How ISO Works
Inspired by Om I’ve been getting back into my DSLR photography. I learned a lot about how ISO settings work from this delightful physics YouTube channel MinutePhysics.
TechCulture
Matt Mullenweg.
Essays on open source, publishing, and the web.
Recent essays
29 of 29AI Slop
If you’re going to give me AI slop, at least make it fun! Give me iambic pentameter. Make it all rhyme. Have it be a song. I think we’re under-utilizing the artistic and creative capabilities of models by making them produce work that sort-of-but-not-really lo…
Important Security Update
WordPress 7.0.2 went out today with two important security updates. One is a type of pre-authorization RCE we (fortunately!) have only seen a few times in WordPress’ 23-year history; the last, I believe, in the PHPMailer class five years ago. Major kudos to Ad…
Code for the People
Lights! Camera! Action! Todd Spangler at Variety writes: Automattic’s ‘Code for the People’ Documentary Is a Rallying Cry for Users to Fight for the Open Internet, from the NYC premiere last week. I’m looking forward to the San Francisco premiere of the docume…
USA 250
This auspicious 250th Independence Day, I find myself thinking of what Om wrote in iAMerican when he became a US citizen in 2013. On a globe, America is a landmass, a country. In an immigrant’s heart it is a belief that future is almost always better. It may n…
Om Links
There has been a lot of excitement about the OmFest idea. If you’d like to attend or contribute, please fill out this form as soon as possible so we can gauge the type of venue we need. Update: ThankYouOm.com from Michael Galpert pulls together all the tweets,…
All Roads Lead to Om
Yesterday, my best friend and brother from another mother, Om Malik, passed away. They say that blood is thicker than water, and what we had was way thicker than blood. — Bob Weir Om’s request was for a small family prayer ceremony. In mourning, that will be a…
No Bubble
A throwback from 2007: a local Bay Area a cappella group called The Richter Scales made a Webby Award-winning viral video about how that bubble felt. Hat tip: Toni.
Hill For A Stepper
In honor of Father’s Day, I wanted to add to the two quotes from my Dad’s obituary, “Seven days without chicken made one weak.” and “If you fail at raising your children, nothing else mattered.” with another saying he had. Ain’t no hill for a stepper. If you’d…
Death by PowerPoint
PowerPoint makes us stupid. — Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander Classic 2010 NYT We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint.
Best Trash
A typography savant on staff had spent a month designing link underlines (literally just lines) that were more visually pleasing than Chrome or Safari’s defaults. On Tuesdays, engineers stayed late at the office, fixing design imperfections over dinner. One of…
Midjourney Medical
I’m sorry I couldn’t be there in person, but I was so excited to watch the Midjourney Medical launch from afar. This is a really big deal. David Holz, one of the most underrated pioneers in AI, has taken money from making cat pictures to build a full-body ultr…
Audio Wars
It looks like Ubiquiti is coming for Sonos with its PoE Audio Port, a $199 device that closely resembles the $499 Sonos Port, and $599 PowerAmp. Sonos is going up-market with the Amp Multi. Sonos has had a rough patch, but I’m pretty ride or die for them, and…
Assorted Links
Sometimes you have to just start with beauty. Listen to Jon Batiste’s Beethoven Blues, then relish this interview, where he plays and talks about it. I can’t wait for Black Mozart, which is already starting to trickle on Spotify. Forget all that Ferrari stuff,…
WCEU
Cześć wszystkim, Kraków… I made the call not to fly to Poland for WordCamp Europe. I’m very sorry for the last-minute notice; I was really hoping to make it. I’m okay, but I want to stay close to loved ones going through difficult times. Seeing the pictures fr…
Bee Champion
Spelling bees have gotten a lot more intense. How many of these do you know? torrone, enthymeme, iguape, Denebola, fais-dodo, cywyddau, pohutukawa, monadnock, émeute, nannofossil, tongkang, Natchitoches, flaith, semele, rusell, sawder, campernelle, Nicol, Zame…
Maybe
I think I heard this parable somewhere in the 14 hours of Alan Watts lectures someone recommended to me in 2017, but here’s a beautiful 2-minute version I’d love to share for everyone going through something. I really appreciate the love and support I received…
RIP Sonny Rollins
Sonny Rollins, the Saxophone Colossus, has passed. He is probably my favorite saxophonist, and while the aforementioned album is one of the five I would take to a deserted island, he has so many other good ones like The Cutting Edge which also has bagpipes, or…
TheOpenSource
It’s very cool to see Theo / t3.gg‘s open source arc. Just in general, with people creating more software than ever, it’s so exciting to see an explosion of open source and a growing understanding of why working together on open source makes so much sense for…
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…
Turn Every Page
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…
Pedro Franceschi
This Ashlee Vance interview of Pedro Franceschi from Brex contains so many interesting stories it might cause you to reconsider what it means to be a CEO.
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?…
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 cate…
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.
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 Guantanamera 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-wome…
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.
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…
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.