Pete Millspaugh has a lovely article over on WIRED that peers into the world of domains. (If you’re as interested in the esoteric details of domains as I am, follow Pete’s writing at Dot Com Press .) You should just read the article, but here are a few things that stood out to me. The .com Registry Did you know who the registry for .com is? I didn’t. The registry that owns .com, Verisign, makes a

My notes from this talk by Alexander Petros at Big Sky DevCon 2026 . Alex starts by noting how “modernize” used to mean something along the lines of “update this thing that was made before I was born”. But now “modernize” means something more like “update this thing from 5-10 years ago” (hence the framing of the talk, the “modernization treadmill”). Using a real-world example of an incredibly slow

Louie Mantia has a great post about how app icons are converging towards the squircle on iOS and macOS. His post reads like a history. If you’re wondering, “How did we get to a place where all app icons are becoming squircles?” Mantia’s post answers that question by starting at the beginning. It’s hard to walk away from Mantia’s article without a sense of empathy for Apple’s position, like “Oh ok,

That’s something Ben Thompson said a recent episode of Dithering . He was referring to how he felt while trying to help his mom get control of her digital life. Everything was just too hard and convoluted and he felt embarrassed as someone who works in tech. That very same evening, I randomly got this text from a family member. I hear this a lot from family and friends who sit outside tech. “Nothi

Marques Brownlee just released a video essay titled “Dear YouTube” . I loved it. He talks about how YouTube is going to start shipping this new feature where makers can essentially publish different “variants” of their videos and see which performs best (an A/B test). Which immediately begs a lot of questions. Brownlee voices his: If I’m watching a video, do I know if it’s part of one of these A/B

Confession: I got nerd-sniped by Sam Henri Gold’s request for my icon galleries: I'd like to humbly request artwork-level searching in macosicongallery.com What follows is a train-of-thought blog post as I play with what an implementation might look like. I’ve actually long-wanted something like this, e.g. let me search for “coffee” and show me all icons that have some depiction of coffee in them.

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 hu

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”: T

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 separat

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