It was so cool to see WordPress highlighted (although with a lowercase P in in the closed captioning) on the Apple keynote today. 

I recommend watching the entire keynote, but especially the Apple Intelligence section starting at 1:04 not because we’re mentioned but because it shows the future of computing, which is the future of society.

Apple is an exciting company because they push so much compute and capability to the edge with their devices, it gives people superpowers. The Grammarly-level editing and spell-check alone is amazing, on par with their math stuff. Some of these superpowers will be directed into blogging, and I can’t wait to see what people do with all these new generative tools at their disposal. I really love the Promethean model where all of us have devices in our pocket or desktop that can turn us into superheroes.

I think it’s actually going to turn the hosting world upside down because complex transformations that would be difficult to run on the server-side will be trivial to run client-side with these millions and billions of processors being distributed through people’s smartphone upgrades. This innovation should exist at the operating-system layer (I include browsers and WASM in this) not be replicated in every application. WordPress Playground plays into this trend. (Interesting that Apple has now started to adopt the playground terminology.)

Sriram Krishnan calls Tyler Cowen one of the best talent spotters.

I take a few life lessons from Tyler, who I consider a mentor even though we’ve spent, at most, dozens of minutes together in the past several decades. (Don’t constrain your mentors by their availability, engage with their work!)

1. He has blogged consistently on Marginal Revolution since 2003. As he learns he shares, and that’s a lighthouse beacon attracting smart people around the world with similar interests. So the lesson is: blog!
2. He keeps himself open to engagement, with his email address being public. He reads and responds to his own emails.
3. He treats everyone with with respect. I was a kid no one had heard of when I met him at an economics conference in 2003, but he spoke to me with the same respect and attention he gave to Milton Friedman, who was also there.

His advice to me was simple but true: Write every morning. Be more ambitious. Because it was coming from him I took it seriously. It’s all very open source. (I’m very curious to see how economic theory and open source intersect in the coming years, I think there’s a lot in the open source world that is novel and useful.)

I’m inconsistent compared to him in those three things but I look up and aspire to the example he sets, especially within the WordPress community where I keep myself easy to reach on the community Slack or talking to people at WordCamps. (Like WordCamp Europe in Turin next week!)

In my life I like to experience things high/low, to stay grounded. So while I’ve been taken on culinary adventures with the best chefs in the world like René Redzepi or Kyle Connaughton, sometimes I find myself on a United flight, as I am today, ordering the chicken.

When you move between two extremes it’s not the big things that bother you, for example I’m sure this chicken wasn’t raised on scraps from Michelin star restaurants, as I was once told in New York, but the little things, like “Why is this butter as hard as a rock?”

Butter, one of the most magical of ingredients, should spread. Yet it is served in so many places at a temperature that makes you feel more like you’re carving Play-doh. So I will now give you one of my favorite travel hacks: On United they nuke the main entree too hot to eat when it arrives, but this is now to your advantage because you can open the small butter tin and put it on the scorched entree and let thermodynamics turn it from rock-hard butter-ice to supple, delicious butter.

The process takes a minute or two, just enough time to eat your salad (be careful opening the pressurized balsamic dressing!) and allow the bread to cool a bit and be palatable.

On occasion I have left the butter in the heat too long, and it liquifies, but then I just use it as a pour or dip my bread into it, imagining myself at Peter Luger’s dipping my steak into the collected deliciousness at the bottom of the dish. If you’re serving at home, softening the butter and warming plates is an easy way to elevate your game.