Aside Archives

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.

A nice new WordPress 6.6 is out, our 50th release, on the same day people are getting hit with huge bills from Webflow. I really enjoy working in Open Source. There is no more customer-centric license. There’s some really fun stuff cooking, too, I can’t wait to show y’all.

50 releases… wow. No matter what happens in the world, we’re just going to keep cranking. Three times a year. Relentlessly. A little better each time. Don’t believe me, just watch.

Illuminate has crossed the funding threshold it needed to actually kick off the project of bringing the Bay Lights back to San Francisco, as Heather Knight writes for the New York Times. The upgraded lights will be visible not just from San Francisco but also in Oakland, Treasure Island, Berkeley… all across the Bay. It’s felt like the lights have been the lumen-physical embodiment of San Francisco’s struggles: sparkling and inspiring at the start, then facing troubles, a trough of darkness, and now hope for something better sparked and on the horizon.

I’d love to get as many citizens and addresses in San Francisco as donors, however small, to round out the last bit of the funding, so that as many people as possible can feel the ownership and pride of making the city better. Back in January when I promoted this last it was on a terrible platform, it’s now been re-done by the GiveWP team to be totally native WordPress and a slick donation experience, easy to do on mobile and with Apple Pay. (Major kudos to Devin Walker there!) Please share the link to your friends, especially ones that see the bridge from their home, for $10 it’s the cheapest pro-social dopamine boost you can have every time you look at the bridge.

What if this VR is training our brains to compute in a different way? How we perceive our thoughts to train the models. We are reconfiguring our model of reality to process things in a way we couldn’t before.

If I were President for a day, the first thing I would do is instruct our national security to patch and secure every American technology company, as they are our gems in the world. I would burn every zero-day I had on a US company and help them patch it. The rest of the world would know our immense defense budget was now being used to secure our companies as well, as China does. Apple, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, Arista, Unifi, Qualcomm… I’m probably missing a few, they should all have the shield of our national security defense. Right now each company has to create their own defenses, and they are getting eaten and pillaged by foreign companies with state backing.

I just replied to an email from 2018. I am tragically, comically, behind on email. Because Automattic doesn’t use email, we use P2, it’s never been a priority for me. But I have been sloppy, careless, and derelict in my duty of answering emails. Apologies to you all. You’re going to get some weird, very late replies.

There’s fascinating and terrifying feature article about Facebook, Duterte, and the drug war in the Philippines, written by Davey Alba. My first trip there was actually to Davao, and having been to the country several times and met so many bloggers there it’s hard to imagine what’s described. There are definitely echoes of the Wired feature on Facebook and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. Both are good reminders that as technologists the tools we create can be used and leveraged in ways we wouldn’t imagine in our worst nightmares.

Brett Martin has an excellent longread in GQ, Houston Is the New Capital Of Southern Cool. I moved to San Francisco when I was 20, I hadn’t ever even been old enough to drink in Houston, but when I returned in my late twenties and really made it my home I was blown away at how much the city had changed in the time I had been away. Or maybe I just grew up enough to appreciate it. Regardless, Brett captures the verve and paradoxes of the city well.

 

I’m a huge fan of Mailchimp, but dang does the service get abused by folks aggressively opting you into mailing lists. I have a very early, very generic Gmail address that people put as a filler address into every possible service and it gets tens of thousands of list and spam mails. A good trick to find and unsubscribe from all the Mailchimp lists you’re on is to search for mcsv.net and then select all, report as spam, and unsubscribe. Gmail doesn’t deal well when the unsubscribe list is taller than your screen, so you may need to hit command + - a few times to make it all fit. Also according to this post, “you can also get in touch with our compliance team directly at compliance@mailchimp.com with the email address you would like to remove from all lists and they will be happy to further assist you there as well.” I will try that as well.

I really love this thread and the replies sharing stories about Val Vesa’s experience talking about WordPress in an Uber / Lyft ride:

Elif Batuman, who was recently a Pulitzer finalist for her novel The Idiot, has a stunning story in the New Yorker on Japan’s Rent-a-Family Industry, “People who are short on relatives can hire a husband, a mother, a grandson. The resulting relationships can be more real than you’d expect.”

You think from the title it’s going to be one of those gee-whiz stories or vaguely condescending toward Japanese, but what follows is actually an incredibly poignant and powerful view of society through a lens I had never imagined before. It’s a #longread but I hope you take the time to sit with it this weekend. You may need a swordsman.