My old HSPVA friend and classmate Joe Santa Maria has a really cool album that I can only describe as if a Chris Potter big band decided to play Indonesian gamelan music, a type of trance-like rhythmic music which I originally discovered through Aaron Taylor Kuffner’s Gamelatron. You can listen or buy the album here. This is the first album I’ve bought in… forever, I’ve gotten so used to streaming. Feels kinda nice. I need to explore Bandcamp more it’s so cool.
Aside Archives
What if this VR is training our brains to compute in a different way? How we perceive our thoughts to train the models. We are reconfiguring our model of reality to process things in a way we couldn’t before.
If I were President for a day, the first thing I would do is instruct our national security to patch and secure every American technology company, as they are our gems in the world. I would burn every zero-day I had on a US company and help them patch it. The rest of the world would know our immense defense budget was now being used to secure our companies as well, as China does. Apple, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, Arista, Unifi, Qualcomm… I’m probably missing a few, they should all have the shield of our national security defense. Right now each company has to create their own defenses, and they are getting eaten and pillaged by foreign companies with state backing.
I just replied to an email from 2018. I am tragically, comically, behind on email. Because Automattic doesn’t use email, we use P2, it’s never been a priority for me. But I have been sloppy, careless, and derelict in my duty of answering emails. Apologies to you all. You’re going to get some weird, very late replies.
On January 25th, this upcoming Thursday, I will be speaking at Ignite San Francisco on the topic of Automattic’s sabbatical benefit and my upcoming one, alongside Adam Savage, Shelby Devlin, Elise Hu, Leanne Gluck, Kat Lague, Amanda Nagai, Joshua Schachter, Emily Quinn, Rose Bloomin, Jamie Joyce, MaSovaida Morgan, Todd Kerpelman, Brett Kistler, Shary Niv, and Connie Yang. The event will sell out so get your tickets soon!
This is me on Mastodon, it’s really me, also added to my Gravatar.
There’s a great review of the Combustion Predictive Thermometer in Wired today. If you do any sort of cooking or grilling regularly, this tool from my good friend Chris Young is really essential.
The new WordPress 6.4 is named in honor of Shirley Horn, who NPR described as the queen of silence and interpretation. If you’re in San Francisco and love jazz vocalists, this Friday Clairdee will be at Keys.
Version 6.3 is out! Time to fire up your updating engines. 😄 This is actually a really big one. (As a reminder, we do three major release of WP per year and each one is a +0.1, 7.0 will just be the next release after 6.9, so big things can happen in random version numbers.) We’ve made a release landing page to cover some of the new things in this one, check it out.
We just launched polls on Tumblr, and it’s been pretty fun. Cool to bring together the Crowdsignal (née Polldaddy) technology into a new world.
You can now subscribe to updates from this blog in this Telegram channel! Right now it will get updates from Ma.tt and Matt.blog, and hopefully my Tumblr in future once the bot supports that as a content source. If you’d like to set this up for your WordPress site, check out this tutorial on Jetpack.
There’s fascinating and terrifying feature article about Facebook, Duterte, and the drug war in the Philippines, written by Davey Alba. My first trip there was actually to Davao, and having been to the country several times and met so many bloggers there it’s hard to imagine what’s described. There are definitely echoes of the Wired feature on Facebook and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. Both are good reminders that as technologists the tools we create can be used and leveraged in ways we wouldn’t imagine in our worst nightmares.
Brett Martin has an excellent longread in GQ, Houston Is the New Capital Of Southern Cool. I moved to San Francisco when I was 20, I hadn’t ever even been old enough to drink in Houston, but when I returned in my late twenties and really made it my home I was blown away at how much the city had changed in the time I had been away. Or maybe I just grew up enough to appreciate it. Regardless, Brett captures the verve and paradoxes of the city well.
I’m a huge fan of Mailchimp, but dang does the service get abused by folks aggressively opting you into mailing lists. I have a very early, very generic Gmail address that people put as a filler address into every possible service and it gets tens of thousands of list and spam mails. A good trick to find and unsubscribe from all the Mailchimp lists you’re on is to search for mcsv.net
and then select all, report as spam, and unsubscribe. Gmail doesn’t deal well when the unsubscribe list is taller than your screen, so you may need to hit command + -
a few times to make it all fit. Also according to this post, “you can also get in touch with our compliance team directly at compliance@mailchimp.com with the email address you would like to remove from all lists and they will be happy to further assist you there as well.” I will try that as well.
I really love this thread and the replies sharing stories about Val Vesa’s experience talking about WordPress in an Uber / Lyft ride:
Elif Batuman, who was recently a Pulitzer finalist for her novel The Idiot, has a stunning story in the New Yorker on Japan’s Rent-a-Family Industry, “People who are short on relatives can hire a husband, a mother, a grandson. The resulting relationships can be more real than you’d expect.”
You think from the title it’s going to be one of those gee-whiz stories or vaguely condescending toward Japanese, but what follows is actually an incredibly poignant and powerful view of society through a lens I had never imagined before. It’s a #longread but I hope you take the time to sit with it this weekend. You may need a swordsman.
On Automattic's internal BuddyPress-powered company directory, we allow people to fill out a field saying how far their previous daily commute was. 509 people have filled that out so far, and they are saving 12,324 kilometers of travel every work day. Wow!
Longreads was nominated today for its first-ever National Magazine Award, in the category of columns and commentary, alongside ESPN The Magazine, BuzzFeed News, Pitchfork, and New York magazine. Laurie Penny's Longreads columns explore important questions of consent and female desire that have strongly resonated in our current moment. In addition to this nomination, Penny's columns have been translated and republished in Italian and German newspapers, and will be collected in a forthcoming book.
I had originally planned last year to write a review of each book as I read it, but The Rules Do Not Apply threw a spanner in the works. I had no idea how to write about it, much less review it. The author, Ariel Levy, has a great interview in Longreads from when the book came out.
Speaking of Longreads, don't forget to check out their top 25 exclusives from 2017, and their number 1 picks overall. Some amazing writing in there.
Politico has a lovely story on the history and present of the NORAD Santa Tracker, which started because a 1955 Sears department store ad had “a digit wrong — and was instead the direct line into the secret military nerve center in Colorado Springs, Colo., where the Pentagon was on the lookout to prevent nuclear war.”