Jim Nielsen

  1. More Details Than You Probably Wanted to Know About Recent Updates to My Notes Site

    I shipped some updates to my notes site. Nothing huge. Just small stuff. But what is big stuff except a bunch of small stuff combined? So small stuff is important too. What follows is a bunch of tiny details you probably don’t care about, but they were all decisions I had to make and account for along…

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  2. Re: People Are Not Friction

    Dave Rupert puts words to the feeling in the air: the unspoken promise of AI is that you can automate away all the tasks and people who stand in your way. Sometimes I feel like there’s a palpable tension in the air as if we’re waiting to see whether AI will replace designers or engineers first. Designers…

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  3. You Might Debate It — If You Could See It

    Imagine I’m the design leader at your org and I present the following guidelines I want us to adopt as a team for doing design work: Typography: Use expressive, purposeful fonts and avoid default stacks (Inter, Roboto, Arial, system). Motion: Use a few meaningful animations (page-load, staggered reveals…

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  4. Food, Software, and Trade-offs

    Greg Knauss has my attention with a food analogy in his article “Lose Myself”: A Ding Dong from a factory is not the same thing as a gâteau au chocolat et crème chantilly from a baker which is not the same thing as cramming chunks of chocolate and scoops of whipped cream directly into your mouth [..…

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  5. Two of My Favorite Things Together at Last: Pies and Subdomains

    I like pie. And I’ve learned that if I want a pie done right, I gotta do it myself. Somewhere along my pilgrimage to pie perfection, I began taking a photo of each bake — pic or it didn’t happen. Despite all my rhetoric for “owning your own content”, I’ve hypocritically used Instagram to do the deed…

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  6. 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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  7. 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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  8. 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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  9. 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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  10. 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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