Jim Nielsen’s Blog

I wish I could remember how this podcast came across my radar so I could give credit where it’s due. But alas, I cannot.

It’s episode 217 with Dr. Iain McGilchrist.

At one point, he shares his perspective about how science and reason can only take you so far:

[science and reason] have their limitations. Most scientists and most philosophers are very well aware of that. Some people who are not terribly aware of [this] think that [science and reason] can answer all our questions. The fact that they can answer very many questions and be extraordinary servants doesn’t make them the arbiters of everything that we know.

Replace “science and reason” there with “AI” and you have a pretty good assessment.

I like the word “servant” there too — AI can be a good servant, but it’s a terrible master.

[AI] has no body, so it cannot suffer, it cannot love, it doesn’t know that it’s going to die, none of the things that humans deal with, so it is a very, very poor guide to how we should think [of consciousness]

Ok, enough AI. Back to science and reason.

There’s a lot to be said for the scientific method, but not everything can be understood by analysis:

What most people don’t understand is that most [of the great] discoveries in science and mathematics were not made by following the scientific method at all. They were not made by linear powers of logic or algorithms or anything else. They were made by suddenly seeing a gestalt. In other words, a whole that is a form that cannot be reduced to its parts without a loss.

Einstein was famous for this kind of working. He worked in thought experiments and visualizations. His moments of breakthrough came not as the final steps of a deductive chain of reasoning, but through a sudden restructuring of the whole picture of his understanding — “suddenly seeing a gestalt”. He didn’t have new data or a new experiment. He had insights that provided a new framing to hold the existing pieces together.

Those insights were later translated into equations, and then verified through experimentation by others — to this day, scientists are still conducting experiments whose results prove “Welp, looks like Einstein was right. Again!”

As Dr. McGilchrist says: analysis only gives you information, and information is only useful when it is fed back into a context of a whole.

He illustrates this point by talking about a piece of music. You can take it apart, break it into pieces, practice individual passages, etc. — and that can be useful — but it’s the song as a whole that you’re drawn to and the performance of a song will be futile unless it is re-cohered from individual parts into a whole.

(It’s not the things, but the relationships between them that matter.)

Perhaps there’s room for a bit more humility in our knowledge and creative work:

right at the core of reality is the coming together of opposites. That less can be more. That unknowing can be more than knowing. And that there can be something rich in “non-doing” as Buddhists say.

And these are not the same as idleness and ignorance. Ignorance is what you have before you have knowledge. And unknowing is what you have after knowledge if you’re lucky. And it is the beginning of wisdom.

I love that articulation:

• There’s a difference between ignorance and “not knowing”.
• Not knowing is what you have after you’ve gained knowledge (because you realize how little you know).
• Knowing how little you know is the beginning of wisdom.

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As icons continue to change across Apple’s platforms, I have thoughts. They mainly revolve around two perspectives:

1. What I think of icons as a long-time user of Apple’s platforms.
2. What I think of icons as a digital collector and physical archivist of icons.

Let’s see if I can articulate my thoughts.

Apple Recommends Making Icons With Icon Composer For “More Expressivity”

In “Create icons with Icon Composer” from WWDC 2025, Lyan Bewry from Apple’s Design Team gives the rationale for why developers should use Apple’s new Icon Composer:

Icon design is moving from a past of simply static images, to a future of expressive, multi-layered artworks that respond to user input and adapt between appearances. They’ve become a much richer and more integrated experience on-device.

Catch that? Icons are moving from a “static” past to an “expressive, multi-layered […] much richer” future.

You may have noticed this in some of Apple’s latest OS releases, how lighting effects, customizations, etc., can all affect what an icon looks like at any given moment within the operating system.

So what are these .icon files made by Icon Composer?

Icons Are Software Now

In the Accidental Tech Podcast episode 699 “Not the Correct Squircle” John Siracusa talks about some of the technical details and differences between app icons in macOS 26 (Tahoe) and 27 (Golden Gate):

These .icon files, this format that Apple came up with, it’s a bunch of resources and a recipe. So it’s like bitmaps, vector images, layers, recipes and effects. That’s what it is. And these icons are assembled on the fly by the operating system. It doesn’t burn up bitmaps of them. I take your ingredients, I assembled them, I composite them, I apply your layer effects, and then eventually it renders a bitmap that it keeps in memory somewhere.

Who is thinking about backwards compatibility in their icons?

Tahoe’s effects are different than 27’s effects […] And also, 27 has effects that 26 doesn’t support. And 26 won't even read the .icon files from 27, which makes everything complicated.

Complicated indeed.

Schrödinger’s Icon

As noted, the days of a single, static image for icons are over. An app icon is no longer a PNG file.

It’s a bit of a Schrödinger’s icon if you will. There’s no longer a universal answer for “What does your app icon look like?” An icon is simultaneously light, dark, glass, tinted, etc.. Only once it is “observed” — that is rendered at runtime on a device with settings applied (user preferences, device angle, etc.) — can you really know what it looks like.

An icon now has a runtime.

My Two Cents

I don’t know.

Icons are effective because of their ability to be quickly recognizable and memorable. Visual simplicity and consistency support that.

Making something more “expressive” and “richer”, to me, means conveying more. But icons are meant, to a degree, to convey less. Only the essential. That’s what makes them effective. There’s definitely a point where, the more they convey, the less effective they are at their purpose.

The more you move away from a singular, visual representation, the more room there is for confusion and greater cognitive effort for discernment.

Take, for example, Apple’s Phone app. What’s the icon for it? Can you picture it in your head? It’s a green icon with a white phone glyph. That’s what it was in the original iPhone keynote (and it’s what the Phone app will always be to me). Iconic!

But wait! Now it’s also a black icon with a green phone glyph if you’re in dark mode. And there’s more! It’s a clear glass icon with a phone glyph if you’re in clear mode. And! It’s [insert color here] with a phone glyph if you’ve tinted it.

Consistent color is a strong ingredient in aiding memorability and recognizability. Look at Coke:

• Red can? Coke
• Black can? Coke Zero
• Silver can? Diet Coke

Simplicity matters. It aids recognizability and memorability. If you start making it more complicated and more varied, you lose what made it simple, recognizable, and memorable to begin with.

And what are app icons but visual tools for immediate recognizability?

Anyway, now that app icons have a runtime and will increasingly vary in their appearance, I’m not sure how to archive them anymore.

This story is still developing…

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“We asked 100 people: What are the top three companies on earth best positioned to make a world-class Mac-assed Mac app?”

Buzz!

“Apple!”

Survey says:

Yes! Apple at the number one spot.

Makes sense. Who better to make the very definition of a great Mac app than the people who make the Mac? No brainer, I suppose.

Granted, they’ve had some misses, but nobody bats 1000.

Ok, let’s keep going.

“We asked 100 people: What are the top three companies on earth best positioned to make a world-class Mac-assed Mac app?”

Buzz!

“Anthropic!”

Survey says:

Wow, that’s odd huh? You’d think Anthropic would be right there at number two. Not only do they have billions of dollars, but they also develop, maintain, and control the super intelligence we’ll all soon be subservient too, right?

Surely if anyone (besides Apple) is well positioned to make a world-class Mac app, it would have to be Anthropic — right?

And yet, here we are with Claude Desktop as an Electron app.

Ok, let’s keep going.

“We asked 100 people: What are the top three companies on earth best positioned to make a world-class Mac-assed Mac app?”

Buzz!

“Adobe!”

Maybe not.

Buzz!

“Google!”

Not so much.

I’m sorry, but that’s three strikes.

Apparently it’s a mistake to assume that a big company with piles of cash is well poised to make a great Mac app — even if they are enabled by hyper-super-intelligence.

“Well who cares? It just goes to show you don’t have to make a good Mac app to be obscenely successful in terms of revenue!”

Well, maybe that’s true.

Actually, come to think of it, it kinda does seem like the bigger you get and the more money you make, the more likely it is you’re making an Electron app.

There seems to be a correlation between “Mac-assed Mac app-edness” and “Company size/revenue”.

Why is that?

I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader (though my mind is leaning towards something to do with care).

Thank you for playing reading this game of family feud.

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I made some updates to my notes blog, including a change to how my “Shuffle” feature worked.

Figured I’d blog about it.

Shuffle? On a Blog?

At the time of this writing, I have 974 “notes” that I’ve published.

For fun, I have a “shuffle” button that digs up a random note from the past. I like to press it from time to time and re-encounter some insight from the past.

It’s like going through an old album, pulling out a random photo, and thinking, “Oh yeah, I remember this! Good times.”

Like old photos, there’s also the occasional “that didn’t age so well”.

But I find it fun to randomly dig up old insights from others and continue to be inspired.

How Did It Work Before?

Since my site is built and hosted as static files without a runtime server, this feature required JavaScript to work.

Every page had a snippet like this:

<!-- In the site navigation -->
<button id="js-shuffle">Shuffle</button>

<!-- Way down at the end of the HTML -->
<script>
  // All 974 note IDs injected by my SSG
  const noteIds = ['id-1', 'id-2', id-3', 'id-4', '...'];
  document.querySelector("#js-shuffle")
    .addEventListener('click', () => {
      // randomly grab an item in `noteIds`
      const randomId = '...';
      window.location.href = `/n/${randomId}/`
    })
</script>

Essentially: inject every note ID into every HTML page and, when the shuffle button is clicked, randomly grab one and navigate the user to it.

Not the most elegant thing, but it worked.

The problem was that every time I published a new post, every single page had to be re-uploaded to Netlify because every file’s hash would change and its etag/cache was invalidated.

This made my builds slow. It also made it difficult, from a development perspective, to ensure refactors didn’t result in unexpected changes to output (using Dev.changes from my SSG web origami).

So I decided to make a change.

What About a No-JS Approach?

Because I love to see if I can make things work without JavaScript, I had the thought to randomly write the href at build time using my SSG, which would result in output like this:

<!-- /notes/1 -->
<a href="/notes/3">Shuffle</a>

<!-- /notes/2 -->
<a href="/notes/1">Shuffle</a>

<!-- /notes/3 -->
<a href="/notes/2">Shuffle</a>

And every time I re-build my site, just have this logic run on the static site generator so that it’s different href for every page, every time.

Pros:

• Doesn’t require JavaScript
• Doesn’t require a server (request-time logic)

Cons:

• File hashes change across builds (even if there’s no new content or template changes, every HTML page now has a different href for the shuffle link for every build). This makes deployments way slower because Netlify has to redeploy every file on every build. Plus Etags change so caching is basically ineffectual.

I decided I didn’t want to do this, so on to JavaScript!

How Does It Work Now?

My first thought was to create a single JSON file that contained all my note IDs. Then when the “Shuffle” button gets clicked, I fetch that, grab a random ID, and navigate the user, e.g.

<!-- In the site navigation -->
<button id="js-shuffle">Shuffle</button>

<!-- Way down at the end of the HTML -->
<script type="module">
  const noteIds = await fetch("/notes.json").then(...);
  // Handler code for when button is clicked
  // grab a note ID & navigate to that location
</script>

This would work. It localizes the caching issue to a single file, so only one file has to be invalidated/re-uploaded across builds.

But in playing with it a little more, I decided to try something a little more...unconventional.

I’ve written before about having lots of little HTML pages and I thought, “Can I put this functionality in a single HTML page rather than a JSON file?”

And what I ended up with was a link, e.g.

<a href="/shuffle/">Shuffle</a>

That when clicked navigates the user to a new page. That page has all the JS logic embedded in it, e.g.

<!-- In the site navigation -->
<span>Shuffling...</span>

<!-- In the body of the page -->
<noscript>JS is required to use the Shuffle functionality</nocript>
<script>
  // All 974 note IDs injected by my SSG
  const noteIds = ['id-1', 'id-2', id-3', 'id-4', '...'];\

  // A slight delay so user sees "Shuffling..." effect
  setTimeout(() => {
    // randomly grab an item in `noteIds`
    const randomId = '...';
    window.location.href = `/n/${randomId}/`
  }, 300);
</script>

There are a few things I like about the experience this implementation provides.

First: shuffle is a route, so I can navigate to it directly without using the GUI, e.g. notes.jim-nielsen.com/shuffle

Second: I handle the UI/X with a slight delay to make it appear like something is happening when you click the button. If you click the button and it immediately jumps to the next, randomized page, it almost seems to happen too fast. Like you’re left with this feeling of “What just happened?”

But in this scenario, it navigates you to the “Shuffle” page, the button you just clicked turns into a spinner + text indicating something is happening, and there’s a slight (intentional) delay before the JS executes and sends you to a randomized note.

I know it’s a bit weird. “Introduce artificial slowness? Are you crazy?” But I like it. It feels like the shuffle feature on an old music player.

I remember one of my CD players had a “Shuffle” feature. When I’d click the button, it would display “Shuffling…” on the little black and white screen and you’d encounter this brief state where (I presume) the lens inside the hardware would move along the physical track to the spot where it would start reading a new, random song from the CD.

The hardware constraints necessitated this kind of an experience, but I always liked it because it felt like the CD player was “thinking” about what track to pick next. This state clearly conveyed to me that my intent to shuffle was received and being followed. I liked that feedback, and it’s exactly what I wanted to do on my notes site (even though it was completely unnecessary).

I like having that brief moment of feedback where it’s very clear that your intention was received and being followed, vs. having it happen so fast you can’t even perceive precisely what happened.

Here’s a video to show it in action:

Why?

I know that’s a lot of information for something so small — and, arguably, unnecessary.

But I still enjoy writing about how I make decisions when I build things for myself.

Hence this post.

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I was popping off about negation being an act of creativity, when Blake Watson introduce me to the idea of the “This Page Intentionally Left Blank”-Project (Internet Archive):

In former times printed manuals had some blank pages, usually with the remark “this page intentionally left blank”. In most cases there had been technical reasons for that. Today almost all blank pages disappeared […]

[this project] tries to introduce these blank pages to the Web again […] to offer internet wanderers a place of quietness and simplicity on the overcrowded World Wide Web

Ahead of its time.

In our age of generative AI, a blank page is a deliberate act!

So I went ahead made my own.

Go ahead and crawl that bots. I don’t use robots.txt, but I’m thinking of making one specifically to say “Make sure you don’t miss this page Botty Bot.”

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I quite enjoyed this talk from Bryan Cantrill where he discusses the difficult engineering problems they overcame while working on their company Oxide.

Some of the problems they ran into were bugs. But these weren’t any ordinary bugs, they were company-destroying bugs: bugs that, if they couldn’t be fixed, would sink the entire company.

And the difficulty in solving these bugs was that they had no precedent. Any documentation or knowledge they could find around the symptoms of the problem was actively incorrect.

In fact, Bryan says that the team’s breakthroughs on these bugs were solutions that an artificial super intelligence would’ve never suggested because they ran against all known and available reasoning, documentation, and knowledge.

His point being: intelligence isn’t everything. Human values are still incredibly important.

Intelligence alone does not solve problems like [the ones we encountered]. Our ability to solve these problems had nothing to do with our collective intelligence as a team. We’ve got a terrific team, but it’s a lot more than just intelligence. And in particular for these [kinds of] problems, and many like them, we had to summon the elements of our character not our intelligence. Our resilience. Our teamwork. Our rigor. Our optimism. […]

We talk about super intelligence, but is anyone talking about super collaboration or super teamwork? We absolutely needed teamwork [at Oxide].

If human values like curiosity are what led to breakthroughs — not the application of synthetic intelligence — why is there so much emphasis on intelligence these days? Bryan has a curt analysis:

This infatuation with intelligence comes from people who just don’t get outside enough.

He notes how intelligence isn’t everything in a job interview. Like, you don’t hire people by giving out an exam and taking whoever scores highest. You try to suss out other aptitudes. Nobody looks at applicants who lack values like teamwork or optimism and says, “Well, they can’t work with anyone and they’re incredibly unpleasant to be around, but their intelligence is great — let’s hire them!”

Intelligence is great, but it’s not everything.

We do a disservice to our own humanity when we pretend that [AI] can engineer autonomously.

A cogent case for the values of our humanity.

More like this please.

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If you have’t heard, Om Malik passed away.

People are sharing stories of their graceful encounters with him.

This one is mine.

Back at the beginning of 2021, I set a goal to write 72 blog posts.

I was puttering along, publishing whatever came to mind, mostly figuring that nobody was reading any of it.

But that was ok. The process was therapeutic and it helped clarify my professional thinking, so I kept going.

One day on Twitter I got a DM from someone with the handle @om.

“I don’t know who this is,” I thought, “but damn that is a great handle!”

Then I peaked at the follower count: over 1 million!

“WTF? Who is this???” I thought.

I’d never — then or since — been contacted by someone with such a high profile online.

How was I even on this person’s radar?

I continued on to his message:

Jim I wanted to thank you for your blog. I am neither a developer or a designer but appreciate the web, the open web and in general normal, common sense writing from experts.

I have quietly enjoyed your work — and hope you hit the target of 72 posts in 2021. My highly selfish ask, as I know it will feed my brain good important stuff.

Have a wonderful weekend and a great writing year

I was flabbergasted. Who was this person with such a high follower count saying such kind words and I’d never heard of him?

I quickly went to Google. He had his own Wikipedia.

“Om Malik…tech writer…founded Gigaom!” Ah-ha! I knew Gigaom the company/blog. It shaped a lot of my early exposure to the tech beat. I devoured it. I can still picture the logo in my head!

Now I knew the man behind it. Knowledge unlocked!

I thanked him graciously for taking the time to send a message whose importance seemed incredibly lopsided in my favor.

I quote his message here because I still think about it on occasion. His words then (as well as later ones) continue to lift me up on days when I feel like an imposter. They remind me of the power of a small act of kindness, even within such a vast world wide web.

I still think about his words.

I still think about him.

I’m sure many will for some time.

And that is a legacy.

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John Gruber writes about those annoying popups every website seems to have now and while he does a great job tearing into these ubiquitous, user-hostile patterns, one of the things that stood out to me about his piece was this meta commentary on blogging. Here’s John:

If you visit a website you should ... see the website. See its content. Be able to read the article whose page you are attempting to visit. Showing a “subscribe to our newsletter” or “accept our fucking cookies” dickover to someone trying to read an article on the web makes no more sense than sending out an email newsletter that only contains a link to read the newsletter on a webpage. A webpage should show the webpage. An email should show the email. I should not have to explain this.

It’s funny how often blogging feels like being the little child in the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes. You’re just stating what seems obvious to you.

I often look at my own posts and think, “There’s nothing novel, or important, or deep in here at all — is this even worth saying?”

A post’s point can seem so glaringly obvious to me (and thus, I presume, others) it feels like a waste of time to even say it. As John says:

A webpage should show the webpage. An email should show the email. I should not have to explain this.

But then real-world examples of annoyance pile up around you and nobody talks about it, so you finally just have to say it in a post and bring receipts.

You feel like someone gone mad: “Is anyone else seeing the same thing I’m seeing? And we’re just ok with this?”

Very often, those are the best posts I read from others.

So it must be that a key ingredient to blogging is simple: have a willingness to state something that seems obvious to you but nobody else is saying it.

Or if someone else is saying it, just link to them and say, “Yes!!! This!!!”

Reply via: Email · Mastodon · Bluesky

Consistency serves a purpose in visual design, but it seems to have become the purpose of a lot of visual design.

Look no further than these evolutions of macOS icons (image courtesy of BasicAppleGuy):

The Creator Studio icons are undeniably consistent visually: rounded rectangles, controlled gradients, simplified forms, restrained depth, etc.

In contrast (and by modern standards) the originals seem heretically inconsistent. They lack coherence in visual details like shape, material, and lighting.

But what they lack in visual consistency between one another, they make up for in excellence individually.

In fact, their aversion to familial visual consistency almost seems like an intentional choice — a deliberate augmentation of individual purpose.

What purpose? To be singularly representative and deeply iconic.

Icons that are iconic.

To be iconic, by definition, is to be famously distinctive.

None of the Creator Studio icons, especially when held up as a suite, are iconic. None are atypical, they’re merely typical.

All in pursuit of what, consistency — amongst each other and across platforms — as the overriding goal?

This over-emphasis on “systems” design seems endemic to modern software.

Systems prescribe rules because they are the easiest attributes to document, enforce, and automate — “All icons must use this shape, this lighting, this stroke.”

Excellence, by contrast, is harder to systematize. It requires judgment, taste, care, experience, and a sensitivity to context — all in service of meaning and purpose, not superficial similarity.

When you strive for consistency across a suite, individual elements lose their ability to be exceptional and iconic on their own terms. Consistency for the group becomes a ceiling on individual excellence.

But if you flip that, if you make excellence the goal for each individual element, something interesting can happen: excellence becomes your motif of consistency. It’s no longer a consistency of shapes and gradients, but one of quality and intention that serves a deeper meaning and purpose than superficial visuals.

Give me a consistency of excellence any day over a consistency of appearance.

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You’ve probably heard the term.

It’s meant to convey how difficult it can be to start something.

“Blank page paralysis”.

But for my money, beginning is easy. Finishing is the hard part.

In software, they call it “the last 90%”.

In logistics, they call it “the last mile”.

It’s that final stretch that’s disproportionately hard.

Finishing makes something real and finite, subject to judgment.

As I near completion, there’s a little voice in my head that says, “As long as it’s unfinished, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s still potentially perfect!”

I don’t struggle with blank page paralysis.

But I am paralyzed in the face of a full page ready for publishing.

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