I just got off stage from the great dev/ai/nyc event with John Borthwick, we had a wide-ranging discussion that we’ll post online soon. We had hundreds of people in the room and hundreds on the waitlist… the energy in NYC is electric!
As a few recommendations from the event, I recommended revisiting the movie Her and Iain M. Banks Culture series, John recommended The MANIAC about John von Neumann, which I’ll add to my reading queue now.
While there is much to celebrate in WordPress sometimes we must also mourn.
In a horribly tragic incident, Zeel Thakkar, a WordPress contributor and Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship 2025 recipient, passed away on stage at WordCamp Surat. WordCamp Asia has written a beautiful memorial to her. She will be forever on our Remembers page.
We’re celebrating Thanksgiving this year with my sister Charleen in Austin, and it’s no surprise there’s a great Meshtastic community here!
If you haven’t seen it, The Thinking Game documentary is excellent, and available for free on YouTube.
You have to buy it, but the Kanye documentary In Whose Name is also pretty fascinating. (I first blogged about Kanye in 2007, discussing PHP’s botched version 4 to 5 upgrade.)
They’re both long reads, but worthwhile.
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.
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.
Auto-imported from old gallery:
For the Japanese WordPress community, I have planted a special Wapuu at the coolest spot in Niseko, Bar Gyu, aka the refrigerator door bar.
Now on the handle you’ll find a special surprise. Anyone recognize which WordCamp it’s from?
Ioanna and Hisashi run one of the coolest bars in the world; it’s been on my bucket list to visit. Hisashi is a big jazz fan, he even gifted me two records from a Japanese jazz pianist in Sapporo called Ryo Fukui.
I can’t wait to play these in San Francisco, where I have a Shindo Laboratory vinyl setup. (Pics from visiting Shindo Labs in 2009.) Some more snaps from the town since I haven’t done much PhotoMatting in a while.
I actually didn’t ski this trip despite the outfit because WordPress and Automattic had too much interesting stuff going on. So I’ll have to return to experience the famous snow of Niseko. And if you’re ever in the area, definitely make the trip to check out Bar Gyu! Maybe drop another WordPress sticker on the door.
Toni Schneider, the CEO of Automattic, writes 5 reasons why your company should be distributed.
Liane’s birthday dinner at the SLS Hotel in Los Angeles and a bar (name?) afterward.
First, I want to say how great the jazz scene is in New York. I caught a little Latin at my go-to Guantanamera last night, but the band seemed to be phoning it in a bit, so I walked over to Dizzy’s and heard an amazing big band performance by the Diva all-women Jass Orchestra, they had Clint Holmes leading vocals and I got Frank Sinatra / Count Basie vibes, so great to see such a tight big band.
In WordPress, last week it was fun to see the company some call parasitic WP Engine acquire WPackagist. So a popular way to use WordPress with Composer, previously maintained by an awesome co-op agency in London, was now in the clutches of a company using its capital advantage to try to openwash its alleged bad behavior, probably in a process that wasn’t ideal for the sellers.
Four days later, an awesome independent organization roots.io released WP Composer (renamed to WP Packages, in OpenClaw fashion) with 17x faster cold resolves than WPackagist. Check out their comparison page.
It’s beautiful to see how resilient and nimble the antibodies in the WordPress community are. Major hat tip to Ben Word.
In another type of antibody, Sid Sijbrandi, whom I previously talked about going into founder mode on his cancer, gave an incredible presentation at the Open AI Forum about how he ran a bunch of N-of-1 experiments and therapies to cure his terminal osteosarcoma. He’s also open-sourced 25TB of his data for cancer research. Incredible!
If you want to see the future of health care, give Sid’s presentation a watch.
When I wrote about starting a bank, aka SafeBank, I was overwhelmed by the feedback and at least once a week since then I’ve been contacted by someone working on the idea. One I hadn’t heard of yet though is BankSimple, which I noticed yesterday because Alex Payne is leaving Twitter to work on it. I’m fully focused on WordPress and Automattic so can’t be involved with any new ventures as more than an advisor, but I’m glad smart people are tackling the problem and I hope to have an account at one (or more) someday.
A few pictures of my old apartment to chronicle its state before the move, and some pre-moved-in photos of the new place.
Financial Times: Given the choice, how much choice would you like? A refutation of the “so-called paradox of choice [that] is one of the most overrated and incorrectly cited results in the social sciences” according to Tyler Cowen. Hat tip: Ryan Holiday in Tim’s comments.
As I mentioned the other day, I’m going to Montreal for about a month and a half, maybe two months. I posted to my moblog about packing and Hanni asked what the final manifest would look like. Here is a breakdown of everything I’m taking for the 1.5-2 month trip, which is about 4x what I normally travel with.
JP Mangalindan interviews Jeff Bezos for Fortune. (WP.com-hosted article.)
I was on the WordPress Podcast a few weeks ago and they just posted the first segment. Always fun talking to Joost and Frederick!
The story has completely broken now (TechCrunch, GigaOM, NY Times) that Six Apart is being is being acquired by VideoEgg, and the combined entities are going to be called Say Media and focus on advertising. This is bittersweet news as Six Apart, with their platforms, has always been Automattic’s and WordPress’s most direct competitor, with Movable Type equivalent to WordPress.org, Typepad (and Livejournal and Vox) to WordPress.com, Typepad anti-spam to Akismet, Typepad Connect to IntenseDebate. I’ve always thought of them like our big brother — they created the marketplace and introduced the concept of blogs to countless people, and still to this day employ 2-3x the number of people at Automattic. (And, it follows, probably do more revenue than us.) I remember many aspects of Six Apart’s history vividly: Anil joining Six Apart in 2003. The 3.0 licensing change and Mark Pilgrim’s Freedom 0 essay, a few weeks later when I first met Ben and Mena on my first trip to San Francisco, visiting Six Apart’s old old digs in an office park somewhere. They had clocks on their walls where their different employees were and I thought that was the coolest thing. Jay Allen joining MT. Typekey launch! The Salon feature. The acquisition of Livejournal. Yadis née OpenID. Their big series B. Mena’s TED Talk. Project Comet which launched as Vox and frankly had me freak out. Acquisition of Rojo (with Chris Alden later becomeing 6A’s CEO). Typepad introducing Pages. Livejournal sold to SUP. The tift we got into around WordPress 2.5. On stage with Steve Jobs at launch of app store. Buying Pownce. (Some of this is out of order.) About a year ago something changed and the Typepad (and Blogger) team really started to hit a groove and seemed to be launching significant, well thought out, and social features on a near-weekly basis. On a feature-for-feature basis the Big Three are closer than they’ve ever been. The tech press is fickle and these launches get almost no coverage, but for each platform’s respective users they’ve been really meaningful. The new company is not getting out of the platform business. Their position is incredibly strong in Japan and I get the sense that’s where the center of gravity for Movable Type development has been for a while. But their primary focus (and revenue) is shifting, and I think that is great for the market as a whole. I would be really sad if Adsense continues to be the best best the world can come up with with regards to advertising on blogs, and now in Say you have the quiet execution monster of Videoegg combined with some of the folks who understand blogging better than anyone else in the world, and my hope is that Automattic’s work with dovetail with Say’s more than ever. VideoEgg, for now, is actually a great example of a site using WordPress as a CMS. (View its source.)
Adam Savage of Mythbusters talks about how he solves problems, with an entertaining Q&A afterward. Hat tip: Paul Kedrosky.