Jim Nielsen

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.

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

I hate when my music library drifts over time.

Example:

- Add "Phantom of the Opera" to my library
- 3 years pass
- Now there's 5 "Phantom of the Opera" albums in my library, each with only a partial set of songs.

I guess the mistake here is calling it _my_ music library.

It's not mine. It’s Apple’s.

What’s mine are the pointers to Apple’s music catalog.

Apple (& rights holders) get to decide what constitutes an album — now and in the future.

📝 Just me reflecting on a word choice I saw in a UI. No biggie.

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/w0rdz-are-1mportant/

TFW previous you made the right abstraction, so the next chunk of work you need to do just slides right in

RE: @davatron5000@mastodon.social

I was not cool. Mine was the most mass-produced one ever made by Sony. But I didn't know that as an 8y/o so I thought it was friggin awesome. Now looking back, I see it was:

> cheap, plastic, often noisy, but fairly decent

just like me!

https://walkman.land/sony/wm-fx101

📝 Computers and the internet are a two-edged sword for me — thx for making me have to confront this realization before I was ready @davatron5000@mastodon.social lol

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/two-edged-sword-of-computers-and-internet/

UIs be like:

---

Your choices:
[Dropdown]

---

lol, no I believe those are _your_ choices.

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.

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.

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.

📝 “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/