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  📝 You know, those things we all do even though individual experience suggests otherwise. https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/nobody-believes-it-everybody-does-it/

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  Every once and a while, somebody will reach out to me about one of the app icons in my icon site because their company has done some kind of brand refresh and they want me to update the app icon / logo. And there's this part of me that is like, “Have you completely missed the point of this site? It’s an archive. I archive icons for archival type purposes. Updating it to match whatever brand refresh you did is like the very antithesis of why I made this site in the first place.”

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  Nice little thoughtful touch: When you go to the accessibility settings on iOS, there’s a preference for on/off labels on switches. If it’s off, it’s the only switch that has a little “o” inside it, hinting at its purpose.

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  Our 6y/o (who is a quiet kid—outside of our home) told us today that a kid at school asked him, “Why are you so quiet?” And another kid said, “Yeah, why are you so quiet?” And he said, “I didn’t answer them.”

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  📝 tl;dr - Downtime is mainstream now. - Status pages are the public interface for understanding it. - Uptime percentages are a lousy interface for general understanding. - Can we stop? https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/stop-with-the-uptime-percentage/

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  9y/o: “Have we had the smallpox vaccine?” Me: “Yes” 6y/o: “What about the bigpox vaccine?”

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  > They'd say > “Well, how could we have known?” > I'll tell them: “It's not so hard to tell” Subtext of Jack Johnson lyrics hitting hard today lol

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  📝 I published my story of my encounter with Om Malik. What a simple but indelible example of kindness and thoughtfulness. https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/tribute-to-om/

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  📝 Quite enjoyed this talk about how intelligence alone isn’t enough. Other human values are vital to collaborative efforts, like resilience and optimism — and, I might add, humor (which shines through in the talk). https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/intelligence-isnt-enough/

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  Claude Science? When do we get Claude Religion?

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  If you haven’t seen it yet, Mandy Brown’s new website is dope https://aworkinglibrary.com Lots of things to love. A few that stand out to me: - It's _fast_ - Every page has a “footer” that’s essentially just the home page — enthralled by this idea. - ❤️ the treatment for citations on post pages

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  Negation is creative

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  📝 In our age of generative AI, a blank page is a deliberate act! https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/intentionally-blank/

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  📝 Post-mortem on my "lots of little HTML pages" approach — still like it. The browser's most basic feature is following a link. What if you built a site’s interactions around just that? e.g. a "menu" could just be: <a href="/menu/"> and a dash of CSS view transitions for flair. https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/small-html-pages/

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  📝 I was trying to write a `:has()` selector with `:visited` and it wasn't working as expected. Turns out it wasn’t a bug, it was the browser telling what MDN calls “a little white lie” ha! https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/browsers-white-lies/

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  There is so much to unpack in this image alone, I don't even know where to start https://mudmapmagazine.com/the-utopia-of-the-family-computer/

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  Even in my own personal projects — let alone stuff at work — it is so incredibly hard to say "no". Yet once again, I've found that if I just cut more stuff out, things get better.

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  Wherever I am, the world comes after me. It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it. Now I understand why the old poets of China went so far and high into the mountains — Mary Oliver

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  📝 Story about a family vacation when I was a teen and our car kept overheating and nobody could fix it without hooking it up to a computer. https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/hook-it-up-to-the-machine/

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  This is kind of a cool read, especially in an era where the excuse for most technology is “well you can’t un-invent it” you can’t put the genie back in the bottle, but you can (willingly or not) forget how to summon him https://newsletters.feedbinusercontent.com/caa/caaada612102544292258341ec645342ec7829fc.html

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  Let me tell you something: when it comes to software, it takes a lot of effort to choose to do so little.

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  📝 Speed isn't everything, not even in a relay race. The interfaces between people (represented by the baton) can nullify whatever speed you have. Faster individuals don't necessarily make a faster team. https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/collective-speed-isnt-the-sum-of%20individual-speed/

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  Somebody asked me for a few sites I really enjoy looking at as well as reading. I figured I'd repurpose my response as broadcast content :) https://anhvn.com/ https://robinrendle.com/ https://maggieappleton.com/ https://tylergaw.com/ https://chsmc.org/ https://rachsmith.com/ https://dbushell.com/ https://lynnandtonic.com/ https://ryanmulligan.dev/ https://www.nicchan.me/

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  📝 I fixed a problem of my own making. I went to local builds/deploys for my notes site. So far I'm digging it. Might do it with more of my sites. https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/fewer-computers-fewer-problems/

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  Adobe and /etc/hosts being in the news is reminding me of the good old days of cracked installers and ASCII readme files that instructed use of keygens and your own modifications of /etc/hosts to block Adobe phoning home.

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  📝 “Growth” is an interesting word. In the natural world, you tend to it. In the business world, you “hack” it, “engineer” it, and do everything you can to otherwise accelerate, manipulate, and manufacture it into existence. https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/grow-like-a-tree-not-a-cancer/

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  I keep thinking of that phrase — something like, “They reduce the meaning of the word to that which their machines can achieve.” And now I just see it everywhere. - They made artificial "intelligence". - They made a "browser" in a weekend. - They added “presence” to the UI. Rich human concepts narrowed to fit what a technology can achieve, then they lay claim to the name.

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  lol, in a cruel twist of fate, AI turned coders into the very thing they abhorred most: managers.

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  One thing I've learned about me: if my spidey sense says “that’s a terrible idea for a business”, it’ll do well if somebody has the gall to do it.

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  UIs be like: --- Your choices: [Dropdown] --- lol, no I believe those are _your_ choices.