Great piece by Jonathan Libov on text-based messaging interfaces for everything in the future, it’s like the command line has come alive again.
Category Archives: Asides
Watching Television
It wasn’t that long ago, in the grand scheme of things, that I didn’t have any TV shows I was actively watching. Life has been busier than ever, but I’ve started catching up with shows instead of movies when flying. I’ve been blown away by the high quality of storytelling in the medium of television right now.
So I find myself actively watching a few different shows:
- House of Cards (new season out today!).
- True Detective.
- Scandal.
- Blacklist.
- Empire.
- West Wing.
There are some guilty pleasures in there, and there are probably a dozen shows that friends have recommended to me as amazing that I’ve never even started. (Hence West Wing, I’m watching it for the first time, somewhere in Season 4.)
This is the first time I’m watching things that are still “on” versus something like Firefly or Sopranos which are complete already. There’s definitely something fun about discussing the latest developments with other people who are also caught up, in the zeitgeist, and the anticipation of new episodes coming out, like what I imagine it must have been like with serialized novels back in the day.
Ben Dwyer on why writing code is like solving a Rubik’s cube.
A lot of the tech news I’ve linked here has been a bit of a downer, but today we can celebrate: FCC votes for net neutrality, a ban on paid fast lanes, and Title II. This is not an outcome I would have bet on a year ago.
As a good follow-up to the podcast with Tim the other week, I did a podcast with Matt Medeiros of the Matt Report.
On WordPress.com and Bitcoin
There’s been some controversy and discussion about the fact that WordPress.com no longer support Bitcoin in our new checkout flow on signup. (It’s still there in some other flows.)
Since there has been a lot of discussion about it, I wanted to share directly some of the answers I had to Grace’s follow-up questions, since I’m not sure if they’ll be published and if they are it probably won’t be in their entirety.
In regards to your future plans for the currency, is bitcoin support definitely returning or is that just a possibility at this point?
We’re big fans of Bitcoin and hope to support it again in the future, for all of the reasons that we originally supported it in 2012, which you can read about here:
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/pay-another-way-bitcoin/
Is there anything that will influence the outcome of this decision?
No, it is simply a matter of development resources, which are especially scarce for us right now as we’re trying to keep up with growth.
You mention that bitcoin has low volume compared to other payment methods, has this always been the case? Has its volume share changed over time?
The volume has been dropping since launch, in 2014 it was only used about twice a week, which is vanishingly small compared to other methods of payment we offer. We supported Bitcoin for philosophical reasons, not commercial ones.
What are the key aims of your checkout process changes?
Our goals are twofold: to refactor the code behind it which has parts that are over five years old and has grown very complex, and to make it faster and easier for people to buy our services.
When you first launched bitcoin payments WordPress’ blog post praised it as an inclusive payment method for those who cannot use PayPal. Do you worry that these people will now be excluded from the platform?
Of course, but either that number of people turned out to be smaller than we expected or they found other ways to pay. Since it’s so few people overall I’m happy to extend people’s subscription for a year, as I offered in your comments section.
What does being a ‘big believer’ in bitcoin mean to you?
I believe Bitcoin or some other blockchain-like system will be the basis of the majority of financial transactions in the future, from small remittances to multi-billion dollar corporate acquisitions. I think transaction costs should follow Moore’s law, and I don’t think we’re going to get there with the centralized gateways that currently account for the overwhelming majority of transactions. I also personally hold Bitcoin, I’m an advisor to Stellar.org, and my friends make fun of me for bringing up Bitcoin and the blockchain in unrelated conversations.
The bitcoin option still appears on the ‘WP Admin’ screen but not on ‘My Upgrades’. Is this part of the phase out, or likely to stay this way?
That’s on the old code base, and will be available for a short while if any current Bitcoin subscribers want to renew while the option is still available.
Find three hobbies you love: one to make you money, one to keep you in shape, and one to be creative.
I’m not sure the provenance of this quote, but I read it and it really resonated with me, and I’ve found myself repeating it frequently.
I am Elon Musk, CEO/CTO of a rocket company, AMA!. This guy continues to amaze.
Hey guys! I found a good comment on Youtube. Documenting here for posterity, from vTxTobi:
Top 5 rappers:
1. Kendrick Lamar
2. K.dot
3. Guy in second verse of Control
4. Short dude in TDE
5. The good kid in a mad city
(I added the links.) The joke is all of those refer to Kendrick Lamar, so was laugh-out-loud funny. It was on Kendrick’s powerful and controversial new Blacker the Berry track. So congrats to vTxTobi for writing the only decent comment I’ve read on Youtube in years. 🙂
There’s been some interesting threads going around on Jetpack and the future of WordPress, here’s Chris Lema’s take: Is the Future Success of WordPress tied to Jetpack?.
I enjoyed this Ars Technica look at USB 3.1 and Type-C, which is probably the cable/connection change people will notice the most over the next few years. (As I look with despair on my dozens of USB devices and cables.) I also dug their retrospective, A brief history of USB, what it replaced, and what has failed to replace it. Remember serial ports?
Automattician Guillermo Rauch writes on the 7 Principles of Rich Web Applications.
One theory I have is that there’s some secret “developer full-time employment act” that means these programmers have to do something even if it’s just replicating work that’s already been done. Kind of like New Jersey where every gas station is full serve (that had to be some full employment gambit back in the day).
Sounds like something that could be written today about Vox, Buzzfeed, Gawker, or any of the quixotic CMS projects at Washington Post, NY Times, Conde Nast, et al, but it was actually written in 2007.
Jobs’s taste for merciless criticism was notorious; Ive recalled that, years ago, after seeing colleagues crushed, he protested. Jobs replied, “Why would you be vague?,” arguing that ambiguity was a form of selfishness: “You don’t care about how they feel! You’re being vain, you want them to like you.” Ive was furious, but came to agree. “It’s really demeaning to think that, in this deep desire to be liked, you’ve compromised giving clear, unambiguous feedback,” he said. He lamented that there were “so many anecdotes” about Jobs’s acerbity: “His intention, and motivation, wasn’t to be hurtful.”
Your one #longread today should be the New Yorker’s profile of Jonathan Ive by Ian Parker. This anecdote resonated with me from the time I (poorly) did design for a living, and how much patience and stoicism are part of the job when working with a deciding stakeholder, often known as a client:
Bob Mansfield, a former senior hardware engineer at Apple, who is now semi-retired, recently described the pique that some colleagues felt about Ive’s privileged access. As he put it, “There’s always going to be someone vying for Dad’s attention.” But Mansfield was grateful for Ive’s cool handling of a C.E.O. who was “not the easiest guy to please.” Mansfield’s view was “Jony puts up with a lot, and, as a result of him doing it, people like me don’t have to.”
This also made me giggle.
Brunner is proud of the Beats brand, but it took him time to adjust to a design rhythm set as if for a sneaker company: “Originally, I hated it—‘Let’s do a version in the L.A. Lakers’ colors!’ ” He laughed. “ ‘Great. Purple and yellow. Fantastic.’ ”
To make it a full New Yorker weekend, here’s a longread from Michael Pollan, best known for his book Omnivore’s Dilemma, on the reopened research on the potential therapeutic uses of psychedelics. While we’re on Pollan it’s worth repeating his advice from Food Rules, “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”
Since it’s Valentine’s day, here’s a little humor from the New Yorker’s Hallie Cantor: What I Imagine My Boyfriend’s Ex-Girlfriends Are Doing Right Now. (That the character is named Matt is completely coincidental.)
Shocked and dismayed this morning on the news that David Carr passed last night after collapsing in the New York Times newsroom, where he was working into the evening. If you’re not familiar with his work or legacy, these links on Mediagazer are a good start.
Amazing Dance
https://vimeo.com/118946875
Incredible music (“Take Me To Church” by Hozier), incredible artist (the dancer, Sergei Polunin), and incredible photographer / director (David LaChapelle).
I had the great fun the other week of hanging with Tim Ferriss on his podcast, an episode he titled Matt Mullenweg on Polyphasic Sleep, Tequila, and Building Billion-Dollar Companies. His previous guest was Arnold Schwarzenegger (!) and if you dig into the podcast archives there are some really amazing episodes, I’m working my way through them now.
There’s a relatively new site called Fusion.net that is definitely worth checking out, it’s already full of great articles and they’re starting to climb up the Techmeme Leaderboard. They run on WordPress.com VIP.