chx

And here we are 18 years later and some people still think they can delete this. What else do you believe in? The tooth fairy? Santa Claus? Come on.

Also what have you thought they can tell you? An archaeogenetics teacher described this belief as "they think we throw a bone in the machine which tells us it was half hun, half avar, half bear and spoke slavic".

Y'all surrendered an intrinsic part of the privacy of your, your sister, your brother, even your unborn children for snake oil -- and paid for the privilege. I can't even.

commence the downvotes but you can't put the toothpaste back once it's been squeezed out.

> So they gave the Nobel Physics prize to AI bros before honoring another woman. Five women were ever honored so and 221 men.

> This is your regular reminder Wikipedia refused an attempt to create a page for Donna Strickland with "This submission’s references do not show that the subject qualifies for a Wikipedia article" not half a year before she became a Nobel laureate. Katalin Kariko's page was not created until April 27, 2020.

#EverydaySexism #SystemicMisogyny

It got a decent amount of favs and retoots - and no angry responses. Now, when I posted this here, it got flagged.

That tells a hell lot about the people who visit the site. It's a great opportunity to check your own biases. That's why I am reposting it with this note.

Is the Wordpress community so weak that after all these years they couldn't weather Matt retiring?

And if Automattic is such a business which can only exist as a monopoly then it shouldn't exist. Because that's what you are implying.

Once again: if WP Engine misuses trademarks which Matt holds then by all means send a C&D to them and if they resist then sue them. That's a completely normal business behavior. What's happening here is lunacy.

This is the same fallacy as "immigrants are taking our jobs".

No, this is not true. The market can expand, competition spurs innovation, they put in marketing and so forth. The income of Automattic in a world where WPE doesn't exist is less , likely much less than the income of real Automattic plus WPE.

You have been posting nonsense ever since you started, just stop.

2. If it does go to court presentation will matter an awful lot. There are really technical topics involved which for us are easy to understand but not so much for a jury of peers. Translating well the facts for the jury involves experience, a very good team and talent.

This is a very common misconception, really. Yes, there are no new ideas. The fact that LG Prada sported a capacitive touch is only relevant for mansplaining. rewind.ai predates Microsoft Recall but who cares, really? The chances of an abusive spouse discovering it and using it to oppress further a woman is nil while Recall will be right in front of their eyes. AirTag was not the first stalking device but for sure it was the first to reach mass enough adaptation to get multiple women murdered. The list is endless.

WoW came out in 2004. What came before in a similar genre? Maybe Diablo II in 2000-2001. And while the Guild Halls were planned for D2 they never actually shipped. There were forums etc but nothing like the scale and possibility of WoW. There were no patterns for this before.

And once again which one it is: you didn't answer me. If you think you did that's because you forgot to switch accounts. https://i.imgur.com/LeF241n.png

You are constantly talking nonsense. This is simply not a thing. Much as "rizz" and "cuckoo" is not in this context.

> Automattic releases a blog post in response to the lawsuit and announces that they have hired famous scumbag Neal Katyal

There's not really a measure to say how much worse an $1000 or $500 per hour lawyer would be but no one is taking chances when you have this much money on the line.

Based on public posts only, Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, founder of Wodpress completely lost his mind and went into war against WPEngine for unclear reasons (many suspect it's money pressure perhaps from investors). He claims they don't contribute to Wordpress and WPEngine says while they don't contribute to the core product they contribute aplenty to plugins, sponsor camps and documentation. He claims WPEngine "butchers" WordPress, WPEngine claims they host an unchanged version. (Note: WordPress is a codebase under GPL, you can change it). He claims WPEngine disables revisions and indeed they do and you need to contact support to get it switched on -- but the ability to disable revisions is included with WordPress although normally it's a simple setting. WPEngine claims they do this for performance reasons while Matt claims this is done only because of greed. He claims they violate trademarks, WPEngine says they didn't change how they use trademarks over more than a decade and their usage is referential (nominative) which is legal.

Further, WPEngine points out as recently as 2023 Matt had a positive opinion of them at a fireside chat at DE{CODE} 2023 "when you support companies like a WP Engine, who don’t just provide a commercial service, but are also part of a wider open source community, you’re saying, hey, I want more of this in the world". https://wpengine.com/resources/decode-2023-fireside-chat-mul...

This was merely an argument between the two but then Matt decided to cut WPEngine off from wordpress.org making installing and updating a much more arduous manual process for every WPEngine customer. He did this without any notice to WPEngine. Dragging users into this seriously and negatively impacts WordPress itself and calls have mounted for a WordPress governance overhaul eg https://x.com/QuinnyPig/status/1839340016738480226

That he is not acting rationally was crystal clear when the lawsuit got filed because he came to this very place and started commenting on it while multiple people begged him to just stop because he is digging himself deeper into a hole. Everyone knows you shut up the moment you are sued.

And after that he cut off the Advanced Custom Fields plugin team who is employed by WPEngine from wordpress.org. This plugin has a few million users. https://x.com/wp_acf/status/1841843084700598355

My personal take on this is obviously not positive. This entire debacle hurts open source itself. Mind you: I do not know whether Matt is right or not but there was no need for any of this. If Matt thinks WPEngine violated his trademarks? Asking for a license fee, sending a C&D and suing them are what a trademark holder normally does. Indeed, it might even be beneficial for us all to get judicial review on trademark usage like this, mostly these open source trademarks operate on "gentleman's agreements", I don't think they have ever been tested in court. If Matt has a beef with WPEngine using too much wordpress.org resources? 1) he could've announced that in say three months there will be a cutoff so WPEngine can implement a proxy 2) either fastly or cloudflare would've been happy to take that traffic off his hands (indeed, Matt said after the cutoff both reached out to him). For both of them a thriving web ecosystem means more business and it has a nice marketing value too. Finally, if he has a problem with the amount WPEngine contributes? That's a very hard problem, some ideas are at https://dri.es/solving-the-maker-taker-problem but inconveniencing countless sites because you have a beef with their hosting company is not going to help that's for sure.

To recap, in the lawsuit post, someone said about the law firm WP Engine got:

> Quinn Emanuel is one of the premier (and most expensive) litigation firms in the US. Partners in their litigation department run $2000/hour or more. Associates cost almost $1000/hour.

And I noted the team is lead by Rachel Kassabian who was lead counsel for Google which in Perfect 10 v Amazon (originally it was against Google) resulted in thumbnail of copyright images in search results being fair use.

Automattic chose Neal Katyal. His latest accomplishment was trying to defend Johnson & Johnson 's dicey "Texas Two-Step" and lost while billing $2,465 an hour.

A hell lot of money will be spent on this case, that's for sure.

To be more on topic, to quote:

there was a security issue with the .io domain. In 2017, a researcher managed to take control of four of the seven authoritative name servers for the .io domain. We accept that mistakes can happen, strong processes limit the chances of them happening, but they still can.

However, the domain administrator made no attempt, at any time, to communicate with anyone about the issue.

https://www.drawio.com/blog/move-diagrams-net

In 2015 a similar project: https://www.drupal.org/drupalorg/blog/drupal.org-migrates-co...

We can have debates about whether this philosophy is the right one or not but there's no point. It's what it is and it makes fixing things like this simply not possible.

WPE called the heavy cavalry -- Rachel Kassabian from Quinn Emanuel? oh boy. Remember Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc which found thumbnail versions of copyrighted images for search engine purposes is fair use? That was originally against Google and she was Google's lead counsel.

https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/

How does "Most Trusted" differ from "best" which is allowed?

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEmuEWjHr5c for why TV or anything else didn't obsolete teaching.

We as educators can show the interesting parts, the wonders of a field but more we can't do. The author of the article seems to have not managed to get through. Truth to be told, such happens every day in schools because most schools use completely outdated ways to teach -- frontal pedagogy itself is such -- and so ChatGPT is not their biggest problem but it certainly makes a bad situation worse. Recommended watch: Ken Robinson's Ted talk Do schools kill creativity. Recommended reading: Carl Rogers Freedom to Learn: A View of What Education Might Become. For a shorter read, Aronson's Social Animal has a chapter.

If we add "the result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed" as Hannah Arendt put it, the consequences are indeed catastrophic.

> art project idea: "The British Museum", which is housed somewhere outside the UK and will accept and display any donations from anonymous donors into its collection that were provably stolen from Great Britain

In other words, in another area: you can take all the art made in the world before Guernica and throw it in any probabilistic network but for sure you won't get Guernica out of that.