FeedCity

WordPress emerged from the ashes of UserLand, something I am recently reacquainted with, working the last couple of months with Claude on a reboot of Frontier, this time written in JavaScript, running in Electron. But someone is sure to reboot Manila in this context, and Manila is at least a grandparent of WordPress. I'm following all kinds of trails as we test the product, codename Atlantis, against all the apps we wrote for it back then.

At the grocery store this week, I walked by someone who was having trouble figuring out the label of a specific item. He flagged me down. There was a language barrier, but it’s kind of heartwarming how much you can communicate just by smiling, pointing, thumbs-up, and insert...

Quick video demo of the new photos picker in Micro.blog for Mac. Much faster to grab a photo from your library in Photos.app.

Ben Thompson in today’s daily update about AI on the Apple Watch:

It does appear that Apple has taken care with this feature, including not making raw transcripts available, even to the Apple Watch owner, but this is an area where I wish the company wasn’t early.

Good perspective from Dave Winer about the news that Matt Mullenweg is on leave from Automattic:

I didn’t want to be the CEO of a tech company, and I expect that being the CEO wasn’t really a good fit for Matt either. A CEO’s job is very different from being a developer and idea guy which Matt clearly sees himself as. Something has got to give, either you’re a good CEO and the product languishes, or you focus on the product, and the company is unmanaged.

This applies to Micro.blog too. I’m not a good CEO and not a good boss. I try to make the web a little better by helping people blog.

Repository: BlackRock’s latest SEC filing values its Automattic shares at $14.33 per share. They originally invested at $85 a share in 2021. That means their market cap has dropped from $7.5 billion to $1.2 billion. My guess is when that happens the CEO if they want to keep their job, has to rethink the whole enterprise. And that usually doesn't happen until they get a new CEO. My guess is that's what we saw play out yesterday.

The last two episodes of season three of Silo on AppleTV prove that there is value in a three season, boring escapade of confusing, unlikable uninteresting characters, living their whole lives in a silo, fearing the outdoors -- if you have a clever way of accounting for all that at the end. Highly recommend watching just season three and pretending that none of the other stuff matters because it probably doesn’t. But I bet if I go back to the beginning and start over, I'll find there's more intrigue than I thought. I'll probably do it, will let you know.

Fair to say I was gobsmacked by the news late yesterday that Automattic's board had put their CEO, Matt Mullenweg, on paid leave. I've read lots of stuff about it, in news articles and in a Hacker News thread. And a lot of posts on Twitter by Matt, and the replies. Are you ...

Listening to Hillary Clinton on the news this morning. It’s always like a glimpse into what might’ve been. She actually knows things. Thoughtful, measured. 🇺🇸

It’s a really big deal that we’re scanning all the plugins now.

My home page is a poem. I designed it in this way to explore the extent to which a literary medium – a poem – could be used for navigation, for way finding. Poems help me see the world differently, to navigate thoughts. So too does navigation: every link is a bridge to a new...

Today I’ll mostly be listening to The Bothy Band, in memory of Paddy Keenan—what a piper!

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.

Today’s #WASSUP tip: a search shortcut for saving pages in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.Yes this is a lot like yesterday’s tip, except for archiving a page, rather than looking it up. For example if you try looking up a page in the Internet Archive and it’s not ther...

Jason Snell blogged about all the Apple news today, including the slightly controversial Apple Watch recording feature:

Our culture may ultimately reject even the most privacy-focused AI recording features, whether they come in camera glasses or attentive smartwatches. But if there’s any valid, non-creepy case to be made for this sort of technology, someone needs to make it.

I’ve long wanted an easy way to record quick notes that are transcribed and synced, but I don’t want to record other people. Perhaps a better place to start would’ve been for it to ignore all voices except our own.

Surprising news. Matt Mullenweg was forced to take a paid leave of absence as CEO by Automattic's board.

I sort of tuned out during the Apple Watch part of the presentation today. Catching up on Siri Recap and Live Rewind. How it works (PDF) is interesting… It’s pretty clever. Jumping through a lot of hoops for maybe not-great transcription, though.

I have completely lost interest in new phones. The last one I bought was a Pixel 9 because they said it would have great AI features. At that time the sky was the limit, there were new breakthroughs every afternoon in AI. Now it's just an app. I will be ready for the next th...

I close my eyes and I can still see the blanket of stars that I saw moments ago when I was leaning as close as I could into the glass of the window such that I could see as many stars as possible. Such is the impression that the stars made that I can see them in my mind even...

Not sure who created these, but I’m starting to notice a couple bridges from specific X accounts to AT Proto, so you can follow people on Bluesky (or in Micro.blog) without visiting X. Here are two: John Ternus and Tibo. There are probably more.