Writing something down forces you to fully understand it. When the idea is on paper, you can see all the missing assumptions and leaps in logic. It’s common to start writing, do some research and find out that your original point was wrong.

This is a good thing.

You are now less wrong then you were before, and have something you can share so that we can all be less wrong.

Even if you don’t learn anything new, we don’t find our interests and hobbies by magic: We read about them from someone else. Simply writing about what you did yesterday — even if you are not an expert on the topic — can be very valuable to the right person.

Why a blog:

Blogs have a long shelf-life: Social media posts vanish in hours, but a good blog post can stay readable and relevant for decades. Your work can have a lasting impact on lots of people rather then being briefly noticed by a few.

You can go back and edit old posts to improve the writing or add fresh information. If you were wrong about something, you can correct it: You aren’t locked into your first impressions of the topic.

Posts can build on each other, cite sources or provide hundreds of pages worth of detail. None of these are requirements, but having the option allow actual learning and nuanced discussions.

You can write a detailed response to someone else’s detailed opinion instead of just throwing insults: meaningful human interaction that just isn’t possible on “social” media.

You can own your identity: If you register yourname.com (costs around around $10/year) you aren’t tied to any particular service. Switching hosting provides is completely seamless: None of your readers will even notice anything’s different.

Compare that to being “@yourname on Twitter”: If the platform tries to extort you, gets sold to a horrible person, or vanishes without a trace… You are out of luck. Sure, you could move to “@yourname on Mastodon” but at the price of loosing your all readers and breaking every link to your work.

On your own website, you can customize everything, and there’s no risk of a company forcing a terrible redesign on you. Instead of being yet-another-post-feed, you can have your own unique place on the internet

Posts can be indexed by Google and friends: A niche post can become the top search result and keep that spot for years. Social media does have some indexing, but it is very hit-and-miss.

You can use RSS or mailing lists to keep readers updated without having to worry if an algorithmic feed is showing your work… although you can still link to your site on social media.

The alternative…

On social media, if a post doesn’t immediately go viral, it’s effectively dead and will be burried by the algoritic feed.

The only thing that people ever see are short and anger-inducing posts: They have to be short or readers will get distracted all the other content next to them. Posts also need “engagement”, and anger is a great motivator.

Social media rewards posting short (and often misleading) content with a broad appeal. Meaningful intellectual discussions are punished: some places have character limits that prevent you from even trying.

Niche topics don’t fare any better: Unless it can find a large audience in the first few hours, it won’t be shown to anyone. When someone who is interested does come along, they often won’t be able to find it because the search feature doesn’t work.

It’s not an accident that these places are full of bad political takes and endless arguments. They make money from advertising: They want to keep the greatest number of people the site for as long as possible… even if they become horrible places to be.

Hosting:

This site is hosted on a VPS and I use a static site generator (Hugo) to generate the index pages. I’d only recommend this if you are planning to do other things on the server: Otherwise it is overkill and more expensive (3.5/month) then other options.

If you are willing to write some HTML or configure a site generator, Github Pages or Cloudflare Pages will host a site for free. Because it’s just some HTML, switching providers in the future will be painless.

There are also plenty of blog specific hosting services that will let you get by without typing a single angle bracket. However, I haven’t used any of them so I can’t give specific recommendations.

If you bring your own domain, don’t stress to much about the choice: You can always switch without effecting your readers.

Closing notes:

Your first blog post will probably be bad. That’s ok: Your second one will be better, and your third will be even better. All that matters is that you wrote something and put it out into the world. Writing is a skill: you will get better with time.

While social media can be super toxic, most people on the internet are nice: The vast majority of what I receive is praise, “Thank You”-s and polite corrections. Out of hundreds of emails, I’ve only gotten a single piece of hate-mail.

… but please: Don’t use an LLM generate posts for you. I want to interact with a human and not a robot. Even if it’s got a few spelling mistakes it’s still yours and still has value. An LLM generated post is worthless: If I wanted to read AI slop, I would have generated it myself.

If you feel inclined to ChatGPT something, don’t. Post what you would have used as the prompt: That’s the important part.

I was reading Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines from 1992 and found this nice illustration:

accompanied by explanation:

Fast forward to 2025. Apple releases macOS Tahoe. Main attraction? Adding unpleasant, distracting, illegible, messy, cluttered, confusing, frustrating icons (their words, not mine!) to every menu item:

It’s bad. But why exactly is it bad? Let’s delve into it!

Disclaimer: screenshots are a mix from macOS 26.1 and 26.2, taken from stock Apple apps only that come pre-installed with the system. No system settings were modified.

Icons should differentiate

The main function of an icon is to help you find what you are looking for faster.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, adding an icon to everything is exactly the wrong thing to do. To stand out, things need to be different. But if everything has an icon, nothing stands out.

The same applies to color: black-and-white icons look clean, but they don’t help you find things faster!

Microsoft used to know this:

Look how much faster you can find Save or Share in the right variant:

It also looks cleaner. Less cluttered.

A colored version would be even better (clearer separation of text from icon, faster to find):

I know you won’t like how it looks. I don’t like it either. These icons are hard to work with. You’ll have to actually design for color to look nice. But the principle stands: it is way easier to use.

Consistency between apps

If you want icons to work, they need to be consistent. I need to be able to learn what to look for.

For example, I see a “Cut” command and next to it. Okay, I think. Next time I’m looking for “Cut,” I might save some time and start looking for instead.

How is Tahoe doing on that front? I present to you: Fifty Shades of “New”:

I even collected them all together, so the absurdity of the situation is more obvious.

Granted, some of them are different operations, so they have different icons. I guess creating a smart folder is different from creating a journal entry. But this?

Or this:

Or this:

There is no excuse.

Same deal with open:

Save:

Yes. One of them is a checkmark. And they can’t even agree on the direction of an arrow!

Close:

Find (which is sometimes called Search, and sometimes Filter):

Delete (from Cut-Copy-Paste-Delete fame):

Minimize window.

These are not some obscure, unique operations. These are OS basics, these are foundational. Every app has them, and they are always in the same place. They shouldn’t look different!

Consistency inside the same app

Icons are also used in toolbars. Conceptually, operations in a toolbar are identical to operations called through the menu, and thus should use the same icons. That’s the simplest case to implement: inside the same app, often on the same screen. How hard can it be to stay consistent?

Preview:

Photos: same and mismatch, but reversed ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Maps and others often use different symbols for zoom:

Icon reuse

Another cardinal sin is to use the same icon for different actions. Imagine: I have learned that means “New”:

Then I open an app and see. “Cool”, I think, “I already know what it means”:

Gotcha!

You’d think: okay, means quick look:

Sometimes, sure. Some other times, means “Show completed”:

Sometimes is “Import”:

Sometimes is “Updates”:

Same as with consistency, icon reuse doesn’t only happen between apps. Sometimes you see in a toolbar:

Then go to the menu in the same app and see means something else:

Sometimes identical icons meet in the same menu.

Sometimes next to each other.

Sometimes they put an entire barrage of identical icons in a row:

This doesn’t help anyone. No user will find a menu item faster or will understand the function better if all icons are the same.

The worst case of icon reuse so far has been the Photos app:

It feels like the person tasked with choosing a unique icon for every menu item just ran out of ideas.

Understandable.

Too much nuance

When looking at icons, we usually allow for slight differences in execution. That lets us, for example, understand that these technically different road signs mean the same thing:

Same applies for icons: if you draw an arrow going out of the box in one place and also an arrow and the box but at a slightly different angle, or with different stroke width, or make one filled, we will understand them as meaning the same thing.

Like, is supposed to mean something else from ? Come on!

Or two-letter As that only slightly differ in the font size:

A pencil is “Rename” but a slightly thicker pencil is “Highlight”?

Arrows that use different diagonals?

Three dots occupying ⅔ of space vs three dots occupying everything. Seriously?

Slightly darker dots?

The sheet of paper that changes meaning depending on if its corner is folded or if there are lines inside?

But the final boss are arrows. They are all different:

Supposedly, a user must become an expert at noticing how squished the circle is, if it starts top to right or bottom to right, and how far the arrow’s end goes.

Do I care? Honestly, no. I could’ve given it a shot, maybe, if Apple applied these consistently. But Apple considers and to mean the same thing in one place, and expects me to notice minute details like this in another?

Sorry, I can’t trust you. Not after everything I’ve seen.

Detalization

Icons are supposed to be easily recognizable from a distance. Every icon designer knows: small details are no-go. You can have them sometimes, maybe, for aesthetic purposes, but you can’t rely on them.

And icons in Tahoe menus are tiny. Most of them fit in a 12×12 pixel square (actual resolution is 24×24 because of Retina), and because many of them are not square, one dimension is usually even less than 12.

It’s not a lot of space to work with! Even Windows 95 had 16×16 icons. If we take the typical DPI of that era at 72 dots per inch, we get a physical icon size of 0.22 inches (5.6 mm). On a modern MacBook Pro with 254 DPI, Tahoe’s 24×24 icons are 0.09 inches (2.4 mm). Sure, 24 is bigger than 16, but in reality, these icons’ area is 4 times as small!

So when I see this:

I struggle. I can tell they are different. But I definitely struggle to tell what’s being drawn.

Even zoomed in 20×, it’s still a mess:

Or here. These are three different icons:

Am I supposed to tell plus sign from sparkle here?

Some of these lines are half the pixel thicker than the other lines, and that’s supposed to be the main point:

Is this supposed to be an arrow?

A paintbrush?

Look, a tiny camera.

It even got an even tinier viewfinder, which you can almost see if you zoom in 20×:

Or here. There is a box, inside that box is a circle, and inside it is a tiny letter. i with a total height of 2 pixels:

Don’t see it?

I don’t. But it’s there...

And this is a window! It even has traffic lights! How adorable:

Remember: these are retina pixels, ¼ of a real pixel. Steve Jobs himself claimed they were invisible.

It turns out there’s a magic number right around 300 pixels per inch, that when you hold something around to 10 to 12 inches away from your eyes, is the limit of the human retina to differentiate the pixels.

And yet, Tahoe icons rely on you being able to see them.

Pixel grid

When you have so little space to work with, every pixel matters. You can make a good icon, but you have to choose your pixels very carefully.

For Tahoe icons, Apple decided to use vector fonts instead of good old-fashioned bitmaps. It saves Apple resources—draw once, use everywhere. Any size, any display resolution, any font width.

But there’re downsides: fonts are hard to position vertically, their size doesn’t map directly to pixels, stroke width doesn’t map 1-to-1 to pixel grid, etc. So, they work everywhere, but they also look blurry and mediocre everywhere:

They certainly start to work better once you give them more pixels.

or make graphics simpler. But the combination of small details and tiny icon size is deadly. So, until Apple releases MacBooks with 380+ DPI, unfortunately, we still have to care about the pixel grid.

Confusing metaphors

Icons might serve another function: to help users understand the meaning of the command.

For example, once you know the context (move window), these icons explain what’s going on faster than words:

But for this to work, the user must understand what’s drawn on the icon. It must be a familiar object with a clear translation to computer action (like Trash can → Delete), a widely used symbol, or an easy-to-understand diagram. HIG:

A rookie mistake would be to misrepresent the object. For example, this is how selection looks like:

But its icon looks like this:

Honestly, I’ve been writing this essay for a week, and I still have zero ideas why it looks like that. There’s an object that looks like this, but it’s a text block in Freeform/Preview:

It’s called character.textbox in SF Symbols:

Why did it become a metaphor for “Select all”? My best guess is it’s a mistake.

Another place uses text selection from iOS as a metaphor. On a Mac!

Some concepts have obvious or well-established metaphors. In that case, it’s a mistake not to use them. For example, bookmarks: . Apple, for some reason, went with a book:

Sometimes you already have an interface element and can use it for an icon. However, try not to confuse your users. Dots in a rectangle look like password input, not permissions:

Icon here says “Check” but the action is “Uncheck”.

Terrible mistake: icon doesn’t help, it actively confuses the user.

It’s also tempting to construct a two-level icon: an object and some sort of indicator. Like, a checkbox and a cross, meaning “Delete checkbox”:

Or a user and a checkmark, like “Check the user”:

Unfortunately, constructs like this rarely work. Users don’t build sentences from building blocks you provide; they have no desire to solve these puzzles.

Finding metaphors is hard. Nouns are easier than verbs, and menu items are mostly verbs. How does open look? Like an arrow pointing to the top right? Why?

I’m not saying there’s an obvious metaphor for “Open” Apple missed. There isn’t. But that’s the point: if you can’t find a good metaphor, using no icon is better than using a bad, confusing, or nonsensical icon.

There’s a game I like to play to test the quality of the metaphor. Remove the labels and try to guess the meaning. Give it a try:

It’s delusional to think that there’s a good icon for every action if you think hard enough. There isn’t. It’s a lost battle from the start. No amount of money or “management decisions” is going to change that. The problems are 100% self-inflicted.

All this being said, I gotta give Apple credit where credit is due. When they are good at choosing metaphors, they are good:

Symmetrical actions

A special case of a confusing metaphor is using different metaphors for actions that are direct opposites of one another. Like Undo/Redo, Open/Close, Left/Right.

It’s good when their icons use the same metaphor:

Because it saves you time and cognitive resources. Learn one, get another one for free.

Because of that, it’s a mistake not to use common metaphors for related actions:

Or here:

Another mistake is to create symmetry where there is none. “Back” and “See all”?

Some menus in Tahoe make both mistakes. E.g. lack of symmetry between Show/Hide and false symmetry between completed/subtasks:

Import not mirrored by Export but by Share:

Text in icons

HIG again:

Authors of HIG are arguing against including text as a part of an icon. So something like this:

or this:

would not fly in 1992.

I agree, but Tahoe has more serious problems: icons consisting only of text. Like this:

It’s unclear where “metaphorical, abstract icon text that is not supposed to be read literally” ends and actual text starts. They use the same font, the same color, so how am I supposed to differentiate? Icons just get in a way: A...Complete? AaFont? What does it mean?

I can maybe understand and . Dots are supposed to represent something. I can imagine thinking that led to . But ? No decorations. No effects. Just plain Abc. Really?

Text transformations

One might think that using icons to illustrate text transformations is a better idea.

Like, you look at this:

or this:

or this:

and just from the icon alone understand what will happen with the text. Icon illustrates the action.

Also, BIU are well-established in word processing, so all upside?

Not exactly. The problem is the same—text icon looks like text, not icon. Plus, these icons are excessive. What’s the point of taking the first letter and repeating it? The word “Bold” already starts with a letter “B”, it reads just as easily, so why double it? Look at it again:

It’s also repeated once more as a shortcut...

There is a better way to design this menu:

And it was known to Apple for at least 33 years.

System elements in icons

Operating system, of course, uses some visual elements for its own purposes. Like window controls, resize handles, cursors, shortcuts, etc. It would be a mistake to use those in icons.

Unfortunately, Apple fell into this trap, too. They reused arrows.

Key shortcuts:

HIG has an entire section on ellipsis specifically and how dangerous it is to use it anywhere else in the menu.

And this exact problem is in Tahoe, too.

Icons break scanning

Without icons, you can just scan the menu from top to bottom, reading only the first letters. Because they all align:

In Tahoe, though, some menu items have icons, some don’t, and they are aligned differently:

Some items can have both checkmarks and icons, or have only one of them, or have neither, so we get situations like this:

Ugh.

Special mention

This menu deserves its own category:

Same icon for different actions. Missing the obvious metaphor. Somehow making the first one slightly smaller than the second and third. Congratulations! It got it all.

Is HIG still relevant?

I’ve been mentioning HIG a lot, and you might be wondering: is an interface manual from 1992 still relevant today? Haven’t computers changed so much that entirely new principles, designs, and idioms apply?

Yes and no. Of course, advice on how to adapt your icons to black-and-white displays is obsolete. But the principles—as long as they are good principles—still apply, because they are based on how humans work, not how computers work.

Humans don’t get a new release every year. Our memory doesn’t double. Our eyesight doesn’t become sharper. Attention works the same way it always has. Visual recognition, motor skills—all of this is exactly as it was in 1992.

So yeah, until we get a direct chip-to-brain interface, HIG will stay relevant.

Conclusion

In my opinion, Apple took on an impossible task: to add an icon to every menu item. There are just not enough good metaphors to do something like that.

But even if there were, the premise itself is questionable: if everything has an icon, it doesn’t mean users will find what they are looking for faster.

And even if the premise was solid, I still wish I could say: they did the best they could, given the goal. But that’s not true either: they did a poor job consistently applying the metaphors and designing the icons themselves.

I hope this article would be helpful in avoiding common mistakes in icon design, which Apple managed to collect all in one OS release. I love computers, I love interfaces, I love visual communication. It makes me sad seeing perfectly good knowledge already accessible 30 years ago being completely ignored or thrown away today.

On the upside: it’s not that hard anymore to design better than Apple! Let’s drink to that. Happy New year!

Notes

During review of this post I was made familiar with Jim Nielsen’s article, which hits a lot of the same points as I do. I take that as a sign there’s some common truth behind our reasoning.

Also note: Safari → File menu got worse since 26.0. Used to have only 4 icons, now it’s 18!

Thanks Kevin, Ryan, and Nicki for reading drafts of this post.

First, thank you to everyone who reached out to me over the holidays to offer their condolences on my father’s passing. One touching consequence of writing a newsletter is receiving words of support from people I’ve never met in person, a connection with those who might otherwise be strangers but for having read what I’ve shared here. I am deeply appreciative for your kind words, they’ve meant a lot during my grieving.

Along those same lines, I hope you’ll forgive me if I spend one more week telling you about my dad, because as you’ll soon learn, AI played a bizarre role both in fostering our relationship and, perhaps, in hastening his death. To understand what happened will require that I share with you some intimate details about who he was and who I am, things he struggled with and the struggles between us, and how the intersection of his curiosity with this new technology proved to be one of my most vexing challenges over the last year.

So, to start: My father was trained as a neuroscientist. He received his PhD in 1977 from the University of Florida, which explains the odd fact that I was born in Gainesville, a city I’ve yet to ever visit (my parents moved away when I just a few weeks old). After he completed his post-doc in southern California, my family moved to Long Island so he could join the newly formed department of neurology at SUNY Stony Brook as an assistant professor. Over the next several years, he published around 50 research articles, predominately on the effects of sustained drug use on the brain.

Then, circa 1983, something happened that would upend the course of my family’s future. For reasons that remain shrouded in some mystery, my father stopped working, and he would spend the rest of his life on disability. I was only seven at the time, but I remember my dad was “sick,” and was making frequent visits to see specialists in New York City. But sick with what exactly, you might wonder, and me too, for all my life. Because the doctors could never quite pinpoint anything specifically wrong with him, at least physically. According to medical reports that I only found a few weeks ago, buried deep in my dad’s filing cabinet, neurological examinations suggested he possessed an extraordinarily high degree of verbal capability, but struggled with relatively simple logical tasks and problem solving, a “highly unusual combination,” as one examiner put it. Some of his doctors speculated he might have some form of encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain, but others found no evidence of that.

Whatever was going on, the upshot is that my father never worked again in his life. This, as you might imagine, was the source of considerable stress in my family, especially since my mother worked as a school librarian, which of course is not a lucrative career choice. I remember being shocked, and frankly deeply resentful, when I figured out in high school that our family of five (I have one sister and one brother), was technically living below the poverty line. I loathed this state of affairs and blamed my parents, my dad in particular, for the limitations that resulted. Later in my life, I would come to recognize that growing up in these circumstances helped shape me to become self-sufficient and independent in ways I’m now fiercely proud of. Indeed, once I started moving into the world of the rich and privileged and realized how fucked up so many people seem to be when they live a life without constraints, I even became grateful. But in my 20s and into my 30s, well, my relationship with my dad was strained, to say the least.

Although my father was unemployed for nearly all of his adult life, he never lost his intellectual curiosity, and thus he developed an unusual medley of interests to keep his mind active. One of these was the JFK assassination, he became part of the “conspiracy buff” community—we’ll save that story for another time. But another enduring area of interest was technology, where he was remarkably prescient in seeing where things were headed.

To wit: My family was the very first on the block to have a “microcomputer” in our home in the form of a Commodore 64 (and later the Amiga, which I think my dad felt genuine affection for). He also got active on what were called electronic “bulletin board systems” or BBSs, the precursor to the Internet really, where people connected their computers to their phone lines to send files back and forth at rates so painfully slow it defies modern comprehension. What’s more, back in the day the monopolistic phone companies charged exorbitant rates for making “long distance” phone calls, which meant that some BBS users, including my dad, looked for workarounds by hacking (or “phreaking”) phone codes to make free dial-up connections. This was illegal, of course, and when I was in eighth grade my dad was arrested and charged with multiple felony counts of theft by computer intrusion—we’ll save that story for another time, too.

My point is that my dad was always interested both in the brain and technology, so when AI in the form of large-language models were dropped into our world, he was absolutely fascinated—and so was I. As such, when I began my own efforts to understand how these models were doing what they were doing, he was right there alongside me for the intellectual journey. And for all my critiques of this new technology, I will forever be grateful that AI created a path for my dad and I have to have so many rich conversations over the past two years about its functioning. It’s fair to say it helped restore our relationship, and created a new bond between us, as we together tried to figure out just how similar (or not) its processes compare to human cognition. Cognitive Resonance exists in part because of these conversations, as I realized the exploration my father and I were mutually sharing might be of broader interest to the world. (A hypothesis I’m still testing.)

Which is why it’s such a strange, tragic irony that AI played a non-trivial role in the health crisis that led to my dad’s death.

As I’ve shared with you previously, about 18 months ago my father was diagnosed with lung cancer, kidney disease, and Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL). Upon receiving the news, he quickly addressed the lung cancer via radiation treatment, and—after some false starts—was eventually able to successfully treat his kidneys as well. But the CLL, well, that’s a more complicated story, and it’s where his use of AI likely hastened his declining health, and magnified the pain he endured.

Here’s what happened: Not long after his CLL diagnosis, my dad’s oncologist recommended he start “Venetoclax-Obinutuzumab” treatment (Ven-Obi), a relatively new approach to addressing CLL that’s proven remarkably effective both at extending patient life expectancy while reducing physical suffering. I did not know his doctor was urging this, however, because my dad did not tell me or my siblings. Instead, my father became convinced that he was undergoing something called Richter’s Transformation, a rare complication of CLL that is particularly painful. There was no evidence of this, medically, but my dad nonetheless believed it was happening to him, and that as a result he should refrain from treating his CLL by Ven-Obi because it would only make things worse.

And my father believed that because that’s what Perplexity AI told him.

It was a shock when I discovered what was happening, as you might imagine. I only discovered what was going on when my father gave me access to his online medical record, allowing me to peer into his long-running correspondence with his oncologist. From that I learned that my dad had used Perplexity to self-diagnose his condition and had sent the Perplexity report, if it can be called that, along to his very perplexed and frustrated doctor. Given that I’d spent the better part of a year talking with my father about the unreliability of factual statements made by AI, you can only imagine my extreme frustration discovering that my efforts had utterly failed within my own family.

AI enthusiasts, whether in education or more broadly, will often try to cover their asses from responsibility for non-factual statements by AI models by saying, “well, you always need to check their output.” As a general matter, that’s a ludicrous claim, since the whole value proposition of these tools is to spare us cognitive effort—but in this instance, it’s exactly what I did. I contacted the doctors who led the study that Perplexity cited in support of its statement that refraining from Ven-Obi was the proper course of action for someone with Richter’s. Much to my surprise, both doctors replied straightaway, and confirmed what I already knew to be true, that Perplexity had misstated the conclusion of their research, and that my father should follow the course of treatment his oncologist was recommending.

Of course I immediately passed this information along to my dad, desperately hoping to appeal to his scientific and empirically oriented belief system. But he didn’t respond at all. I was yelling into the void. It was only after several more months passed, and after his physical condition continued to worsen dramatically, before he finally agreed to start the Ven-Obi treatment his oncologist had recommended a year prior. It didn’t seem to matter at that point, sadly. Although the treatment immediately reduced his white blood cell count, his pain endured, and culminated in his death just a few weeks ago.

I am obviously still grappling with all this, and I don’t want to overstate my case. I don’t think AI killed my father. I think it’s possible, perhaps even likely, that in a world without AI, he would still have latched on to some other piece of research to support his disposition against medical treatment, as he had deep misgivings—fear, really—about spending time in hospitals. Nonetheless, the fact remains that AI does exist in our world, and just as it can serve as fuel to those suffering manic psychosis, so too may it affirm or amplify our mistaken understanding of what’s happening to us physically and medically. (OpenAI claims to be limiting the use of ChatGPT to provide “tailored” medical advice that requires a license, but the head of its medical research team maintains “it will continue to be a great resource to help people understand legal and health information” —sure, if you say so.)

In the course of discussing AI with my dad, I am fairly certain he moved toward becoming more generally skeptical of it. Toward the end of his life, he started sending me articles and YouTube videos about the limitations of these tools. Still, I will forever wonder whether my efforts came too late, and whether he might still be with us if I’d been more effective in undermining the authoritative tone AI strikes when generating its tokens. There’s nothing I can do to change the past, of course. But I can for damn sure keep working to raise the consciousness of others.

A fire has been lit, even while my heart still hurts.

My father created a playlist he labelled “Wake,” which doubles both as testament to his great taste in music and elegy for what’s happening in America. You’ll be doing me and his memory a great honor if you give it a listen. He’d like knowing it found an audience.

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If you’re looking to edit an image, you might open it in Photoshop, GIMP, or even Paint Shop Pro if you’re stuck in 2005. But who needs it — [Patrick Gillespie] explores what can be done when editing a JPEG on a raw, textual level instead.

As the video explains, you generally can’t simply throw a JPEG into Notepad and start making changes all willy nilly. That’s because it’s very easy to wreck key pieces of the image format that are required to render it as an image. Particularly because Notepad likes to sanitize things like line endings which completely mess up the structure of the file. Instead, you’re best off using a binary editor that will only change specific bytes in the image when you tell it to. Do this, and you can glitch out an image in all kinds of fun digital ways… or ruin it completely. Your choice!

If you’d like to tinker around with this practice, [Patrick] has made a tool for just that purpose. Jump over to the website, load the image of your choice, and play with it to your heart’s content.

This practice is often referred to as “datamoshing,” which is a very cool word, or “databending,” which isn’t nearly as good. We’ve explored other file-format hacks before, too, like a single file that can be opened six different ways. Video after the break.

[Thanks to AloofPenny for the tip!]

Warning: this post is positively dripping with of media. Please pardon the larger-than-usual webpage size as I geek out, reminisce, and stand on a little soapbox in my little corner of the Internet. Anyone browsing the stacks of a public librarypy around the turn of the millennium would eventually come across the music-and-software section. Brightly colored photos, generally divorced from their original backgrounds were spliced into abstract arrangement along with bold text and wrapped in a plastic clamshell. Sometimes the CDs were in the original box, other times in a library-specific distribution with a text label that required a child to open each case to see see if the CD label suggested it was something interesting. I was just tall enough at the time to idly flick through the boxes, crack open audio book box sets, and flip through the index card racks that would soon be on their way out.

In 2024, schoolteacher Ginny Robinson won the Best in Show award at a quilting convention for her quilt called What We Will Use as Weapons: A List of School Supplies.

This is a protest quilt. It was made by an artist whose day job puts her on the front lines of one of the most grotesque realities in America today. She is a teacher.

What We Will Use as Weapons: A List of School Supplies is the title for this provocative work of art that features school supplies hurling toward the center on the front and an assault rifle on the back. This long, narrow quilt is the actual size and shape of a door. An outline of a human is stitched through the layers. On the front, the person is meant to represent a shooter, and on the reverse side, a teacher.

Robinson’s quilt is now part of the collection at the International Quilt Museum.

Tags: education · Ginny Robinson · guns · quilts · USA