I think it’s very plausible that this guy was an investor in Automattic but that his nonprofit tech team picked WP Engine to host their organization’s sites. It’s a good service!
Undoubtedly Matt connected him with the reporter to provide a supportive quote.
And I bet his tech team absolutely loved to get an emergency edict from their president to change all their site hosting ASAP.
I took my kids to those as well. For Fellowship we took our time getting popcorn etc, not caring about missing previews… boy was I surprised when we walked in and it had already started.
Made sure to be early for The Two Towers so we did not miss the iconic opening scene. And to the point of the linked blog post… they ran several spoiler-filled ads before the movie started (to be clear: before the starting time, while people were filing into their seats).
They don’t need to. Fandom benefits from being an old and popular site. Google manually adjusts their ranking to prioritize such sites, because they think those sites are what the “average” searcher expects to see come up when they search certain topics.
Essentially, Google fears that the average searcher will think Google is broken if certain popular sites don’t come up in their results.
It’s worth remembering that there was AI before generative AI, and there are applications of AI that don’t produce slop, like knowledge graphs and natural language search. Some of that might be called just “machine learning” now.
Yeah, it seems like "AI" has mostly become a marketing term for generative large models. For the people doing the stuff that is often called "machine learning", I see two reactions. Those seeking hype will call it "AI" anyhow, and a bunch of those that don't are firmly sticking with "machine learning" to avoid the rising backlash.
I'm very curious to hear how others are seeing the terms used, though.
The article is too polite to say this directly, but the issue is that people made a bad decision to purchase marketable securities via TreasuryDirect. You can buy these through any brokerage account and they are easily sold there as well.
Transferring securities is not something people should need to do very often, and as a consequence it is not optimized in general. The one time I had to do it, I had to hand-sign paperwork and get a medallion stamp as well. This was to move stocks from one private (not govt) IRA provider to another without selling them.
I have a TreasuryDirect account but only use it to purchase and hold inflation-protected bonds.
Why should anyone need an account from a private business to buy bonds, why do you think that people deserve to be punished for buying directly from the government, and why do you think this is common knowledge?
> Why should anyone need an account from a private business to buy bonds,
That wasn't asserted. It's a more efficient route. Just as Door Dash is faster than having food mailed via USPS.
> why do you think that people deserve to be punished for buying directly from the government
This was not a claim either, but I'll be gracious. The government never makes inefficiency an explicit goal. The consequence is the incidental effect of a massive bureaucracy. This is common knowledge.
> and why do you think this is common knowledge?
Need to come down to the DMV or Social Security office? Gonna be a few hours in many localities. If you're lucky enough to use the website, maybe a few minutes. Scale this up to the Federal Level and less frequently exercised services.
From secondhand experience (my wife): Getting a first name change and have no fingerprints? It'll be months of exchanges before the FBI nixes the application.
TreasuryDirect works great for buying bonds. This article is about people who want to sell bonds, and since that is a private activity, they need to do so through a private business, not TreasuryDirect.
Furthermore tax reporting remains stuck at a '90s level of automation: 1099 form info cannot be imported automatically into Turbotax. You're spared this nuisance only so long as you merely acquire and hold "Savings Bonds".
It’s not tautological, it’s the difference between giving someone twice as many heart beats, vs making their heart beat half as fast.
Even if we figure out how to do the latter, it doesn’t help folks who have already had most of their heart beats. It’s not actually life extension.
And what is life like lived at half speed? Let’s say we can get people to 200 by keeping them immobile and cold and nearly starving them of calories and oxygen—dramatically suppressing their metabolism. Who would want that?
>Let’s say we can get people to 200 by keeping them immobile and cold and nearly starving them of calories and oxygen—dramatically suppressing their metabolism. Who would want that?
I can imagine quite a few people. Maybe they are already in pain or have mobility issues. At that point why not say "yeah just feed me painkillers and keep me half-frozen. i can do everything in VR/online"? It's better than hospice.
The nightmare scenario is that the money is not handed out equally to all candidates.
If corrupt incumbent politicians have complete control of the finances of an election, how could they be held accountable? Anyone wanting to run against them on this issue would simply be denied the money to do so.
But what you are proposing is a different government, one in which leaders could operate without the primary accountability that they face now: that anyone can organize a campaign against them.
The barriers you cite already exist. There are plenty of rules ablout what must do to get on the ballot, yet somehow new politicians still get into politics.
It started off that way—remember people buying pizzas and domain names with bitcoin? That is the sort of thing that people do with dollars.
But it became quickly apparent that cryptocurrencies suck as currency because they are so strongly deflationary. However, that makes them work great as commodity financial instruments.
So viewing crypto as a financial market (not a currency), it benefits the U.S. to have as much of the market transacting within the jurisdiction as possible. Then you get the tax benefits, and ancillary benefits (e.g. rich crypto owners buying things).
For most of its life, Twitter was completely open. You could see any tweet or user page with the URL, whether or not you were logged in. The only exception was if someone had “protected” their account.
Twitter as it runs now is far more locked down. And that happened after it experienced significant, noticeable outages.
Performance is not binary… Twitter is still “up” as a service but with a much smaller public footprint and handling much smaller amounts of traffic.
Do you know when they stopped being frictionlessly open? I’m curious when they started doing the to continue you have to log in pop overs. It preceded musk, as I said. I think every link still worked, but scrolling and navigating twitter like a typical website instead of typing in a link had log in gates.
There’s no world where forcing significant customers off WP Engine works out well for Automattic.
Those customers are not going to migrate their sites to the company that just gave them an operational and security headache (Automattic).
And most big customers do not give a shit about Wordpress per se. They just use it because it’s a free and convenient accelerant for the sites they want to build. If it starts becoming a hassle they will just move to a different CMS. There are plenty of options.
"In an email, Bruce Perens, one of the founders of the open source movement who drafted the original Open Source Definition, told The Register, "Let's be clear about WP Engine: It's built on WordPress. There would be no business without WordPress. And it's a large business with big revenue, operated as if it's funded by private equity."
"Private equity always demands big returns, regardless of the harm they do to the business. One of my customers has been completely destroyed by them – they are still operating but on such thin resources that they can't dedicate the time of one engineer to work with me on an open source compliance review, even if I do it for free.
"So, WP Engine is in that situation, and has to increase returns to the investors. What do they do? Cut any voluntary expense, which includes returning any value to the creators of WordPress. I'm told that WordPress asked for eight percent of revenue, which sounds fair to me considering that it's the basis of WP Engine's business.
"But because it's an open source project, WordPress can ask but can't demand that money, so they have to turn to hostile enforcement of their trademark and denying access to their updates."
By that logic, the 30% Apple tax must be "extremely fair" because all iOS apps are built on both the software and hardware built by Apple, which are arguably far more complex than a piece of PHP software. (/sarcasm)
Being "built" on something does not in itself imply value. What has to be taken into account is also "value that is added." If the underlying platform had high intrinsic value in itself, then no value would have had to be built on it to profit from it, which would mean WP Engine would not be the only entity profiting from it.
And to add to the reductio ad absurdum, are PHP engineers required to "donate part of their salaries" to the project just because "they're profiting off of that language?" (/sarcasm)
I did not say that what WordPress was doing was "fair" I was trying to explain how their actions can make sense from their side of the table.
As to 30% being "fair" it's a fee structure that is known in advance, you can plan accordingly. I try to deal with the world as it is, not how I would like it to be.
Undoubtedly Matt connected him with the reporter to provide a supportive quote.
And I bet his tech team absolutely loved to get an emergency edict from their president to change all their site hosting ASAP.
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