Aside Archives

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.

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.

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.