Category Archives: Personal

Life updates, reflections, and everything that doesn’t fit neatly into another category.

Om Links

Personal

There has been a lot of excitement about the OmFest idea. If you’d like to attend or contribute, please fill out this form as soon as possible so we can gauge the type of venue we need.

Update: ThankYouOm.com from Michael Galpert pulls together all the tweets, Instagram posts, and blog posts into a beautiful site.

It’s truly a testament to how Om lived life to see the outpouring of remembrances in comments on the post and around the web on Techmeme.

I do wish he had been more public earlier in his health journey. You never know what you’ll learn. I’ll take that as a lesson for myself if I’m ever in a similar situation.

There have been some great long-form writings about Om:

I know I’m missing a ton, I’ll update the above. I also added a few more vignettes and pictures to the last post.

All Roads Lead to Om

Personal

Yesterday, my best friend and brother from another mother, Om Malik, passed away.

They say that blood is thicker than water, and what we had was way thicker than blood. — Bob Weir

Om’s request was for a small family prayer ceremony. In mourning, that will be all there is. In celebration and tribute, I love that everyone is sharing their Om stories online, like the writing and photography Christopher Michel shared, which very much embody the OG spirit of blogging that Om pioneered.

A Renaissance Man

I knew Om contained multitudes, but sitting by his side these last few weeks, I’ve been amazed to learn how many deep and completely separate communities he was part of. He meant so much to so many, in so many different ways.

Om loved putting on a good conference, and I’d like to celebrate his life with an awesome event on September 29, 2026 (his 60th) in San Francisco, like an OmFest. (Update: Sign up here!) I’ll find a space where every community from the many facets of Om can come together. In the spirit of Open Source and co-creation, we can have some booths, flash talks, a gallery of his photography, pen showcase, and whatever other fun ideas people want to contribute. I can’t wait for the beautiful collision of his tech / journalism / Indian party planner / pen / coffee / shoes / photography circles, and probably some niches I couldn’t even imagine.

A Few Vignettes

I have so much to say about Om, but right now I’m working on moderating comments and keeping his website tip-top, so here are a few snippets:

Fundamentally, Om was a lover of humanity. He became a fast “regular” everywhere he went. He wouldn’t just buy coffee, he would also learn the name and story of every barista, the dogs and people in South Park. His deep curiosity and respect weren’t just for the fine and famous. It extended to every soul that crossed his path. His encyclopedic knowledge and photographic memory created connections not just in San Francisco, but all around the world wherever we traveled. (I need to pull the stats, but we went to five continents together, including Antarctica.)

He loved people and their stories. 

Om and I were an odd couple. We met online through forums and email because Om was one of the earliest adopters of WordPress. We finally met in person in 2004 when I was 20 and he was 38. He connected me to the first investors I ever spoke to, Phil Black, who formed True Ventures, and Tony Conrad, and introduced me to Toni Schneider, my business soul mate, who became like a co-founder as the CEO of Automattic in our first 8 years.

And of course on the internet. I don’t know how we would count, but I would guess Om read at least 1 or 2% of the whole thing.

Om was a voracious learner. I was there when he first used chopsticks, and only a few months later, he knew every sushi restaurant in San Francisco and exactly what he liked at each.

Om is probably in the top ten in the world for finding things incredibly early. That’s why he has the best usernames! How does one guy get the @om username on WordPress.com in 2005 (user ID 719), Twitter in 2006, Instagram in 2010? The first WordPress meetup was at Chaat Cafe (now Corner) in 2005, 8 people showed up, and Om was one of them.

One of the biggest lessons I learned from Om is the deep appreciation of craft. When he took an interest in photography or pens, he would somehow find his way to the most obscure, highest-quality expression of that form. “What Would Om Want?” is a question I will always ponder. I want to craft products that would make Om proud.

Om’s last word was “love.”

In a jitney on our trip to India in 2009
The day Om became a US citizen
In NYC with the True crew, 2008
Matching dyed blonde hair, 2016
With a golden heart, 2025

Nothing Gold Can Stay, by Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Bay Lights are Back!

Art, Personal

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 around, and it’s such an honor to see them relit now with better technology and new programming from the amazing artist Leo Villareal.

Whether you’re looking down at the lights from a penthouse or top office, or up at them from the water along the Embarcadero, this is truly an art project that illuminates the soul of everyone in San Francisco, radically accessible and open.

I’ve heard they’re still raising around 500k to close out the project. You can dedicate a light here for someone special. I’m going to do one to honor my father, who passed in 2016. If you’d like to be part of San Francisco’s boom loop and have a pleasant twinkle of enlightenment every time you see the bridge, I encourage you to donate as well!

If you live somewhere with a view of the bridge, think of it as buying a piece of art you’ll enjoy every night, and also having that warm feeling of being part of making San Francisco more beautiful for everyone.

I’m on the board of Illuminate, which only has two full-time employees, and I’ve never seen another non-profit generate so much public joy and benefit with so few people. They’re also behind the Golden Mile and the live music at the Golden Gate Bandshell.

Please consider making a one-time donation of a light, which is anywhere from $100 to $2,500, or become a recurring member of the Illuminate Tribe, or if you are really part of making San Francisco better consider being an Illuminary at 50k/yr.

Also, thank you to all the WordPress community members who have done so much to support this project and help them fundraise and improve their website. It’s such a great example of the WordPress open source spirit and ethos.

San Francisco is so back! Let’s go!

Song Creation

Design, Music, Personal, Travel, Video, WordPress

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 with WordPresser Blake Bertuccelli-Booth to catch a set by Jason Marsalis at Snug Harbor, featuring some great originals and surprising arrangements of Maroon 5’s “This Love” and the music from the Bejeweled Butterflies game. Great artists find inspiration everywhere.

Afterward, we went to see my friend Troy, aka Trombone Shorty, at his studio. (Troy and I met when we both received the Heinz Award in 2016.) He was with Silkk the Shocker and Reggie Nicholas Jr., working on beats and songs. Though I was there for just a short while, it was inspiring to see the act of musical creation.

A few days ago, Ed Sheeran went on the new Benny Blanco / Lil Dicky / Kristin Podcast Friends Keep Secrets. I haven’t watched the entire episode, but the twenty minutes from about 1:09 to the end where Ed and Benny come up with a new song I’ve seen 4 times now, it’s magical. Check it out, it’s one of the coolest things you’ll see this week.

I’ve seen Ed Sheeran loop his songs live, but this act of creation is very special, and I love the dynamic between him and Benny. It reminds me of that magical moment in Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary where you see Paul McCartney and the band come up with the idea for the classic song Get Back.

Popping Bottles

Ideas, Personal

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 effervescence. An elixir that comes out with sparklers but makes you feel great with nootropics not hungover. Priced at hundreds of dollars retail so thousands at a club. It could even be a cold chain, with the freshest ingredients that need to be preserved.

Let’s do some turmeric-ginger-cayenne shots and get crunk.

Gone (Almost) Phishin’

Personal, Tech, ,

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. This came out of nowhere; I hadn’t done anything to elicit it. I even had Lockdown Mode running on all my devices. It didn’t matter. Someone was spamming Apple’s legitimate password reset flow against my account—a technique Krebs documented back in 2024. I dismissed the prompts, but the stage was set.

What made the attack impressive was the next move: The scammers actually contacted Apple Support themselves, pretending to be me, and opened a real case claiming I’d lost my phone and needed to update my number. That generated a real case ID, and triggered real Apple emails to my inbox, properly signed, from Apple’s actual servers. These were legitimate; no filter on earth could have caught them.

Then “Alexander from Apple Support” called. He was calm, knowledgeable, and careful. His first moves were solid security advice: check your account, verify nothing’s changed, consider updating your password. He was so good that I actually thanked him for being excellent at his job.

That, of course, was when he moved into the next phase of the attack.

He texted me a link to review and cancel the “pending request.” The site, audit-apple.com, was a pixel-perfect Apple replica, and displayed the exact case ID from the real emails I’d just received. There was even a fake chat transcript of the scammers’ actual conversation with Apple, presented back to me as evidence of the attack against my account. At the bottom of the page was a Sign in with Apple button that he told me to use.

I started poking at the page and noticed I could enter any case ID and get the same result. Nothing was being validated. It was all theater.

“This is really good,” I told Alexander. “This is obviously phishing. So tell me about the scam.”

Silence. *Click*.

Once I’d suspected what was happening, I’d started recording the call, so I was able to save a good chunk of it, which Jamie Marsland used to make a video about the encounter. You can hear for yourself exactly how convincing “Alexander” was.

So let my almost-disaster help you avoid your own. Remember these rules.

  • Don’t approve any password-reset prompts—those are the first part of the attack. Do not pass Go, just head directly to your Apple ID settings. 
  • Apple will never call you first. 
  • When you get an email from Apple—or, really, anyone telling you to complete a digital security measure—check the URL they’re trying to send you to. Apple Support lives on apple.com and getsupport.apple.com, nowhere else.

After all, the best protection is knowing what this looks like before it happens.

Thank you to Peter Rubin and Jamie Marsland for putting this all together.

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 of the first and best examples of self-modifying software that contours to your brain. With vibe coding, we may get back to that space where everyone’s personal setup is like a crazy specific Emacs config file.

Claude & Sonos

AI, Audrey, Humor, Personal, Tech

Tonight was one of my most surreal Claude Code Sundays. To make a long story short, I pointed Claude Code at my Sonos setup in Houston: “All 29 Sonos speakers were running on WiFi with SonosNet completely disabled. They had accumulated ~89 million dropped packets across the system. That packet loss is why groups kept falling apart – Sonos grouping requires tight sync between speakers, and the WiFi was too congested to deliver it.”

We had a wild rollercoaster where at one point it bricked several of my devices (green LED), got mixed up on some groupings being a home theater, and sent me all around the house plugging things in to ethernet or not. At one point, I was certain I’d have to redo everything from scratch. Then we came back and everything worked, I asked, “What song should we play to celebrate this accomplishment?”

Ha – has to be “The Chain” by Fleetwood Mac. Seems fitting given we just spent the evening fixing one. Want me to queue it up on the Gym/Office?

It then failed horribly at trying to play that song, then, because it thought the speakers were re-meshing, it tried to play it on outdoor speakers, which would have surprised my neighbors at midnight. I ended up picking the song manually, and I must say it’s quite nice. I see why it’s easy to fall in love with these things, because the variable positive reinforcement slot machine cowboy hacking is honestly more fun than if it had just gotten it right on the first try.

Think back to February 2020.

If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a few people talking about a virus spreading overseas. But most of us weren’t paying close attention. The stock market was doing great, your kids were in school, you were going to restaurants and shaking hands and planning trips. If someone told you they were stockpiling toilet paper you would have thought they’d been spending too much time on a weird corner of the internet. Then, over the course of about three weeks, the entire world changed. Your office closed, your kids came home, and life rearranged itself into something you wouldn’t have believed if you’d described it to yourself a month earlier.

Matt Shumer has written the post about this AI inflection point I wanted to write and send to friends, so I’m just gonna link to his and suggest that you read it. Hat tip: Toni.

The only thing I’d add is that there will be more demand for some of these things being automated, and tremendous consumer surplus created, so I think my view is a bit rosier than the tone this leaves you with.

Leadership at the Peak

Automattic, Design, Education, Personal

I want to start by thanking the Automattic board, and in particular General (Ret.) Ann Dunwoody, for encouraging me to step away from the endless work of being CEO of Automattic to focus on training and development. Ann, as one of this generation’s great leaders, did it herself before recommending it. She took the course shortly after becoming a four-star.

The course was Leadership at the Peak from the Center for Creative Leadership, a nonprofit founded in 1970 by the family that invented Vicks VapoRub.

As I reflect on all the corporate training I’ve had, from the first class they made me take at CNET 22 years ago because my title had manager in it, to the workshops or intensive CEO things I’ve been lucky enough to be exposed to later, there’s one thing that really stands clear: You get out of any program what you put into it.

If you come in skeptical, distracted, or resentful, even if golden information is being dropped, it will bounce off you like water on a duck. You have to put yourself in a state of mind of extreme openness and enthusiasm, and take an earnest try at what the facilitators have designed and planned, no matter how cheesy, corny, obvious, or silly it might seem. Remember, their intention is for you to get something out of this, and they’ve done it before. 

Holding that state of openness is also a catalyst for the teacher; they light up when students are willing to trust the process, and they’ll give you their very best. I originally titled this post “Complete Surrender” because that extreme statement helps me step out of the part of my mind that is always trying to challenge authority, remix conventions, or think I’m cleverer than others.

These programs are usually expensive, not just in dollars but in time you have to clear from other commitments, so don’t squander it by staying in your default modes of checking work, news, etc. Create a space for yourself to reflect, learn, and grow. It’s rare and precious.

The caveat, of course, is to choose your teachers well. CCL has been doing this since the 70s; they’ve figured a few things out. They’re Lindy. All of these programs change and evolve over time; they’re not carved in stone, but it’s particularly interesting to see what survives when something has been going on for a long time.

I’m also not religious about these things. I think of them as mental models that are new arrows in your quiver. You can use them as is, or, even better, mix them with something else you’ve learned to create something more useful and personalized to your context. The more you have, the more sturdy your latticework of understanding is, and the more robust your information framework will be when you encounter something novel.

There’s also some luck in the group; a bad apple can throw off the week for everyone. My cohort had people from a variety of industries like healthcare, paper products, car rentals, and business process outsourcing from all around the world, including Egypt, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and all across the US. It would have been easy for people to be guarded, but everyone really leaned in. I think we had so little network overlap that people felt more comfortable opening up. And, of course, it was endlessly fascinating to learn about the challenges across vastly different industries, as well as the universal commonalities that arise whenever you try to vector a group of humans towards a common goal.

One of the inspirations I drew from Ann’s book, A Higher Standard, was the extent to which the Army invests in training and development, sometimes sending people to programs for years before they move into a new role. They’re always thinking about the next generation.

A big theme for me in 2026 is learning: Last month at Automattic, we did our first two-week in-person AI Enablement intensive at our Noho Space, and the feedback was incredible. On the WordPress side, this year we’ll have thousands of college students enroll in our new WordPress Credits program to earn credits toward their degrees. The number of cities where WP meetups are held is on track to double; it’s clear people are hungry for opportunities to learn and grow.

People have been asking my takeaways from the course, and it’s been hard to summarize, but I came away with big lessons on how my comfortable and improvisational presentation style can come off as not having a solid plan or being prepared, the importance of exercise and nutrition to have the energy you need as a leader, and the importance of being on time and what that signals to others. Great feedback is a gift and a mirror, allowing you to see things you might miss about how you show up to others. In the course, we made plans, and since then, I’ve been experimenting with integrating these learnings and others into my day-to-day. I feel like it’s really had an impact.

So in closing, when you’re a busy executive, there’s never a good time to step away for a week, but I highly encourage every leader to at least once a year invest in themselves and let your colleagues and loved ones know that for a few days you’ll be really focused on a departure from your quotidian day-to-day and work on growth. It’s hard but worth it.

What a Week

AI, Personal

There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen

No attribution, but fun Quote Investigator dive.

Sorry for dropping off the daily blogging train; it just turned out to be a week of pleasant surprises and life-changing events. I’ll share with y’all the second-most exciting one. 

I know I’ve been pushing you all to learn the AI coding stuff as deeply as possible, and I have been doing some myself, my favorite a few years ago, a script to count when we had too many words in a presentation slide, but I knew Claude Code was something different and better.

However, I fell into the trap of bookmarking and downloading tens of hours of Claude Code tutorials and not installing the thing itself. And work has been busy! My colleague Dave Martin was hosting an internal livestream. I joined late, then had to leave because an important call came in. I decided to forget it all, throwing caution to the wind, and just install Claude Code and play with it without reading anything.

The next 24-36 hours are a bit of a blur. I haven’t locked into a multi-day coding session fueled by energy drinks, sugar, and cheesy carbs since my early 20s! There were some interruptions for previous commitments, but I basically became addicted to the feeling of that steep learning curve. Every minor annoyance or workflow became an opportunity to create new software in languages I’d never touched before. 

It also really rewired my brain, even in how I talk. (Found myself saying “thinking” after a colleague’s question. 😂) I’m thinking about problems in a much more structured manner now, how to divide and chunk tasks, and provide appropriate context and skills. I really do feel like my brain is being terraformed a bit.

So far I’ve written scripts or apps for grabbing daily summaries from my calendar, spinning up new projects and syncing them with Github, switching between Brave tabs better, an app to search and launch Brave tabs quickly…

Did you know that macOS Preview regressed and no longer lets you export a single page of a PDF as an image? I have an app that does that. What do I do with it? Do I open source it? Am I a Mac App developer now? Do I want to support this for other people forever? Should I even put it in source control? Or publish a set of tests and prompts, as Drew Brenig did with whenwords.

It’s a strange and wonderful time to be a lover of software and computers. A little bit of code goes a long way. I’m at a CCL leadership training this week so offline during the days and exhausted at night but I gotta keep all those little bots running.

Cancer Founder Mode

Audrey, Friends, Health, Personal

Sid Sijbrandi, a friend and a former CEO of Gitlab, has started to share some of the story of his journey with cancer.

Manager mode assumes that existing systems will surface the best options. When I was first diagnosed with cancer in 2022, I delegated the crucial analyses and decisions about my care to others. In late 2024, when my cancer reappeared and my doctors told me I had exhausted the standard of care and there were no trials for my situation, I realized that assumption might, quite literally, kill me. Founder Mode was my only option.

Founder Mode meant going deep on every diagnostic and treatment option. It meant assembling a team of physicians and scientists to work from first principles to understand what was possible beyond standard protocols. Together, we paved new roads to access the very cutting edge of science and technology. Today, thanks to the efforts of many people around the world and the support of my wife Karen, I currently have no evidence of disease.

Sid was already very inspiring before this journey, and this is especially impressive. Elliot Hershberg has the full story and analysis, including some predictions for the future of cancer treatment.

A Better Writer

Humor, Personal

RIP Scott Adams. Early Dilbert was the first cartoon I fell in love with, and early dilbert.com was one of the first websites I remember visiting. My dad would print out cartoons and put them on his cubicle wall. Between the Dilbert comics, books, 2600, and Wired, I was swimming between what felt like a radical transgressive world online and the reality of my dad putting on a suit and tie every day and working a giant cubicle farm programming computers.

It’s probably underappreciated how Dilbert (and Office Space) made millions of better managers by making fun and teaching people what not to do.

Scott could put in a few words things that could transform the way you think, reframe the world. One of his classics, from a now-gone Typepad blog, was The Day You Became A Better Writer, which I’ll reproduce here:

I went from being a bad writer to a good writer after taking a one-day course in “business writing.” I couldn’t believe how simple it was. I’ll tell you the main tricks here so you don’t have to waste a day in class.

Business writing is about clarity and persuasion. The main technique is keeping things simple. Simple writing is persuasive. A good argument in five sentences will sway more people than a brilliant argument in a hundred sentences. Don’t fight it.

Simple means getting rid of extra words. Don’t write, “He was very happy” when you can write “He was happy.” You think the word “very” adds something. It doesn’t. Prune your sentences.

Humor writing is a lot like business writing. It needs to be simple. The main difference is in the choice of words. For humor, don’t say “drink” when you can say “swill.”

Your first sentence needs to grab the reader. Go back and read my first sentence to this post. I rewrote it a dozen times. It makes you curious. That’s the key.

Write short sentences. Avoid putting multiple thoughts in one sentence. Readers aren’t as smart as you’d think.

Learn how brains organize ideas. Readers comprehend “the boy hit the ball” quicker than “the ball was hit by the boy.” Both sentences mean the same, but it’s easier to imagine the object (the boy) before the action (the hitting). All brains work that way. (Notice I didn’t say, “That is the way all brains work”?)

That’s it. You just learned 80% of the rules of good writing. You’re welcome.

Powerful. Profound.

Scott also said some not-great things, as the obituary notes. I’ll share something I posted internally at Automattic.

When I was younger, I used to have a more binary view of people, but as I’ve grown, read a ton of biographies, seen the press cycles, and been lucky enough to meet some idols and villains, I’ve become much more comfortable taking everyone as a flawed human being.

I admire or learn from aspects, but that doesn’t mean I would 100% agree with everything. I don’t even 100% agree with my past self!

One thing you’ll note in a lot of biographies is that people who have accomplished great achievements often have flaws or mistakes in equal measure.

Take what lessons you like from people.

I love reading and writing about writing, and improving your writing is one of the best force multipliers for everything else you do in life. If you’d like to go further on this, the best book I’ve read on the subject is On Writing Well by William Zinsser. And if you want more Scott Adams, read this piece from his doppelgänger Scott Alexander.

Remembering Jesus Ornelas

Music, Personal

Today we honored the passing of Jesus Ornelas, the father of my friend Rene, whom I’ve known for 28 years now. At the service outpouring of love expressed in words, music, and presence was so powerful. Alongside his biological sons, I said a few words, which are as follows.

My memories of Mr. Ornelas begin with seeing him, without fail, drive Rene halfway across town twice a day to attend HSPVA to support his artistic calling, even though his own predilection was for handicraft. The tireless devotion of a father working to create a better life for his son.

I remember fondly when we would gather at Woodlawn, three houses on the same street, his sly smile and contentment seeing all of his family so close together. Gosh, looking back, we were so poor, but only in money. We were rich in love and family. My memories of those times are not what we lacked, but the abundance of what we had together, which was time, friendship, and some pretty darn good food.

Mrs. Ornelas, your love and devotion to your husband through these twenty one years of dementia is an inspiration to us all who love a partner and a testament to the human spirit. Su amor y devoción hacia su esposo a lo largo de estos veinte uno años de demencia son una inspiración para todos nosotros que amamos a una pareja y un testimonio del espíritu humano.

To Jesse, Eddie, and Rene, I will say that how you live as men is a testament to the example your father set. I can’t imagine how proud he must be looking down at this room, seeing how he came from such challenging conditions in Mexico to build a life for you all here in Houston and see every generation grow and prosper even more. Rene, I hope our fathers are together, cracking a beer and smiling as they look down on our lives.

Though his corporal form is no longer with us, everyone here will keep him alive by remembering and embodying his best qualities. We don’t need a bracelet to remind us What Would Jesus Do in those invisible acts of service for loved ones.

May his memory be a blessing to all of us, and let our actions, seen and unseen, honor his legacy.

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

Find My Update

Personal

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.

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

Personal, Travel

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.

Beware Unearned Wisdom

Essays, Personal

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.