Jim Nielsen's Blog
Jim Nielsen's Blog
Jim Nielsen
Opinions with a shelf life. Made by Jim Nielsen.
Latest Posts
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 gift, a shortcut, a connection. All from a simple idea: here’s a thing that...
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 the bottom of my Big Box of Cables to find two cables that I needed for something....
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. It perfectly illustrates how impossible it is to try and compare two interfaces...
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 hard as it was to get to 90%. And from 99% to 99.9% is just as hard again. This...
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 website had a Flash intro? Everyone knew they were annoying and uneccessary, but...
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 Netflix provide some feedback buttons to indicate the kinds of experiences we all...
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 mind: “How do I convey that kind of volume across time in a more interesting way...
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 released it, and I had an implementation PR up for my blog by end of day. Then, like I...
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 color. Then I use this metadata to present icons of (roughly) the same color. It’s...
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 maintainer got phished by succumbing to (amongst other things) a faux Microsoft Teams...
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 relieve this constraint. An LLM can extrapolate what you mean (more or less) from...
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 feeling in the morning like, as my brain and body wake up, my vision needs to as...
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...
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...
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...