2026-09-28 03:00:00
So there I am reading Unsung when I come across this quote from Jef Raskin:
An interface is humane if it is responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties.
This articulation perfectly captures why I recoil at modern “growth tactics” in user interfaces and experiences: they are designed to exploit human frailties, not be considerate of them.
Stated again: a humane interface — or a humane system, even a humane technology — is considerate of human frailties. It acknowledges they exist and works with them, rather than taking advantage of them.
Humane technology does not rely on impulse, addiction, or imposition to survive.
It survives purely on the free choice of its user.
You choose to use it because you have the freedom not to.
2026-09-26 03:00:00
Whenever a new version of macOS drops, I find myself archiving the new app icons for my macOS icon gallery.
In the past, the work to do this was a bit tedious.
First, I’d find the app in the “Applications” folder (or elsewhere on the Mac), right click and choose “Get Info”:
Right-click the app icon in the Get Info pane and choose “Copy”:
Open the Preview app and go “File -> New from Clipboard”:
This gets me the app icon file with a variety of sizes (the 1024-pixel version is the one I want). From here, I go “File -> Export…”, choose “PNG”, and name the file as the app name, lowercased, hyphenated — e.g. “app-store.png” (I do this for automation purposes not relevant here).
Doing that for every Apple-supplied app in the OS can get tiring. It’s often upwards of 75+ icons.
“This seems like the perfect task for an LLM,” I thought. So I hastily wrote a prompt to see if it could do it.
And it did — sort of, after a little coaching.
On the first try it found an app’s .icns file, grabbed the 256×256 version, upscaled it to 1024×1024, and saved it.
So I scolded it, “No, no. NEVER upscale an image. Always find the biggest one. I can get the 1024 version myself from the ‘Get info’ pane, so surely you can find that size somewhere.”
It came back dutifully, having found the right image, and said it would never upscale again.
Satisfied it could do what I wanted, I worked on creating a list of all the apps whose artwork I wanted to archive. Then I gave that list to the LLM and said, “Do your thing.”
And it worked! It was kind of wonderful. Saved me a ton of time.
76 app icons found, extracted, and saved in much less time than it would’ve taken me to do this “by hand”.
2026-09-24 03:00:00
I was listening to the episode “Make Your Own Thing” from the Off Protocol podcast where Jim Ray interviews John Gruber.
They cover a variety of topics, including Gruber’s thoughts on the dilution of personal brand by publishing through “chain” platforms like Substack (I quite enjoyed the metaphor of a personal website where you publish your stuff to that of a chef/restaurant, but that’s a separate post).
Around ~1:13:00, Gruber quotes Walt Disney who said, “We don't make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.” And he goes on to argue that when you’re forced to choose one of these priorities over the other — because you will undoubtedly face decisions where the two sets of values come into direct opposition — the company that prioritizes making movies over making money is fundamentally a different company than the one that chooses making money over making movies.
If you ultimately prioritize making money, then what’s going to be ultimately great about your company is you make a lot of money (for shareholders, for owners, for yourself, for whomever).
Conversely, if you ultimately prioritize making movies, than what’s going to be ultimately great about your company is your movies. Hopefully that makes you a lot of money, but it might not. One day people might say, “Damn, they made great movies. Too bad they’re not around anymore.”
To be fair, the prioritization of those values shifts and changes over time. Sometimes companies prioritize one over the other based on circumstances, e.g. “We’re gonna go bankrupt soon, we have to prioritize making money in these particular areas or we won’t be around long enough to keep making money.”
I’m not saying there’s an easy answer in those situations, I just find the opposition of those priorities intriguing. Ultimately, you do have to choose something over something else. It’s not necessarily a one-time decision, but the outcomes are a function of that prioritization over time.
Gruber believes Apple still generally prioritizes users most, i.e. in most cases, most of the time:
I think it’s true that the second priority for [Apple] is to make as much money as possible, but it’s the second priority. Every time [that] priority kinda creeps ahead […], like the way they’ve shepherded the App Store and the commissions they make from it, is arguably an area where they’re driven more by, “Let’s make as much money as possible because we control the App Store.” Rather than, “Let’s make the App Store as good for users and developers as possible.” And I think that’s the reason we complain about it, of all the things Apple makes [the reason people who enjoy the company’s products still complain the most about] that area of the company is because the priorities are clearly in the other order.
It does feel like so much of tech today is people asking, “What can we make for others that’ll make us a lot of money?”
But that’s a different prioritization than, “Let’s make something great for ourselves and, along the way, let’s see if we can make some money in order to keep doing what we love.”
2026-09-22 03:00:00
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 was, in fact, a line from The Simpsons. Here’s Google’s response (as reported by Cantrill):
During the Springfield mayoral debate on Channel 6, Sideshow Bob dramatically delivers the line “these ghoulish claims strike brazenly at the hearth of Springfield” while turning the debate against Mayor Joe Quimby. Instead of denying his criminal history, Bob exploits Quimby’s record and boldly tells the audience they secretly long for a cold-hearted Republican to rule them like a king.
(Here’s my homemade graphic for illustration purposes.)
Cantrill was astonished. Not knowing the episode enough by heart to discern whether this claim was true, he had a little bit of a panic attack:
If I am having what I feel to be original thoughts that are, in fact, just Simpsons lines regurgitating from 30 years ago, that’s troubling […] How am I not an LLM?
So he set out to find the truth. He finds the episode and watches it, but doesn’t hear the line.
But what if the episode he watched was an edited version and the full-length one is out there somewhere? He’s gotta get to the bottom of this.
So he goes back to Google and pushes on the AI’s answer, asking for the full script of the episode. At that point, the LLM folds and says the line is not from The Simpsons, but is actually from a post by — drum roll… — Bryan Cantrill.
Here’s Cantrill, again, reporting Google’s AI response:
What happened here is a classic AI “hallucination”. Because the phrase you shared used highly stylized, melodramatic language, “ghoulish claims”, “strike brazenly at the hearth”, my system misidentified the tone as belonging to Sideshow Bob who is famous for speaking in exactly that kind of grandiloquent Shakespearean style.
I have to say, I found the whole story amusing and relatable.
I just wanted to write this all down and save it as a way for future me to remember, “This is what it was like to be online in 2026.”
2026-09-21 03:00:00
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:
Notes:
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™.
When you couldn’t get one of those early iPhones (because of price, because of geographic location, because of ___) the Touch was your gateway drug.
For me, it was price. I was a poor kid in college in 2007, and the iPhone was $$ (and it was on AT&T, which was even more $$).
Eventually, I was able to get an original iPhone on eBay (and jailbreak it for T-Mobile — remember Cydia?). But the Touch was my first taste of iPhone.
That’s my Hall of Fame list. What’s yours?
2026-09-19 03:00:00
“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 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 cost, convenience, and availability.
Which brings me to “artificial” intelligence: surely a trade-off, not a substitute.
Ain’t nothing like the real thing.
These labs should consider ripping off (cause they’re good at that) Mastercard’s old tagline: “There’s some intelligence money can’t buy; for everything else, there’s Claude.”
