Remembering Eric

A dear friend and colleague has passed away after a losing battle with cancer. Eric was the kindest soul and leaves an enduring memory behind. Thinking of his family and the privilege of having known him, I’m brought back to the poem “Continuities” by Walt Whitman. Forever in pain and joy…

Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form—no object of the world.
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.
Ample are time and space—ample the fields of Nature.
The body, sluggish, aged, cold—the embers left from earlier fires,
The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;
The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual;
To frozen clods ever the spring's invisible law returns,
With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn.

Big Sky

Automattic just released a new AI builder on WordPress.com, codenamed “Big Sky”. One of its main design principles is to operate in the real block editor environment, which means users can edit the website either through the conversational interface or by making direct edits, bouncing as needed between the two interaction models. Blocks and patterns really help structure things in a way that both users and AI can manipulate with ease.

Try it out, it’s early access, and it’s only going to get more capable from here!

On Friendship

Albert Camus wrote to René Char in 1957:

The more I age, the more I find that you can only live with beings who liberate us, who love us with an affection that is as light to bear as it is strong to experience. Life has become too difficult, too bitter, too weakening, for us to suffer more new servitudes from those we love. We would end up succumbing to sorrow, literally, and we have to live to find the words, the impulse, the thought on which to sustain a joy, the joy.
I cannot conceive of our friendship any other way. I adore your happiness, your freedom, in a word: your adventure, and I would like to be a companion you can be sure of, always.

So here’s to the blithe and lasting spirit of friendship… happy 40th birthday, Matt!