Jim Nielsen’s Blog

Here’s Dave Rupert writing about all those emails, texts, phone calls, etc. we’re getting these days:

Once upon a time it had utility, now it’s all noise and grifter slop demanding our attention and giving us to-dos

That last part really hit: “giving us to-dos”.

I feel this. So many of the messenger apps on my phone are other people laying claim to my time and attention.

It reminds me of an interaction I had with my Dad years ago.

This was back when cell phones were starting to become ubiquitous.

Not smartphones, mind you. Cell phones, i.e. telephones that were mobile. Texting wasn’t really a thing yet. These were devices for making voice calls wherever you went.

As a teen, it seemed like everyone had one: my teachers, my friends, even my friends’ parents.

But not my parents.

They were “behind the times”. (Everyone was getting cell phones and we didn’t even have caller ID on our landline!)

One night at family dinner I asked, “Dad, why don’t you have a cell phone?”

His response?

“Why would I want to allow other people to contact me whenever they want?”

I still think about that.

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I’ve mentioned before my interest in the history and development of nuclear weapons.

Currently, I’m reading The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg (of Pentagon Papers renown).

In the first chapter, Ellsberg talks about his time working at the RAND Corporation during the missile gap years when the U.S. thought it was falling behind the Soviet Union in nuclear capabilities.

Many of his descriptions sound strikingly similar to the rhetoric coming out of places like Anthropic. For example, note the religious overtones of working at a corporation:

I loved RAND, where I ended up spending ten years [...] Much, I imagined, like members of a religious order would, I shared with my colleagues a sense of brotherhood, living and working with others for a transcendent cause.

They were insiders: burdened with the responsibility of knowledge others did not possess.

precisely in my early missile-gap years at RAND and as a consultant in Washington, there was our sense of mission, the burden of believing we knew more about the dangers ahead, and what might be done about them, than did the generals in the Pentagon or SAC, or Congress or the public, or even the president. It was an enlivening burden.

And what was their “enlivening burden”? Saving the world:

[My colleagues] shared a feeling—soon transmitted to me—that we were in the most literal sense working to save the world.

What really stood out was this part, where Ellsberg describes how he and his colleagues truly believed the end was nigh:

From the Air Force intelligence estimates I was newly privy to, and the dark view of the Soviets, which my colleagues shared with the whole national security community, I couldn't believe that the world would long escape nuclear holocaust. Alain Enthoven and I were the youngest members of the department. Neither of us joined the extremely generous retirement plan RAND offered. Neither of us believed, in our late twenties, we had a chance of collecting on it.

This reminds me of the report that AI researchers have taken up smoking as a way to signal their belief that AI will cure cancer before smoking kills them.

At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear a lab like Anthropic announce they’re discontinuing all employer-sponsored retirement benefits. It’d be a small sacrifice on behalf of the employees to demonstrate their faith that universal high income is just around the corner. (The corporate cost savings would just be a nice bonus.)

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Have you heard the good news? I bemoaned the approach of putting an icon in every menu item by default which shipped with macOS Tahoe — but now it’s gone in Golden Gate!

John Gruber wrote about this reversion back in June, including the fact that Apple’s new Human Interface Guidelines specifically call out Tahoe’s approach to menus as an example of what not to do on macOS.

As the old saying goes, it takes a big man corporation to admit when they’re wrong.

As I mentioned in my original post, one of the arguments I had in my quiver against this practice was “Apple doesn’t do it”. But once Apple started putting icons in all their menus in Tahoe, I lost a persuasive point in my argument.

But now, I think I have an argument that’s even stronger than before!

It’s no longer: “Apple doesn’t put icons in their menus.”

It’s: “Apple tried putting icons in all their menus, and even they went back on it!”

They designed it, shipped it, lived with it for a year, then publicly changed their guidance on it. To me, that’s a lot more persuasive than simply saying, “Apple doesn’t do this.”

Choosing not to do something you’ve never done is one thing.

Choosing not to do something you’ve done is experience.

That’s the essence of life: learning by doing.

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From where I sit, figuring out what to build, building it, and shipping it are all part of the art of making software.

Many disciplines have emerged through the years to facilitate this work: product, design, engineering, devops, etc.

We need all these disciplines to make great, dependable software (granted, in different doses). Each brings different values and judgments; each sees things the others don’t.

And including all might mean going a bit slower.

Human collaboration may seem less “efficient” than handing the work over entirely to the machines.

But inefficiency may be the cost of collaborating with humans, rather than extracting an output from a machine. We gain not only from their judgment and expertise in a particular discipline, but from the relationship, trust, and shared understanding that blossoms from making something together.

As the old proverb says: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

Reformulated for today: If you want to go fast, go with the LLM. If you want to go far, go with your fellow humans.

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I wrote the chapter on app icon history for The iOS App Icon Book.

The other day I found an old note stashed away where I had started researching the macOS version of that chapter (which Michael ultimately ended up writing).

At the time, I didn’t know what to write. I mean, how do you write a history of icon design for the Mac? It’s rich!

To get my creative juices flowing, I started by researching the different docks in macOS through the years and compiled them all into a single graphic (big shout out to this compilation of images on 512 Pixels).

I just wanted to preserve and archive that image. Check out the high-res version here.

That’s it, that’s the post.

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Pete Millspaugh has a lovely article over on WIRED that peers into the world of domains. (If you’re as interested in the esoteric details of domains as I am, follow Pete’s writing at Dot Com Press.)

You should just read the article, but here are a few things that stood out to me.

The .com Registry

Did you know who the registry for .com is? I didn’t.

The registry that owns .com, Verisign, makes a billion and a half dollars every year just by keeping the lights on. To Verisign’s credit, the lights never go out: It reports 100 percent uptime over the past 28 years. It’s a pretty slick business model, watching over a database of words and collecting annual renewal fees. Warren Buffett thought so too, investing in Verisign in 2012, when its stock price was about one-eighth what it is today.

Why is it simultaneously surprising and not surprising that the company running .com makes billions and has 100% uptime over almost three decades?

Maybe GitHub should reach out for some advice, lol.

Buying Domains Is a Spy Thriller

Apparently the last time you could buy generic top-level domains (gTLDs) was in 2012.

So now that ICANN is providing another window of purchases in 2026 — and nobody knows when another window will open — there’s a lot of interest in capitalizing on these moments for new gTLDs.

most organizations [are] extremely secretive about their plans. One applicant from the last round tells me companies were flying around the world, meeting in person to avoid any risk of digital leaks, avoiding Gmail for fear of Google spying. Instead of email or video calls, she flew to London, then to Madrid. “We did it all in person. People got a little weird and scary, super paranoid.”

There’s a certain irony to this — people flying around the world to conduct business on owning a piece of the internet because they don’t trust the internet.

It appears the future of the internet is to be negotiated offline lol.

More Domains = More Online Handles

We haven’t had new gTLDs since 2012. Why do we need more?

I can imagine a future where expressive top-level domains become our personal brands, identities on the internet. This is already true in some nerdy corners of the web, like on Bluesky, where your domain is your username. I don’t call my internet friends Neal and Luke, I call them neal.fun and luke.zip. Instead of joining the land rush to grab our username on each new social media site, we’ll carry our domain around the web with us.

I’m telling you, domains are the OG handles on the internet.

More domains mean more opportunities for individual expression at the root layer of internet infrastructure — that makes sense for a web that’s meant to be worldwide!

You Think You Have a Domain Vice?

As developers, we often joke about our addiction to buying domain names for our side projects.

But buying a domain name — e.g. my-side-project.com — is child’s play compared to buying a generic top-level domain name (gTLD). That’s where the domain whales are.

ICANN charges a $227,000 application fee for each string, to recover the cost of running the program. The $36 million or so that Nova will need to cover those fees […] is coming from the personal bank account of Yoni Belousov, a reclusive domain investor (industry jargon: “domainer”) who’s been in the business since he was 14 years old.

Next time somebody asks me what I’d do with an insane amount of wealth, I now have the jargon for an answer: “I’d become a domainer.”

A Few Fun Facts to Close

A few things about domains I didn’t know until I read this:

all two-letter extensions are off the table. Those belong to countries, like .co in Colombia and .me in Montenegro and .ai in Anguilla.

If you want to run a geographic TLD, like .nyc or .paris, you need approval from that municipality

your string can’t be too similar to an existing one (.corn is a no-go; looks too much like .com)

certain special strings are off limits, like .icann and .www (wouldn’t that be a trip).

www.www would be a baller domain! Just think of the recursion you could do with that on the subdomain level.

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My notes from this talk by Alexander Petros at Big Sky DevCon 2026.

Alex starts by noting how “modernize” used to mean something along the lines of “update this thing that was made before I was born”. But now “modernize” means something more like “update this thing from 5-10 years ago” (hence the framing of the talk, the “modernization treadmill”).

Using a real-world example of an incredibly slow website that was required to access state-sponsored programs for welfare, Alex points out the disparity in conditions between those of us who make software and those who have to use them:

The people who develop these websites are usually doing so on high-powered internet connections and high-powered devices, but they're not using them in the conditions that the people who most need those benefits are going to be.

Then he shows a Reddit thread where somebody essentially posted, “I’m having problems with this website. I’ve been waiting for months for my application to go through. Any suggestions?” And one Reddit user responded, “The best thing you can do is go into the physical office, get a case worker, and your problems will be solved within the hour.”

The irony.

I guess we've come full circle now. It used to be:

“Don’t talk to anybody. It’s faster and more convenient to use the website!”

But now it’s:

“Don’t use the website. It’s faster and more convenient to talk to somebody!”

Have we failed at making websites?

And is our failure, at least in part, rooted in the fact that we don’t leverage the basic tools for making websites: HTML, CSS, and (in a distant third) JavaScript?

Alex goes on to argue that the technologies of the web have an ideological bent and, if used as designed, can solve so many of the performance, accessibility, and usability issues that plague so many websites.

The grain of the web’s technologies are rooted in these values:

• User-friendly
• Backwards- and forwards-compatibility
• Long-term viability
• Universal accessibility

Which means if you use them as intended, they are optimized to deliver outcomes rooted in those same values.

So if you like those values and you want those outcomes, use the platform.

Take HTML, for example. Here’s Alex:

HTML does [performance improvements] for you for free. If you've coded your website in a proper, semantical, structure HTML style, it will just get better over time at zero cost to the people who built that website

HTML is your friend. HTML won’t give you up or let you down. HTML will make it difficult for you to make a bad website.

Write it in to the requirements of the project you’re doing that it work without JavaScript. Not necessarily that it doesn’t have any JavaScript, but just that the core functionality of the website can happen without JavaScript. If you do this […] you will find that it’s very hard to deliver a bad web page because the structure that HTML requires is one that fundamentally is good for the user, performant, and cost effective.

Technologies are imbued with culture, which influences what you do and how you do it. If you can align your ideological beliefs with your technological choices, you might end up with an outcome that aligns with your values — who would’ve thought, eh?

A lot of modern software developers come from websites like Facebook, they come from big tech companies [who] fundamentally have a different set of priorities. Their job is to keep you on the website as long as possible so that you consume more ads. But that’s the opposite set of requirements and priorities that the government needs to be doing, which is to build something that is clean, quick, efficient, and gets you in and out as fast as possible. So [I tell people] that the technology they use comes from [an] ideological place. But there are different ideological places that produce different technological results and if we start from those through lines then we can produce services that help people who need them.

The ideological principles of the web are well established: users over everything else.

If you use HTML as much as possible, you’ll make something that’s as user-friendly as possible on the web.

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Louie Mantia has a great post about how app icons are converging towards the squircle on iOS and macOS.

His post reads like a history. If you’re wondering, “How did we get to a place where all app icons are becoming squircles?” Mantia’s post answers that question by starting at the beginning.

It’s hard to walk away from Mantia’s article without a sense of empathy for Apple’s position, like “Oh ok, I get why they’re doing what they’re doing. It makes sense.”

Apple’s direction is kind of a tacit acknowledgement to how most people are shipping app icons. Apple is “paving the cowpaths” as it were, because most app icons are just brand logos.

Nowadays, it’s these bland, big-business logo icons that make up a good chunk of iOS Home Screens and macOS Docks, instead of the beautiful, illustrative app icons that used to dominate our devices.

So many app icons are just logos in a squircle, so Apple made tools like the Icon Composer and glass effects to help make that approach look good by default.

Apple is helping most people most of the time make app icons that don’t suck.

[Apple is making] it easier for all apps to fit in on the platform, especially apps built by designers and developers who aren’t familiar with how to make an icon that looks great next to first-party icons.

The net effect is:

some of the platform’s best icons look worse, while some of the platform’s worst icons look better.

In other words, this new approach raises the floor but it also lowers the ceiling.

The thought that came to mind as I read Mantia’s post was, “This reminds me of HOAs.”

I grew up in a neighborhood where anyone could do anything with their homes and yards, so you had this eclectic mix throughout the neighborhood — everything from “Wow, that house is so unique!” to “That thing is a dump.”

Somewhere along the way HOAs became more prevalent (in my neck of the woods), where all the houses in a neighborhood have to meet a certain standard — and so they all start to look the same.

It keeps the dumpy things out, yet nobody stands out.

That’s kinda what macOS feels like right now with regard to app icons.

For better or worse, squircle app icons are Apple’s HOA and we’re all just living in it.

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That’s something Ben Thompson said a recent episode of Dithering. He was referring to how he felt while trying to help his mom get control of her digital life. Everything was just too hard and convoluted and he felt embarrassed as someone who works in tech.

That very same evening, I randomly got this text from a family member.

I hear this a lot from family and friends who sit outside tech.

“Nothing works.”

“Everything is hard to use.”

“I can’t make sense of this.”

And to them I am a representative, a connection, to this pain in their lives.

And I, too, am embarrassed on behalf of the tech industry — by our collective failure.

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Related posts linking here: (2026) “Getting off the Modernization Treadmill”

Marques Brownlee just released a video essay titled “Dear YouTube”.

I loved it.

He talks about how YouTube is going to start shipping this new feature where makers can essentially publish different “variants” of their videos and see which performs best (an A/B test).

Which immediately begs a lot of questions. Brownlee voices his:

• If I’m watching a video, do I know if it’s part of one of these A/B tests?
• If I’m reading the comments of a video, how do I know I saw the same thing as another commenter?
• How do linked timestamps work?

It’s pretty wild when you think about it. I mean, imagine sending someone a link, “Check out this cool video!” And at that point you’re basically crossing your fingers, “I hope they see the same thing I did…”

Marques says he spoke to some YouTube engineers about these questions and they didn’t really have answers. They were kind of just like, “We don’t know — yolo! This’ll ship soon.”

So his video is a kind of plea to YouTube creators everywhere: Don’t use this feature!

There’s this sort of unspoken rule of community on YouTube, that like we’re all having this same experience together — we’re all watching the same video. That is what makes it a cultural phenomenon is that we all saw the same thing […] so letting people put up two or three different videos of the same thing at the same time kind of fundamentally breaks that, which doesn't feel right.

I agree, 100%.

Brownlee goes on to make a lot of great points in the video that, I think, can be applicable to making software as well. A few that stood out:

• The skill of being a “creator” is not about maximizing views, retention, etc. It’s about finding creative ways to share stories, teach concepts, explore ideas, etc. Views, retention, etc. are all downstream of that.
• Making (and finishing) something over and over and over is a better use of your time than making one thing and then trying all kinds of variants and obsessing over their varied performance.
• When you focus on optimizing, you end up trimming out all the creative (and fun) stuff because those things won’t, by definition, ladder up to metrics of efficiency. (Moby Dick was not the most efficient way to tell that story.)
• Stand by your creative choices. Learn from your wins and failures, then make the next thing. Have some conviction.

I find it interesting how Brownlee shares his opinion that YouTube spends way too much time chasing their competitors and not enough time being YouTube.

Which, when you think about it, is exactly the kind of place a feature like this would stem from: an insecurity in your own creative choices. How YouTube approaches its own insecurities is now trickling down as a feature to its users.

“Let’s let people make lots of variations on things, try all of them, and see what performs best” is exactly the kind of thinking you get in a platform that doesn’t know what it wants to be. So it’s left spending its time 1) doing what others are doing, and 2) following the fickle whims of whatever it can measure.

It’s like this adolescent attitude of, “I don’t know what I want to be, so I’m gonna imitate my peers and let others tell me what they think I should be.”

Anyway, that’s a long way of saying I liked the video. You might too. Hopefully you see the same thing I did, lol.

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