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.

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.

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.

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.

On November 5^th at our Noho office the legendary John Borthwick (investor in Twitter, Tumblr, Buzzfeed, Digg, Venmo…) and I will have a conversation on the future of the Open Web and human-centered AI. Please join us!

The Atlantic November issue is lovely, focused on the American Revolution. I particularly enjoyed:

• The Myth of Mad King George, which gave a different more nuanced view of King George I didn’t have before or from the Hamilton musical.
• Why Did Benjamin Franklin’s Son Remain Loyal to the British? I was obsessed with with Ben Franklin’s Autobiography as a kid, he was an incredible self-made man who came from impossibly hard beginnings and had a profound impact on history. I think I originally read through Project Gutenberg on my first Handspring Visor. The article shows an entire huge part of his life that is missing from his Autobiography.
• What We Learned Filming The American Revolution is from Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt, who’ve come together with the challenging task of making a documentary from a time there were no photographs or videos. Ken Burns is one of my favorite documentarians, and the behind the scenes is very interesting.

So pick up a copy as you pass through an airport or by a newstand. I consider it a very worthwhile subscription. It might be better to read in print or through Apple News+ as their website a bit broken for me right now.

I don’t get sick very often, but when it catches up to me it hits like a freight train. Just trying to keep all the plates spinning while operating at 10% capacity, been sleeping a ton. Today was in some ways better, some ways worse than yesterday. I try to avoid hospitals and emergency care, as you wind up in their system, so I’m trying to ride this one out at home. Had to cancel a bunch of travel and conferences and meetings I was looking forward to this week. Really makes you appreciate and be grateful for good health — it’s a baseline for everything else and I’m blessed with it 99% of the time.

I have some “grand theories” of software engineering: I think there are two tribes of engineers that complexify things or simplify things, and they are in eternal conflict.

Complexify: Jamstack, headless, Contentstack, Contentful, DXP, DAM, micro-services.

Simplify: WordPress, Simplenote, Day One, djbdns, SQLite.

Not enough engineers have studied under the code of Daniel J. Bernstein.

Just last night I was re-watching Annie Hall to remember and honor Diane Keaton, and now the news that D’Angelo had passed. I’m writing this listening to Voodoo, one of the great albums of all time. That CD in my beater car in Houston was on constant rotation, the richness of the tracks— it’s an album you have to listen to in its entirety, it takes you on a journey, the way the tracks blend in to each other. Not ideal for the atomized world of songs being stand-alone.

D’Angelo was obviously a star, but one amazing thing about his bands is he brought so many people with him, so many amazing jazz musicians, including Roy Hargrove, Robert Glasper (HSPVA!), Chris Dave (HSPVA!), Kenny Garrett, Pino Palladino, Questlove… May his memory be a blessing.

Probably the most interesting thing on the internet today is Andrej Karpathy’s nanochat, “a minimal, from scratch, full-stack training/inference pipeline of a simple ChatGPT clone in a single, dependency-minimal codebase.” 8,000 lines of beautiful code, as Simon Willison notes. If you want to understand how LLMs work, study this. Andrej is a code poet.

In hacking news, Wired has an amazing article on intercepting geostationary satellite signals.

On Friday, we turned on something cool: every WordPress.com site now supports MCP. Right now this is read-only access to your site, because the S in MCP stands for Security, but you can already start to do some cool stuff with it.

Sorry everybody, my @photomatt on Twitter has been hacked, I’m trying to regain account access, but it is not currently in my control. Update: Thank you to the fine teams at X/Twitter and Nikita Bier, my account has been recovered. Just for future reference, I will never promote cryptocurrencies or similar investments. If you see anything from me or WordPress claiming that, be highly skeptical. Invest in open source, public stocks, and great companies like Automattic. 🙂

When my father passed unexpectedly, I was despondent. One thing I remember was the Amazon lovebomb I got from my high school girlfriend Sunaina Sondhi, five books to help me deal with the pain. Even a decade after we dated, books were her love language; in fact, she had given me my very first book about meditation when we were teenagers. I don’t recall what all the books were, but the two that really made a difference for me were Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s and David Kessler’s posthumous book On Grief and Grieving, and the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. Each allowed me to process and understand the emotions I was going through.