Classical Accordian

So my new obsession is a Ukrainian-born musician, Alexander Hrustevich, who plays a type of chromatic Russian accordion called a Bayan. He plays incredible transcriptions of classical pieces, replicating the parts of an entire orchestra with just two hands. If you’re familiar with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, you know the Presto for Summer is one of the most challenging parts. Listen to this, it’s just a bit under three minutes.

Here’s the 14 minute version which is beautiful to hear the dynamic range that’s possible.

I’ve always loved the sound of a big pipe organ and the resonance and feel of the bayan. It is really quite remarkable, and it’s been very enjoyable having a playlist of Alexander’s music in the background as I work. This Bach-Fantasia and Fugue in G minor BWV 542 is also quite good.

My 42nd birthday is tomorrow! Working on a post for y’all.

The only people for me are the mad ones. The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

— Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Small Hit

Apple

The NY Times has a profile of John Ternus as a possible successor to Tim Cook that has a number of ridiculous lines; it’s quite bad, but this is one of my favorites:

Apple has had many small hits under Mr. Cook and continues to be one of the most profitable companies in the world. 

Goodness! I would love to have a hit someday as the small as the ones Apple has had under Cook. Apple Watch sells more than the entire Swiss watch industry. Airpods are the most popular headphones in the world. Their market cap is bigger than the GDP of all but four countries in the world.

Find My Update

Asides

The best part about blogging is the comments, and after I posted “I wish that when you use Find My to find your iPhone, it would also flash the flashlight, which would be great for finding it in a bag or a dark room.” Michael Wender and David Artiss jumped in that it’s already there!

Apple support says if you touch and hold it will flash the light! Now I haven’t been able to get this to work yet, perhaps because when I did, I got a notice that Precision Finding, which uses ultra-wideband (UWB) frequencies to help you find your phone or Airtag, which is magical, isn’t available in all regions. I’m currently stranded in St. Martin because of airspace issues with Venezuela, and apparently, this is one of the countries, like Indonesia, where UWB doesn’t work.

Update: Hours later, the press-and-hold thing now flashes the light, so it must have been a heisenbug.


I wish that when you use Find My to find your iPhone, it would also flash the flashlight, which would be great for finding it in a bag or a dark room. 

Anything that annoys you is teaching you patience.

Anyone who abandons you is teaching you how to stand up on your own two feet.

Anything that angers you is teaching you forgiveness and compassion.

Anything that has power over you is teaching you how to take your power back.

Anything you hate is teaching you unconditional love.

Anything you fear is teaching you the courage to overcome your fear.

Anything you can’t control is teaching you how to let go.

Happy New Year

Asides

I rang in the new year with an unexpected trip to St. Barts with friends.

I resolved in 2025 to watch more films. It’s an art form I have many friends in, and when we have hung out, I’ve realized how shallow my understanding of the film canon is. I have a lot of catch-up to do, and it also requires a lifestyle change, as I’m usually at a laptop. Making space to enjoy a film for a few hours was a departure from my regular routines.

I watched 72 movies last year! This definitely came at the cost of books finished, if I look at my stats. But I’ve begun to really appreciate the contours of what I love about a movie now.

This is a long lead to recommend the movie Jay Kelly, which streams on Netflix with George Clooney and Adam Sandler. After seeing many great and terrible movies, old and new, I really appreciated what they did with this film, and it was one of the rare ones I watched entirely or in sections several times, gaining new appreciation for what they pulled off.

It starts with a “One-er,” which is a continuous shot with no cuts that moves between a number of different scenes in a really slick way. (Excellent episode of The Studio about this!) It’s a film way of showing off, as it must be incredibly hard to have hundreds of people all pulling off something flawlessly for a long period of time, not unlike a Broadway show.

Jay Kelly is George Clooney playing himself, which, as he says, is the hardest thing to do. There are meta-levels of reality and fiction, and so many allusions and callbacks, the entire thing is a work of art. You learn to appreciate what actors do and how film is made while watching a film being made in such a nice way.

So that is my recommendation for the year. In older movies, I really enjoyed Kate & Leopold, which also features an amazing Sting song that is impossible to find on streaming services.

The writer Aadil Pickle has a great profile of one of my favorite hackers, “Training the Idea Muscle” on Riley Walz. Riley epitomizes the term “high agency,” and I’ve been continually impressed with his ability to rapidly code novel ideas and interfaces on top of public or reverse-engineered data. He’s a hacker, artist, and provocateur.

I’m enjoying this slower time of the year, and it looks like this will be the warmest Christmas I can remember in Houston; it was 80° F today! Makes me appreciate what Christmas in the southern hemisphere must be like.

Wolfram Automattica

Automattic

It’s exciting to announce that Stephen Wolfram has joined as a special advisor to Automattic.

I promise this is not just because he is such an incredible blogger, using WordPress, natch.

If you don’t know about Stephen Wolfram, his about page is not a bad place to start, but far more interesting is his 2019 essay on Seeking the Productive Life, which includes a setup for hiking outdoors while typing on a laptop.

Stephen was doing the remote CEO thing decades before I imagined Automattic. He spoke at Automattic’s Grand Meetup in 2019 and one of my favorite memories was seeing him at the silent disco after-party. We also did an episode of the Distributed podcast together.

Since he started engaging more deeply earlier this year, I’ve gotten a lot of joy from seeing him interact with teams across the company, asking questions in an incisive, inquisitive way that helps break down problems. We just finished up several hours of a deep dive into our board topics with several hundred Automatticans participating.

Automattic has been blessed with amazing directors over the years. Currently, our board is Susan Decker, General Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and me.

Beware Unearned Wisdom

Essays

One of Carl Jung’s famous quotes is to “Beware unearned wisdom.” Sometimes it’s brought up in the context of psychedelics. From LSD and the Mind of the Universe by Christopher Bache:

Psychedelics give us temporary access to realities beyond our pay grade, allowing us to experience things beyond our normal capacity.

It’s all too easy to think that because we have had a deep and profound experience, we have become a deep and profound person, but this is a fool’s delusion.

Even when psychedelics allow us to experience the person we are in the process of becoming, we have to face the fact that we have not become this person yet, nor have we fully internalised the wonderful qualities we may have temporarily touched.

I’m starting to see some of the same things happening with vibe coding and LLM writing.

Sam Kriss at the New York Times took on the inevitably meta task of writing Why Does A.I. Write Like … That? It’s a good read that will tickle your mind, as the mimetic effects of model training data overfit and influence society, even in how we speak and write when not using AI.

I’m starting to get that “feel” now, sometimes when using software. The demo or functionality seems amazing, but when you begin to poke around the edges, it all crumbles. We think we have something amazing because a chatbot one-shot an application, but there may be a hidden technical debt there.

A big focus for me in this coming year is “back to basics”: ensuring the core functionality is robust. You can’t build a house on a foundation of sand. It’s very exciting and tempting to go to the new shiny thing, but you only earn that right when the fundamentals are solid.

It’s been funny hearing about OpenAI’s Code Red, because about 18 months ago, I declared Code Blue on WordPress.com. In a hospital, Code Red means a fire, which I don’t think is the analogy OpenAI was going for, but I unfortunately learned when my father passed that Code Blue means all hands on deck because a patient has a cardiac or respiratory arrest; it signals a critical, life-threatening medical emergency. All the best specialists swarm in and, hopefully, save the patient. (BTW, on WordPress.com, the team has done a fantastic job of shipping literally thousands of bug fixes and quality improvements, and keeping focus on that despite the pull to new initiatives. There’s much left to do, but it’s headed in the right direction.)

The Cambrian explosion of new stuff built by AI is just a phase, and AI-assisted coding can actually be incredible for maintenance and bug fixes. But the tools are only as good as the questions we ask them, so it will have to battle with human nature’s addiction to novelty.

The Wall Street Journal has a fun article about the Nex Playground, The Hottest Toy of the Year Is Made by a Tech Startup You’ve Never Heard Of. It’s a very fun way to game with friends and stay active, so afterward you have that same great feeling like after playing a sport. I think this is the first time one of Audrey Capital’s companies (we invested when it was the Homecourt app) is the hot Christmas item. Here’s it on Amazon, though it looks like it doesn’t ship before Christmas right now.

Apple iWeb

Asides

The new X/Twitter algorithim is hard to predict, but I’ve had one go viral with over a million views now, a quote-tweet of a cool demo video of Apple’s website builder from 2009, with themes and blog support and everything. Interesting to compare its interface to Gutenberg and WordPress today.

For the video to play on the webpage, you have to visit in Safari.

The colors here have now gone blue for winter, and snow has started, thanks to the excellent Snow Fall plugin. I also wanted to congratulate Wealthfront on their IPO. Many on their team have been friends or advisors over the years, from David Fortunato responding to my email about their WordPress blog being on an old version when they launched, to the amazing Adam Nash who teaches CS 007 Personal Finance for Engineers at Stanford, and he now runs the awesome Daffy donor-advised tax fund startup. I was an early customer, and even on their homepage as a testimonial in 2011, Audrey Capital has been an investor since 2013 and if you sign up with this link we both get 5k extra managed for free.

Aldeas

Asides

Tonight was a lot of threads connecting for me. At Automattic’s Noho Space we hosted an event for Martin Scorsese’s new documentary about Pope Francis, called Aldeas. There was a point in my life when I wanted to become a priest, and I had been inspired by meeting a Franciscan seminary student. I took it very seriously and considered that as a path for my life, but some combination of jazz and girls made me realize that the priesthood was not my destiny.

The jazz led to building websites for Houston jazz musicians, which led to coding, which led to WordPress, which after a lot of twists and turns led to Automattic acquiring Tumblr. One of Tumblr’s greatest memes was Goncharov, directed by Martin Scorsese. The only reason Automattic, as a distributed company, has an office in NYC is because of the Tumblr acquisition. The office is filled with art from Tumblr artists so I had the very surreal experience of talking after Martin Scorsese, who at 83 is sharp as a tack and a gifted speaker, a few feet away from a Goncharov poster about how my Catholic upbringing led me down the path of starting WordPress, and how Pope Francis’ life inspired the WordPress Jubilee and reflection. Full circle.