About me: 🚀 25+ years of tech experience 🌎 WordPress developer 💻 Open source contributor 💾 PHP, JavaScript, Python, Zapier 👍🏻 I treat your business like my own ✅ Trying to make the web fun again! DMs are open for questions, projects, job offers.

Being non-technical in San Francisco must feel like divine retribution At least Fitness SF knows their customer base

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Fifth week in a row setting a new record for the number of new plugins submitted to the WordPress plugin repo. Last week there were 1363 new plugins submitted (194/day!) Approvals dipped slightly, but still hit 942 (134/day).

The religious fervour with which people defend Aı sends up major red flags for me. 🚩🚩🚩 For something that is “just a better tool”, a lot of people really don’t like it if you aren’t using it.

Saw this on a service I use: "This product uses AI. Double check its work." 1. The fact this message exists tells me that Aı isn't where people say it is. 2. The good news: I don't use Aı in this project at all, so I have nothing to worry about!

How are your weekend plans coming along, Aı bros?

Great point. Billionaires are shouting Aı from the rooftops and many people just listen and agree. Think for yourself. Build for yourself.

If you burn tokens, are you even a developer?

Well as long as the PRs are reviewed and approved, right? 😆 Right?

Managing sites without proper backups or a recovery plan is a bad deal. Ask your site manager about this. I offer site recovery at no extra cost for my clients. It's in my best interest to keep your site up to date and secure. To date, I've had to do zero recoveries!

I hope you're enjoying the pumpkin spice season.

What it feels like to order fast food—in this economy!

This is basically what I see happening right now in the tech community. Just keep saying "Aı" until everyone in your circle is saying it too.

They are all hoping to drop the bags on the public market. The current staff and early investors get ultra rich (except SBF), then the public fight over the scraps of wealth via short / long investing. This is rideshare and delivery drivers all over again. The tech starts out pretty great, but they can't turn a profit because it was so easy to replicate there are too many of them. Even incumbents like GrubHub eventually lose profitability even with first mover advantage and early IPO for fundraising. Ease of market entry + low brand affinity + minimal ways to innovate = a bad market to be in, trust me I'm an SEO and there are about 500 million people globally who claim to be an expert at this. If those same 500 million could generate a food delivery or rideshare app overnight, they probably would. This means that the apps cannot raise prices without losing consumers to churn, but the more they allow consumers to use something that costs 100x what they are willing to pay for it, the less likely the entire industry will be to raise the prices. LLM companies are in the same boat, trying push the inevitable off as far as possible until the current shareholders get rich AF. Their only hope for long-term survival is to get all of society so hopelessly addicted that they all become "too big to fail" and force us into a situation where the going concern plays in their long-term favor, meaning we'll have to pay more for products that do marginally better (or worse) than products we already have. To me this made the xAI and SpaceX pre-IPO merger a brilliant move. It gives them a revenue vehicle no matter what happens. For example xAI could simply become a personal AI for X users (if such a thing takes off), while SpaceX provides X space infrastructure like datacenters. All while they profit on acquisitions like Cursor. Meta sees Muse as a future advertising creator consultant and ad buyer as well as a personal confidant. Google sees Gemini as the know-it-all of the future pulling from your calendar and email and drive at will. Microsoft sees Copilot / other AI as their next revenue growth for Azure (their #1 revenue source). OpenAI and Anthropic do not have this type of vertical integration and attempts to build something like this have so far been failures about as big as Loopt (Sam's first company). The Sora 2 app was popular with users, but a massive cost sink for OpenAI, Claude Code is popular with developers but undercut on pricing by competitors. The companies who stole the internet, may not actually survive the wave of tech they created, a rare failure in the tech world, as their only way out is if they convince one or more groups to pay them large amounts of money: 1. Consumers - There is no case that an LLM is worth paying more than $20-$25 for, and many consumers are against paying completely. 2. Developers - Devs are integrating LLMs into their products, but 100% of those I talk to said they would drop token/API based ones for onboard ones of similar quality if given the chance. They also all fear the LLMs will just steal their apps (i.e. what Twitter did to developers for over a decade). 3. Businesses - To integrate these systems into their processes and pay more for it (ChatGPT work). 4. Content creators - To use LLMs to generate photos and video clips at scale, but accept the inherent limitations of the tech + the added censorship. 5. Advertisers to run ads - But making the ads useless and giving the advertiser nearly zero data on what content an ad appears for. This isn't a repeat of Apple vs. Microsoft or Google vs. Yahoo! or Facebook vs. MySpace or Reddit vs. Digg. There are too many players all vying for the exact same markets, then changing directions and trying for a different market later. This is all out war between some of the biggest and most well-funded companies in the history of humankind, blood is bound to be shed.

I challenge you to post a Thanksgiving dinner plate better than mine.

Happy Thanksgiving, Canada!