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<p>Sorry everybody, my @photomatt on Twitter has been hacked, I’m tryi ...
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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:thr="http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0" xml:lang="en-US" > <title type="text">Matt Mullenweg</title> <subtitle type="text">Unlucky in Cards</subtitle> <updated>2025-10-21T05:00:15Z</updated> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt" /> <id>https://ma.tt/feed/atom/</id> <link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://ma.tt/feed/atom/" /> <generator uri="https://wordpress.org/" version="6.9-alpha-61006">WordPress</generator><icon>https://i0.wp.com/ma.tt/files/2024/01/cropped-matt-favicon.png?fit=32%2C32&quality=80&ssl=1</icon> <entry> <author> <name>Matt</name> <uri>http://ma.tt/</uri> </author> <title type="html"><![CDATA[Simplify]]></title> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/simplify/" /> <id>https://ma.tt/?p=150316</id> <updated>2025-10-21T05:00:15Z</updated> <published>2025-10-21T04:59:30Z</published> <category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="Asides" /> <summary type="html"><![CDATA[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.]]></summary> <content type="html" xml:base="https://ma.tt/2025/10/simplify/"><![CDATA[<p>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. </p> <p><strong>Complexify:</strong> <a href="https://jamstack.org/">Jamstack</a>, headless, Contentstack, Contentful, <a href="https://www.acquia.com/blog/what-digital-experience-platform-dxp">DXP</a>, <a href="https://business.adobe.com/blog/basics/digital-asset-management">DAM</a>, micro-services. </p> <p><strong>Simplify:</strong> WordPress, Simplenote, Day One, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Djbdns">djbdns</a>, <a href="https://sqlite.org/">SQLite</a>. </p> <p>Not enough engineers have studied under the code of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Bernstein">Daniel J. Bernstein</a>.</p> <p></p>]]></content> <link rel="replies" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/simplify/#comments" thr:count="2" /> <link rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/simplify/feed/atom/" thr:count="2" /> <thr:total>2</thr:total> </entry> <entry> <author> <name>Matt</name> <uri>http://ma.tt/</uri> </author> <title type="html"><![CDATA[Make No Little Plans]]></title> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/make-no-little-plans/" /> <id>https://ma.tt/?p=150274</id> <updated>2025-10-20T05:35:54Z</updated> <published>2025-10-19T20:19:33Z</published> <category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="Quote" /> <summary type="html"><![CDATA[Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. … <a href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/make-no-little-plans/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Make No Little Plans</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>]]></summary> <content type="html" xml:base="https://ma.tt/2025/10/make-no-little-plans/"><![CDATA[<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow"><p>Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.</p></blockquote> <p>— <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Burnham">Daniel Burnham</a>, Chicago architect (1864–1912) (Hat tip: <a href="https://intenseminimalism.com/2010/make-no-little-plans/">Erin</a>, and the <a href="https://summit.co/make-no-small-plans">Summit folks</a>.) (It’s an old quote but update in your head to include the ladies too.)</p>]]></content> <link rel="replies" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/make-no-little-plans/#comments" thr:count="2" /> <link rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/make-no-little-plans/feed/atom/" thr:count="2" /> <thr:total>2</thr:total> </entry> <entry> <author> <name>Matt</name> <uri>http://ma.tt/</uri> </author> <title type="html"><![CDATA[Albumin]]></title> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/albumin/" /> <id>https://ma.tt/?p=150261</id> <updated>2025-10-20T05:33:26Z</updated> <published>2025-10-19T00:42:10Z</published> <category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="Health" /> <summary type="html"><![CDATA[Since reading the Four Hour Workweek and Tim Ferriss I’ve been a bit of a bio-hacker, always trying weird and new stuff. Today was a new one! I did therapeutic plasma exchange (TPE), also known as plasmapheresis, which supposedly gives you all the benefits of parabiosis without, you know, needing to be a vampire or … <a href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/albumin/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Albumin</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>]]></summary> <content type="html" xml:base="https://ma.tt/2025/10/albumin/"><![CDATA[<p>Since reading the <a href="https://fourhourworkweek.com/">Four Hour Workweek</a> and <a href="https://tim.blog/">Tim Ferriss</a> I’ve been a bit of a bio-hacker, always trying weird and new stuff. Today was a new one! I did therapeutic plasma exchange (TPE), also known as plasmapheresis, which supposedly gives you all the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_blood_transfusion">benefits of parabiosis</a> without, you know, needing to be a vampire or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBA0AH-LSbo">having a blood boy</a>. So with the awesome folks at <a href="https://extension.health/">Extension Health</a> I had my blood filtered and put back in, which took a few hours. My plasma <a href="https://x.com/bryan_johnson/status/1845950287032492378">was not as clear as Bryan Johnson’s</a>, with 41 years of microplastics and mold and who knows what else in there. The process took a few hours, and afterward I got some chicken on rice from a Halal cart on Broadway so maybe it all evens out.</p>]]></content> <link rel="replies" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/albumin/#comments" thr:count="0" /> <link rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/albumin/feed/atom/" thr:count="0" /> <thr:total>0</thr:total> </entry> <entry> <author> <name>Matt</name> <uri>http://ma.tt/</uri> </author> <title type="html"><![CDATA[WordCamp Canada Talk]]></title> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/wordcamp-canada/" /> <id>https://ma.tt/?p=150251</id> <updated>2025-10-18T13:51:28Z</updated> <published>2025-10-17T14:24:40Z</published> <category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="WordPress" /> <summary type="html"><![CDATA[Howdy and bonjour! First, thank you so much, merci beaucoup, for having me at your WordCamp. I love the spirit of local communities gathering and helping each other learn and grow together. I wasn’t actually planning to speak or even do a Q & A; I was just going to attend this WordCamp. But since … <a href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/wordcamp-canada/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">WordCamp Canada Talk</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>]]></summary> <content type="html" xml:base="https://ma.tt/2025/10/wordcamp-canada/"><![CDATA[<p>Howdy and bonjour! First, thank you so much, merci beaucoup, for having me at your WordCamp. I love the spirit of local communities gathering and helping each other learn and grow together. I wasn’t actually planning to speak or even do a Q & A; I was just going to attend this WordCamp. But since the organizers have given me a bit of your time, I will try to make the best of it. </p> <p>I love Canada. I first came here for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Voice">the Northern Voice conference</a> in 2006. Was anyone at that one? I think Dave Winer was actually there. It was a pretty awesome one. What’s that?</p> <p>[Here I think Dave said he wasn’t at that one, but a different conference, but can’t remember.]</p> <p>Well, that’s why we blog. My memory is not that good. [laughs] By the way, I think this week is your anniversary, right? </p> <p><strong>Dave Winer:</strong> It was actually a couple of weeks ago—31 years.</p> <p><strong>MM: </strong>Oh, wow. Thirty-one years. Round of applause! I think why I thought it was your anniversary is that on my blog’s related posts, it showed a post from 2014 that was congratulating you on your 20th because I think <em>The Register</em> or someone did a nice article. </p> <p>So yeah, I’ve since been back dozens of times, including several summers in Montreal, at the jazz festival there—they also do <a href="https://haitienfolie.com/">Le Festival Haïti en Folie</a>, and <a href="https://montreal.hahaha.com/home/">Just For Laughs</a>—and a few times here in Ottawa, where I’m on the board of a cybersecurity company called Field Effect. We might even have some Field Effect people here—oh, hi! Thanks for coming. </p> <p>Let me give a little update on what I’ve been up to. My life’s mission is to democratize publishing, commerce, and messaging. So I have some projects in each of those areas. In publishing, my main work is WordPress, the core software available to everyone. We host it on <a href="http://wordpress.com">WordPress.com</a> and <a href="https://pressable.com/">Pressable</a>, and allow others to host it with <a href="https://wpcloud.com/">WP Cloud</a>—a cool product—and we use <a href="https://jetpack.com/">Jetpack</a> to bring all the best cloud features to every WordPress, wherever it is running. And, of course, running the main community hubs at <a href="http://wordpress.org">WordPress.org</a>, <a href="http://wordpress.tv">WordPress.tv</a>, WordCamps, <a href="http://wordpress.net">WordPress.net</a>, which probably some of y’all haven’t heard of, et cetera, et cetera. </p> <p>On the social side of publishing, I have <a href="https://tumblr.com/">Tumblr</a>, which is a microblogging social network, but right now it’s on a different technical stack. I need to switch it over to WordPress, but it’s a big lift. It’s over 500 million blogs, actually, and as a business, it’s costing so much more to run than it generates in revenue. We’ve had to prioritize other projects to make it sustainable. It’s probably my biggest failure or missed opportunity right now, but we’re still working on it. </p> <p>I’m really excited about the personal publishing side of our products: <a href="https://dayoneapp.com">Day One</a> and <a href="https://developer.wordpress.com/studio/">WordPress.com Studio</a> and <a href="https://wordpress.org/playground/">WordPress Playground</a>. Day One is a fully encrypted, shared, and synchronized blogging and journaling app that runs on every device and on the web. You can also have shared encrypted journals with others. It uses the same encryption as one password. It’s the first place I go to draft an idea—for example, to write this talk. Its editor is not as good as Gutenberg yet, but it’s pretty decent at allowing multimodal input—which means you can record voice notes, draw things, etc.—and capturing it all. It’s mostly replaced Evernote, Simplenote, and even private P2s for me. It has some fun features, like when you make a new entry it records, the location, what music you’re listening to on Apple Music, how many steps you’ve taken, the weather. Honestly, some features that would be nice to get into WordPress, at least as a plugin. Right now, I just copy and paste it in the WC admin or the Jetpack app if I want to publish something; that could also be made smoother in the future. </p> <p>So WordPress.com Studio is built on an open source project called Playground that we created to allow you to spin up WordPress in a WASM container in about 30 seconds, right inside your browser. Who’s tried Playground or Studio? It’s kind of wild, right? You know how hard it’s been to set up servers and databases and everything like that, and so to see a WordPress virtual machine spin up in like 30 seconds just blows my mind. There’s so much you can do with it. It’s the most sci-fi thing happening inside of WordPress right now, and we’ve just barely begun to take advantage of the massive technical and architectural shift it allows. For example, my colleague <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/ellatrix/">Ella</a> builds an iOS app called <a href="https://wordpress.org/playground/wordpress-for-native-ios-apps/">Blocknotes</a>. It’s a lot like Simplenote, but it uses a Gutenberg editor, and it’s entirely a WordPress playground instance—the entire iOS app. </p> <p>Part of the evolution of WordPress has been going from a blogging system to a CMS to a full development platform. So what Dave talked about yesterday, and now that you can build entire mobile apps—which, by the way, can run on every platform, cross-platform, and run the same thing on the web—it’s kind of like a promise from back in the day of Java or other things, React, Native. It’s now very possible with this WordPress WASM stuff. WASM stands for <a href="https://webassembly.org/">web assembly</a>. </p> <p>The main distractions and things holding back WordPress right now are the legal attacks from WP Engine and Silver Lake—I can’t comment on that, but stay tuned for some major updates soon. </p> <p>I forgot to put this in my post—WooCommerce! On the commerce side, there’s, of course, WooCommerce, which is very, very exciting. You can think of it like an open-source Shopify, our enablers here in Ottawa. It now processes over $30 billion of GMV (gross merchant volume) per year, and you can customize it to do pretty much anything: subscriptions, digital, physical goods, everything. And of course, it’s fully open source and built on WordPress. It’s actually a WordPress plugin, so pretty exciting. WooCommerce is now on about 8% of all websites in the world—WordPress is 40, so it’s running on about a quarter of all WordPress sites. It’s been a big part of the growth of WordPress, actually, the past few years. </p> <p>In messaging, we have this product called Beeper. Anyone tried out Beeper yet? We got a Beeper super-user here, actually, in Robert. So Beeper basically takes all the different messaging apps—WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram DMs, LinkedIn DMs, did you ever check those?—and it brings it all into one app, one interface, kind of like a Superhuman for messaging, and gives you cool features across all of them. Now this is obviously a pretty hard technical challenge, because we have to reverse engineer all the different networks for everything. But check it out, it’s a pretty fun little app. It’s, free for up to a couple accounts, and paid after that. </p> <p>There’s also an open source component of that as well. We’re going to make it easier for people to build bridges and connections to different networks, because there’s a lot that we don’t support yet that we get demand for, like <a href="https://kakaotalk.en.softonic.com/mac">KakaoTalk</a> in Asia. People also want to do dating apps, which I guess have messaging platforms. So it’d be pretty fun to have everything all in one. </p> <p>I’ve been in the public a lot, doing lots of talks and actually blogging every single day now for 28 days, which will be 29 when we all hit the publish button at the end of this! So I’ve been blogging a lot. It’s a lot to keep up with. Actually been going every day since <a href="https://us.wordcamp.org/2025/">WordCamp US</a>, with one missed day in there. I got very, very inspired at WordCamp US. It was a fantastic event. I got to hang out a lot and go to a bunch of sessions, and it inspired me to blog a lot more. If you run Jetpack, there’s actually a pretty cool feature where the notifications will tell you what kind of streak you’re on. So whenever I post, I get this nice little notification, like 28 days. And it has little easter eggs when you get certain number of days in a row, which is fun. So I’m gonna have to add some of this to the post later—I riffed a little bit. We’ll get the recording. So now that this is all done, we can push the publish button together. </p> <p>This is a cool device called a Daylight computer. So cool. It’s from a startup I’m invested in through <a href="https://audrey.co/">Audrey Capital</a> and Automattic. Think of it like a cross between a Kindle and an iPad. It works in the daylight, hence the name—it doesn’t emit any blue light. It’s great for kids. You can order it on <a href="http://daylightcomputer.com">DaylightComputer.com</a>. It runs Android, so it’s super hackable. You can have apps like Beeper, Day One, WordPress, Jetpack, WooCommerce on it. Very, very neat device. I actually have WP Admin loaded right here; you can see you can scroll like super, super fast. Soon the wifi is going to work—it’s a wifi-only device. </p> <p>Later I’ll update this post with an mp3 recording enclosed an RSS in honor of Dave Winer, who spoke here, who invented podcasting and RSS. And actually, if you go way back in my RSS feeds, I have some mp3 enclosures from 2004 and 2005, some very funny early podcasts. Also, whenever they post this video to WordPress TV or YouTube, I’ll share that too, and I’ll add some links. Thank you. Merci beaucoup! If you want to follow more. Please check out my blog at <a href="https://ma.tt">ma.tt</a>. No WWW, no .com. Just ma.tt. I cross post to ma.tt on Bluesky and Mastodon and on Tumblr, Instagram and Twitter/X at @photomatt. </p> <p>And now we’re going to push the button together. Y’all ready? Murphy willing, are you ready to publish? think I need to add a category and stuff, but I’ll do that later.</p> <span id="more-150251"></span> <p><strong>Q: </strong>Hi, I’m Michelle Frechette, and I drove up from Rochester, New York on Wednesday, so it’s good to be here. [Applause] I love that our open source extends beyond just publishing websites and words, and that we have, for now several years, the photo directory, which is available to people—and we are closing in on 30,000 published photos, which I think is phenomenal. </p> <p><strong>MM: </strong>And all of those are, I think, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/public-domain/cc0/">CC0</a>, Creative Commons Zero-licensed. So it’s compatible with GPL, embedded in WordPress themes. You can use it on your site. It’s very cool.</p> <p><strong>Q: </strong>Yeah, you don’t have to give attribution to anybody. You can just use the photos that are there, which I think is good. What are we going to do so that more people know that it exists, besides the 10,000 people who have submitted photos, because I think it’s still, it’s it’s growing. It’s huge. There’s a million beautiful there’s almost 30,000 beautiful photos in there, but I don’t think enough people know that it exists yet. So how can we get the word out, to get more people to use it?</p> <p><strong>MM: </strong>Well, I think first we should ask questions about it at WordCamps. </p> <p><strong>Q: </strong>I’m on it. </p> <p><strong>MM: </strong>So check. We’re actually just kind of on like a Version One of that whole idea. So in my mind, for things that we should do, is 1: I think we need to better integrate finding those photos in the media library, because right now, it’s kind of like you have to click a few buttons to get to it. 2: I would like, for every single WP admin when you upload a photo, for you to be able to set the licensing to it. And if it is licensed as CC0, we can submit it to the directory. And of course, the directory has some extra rules, right? Some of these rules, I think we might be able to re-examine now. So for example, right now, in the directory, we don’t allow anything that shows someone’s face, right? And the reason for this is, even if something’s CC0-licensed, to have someone’s face, you need a model release form. There’s different laws for that in different countries and things like that make sense, right? You wouldn’t want someone to take your photo at a WordCamp, and now they think it’s CC0, and you start seeing them running ads for, you know, some sort of new medicine or Viagra or something; it could be very embarrassing. However, when AI creates a face, there’s no such restrictions there. So something that we could actually start to do, because right now I think we have some anti-AI rules in the photo directory, I think we should probably start to look at evolving that. So, for example, you can take a picture of me right now, change my face with AI to a face that has never existed, and that could be CC0-licensed and anyone in the world could use it. So I think there’s some possibilities there. </p> <p>Because right now, the laws for AI-generated stuff vary from country to country. I think right now in America, it can’t be copywritten, at least in the same way. At least if it’s fully created; when a human starts to modify it, it can be. Sometimes I’m not familiar with the laws here yet, but I’m sure I’ll look them up later. So I think that would be a pretty interesting way to open it up right now, because in theory, we should have way more than 30,000 photos. Actually, I have 30,000 photos on my site, which are mostly GPL-licensed. So how can we—yeah, I do need to submit them. Some of them are already in WordPress Core. So remember <a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/twentyten/">the Twenty Ten theme</a>, which has like the little sheep. People really love those sheep. So all those photos I GPL-licensed a long time ago—in my copious free time, yes. </p> <p>So I think those are some of the ideas for it. And also think about another project we do that people aren’t as familiar with, Openverse search. Has anyone used Openverse yet? It’s pretty cool. So actually, Creative Commons, the nonprofit, used to have a search engine that indexed the entire web and would allow you to find different types of Creative Commons content, including that requires attribution or other things. The foundation actually was shutting this down, and we took it over, and we now run it on WordPress.org We renamed it to Openverse instead of Creative Commons, but they still index the entire web, including audio files, video files, images, all sorts of stuff. So it’s a very, very cool project. It is embedded in WP Admin a bit, but again, we probably should combine that with a photo search and other things. </p> <p>I also think there’s some opportunities to use AI analysis of all the photos to give a better semantic understanding and a better search that we currently offer, which right now is typically monollingual, I don’t think it translates well into the, you know, 60-plus languages that WordPress supports, and it’s manual tagging. So there might be things to do, like a more automated understanding, which, of course, gets better over time. You know, we started to incorporate some of the AI models like Gemini and other things on WordPress.org to make us way more efficient on things like plug-in submissions and some code scanning. I actually think we’re very much in chapter one of where this is going to be. It can sort of massively [grow]—because WordPress.org relies on volunteers, basically. Some people are sponsored, but most are not. And we’re over 60,000 plugins now, or 10,000 themes, and actually, the rate of plugin submission, I think, has basically doubled since last year, and the team has gotten it down where before they had a six-month queue, they’ve got it down to basically under a week. So you know, we can definitely automate more and more and more and be vastly more efficient and support way more developers and more users, way more everything, and probably improve the code quality. So that’s another thing I’m pretty excited about. </p> <p><strong>Q: </strong>I love it. <a href="http://wordpress.org/photos">WordPress.org/photos</a>, if you want to look at it. </p> <p><strong>MM: </strong>Thank you, Michelle! </p> <p><strong>Q: </strong>Hey, Matt. Courtney Robertson. Kind of related to Michelle’s question: This week, I saw <a href="https://iconick.io/">Nick Hamze</a> recounting how when you go to submit a theme, the image that’s in the preview for the theme, if it is AI-generated that that’s getting rejected and the nuances Dion dug into—Dion is one of our long time core commiters, core leads, etc, in the project. A hidden gem. If you haven’t encountered Dion yet, please find Dion and meet him. So Nick is learning the legal ramifications of having an AI-generated image as part of the theme directory, like what we have to do in the theme directory. Because if the image that’s in the theme is generated by AI, there’s a lot of legal stuff about, can we do it? Can we not? And we would all like to just be like, “Yeah, whatever. Move on.” But then there’s some other ramifications. Is that on your radar? I know we’ve looked at criteria of what could go into the theme repo and some of those deals. I don’t know if. I mean, once we get into legal stuff, that’s maybe beyond you and I.</p> <p><strong>MM: </strong>Well, unfortunately, I’m getting really good at legal stuff. [Laughter] It wasn’t on my roadmap for the past year or two, but yeah. So this is very much an evolving area, and the laws from country to country do vary a lot. However, there’s also some common sense things you can apply, and I think that there is a sort of rapidly—we’re not putting the genie back in the bottle with AI stuff. One, just the companies; like, OpenAI is just too big to fail now. The entire economy and growth is based on these systems. The infrastructure buildouts, massive data centers, everything. It’s kind of incredible. Not to mention the usage, like it’s really transforming translation, code, so much. </p> <p>Now, WordPress.org, particularly, because a lot of this is volunteers, those folks aren’t comfortable making big policy decisions like this that could have ramifications. They already put a lot on the line. I kind of shield everyone from a legal point of view and everything like that, but in theory, people could go after them, and we have had instances where some of these folks can get oppressed by someone who gets something rejected, or banned from the forums for spamming or stuff like that. So we do try to provide some shelter. </p> <p>Now, on this issue, in particular, Nick is someone I talk to almost every day. He’s doing some very, very cool stuff across WordPress and some innovative things with themes. I like that he pushes the boundaries. So for example, right now, the theme directory is fairly conservative in for example, with the intention that we want the demo to look like the theme when you install it, or we don’t want it to rely on a plugin. And part of the intention there is that for WordPress, we want you to be able to switch between themes really easily. So one of the beauties of it is that you can take your entire blog site, click a button, and you have a brand new design. Now themes, as they start to incorporate more advanced functionality—which is pretty cool—those sorts of things aren’t allowed. In fact, one of my favorite examples of something that was in the theme directory a long time ago and is not allowed on the current guidelines, that I think we’ve made an exception, is the Command Line theme. Has anyone seen this? You load it up, it’s like a blinking terminal, and you interact with it by typing in commands, like “list,” “post,” and you can type “help,” and it gives you all the things. This is so cool! By the way, I don’t think it complies with, like, any of our standards. [laughter] Like accessibility, it probably breaks some rules there, all sorts of things. </p> <p>So I think part of it is, you know, how can we move? And I think Nick even did a post about this, like rules versus guardrails. So I think part of the way we can do this is as a marketplace. Right now, there’s certain things that we don’t allow, and in fact, those rules creep up and get bigger every time, right? Because each sub-team comes in and says, “Oh, I need my rules to be requirements.” Actually, accessibility is a great, great example of that. Now, I think what’s interesting in a marketplace is we can move these things from being rules to being like tags. So for example, if you were a university, you only want to see themes that were WCAG 2.0 or higher compliant—which are by the way, some pretty strict requirements that don’t apply to many websites, for good reasons, but that was a requirement. You should be able to do that as a search. Or if you want to see themes that are orange, or all these sorts of things: I feel like those should just be tags in the marketplace, and use the rating system as well to open up what we can host, but then give better tools for people to search and choose what they want. </p> <p><strong>Q: </strong>Thanks. Just a shout out. Please let Nick know that a lot of us are reading what he’s putting forward, and I forget his exact website domain. It’s <a href="https://iconick.io/">Iconick</a>.</p> <p><strong>MM: </strong>It’s spelled in an interesting way. </p> <p><strong>Q: </strong>Yeah, it has his name in it. I wonder where he got that idea. [Laughter]</p> <p><strong>MM: </strong>Yeah. So it reads as “iconick.” Nick Hamze, H-A-M-Z-E. Google him. He’s got some really cool themes. He’s done a lot of cool projects, <a href="https://iconick.io/wapuu-slaps/">a bunch of Wapuus</a>. Actually, I’m talking to them about how we can upgrade all the Wapuu stuff. By the way, y’all have some awesome ones at this event. I got the little swag pack with all the stickers and everything. All the sponsors have different ones. You have like, four or five of them. I’m actually gonna put this sticker on my laptop later, probably that WCF one, so keep an eye out for that.</p> <p><strong>Q: </strong>Paul Bearne. I want to talk about <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/hello-dolly/">Hello Dolly</a>, the plugin, which shipped with Core.</p> <p><strong>MM: </strong>Which, by the way, people tried to get rid of because of copyright issues. Yeah, there’s actually some interesting things we did to get around that and make it fair use.</p> <p><strong>Q: </strong>Should it be removed?</p> <p><strong>MM: </strong>You’re asking the wrong guy.</p> <p><strong>Q: </strong>Well, it’s there because nobody wants to ask you to come and remove it.</p> <p><strong>MM: </strong>No, they ask me like once a year. [Laughter]</p> <p><strong>Q: </strong>If it stays, perhaps we could redo the description to indicate that it’s historic—it was the first plugin, it was the proof of concept—but please don’t copy it. It’s no longer good code.</p> <p><strong>MM: </strong>I completely disagree with that. Tell me why it’s not good code. Because it doesn’t use classes or object orientation? Why is it bad code?</p> <p><strong>Q:</strong> It’s not accessible, it’s not translatable. </p> <p><strong>MM: </strong>It is translatable. It actually goes through the translation functions.</p> <p><strong>Q:</strong> There’s no translation around the strings. </p> <p><strong>MM: </strong>That’s not true. </p> <p><strong>Q: ’</strong>Tis true. [Laughter]</p> <p><strong>MM: </strong>Then it was removed because it was one of the first things we did the underscore for. Well, let’s look it up later today, but it’s not true that no one’s ever asked me. It does get asked about once a year. There’s lots of issues on the bug tracker about it. And if there’s ways to improve it, like make it translatable, I think that’s great, and I know people have actually used that before to also just change the lyrics to, like, put different songs in there, different things they want to</p> <p>say. </p> <p><strong>Q: </strong>When it becomes translatable, the [inaudible] can have more fun with the translation strings.</p> <p><strong>MM: </strong>Yeah, but they don’t have to, right? That’s the fun thing.</p> <p><strong>Q: </strong>Then I look forward to some patches. </p> <p><strong>MM: </strong>What I don’t want to do is, I don’t want to make it super-complicated. I know we did some things, like we moved it to a sub-directory. It actually just used to be a single file, so there have been some minor upgrades there. But the whole idea is to show how easy it is to use the actions and filter system inside of WordPress. </p> <p><strong>Q: </strong>There are no actions or filters in that plugin.</p> <p><strong>MM: </strong>Yeah, that’s how it looks in the WP Admin.</p> <p><strong>Q: </strong>There’s no filter on the string</p> <p><strong>MM: </strong>Well. we can add a filter on the string. And maybe it’s, it’s actually a filter and not translation, might be actually better, because, like you said, like maybe the pot system is not appropriate for that. Although, why not? Like, I’m sure you can translate those lyrics to French and other things, they would be meaningful. And also the connection to jazz musicians. It was one of the first famous jazz songs by one of my idols, Louis Armstrong, and you know, since then, we’ve named every release of WordPress in honor of a jazz musician. So that’s one of the cool things about WordPress versus other software is it has soul. You know, it’s true. Code is poetry. You know, we honor musicians and artists. You know, one of the first blocks we did in Gutenberg was actually a poetry block, a prose block. Has anyone used this one? It’s one of these things people are always like, “we should remove this.” [Laughter] </p> <p>Actually, I did it because I took a writing poetry course, and the author, a famous poet, was complaining how, when she posted to WordPress she couldn’t have the formatting correctly—you know how a lot of poetry will use interesting formatting where the white space has significance? Or spacing that has kind of unusual things? So the behavior of the editor, which takes multiple line breaks and combines into one, and other things, all that was being collapsed. And so I said, “Oh!” I think it’s called the Prose block, but it’s basically a block inside Gutenberg that preserves white space, kind of like a “pre” tag, and it’s used by some of the poets out there. So sometimes we do these really niche features for like, very high-end users. So for example, I think three or four of the living Fields Medalists use WordPress—actually, WordPress.com. </p> <p>Does anyone know about the <a href="https://www.mathunion.org/imu-awards/fields-medal">Fields Medal</a>? A couple people. So it’s a math award. It’s more prestigious than a Nobel Prize. They give away a Nobel Prize every year. This happens only every four years, and some of the smartest people in the world have it, like <a href="https://terrytao.wordpress.com/">Terence Tao</a>, who is, if you don’t know about him, look him up. He is probably one of the top five smartest people in the world, amazing, brilliant mathematician—he actually just got defunded, but the <a href="https://www.simonsfoundation.org/">Simons Foundation</a> is now sponsoring all his work, which is very exciting. If you don’t know Jim Simons, he’s the founder of <a href="https://www.rentec.com/Home.action?index=true">Renaissance Technologies</a>. Has anyone heard of Renaissance Tech? RenTec? One or two people? Oh, I’m telling you all sorts of cool stuff now. </p> <p>So Renaissance Technologies is the most successful hedge fund ever in history. They show, I think, annualized returns of over 40% over 35 years. It’s actually physicists and mathematicians that came together. Jim Simons was one of them, he went out of business or bankrupt or something, and was like, “gosh, I need to make some money. Maybe I’ll check out the stocks and trading thing.” And they started out, and they actually did really well, but then in the 80s, it all crashed. Jiim’s big, big innovation was that he invented algorithmic trading. So he basically said, we have humans making decisions. One, they’re too slow. And two, we don’t know why it’s working. And so there must be some fundamental sort of physics or rules of the trading markets and the business systems. And so RenTec started to gather the most data of anyone in the world. The next hedge fund to do this well was Bridgewater, but basically they started getting data sets, like shipping back to the 1400s, like really obscure things. They go get stuff out of books and develop all this priority training data, use it to map the economy and essentially create these models that the mathematicians would come up with. You can only be an investor in this fund if you work for the company, which is pretty interesting. And of course, everyone there is like a decamillionaire and everything. I forget how many employees—200 or 150 or something. Really, really small. So legendary. And he passed away a few years ago, but his foundation funds a ton of fundamental research and physics and math and so he’s someone I really look up to and admire. I <a href="https://ma.tt/2024/07/jim-simons-rip/">blogged about him</a> earlier last year. He reminds me a lot of my dad, just the way he looks and talks. My dad passed away in 2016, so I really like watching Jim Simon’s stuff. </p> <p>Oh, I forgot to say, the point of the Fields Medalists. The reason the Fields Medalists use WordPress is we support a LaTeX plugin. LaTeX is basically like a markup language for doing advanced math formulas. We’re actually working on an update to this to be a bit more user-friendly. We added support for it in 2005 because Terence Tao started a free WordPress.com account, and he was complaining about this and embedding these images. I followed his blog, and I was like, “oh, we should make a block for this kind of shortcode.” And this shortcode is actually built into Jetpack, so anyone who runs Jetpack has access to this, and it’s now a Gutenberg block as well. So we’re adding diversity. So maybe tell the math department here. It’d be awesome to get some more mathematicians and folks on WordPress.</p> <p><strong>Q: </strong>Matt, just want to give you a heads up. We’ve got about five minutes left. </p> <p><strong>MM: </strong>All right, rapid fire. Should I do some fast ones? I just need to talk a little less.</p> <p><strong>Q: </strong>I’m Chris, I work for Pantheon. As you obviously know, Pantheon does Drupal stuff. So I know WordPress, but I have been watching, particularly, the evolution of their development work in AI, specifically integration in the Drupal admin, and also how the Drupal CMS is onboarding new users to Drupal, and the <a href="https://www.drupal.org/project/experience_builder">Experience Builder</a> that they’re building. As we gather here today, probably most WordPressers might not be aware that there’s actually DrupalCon Europe happening in Vienna right now, and there’s lots of things that are happening out of that. And there’s a lot of really interesting and exciting things happening in that Drupal space. I know you’ve had conversations with Dries, because at least Dries <em>says</em> that you’ve had conversations.</p> <p><strong>MM: </strong>We talk semi-regularly. You know, there’s only there’s like a dozen people in the world who, like their whole life, is creating CMSes, Dave’s actually one of them in the room. We’re just going to do it the rest of our lives. And Dries is one of them, so I have incredible respect. We actually did a talk together with Mike Little, the co-founder of WordPress. So if you look up Dries, Mullenweg, Mike Little, you’ll you’ll find this. It’s pretty cool talk. Actually, we got to talk about the history and everything. </p> <p><strong>Q: </strong>So the question here is: To what degree are you looking at or thinking about the types of developments that are happening in Drupal but other CMSes as well, and what can we, as WordPress, learn from those other ecosystems?</p> <p><strong>MM: </strong>Oh, it’s a great question. I’ve got to look up the user ID. I think I was one of the first couple hudnred people registered on drop.org, which is the predecessor to <a href="http://drupal.org">drupal.org</a>. Dries was actually at that Northern Voice conference in 2006; he has a post about it on his blog with some photos. So yeah, I keep in pretty close contact with a number of the other CMSes. Well, I won’t say close contact, but usually about once a year we’ll get together with Anthony from Squarespace, Tobi from Shopify, with Dries, whenever we’re in the same country, or I’m over in Europe or Boston. I try to look them up, and I test out things pretty regularly. </p> <p>So I haven’t seen the very, very latest stuff for Drupal. I think I checked out one of the last iterations they did. I love that with companies like Pantheon now doing both WordPress and Drupal, we’re getting a lot of overlap between the communities. So I would say, please bring this stuff over. I mean, we’re both PHP, we’re both GPL. It’s one of the reasons I’ve always really supported Drupal, even though we’re kind of mutually exclusive solutions. I’m always going to be supportive with other open source projects. So yeah, for those people who overlap, like yourself, please make some suggestions. You know, start a P2 post, or do a blog post about it. We’ll get it in the newsletter, or maybe even if there’s something specific that we could bring over code wise, we can start to get that incentive into <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/">Trac</a> and everything. Cool. </p> <p>I think Drupal also has a plugin to use Gutenberg, right? Yeah, which is pretty cool. It was one of the reasons we designed Gutenberg to actually be portable to other CMSes, and why we’ve been putting it under license, dual-licensing it so to be embedded even more places, not just GPL.</p> <p><strong>Q: </strong>Forgive the AI translation of my words, but it’ll help me be concise. But here’s the question. Really, really simple—no, it’s not. WordPress has always thrived because of its open, community-driven ethos, but as the ecosystem grows, we’re seeing more like large, profit-driven players who don’t necessarily share the values. How can individual contributors and agencies like ours actively help protect WordPress and uphold the values and ethics that have sustained it from bad actors and people who might try to exploit the community? And do you see room for something more formal, like a certification for individuals and agencies that define what being a good actor is, to help educate clients and even the market, to help protect in a more proactive way from those sorts of bad actors?</p> <p><strong>MM: </strong>Well, that’s a big question. I’ll try to answer quickly. So first I will say, I don’t want to say that there’s bad actors. I think there might be bad actions sometimes, and just temporarily bad actors who hopefully will be good in the future. You know, every saint has a past, every sinner has a future. I never want to define any company or any person as permanently good or bad. Let’s talk about actions. </p> <p>Second, I think with these actions, we can start to create incentive systems, and it’s part of what we’re doing with Five for the Future, which is basically saying, you contribute back—which also implies that you’re not violating the GPL, or something like that. So we’ve got the hard stuff, like, if you violate the GPL, you’re gonna get a letter. Violate the trademark. You know, that was more of a legal thing. But also the gentle stuff, like, how can we encourage good behavior by giving people higher rankings in the directory or in the showcase, for example? </p> <p>Then finally, I’ll just say, vote with your wallet. Each one of you here has the ability to strongly influence these companies. If they’re commercially motivated, great, let’s commercially motivate them to do the right thing by giving more business to the good companies and less business to the other companies. This has actually been happening a lot the past year. I think I can say this: There’s a site called <a href="https://wordpressenginetracker.com/">WordPress Engine Tracker</a> which is currently tracking a number of sites that have left a certain host. It’s about to cross 100,000 that have switched to others host. And 74,000 have gone offline since September of last year. We actually used to make all this data public. The whole list was on there. They got a court order so the data could be fact-checked by press or other people. There was actually a court order that made us that down. So again, trying to muzzle free speech and transparency. But you know, we’re allowed to keep that site up, so check it out while you can. </p> <p>Do we have time for one more. Is this last one?</p> <p><strong>Q: </strong>Okay, I don’t think this qualifies as rapid fire, but it’s a softball. First of all, I came to WordPress as an open source advocate. I became a b2 user. That’s how I got to WordPress. So my all-time favorite WordPress release is 1.5, because it has what I consider a killer feature. It’s not the one you’re thinking. It’s pages.</p> <p><strong>MM: </strong>1.5 right? Yeah, I remember introducing that. Originally. I had a different CMS I was going to release called ContentPress. Or Multipattern. I wasn’t sure what to call it, and so I had this whole other CMS. And I was like, man, we should just build this into WordPress, even though it’s a blogging system. I think having this pages feature put us ahead of Movable Type and others. So yeah, glad we did. I think we introduced themes and that I released him. </p> <p><strong>Q: </strong>Yes, themes was the was kind of the obvious big feature for it, but pages is the point at which I would say that WordPress went from blogging engine to CMS. So that’s my favorite. But what I was going to ask is—</p> <p><strong>MM: </strong>So it’s all been downhill since then? </p> <p>[Laughter]</p> <p><strong>Q: </strong>No, it was such a pivotal moment that helped with WordPress’s meteoric adoption rates. And for me, personally, at that time, it allowed me to take a whole bunch of static HTML and bring it into WordPress so I could manage it so much more easily. So my question was: can you tell us a story, or give us some fun facts about that? Softball question, unless it really taxes your memory.</p> <p><strong>MM: </strong>Well, luckily I blog. I’ll say that two of my favorites ever in history are 1.2 and 1.5—which actually came out right after each other, because we skipped a few releases; it was a time when we actually got pretty delayed. So 1.2 introduced the hooks and filter system, which was pretty revolutionary, I think still, as a unique programming paradigm. But before that, to modify WordPress, you’d actually open up files and change lines. I used to publish these, we called them hacks, and they were. At one point we introduced the hacks file, which made it a little bit better. But then our plugin hook system allowed a separation between the core and the add-ons, but you could go really deep to modify things. Then 1.5 was themes, I believe. So 1.2 was plugins, 1.5 was themes. And then the other big one—I think it was 2 or 2 point something, was when we introduced WYSIWYG for the first time. Which, by the way, was so controversial; people did <em>not</em> want basic WYSIWYG in WordPress, which was funny, like 10 years later, when they’re like, “Okay, this Gutenberg thing’s even worse.” I was like, “Ah, I’ve been through <em>this</em> before.” </p> <p>So I think that those are kind of the fun stories around there. Again, some of this stuff was pretty slow to be adopted at first. I wasn’t certain that this should be rolled into WordPress or there should be separate software, but I’m glad we did. You know, Movable Type was a dominant thing at the time, and their static page functionality wasn’t very robust. And so the other thing that WordPress did around this time that I thought was pretty awesome is really clean URLs. So where, prior, you know, people would have crufty URLs, like they’d have an ID in the number, or you’d have for WordPress,—the default’s still there, actually—is like “?p=123,” so creating the mapping system where we map dates, a hierarchy, and these clean slugs to the pages in the back, in the browsing system, essentially, I think was really crucial. And I love that URLs from 20-something years ago still work or redirect to proper things today. So I think that’s really, really important. Thank you. All right. Last one,</p> <p><strong>Q: </strong>Hey, Matt. I’m Raquel, and I love kitties and surprises. Just some facts. I have a another question around the community. I want to know how do you feel, what are your raw thoughts, on independent WordPress events that are happening in our space now?</p> <p><strong>MM: </strong>And do you want to disclose anything there?</p> <p><strong>Q: </strong>I mean, I am the one responsible for <a href="https://pressconf.events/">PressConf</a>, so independent WordPress event. So, yeah, how do you feel? I’m just curious as to how we can all get better together, which tends to be my motto.</p> <p><strong>MM: </strong>I’m very much like a “let a thousand flowers bloom” kind of guy. So thank you. I know it’s a huge labor of love doing something like PressConf. That’s something that’s been very active in WordCamps and other things in the past, and hopefully with WordCamp US going to Phoenix, we’ll have an opportunity to do some work together there. </p> <p>So I think that’s my fundamental, you know, raw thoughts. You know, I do think about, you know, what do we want to encourage in the world as well? So I would just encourage you as an independent organizer. You know, there’s some beauty there that you don’t have to follow the rules or guidelines necessarily. And it’s commercial events. Well, like the tickets cost more than WordCamp and stuff, right? How much is a ticket?</p> <p><strong>Q: </strong>Depending on early bird to total, $700 average.</p> <p><strong>MM: </strong>And so that’s a bit of a smaller event, right? That’s part of what people like about it. So the ticket price actually becomes like a little bit of a barrier to entry. It’s more intimate. You get some really awesome attendees and talks there, as I think about this as well, just like, you know, what do we want to see more of in the world? And, you know, trying to focus time, particularly my time, to those types of things. So that’s why I came to WordCamp Canada. You know, this is not the biggest WordCamp in the world, but man, this spirit here, and the people and the everything, and like you know, what you’ve all put together, as it’s come together over the past few months, the incredible work of the organizers,the social media team’s been doing a great job getting some awesome speakers like Jill and Dave and like, I was like, man! That’s why I was just planning to come and attend. You know, just to check it out, because I was very interested in the content and everything y’all put together. So again, I guess we’re out of time. So I just want to say thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I’m going to run to the restroom, but then I’ll be right back out in the lobby. I’m going to take pictures, shake hands, kiss babies. </p> <p>[Laughter]</p> <p>I can shake the hand of a baby too. It’s whatever. I’m open-minded. But hey, thank you. I appreciate it.</p> <p><strong>Update:</strong> The video is up, it’s pretty bad I think the audio is pulling from a DJI thing not the microphones, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL-XccK30sY">but here it is</a>.</p>]]></content> <link rel="replies" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/wordcamp-canada/#comments" thr:count="1" /> <link rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/wordcamp-canada/feed/atom/" thr:count="1" /> <thr:total>1</thr:total> </entry> <entry> <author> <name>Matt</name> <uri>http://ma.tt/</uri> </author> <title type="html"><![CDATA[On Money Stuff]]></title> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/money-stuff/" /> <id>https://ma.tt/?p=150241</id> <updated>2025-10-19T02:14:37Z</updated> <published>2025-10-17T04:25:25Z</published> <category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="WordPress" /> <summary type="html"><![CDATA[There are a few writers who I follow religiously, and one is Matt Levine of Bloomberg’s Money Stuff. For business and finance it’s one of the smartest and funniest things you can read. Yesterday, I think for the first time, he mentioned WordPress! In the context of his quote on this great X thread about … <a href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/money-stuff/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">On Money Stuff</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>]]></summary> <content type="html" xml:base="https://ma.tt/2025/10/money-stuff/"><![CDATA[<p>There are a few writers who I follow religiously, and one is <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-s-levine">Matt Levine of Bloomberg’s Money Stuff</a>. For business and finance it’s one of the smartest and funniest things you can read. Yesterday, I think for the first time, <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-10-15/openai-has-a-business-plan">he mentioned WordPress</a>! In the context of his quote on this <a href="https://x.com/FhantomBets/status/1977410624343965999">great X thread about how the Polymarket insider predicted the Nobel peace prize winner</a>.</p> <blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow"><p>This trader apparently <em>didn’t </em>have inside information, in the traditional bad sense of like bribing a Nobel committee staffer. Instead, web scraping:</p> <p>“The Nobel site runs on WordPress. Like many WordPress setups, it has an XML sitemap that lists every indexable page, even ones not yet public. If someone were monitoring this sitemap, they could easily notice a new page appear, something like “http://nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2025/machado/facts/”</p></blockquote> <p>If you run a WordPress site and want the best advice in the world for how to avoid this sort of thing, I <a href="https://wpvip.com/">highly recommend our enterprise WordPress VIP service</a>! They help run some of the largest and most secure WordPress sites in the world, and could easily help navigate avoiding something like this from happening. WordPress is easy and cheap to run everywhere, <a href="https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/lamp-web-server-with-wordpress">even on a Raspberry Pi</a>, but you get what you pay for, and any serious organization or mission-critical website should be on VIP.</p>]]></content> <link rel="replies" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/money-stuff/#comments" thr:count="3" /> <link rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/money-stuff/feed/atom/" thr:count="3" /> <thr:total>3</thr:total> </entry> <entry> <author> <name>Matt</name> <uri>http://ma.tt/</uri> </author> <title type="html"><![CDATA[The Curse of the Muse]]></title> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/muse/" /> <id>https://ma.tt/?p=150237</id> <updated>2025-10-16T00:01:18Z</updated> <published>2025-10-16T00:01:18Z</published> <category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="Essays" /> <summary type="html"><![CDATA[Some days, like this morning when I almost missed my flight to WordCamp Canada in Ottawa, I’m so overwhelmed with the maelstrom of ideas and sparks of creation that it feels like waves crashing against a dam. There are so many ways I can imagine new software, new products, new ways for the world to … <a href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/muse/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">The Curse of the Muse</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>]]></summary> <content type="html" xml:base="https://ma.tt/2025/10/muse/"><![CDATA[<p>Some days, like this morning when I almost missed <a href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/in-canada/">my flight to WordCamp Canada in Ottawa</a>, I’m so overwhelmed with the maelstrom of ideas and sparks of creation that it feels like waves crashing against a dam. There are so many ways I can imagine new software, new products, new ways for the world to be.</p> <p>This is a beautiful process, but it’s also painful! The anguish and agony arise as you attempt to distill the ideas and sparks; the creativity dims, and the beauty and perfection of the original inspiration fade, as I try to translate it into something that can become real and be legible to others. That’s why I have to drop everything when inspiration strikes, because if I try to return to it later, I find the muse has left and I can’t bottle that energy anymore. (There’s a reason <a href="https://meyerweb.com/">Eric</a>, <a href="https://tantek.com/">Tantek</a>, and I put “muse” <a href="https://gmpg.org/xfn/background">into the XFN standard</a>!)</p> <p>To the extent I’ve been successful at all in my life, it is because I’m able to contain this tornado and break it down into plans, business models, people, and teams. <em>I’ve never done anything useful on my own</em>; it’s always been in conversation and partnership with others. </p> <p>I’m grateful to everyone I work with across <a href="https://automattic.com/">Automattic</a>, WordPress, <a href="https://audrey.co/">Audrey</a>, <a href="https://tinkertendo.com/">TinkerTendo</a>, <a href="https://keysjazzbistro.com/">Keys</a>, <a href="https://www.theinstitute.com/">The Institute</a>, <a href="https://illuminate.org/">Illuminate</a>, <a href="https://ecoamerica.org/">EcoAmerica</a>, <a href="https://fieldeffect.com/">Field Effect</a> (in Ottawa!), as well as all my <a href="https://www.facebook.com/saxmatt">friends</a> and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattm/">professional connections</a>. They are the ones that help me shape this energy into things that actually have an impact in the world and aren’t just fever dreams.</p> <p>This essay itself had <a href="https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/">hundreds more words</a>, but I have to <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0060891548?tag=photomatt08-20">edit</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aStHTTPxlis">delete delete delete</a>, trim things down.</p>]]></content> <link rel="replies" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/muse/#comments" thr:count="2" /> <link rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/muse/feed/atom/" thr:count="2" /> <thr:total>2</thr:total> </entry> <entry> <author> <name>Matt</name> <uri>http://ma.tt/</uri> </author> <title type="html"><![CDATA[D’Angelo & Diane]]></title> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/dangelo-diane/" /> <id>https://ma.tt/?p=150230</id> <updated>2025-10-15T04:37:54Z</updated> <published>2025-10-15T03:49:42Z</published> <category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="Asides" /> <summary type="html"><![CDATA[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 … <a href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/dangelo-diane/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">D’Angelo & Diane</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>]]></summary> <content type="html" xml:base="https://ma.tt/2025/10/dangelo-diane/"><![CDATA[<p>Just last night I was re-watching <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Hall">Annie Hall</a> to remember and <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/diane-keatons-shadows-and-light">honor Diane Keaton</a>, and now <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/14/arts/music/dangelo-dead.html">the news that D’Angelo had passed</a>. I’m writing this listening to <a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/2lO9yuuIDgBpSJzxTh3ai8">Voodoo</a>, 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.</p> <p>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 (<a href="https://khspva.houstonisd.org/">HSPVA</a>!), Chris Dave (HSPVA!), Kenny Garrett, Pino Palladino, Questlove… May his memory be a blessing.</p>]]></content> <link rel="replies" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/dangelo-diane/#comments" thr:count="1" /> <link rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/dangelo-diane/feed/atom/" thr:count="1" /> <thr:total>1</thr:total> </entry> <entry> <author> <name>Matt</name> <uri>http://ma.tt/</uri> </author> <title type="html"><![CDATA[Nanochat & MCP]]></title> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/nanochat-mcp/" /> <id>https://ma.tt/?p=150223</id> <updated>2025-10-14T06:07:58Z</updated> <published>2025-10-14T06:07:14Z</published> <category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="Asides" /> <summary type="html"><![CDATA[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 … <a href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/nanochat-mcp/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Nanochat & MCP</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>]]></summary> <content type="html" xml:base="https://ma.tt/2025/10/nanochat-mcp/"><![CDATA[<p>Probably the most interesting thing on the internet today is <a href="https://x.com/karpathy/status/1977755427569111362">Andrej Karpathy’s nanochat</a>, “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, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/13/nanochat/">as Simon Willison notes</a>. If you want to understand how LLMs work, <a href="https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat">study this</a>. Andrej is a code poet.</p> <p>In hacking news, Wired has <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/satellites-are-leaking-the-worlds-secrets-calls-texts-military-and-corporate-data/">an amazing article on intercepting geostationary satellite signals</a>.</p> <p>On Friday, we turned on something cool: <a href="https://wordpress.com/blog/2025/10/07/mcp/">every WordPress.com site now supports MCP</a>. Right now this is read-only access to your site, because the S in MCP stands for Security, but <a href="https://developer.wordpress.com/docs/mcp/prompt-examples/">you can already start to do some cool stuff with it</a>.</p>]]></content> <link rel="replies" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/nanochat-mcp/#comments" thr:count="1" /> <link rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/nanochat-mcp/feed/atom/" thr:count="1" /> <thr:total>1</thr:total> </entry> <entry> <author> <name>Matt</name> <uri>http://ma.tt/</uri> </author> <title type="html"><![CDATA[Last Ball]]></title> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/last-ball/" /> <id>https://ma.tt/?p=150219</id> <updated>2025-10-13T06:36:52Z</updated> <published>2025-10-13T06:36:52Z</published> <category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="Asides" /> <summary type="html"><![CDATA[If you appreciate golf at all, the story of how Tiger Woods won the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach without knowing he was down to his last golf ball because of arcane rules is pretty interesting.]]></summary> <content type="html" xml:base="https://ma.tt/2025/10/last-ball/"><![CDATA[<p>If you appreciate golf at all, <a href="https://www.espn.com/golf/story/_/id/26902640/down-last-ball-how-tiger-avoided-disaster-won-2000-us-open-15">the story of how Tiger Woods won the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach without knowing he was down to his last golf ball because of arcane rules is pretty interesting</a>.</p>]]></content> <link rel="replies" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/last-ball/#comments" thr:count="2" /> <link rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/last-ball/feed/atom/" thr:count="2" /> <thr:total>2</thr:total> </entry> <entry> <author> <name>Matt</name> <uri>http://ma.tt/</uri> </author> <title type="html"><![CDATA[In Canada]]></title> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/in-canada/" /> <id>https://ma.tt/?p=150205</id> <updated>2025-10-11T15:35:19Z</updated> <published>2025-10-11T15:35:19Z</published> <category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="WordCamp" /><category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="WordPress" /> <summary type="html"><![CDATA[I’ve been trying to find time in my calendar to attend more WordCamps as I love meeting WordPressers all over the world. The stars aligned, and I’ll be swinging by WordCamp Canada next week. They’ve put together an amazing program, including open web pioneer and inventor Dave Winer, so I’m looking forward to checking out … <a href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/in-canada/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">In Canada</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>]]></summary> <content type="html" xml:base="https://ma.tt/2025/10/in-canada/"><![CDATA[<p>I’ve been trying to find time in my calendar to attend more WordCamps as I love meeting <a href="https://ma.tt/2025/09/wordpresser/">WordPressers</a> all over the world. The stars aligned, and I’ll be swinging by <a href="https://canada.wordcamp.org/2025/">WordCamp Canada</a> next week. They’ve put together an amazing program, including open web pioneer and inventor Dave Winer, so I’m looking forward to checking out the sessions. I wish I could go to every WordCamp, like I used to! I’ve been recording videos and messages for those I can’t physically attend. Ottawa is also great as the only other commercial board I’m on is <a href="https://fieldeffect.com/">Field Effect</a>.</p>]]></content> <link rel="replies" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/in-canada/#comments" thr:count="4" /> <link rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/in-canada/feed/atom/" thr:count="4" /> <thr:total>4</thr:total> </entry> <entry> <author> <name>Matt</name> <uri>http://ma.tt/</uri> </author> <title type="html"><![CDATA[Twitter Hacked]]></title> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/twitter-hacked/" /> <id>https://ma.tt/?p=150193</id> <updated>2025-10-11T15:21:37Z</updated> <published>2025-10-11T00:34:48Z</published> <category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="Asides" /> <summary type="html"><![CDATA[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 … <a href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/twitter-hacked/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Twitter Hacked</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>]]></summary> <content type="html" xml:base="https://ma.tt/2025/10/twitter-hacked/"><![CDATA[<p>Sorry everybody, my @photomatt on Twitter has been hacked, I’m trying to regain account access, but it is not currently in my control. <strong>Update: </strong>Thank you to the fine teams at X/Twitter and <a href="https://x.com/nikitabier">Nikita Bier</a>, 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. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/16.0.1/72x72/1f642.png" alt="🙂" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /></p>]]></content> <link rel="replies" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/twitter-hacked/#comments" thr:count="3" /> <link rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/twitter-hacked/feed/atom/" thr:count="3" /> <thr:total>3</thr:total> </entry> <entry> <author> <name>Matt</name> <uri>http://ma.tt/</uri> </author> <title type="html"><![CDATA[Jeremy Kranz and Sentinel]]></title> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/jeremy-kranz/" /> <id>https://ma.tt/?p=150173</id> <updated>2025-10-10T19:30:12Z</updated> <published>2025-10-10T19:30:12Z</published> <category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="Automattic" /><category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="Friends" /><category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="Technology" /> <summary type="html"><![CDATA[I’d like to introduce you to Jeremy Kranz. With his career as an investor at Intel Capital, then GIC, which is the sovereign wealth fund of Singapore rumored to manage over $700B, to now running his own fund Sentinel Global, he has had a front-row seat to investments in industry changing companies such as ByteDance … <a href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/jeremy-kranz/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Jeremy Kranz and Sentinel</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>]]></summary> <content type="html" xml:base="https://ma.tt/2025/10/jeremy-kranz/"><![CDATA[<p>I’d like to introduce you to <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremykranz/">Jeremy Kranz</a>. With his career as an investor at <a href="https://www.intelcapital.com/">Intel Capital</a>, then <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIC_(sovereign_wealth_fund)">GIC</a>, which is the sovereign wealth fund of Singapore rumored to manage over $700B, to now running his own fund <a href="https://www.sentinelglobal.xyz/">Sentinel Global</a>, he has had a front-row seat to investments in industry changing companies such as ByteDance (which became TikTok), Alibaba, Uber, DoorDash, Zoom, DJI (which changed the drone industry and argubly modern warfare), and many more I’m probably not even aware of.</p> <p>When I first met Jeremy in 2014, I was amazed that a late-stage financial investor could understand Open Source so well, and he immediately grokked what <a href="https://automattic.com/">Automattic</a> was doing in a way that I think has little parallel in the world. (Today, it reminds me of Joseph Jacks at <a href="https://oss.capital/">OSS Capital</a>.) <a href="https://www.insightpartners.com/team/deven-parekh/">Deven Perekh of Insight Partners</a> led Automattic’s 1.16B valuation Series C round, making us one of only forty “unicorns” (private companies valued over a billion dollars) at the time, and one of the reasons they beat out others as the lead of the round was that GIC/Jeremy was a LP of Insight so they could directly co-invest. GIC is so intensely private <a href="https://ma.tt/2014/05/new-funding-for-automattic/">I couldn’t even mention them in the announcement at the time</a> even though they were the catalyst for the round. Since then, Jeremy has become a close friend and advisor, and he even took me to <a href="https://www.nugs.net/live-download-of-dead-and-company-dos-equis-pavilion-dallas-tx-10-14-2021-mp3-flac-or-online-music-streaming/26749.html">my first Grateful Dead concert</a>.</p> <p>Eleven years later, this is his first podcast! Jeremy shares incredible <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/alpha.asp">alpha</a> around China, AI and its adoption in the enterprise, how asset allocation is evolving, and at the end, a beautiful tie together of the Grateful Dead and Open Source.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed alignwide is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"><iframe title="10 Black Swans All at Once: ByteDance’s First Investor Tells All" width="604" height="340" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8ledkmcO3M0?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe></div></figure>]]></content> <link rel="replies" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/jeremy-kranz/#comments" thr:count="1" /> <link rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/jeremy-kranz/feed/atom/" thr:count="1" /> <thr:total>1</thr:total> </entry> <entry> <author> <name>Matt</name> <uri>http://ma.tt/</uri> </author> <title type="html"><![CDATA[Kathy Sierra]]></title> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/kathy-sierra/" /> <id>https://ma.tt/?p=150166</id> <updated>2025-10-10T01:22:50Z</updated> <published>2025-10-10T01:22:50Z</published> <category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="Marketing" /> <summary type="html"><![CDATA[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 … <a href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/kathy-sierra/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Kathy Sierra</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>]]></summary> <content type="html" xml:base="https://ma.tt/2025/10/kathy-sierra/"><![CDATA[<p>I was reminded today of the profound marketing influence of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Sierra">Kathy Sierra</a>, who was a pretty prolific blogger and speaker back in the day. I would summarize her thesis as such: <strong>Your best marketing and communication should talk about how you make your users awesome, not how you’re awesome</strong>. If you’d like to check out some of her talks, <a href="https://href.li/?https://wordpress.tv/2008/10/31/wordcamp-sf-2008-kathy-sierra-kicking-ass-and-creating-passionate-users/">she spoke at WordCamp in 2008</a>, <a href="https://vimeo.com/81625882?fl=pl&fe=ti">at Business of Software in 2013</a>, and at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBtcGwHPMKM">Mind the Product in 2015</a>.</p>]]></content> <link rel="replies" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/kathy-sierra/#comments" thr:count="2" /> <link rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/kathy-sierra/feed/atom/" thr:count="2" /> <thr:total>2</thr:total> </entry> <entry> <author> <name>Matt</name> <uri>http://ma.tt/</uri> </author> <title type="html"><![CDATA[Battery Scan]]></title> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/battery-scan/" /> <id>https://ma.tt/?p=150146</id> <updated>2025-10-09T07:40:15Z</updated> <published>2025-10-09T06:24:00Z</published> <category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="Technology" /> <summary type="html"><![CDATA[One of the cooler companies I’ve seen in a while is LumaField, which does industrial CT scanning, as they describe it. Industrial X-ray CT (Computed Tomography) works on the same basic principle as medical CT, taking hundreds of X-ray images from different angles to capture the internal and external structure of objects in three dimensions. … <a href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/battery-scan/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Battery Scan</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>]]></summary> <content type="html" xml:base="https://ma.tt/2025/10/battery-scan/"><![CDATA[<p>One of the cooler companies I’ve seen in a while is <a href="https://www.lumafield.com/">LumaField</a>, which does industrial CT scanning, as they describe it.</p> <blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow"><p>Industrial X-ray CT (Computed Tomography) works on the same basic principle as medical CT, taking hundreds of X-ray images from different angles to capture the internal and external structure of objects in three dimensions.</p></blockquote> <p>In addition to providing amazing graphics of these scans, they also gather some valuable data. <a href="https://www.lumafield.com/battery-report">Their Lumafield Battery Quality Report does a deep dive into lithium ion battery manufacturing</a>, showing the wild differences between different brands. </p> <p>I love this stuff, whether you call it QA, evals, testing, or whatever, it reminds me of <a href="https://www.principles.com/principles/8b086563-5bb4-4741-8713-c62bd1a0d749/">Ray Dalio’s Principle to embrace reality and deal with it</a>.</p>]]></content> <link rel="replies" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/battery-scan/#comments" thr:count="1" /> <link rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/battery-scan/feed/atom/" thr:count="1" /> <thr:total>1</thr:total> </entry> <entry> <author> <name>Matt</name> <uri>http://ma.tt/</uri> </author> <title type="html"><![CDATA[Tim & Pablos]]></title> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/tim-pablos/" /> <id>https://ma.tt/?p=150138</id> <updated>2025-10-07T13:36:03Z</updated> <published>2025-10-07T13:36:03Z</published> <category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="Asides" /> <summary type="html"><![CDATA[Two of my favorite humans, Tim Ferriss and Pablos Holman, had a great interview together. Pablos has a great new book out, and Audrey Capital is a happy LP in his Deep Future fund. Of my many hacker friends, Pablos is probably the most public.]]></summary> <content type="html" xml:base="https://ma.tt/2025/10/tim-pablos/"><![CDATA[<p>Two of my favorite humans, <a href="https://tim.blog/">Tim Ferriss</a> and <a href="https://pablosspeaks.com/">Pablos Holman</a>, had a great interview together.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed alignwide is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"><iframe title="One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met — Pablos Holman" width="604" height="340" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eCp6ixlzyh0?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe></div></figure> <p>Pablos has a <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F23CLXZP">great new book out</a>, and <a href="https://audrey.co/">Audrey Capital</a> is a happy LP in his <a href="https://deepfuture.tech/">Deep Future fund</a>. Of my many hacker friends, Pablos is probably the most public.</p>]]></content> <link rel="replies" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/tim-pablos/#comments" thr:count="2" /> <link rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/tim-pablos/feed/atom/" thr:count="2" /> <thr:total>2</thr:total> </entry> <entry> <author> <name>Matt</name> <uri>http://ma.tt/</uri> </author> <title type="html"><![CDATA[Beeper Updates]]></title> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/beeper-updates/" /> <id>https://ma.tt/?p=150133</id> <updated>2025-10-07T11:41:38Z</updated> <published>2025-10-06T18:22:00Z</published> <category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="Automattic" /> <summary type="html"><![CDATA[Beeper has a fun set of September updates, adding support for Google Voice, LinkedIn now runs on-device, typing indicators for Google Messages and Instagram, full Telegram custom emoji support, and more.]]></summary> <content type="html" xml:base="https://ma.tt/2025/10/beeper-updates/"><![CDATA[<p><a href="https://blog.beeper.com/2025/10/06/beeper-september/">Beeper has a fun set of September updates</a>, adding support for Google Voice, LinkedIn now runs on-device, typing indicators for Google Messages and Instagram, full Telegram custom emoji support, and more.</p>]]></content> <link rel="replies" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/beeper-updates/#comments" thr:count="1" /> <link rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/beeper-updates/feed/atom/" thr:count="1" /> <thr:total>1</thr:total> </entry> <entry> <author> <name>Matt</name> <uri>http://ma.tt/</uri> </author> <title type="html"><![CDATA[Telegram and Weird Al]]></title> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/telegram-and-weird-al/" /> <id>https://ma.tt/?p=150113</id> <updated>2025-10-07T10:24:52Z</updated> <published>2025-10-05T21:08:02Z</published> <category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="Music" /><category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="Technology" /> <summary type="html"><![CDATA[I have two interesting interviews to share with you today, the first is Lex Fridman interviewing Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram. I started using and advocating for Telegram back in 2015, and Audrey Capital was part of their aborted fundraise in 2018. As a software craftsperson, I’ve always had tremendous respect for the team … <a href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/telegram-and-weird-al/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Telegram and Weird Al</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>]]></summary> <content type="html" xml:base="https://ma.tt/2025/10/telegram-and-weird-al/"><![CDATA[<p>I have two interesting interviews to share with you today, the first is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjPH9njnaVU">Lex Fridman interviewing Pavel Durov</a>, the founder of <a href="https://telegram.org/">Telegram</a>. I started using and advocating for Telegram back in 2015, and <a href="https://audrey.co/">Audrey Capital</a> was part of their aborted fundraise in 2018. As a software craftsperson, I’ve always had tremendous respect for the team and the rate at which they shipped truly novel design and UI. I’m amazed by the speed at which they ship major features across multiple platforms. The network also has incredibly resiliency, which they get into on the podcast. As I’m often in poor connectivity situations in planes or remote locations, Telegram has been one of the networks that works most reliably.</p> <p>I’ve met Pavel only briefly about a decade ago, but have followed his story as he’s a unique character with an ascetic lifestyle, target of many intelligence agencies, sperm donor father of 100+ children, and many other unique characteristics. I use Telegram like I use X/Twitter, I put things I consider semi-public on it and I think of it like a social network and development platform, and <a href="https://ma.tt/2022/08/telegram-channel/">since 2022 I’ve cross-posted my blog to a Telegram channel using a Jetpack bot</a>. It’s probably my favorite community platform. The four hour interview between Lex and Pavel covers a lot of ground, but product builders will probably appreciate most the middle part around the 2-hour mark where they go into their engineering and design philosophies. (BTW I usually watch/listen to these at 2x speed.)</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed alignwide is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"><iframe title="Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature | Lex Fridman Podcast #482" width="604" height="340" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qjPH9njnaVU?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe></div></figure> <p>If you’re looking for something a little lighter on a Sunday I recommend this <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSu2eMkIyZs">heart-warming conversation between John Mayer and Weird Al Yankovic</a>.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed alignwide is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"><iframe loading="lazy" title="How's Life with John Mayer - Weird Al Yankovic FULL INTERVIEW" width="604" height="340" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sSu2eMkIyZs?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe></div></figure> <p>I know this seems like an unusual pairing, but both Pavel and Weird Al are hackers in the sense that they examined the rules of the system and decided to create a new game.</p>]]></content> <link rel="replies" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/telegram-and-weird-al/#comments" thr:count="2" /> <link rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/telegram-and-weird-al/feed/atom/" thr:count="2" /> <thr:total>2</thr:total> </entry> <entry> <author> <name>Matt</name> <uri>http://ma.tt/</uri> </author> <title type="html"><![CDATA[Greenwashing]]></title> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/greenwashing/" /> <id>https://ma.tt/?p=150105</id> <updated>2025-10-07T10:05:45Z</updated> <published>2025-10-05T06:44:42Z</published> <category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="Karma" /><category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="Open Source" /><category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="WordPress" /> <summary type="html"><![CDATA[Tonight there was a lovely event at TinkerTendo by Raman Frey and Karin Johnson of Good People Dinners, this one honoring David Gelles’ new book, Dirtbag Billionaire: How Yvon Chouinard Built Patagonia, Made a Fortune, and Gave It All Away. I’m a huge fan of Yvon Chouinard and really enjoyed his book Let My People … <a href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/greenwashing/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Greenwashing</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>]]></summary> <content type="html" xml:base="https://ma.tt/2025/10/greenwashing/"><![CDATA[<p>Tonight there was a lovely event at <a href="https://tinkertendo.com/">TinkerTendo</a> by Raman Frey and Karin Johnson of <a href="https://www.gpdinners.com/">Good People Dinners</a>, this one honoring <a href="https://davidgelles.com/">David Gelles’</a> new book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dirtbag-Billionaire-Chouinard-Patagonia-Fortune/dp/1668032260?tag=photomatt08-20">Dirtbag Billionaire: How Yvon Chouinard Built Patagonia, Made a Fortune, and Gave It All Away</a>. I’m a huge fan of Yvon Chouinard and really enjoyed his book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Let-People-Surfing-Education-Businessman/dp/1594200726/?tag=photomatt08-20">Let My People Go Surfing</a> which I read back in 2018. It was the first time hosting such a large 60-person dinner in the TinkerTendo warehouse, and thanks to <a href="https://copperhome.com/">this Copper battery-operated induction stovetop</a> and an amazing local chef, <a href="https://www.komaaj.com/">Hanif Sadr</a>, the food turned out amazing.</p> <p>I’ve only started the new book, but I’m interested to see what’s happened in the 20 years between Yvon’s book and David’s, especially the story of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/climate/patagonia-climate-philanthropy-chouinard.html">how Yvon gave away all his equity and control in the company</a> to ensure a focus on his lifelong goal of environmentalism and conservation. Patagonia is one of the better corporate entities fighting for good, but it reminded me of how companies can put on a jacket of doing good while actually being evil underneath.</p> <p>Like I talked about the <a href="https://ma.tt/2025/09/externalities/">economic concept of Externalties a few weeks ago</a>, I think it’s imperative that the WordPress community understands the history of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing">Greenwashing</a>, which the <a href="https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/science/climate-issues/greenwashing">United Nations defines as follows</a>:</p> <ol class="wp-block-list"><li>Claiming that the company will achieve future environment milestones while not putting sufficient plans in place to do so.</li> <li>Being intentionally vague about operations or using vague claims that cannot be specifically proven (like saying they are “environmentally friendly” or “green”).</li> <li>Saying that a product does not contain harmful materials or use harmful practices that they would not use anyway.</li> <li>Highlighting one thing the company does well regarding the environment while not doing anything else.</li> <li>Promoting products that meet regulatory minimums as if peer products do not.</li></ol> <p>In <a href="https://wordpress.org/">WordPress</a> and open source our environmental crisis comes from companies that frack the open source software and brands, which shows up as lack of investment in the code which falls fallow <a href="https://tech.eu/2025/07/25/chronic-underfunding-of-open-source-software-poses-strategic-risk-to-europes-digital-sovereignty/">especially in the security sense</a>, or by attaching themselves to a brand or trademark and tricking people into thinking they’re associated with the Good Open thing, when they’re really a parasitic cancer on it.</p> <p>This is happening right now in WordPress, so when you see a company hire a good person or sponsor an event that seems on its own a good thing, and probably represents hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment, weigh that against the tens of millions they’re spending with their other hand to destroy the source of everything they’ve benefited from, and if they were to win, endanger every open source project. It’s an open source form of greenwashing, perhaps call it <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openwashing">openwashing</a>.</p>]]></content> <link rel="replies" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/greenwashing/#comments" thr:count="8" /> <link rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/greenwashing/feed/atom/" thr:count="8" /> <thr:total>8</thr:total> </entry> <entry> <author> <name>Matt</name> <uri>http://ma.tt/</uri> </author> <title type="html"><![CDATA[Linkrot]]></title> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/linkrot/" /> <id>https://ma.tt/?p=150093</id> <updated>2025-10-04T00:58:00Z</updated> <published>2025-10-04T00:24:40Z</published> <category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="Press" /><category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="WordPress" /> <summary type="html"><![CDATA[One of the things I hate most on the internet, and part of the reason I started WordPress, was to fight linkrot. Ever since 1998, when Tim Berners-Lee wrote “Cool URIs Don’t Change,” I’ve been obsessed with content management and ensuring that links don’t break. (BTW, TBL, a pioneer of creating the World Wide Web, … <a href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/linkrot/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Linkrot</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>]]></summary> <content type="html" xml:base="https://ma.tt/2025/10/linkrot/"><![CDATA[<p>One of the things I hate most on the internet, and part of the reason I started <a href="https://wordpress.org/">WordPress</a>, was to fight linkrot. Ever since 1998, when <a href="https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/">Tim Berners-Lee</a> wrote “<a href="https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI">Cool URIs Don’t Change</a>,” I’ve been obsessed with content management and ensuring that links don’t break. (BTW, TBL, a pioneer of creating the World Wide Web, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/10/06/tim-berners-lee-invented-the-world-wide-web-now-he-wants-to-save-it">has a great new profile out in the New Yorker</a>.)</p> <p>I learned today from the <a href="https://newspack.com/">Newspack</a> newsletter that the <a href="https://www.houstonpress.com/">Houston Press</a> is now on WordPress. Newspack is a distribution or bundle of WordPress designed for journalism, and it is led by <a href="https://kinsey.nyc/">Kinsey Wilson</a>, who began his career as a night-shift journalist covering cops for a newspaper in Chicago, went on to have top editorial and business positions at The New York Times, NPR, and USA TODAY, and ran WordPress.com for a few years, which gives him a very unique position to help craft WordPress for journalists and publishers.</p> <p>The Houston Press is an alt-weekly that wrote the very first profile of me in the world, <a href="https://ma.tt/2004/10/press-and-cnet/">which I blogged about here</a>. There’s a funny quote in there:</p> <blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow"><p>He recently considered taking a job with a San Francisco search-engine start-up, but ended up turning them down. “They have a ton of money…But it would be 50- or 60- or 70-hour weeks, a lot of work, and I wouldn’t have time” to do WordPress. </p></blockquote> <p>That “search-engine start-up” was <a href="https://www.google.com/">Google</a>! How the internet might have turned out differently if I had taken that job, as my Mom wanted me to (because they offered free food). I still think Google is one of the most interesting companies in the world, one of the few places I’d consider working if I weren’t running <a href="https://automattic.com/">Automattic</a>.</p> <p>Back to linkrot, the original link to the profile in that article was <code>http://www.houstonpress.com/issues/2004-10-28/feature2.html</code>, which this morning didn’t work, but thanks to the Houston Press being on Newspack/WordPress I was able to ping Kinsey and his colleague Jason Lee was able to fix it so it redirects to the new canonical URL for that content in minutes. A little corner of the internet tidied up! I love the <a href="https://web.archive.org/">Wayback Machine</a>, but not needing it is even better.</p>]]></content> <link rel="replies" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/linkrot/#comments" thr:count="7" /> <link rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/linkrot/feed/atom/" thr:count="7" /> <thr:total>7</thr:total> </entry> <entry> <author> <name>Matt</name> <uri>http://ma.tt/</uri> </author> <title type="html"><![CDATA[Blocktober]]></title> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/blocktober/" /> <id>https://ma.tt/?p=150063</id> <updated>2025-10-02T22:15:34Z</updated> <published>2025-10-02T22:15:34Z</published> <category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="WordPress" /> <summary type="html"><![CDATA[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.]]></summary> <content type="html" xml:base="https://ma.tt/2025/10/blocktober/"><![CDATA[<p>It’s so exciting to see what the creative minds like <a href="https://iconick.io/">Nick Hamze</a> or <a href="https://tammielister.com/">Tammie Lister</a> are doing with Automattic’s AI vibe coding tool, <a href="https://telex.automattic.ai/">Telex</a>. Tammie is doing a Blocktober, <a href="https://blocktober.fun/">a block every day this month of October, you should follow along</a>.</p>]]></content> <link rel="replies" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/blocktober/#comments" thr:count="0" /> <link rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/blocktober/feed/atom/" thr:count="0" /> <thr:total>0</thr:total> </entry> <entry> <author> <name>Matt</name> <uri>http://ma.tt/</uri> </author> <title type="html"><![CDATA[Fight For Open]]></title> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/fight-for-open/" /> <id>https://ma.tt/?p=150050</id> <updated>2025-10-01T20:54:12Z</updated> <published>2025-10-01T20:29:45Z</published> <category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="Apple" /><category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="Automattic" /> <summary type="html"><![CDATA[Sometimes the battle for open source and freedom can take on very prosaic and practical terms, but the wins can benefit everybody. To give an example: In Beeper we need more memory for showing notifications, because we support end-to-end encryption for networks like Signal, but Apple’s default was to only give 15 megabytes — barely … <a href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/fight-for-open/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Fight For Open</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>]]></summary> <content type="html" xml:base="https://ma.tt/2025/10/fight-for-open/"><![CDATA[<p>Sometimes the battle for open source and freedom can take on very prosaic and practical terms, but the wins can benefit everybody. To give an example: In <a href="https://www.beeper.com/">Beeper</a> we need more memory for showing notifications, because we support end-to-end encryption for networks like Signal, but Apple’s default was to only give 15 megabytes — barely enough to do anything. The previous CEO of Beeper, Eric Migicovsky, started a lobbying effort with the <a href="https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/index_en">EU’s Digital Markets Act</a> on behalf of the team to give third-party apps the same memory limits that Apple provides for their own apps, which is 50MB instead of 15MB. (And up to 250MB on their higher end devices.)</p> <p>Today we’ve gotten a notification that as part of iOS 26 update Apple has shipped to 2.3B devices around the world, our memory limits issue has been addressed globally, for every application developer, and some interoperability requests we had for <a href="https://developer.apple.com/documentation/telephonymessagingkit">SMS/RCS</a> have been addressed for EU users. Kudos and huge thank you to Apple for giving us all new capabilities to build amazing experiences for users on par with what they seek to deliver themselves. If you want to geek out on this, <a href="https://blog.beeper.com/2025/10/01/how-beeper-ios-implements-notifications/">check out the technical deep dive that Beeper just posted</a>.</p> <p>BTW, if you haven’t heard of it yet, <a href="https://www.beeper.com/">Beeper</a> is an Automattic product which aims to democratize messaging, just like WordPress democratized publishing for the world, by allowing you to get all your messages from friends across 11 different networks, like WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, Twitter/X, Signal, Discord, in one single inbox. The new version we launched in July does this in a completely secure way that’s local to your device, so the same encryption, privacy, and security each network provides is maintained.</p>]]></content> <link rel="replies" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/fight-for-open/#comments" thr:count="5" /> <link rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://ma.tt/2025/10/fight-for-open/feed/atom/" thr:count="5" /> <thr:total>5</thr:total> </entry> <entry> <author> <name>Matt</name> <uri>http://ma.tt/</uri> </author> <title type="html"><![CDATA[What’s Your Time?]]></title> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/09/tick-tock/" /> <id>https://ma.tt/?p=150037</id> <updated>2025-09-30T17:33:29Z</updated> <published>2025-09-30T17:30:25Z</published> <category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="Asides" /> <summary type="html"><![CDATA[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 … <a href="https://ma.tt/2025/09/tick-tock/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">What’s Your Time?</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>]]></summary> <content type="html" xml:base="https://ma.tt/2025/09/tick-tock/"><![CDATA[<p>I think some of the best writing about technology PR is this ten-year-old article by <a href="https://www.onbackground.com/">Aaron Zamost</a>: <a href="https://medium.com/backchannel/how-the-tech-press-forces-a-narrative-on-companies-it-covers-5f89fdb7793e">What’s Your Hour in ‘Silicon Valley Time’?</a> 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: <em>This too shall pass</em>. </p> <p>See also: The Zen fable or old Chinese poem of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_old_man_lost_his_horse">the old man who loses his horse</a>.</p>]]></content> <link rel="replies" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/09/tick-tock/#comments" thr:count="0" /> <link rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://ma.tt/2025/09/tick-tock/feed/atom/" thr:count="0" /> <thr:total>0</thr:total> </entry> <entry> <author> <name>Matt</name> <uri>http://ma.tt/</uri> </author> <title type="html"><![CDATA[Om 59]]></title> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/09/om-59/" /> <id>https://ma.tt/?p=150022</id> <updated>2025-09-30T00:54:44Z</updated> <published>2025-09-29T15:50:56Z</published> <category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="Personal" /> <summary type="html"><![CDATA[I want to dedicate my blog post today to my dear friend and brother, Om Malik, whose birthday it is. Om is a multi-hyphenate, but at his core, he’s a writer, someone who looks at the world and parses it down for others, a seeker who appreciates the spark of creation before most others. Om … <a href="https://ma.tt/2025/09/om-59/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Om 59</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>]]></summary> <content type="html" xml:base="https://ma.tt/2025/09/om-59/"><![CDATA[<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img data-recalc-dims="1" loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="604" height="340" data-attachment-id="150030" data-permalink="https://ma.tt/img_0803-3/" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/ma.tt/files/2025/09/IMG_0803-1-edited-scaled.jpeg?fit=2560%2C1440&quality=89&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1440" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"2.2","credit":"","camera":"iPhone 13 Pro","caption":"","created_timestamp":"1633864736","copyright":"","focal_length":"2.71","iso":"400","shutter_speed":"0.019230769230769","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="IMG_0803" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://i0.wp.com/ma.tt/files/2025/09/IMG_0803-1-edited-scaled.jpeg?fit=840%2C473&quality=89&ssl=1" data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/ma.tt/files/2025/09/IMG_0803-1-edited-scaled.jpeg?fit=604%2C340&quality=89&ssl=1" src="https://i0.wp.com/ma.tt/files/2025/09/IMG_0803-1-edited-scaled.jpeg?resize=604%2C340&quality=89&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-150030" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/ma.tt/files/2025/09/IMG_0803-1-edited-scaled.jpeg?w=2560&quality=89&ssl=1 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/ma.tt/files/2025/09/IMG_0803-1-edited-scaled.jpeg?resize=840%2C473&quality=89&ssl=1 840w, https://i0.wp.com/ma.tt/files/2025/09/IMG_0803-1-edited-scaled.jpeg?resize=1024%2C576&quality=89&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/ma.tt/files/2025/09/IMG_0803-1-edited-scaled.jpeg?resize=195%2C110&quality=89&ssl=1 195w, https://i0.wp.com/ma.tt/files/2025/09/IMG_0803-1-edited-scaled.jpeg?resize=768%2C432&quality=89&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/ma.tt/files/2025/09/IMG_0803-1-edited-scaled.jpeg?resize=1536%2C864&quality=89&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/ma.tt/files/2025/09/IMG_0803-1-edited-scaled.jpeg?resize=2048%2C1152&quality=89&ssl=1 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/ma.tt/files/2025/09/IMG_0803-1-edited-scaled.jpeg?resize=818%2C460&quality=89&ssl=1 818w, https://i0.wp.com/ma.tt/files/2025/09/IMG_0803-1-edited-scaled.jpeg?w=1208&quality=89 1208w, https://i0.wp.com/ma.tt/files/2025/09/IMG_0803-1-edited-scaled.jpeg?w=1812&quality=89 1812w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 604px) 100vw, 604px" /></figure> <p>I want to dedicate my blog post today to my dear friend and brother, <a href="https://om.co/">Om Malik</a>, whose birthday it is. Om is a multi-hyphenate, but at his core, he’s a writer, someone who looks at the world and parses it down for others, a seeker who appreciates the spark of creation before most others.</p> <p>Om was one of the earliest users of WordPress and he was one of <a href="https://ma.tt/2005/01/meetup-aftermath/">8 people who came to the very first WordPress meetups at Chaat Cafe on 3<sup>rd</sup> street in San Francisco in 2005</a>. (You can tell what an early adopter he is because he has the username “Om” <a href="https://x.com/om">on Twitter/X</a> and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/om/">Instagram</a> and WordPress and probably more.) We had connected on the WordPress support forums when I helped him get set up around the 1.0 days. After I moved to San Francisco to take the job at CNET he connected me to people like Phil Black, Tony Conrad, and Toni Schneider who would become, respectively, an investor, board member, and CEO of Automattic. These are folks I still work with and consider close friends today. As a journalist, he had a keen nose for BS and made sure as a naïve 20-something in SF I was connecting with quality people.</p> <p>Since we met we’ve both had a shared love for photography, and I’ve seen Om blossom into an amazing photographer with a really unique style and approach, <a href="https://www.photosbyom.com/">in fact you can even buy some of his photography prints</a>.</p> <p>Over the years, we’ve dipped in and out of shared obsessions with cameras, watches, shoes, fashion, and design. We have a fair number of matching things in each. In photography we’ve shivered in minus thirty weather in Antarctica and Jackson Hole at odd hours to catch a special shot. We’ve traveled to Europe and Japan dozens of times, being very early (pre John Mayer and Kanye) to brands like <a href="https://www.visvim.tv/">Visvim</a>. <span style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">When I wear something like a bespoke<span style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">, hand-made piece from <a href="https://45rglobal.com/" target="_blank">45R</a> to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45HRzzc0waU" target="_blank">speak at WordCamp US</a>, he recognizes it off the cuff </span>and even knows the one store on Crosby Street in New York where you can buy it.</span> He is a tastemaker and an aesthetic connoisseur in every area he’s interested in, from food to coffee to pens, and everything in between. Sometimes we’ll start a journey together, for example, trying nice pens, and years later, I’ve moved on and he’s gone deep into collecting dozens of them, being in obscure forums and Reddits, or attending events like the <a href="https://sanfranciscopenshow.com/">SF Pen Show last month</a>.</p> <p>When you walk into a coffee shop with Om he doesn’t just know the barista’s name, he knows their dog’s name and the story of every person working there.</p> <p>I’m 500 words in, and I still haven’t even scratched the surface of describing Om’s journey, from growing up in Delhi to becoming a journalist for a Japanese publication in New York, a book author, party promoter, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, photographer, and explorer. If you want to understand the AI bubble we’re in right now, you should <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0471660612?tag=photomatt08-20">read his book Broadbandits on the crazy telecom / Enron bubble</a>. This is a long way to say, happy birthday Om!</p>]]></content> <link rel="replies" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/09/om-59/#comments" thr:count="6" /> <link rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://ma.tt/2025/09/om-59/feed/atom/" thr:count="6" /> <thr:total>6</thr:total> </entry> <entry> <author> <name>Matt</name> <uri>http://ma.tt/</uri> </author> <title type="html"><![CDATA[Craft vs Slop]]></title> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/09/craft-slop/" /> <id>https://ma.tt/?p=150017</id> <updated>2025-09-29T06:46:13Z</updated> <published>2025-09-29T06:41:36Z</published> <category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="AI" /> <summary type="html"><![CDATA[In an age where AI can generate an infinite amount of stuff, what matters? Some of the most interesting writing I’ve read on this comes from Will Manidis, who makes it biblical and says that Craft is the Antidote to Slop: From Genesis, man enters not a paradise without labor but a world of intentional … <a href="https://ma.tt/2025/09/craft-slop/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Craft vs Slop</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>]]></summary> <content type="html" xml:base="https://ma.tt/2025/09/craft-slop/"><![CDATA[<p>In an age where AI can generate an infinite amount of stuff, what matters? Some of the most interesting writing I’ve read on this comes from <a href="https://willmanidis.com/">Will Manidis</a>, who makes it biblical and says that Craft is the Antidote to Slop:</p> <blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow"><p>From Genesis, man enters not a paradise without labor but a world of intentional creation. The LORD God places man in the Garden of Eden<em> “to dress it and to keep it”</em> (Genesis 2:15) establishing labor not as punishment but as sacred vocation. This original calling invites us to co-create the Kingdom, tending and developing the world with intention and care. Our fundamental purpose is not consumption but participation in the ongoing work of creation.</p> <p>The serpent’s temptation represents the first shortcut in human history<em>.”Ye shall be as gods” </em>(Genesis 3:5) was not an invitation to deeper engagement with creation, but a way to get out of the work required to tend to it. The consequence wasn’t the introduction of work itself, but its corruption into burdensome toil: <em>“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread” </em>(Genesis 3:19). Humanity’s first sin was, in part, choosing the easy shortcut over the meaningful process – preferring effortless gain to the demanding but fulfilling work of tending the garden.</p></blockquote> <p>You can read the rest as <a href="https://x.com/WillManidis/status/1971920155996574168">screenshots on X</a> or <a href="https://minutes.substack.com/p/craft-is-the-antidote-to-slop">on his Substack</a>, but I hope he gets a real website soon. This also makes me think you should watch the <a href="https://www.weareasgods.film/">We Are As Gods documentary on Stewart Brand</a>, supported by the amazing folks at <a href="https://press.stripe.com/">Stripe Press</a>.</p>]]></content> <link rel="replies" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/09/craft-slop/#comments" thr:count="5" /> <link rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://ma.tt/2025/09/craft-slop/feed/atom/" thr:count="5" /> <thr:total>5</thr:total> </entry> <entry> <author> <name>Matt</name> <uri>http://ma.tt/</uri> </author> <title type="html"><![CDATA[Saturday Shares]]></title> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/09/saturday-shares/" /> <id>https://ma.tt/?p=150000</id> <updated>2025-09-28T01:31:04Z</updated> <published>2025-09-28T01:31:04Z</published> <category scheme="https://ma.tt" term="Asides" /> <summary type="html"><![CDATA[A few links for you: Fun fact: this post has the ID of “150,000” in my wp_posts table.]]></summary> <content type="html" xml:base="https://ma.tt/2025/09/saturday-shares/"><![CDATA[<p>A few links for you:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"><li>From Kirschblütenboogie to Khruangbin (from Houston!), here’s a <a href="https://open.spotify.com/playlist/27gcPbqPTfnjS1xnfq9jFe?si=lF1sBoR1R3SyrPOEu3c3aQ">Saturday chill Spotify playlist I made for you to have good vibes this weekend</a>. Perfect for sunsets. Hat tip: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielgruneberg/">Daniel Gruneberg</a> who first introduced me to Hermanos Gutiérrez.</li> <li><a href="https://openssf.org/blog/2025/09/23/open-infrastructure-is-not-free-a-joint-statement-on-sustainable-stewardship/">Open Infrastructure is Not Free: A Joint Statement on Sustainable Stewardship</a>. “Billion-dollar ecosystems cannot stand on foundations built of goodwill and unpaid weekends.”</li> <li>Chat-based photo editing is one of the most magical uses of AI right now, and <a href="https://blog.google/products/photos/android-conversational-editing-google-photos/">Google Photos just made it available to everybody</a>.</li> <li>Did you know <a href="https://automattic.com/expectations/anti-glossary/">Automattic has an anti-glossary</a>?</li> <li>It’s cool to see <a href="https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/07/07/copyleft.html">Vitalik Buterin come around to copyleft licenses</a>.</li> <li>I’m going to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQDNgy774sg">re-link the Grit interview, some people are saying it is their favorite they’ve seen of me in years</a>.</li> <li>BCG has an annoyingly-good rundown of <a href="https://www.bcg.com/publications/2023/corporate-development-finance-function-excellence-art-of-capital-allocation">The Art of Capital Allocation</a>.</li> <li><a href="https://siliconangle.com/2025/06/26/linux-foundation-open-source-ai-opensourcesummit/">The Linux Foundation thinks open source contributes $9 Trillion in global value</a>. Really what we’re doing is sharing the technological phylogenetic branches for humanity’s progress.</li> <li><a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/08/study-social-media-probably-cant-be-fixed/">A great interview with Petter Törnberg on his paper about how social media might be structually dysfunctional</a>. “Rather than bringing us together into one utopian public square and fostering a healthy exchange of ideas, these platforms too often create filter bubbles or echo chambers.”</li> <li>See <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4JxqES_Gzk">Harry Mack meet Will Smith and Martin Lawrence</a>.</li></ul> <p>Fun fact: this post has the ID of “150,000” in <a href="https://codex.wordpress.org/Database_Description#Table:_wp_posts">my wp_posts table</a>.</p>]]></content> <link rel="replies" type="text/html" href="https://ma.tt/2025/09/saturday-shares/#comments" thr:count="3" /> <link rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://ma.tt/2025/09/saturday-shares/feed/atom/" thr:count="3" /> <thr:total>3</thr:total> </entry> </feed> If you would like to create a banner that links to this page (i.e. this validation result), do the following:
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