No one should risk an unknown entity taking illegal control of a key plugin on their site. I can't imagine anyone wanting WP.org to weaponize more plugins on their site.
But none of his actions are sensible if he just wants to defend it. He's done more damage than WP Engine ever did.
The argument that WP Engine is trying to mislead people is weak at best. We're seriously saying that talking about WordPress hosting was misleading? To whom? What about every other host that does this?
Also considering the current deliberately misleading state of .com/.org/Automattic/Matt/the foundation etc, I really think they could do a lot to lead by example there before going this unnecessarily nuclear to others. I don't believe it because the reaction is totally out of line with the issue.
> But none of his actions are sensible if he just wants to defend it. He's done more damage than WP Engine ever did.
Trying to see things from Matts perspective, it totally makes sense to go nuclear in order to defend what you see as your baby being under attack from a hostile for-profit entity.
I don't necessarily agree that the situation actually is "WP Engine is attacking Wordpress", but clearly Matt sees it like that, no matter if it's real or not, and it does make his actions understandable, even if I disagree with them, or how weak the argument is.
> Trying to see things from Matts perspective, it totally makes sense to go nuclear in order to defend what you see as your baby being under attack from a hostile for-profit entity.
Trying to see things from the perspective of the wordpress community, and not just 1 dude: wordpress is not his baby, it is the community's baby, and he is the hostile for-profit entity attacking it with things like this checkbox, cutting off over a million community members from security updates, etc.
tl;dr: nobody is saying Matt doesn't think he's always in the right (obviously he does), we're just pointing out that he isn't, and his actions hurt wordpress and the community.
There's a fine distinction to be made between "he thinks he's right" and "he thinks he can get away with it", which both would lead to the actions we now see
Might be a weird question, but what sort of consultancy opportunities do you get? I have worked for a long time in a design and development agency and I (think) I saw very little opportunity or demand for consultancy.
To the point where I legitimately don't know who or in what situation all these businesses are that are spending so much money on 'consultancy'. When do these businesses seek consultants and what for? I know that might be a far reaching question, so any examples would be appreciated.
In my experience this stuff is very cliquey - if you’re friends with the guy who is Chief Innovation Officer at some bank, or a heavy hitter at a government department, it’s easy to get yourself lucrative day rate consulting contracts, and much less easy if you don’t. Gotta know the right people and mix in upper middle class circles with people who have power over purse strings.
You make a good point but you can't in the long term fight against this in a healthy way by stifling peoples access to information. Some people seem to hold the worldview that they know the right answers and must protect the simpletons from the wrong ones, where others would like to make all information available and trust in people to eventually form sensible solutions.
It’s interesting how people like the OP single out the two cures for the diseases of hatred & oppression: censorship and cancellation. And yet lack the courage to couch their ask in plain language: Let us say anything we want but never face any consequence for doing so.
I'm not sure how anyone holds this opinion. Do you really believe that this will result in fair, unbiased reporting? Who is the long-term great arbiter not only of the news but removal of non-news?
I'm also not sure why your worldview seems to be that given access to all opinions, the stupidest ones too, people will not and cannot learn to make informed judgements for themselves. You will see some stupidity but it's a very bleak and arrogant worldview to presume that people are incapable of making rational decisions given information and time.
Arguments in bad faith drive out those in good faith.
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past." -- Jean-Paul Sartre
Automated or crowdsourced moderation don't counter that; they reinforce it.
Look at Twitter and reddit, two sites where it's impossible to have a serious discussion because those who hold platform-approved opinions "like to play with discourse" and "seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert."
"They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly" for fear of the moderators.
Skilled, professional, human moderation might counter that, but doesn't scale.
38% of the white evangelical Protestants who responded to Pew Research Center's survey[1] said that humans have always existed in their present form. But maybe you're right; maybe these people just need more time to become informed. It's only been 160 years since On the Origin of Species was published. We need to be more patient.
I know you're being facetious, but you actually prove the point well. I wonder what that % was 10, 20, 30, 50 years ago. I wonder which direction it's going?
But no I'm sure it would be far better if we banned such heretic thoughts and enforced our worldview.
It has been fairly stable. Creationism went from 38% in 1983 to 33% today (but with enough variability that it was also 38% as recently as 2017). "God made evolution happen" is another 40-44%, again fairly stable. Given the margin of errors in the polls, I'd say that they're pretty much the same, or a very slight decrease.
"It's just evolution" did change noticeably, but it's still only 22%. That's up from 9% in 1983.
So presumably the "i dunnos" are decreasing. But nothing seems to alter the misinformation very much.
I loved the early Internet, and initially stoked when more and more people got onto it. I thought we'd enter an enlightened age of education and everyone could live up to their potential. Obviously, that's not what happened at all, and the current-day internet is a cess pool of people profiting off misinformation and encouraging these stupid bubbles where people are fed a feedback loop of bullshit.
Watch https://www.netflix.com/title/81254224 and see how effectively social networks can hijack the human brain for nefarious (or just irresponsible) ends.
> Do you really believe that this will result in fair, unbiased reporting?
One could make the argument that the eras in which only those who had money or political power had a real voice resulted in a more stable society. Allow everyone to have a voice (full freedom of speech) but outlaw platforms that truly try to give a voice to everyone. If someone really wants to put out a message they can go to the street corner and shout whatever they like, no matter how bad it is, unrestricted.
A fair point. I'm not sure stability and freedoms generally always increase along the same line here. You can definitely increase stability while stifling freedoms. Not that they necessary directly correlate, but I imagine one way to cheaply and quickly gain some level of temporary stability is to stifle freedoms.
Are you saying that "so many" men were accidentally raping as there was no implicit consent? That's ridiculous. As the article alludes, sex is not a scary and horrible minefield, and the idea of consent shouldn't be overused and watered down to apply to every difficult situation.
You're describing power within an industry, not our culture. You are for no reason attributing the action of a few to many. Which is sexist.
Not OP, but I'm pretty sure they meant that too many men were deliberately raping or abusing women against their consent, through force, extortion, manipulation, deceit and incapacitation. And that this is where the MeToo movement came from, to show people just how prevalent this is.
> and the idea of consent shouldn't be overused and watered down to apply to every difficult situation
I got the impression that's what the article was doing. That was my main issue, it seems to take consent and MeToo and frame it in a very juvenile manner, contextualized with teenagers getting to know their sexuality and first experimenting not sure about what they want, like or how to act. Where consent and MeToo is about preventing serious sexual abuse, not dealing with a breakup or an ackward kiss.
Democracy (at least the US flavor of it) has run its course and is no longer working - since apparently the president can appoint the top brass of the judicial branch, and the house can just make legal action against the president go away. To name a few examples. Also voting is not considered a right or obligation, but a privilege. I can go on.
Technical point, but US democracy has survived a literal civil war in the past and been fine. The US would continue doing fine if it carried on this way for another 100 years. Although the politicians might want to implement some wealth creation policies imho instead of experiments with literally banning working.
The change is the corruption is visible now that the internet is a thing. The making of the democratic sausage has always been a disgusting process.
You are for no reason attributing the action of a few to many.
The point is that it isn't a few men. If you listen to women most of them have accounts of how they've been harassed in some way. A recent (2018) survey[1] found that 81% of women had experienced verbal sexual harassment, and 27% reported physical sexual assault. That is not "a few" men giving the rest a bad name. Also it is not sexist to point it out.
>A recent (2018) survey[1] found that 81% of women had experienced verbal sexual harassment, and 27% reported physical sexual assault.
Sorry but this stats does not support your claim...? If the stats phrasing was "81% of men had conducted" it would support your claim, but experienced doesn't in any way means that every woman that experienced harassment experienced it from one unique male each time (which is probably the least likely implication of all).
It is sexist to point it out, just at it is racist to point to incarceration rate (weighted by population) of blacks to call a black person more prone to disobedience. (or male incarceration rate, for that matter)
It is a classical classroom example case of misrepresentation of statistic to make discriminatory remark, or shift the blame to a group.
but experienced doesn't in any way means that every woman that experienced harassment experienced it from one unique male each time (which is probably the least likely implication of all)
That's not the claim I was making though. What I said was that we don't know if it's a minority of men who are harassing women. The stats don't tell us that. The assertion that it's very few men doesn't really hold water though, simply because women everywhere report the same experiences. Consequently there are men everywhere who are harassing women.
It is a classical classroom example case of misrepresentation of statistic to make discriminatory remark, or shift the blame to a group.
I'm not misrepresenting the statistics. I'm saying that the statistics tell us there's a massive problem with sexual harassment of women and we don't know if that's from a minority or a majority of men. You're not using the statistics when you say it's a minority of men. You're making an unfounded and unproven assumption.
I would hope that it's not a majority of men, but whether it's 1%, or 5%, or 25% of men isn't something I'd like to even guess at. My partner tells me that it's far closer to 25% than 1% though, and I believe her.
Pretty much everyone has interacted with the police at some point in their lives and there are only a few police. And I suspect a silly % have experienced assault from a tiny number of criminals. I've been assaulted by a stranger, but the number of potential assaulters I've seen is minute. You're not arguing from actual evidence.
The assumption that we've got no evidence and therefore we'll go with your partner's estimate is unlikely to carry the debate. That is why people are calling your comment sexist. [No argument -> could be 25% of men!] is a sexist position. Plus this is a forum flooded of men so that flaw there will be spotted pretty quickly.
I think it's likely that 81 percent of all people have experienced having something stolen. That doesn't mean 81 percent of us are thieves. Similarly, I guess 99.99 percent of us have experienced receiving spam in our email. That doesn't mean 99.9 percent of us are spammers.
We should not confuse perpetrators and victims.
From the several hundreds of men I know as friends, class mates, colleagues, I have never experienced a single one cat calling, groping, grooming or doing worse kinds of sexual harassment. In hundreds of parties and thousands of work situations, I've never seen it. Not even once.
I've seen both men and women circulating sexually charged jokes or telling such jokes in work environments, and I've seen both men and women comment on each others looks or hitting on each other, both when it was wanted and unwanted. But that's it.
Yes, that's just my anecdotes, but it seems far more likely to me that we are talking about a small percentage of men doing it all the time than most men doing it sometimes.
I think it is minority of men doing the same thing again and again and again. Verbal sexual harassment is specifically something that one person can do to many others within short time.
But I remember reading that rapes are similar. One person is doing it multiple times till he get caught.
That's a good point. As a men, I am always like in total shock when I read about some of these stories. I always think? What who does that? I never ever even thought of doing that? And wondered like, am I the outlier? Do everyone else just call their coworkers to their office waiting for them with their member out? How come so many women have had that experience?
But I think it is very possible like you said that a few can impact a lot of women by just repeated behavior. Somehow I hope so at least.
I hear that, after it left beta, the number of games that you can play on GeForce NOW is greatly reduced. I have read that you can no longer play arbitrary games from your Steam library (like you could in beta), and furthermore, a few major publishers have pulled their games from the service.
So the advantage of Paperspace would be that you can play many more games than you can on GeForce NOW.
I don't know how to show you an actual list compared to my Steam library but I only know a handful of games that have been removed (The Longest Dark was big drama a few weeks ago) but I'm sitting here testing a bunch of my most popular games (Bannerlord, DOS2, POE2, Destiny 2, LOL, Space Engineers, etc) and I haven't hit a game yet that I can't play.
Some publishers have been very anti-competitor regarding it and taken down their entire libraries but there is still a ton to play.
On the flip side, none of the games I play are available on GFN. It's incredibly frustrating. I've moved on to Shadow where I'm not subject to the arbitrary whims of publishers and developers. I can install any game that I own and nobody can do anything about it.
If your use case is gaming, does Linux support matter much? If anything I would think this would be for someone who has a Linux setup but wants to access games that aren't available.
"If your use case is gaming, does Linux support matter much?"
It really depends on the game.
For instance, Factorio, which is enormously popular on HN, has a perfectly functioning Linux version. Many other games do too, and some games even perform better on Linux than on Windows, not to mention having a better user experience on Linux (especially if you are technical and know what you're doing).
I have an old Linux laptop, and Factorio performs well enough in single player, but I run in to serious performance issues on multiplayer. It's be nice to be able to run this Linux game on a more performant Linux machine, without shelling out the $$$ for a new gaming rig.
Further, I'd like to avoid Windows as much as possible, where it can be avoided.
Shadow.tech I have had good experiences with. It does take a while to go from sign-up to them actually spinning up a machine for you but the latency is extremely good for cloud gaming.
I'm actually really glad to have seen this and the comments. This has something I've been prattling on about to anyone who will listen for the last couple of years now. Glad to be somewhat vindicated!
Update ACF and stay secure against this latest threat. https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/blog/installing-and-upg...