2026-10-30 03:00:00
It’s time to celebrate a little win.
The other day, my mom contacted me saying her 10-year-old iPhone wouldn’t turn on.
After getting a hold of the device and doing some family IT support, I concluded the battery was dead.
So I bought her a new (old) one on Walmart (SE 3rd gen., if you must know).
Her old phone used a SIM card, so I was expecting the process to go something like this:
But step 4 and 5 never happened.
The new phone “just” connected. I called her number. I texted it. Everything worked as expected.
Everything worked as expected.
Everything worked as expected.
I didn’t have to Google a single question.
I was floored.
Flabbergasted.
I know I shouldn’t have been because that’s how SIM cards are supposed to work, right? Like that’s the whole promise of a SIM card: you can seamlessly swap them between phones.
And in this case, the tech worked exactly as promised.
As I write this, I’m kind of amazed at how amazed I am that everything “just worked”.
Shout out to anyone who has ever worked on SIM card technology.
More things like this please :)
2026-10-26 03:00:00
Here’s Dave Rupert writing about all those emails, texts, phone calls, etc. we’re getting these days:
Once upon a time it had utility, now it’s all noise and grifter slop demanding our attention and giving us to-dos
That last part really hit: “giving us to-dos”.
I feel this. So many of the messenger apps on my phone are other people laying claim to my time and attention.
It reminds me of an interaction I had with my Dad years ago.
This was back when cell phones were starting to become ubiquitous.
Not smartphones, mind you. Cell phones, i.e. telephones that were mobile. Texting wasn’t really a thing yet. These were devices for making voice calls wherever you went.
As a teen, it seemed like everyone had one: my teachers, my friends, even my friends’ parents.
But not my parents.
They were “behind the times”. (Everyone was getting cell phones and we didn’t even have caller ID on our landline!)
One night at family dinner I asked, “Dad, why don’t you have a cell phone?”
His response?
“Why would I want to allow other people to contact me whenever they want?”
I still think about that.
2026-10-22 03:00:00
I’ve mentioned before my interest in the history and development of nuclear weapons.
Currently, I’m reading The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg (of Pentagon Papers renown).
In the first chapter, Ellsberg talks about his time working at the RAND Corporation during the missile gap years when the U.S. thought it was falling behind the Soviet Union in nuclear capabilities.
Many of his descriptions sound strikingly similar to the rhetoric coming out of places like Anthropic. For example, note the religious overtones of working at a corporation:
I loved RAND, where I ended up spending ten years [...] Much, I imagined, like members of a religious order would, I shared with my colleagues a sense of brotherhood, living and working with others for a transcendent cause.
They were insiders: burdened with the responsibility of knowledge others did not possess.
precisely in my early missile-gap years at RAND and as a consultant in Washington, there was our sense of mission, the burden of believing we knew more about the dangers ahead, and what might be done about them, than did the generals in the Pentagon or SAC, or Congress or the public, or even the president. It was an enlivening burden.
And what was their “enlivening burden”? Saving the world:
[My colleagues] shared a feeling—soon transmitted to me—that we were in the most literal sense working to save the world.
What really stood out was this part, where Ellsberg describes how he and his colleagues truly believed the end was nigh:
From the Air Force intelligence estimates I was newly privy to, and the dark view of the Soviets, which my colleagues shared with the whole national security community, I couldn't believe that the world would long escape nuclear holocaust. Alain Enthoven and I were the youngest members of the department. Neither of us joined the extremely generous retirement plan RAND offered. Neither of us believed, in our late twenties, we had a chance of collecting on it.
This reminds me of the report that AI researchers have taken up smoking as a way to signal their belief that AI will cure cancer before smoking kills them.
At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear a lab like Anthropic announce they’re discontinuing all employer-sponsored retirement benefits. It’d be a small sacrifice on behalf of the employees to demonstrate their faith that universal high income is just around the corner. (The corporate cost savings would just be a nice bonus.)
2026-10-20 03:00:00
Have you heard the good news? I bemoaned the approach of putting an icon in every menu item by default which shipped with macOS Tahoe — but now it’s gone in Golden Gate!
John Gruber wrote about this reversion back in June, including the fact that Apple’s new Human Interface Guidelines specifically call out Tahoe’s approach to menus as an example of what not to do on macOS.
As the old saying goes, it takes a big man corporation to admit when they’re wrong.
As I mentioned in my original post, one of the arguments I had in my quiver against this practice was “Apple doesn’t do it”. But once Apple started putting icons in all their menus in Tahoe, I lost a persuasive point in my argument.
But now, I think I have an argument that’s even stronger than before!
It’s no longer: “Apple doesn’t put icons in their menus.”
It’s: “Apple tried putting icons in all their menus, and even they went back on it!”
They designed it, shipped it, lived with it for a year, then publicly changed their guidance on it. To me, that’s a lot more persuasive than simply saying, “Apple doesn’t do this.”
Choosing not to do something you’ve never done is one thing.
Choosing not to do something you’ve done is experience.
That’s the essence of life: learning by doing.
2026-10-16 03:00:00
From where I sit, figuring out what to build, building it, and shipping it are all part of the art of making software.
Many disciplines have emerged through the years to facilitate this work: product, design, engineering, devops, etc.
We need all these disciplines to make great, dependable software (granted, in different doses). Each brings different values and judgments; each sees things the others don’t.
And including all might mean going a bit slower.
Human collaboration may seem less “efficient” than handing the work over entirely to the machines.
But inefficiency may be the cost of collaborating with humans, rather than extracting an output from a machine. We gain not only from their judgment and expertise in a particular discipline, but from the relationship, trust, and shared understanding that blossoms from making something together.
As the old proverb says: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
Reformulated for today: If you want to go fast, go with the LLM. If you want to go far, go with your fellow humans.
2026-10-13 03:00:00
I wrote the chapter on app icon history for The iOS App Icon Book.
The other day I found an old note stashed away where I had started researching the macOS version of that chapter (which Michael ultimately ended up writing).
At the time, I didn’t know what to write. I mean, how do you write a history of icon design for the Mac? It’s rich!
To get my creative juices flowing, I started by researching the different docks in macOS through the years and compiled them all into a single graphic (big shout out to this compilation of images on 512 Pixels).
I just wanted to preserve and archive that image. Check out the high-res version here.
That’s it, that’s the post.
