Check out Ben Thompson of Stratechery (one of the most valuable subscriptions) on The Benefits of Bubbles.
I’ve been following this cool open source project called Meshtastic, which is “An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devices.” I finally got some time to set it up tonight. It was super easy; you just flash the Meshtastic firmware in your browser to any of the compatible devices. I got a Heltec v3 device for $35 bucks on Amazon. (I’d link but it’s out of stock, and I think there’s a newer version.) Apparently, there are enough people running nodes that you can bounce a message from Portland to San Francisco! I love the idea of parallel to the internet networks, and I’ve been meaning to get a HAM license, but in the meantime, this looks pretty fun.
Two interesting AI updates this week: It’s nice to read Andrej Karpathy’s review of Tesla’s FSD v13, as someone who was involved with creating their first self-driving efforts. I’ve only experienced v12, so very excited to try out the latest generations soon. Ubiquitous self-driving will reshape cities and save countless lives.
On the heels of announcing a $40B investment in Texas, Google has launched Gemini 3. It’s still funny how every organization ships its org chart with the naming and accessibility of the various models it releases, but, more broadly, it is so exciting to see so much intellectual capital focused on this area, with the frontier labs leapfrogging each other every few months. Every model has a feel, and with Gemini 3 you start to feel the breadth of Google’s long investment in the space show up in interesting ways. Yet it can still be beaten in coding by an upstart like Anthropic with a fraction of Alphabet’s resources.
What a time to be alive. Witnessing multiple excellent organizations ship the best work of their career rapidly is invigorating and inspiring; the competition drives better results, and the diffusion of new approaches is rapid. The consumer surplus that we all benefit from is just beginning to be felt; we’re maybe 1 or 2% impacted in the economy so far.
Jeff Dean AI Club talk
There’s a new video with Jeff Dean talking at the Stanford AI Club, only 2k views so far, he’s half of the pair I blogged the other day.
SF WordPress Party
We’ve secured an amazing secret venue for State of the Word on Tuesday, but it has limited capacity in terms of people and has a lot of security hurdles to jump through to get in.
So to open things up to the community more, we’re going to activate my hacker/maker art warehouse, TinkerTendo, in the Dogpatch neighbourhood for a simulcast watch party. There will be some cool art from the Misalignment Museum there, great wifi, lots of power plugs and floor seating, a big projection screen and speakers and I think will be a great spot for WordPress folks to hang and network and co-work while in San Francisco. I’ll swing by after the talk to meet everyone as well.
If you want access, you can register via Meetup here.
Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon, boldly publishes his 2026 tech predictions. While you’re on his blog, take a moment to enjoy his essay, Development gets better with Age. Werner and I first crossed paths almost 20 years ago at tech conferences like GigaOm’s Structure, LeWeb, Future of Web Apps, O’Reilly Etech, and TheNextWeb. Though we don’t see each other often, I have enjoyed following his work and writing over the years, and it delights me that he’s still learning and sharing with the same vim and vigor I remember from when we first met. I think he might have been the first person to introduce me to the works of Richard Feynman through a BBC program.
It’s an interesting cultural moment right now: I think Bryan tweeted, many people are watching people catching balls, while others are watching Bryan Johnson tripping balls. Bryan Johnson, of Blueprint fame, is livestreaming taking a heroic dose of mushrooms. It’s been an interesting journey with the journalist Ashlee Vance, Naval Ravikant, David Friedberg, Marc Benioff, Genevieve Jurvetson, and now a DJ set by Grimes. I was hoping he’d be talking/interacting more with the guests, but it’s been more of a live commentary. Glad all the work Bryan is doing, as Genevieve said, to broaden the Overton window on this, really re-opening a lot of research originially started by the government and pharmacutical companies 50-60 years ago.
SoTW Eve
The State of the Word is tomorrow, and it’s so fun to see SF abuzz with WordPress open source energy. We’re doing a lot of firsts tomorrow, including the first release timed to the State of the Word, and we’ll have a good chunk of the release team there to push the button and bring WordPress 6.9 to the world.
We’ll also be crossing streams with another community: in the last ten minutes, we’ll join TBPN, the new must-watch daily tech show.
The art and activations are looking so good; it’s fun to see how everything evolves. Tokyo was so beautiful last year; I wasn’t sure how we’d top it, but the creativity of everyone coming together has sparked something new this year that I think is quite cool. We’re trying to honor our mission of democratizing publishing, making things that are powerful and capable, but also retain the flicker of art.
We’re also opening up TinkerTendo to the community. I was just there with a few dozen of the crew, and the vibes are so fun. If you’re in SF, definitely swing by and connect with the folks building the most open internet we can all enjoy.
Check out the livestream tomorrow, it’ll be a nice capstone to all we’ve built together this year.
Unifi 5G
One of my favorite hobbies is home networking and wifi, and once you go down that rabbit hole one of the best companies you can follow is Unifi. They’re such a cool company in so many ways, from having a 4-person board of directors, as a public stock. You can clearly tell they delight in bringing great design to hardware, in a Apple-like attention to detail.
They ship such cool products regularly, across an entire ecosystem that spans cameras to access control, it’s hard to describe everything they can cover, and they’ll even have random stuff that integrates into their system like EV charging or digital signage. I get as excited when they ship a new generation of hardware as I do for an iPhone launch.
But what’s exciting is that they just launched 5G bridging, with some fun devices that connect everything. I imagine someday I’ll have a Unifi puck hooked up to Starlink, providing amazing routing and connectivity anywhere in the world, powered by some PoE battery.
Happy Birthday Kinsey
Yesterday I had the great honor and privilege of attending a colleague’s 70th birthday party. You may not have heard his name before, but Kinsey Wilson has been at the center of shaping journalism with a movie-worthy career that started at the bottom as a crime reporter in Chicago, and has taken him to the highest echelons at NPR, the New York Times, and, most recently, we’ve been lucky to have him at Automattic.
Kinsey brings a journalistic curiosity and passion for finding truth, paired with a deep optimism and creativity for seeing around the corner for how technology can transform how we consume and produce media.
While his Wikipedia page or biography provides appetizers to some of what he’s done, Kinsey has led such a rich and beautiful life that any attempt to summarize it ends up being criminally reductive. The best you can hope for is to give a taste of his person through vignettes.
A beautiful snippet from the montage of accolades at his birthday was how Kinsey was someone you’d follow into battle. I’ve learned so much from seeing the empathy, candor, and integrity he brings to every team he leads, which engenders an incredible loyalty I’ve rarely seen in my career. When he left NPR, 62 colleagues made an “Infinite Kinsey” website of accolades.
That sort of thing is rare, and it’s been an honor and a privilege to work alongside him to democratize publishing.
One of those colleagues, Elise Hu, introduced us while he was at the New York Times and while my intention when I first met him was to get more WordPress at the Times, my imagination was sparked by thinking of how he could bring his experience to help shape WordPress and Automattic, hence my pivot into recruiting him.
Kinsey’s impact on journalism (and podcasting!) at NPR and New York Times is easy to understand, but less well-known is how he came into Automattic and got deep into understanding WordPress and seeing it as a platform that could enable the newsrooms and journalists to accomplish their mission in a more efficient way with the project he leads, Newspack.
He’s a fierce steward of the Fourth Estate.
Newspack and its team’s close relationship to customers invents solutions on top of WordPress that delight its users and percolate and influence everything we do at Automattic. They’re one of the teams that sets the bar for others in the company.
To Kinsey, I’ll leave you with a quote from one of my other inspirations, Charlie Munger, who at the tender age of 99 shared a wish with a visitor, “Oh, to be 86 again.”
I’ll try not to be too tech-bro optimist and say that 70 is the new 40, but I look forward to seeing the ripples that you have on the future of publishing for many years to come.
A more accurate framing would be that Fizzy is source available. You can read it, run it, and modify it. But DHH’s company is keeping the SaaS rights because they want to be able to build a sustainable business. That is defensible and generous, but it is not open source.
Dries Buytaert follows up on my response to DHH with ‘Source available’ is not open source (and that’s okay).
Tumblr has a fun 2025 in review, and if you’re a Pocket Casts user open the app to see all your stats for your listening this year.
The colors here have now gone blue for winter, and snow has started, thanks to the excellent Snow Fall plugin. I also wanted to congratulate Wealthfront on their IPO. Many on their team have been friends or advisors over the years, from David Fortunato responding to my email about their WordPress blog being on an old version when they launched, to the amazing Adam Nash who teaches CS 007 Personal Finance for Engineers at Stanford, and he now runs the awesome Daffy donor-advised tax fund startup. I was an early customer, and even on their homepage as a testimonial in 2011, Audrey Capital has been an investor since 2013 and if you sign up with this link we both get 5k extra managed for free.
Apple iWeb
The new X/Twitter algorithim is hard to predict, but I’ve had one go viral with over a million views now, a quote-tweet of a cool demo video of Apple’s website builder from 2009, with themes and blog support and everything. Interesting to compare its interface to Gutenberg and WordPress today.
For the video to play on the webpage, you have to visit in Safari.
The Wall Street Journal has a fun article about the Nex Playground, The Hottest Toy of the Year Is Made by a Tech Startup You’ve Never Heard Of. It’s a very fun way to game with friends and stay active, so afterward you have that same great feeling like after playing a sport. I think this is the first time one of Audrey Capital’s companies (we invested when it was the Homecourt app) is the hot Christmas item. Here’s it on Amazon, though it looks like it doesn’t ship before Christmas right now.
The writer Aadil Pickle has a great profile of one of my favorite hackers, “Training the Idea Muscle” on Riley Walz. Riley epitomizes the term “high agency,” and I’ve been continually impressed with his ability to rapidly code novel ideas and interfaces on top of public or reverse-engineered data. He’s a hacker, artist, and provocateur.
I’m enjoying this slower time of the year, and it looks like this will be the warmest Christmas I can remember in Houston; it was 80° F today! Makes me appreciate what Christmas in the southern hemisphere must be like.
Two interesting posts today, first is Nick Hamze, who ponders the case on his delightfully avant-garde site for how WordPress fits in when everything is coded up on a whim, Nobody Rips Out the Plumbing.
Separately, I was delighted to see that legendary investor Brad Feld has hooked up Claude Code to post to his WordPress site, which hammers in Nick’s point that when you can use these tools on top of existing infrastructure, you get a much stronger foundation than imagining everything from scratch.
Boris Cherny
I really enjoyed this conversation with the creator of Claude Code.
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
30 years a 1 month later, it seems like an apt time to revisit John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. The poetry is amazing.
Popping Bottles
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.