> The only new information here is that his signature was on these documents.
This is what's called "confirming the story". News organisations do this all the time -- corroborate their competitors' stories -- and it is absolutely news.
In this case it's a really big bit of news, to people outside the tech world: it means there will likely prove to be concrete, potentially-lawsuit-bound corroboration that Sam Altman is not "consistently candid".
Mmm, though I think these are two angular perspectives on the same idea, more than they are the same idea.
I feel "egregious" makes more sense for the idea of these bullshit contracts in the general case -- the idea that a lawyer wrote them or signed off on them.
"Draconian" is a really good fit for the experience and outcome for the individual, and for the process by which an individual found themselves signing.
Either way, I don't think there's any reason to minimise what is happening for the employee, or what it means in terms of characterising the conduct and culture of the ultimate unicorn. If stuff like this is allowed to slide, it's not good.
> The percentage of users that need this functionality is exceptionally low.
I am not sure about this -- I do know users who rely on post-cloning to update their sites. And I don't think it's unreasonable that this functionality should be fore.
But what I would say is, it's not a slam-dunk as a piece of generalised functionality, though it might be possible to implement it fairly completely for the core post types.
It would almost certainly need new core hooks. There are questions for example about who can clone whose posts -- do the editing and ownership mechanisms need updating, etc. And it might need reassessing in the Gutenberg era.
I've found post cloning plugins to be an adequate solution here.
Now consider the thing that is happening: someone is being essentially pressured to agree a contract forcing them to stay functionally silent about anything bad they experienced or saw at OpenAI, on pain of losing things they've already earned.
For that individual's experience, "draconian" -- harsh, unusually severe, repressive -- seems like it would be a good fit, right?
And as it is not in the title or the subhead, it's not really being deployed to be clickbait, is it? The title is even more damning
(As an aside, why should this article not intentionally sound alarming? This whole situation is a pretty damning indictment of one of the most influential startups on earth right now. IMO it is alarming.)
It does after all refer to a contract people were apparently pressured into signing when quitting (and not when signing up), that apparently offered no new consideration, and required them to never say anything bad about OpenAI, for life, on penalty of losing remuneration another signed contract entitled them to.
It's journalism. But even the lawyers are saying "egregious". Which is really really not good in this context.
"Draconian" fits, considering how it is normally used.
"My 'we never actually took away people's remuneration using the contracts they signed swearing them to silence' t-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt"
These people have weightier issues like the ethics of the hypothetical technological future on their capacious minds, and mustn't be dragged down to your mucky little level of discussing the ethics of the very real business present.
Seriously: don't bother them with these little questions of the rights of actually enumerable humans to whom they have contractual responsibilities! They're busy thinking in great depth about how their product might affect the rights of all the humans they haven't yet sold it to.
Wordpress requires at least PHP 7.0... and will complain about it if it's not above 7.4 (which was released in 2019).
So this to me looks like WP is progressing with PHP, just slowly.
Frankly I don't have a massive problem with this.
The speed of Laravel's PHP baseline change may be appropriate for Laravel, because it is git-managed, more easily run in a container etc., but it's absolutely inappropriate for WordPress to chase the edge.
Compared to trying to stay up-to-date with needless Node.js changes and frameworks that get EOL'd as soon as there's something more fun to play with, it's a paradise.
Why don't people build things with a decade of life in mind?
I agree about builder plugins -- they are expensive mossy lock-in.
WordPress now has a full-site editing system that lets you GUI edit the templates that are in the normal flow. It is not what I would call easy to master at the code level, but there is a global styles system and a way to use Gutenberg blocks to control layout outside the main content flow.
So we are getting towards a point where page builder plugins won't be needed for skilled shops. But IMO until there are really easy to use themes based around FSE (there may be some), small design shops are still likely to use Elementor, which is a slow, frustrating experience (slower and more frustrating than Squarespace can be)
There are a few deeply frustrating things, if you ask me:
All the media files are stored in a single uploads/year/month (maybe year/month/day) directory, which can mean some very big directories of file variations
There's code that cannot be fun to support anymore, like the Pluggable functions (that still let you get Wordpress to check some external login system)
There's still really not enough of a sense of a "model" anywhere.
It still (AFAIK) stores some things in the database using PHP serialization (which is unambiguously the most annoying serialization format on earth, and means that search and replace tasks must be done in PHP)
I mean... it's hard to blame them for not wanting to break stuff, and the commitment to backwards-compatibility is very nearly unprecedented.
I think WordPress is great, and I am not judging. I'm just saying, there are decisions that might have gone better with a little more foresight. But some of them are literally twenty years old and hard to change now.
Not that WP is alone in that -- FreeCAD is just getting through its "fix a two decade legacy problem" as we speak!
Matt is right about zip uploads. I mean it's better than explaining to random users how to upload nested hierarchies over FTP, but still.
Facebook is not immune to Metcalf's Law. People will log in less when half their friends are not there, meaning fewer ad impressions.
And that's if you assume that falling numbers of people are their only problem, and it's really not that.