Jim Nielsen’s Blog

blog.jim-nielsen.com · American English

Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

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Last post: Sep 21, 2026
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A Great Story Capturing the Essence of Being Online in 2026
Sep 21, 2026 · original
I made a note of it , but Bryan Cantrill wrote a post about the ex-Anthropic employee who pegged the probability of AI killing humanity in the next decade at 10%. The article is a good one and you should read it, but what I want to capture here is a side story from Cantrill on the Oxide and Friends podcast where he talks about how proud he was of this phrase from his post: “These ghoulish claims strike brazenly at the hearth…” . He notes that someone online commented on that phrase, saying it sounded like a mix of classic literature and a line from The Simpsons . Amused, Cantrill says he came up with the line all by himself, so he knew it wasn’t a classic literature reference nor a line from The Simpsons . But just to be sure, he Google’d it: “These ghoulish claims strike brazenly at the hearth” with “The Simpsons” tagged on to the end. To his surprise, Google’s AI told him that the line
The iPhone Model Hall of Fame
Sep 20, 2026 · original
John Gruber makes his picks for the iPhone Hall of Fame: iPhone (original) iPhone 4 iPhone 5S iPhone X iPhone 17 Pro Ok, my turn. Here’s my iPhone Hall of Fame: iPhone (original) iPhone 4 iPhone X iPhone 12 Mini iPod Touch Notes: How do you not put the OG iPhone at the top spot? It’s like doing a Mount Rushmore and not putting the first president first. It’s gotta be George. Aesthetically, the 4 was the best. Just an absolute beauty to behold (and use, so long as you held it right ). Aesthetically, the X was a close second to the 4. But in terms of form, X was best. (Shout out to the 3GS, that curved back felt great in the palm.) The Minis (12/13) stand as proof that commercial success doesn’t always equate with greatness. Ahead of their time, those ones. Oh, and you’re probably wondering: “The Touch? That’s not even an iPhone!” I disagree. The Touch was The iPhone For The Rest of Us™. W
Do You Prefer Artificial?
Sep 18, 2026 · original
“Artificial” things can get a bad rap next to their counterparts, but they have their place. For example, artificial light (i.e. not from the sun)? Super useful, especially at night. And when it comes to skiing, I’ll take artificial snow if I have to. Beats no snow. Artificial isn’t necessarily inferior in all cases, everywhere, all the time. But it is optimized for different values. For example: Artificial grass (i.e. turf) is great for certain contexts, but I don’t want a golf course of artificial grass. Artificial flowers are great for certain scenarios, but I don’t want them at my wedding. Artificial flavoring is yummy (love me some peach rings), but I’d prefer a real peach pie over one with artificially flavored filling. Artificial is an alternative. It’s understood as a trade-off, not a substitute. You trade the real for the artificial when you’re concerned about attributes like co
Bottlenecks Get a Bad Rap
Sep 15, 2026 · original
Poor bottlenecks. Always seen as problematic, antithetical to efficiency. But bottlenecks aren’t universally bad. Think about it: a bottle’s neck is designed to constrain the amount of liquid that can flow out. A decrease in bandwidth is its entire purpose! Otherwise an overwhelming amount of liquid flows out and makes a big mess. We humans have a particular anatomy. We can only consume so much liquid at a time. The neck of a bottle works with that fact. We could make machines to produce so much wine that we’re drowning in it. But that wouldn’t change the fact that we’re only capable of consuming so much liquid at a time (not to mention digestion , etc.). When it comes to liquid consumption, the bottle’s neck isn’t the bottleneck — our neck is! So if you’re having a hard time drinking out of a firehouse, perhaps the question isn’t, “How do I modify my biology to accommodate the bandwidth
Preserving Netlify Analytics Data Beyond 30 Days
Sep 13, 2026 · original
I’ve got Netlify Analytics turned on for a few of my websites. I use it send myself a little daily digest that alerts me when folks link to my writing, be it an individual sending me a few referrals, a newsletter sending me a few hundred, or Hacker News sending me thousands. But sometimes I want to know more than, “What happened with traffic in the last 24 hours?” Sometimes I want to know, “What happened with traffic in the last month?” I can log in to Netlify to answer that question. Sometimes I want to know, “What happened with traffic in the last six months?” Netlify doesn’t have an answer for that because they only store the last thirty days of traffic data. I’ve known about this limitation for years and always thought, “I really should just start saving that data for myself.” But, you know, laziness. How bad do I really want it? The answer, it seems, was “I only want it if it’s _eas
An Ode to Links
Sep 10, 2026 · original
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 points to another thing, off you go! We’ve built an entire culture around links. Just look at the language we use for them: “Drop me a link.” “Send me the link.” “Got a link?” “Link in bio.” “Link in the description.” “Here’s the link.” “Don’t click that link.” “Sorry, wrong link.” Or even just, “Link?” Our language spans the spectrum of meaning, from one end to the other: We save links. We lose links. We share links. We hide links. We send links. We receive links. We collect links. We discard links. We open links. We close links. We add links. We remove links. We make links. We break links. We shorten links. We expand links. We follow links. We ignore links.
Don’t Let Anyone Take Away Your Big Box of Cables
Sep 9, 2026 · original
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. They've been in the bottom for 10+ years. So, "when are you ever gonna use these?" was today. Don't ever let anyone take your Big Box of Cables away. I laughed. I cried. I felt inspired. So inspired, in fact, that I decided I was gonna do something about it. Something that would make me forever remember the value of that advice. I screenshotted that skeet. I printed it (in black and white with the ole’ trusty Brother). I cut it out. I pulled out my big box of cables (the one my wife lovingly labeled “FAMILY TECHNO BOX”). I cut some clear packing tape. And I plastered that thing on the front on my box. Now every time I pull that box out to add YAC (yet a
The Bulldozing of an Interface
Sep 8, 2026 · original
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 side by side as static images. What matters in an interface is how it works, i.e. how you interface with it. And when you bulldoze an interface to build a new one, comparing the old vs. new side-by-side to make sure you “captured everything” is a lie. It’s never obvious what has been lost because the interactive pieces are missing from the static images — and those are what matter most because it’s how the feature works! I’ve found this to be true a lot as of late. Lots of tiny details that were meticulously crafted over years with specific rationales tied to real-world use cases, all completely bulldozed in a giant refactor. (All made possible by the gre
Can We Stop With the Uptime Percentages?
Sep 3, 2026 · original
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 stood out, as I’ve been experiencing more and more “downtime” in my day-to-day work. GitHub’s down. CI’s down. AI’s down. Slack’s down. Downtime’s going mainstream! More and more I find myself visiting service status pages , where I’m confronted with a wall of colors and numbers like this: 100%? 99.72%? 99.09%? 98.98%? Those don’t all seem so different or bad? I mean, those are all an A in grade school. Then I have to remind myself of Jason’s point and re-interpret the numbers, which is more like reading earthquake measurements . The difference between a 6.2 and a 7.8 might not seem that big, but it represents a massive difference in magnitude. Uptime perce
Nobody Believes It, Everybody Does It
Sep 1, 2026 · original
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 everyone else was doing it. And here’s John Gruber writing about his experience with those marketing schemes that trade your personal information for a discount: The marketing shitbirds who press for these schemes […] do so by pointing to data that shows that they do convert some number of users. “It works” they claim, pointing to data. What doesn’t show up in their data are interactions like mine. They don’t have analytics that measure that I now consider their website an antagonist to avoid at all costs. There’s a funny thing about us humans: we place trust in systems that our own individual experience tells us are flawed. For example: KPIs: we know metr

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