aimazon

Most people have a few friends and they’re in the same place. “My people” are in the same place today that they were in yesterday and will be again tomorrow. Most people prefer the inefficient and imperfect group chat because it’s personal. Most people can’t imagine anything worse than bringing more technology into their personal relationships. I’m sure this app is great for the small number of us that are fortunate enough to live like ev, without a care in the world, vibing our way around the world… partying with tenacious founders hungry for an exited-founder’s co-sign, but that’s, what, a few thousand people? That’s not social, it’s niche.

Your problem is that nobody cares enough to deal with paying you because maybe someone forgot a purchase order or something. Your solution is to make someone care. Sending a letter to their legal team will make someone care (and they will in turn kick the accounts payable team into action). They will receive letters like this constantly. Your situation is not unique, except for the fact that you’re not taking action.

Enforcing a contract means enforcing the terms, which is… payment. We use contracts because courts can enforce them. You don’t have to hire $1k/hour lawyers and fight a multinational in court. Pay $500 for a lawyer to write a letter containing a copy of the contract and a demand for payment. That’s it. They’ll pay up within a week.

The fact that your contract doesn’t contain anything about late payment is immaterial.

There is free furniture on Craigslist.

I don’t care if a tool is free or paid, I care if it is going to make my life better. You can sit in the office laughing at me for paying to use software, I’m not bothered, because I won’t be in the office to hear the laughter, as I’ll be using all the time I’ve saved to do something I want to do.

Pay me $250k/year to write code and I’ll spend $5k of that on a paid for editor and a paid for terminal and a paid for git client and a paid for database client and a paid for rest client and a paid for shortcut app so that I can go home at 3pm every day and spend my remaining $245k on the things I care about instead of being stuck in the office micromanaging my vim configuration so that the nerds will respect me.

in the context of software engineering, yes.

I like it. I pay for it. I expect it’ll go to shit when the money tap is turned off but I’m enjoying it while I can. I’d rather see a bunch of VC money subsidise destined-to-fail developer tool businesses than… not, because the technical founders of these companies are typically using VC money to pay for things they want to make and at least some of it is open-source.

Warp is good, it’s a step up from iterm for people who spend a bunch of time in the terminal but don’t want to invest their brain power into emacs or vim or whatever is real nerd software nowadays. $25/month is basically free for the amount of time I use it. I’d pay $25/month for anything that makes my life marginally easier.

A typical acquisition of the legal entity from the shareholders provides protection because there’s no limited liability in the deal (as it’s a sale by the shareholders (as individuals)). An asset sale has higher risk for the buyer (because the sale is, essentially, looting the corpse of a legal entity) with the benefit of not having any liability for the legal entity’s past deeds. Purchasing assets from the company while also expecting the former owner to be on the hook for the value of assets is trying to eat their cake and keep you on the hook to make them another cake.

That said, U.S. LLCs are not normal limited liability companies (like they are in the rest of the world). A U.S. LLC is a weird amalgamation of tax and law. Perhaps what you’re describing (as described to you buy your lawyer) is just one more weird aspect of U.S. LLCs.

(Outside of the U.S., a limited liability company is nothing like a U.S. LLC. The closest the U.S. has to a typical limited liability company is an Inc.)

“My lawyer warned me that when I sell my business, I lose limited liability protection. If the purchase agreement didn’t limit my liability to the buyer, the buyer could later sue me for any amount, even if it exceeds what they paid in the acquisition.”

“Sales below $1M are usually asset sales, meaning that the buyer is purchasing assets from the business but not the business itself. So, I technically still own a company called TinyPilot, but I transferred all of its physical and intellectual property to the new owner.”

Aren’t these contradictory? If it’s an asset sale, the deal is between TinyPilot LLC and the buyer for the assets.

The NYT is very profitable.

"cuts" has to be the worse word choice in this context, it sounds like they're terminating deals rather than creating them.

If a community isn't prepared, willing or able to maintain a well, is building a well in that community a good example of philanthropy? or is it an example of a lazy one-size fits all solution that reflects poorly on the donor, not the community? The donor is responsible for their choice of donation.

Many of the philanthropy videos are either manipulated or outright frauds. If you state your aim is to earn a million dollars to spend a million dollars on philanthropy and then after earning the million dollars you spend half a million dollars on philanthropy, the half a million spend is not a great philanthropic gift, it does not justify misappropriating the other half. Philanthropy as a shield is a strategy as old as time. We can forgive people for failing to meet their stated aims if they failed due to naivety following an earnest attempt. Can we forgive people for failing to meet their stated aims wilfully?

The premise of your position is that philanthropy is always a net good, but that isn't true: philanthropy can be harmful. Homelessness is the easiest example to think about, where half-baked philanthropic efforts can have immediate harmful consequences, as we see time and time again.

I submitted it with a normal Reddit link. @dang did some mechanism automatically replace the Reddit link with old.?

The context is here: https://github.com/JusticeFighterDance/JusticeFighter110

> PLEASE TAKE NOTICE that Defendants hereby respectfully object to the Case Management Order, Notice of Time and Place of Trial and Trial Related Orders dated May 23, 2024. Since the filing of Defendants’ Case Management Conference Statement on May 21, 2024, Mira Hashmall, lead counsel for Defendants, has had a 5-7 day trial scheduled with a start date of March 17, 2025. With the trial in this matter starting on March 10, 2025, and trial in Case No. CGC-22-600095 starting on March 24, 2025, that would be three back-to-back trials and potential overlap amongst them.

"three back-to-back trials"? Is there more?

Where does this claim come from? The article doesn't include it. Matt hasn't made this claim either.

If I release a fox into my hen house, who is at fault for the death of my hens: me or the fox?

Matt isn't being held to a higher standard, he's being held to a different standard, a standard he chose.

WP Engine is a company that chose to build a business around a piece of software released under a license that permits their commercialisation of the software.

Matt is an individual who chose to release software under a license that permits companies to build a business around the software and has then chosen to initiate a "nuclear war" against one of those companies who is complying with the license he chose to release the software under because they are not contributing to the software in a way that he deems acceptable.

They're fundamentally different actors in fundamentally different positions. WP Engine has behaved exactly as one would expect from the start. Matt has behaved in a way that suggests he has lost his damn mind, doing everything in his power to harm a business that is complying with the license he chose.

I don't disagree with the idea that WP Engine should contribute more, I don't disagree that Private Equity is harmful to Open Source, but I fundamentally disagree with Matt's weaponisation of Open Source to make a point. There is a lot of great prior thinking on this subject[1], Matt has many options, he is making the choice to behave in this way, it is not a foregone conclusion.

Our discussion isn't going to lead anywhere, but we can revisit it in a month when Matt's downward spiral has resulted in the inevitable. Perhaps, at that point, you'll reflect on whether Matt's behaviour was worth supporting.

[1] https://dri.es/solving-the-maker-taker-problem

WP Engine are a Private Equity owned for-profit corporation who exist solely to hoover up as much revenue as possible, consequence be damned, that's Private Equity. Matt Mullenweg is an individual who professes to be an open-source software for-the-greater-good moral crusader. I hold them to very different standards. Matt has to behave according to his professed principles otherwise they're not his principles, they're just a mask.

I release Open Source software under a permissive license: if I leverage my control over that software to harm the consumers of my software that I believe are taking without giving, then I am far worse than a leech.

Regarding "WordPress Core": if WordPress Core is all that matters, why are plugins fundamental to WordPress? Why do millions of WordPress websites use Advanced Custom Fields?

You've repeated a bunch of Matt's lies, either you're uninformed or not impartial. The latter cannot be addressed, the former can. Read more, speak less.

You're citing Matt but Matt has been proven to be untrustworthy. For example, his claim of many year long negotiations includes a claim that he had delivered a term sheet to WP Engine in May, but that claim was disproven by himself, no such term sheet was delivered. Additionally, the contributions that he counts from WP Engine are only those included in the "Five for the Future" program which Matt administrates. The actual contributions of WP Engine to the ecosystem include millions of dollars per year on event sponsorship, plugin development (WPGraphQL, ACF) and more.

Read the lawsuit filed by WP Engine. No such negotiations existed. Matt has been arguing with WP Engine in his head. You may believe WP Engine's contributions to WordPress are disproportionately small for their size but make that argument on the basis of accurate information, not the fiction from Matt.

Nobody likes WP Engine but Matt's lying has been so problematic that it is impossible to take his side unless you believe that integrity is optional.

Matt posted about FreeWP on WordPress.org labelling it a fork: https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/spoon/

Yet, per the author, it is not a fork: https://x.com/vinnysgreen/status/1844488053060141233

“I love how I never said I was going to fork the project and only wanted to support those who did. Matt is incredible at only hearing the things he wants to hear.”

Matt is… trolling? by labelling FreeWP a fork.

If the WordPress Foundation is controlled by Matt, Automattic is controlled by Matt and WordPress.org is controlled by Matt, how can there be independent decision making? As Matt has demonstrated by blurring the lines between WordPress.org and Automattic by introducing the ban on WP Engine "affiliates" accessing WordPress.org because of the lawsuit against Automattic, there's no distinction.

Matt has tweeted about his final approval over WordCamp events despite members of the volunteer groups operating under the belief they had the final say, which undermines any attempt to claim these volunteer groups have any control (only the illusion of control): https://x.com/ryancduff/status/1841834672059199590

Automattic just poached Jason Bahl from WPEngine to bring WPGraphQL into core WordPress, demonstrating very clearly that Automattic have control over WordPress core: https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/wpgraphql/

Matt has shared that he owns WordPress.org personally but that Automattic employs hundreds of people to work on it and spends millions of dollars financing it.

Ultimately, you work for Automattic and report to Matt so you're obligated to share his version of the world, but the version of the world you're describing only exists in Matt's head. There's no way to frame what is happening as independent of Automattic. I know that it doesn't matter to you personally, this is just a job, and once you leave Automattic you'll look back and laugh at the absurdity of this situation. I guess the point of my comment is to say: we all know that you know this is nonsense, you're convincing nobody. If you actually believe this nonsense (which I doubt, you're not an idiot) then you need to do a much better job of convincing people.

code is an input not an output. People don’t care about code, they care about products. You can build something new using code that already exists: every product we use today is built on a lot of what came before.

My point wasn’t that writing code with AI is bad, my point was that writing code for the sake of writing code is bad. If something already exists, use it. If something doesn’t exist, build it, bring something new to the world — whether that’s with hand-typed code or ChatGPT assisted code, I don’t care.

I think we should write less code.

That’s not my point. I’m not disparaging AI. I described AI as modern tooling that is beneficial to learn. I’m sure there are many professional developers saving time using AI to generate code they would have otherwise written. My point is that in this specific case, AI didn’t enable anything useful. I would have said exactly the same if the OP had written the code without AI. If a problem is long solved, reinventing it is busy work. Busy work can be fun, I reinvent things all the time, but that doesn’t change the nature of it. If the project they had built had been something novel (that does not exist) then it would have not been busy work.

I was shit talking education if anything :)

The point missed here is that you didn’t need to write any code at all, with or without ChatGPT. ChatGPT helped you with busy work: you reinvented something that already exists, instead of using a mature and established membership platform, you built your own. The reason this has parallels to education is because that’s what education traditionally is: busy work.

You did learn something, by the way: you learned how to use modern tools. You didn’t do things most efficiently but it was more efficient than writing code without the help of ChatGPT.

That's because it's not corpospeak, it's Mattospeak.

Automattic were an early investor in WPEngine, but they exited the investment around 2018.

The country codes used for ccTLDs are arbitrary, I thought: they're roughly consistent with ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes but not exactly. Are there precedents to suggest a country can only have one ccTLD?

That's the amount of hours they contribute to the "Five for the Future" program which specifically refers to work on a subset of the WordPress project managed by Automattic. For example, WPEngine own and develop Advanced Custom Fields, a plugin used by hundreds of thousands of WordPress websites. The work they do on that isn't covered in the 40 hours. Likewise, WPEngine run the DE{CODE} conference but that isn't included in the 40 hours either.