HN user
It could, but it would be more challenging for them to arrest a downward spiral.
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.
should be fore
= should be in core.
Goodness knows how that typo happened.
Also:
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".
Oh yes. One is super.
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.
WordPress is proof that clean code doesn't matter.
At least it isn't Magento.
Have a look at how "draconian" is used.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/draconian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draconian
https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/Draconian
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.)
Not sure how many really better words there are.
Onerous? Extreme? Oppressive? Bullying?
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"
Oh you.
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.
They refer to different articles, though.
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?
https://fullsiteediting.com/themes/ has a list, including one or two skeletons.
I am tempted by Anders Norén's Björk, which is also FSE:
https://andersnoren.se/teman/bjork-wordpress-theme/
I think I did most of my learning with Carolina's own Jace theme.
(FWIW I have always thought the roots.io stuff is a mistake, conceptually.)
Blink is a valiant effort -- serious, quality work, that makes an enormous difference to people who need to do ad hoc work from a tablet...
... and really shouldn't be needed.
(It's not the only useful tool on the iPad -- I adore the rather idiosyncratic GoCoEdit -- but I am a VSC-Remote person now)
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)
Well, maybe not crazy. Just heavily legacy.
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.
Have you looked at WP-CLI?
A lot of the stuff you want to do can be maintained at the command line. And it even gives you a way to do some fleet management.
If you need a simple site now you barely need any plugins at all. Something for a contact form, maybe.
You do have to lean in slightly to how Gutenberg and Full Site Editing works -- I recommend this amazing documentation site:
One of the things that strikes me about WordPress is the way that web nerds expect to find it easy and are angered when it is not.
Like everything, it takes learning. It has opinions.
It has some crazy history (I really wish media items were not handled the way they are), but it also has methodology to it.
If I said I know Go and JS and Perl and Java and Ruby and C, and I was enraged that Rust is so hard to learn, I'd be shot down for it, rightly.
WordPress looks like it does a simple job, but actually it's a whole, quite broad platform. You might have to read some documentation for a bit.
And if you've inherited a site using Elementor, ask the people who made it how to change the simple stuff, because they will be able to help.
If you've inherited a site using Visual Composer or Divi... shoot the people who made it.
If you think Gutenberg is bad (it is very much not, now!)... oh man, Divi was a time.
In the south east of England. It's not really clear it was stolen by anyone. The only people in even slightly recorded history to really steal it buggered off a few hundred years later because they missed olive oil and hated the climate. Everyone else pretty much just turned up to run it better, like slightly violent management consultants.
The point is that commenters arguing a museum should give stuff back from where they took it are often arguing from a country that has documentary records in its current legislative body that it faux-legalistically stole the very land it is on.
In many cases, the USA stole that land well after the British Museum (which is older than the USA) acquired some of its objects. It's astonishingly well-documented.
If the argument is that all land has changed hands at some point in history and that excuses the documented way the USA murdered people, used biological warfare, and walked them to their deaths off their own land, then I'm not sure what all the po-faced American social media fuss is about the Elgin Marbles.
(Personally I think the Marbles should go home)
You know this is the same form of justification that used to be used for squirrelling things away in western museums?
In many cases, the USA knows the names and families of the people it stole land from. Knows their lineage. Even has photographs of some of them!
In historical terms it is a recent, deliberate, judicially-supported, documented theft. Not some undocumented invasion in hazy pre-history. Acts of Congress were passed to do it.
The British Museum (along with the V&A) has some stuff (well looked-after) that people want back. Currently the law literally prevents it being returned, and these organisations are in many cases trying to find ways to work around that law so that it is long-loaned back forever, until the law is changed. There's no simple intransigence; there is dialogue and politics.
The British Empire did some amazing things, and many, many ugly things. You won't find a person in the UK who doesn't understand that now, and there are all sorts of reparation campaigns, restitution campaigns, history projects, etc. etc.; nationally we rub our own noses in it so often that there's a right-wing backlash.
So it's tedious in the extreme the way Americans keep prattling on about British museums as if there is only stonewalling, and as if there is no appropriation from native culture in its post-independence history. It's literally on paper.
Small beer when it's also built in very large part on stolen land, eh? If giving stuff back is important (and I think it is), I'd love it if the knee-jerk thinkers of HN would start by looking at where they live and which tribe it was stolen from by force and murder.
There's a surprising amount of debate in this thread on the rights and wrongs of this topic.
As a matter of simple efficiency, what I suggest to you all is that you imagine this was being rolled out by the British government.
Because then you'd all be certain what it meant and what was necessary.