A few links for you:

• From Kirschblütenboogie to Khruangbin (from Houston!), here’s a Saturday chill Spotify playlist I made for you to have good vibes this weekend. Perfect for sunsets. Hat tip: Daniel Gruneberg who first introduced me to Hermanos Gutiérrez.
• Open Infrastructure is Not Free: A Joint Statement on Sustainable Stewardship. “Billion-dollar ecosystems cannot stand on foundations built of goodwill and unpaid weekends.”
• Chat-based photo editing is one of the most magical uses of AI right now, and Google Photos just made it available to everybody.
• Did you know Automattic has an anti-glossary?
• It’s cool to see Vitalik Buterin come around to copyleft licenses.
• I’m going to re-link the Grit interview, some people are saying it is their favorite they’ve seen of me in years.
• BCG has an annoyingly-good rundown of The Art of Capital Allocation.
• The Linux Foundation thinks open source contributes $9 Trillion in global value. Really what we’re doing is sharing the technological phylogenetic branches for humanity’s progress.
• A great interview with Petter Törnberg on his paper about how social media might be structually dysfunctional. “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.”
• See Harry Mack meet Will Smith and Martin Lawrence.

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 them come true, here they are:

1. Atlantic
2. Economist
3. New Yorker
4. New York Times
5. Wall Street Journal

And one bonus: Houston Chronicle. (Gotta root for the hometown.)

There has been uneven progress toward this over the years; we’ve gotten some of the NYT and all of the New Yorker at one point, only to have them revert under new CTOs. Also, there have been some unexpected huge wins, like when Vox Media retired its proprietary CMS Chorus and brought over amazing publications like The Verge and New York Magazine. For any projects related to these publications, including trials or micro-sites, I’d be happy to provide my feedback on architecture, design, and opportunities, and contribute Automattic and VIP resources wherever they could be helpful.

I believe the most crucial aspect to get right for these customers is real-time co-editing, which is on the Gutenberg roadmap and shipping soon. If I were writing this list today I might choose some different targets.

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 classifieds section! Hiway Technologies wants you to know that every 6 minutes, someone hosts with Hiway.

Every six minutes, so they were doing 240 signups a day. 100,000 sites! Last month WordPress.com created a new site about every 3 seconds. Hiway was founded by Scott Adams, same name but not the Dilbert guy or the game designer, who apparently played football in Florida and the company “was sold in 1999 for $352 million. Adams was 35.”

There was also this guy, who has a website, but do you?

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.

Update 2025-09-16: United actually responded to my tweet about this. 😂

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 Severance, his breakdown of the spooky music is great. It’s also interesting to see that the YouTube community is going through its own version of fair use and copyright, trademark, etc., enforcement, which he discusses here.

Sam Altman is always interesting to follow, and it’s interesting to contrast this great interview he did with David Perell on writing with this very direct and awkward one with Tucker Carlson. I have immense respect for anyone who enters the arena and engages directly with journalists or critics, rather than hiding behind PR agents or lawyers. Given the current blood feud, it’s fun to go back eight years and see Sam Altman interview Elon Musk, long before any of the AI stuff blew up they were both terribly prescient.

Ray Dalio is always a gem and he went on Diary of a CEO. Theo Browne has a good take on what it means to vibe code. Kishan Bagaria discusses how Beeper is going to reach 100 million users. The story of how Atlassian took a non-traditional enterprise path with Jay Simons is great. Not a YouTube, but don’t miss Bret Taylor on The Verge. Check out Adam D’Angelo at South Park Commons.

And finally, I’ll say that YouTube Premium, which turns off all the ads, is probably one of the highest value subscriptions you can have. Many of these are essentially like podcasts, and from a product perspective, I think we need to figure out how to sync and allow seamless movement between watching, listening, or reading transcripts in Pocket Casts (Automattic’s open-source podcasting app). We support video podcasts, but there’s no good way yet to have a Whispersync-like experience between video, audio, and a transcript.

I recently came across a few old business cards I designed back in 1999. The first ones were for my services as a saxophone player:

A few notes:

• I went mostly by “Matthew” then.
• At some point I decided to remove the home address and say that I was available to play not just alto saxophone but baritone, tenor, and soprano as well.
• The number was the home shared house number, not a cell phone.
• The email was an email address the entire family shared, under my dad’s name.
• HAL-PC was an amazing non-profit local to Houston that stood for the “Houston Area League of PC users.” There was a pretty reasonable annual membership fee, and they hosted a monthly general meeting which had hundreds of attendees, always with a presentation or two and a raffle giveaway at the end. They were a dial-up ISP and BBS/newsgroup host. I volunteered for them by going in on Saturdays where they had a room people could bring their broken computers to and get free tech support, and by hosting a SIG, or special-interest group, around PalmOS called HPUG, the Houston Palm Users Group. This was a big part of the inspiration for WordCamps.

This was for my “design” business:

I would also design business cards for friends, here’s one for my friend who was a percussionist and vibraphonist, Chase Jordan: