skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>In situations where is ambiguous what you should be charged (there’s a number of interesting edge-cases)

I'm very curious to know more about those edge cases.
They could move their sites over to the WordPress.com, can't they?

Since they offer competing services in the first place.
> One wonders if Turing

We've been passing the Turing test since the 60's

> Arguably the goal post for AGI has moved about as much

This should not be surprising given we don't have a definition of intelligence fully determined yet. But we are narrowing in on it. It isn't becoming broader, it is becoming more refined.

> "but it's not really thinking!"

We can create life like animatronic ducks. It'll walk like a duck, swim like a duck, quack like a duck, fool many people into thinking it is a duck, fool ducks into thinking it is a duck, and yet, it won't actually be a duck.

I want to remind everyone what RLHF is: Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback. That is, optimizing to human preference. You can train small ones yourself, I highly encourage you to. You will learn a lot, even if you disagree with me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZeyHTJfi_E
Wordpress is a fork of a GPL licensed blog CMS so they had no choice but for it to be GPL.
I think it would be helpful to clearly distinguish between PL simplification (e.g., "if let Some(x) = x, x == 42 {}") and convenience-driven PL expansion (e.g., "let @discardable lhs = rhs ?? 0;"). In case of the former, I'm with you. In case of the latter, I'm not. Rust likely isn't meant to be a tool that is easy to learn at all costs (since the borrow checker does exist, after all). Rust is, IMvHO, supposed to be like vi: hard to learn and easy to use :).
Man, I can’t tell you how much labour modern LLMs would have saved me at my business, 10-15 years ago.

An awful lot of what we ended up dealing with was awful data - the worst example I can think of was a big old heap of textual recipes that the client wanted normalised, so they could be scaled up/down, have nutritional information, etc. - about 180,000 of them, all UGC.

This required mountains of regexes for pre-processing, and then toolchains for a small army of interns to work through every. single. one. and normalise it - we did what we could, trying to pull out quantities and measures and ingredients and steps, but it was all such slop it took thousands of man-hours, and then many more to fix the messes the interns made.

With an LLM, it could have been done… more or less instantly.

And this is just one example of so, so many times that we found ourselves having to turn a heap of utter garbage into usable data, where an LLM would have been able to just do it.

Anyway. I at least managed to assuage my past torment by seeing the writing on the wall and stocking up on NVDA at about the time I was wrestling with this stuff.
Do they have to state it? I think you simply get a phone call to pony up some cash when Automattic has you on their radar.
I see. What a BS. It's obvious that this is a business move by Automattic.

Akismet was (is?!) bundled with every fresh WP installation. That is a product by Automattic, so why is it bundled with the Open Source "product"? It's an unfair competitive advantage over every other company/person that provides a plugin for that. Nobody cared or was just feared to pick up that fight.

Drawing the line at WPEngine seems random, too. There are so many bigger or smaller competitors in that space, it's just somewhat random to pick them out and complain that they don't give back.

Lousy move.
If you have such expectations then clearly state the rules.

- individuals and companies under $a yearly revenue can use the product for free

- companies under $b have to pay $x

- companies under $c have to pay $y

Pretending that something is free to use and then getting disappointed when someone rich indeed uses that thing for free and fighting with them doesn't help anyone at all. (This is not specific to Wordpress.)
Hiding the widgets isn't the main issue. If you infringe the WordPress trademark in commercial use, and ignore any attempt to make it right, and pursue legal action, W.ORG does not have to provide those free services to you.

I'm guessing you are not size of WP Engine and Silver Lake, honest question, if you were, would you want to contribute back to WordPress?
The Danger of the Dream Job Delusion (2010)
Does your company offer a competitor to what Automattic is offering, taking revenues from them, and make 500+ millions in revenues a year? If the answer to those is yes then I’d probably keep quiet before Matt notices you :)
Seems like you should act as if you will be.
My personal blog certainly has, it's good to show you actually do security research if you want a job that offers some time for that
Ha, but to me it's why the analogy works. People don't question that we to do software without knowing final goals because, it's legit unknown, and from an external point of view the waste is not distinguishable from strait work.

The house analogy makes the waste understandable, if you accept to compare design errors with late design.
Is that the one that had a presentation last week without a single working device?
This sounds great, if i could trust it to get it right 100% of the time.
cursor + this would be massive!
Both are in the wrong. WP Engine are morally wrong not to pay back with developer time or money to enhance the Open Source project they are making money with. But Automattic's claim that "Managed WordPress" and in extension "WordPress Plugin" and "WordPress Agency" should be covered by their trademark is crazy.
Any disagreement with what you want to think is "denialism", any undeniable facts you do not like are "nitpicking"

The "deniers" are clearly right about one thing - rational argument is not welcome.
Author here.

> Javascript has a quite different use-case audience than Rust.

Eh. That sounds like a "just so" explanation to me. Linus Torvalds doesn't work on the rust compiler.

I think I could make much more convincing arguments that javascript should move slower than rust - given there's so many large language runtime projects. (V8, Safari, Javascript, Node, Deno, Bun, etc etc). But evidently, that isn't the case.

I'm open to the reason for rust's slow development being that the language developers want the language to move slowly. Thats fine. But, I personally don't want that. I've been waiting for generators to ship for 7 years. Or TAIT to appear - again, for years. I'd much rather rust to move faster.

Of course I attribute all of this to the process & team which makes these decisions. What else is there? What else has any affect on the development of rust?
There is virtually no difference between a "parasocial relationship" and a confidence scam.
Thanks for the hint. Will try the out!
Google restricts creation of new accounts in Russia, news agencies report
If those are all different commits, now imagine the fun of interactively rebasing them on top of a main branch where some other thing changed "Hello, World" to "Greetings dear Globe."
It's still of value to have companies that have different incentives even if they will still try to prey on you, if only because you get to spread your digital footprint among competing companies rather than allies.

Going back to Apple, their stance on privacy is more geared towards their internal consumption (abuse?) than towards privacy violation-as-a-service for sale. That's not great but I'll take anything I can get.

I know what I'm sharing with Apple is up for grabs by them to use "against" me. And I know the same is true for Google of Facebook, so no real difference here. The problem is the next level, where what I share with someone else is up for grabs by Google or Facebook, or the other way around. This huge web of data collection and sharing is the big problem, not the posts that I'm volunteering to give to FB or the emails I choose to host with Google.

In other words, when you talk to me alone you choose to give me the information, you're aware I will use it in some way to shape my actions. If you tell me your phone broke, I'll offer to sell you my spare, and you won't turn red that I used the info. But if a stranger shows up at your door a minute later to sell you a phone we're suddenly having a different conversation. Same if you go to a pharmacy on the other side of town to buy some medication and the moment you make the payment I send you a text offering my regrets for your illness.

"A lot worse" can mean very different things if you talk in relative or absolute terms, or if you think some practices are just as bad as others.
This thread is not about Ray-Ban glasses but their new AR glasses.
Can you elaborate, how your personal website hurt you?
Really depends on the devs. I've seen it go both ways. But you are right, most retests I have done after the pentest issues were fixed is weird. They actively engineer around our suggested fixes instead of actually doing the work they are told to do
> Where does it state that if you profit x amount of profit you should contribute back?

It doesn't. But it doesn't say anywhere that you should get resources (like storage and compute) for free either.

> What is the maximum amount of profit you can make?

I don't know. But I can argue that someone bringing in 500 million a year in revenue should be acting differently from someone bringing in 500k a year. If they contribute back little or nothing, no other player (such as Automattic) who contributes back will be able to compete with them.
Does the notice need to be public? They are fighting for a while, I think WPEngine knew what Automattic demanded (and hence could foresee what happens if they continue). They were/are probably already working on an alternative.
WordPress has been around for a long time, and there is no change to how open it is. It is GPL code, Automattic is not forking it and selling access to the fork.

We are just asking WP Engine to contribute back to the project that they are basing their entire business on.

This is primarily a trademark infringement issue, we asked them to give back to be able to use the trademark we have the license for.
Interesting, so then who pays to run wordpress.org?

I notice a donate link in the footer, which goes to the foundation, but to your point, the foundation seems to avoid saying outright that the funding goes to running .org (instead saying that Matt has been involved with them) https://wordpressfoundation.org/projects/
It's old people particularly and most of it is being done over the phone; something they've used their whole lives. Cognitive decline with age is real, no sense in denying it.
Apparently that’s Matts problem, he says Automattic is giving a lot more back (4000 hours or so) and WPE is doing like 40 hours.

So yeah, is WPE in the right to not give back?

At the heart of this is the same song of making money and the idea of fairness. I honestly don’t know the groundrules here.
Please give me a link, I highly doubt that.
WP Engine is also claiming that Mullenweg tried to "extort" them. He allegedly asked WP Engine to pay astronomical amounts of money to WordPress, or he'd go on a smear campaign against them. THe demands were allegedly refused, and it seems that he has indeed started such a campaign.

The claims were made in an official letter to Automattic that included proof in the form of screenshots, and that was written by a legal professional[1]. I personally think it's unlikely that an actual lawyer would risk their reputation and fabricate something like that.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41631912
Is your company building a business with half a billion of dollars in revenue out the uncountable amount of man-hours put into Wordpress development?
Sorry, the URL has been updated to: https://mazzzystar.github.io/2024/09/26/The-easiest-way-to-h...
I like the house analogy, but I like to think of it as if the people building the house did not know how it was supposed to look (or function). This is mostly true, since very few developers know exactly how the end result (product/service) should look and function when the start coding.

e.g. "We did not know where to put the piping at the start, so we put it on the outside and now installing a new restroom is sort of tricky."
Seeing so much money rolling in, hard to not want a slice of the pie.
Don't get me wrong. Apple definitely has problems. But the thread was specifically about facebook and ad tracking networks. And to conflate different arguments that have nothing to do with tracking into just "Apple Bad" lacks a lot of nuance.

The problem with ad companies is not that they show ads. But that they are trying to paint a perfect picture of you to sell you stuff. And they are painting that picture by spying on you and your peers.

I hope that you can see the difference between spying on your users and selling that data to advertisers and using telemetry in some product. If you ever worked in software you will know that having telemetry can lead to massive improvements in the product. That said, that data has to be confined to the applicable use case and has to be anonymized.

If you really think there is no difference between ad tracking and telemetry you are right. Apple is a lot worse than people think, but better than Google/Facebook.

But if we are talking just about ads, than Apple is definitely not worse than people think. Because they hardly even have an ad network and when they ask you if you want to be tracked you can just select "No".
If you integrate your code to have hard dependencies on a third party server that is provided for free, that's as much part of an implicit social contract as is channeling a subset of earnings back at a project if you're successful. So it may be okay in this instance, but the no notice part is still bad.

WordPress used to not even have a way to have plugins and themes that didn't ask to be updated via WP.org - so you could provoke an update to someone's private plugin if you knew its name. I know because I filed the bug that lead to it being fixed.

But everything in this instance is making Matt and his company look bad. Their complaint seems to be that revisions are not enabled by default on WP Engine and this is somehow breaking the core philosophy of WordPress and the few bytes of text WP Engine saves are supposedly profit seeking, not a performance problem as WP Engine claims.

Additionally, one of Matt's commercial ventures, Pressable, is currently offering to buy out your WP Engine contract if you switch to them. Breaking a competitors product and then offering to buy out their customers should be a red flag in choosing an open source solution.
Yes it's valid. I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.

As programmers, our instinct is to try to interpret things literally, as if they can be represented by math or code.

Copyright is a thing of the law, and laws are not like that. Laws are interpreted by humans, who generally attempt to interpret the spirit, and generally apply reasonable interpretations.

It's clear the author of the code intends it to be available under the Apache 2, and that's good enough.
Infra, services and trademarks. They are not part of the GPL license. Everyone is welcomed to use any GPL code as they see fit, as long as they are within their limits as outlined in the license.

But this does not mean W.ORG has to keep providing these free services to you and your customers, and it does not mean you are free to use trademarks in a misleading way.

Disclaimer: I work at Automattic.
1. Quest has had a wireless connection to PC for 3+ years and it's fine for fast paced games like Beat Saber.
They are, and the foundation's policy[0] already explicitly states:

> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.

Matt's whole "WP Engine needs a trademark license, they don’t have one", to try to extract money from WP Engine, is legally toothless as far as I can tell.

According to WP Engine:

> Automattic CFO Mark Davies told a WP Engine board member that Automattic would “go to war” if WP Engine did not agree to pay its competitor Automattic a significant percentage of its gross revenues – tens of millions of dollars in fact – on an ongoing basis. Mr. Davies suggested the payment ostensibly would be for a “license” to use certain trademarks like WordPress, even though WP Engine needs no such license.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240901224354/https://wordpress...
> The moment someone else starts to make money or more money then you could have off your effort

Company A spends X% of their revenue on improving the product. Company B spends nothing. Company B will be able to price their product lower, and take Company A's customers. It's not sustainable.

The solution is to ask Company B to pay up (in cash or resources), and not be leeching.
> There's zero value in retaining mistakes that were never merged into `master`.

Not to be too pedantic about this, it sounds like you mean flawed commits that were merged into master, but never had a chance to be the HEAD of master? (In other words, they always arrived along with a fix-commit too, so that nobody checking out code could've hit the bug.)

> In fact there is negative value because it makes the history harder to follow.

It also hampers your ability to use tools like git-bisect to detect when behavior changed, especially if some of the bad commits won't compile or pass unit tests.
Conflict of interest, perhaps. Reading about the issues though, gimping the product for pennies and then modifying customers sites to censor things.

At some point, every bad behaviour in a software ecosystem affects other parties and even if his personal role does cause a conflict of interest all the things mentioned seems to point to a party that doesn't respect the ecosystem.

Reminds me of the whole Elastic search vs Amazon stuff that seems to have mellowed down now. https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-is-open-source-aga...
Isn't WordPress.org connected to WordPress foundation? They have a Donate link in the footer.

What about all of these: "user login system, update servers, plugin directory, theme directory, pattern directory, block directory, translations, photo directory, job board, meetups, conferences, bug tracker, forums, Slack, Ping-o-matic, and showcase" – are all of those services provided by WordPress.org without funding from WordPress foundation?
> If you're a tiny org, you don't need to contribute back. But if you're making [...] contribute back in a very significant way.

I'd like to see the price list on this beforehand, so I can decide whether I want to be a tiny org or a big one. Where's that pricelist?
I don't think it's much a matter of society valuing rather than simple exposure and networking.

If I blog about say, Clojure, and my articles are read by people in the Clojure community, it's likely that over time I may receive some emails about my availability for a Clojure role.
Extremely rare I use public wifi - there's a couple of places where phone signal doesn't work and I want/need some internet (underground, planes, actually on board the trains, some cafes etc), but at major stations? It's not like they offer wifi at stations where there's no phone signal (and if they did it would be better all round for the phone companies to offer 4g service instead)

What is the value proposition for wifi at stations?
Is that supposed to make this blatantly anti-competitive behaviour okay?
a couple of other discussions going on including this one with non-paywall op:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651548
I wonder how soon they will arrive at 80%/20%.
Does anybody in the UK ever use the free wifi at stations? It never works anyway.
Yes, but just because you can do something, doesn't mean it isn't a dick move.

If you are offering an API to the public, generally its considered nice if you document what is considered reasonable traffic and if someone is going above it, give them some notice before cutting them off (unless the amount of traffic is so much its affecting availability).

In this case, it doesn't seem to be about the amount of traffic at all. It doesn't seem like WPEngine was abusing the service at all but using it in the way it was expected to be used. It seems like the operator of the service has a financial interest in making WPEngine's life difficult, so they suddenly cut them off.

Do they have the right to do that? Sure. Is it a dick move? Definitely. Especially since no notice was given and it doesn't really seem like the amount of traffic or other policy violation was the issue at hand.
A Simple Lab Ingredient Derailed Science Experiments
See, the only one there that actually sounds useful to me and not a clumsier version of something I can already do, is the breadboard. But I'd much rather have that as a holo table-like system than AR glasses: https://newatlas.com/vr/voxon-photonics-3d-hologram-volumetr...
http://archive.today/SoLAS
The moat is a stolen copyrighted data, used for training LLMs. For now you can probably repeat all what OpenLLM did and others too, but the window of opportunity is closing fast. Some companies are making 1-1 deals with existing LLM provides regarding their data, some are closing down, laws are being written slowly but surely.
I think that you can delete files from safe code, but safe as it won't crash or deadlock (but may panic or trigger bugs on unsafe code).

It'd be good to track capabilities needed by libraries, so similarly to unsafe code, risky portions needing careful review are constrained and highlighted in some way.
There are two paths:

1. Fork and cherry-pick from upstream, don't accept contributions from outside. They need minimal changes.

2. Fork and maintain their fork independently, try to get community contributors too.
I agree completely. On the other hand, it should be recognized there's a difference between packaging for the official repository and packaging done by individual users/sysadmins/developers for distributing independently. Unfortunately all of Debian's tooling and documentation is for the first scenario.

I must emphasize, I'm not saying, to quote you, that the documentation should more accessible, but nobody has stepped up to do yet. I'm saying, they're completely fixated in their approach to tailor packaging tools and documentation for creating packages for inclusion in official repository. Debian's tools and documentation for creating ".deb" packages are completely intermingled with their policies for including packages in the official repository. That's where all the complexity comes from. They're mixing the policy (Debian repository rules) and mechanism (deb format), and unless they recognize this, no amount of packaging tools or documentation improvements will solve it.

Which is such a shame by the way, because like you said, Debian packaging ecosystem is really powerful and would render a lot of complex machinery devops people use today unnecessary. You can distribute out-of-band updates to data files, push configuration (instead of configuration management) [1], do deployments with virtualenv/gems included (instead of containers) [2], proxy/partial repo mirrors for staged updates/deployments etc. Unfortunately if you decide to it, you'll either have to go with the Debian sanctioned way and tear your hairs because of unnecessary complexity, or you'll go look for 3rd party tools and hunt for blogs posts all over the internet as substitute documentation.

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/ConfigPackages
[2] I recommend checking out Vincent Bernat's excellent "Pragmatic Debian Packaging" series (https://github.com/vincentbernat/pragmatic-debian-packages) for some examples
WPCOM is a very limited WordPress - much more limited than Mullenweg is accusing WP Engine of being.

The real competitor in Automattics portfolio is Pressable. Who are currently running a poaching campaign on their frontpage.
If we knew for a fact there was an alien society living lives similar to ours on some planet, sure, I agree.

But if we found out that there are bacteria-like micro-organisms on Europa, or even "fish" in the oceans there, I don't agree that this would change anything in the outlook of the vast majority of people on Earth, even subtly.