gallery sites, I have metadata I’ve manually added over the years to tag certain icons as being predominantly “blue” or “orange” or some other...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — A Sloppy Interface Is a Security Liability 
In his talk “Why AI Is Breaking Software Security As We Know It” (my notes here), Feross Aboukhadijeh talks about the Axios npm incident and how the...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Oops, Should’ve Thought of That
Gordon Brander writes: The thing about computers is that they can do anything you wish, so long as you specify your wish in exacting detail. However, LLMs...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Oh Hey, It’s Not Just Me
My whole life I’ve felt like I have great eyesight (and I still do). But lately I’ve been noticing what feels like…some slippage. Nothing big. Just this...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — 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...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — 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...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — 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...