Sunday Links

Five items:

• Automattic’s new transparency report is up, and TorrentFreak covers how AI-generated notices have been flooding the system. We don’t talk about it much, but for two decades now Automattic has been a fierce fighter for free speech on behalf of our customers and journalists. Our legal team has gotten a big upgrade in the past 15 months so look for more in this area.
• WordPress 7.0 is shaping up to be a great release, and we’re moving fast! As someone noted, after the product review, we got the new Connectors setting screen in beta 2 at AI speed.
• Yesterday, TinkerTendo hosted a fun BioArena Hackathon. From the pics, it looked like a great event.
• Kudos to WP community member Matt Medeiros, who used AI to spin up a quick webapp to help his community track which streets had been plowed after that crazy snowstorm. Making local communities better is definitely part of the WordPresser ethos.
• Claude’s hack to import your memory is an amazing application of what I hoped for with the Data Liberation push on WordPress.org. However, it’s just re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic; what you really want is for that memory to be personal to you and work with every model, which is what OpenClaw and its many claw descendents, like ZeroClaw, do for you. It reminds me of Tantek’s 2005 Attention.xml presentation.