This feels significant. Check out this video. Hat tip: Rory Chitwood.
Category Archives: Asides
WordPress, Taylor Swift, Super Bowl, oh my
There has been quite a bit of buzz in the WordPress community because during the Grammys red carpet Taylor Swift’s website went down and this is what everyone saw:
Hey there! That looks familiar. What a beautiful WordPress logo! (Hat tip: Alexa Scordato for telling me about this.) The website also had some ups and downs, we haven’t been able to get in touch with anyone on Taylor’s tech team, but if you’re there, we’re standing by and happy to spin up your site on wp.cloud so it can handle any amount of traffic.
This gets even more interesting, because for the first time in my life, after having orbited around the Super Bowl for decades*, I am attending in person. Thanks to the graciousness of my friend and advisor Jason Hoffman, I’ll be in an owner’s suite, wearing a WordPress t-shirt, possibly not too far from Taylor, watching the game. Look for me on TV! I know she loves Tumblr so I’ll have with me a little gift bag of Tumblr swag just in case I meet her.
* How have I been orbiting around the Super Bowl? Even though I don’t follow sports, I’m obsessed with the Super Bowl, and typically host watch parties every year. I love seeing the pinnacle of American achievement. The Super Bowl centers around a number of interesting stories in my life, such as when I was in high school and very poor the Super Bowl was in Houston, and they made McNuggets really cheap, so I ate 104 McNuggets in one sitting. (Sweet and sour sauce, natch.) At that infamous Justin Timberlake / Janet Jackson moment, they needed extras on the field to be their audience and my high school girlfriend was one of the kids in the audience when it happened. There’s so many more stories I could tell!
Balaji Srinivasan posted a great essay on how founders should think about debt vs equity, unfortunately it’s on X/Twitter so the format isn’t great, but the content is gold. As we exit the ZIRP world and go back into normal interest rates, I think this is really important concept for entrepreneurs to understand.
It’s hard to pick a favorite tenor player, but the GOATs that come to mind are Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Michael Brecker, and I’m missing people but if I had to pick someone to express the human condition and soul, it would be Joshua Redman. He has such incredible fluency with the horn you get an amazing emotional experience with his vibrations. He’s probably the greatest living tenor saxophonist. He just did a Tiny Desk concert, and the audio and visual capture was impeccable. I watched this full-screen on an Apple XDR and listened with Airpods Max—the chords they’re using, the subtlety of the interactions— the experience was exquisite. (Also peep HSPVA grad Paul Cornish!) I can’t embed because it’s not on Youtube yet.
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’m a proud supporter of the Vesuvius Challenge, and they just announced the winners and have a great article in Bloomberg.
Child of the 90s
This is a brilliant ad, true genius. (Hat tip, Ken Gagne.)
When I read things like the iFixit Teardown of Vision Pro, I am moved almost to tears at the sheer beauty of craftsmanship in this thing. It is literally incredible. I have so much respect for the big tech companies like Apple that invest in long-term science, research, and development to create innovations like this. It is literally the engine driving our economy forward.
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.
Vision Pro First Impressions
Okay… wow. The hardware and display are like nothing I’ve ever seen, really feels like it’s from the future. That said, I found the setup clunky and buggy. Some might have been user error, for example I kept trying to “select” things with my middle finger and thumb and not my left finger.
I almost got stuck in the Persona setup, couldn’t continue. I don’t love how my Persona looks. Looking and selecting stopped working and I could only continue by physically reaching out and hitting the buttons. (This must sound ridiculous to someone who hasn’t used a Vision Pro yet. I looked pretty silly!)
I got totally stuck at the part of the setup where it was importing iCloud apps from backup, and I was ready to give up. A friend put it on and was able to get past that step for me. Adding credit cards was a terrible UI, with the security code PIN pad in front of the interface.
I decided to call it a night, and try more tomorrow. Just like I learned to type I think I’m going to need to learn to become fluent in this new interaction paradigm. I did have a before and after feeling, like the world had shifted, not unlike when you saw the first iPod or iPhone. This post probably doesn’t make any sense to someone who hasn’t tried the Vision Pro, but hopefully the team sees it and can take this feedback.
SaaStr Interview
I was interviewed by Jason Lemkin of SaaStr, who is one of the most insightful people in the SaaS space and runs great events. Check out our conversation.
New York!
You tear me apart. The greatest city in the world. (San Francisco has its allure.) I am so drawn to the impeccability excellence of uptown. Just at a baby shower at 111 West 57th… wow! You have never seen a better building, everything is executed to the highest degree par none.
Yet, I’m so drawn to downtown. The jazz. The creativity, the spark, the drive.
Automattic’s office at 166 Crosby feels like a creative center. We’ve built something pretty cool there to inspire and delight people in space.
Proprietary software is like creating art which no-one can see. Open Source elevates software engineering to a collaborative art form. Code is poetry.
— Tom Willmot
Some choice words from Tom Willmot, who was watching Kirby Fergusen’s Everything is a Remix, which I’ll check out now.
Open Source Creed
Every human has an intrinsic right to put their creative work into the commons. Once freed, work can never be withdrawn, and it has the opportunity—but not the obligation!—for everyone to improve upon it.
(v1)
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!
Fred Again Tiny Desk
You think you’ve seen Tiny Desk performances, but you haven’t seen this.
This is me on Mastodon, it’s really me, also added to my Gravatar.
I loved this essay from James Somers on coding in the age of AI, A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft. Hat tip: Majd Taby.
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.