georgehotelling

2 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

The thing about listening to a song as you read the post is a jab at Mullenweg's "This post should be read while listening to Wish by Joshua Redman. The writing is synchronized to the music reading speed." on https://ma.tt/2024/09/ecosystem-thinking/

georgehotelling

2 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

> I think the problem isn't just that WP Engine doesn't contribute. I read that they pledged to, then had an internal policy not to contribute, and fired an employee for telling this to Matt on Twitter.

Can you share a link? I haven't been able to find that. A prohibition on contributions seems like a bad policy, because at some point WP Engine will want a change in Core and they need the political capital to make that happen.

georgehotelling

2 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

What's the economic incentive for WP Engine to give back? They have a moral duty, sure, but as a business where is the profit? Anything they contribute to core will immediately be available to their competitors, so the naive read is that there's no competitive advantage in contributing back.

However, if they can influence the direction of the project, they can align it with your business goals. That gives them a competitive advantage, that gives them an incentive.

The challenge is that Matt is acting as a BDFL of the open source project. If Matt doesn't want your change added, your change isn't going to get added. There is no one to appeal to, Matt has absolute authority over the code that goes into the open source project that WP Engine's business is built on. Matt is also the CEO of WP Engine's competitor, Automattic.

This conflict of interest has come to a head in the past week and shone a spotlight on the lack of community stewardship of the WordPress project.

Keep in mind that Automattic requires its employees to get approval for any paid side gigs related to software because Matt believes that it creates conflicts of interest. You cannot work on WordPress for Automattic during the day and then freelance making paid WordPress plugins at night, due to the misaligned incentives. The fact that Matt isn't being paid a salary for his work on WordPress is irrelevant, given Automattic's equity is tied to the value of WordPress.

I think private equity skews heavily towards value extraction over value creation. I think that people who build businesses off of open source have a moral obligation to give back to the projects. I think that giving Automattic money to spend on WP core work will make WordPress better.

However, breaking the trust of the community does exponentially more damage to the future of WordPress than any freeloading company. The community trusts that the trademark licenses will not change to target them. The community trusts that their software will benefit from security updates and the plugin ecosystem. That trust is the foundation of WordPress and this week's actions have done damage.

Matt talked about going nuclear, and I think that the metaphor is apt, because when the smoke clears we may be left with no winners.

(I'm a former Automattic employee who roots for open source, WordPress, Automattic, and the vision of the open web Matt Mullenweg has shared.)

georgehotelling

2 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Every time I looked at the animated weather app, I would see the animation start in the past where clouds moved and grew and shrank naturally. As soon as it passed the present moment, the clouds would become fixed shapes and continue on whatever their current vector is. In the visualization there was no attempt to model clouds growing and shrinking. The clouds would suddenly start skidding across the screen.

I've read that is what the underlying precipitation "models" did as well, but obviously can't confirm.

georgehotelling

2 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I'm using pi-hole, uBlock Origin, and Privacy Badger on Firefox. I checked my network tab before complaining and didn't see any resources that failed to load.

georgehotelling

2 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Dark grey #303030 text on slightly darker grey #1B1C21 background is really hard to read. Maybe I'm just getting old, but I also assume the audience for a blog post about the ASCII table was born in a year that starts with 19.

georgehotelling

2 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I'm not sure how to use this, I just see a blank screen with the word "delve" at the top and typing doesn't do anything. I'm on Firefox on macOS.

georgehotelling

2 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

But that doesn't show the first tweet in the thread like in the screenshot.

I recommend everyone sharing social media links to see what it looks like in a private browser window, because the logged out experience is usually bad and sometimes unusable.

georgehotelling

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I opened an issue asking them to add `from typing import *` to the boilerplate.

georgehotelling

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Paperless started as "paperless" but the dev stopped work so another dev forked it to "paperless-ng" (for "next generation" I think). That dev, too, stopped work, so "paperless-ngx" was created.

The paperless-ngx's core team focused on gathering a group of people to support it to avoid any burnout problems and keep the project sustainable.

georgehotelling

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

One difference is that Twitter no longer shows threads to logged-out users, while Mastodon does. If someone posted the same thread to both sites, the Mastodon one would be better to link to.

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