Jim Nielsen

  1. New Year, New Website — Same Old Me

    I redesigned my www website. Why? The end of year / holiday break is a great time to work on such things. I wanted to scratch an itch. Websites are a worry stone [gestures at current state of the world] Do I really need a reason? Nope. I read something along the lines of “If you ship something that shows…

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  2. Easy Measures Doing, Simple Measures Understanding

    In his talk, I like the way Jake Nations pits easy vs. simple: Easy means you can add it to your system quickly. Simple means you can understand the work that you’ve done. I like this framing. Easy means you can do with little effort. Simple means you can understand what you do with little effort. In…

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  3. In The Beginning There Was Slop

    I’ve been slowly reading my copy of “The Internet Phone Book” and I recently read an essay in it by Elan Ullendorff called “The New Turing Test”. Elan argues that what matters in a work isn’t the tools used to make it, but the “expressiveness” of the work itself (was it made “from someone, for someone…

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  4. The AI Security Shakedown

    Matthias Ott shared a link to a post from Anthropic titled “Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign”, which I read because I’m interested in the messy intersection of AI and security. I gotta say: I don’t know if I’ve ever read anything quite like this article. At first…

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  5. 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 correlation to your effort to care…

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  6. 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 publish, but I’m not perfect…

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  7. 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 thinking – with all its wooliness…

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  8. 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. Gartner, the global research and…

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  9. 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 into the void of the internet…

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  10. 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 cognitive bias describing…

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