Essays on open source, publishing, and the web.
Spelling bees have gotten a lot more intense. How many of these do you know? torrone, enthymeme, iguape, Denebola, fais-dodo, cywyddau, pohutukawa, monadnock, émeute, nannofossil, tongkang, Natchitoches, flaith, semele, rusell, sawder, campernelle, Nicol, Zame…
I think I heard this parable somewhere in the 14 hours of Alan Watts lectures someone recommended to me in 2017, but here’s a beautiful 2-minute version I’d love to share for everyone going through something. I really appreciate the love and support I received…
Sonny Rollins, the Saxophone Colossus, has passed. He is probably my favorite saxophonist, and while the aforementioned album is one of the five I would take to a deserted island, he has so many other good ones like The Cutting Edge which also has bagpipes, or…
It’s very cool to see Theo / t3.gg‘s open source arc. Just in general, with people creating more software than ever, it’s so exciting to see an explosion of open source and a growing understanding of why working together on open source makes so much sense for…
You call yourself a Christian engineer, but you haven’t given your life to Open Source? Huh. What license would Jesus choose? I don’t know if it’s GPL or MIT, but sure as heck it isn’t proprietary. Letting proprietary code dictate your life is like following a…
If you’re looking for a good watch this weekend, I couldn’t recommend more the documentary Turn Every Page – The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb. The craft of research, writing, and editing is presented in the most beautiful way possible. Around…
This Ashlee Vance interview of Pedro Franceschi from Brex contains so many interesting stories it might cause you to reconsider what it means to be a CEO.
So, two other Matts at Cloudflare announced EmDash — the spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security. (Is it nominative determinism or a simulation glitch that everyone trying to terraform the web has some variation of “Matthew” in their name?…
I’m really excited to introduce a project I worked on with various AI agents the other night, which I think represents a new way we might build things in the future. First, the problem: My WordPress site has 5,600+ posts going back decades, and I had some cate…
Since he spoke to Dean Baquet in 2017, JAŸ-Z hasn’t done an interview. Hov’s back! He sat down with GQ, and it’s a lovely listen and read. We played enough defense, 2026 is all about offense. Your morality defines who you are, not what you’ve attained.
First, I want to say how great the jazz scene is in New York. I caught a little Latin at my go-to Guantanamera last night, but the band seemed to be phoning it in a bit, so I walked over to Dizzy’s and heard an amazing big band performance by the Diva all-wome…
Nobody is arguing that Stockfish is conscious, but Stockfish would kick Claude’s ass at chess. Kevin Lincoln in AI Perfected Chess. Humans Made It Unpredictable Again.
I’m in NYC for the Stephan Wolfram dev/ai/nyc conversation tomorrow at the Automattic Noho space. While walking back from the Apple Store in Soho where I had picked up a new Studio Display XDR to try out, ran into one of my favorite YouTube accounts to follow…
It’s bad, but it’s so good. As you read this deep dive into the LiteLLM backdoor hack, or this one, it’s really just quite impressive. The use of ICP canisters, wow. Just as an engineer, I’d love to meet the minds behind this code.
If you host your WordPress on WordPress.com your AI agent can now manage your entire site, including updating posts or pages, making drafts, pretty much all the things you normally do with WordPress. Hook this up to your OpenClaw, Hermes, ChatGPT, Claude, Grok…
Long-time WordPresser Miriam Schwab just rebuilt her WordPress site with Claude Code and it looks amazing. Go check it out, this is what is possible now with proper prompting. I’d love to see a WordCamp keynote from Miriam on her process in this. (And she’s do…
Tonight, a project very near and dear to my heart, the Bay Lights in San Francisco, are officially re-lighting after a three-year hiatus. It’s been an incredible journey getting here. I literally mortgaged my apartment in 2013 to help fund them the first time…
Very excited to share that the Clay.earth team that joined Automattic last year is re-launching under a new, very cool name and brand: Mesh. Imagine something that joins you (me) to everyone you’re connected to. It’s going to be a very important layer of the d…
Very excited to share that the Clay.earth team that joined Automattic last year is re-launching under a new, very cool name and brand: Mesh. Imagine something that joins you (me) to everyone you’re connected to. It’s going to be a very important layer of the d…
I’m in New Orleans for the first time in 7 years for a beautiful wedding. My Mom’s side of the family emigrated here in the 1860s, and there’s a deep comfort in the art, traditions, and weirdness of Creole culture. Good music and food are ubiquitous. I met up…
Not doing a full What’s In My Bag yet, but I do want to highlight I’ve been really enjoying the Sennheiser HDB 630 Wireless Over-Ear Headphones. Hat tip: Philip Kaplan aka Pud.
I would like to offer some free business advice to people who are considering selling something they’ve created. First, if the buyer insists you don’t talk to any other bidders, you are being screwed. They only do this because they don’t want you to find the m…
For a brief period, Tumblr was unavailable to the 115M+ people in the Philippines because the government had blocked it. To their credit, the Philippines CICC quickly reviewed and corrected their block after mass public outrage from the Filipino Tumblr communi…
With the rise of GLP-1 drugs, there’s a trend that magnums are being ordered at clubs to meet minimums but left unfinished. I think there’s a space for an ultra-high-end wellness drink at clubs. Imagine Erewhon meets Magic Mind meets Kin, maybe with some effer…
As we announced and TechCrunch covered, my.wordpress.net has soft-launched. What this means is you need to fundamentally shift how you think about WordPress. From the beginning, WordPress has always been open source, giving you freedom, liberty, autonomy, and…
This is a little embarrassing to share, but I’d rather someone else be able to spot a dangerous scam before they fall for it. So, here goes. One evening last month, my Apple Watch, iPhone, and Mac all lit up with a message prompting me to reset my password. Th…
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. 30…
For the Japanese WordPress community, I have planted a special Wapuu at the coolest spot in Niseko, Bar Gyu, aka the refrigerator door bar. Now on the handle you’ll find a special surprise. Anyone recognize which WordCamp it’s from? Ioanna and Hisashi run one…
People are doing pretty interesting things with Emacs (now on version 30.2!) these days, if you haven’t checked in recently. The bleeding edge has always been people into Org Mode. Sacha Chua has hooked up Whisper to Emacs to talk to it. Emacs is probably one…
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