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 … Continue reading Nanochat & MCP →

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.

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 … Continue reading In Canada →

Sorry everybody, my @photomatt on Twitter has been hacked, I’m trying to regain account access, but it is not currently in my control.

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 … Continue reading Jeremy Kranz and Sentinel →

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 … Continue reading Kathy Sierra →

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. … Continue reading Battery Scan →

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.

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.

I have two interesting interviews to share with you today, the first is Lex Friedman 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 … Continue reading Telegram and Weird Al →

Tonight there was a lovely event at TinkerTendo by Ramen 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 … Continue reading Greenwashing →

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, … Continue reading Linkrot →

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.

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 … Continue reading Fight For Open →

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 … Continue reading What’s Your Time? →

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 … Continue reading Om 59 →

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 … Continue reading Craft vs Slop →

A few links for you: Fun fact: this post has the ID of “150,000” in my wp_posts table.

When WordPress started in 2003, I never dreamed it would power over 40% of websites, nine times the number two CMS, but I wrote on a notecard a list of five publications I admired and respected so much I wanted them to run on WP someday. In the interest of sharing your dreams to help … Continue reading Five Publications I’d Love on WordPress →

I love the culture of freestyle rap, it’s so inspiring to see how people can create such rich poetry riddled with allusions and puns on command. Last week I got to meet Harry Mack and see him improvise live and it totally makes sense that he has a jazz drums background. If you’re not familiar … Continue reading Harry Mack →

Telex has launched a new design and a gallery of some interesting examples. It’s really cool to see what people are starting to do with Telex, it really gets back at the fun of hacking and coding at the beginning, when a computer does something for you that makes you gasp. My colleague Eduardo Villunendas … Continue reading Telex Remixes →

There is some riveting drama in the Ruby community around company sponsorships, and directory nudging similar to what happened with Advanced Custom Fields and Secure Custom Fields. This post does the best summary: Shopify, pulling strings at Ruby Central, forces Bundler and RubyGems takeover. I will only add that Automattic attempted to sponsor RailsConf and … Continue reading Ruby Drama →

The 4.7 earthquake definitely disturbed my sleep last night, so it’s nice to have a Cuzen Matcha shot and some Harney & Sons Paris tea to wake up and get me through the day. Speaking of spilling tea, I had a great conversation with Joubin Mirzadegan of the storied VC firm Kleiner Perkins where we … Continue reading Post-Earthquake Tea Grit →

If you’re not playing music while you’re working, you’re missing out. It’s incredible how sounds can transform how our brain works. You can, on tap, put yourself into a different mode of being with music; you can change your drive, motivation, mood, and more. There are some apps that have started to hack this, such … Continue reading Work With Music →

When my father passed unexpectedly, I was despondent. One thing I remember was the Amazon lovebomb I got from my high school girlfriend Sunaina Sondhi, five books to help me deal with the pain. Even a decade after we dated, books were her love language; in fact, she had given me my very first book … Continue reading Books on Grieving →

MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. (The joke is the S in MCP stands for security, but that’s another post.) They say to think of it like “like a USB-C port for AI applications” because it allows interoperability between AI chatbots and other tools. Here’s some of the MCP stuff happening across the Automattic solar … Continue reading MCP Everywhere →

I’m at a dinner tonight and they have these old magazines on the table, including some old copies of WIRED, which, if you can imagine, as a kid in Houston in the 90s, was a portal to the amazing world of the internet and technology. I flipped through, and there is an entire web hosting … Continue reading Every 6 Minutes →

I’m on my first United flight with Starlink, and wow! I ran a fast.com test and got 110 mbps down and 38 mbps up, which is insane. 28ms ping times. While flying! When you think of all of the engineering and technology coming together to let me blog this it’s really incredible.

Andrew Chen has a great post on retention.

One of my favorite YouTubers is Charles Cornell (WordPress-powered!), who creates great videos that break down the music theory of various things you’ve heard, such as this adorable one featuring SNES soundtracks or The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I first came across him reacting to Jacob Collier in 2020. Once I got super-into … Continue reading Weekend YouTubes →