I'm a little unclear on the timeline here, but Mullenweg just got back from Burning Man. I suspect that's related to both the content of the post and the board's timing.

The rumor I saw when all this started implied it was.

I think it said that Mullenweg always came back from burning man with lots of ideas.

The implication to me was the ideas were terrible and the board was afraid of having to deal with it yet again. But that’s a total guess.

I have worked at Automattic for ~7 years. I don't see the history of bad ideas coming from Burning man.

Matt is always looking for inspiration, as we all should be. Whether it comes from Burning man or elsewhere seems irrelevant.

If you're currently at Automattic... any idea who your current CEO actually is? :) What's all this like internally?

Matt is Automattic's CEO.... I see what you're doing... ;)

We/I want to build useful things. This is a distraction. I believe Automattic is a net benefit for the web and look forward to having more focus to continue delivering on that. Internally, were focused on that.

Are there ideas coming from Burning Man?

:) Not sure.

I feel like the only way this makes sense is if "ideas" is a euphamism for drugs.

Sounds like you've never worked for a CEO with "ideas." One time a CEO made the whole R&D team switch to "aspect oriented programming" because he had read a blog post. Another time we had to switch to C# because he had heard it wad better than Java.

Trust me, you don't want a CEO with "ideas."

I worked for a company with co-CEOs. The ideas CEO left and the company tanked. I think there's a right way to have an ideas CEO but maybe a balance helps keep them from switching everybody to C# on a whim. A CEO without ideas seems like a recipe for at best stagnation and at worse just fleecing the company of value and taking a golden parachute.

It’s 100% about the quality of the ideas, isn’t it.

I agree no ideas is just a path towards irrelevance.

The CEO doesn't necessarily have to have the ideas. How many ideas do you think Tim Cook had regarding products at Apple?

Spending time at Burning Man can completely detach you from reality

One thing that's a occasionally annoying (because I deleted my account) but understandable is that a lot of the non-English speakers have stayed on X because it's easy for them to ignore the Nazis.

I used to think this but it seems to me that the most scarce and valuable resource will be having humans pretend to care about you.

Chronological feeds tend to be gameable by growth hacking. Still better than a lot of things.

One of the tricky things for me is feed aggregation for balancing subscriptions between people who post a lot and people who don't.

It also might be interesting if video recommendations were curated feeds by the creator.

It's telecom infrastructure to increase the number of people who have internet in order to increase the number of people using Google. They might have been considering having satellite internet in Android phones.

This is like half of all job listings I've read recently. And it's a decent amount of fintech that's like this.

I'm assuming that the most relevant geoengineering is worldwide stuff like blotting out the sun with microsatellites at L1 and dumping iron or lime into the oceans to increase CO2 absorption.

I haven't tried it, but I saw Leanstral, an LLM specialized in writing Lean proofs, posted on HN recently and it claims to outperform some larger general purpose models. It didn't beat Claude Opus, but it seems to do decently at one tenth the cost. It's plausible that further research could yield other models that are smaller and more effective at limited tasks, reversing the trend of ever growing models.

If open frontier models start closing up and states start more export controls on AI services and hardware, it might be good to ensure the supply chain is there to reproduce the SotA, or even a couple generations behind it.