Link Archives

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.

Fred Vogelstein writes on Crazy Stupid Tech: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different? “To us what’s happening is obvious. We both covered the internet bubble 25 years ago. We’ve been writing about – and in Om’s case investing in – technology since then. We can both say unequivocally that the conversations we are having now about the future of AI feel exactly like the conversations we had about the future of the internet in 1999. “

Mimi Lamarre at Switchboard Magazine has a delightful long read in The Curious Case of Kaycee Nicole, where, in the early days of online communities and blogging, a fake person claimed to have leukemia. The blogging community was relatively small back then, and I recall some of this happening contemporarily.

Mia Elvasia has a great article about how they realized they were spending $635/yr across various plugins to get things that Jetpack offered bundled and often free. Save money!

Jetpack is frequently overlooked as one of the most underappreciated plugins in the WordPress universe. This is partially our fault, as the article notes, because the UI for some of these settings is quite poor. We’re working on it! If you can tolerate a bit of UI clunkiness, there’s significant value to be gained from Jetpack right now. For everyone else, we’ll make it much more intuitive soon.

WooCommerce 10.3 is out, just in time for Black Friday / Cyber Monday, with some nice improvements to the checkout experience, tracking cost of goods sold, and a new beta MCP server, “This new feature enables AI assistants like Claude, Cursor, VS Code, or any other MCP-compatible client to interact directly with WooCommerce stores through a standardized protocol, opening up new possibilities for AI-assisted store management and development workflows.” You can also help out in testing WordPress 6.9, which comes out on December 2nd.

If I’m slow on anything right now, I apologize. I’ve got some flu/Covid thing, so I’m operating at reduced capacity.

I think some of the best writing about technology PR is this ten-year-old article by Aaron Zamost: What’s Your Hour in ‘Silicon Valley Time’? It describes the cycles that companies go through in public perception, and the beauty of revisiting it ten years later is that you can see which of the examples are still relevant, or the domains that 404. As someone who has been around this clock probably a dozen times now, I highly suggest this for anyone “going through it.” Some of the most powerful words in the English language: This too shall pass.

See also: The Zen fable or old Chinese poem of the old man who loses his horse.

Just got word that the court dismissed several of WP Engine and Silver Lake’s most serious claims — antitrust, monopolization, and extortion have been knocked out! These were by far the most significant and far-reaching allegations in the case and with today’s decision the case is narrowed significantly. This is a win not just for us but for all open source maintainers and contributors. Huge thanks to the folks at Gibson and Automattic who have been working on this.

With respect to any remaining claims, we’re confident the facts will demonstrate that our actions were lawful and in the best interests of the WordPress community.

This ruling is a significant milestone, but our focus remains the same: building a free, open, and thriving WordPress ecosystem and supporting the millions of people who use it every day.