2026-06-29 03:00:00
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.
2026-06-26 03:00:00
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.
2026-06-25 03:00:00
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!!!”
2026-06-23 03:00:00
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.
2026-06-20 03:00:00
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.
2026-06-11 03:00:00
Golf content on social media is my online junk food and the other day I came across a video interviewing professional golfers that asks: “What does an amateur golfer have to shoot to be considered good?”
It’s a leading question because the phrasing implicitly frames a number as the answer for a qualitative measurement, but I digress.
All the pros give their answers. Some say you gotta shoot a number in 90’s. Others say the 80’s. Some even say the 70’s. Then along comes Collin Morikawa:
I don’t think there’s a number, but I think you have to be able to finish out every hole without, like, picking up a two-footer.
Love it! I don’t want to go too deep on a social media golf interview clip, but…
I love how he breaks out of the question’s implicit framing and really strikes at the heart of the qualitative question: “What does it mean to be good at golf?”
Being “good”, in his eyes, is not shooting a specific number. Numbers are standardized proxies for measurement across a wide variety of players, skill levels, and — to be quite frank — degrees of honesty. Anyone who has played golf knows that scores can be easily manipulated. On a casual outing amongst friends, my “82” may be very different than the “82” of the players in front of me — or even the players in my own group. It all depends on how you play the game.
So saying “if you can shoot number ___” is a very lossy picture of what it means to be “good” at golf — at least for amateurs.
That’s why I love Morikawa’s answer: if you finish every hole and don’t get a double bogey, you’re “good” at golf.
Because guess what? Finishing is the hard part. The consistency. Showing up to every hole, finishing out based on the actual rules of the game, not taking mulligans, not picking up a two-footer and saying “That’s good.” (Or even missing a two-footer and re-putting and giving yourself the make.)
Relieving yourself of the exacting burden of the reality of the game is the easy way to play, but it doesn’t make you a better golfer.
I think that’s true of so many things we do as humans: programming, design, writing, etc. If you want to be “good” at what you do, do the hard, little things that others gloss over. Do them consistently and well, with discipline and perseverance.
If you do, then I’d say you’re “good” at what you do because “good” isn’t a number. It’s quality. A disposition. A way of being.
