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. 🙂
Aside Archives
I was reminded today of the profound marketing influence of Kathy Sierra, who was a pretty prolific blogger and speaker back in the day. I would summarize her thesis as such: Your best marketing and communication should talk about how you make your users awesome, not how you’re awesome. If you’d like to check out some of her talks, she spoke at WordCamp in 2008, at Business of Software in 2013, and at Mind the Product in 2015.
It’s so exciting to see what the creative minds like Nick Hamze or Tammie Lister are doing with Automattic’s AI vibe coding tool, Telex. Tammie is doing a Blocktober, a block every day this month of October, you should follow along.
If you’re not playing music while you’re working, you’re missing out. It’s incredible how sounds can transform how our brain works. You can, on tap, put yourself into a different mode of being with music; you can change your drive, motivation, mood, and more. There are some apps that have started to hack this, such as Endel, which can generate music programmatically in a very Brian Eno-like way. I’ve been a fan and user of theirs since 2020. I also love the Lofi Girl. On your Sonos you can actually stream Focus @ Will, which is another attempt, and I have a subscription there. My favorite is Endel, though, so if you’re only going to try one, try that one.
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 KĂĽbler-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.
It’s been a busy (and tragic) week but one of the more interesting things to launch was the Really Simple Licensing standard. I have a lot of scars from the web standards wars, so I’m hesitant to dive back in, but this is from a lot of the early Web 2.0 people, as TechCrunch writes about.
As it happens, James LePage of Automattic has spun up a WordPress plugin for it, so that was fast. Now the thing to figure out is distribution and adoption.
It’s New Apple Stuff day, so the headlines are being dominated by that, but it’s worth taking a step back and paying homage to the site that has been the front page of tech news for two decades now, Techmeme. I’ve been a daily visitor since it started, and I appreciate how they pair the algorithm with a light human touch to provide a wide overview. (WordPress-powered!) Fred Vogelstein at Crazy Stupid Tech has a great review of how Techmeme started and evolved.
A few interesting reads or listens:
- The Next Thing You Smell Could Ruin Your Life, a deep dive into chemical sensitivity and toxicant-induced loss of tolerance, or TILT, by Lexi Pandell (WordPress!) at Wired.
- IRL Brain Rot and the Lure of the Labubu, by Kyle Chayka at New Yorker.
- Simon Willison’s Lethal Trifecta talk, on the myriad security issues that arise when combining LLMs, prompt injection, MCPs, and more.
- Daniel Stenberg, a lead developer of the open source utility Curl, talks at FrOSCon about how AI reports are gumming up their security workflows. (YouTube, 53 minutes.)
- Daniel again (on his WordPress-powered blog) discusses a version of their maker/taker problem, specifically the 47 car brands that use Curl but none that sponsor it.
- Fernando Borretti’s Notes on Managing ADHD.
- Good Taste Is More Important Than Ever, by Nitin Nohria in The Atlantic.
The New Yorker is always good, but they’re having a bit of a victory lap as they celebrate their centennial. This article on the vaunted fact-checkers is such a delight, with so many in-jokes and back references it’s hard to keep track.
When I started WordPress, I wrote down five publications that I hoped someday we’d make software so good they’d adopt it. The New Yorker is one of them. If you enjoy words that make your brain tingle, make sure to also follow Automattic’s publications, Longreads and Atavist.
It’s a busy speaking season! I just spoke at the Intelligent Change summit, and will be at SaaStock in Austin on May 14, SXSW London, on June 4, Brilliant Minds in Stockholm, and WordCamp EU in Basel, Switzerland, on June 7.
The long-anticipated “Big Sky” AI site builder on WordPress.com went live today. It combines several models and can create logos, site designs, typography, color schemes, and content. It’s an entirely new way to interact with and edit a brand-new or existing WordPress site. This AI agent will make WordPress accessible to an entirely new generation and class of customers, and it will be a power tool for professionals to do things in minutes that used to take them hours.
It’s so funny that my random re-engagement with Radiohead re-emergence coincides with them doing a new entity that might mean something. I did a poll on Twitter and people preferred OK Computer to Kid A 78%!
Grok told me: “The band has recently registered a new limited liability partnership (LLP) named RHEUK25, which includes all five members—Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Colin Greenwood, Ed O’Brien, and Philip Selway. This move is notable because Radiohead has historically created similar business entities before announcing new albums, tours, or reissues.”
With the world changing so quickly, it’s hard to find alpha, but the best way is by following the brightest thinkers. This CNBC interview with Ray Dalio and Marc Benioff is good, but it’s way better if you go to the livestream about 25 minutes in and see the full discussion without the editing. You hear what these great thinkers actually think, rather than what an editor thought you’d enjoy. A little bit of friction gets you a lot more information.
In high school when 5% of your class doesn’t like you it’s like 3-5 people.
Running a company of 1,700+ when 5% doesn’t like you, that’s 85 people! That fills a room.
150k followers and 5% don’t like you now you have a small stadium of 7,500 people.
It’s still 5%.
The talented Felix Arntz has given an incredible Christmas gift to the WordPress community with his fast, light, and accessible Snow Fall plugin, which is live on this site and you can install on yours. I hope everyone is having a happy holidays! Search for “snow fall” in your plugin dashboard and install his version, make your site cozy for the holidays.
Very excited to share that we’ve acquired WPAI and the team is joining Automattic. They have some very cool products including CodeWP, AgentWP, and WP.chat.
It was a huge pain in the butt, because my mail-in ballot didn’t register properly, but I found a last-minute flight to Houston and this morning walked over to Congregation Emanu El and voted. It is our most sacred duty as a citizen. I encourage every American to vote.
There are two great Cloudflare-related stories published this weekend.
The first is Steven Levy’s incredible story about Tim Jenkin, who created a secure communication protocol for the African National Congress to overthrow the apartheid regime in South Africa. Cloudflare’s CTO, John Graham-Cumming, later helped break past the cryptography system’s lost password, which he blogged about with some technical detail here.
Second, my dear friend Om Malik published a great conversation with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince in his new newsletter Crazy Stupid Tech. Matthew and Om are influential thinkers to listen to, and their discussion contains a lot of interesting nuance about networks, censorship, and sovereignty.
It’s a tough pick, but I think Inside Out 2 might be my favorite Pixar movie. Just everything about it was just so well done. How they incorporated the different aesthetics, neuralinguistic concepts, everything. Chef’s kiss.