mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06I can think. I can wait. I can fast.
This is a little embarrassing to share, but I'd rather someone else be able to spot a dangerous scam before they fall for it. So, here goes.
One evening last month, my Apple Watch, iPhone, and Mac all lit up with a message prompting me to reset my password.
WordPress Everywhere
As we announced and TechCrunch covered, my.wordpress.net has soft-launched. What this means is you need to fundamentally shift how you think about WordPress. From the beginning, WordPress has always been open source, giving you freedom, liberty, autonomy, and digital sovereignty. Open source is the most powerful idea of our generation. For the past few decades, WordPress was software you got from a cloud provider or web host, such as…
Easter Thoughts
You call yourself a Christian engineer, but you haven’t given your life to Open Source? Huh. What license would Jesus choose? I don’t know if it’s GPL or MIT, but sure as heck it isn’t proprietary. Letting proprietary code dictate your life is like following a Bible you’re not allowed to read. Beware those who would seek to mediate your relationship to the divine. Happy Easter, y’all. 🙏🐰🌈
Introducing Me.sh
Very excited to share that the Clay.earth team that joined Automattic last year is re-launching under a new, very cool name and brand: Mesh. Imagine something that joins you (me) to everyone you're connected to. It's going to be a very important layer of the distributed identity and social work we're doing. It's an amazing app you should try out if you haven't yet. Available on the web, MacOS, Windows, iOS, and even the Vision Pro. Stunning design.
High Agency
One term that keeps coming up in discussions about thriving in the AI era is "high agency." This 30-minute longread by George Mack is a great way to get you thinking about how high or low agency shows up in your life.
EmDash Feedback
So, two other Matts at Cloudflare announced EmDash — the spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security. (Is it nominative determinism or a simulation glitch that everyone trying to terraform the web has some variation of "Matthew" in their name? I was in a call set up by Matthew Prince, talking to Matt Taylor and Matt Kane, with my right hand there, …
Long-time WordPresser Miriam Schwab just rebuilt her WordPress site with Claude Code and it looks amazing. Go check it out, this is what is possible now with proper prompting. I’d love to see a WordCamp keynote from Miriam on her process in this. (And she’s doing this while missiles are flying overhead. Wow.)
Bay Lights are Back!
Tonight, a project very near and dear to my heart, the Bay Lights in San Francisco, are officially re-lighting after a three-year hiatus. It's been an incredible journey getting here. I literally mortgaged my apartment in 2013 to help fund them the first time around, and it's such an honor to see them relit now with better technology and new programming from the amazing artist…
Song Creation
I'm in New Orleans for the first time in 7 years for a beautiful wedding. My Mom's side of the family emigrated here in the 1860s, and there's a deep comfort in the art, traditions, and weirdness of Creole culture. Good music and food are ubiquitous. I met up with WordPresser Blake Bertuccelli-Booth to catch a set by Jason Marsalis…
Selling Your Company
I would like to offer some free business advice to people who are considering selling something they've created. First, if the buyer insists you don't talk to any other bidders, you are being screwed. They only do this because they don't want you to find the market-clearing price. Do you think when Microsoft called LinkedIn and said, "We want to buy you for $26B," and they replied, "Sure!
This year at Automattic has been intense. We kicked it off with two weeks of in-person AI enablement training, and there’s a great post about it now. I’ve been so impressed and inspired by my colleagues leaning in to learn and grow together in the most consequential time in software development in the past 40 years.
WordPress, AI, plugins, future of software engineering
Yesterday I was on the WP-Tonic podcast, and my colleague Adrian Laboş did a great summary of the key points, which I'll share here: AI security audit wave incoming: Expect AI tools to flood WordPress core and the 70,000+ plugin ecosystem with both improvements and newly discovered security vulnerabilities, requiring infrastructure to triage at scale. Avoid vibe-coding compliance surfaces…
Taxonomist
I'm really excited to introduce a project I worked on with various AI agents the other night, which I think represents a new way we might build things in the future. First, the problem: My WordPress site has 5,600+ posts going back decades, and I had some categories that were old and I didn't really use anymore, and I wasn't happy with the structure.
If you host your WordPress on WordPress.com your AI agent can now manage your entire site, including updating posts or pages, making drafts, pretty much all the things you normally do with WordPress. Hook this up to your OpenClaw, Hermes, ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, whatever and have fun!
People are doing pretty interesting things with Emacs (now on version 30.2!) these days, if you haven’t checked in recently. The bleeding edge has always been people into Org Mode. Sacha Chua has hooked up Whisper to Emacs to talk to it.
Emacs is probably one of the first and best examples of self-modifying software that contours to your brain. With vibe coding, we may get back to that space where everyone’s personal setup is like a crazy specific Emacs config file.
Claude & Sonos
Tonight was one of my most surreal Claude Code Sundays. To make a long story short, I pointed Claude Code at my Sonos setup in Houston: "All 29 Sonos speakers were running on WiFi with SonosNet completely disabled. They had accumulated ~89 million dropped packets across the system. That packet loss is why groups kept falling apart - Sonos grouping requires tight sync between speakers, and the WiFi was too congested to deliver it."
If you’re looking for a good watch this weekend, I couldn’t recommend more the documentary Turn Every Page – The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb. The craft of research, writing, and editing is presented in the most beautiful way possible. Around 400,000 words were removed from The Power Broker, which was ultimately published as 1,162 pages.
Stockfish
Nobody is arguing that Stockfish is conscious, but Stockfish would kick Claude’s ass at chess. Kevin Lincoln in AI Perfected Chess. Humans Made It Unpredictable Again.
For a brief period, Tumblr was unavailable to the 115M+ people in the Philippines because the government had blocked it. To their credit, the Philippines CICC quickly reviewed and corrected their block after mass public outrage from the Filipino Tumblr community. Let the people tumble!
WP & AI Updates
There's so much fun stuff happening, first the new assistant launched on .com, covered by TechCrunch and in this video. Also some cool Claude stuff launched. James has a nice write-up of the other dozen things that are going on, it's fun to see the AI parts of WordPress moving at AI-speed. We just need to loop back to some of the older screens and give them some love.
Popping Bottles
With the rise of GLP-1 drugs, there’s a trend that magnums are being ordered at clubs to meet minimums but left unfinished. I think there’s a space for an ultra-high-end wellness drink at clubs. Imagine Erewhon meets Magic Mind meets Kin, maybe with some effervescence. An elixir that comes out with sparklers but makes you feel great with nootropics not hungover.
Automattic’s new transparency report is up, and TorrentFreak covers how AI-generated notices have been flooding the system. We don’t talk about it much, but for two decades now Automattic has been a fierce fighter for free speech on behalf of our customers and journalists. Our legal team has gotten a big upgrade in the past 15 months so look for more in this area.
WordPress 7.0 is shaping up to be a great release, and we’re moving fast! As someone noted, after the…
Beautiful Hack
It's bad, but it's so good. As you read this deep dive into the LiteLLM backdoor hack, or this one, it's really just quite impressive. The use of ICP canisters, wow. Just as an engineer, I'd love to meet the minds behind this code.
Ari & X
I'm in NYC for the Stephan Wolfram dev/ai/nyc conversation tomorrow at the Automattic Noho space. While walking back from the Apple Store in Soho where I had picked up a new Studio Display XDR to try out, ran into one of my favorite YouTube accounts to follow right now, Ari at Home! I ran into him around 32 minutes into this Twitch stream…
Declaration of the Independence
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. 30 years a 1 month later, it seems like an apt time to revisit John Perry Barlow's Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.
Community Antibodies
First, I want to say how great the jazz scene is in New York. I caught a little Latin at my go-to Guantamera last night, but the band seemed to be phoning it in a bit, so I walked over to Dizzy's and heard an amazing big band performance by the Diva all-women Jass Orchestra, they had Clint Holmes…
Not doing a full What’s In My Bag yet, but I do want to highlight I’ve been really enjoying the Sennheiser HDB 630 Wireless Over-Ear Headphones. Hat tip: Philip Kaplan aka Pud.
Great Writing
Especially in an age where generating words is cheap, when you come across truly great writing, it really stands out. I want to pull two quotes from The Economist'columnist Charlemagne's article Luxury goods are Europe’s global tax on vanity. Flogging luxury goods is one of the few fields of business in which Europe excels (if one excludes the crafting of regulation).
Bar Gyu x Wapuu
For the Japanese WordPress community, I have planted a special Wapuu at the coolest spot in Niseko, Bar Gyu, aka the refrigerator door bar. Now on the handle you'll find a special surprise. Anyone recognize which WordCamp it's from? Ioanna and Hisashi run one of the coolest bars in the world; it's been on my bucket list to visit.
JAŸ-Z Returns
Since he spoke to Dean Baquet in 2017, JAŸ-Z hasn't done an interview. Hov's back! He sat down with GQ, and it's a lovely listen and read. We played enough defense, 2026 is all about offense. Your morality defines who you are, not what you’ve attained.