throw646577

All of this I agree with.

Oh fuck off, I am not Matt and it should be obvious.

so why is it so unlikely that he could have potentially hired people to write code that he claimed under his moniker?

Sure and he could have bought loads and loads of monkeys and given them typewriters.

Why are you fantasising?

It's a pretty straightforward story here.

???

This is a fair bit of silliness now I'm afraid. Like him or loathe him (and he's making it so very easy to do the latter), Mullenweg was one of the only developers of WP for years back when it was starting. He wrote it part time, he actually quit his job to work on it full time, and he was still a teenager. His energies are why it exists.

Has it all gone horribly wrong in the last couple of years? Yes. Has the money situation complicated things? Yes. But we can state these things without constructing an alternate, incorrect timeline.

He's surely acting like this in part because he does so closely identify with something he risked his livelihood to build as a pretty prolific young developer.

There are plenty of things he's done recently that are ridiculous and bogus enough that they can be criticised without imagining stuff.

Focus on the actual issues.

IIRC yes.

Whatever the latest move is, it's clearly a dick move. He is in a bad place, if he wins anything it is going to be a pyrrhic victory, and he needs to stop.

If he really does still have Neal Katyal working on whatever the merits of his actual case are, I am gobsmacked that he is being allowed to behave this way. Katyal is not an idiot or a troll, and this picture does not make sense to me.

Some of his bullshit has already been smacked down by the court: I don't get why he is still doing this.

Matt: stop.

Mullenweg is a cuckoo. He did not create Wordpress and yet has managed to closely associate the product with his own persona and ever since has spent most of his life wringing money out of Wordpress.

This is quite inaccurate. Sure, WP started as a fork of b2, but it's not true to say Mullenweg is a cuckoo. WordPress is something he personally did extensive development work on to evolve it to where it is today, and he hired many of the people who did most of the rest of it as it became commercially viable. Even early on it was a quite different product to b2, which was at best fledgling, and it is fully fair to say that he is one of its creators. He wrote loads of it at the beginning; it's his thing as much as it is any other developer's, if not more. We should not diminish that achievement by pretending he is just leeching off something that in fact he substantially built.

Now, whether he is cuckoo is another matter; as you say, he appears unhinged. Something has happened to him such that the more self-absorbed tendencies that used to work quite well in a BFDL context have gone very wrong. He always used to be able to come across as the guy who could help sell this so it will all work for everyone in the ecosystem commercially, and could be likeable and encouraging as a community figure, but something has broken.

I am sad for him because this kind of loss of control is ultimately humiliating him. It's time to take off all (or all but one) of the hats, and find something else in life.

You are right about WP Engine: I am no fan having had considerably less than optimal customer service experiences with them.

But this is fucked up.

Like clockwork.

The HN community's response to the Raspberry Pi is the most sustained example of tech industry gift-horse-examination I can think of.

Here they are with a wide range of SBCs and microcontrollers at a wide range of price points, with a level of industrial support, OS support, community support and documentation that none of their competitors match, committing to (and displaying the fruits of that commitment to) support each piece of hardware for over a decade, and HN is like:

"Who cares I got this N100 on Aliexpress from a company with a procedurally generated brand name who don't respond to support requests, will never issue a firmware or driver update, and will be impossible to find before my next birthday, if I can figure out who actually manufactures this at all"

Dudes. It's not the same picture.

And sure, secondhand PCs. Good. But that is a completely different, entirely subjective comparison.

Netscape didn't just try to "latch onto" the popularity of Java.

Netscape _and_ Sun, together, called it JavaScript. The point was that the renamed language had rudimentary bindings that you could use to connect functionality in an HTML page with the applets embedded in it (which were effectively silo'd in HotJava)

https://web.archive.org/web/20070916144913/https://wp.netsca...

It was fully a partner decision.

Also, f***. I am old.

Everything old is new again.

Except they didn’t merge patches from RealThunder’s fork for TNP, for example. They used it as a guide and reference implementation and wrote a new implementation.

In general they do not just merge his work; they have to rewrite it. RealThunder is prolific but he evidently doesn’t use the same coding standards as the rest of the project, and makes changes across workbenches where he chooses for his own ideas, when in the core project they have other maintainers.

He has the total freedom to do this, and I agree his fork is illustrative of good solutions in some cases, but this is not a good way to just fix master. So they don’t.

Transparent previews in Part Design — and a general mechanism for them elsewhere - is coming in 1.1.

I notice you talking about the attachment editor choosing a random orientation a lot: in my experience it does not choose randomly, if you use an appropriate attachment scheme. I think I have rotated a sketch attachment once in my last two dozen or so uses, and that rotation was indicated by the design. The heuristic is complicated though, and the interface has several frustrations. There could be better UI for working through the attachment schemes.

1.1 has a change to core datums (Part Design-style LCS, datum planes, lines and points available throughout FreeCAD, not just in Part Design) that should make some of the more esoteric attachment schemes less often required, because you will be able to place an LCS once

It’s also true of transfers (changes) on routine journeys in most of the world I would have thought. Because almost all services are regular. It is the arrival time at your destination you build time into, then you work backwards, right?

IMO booking strict tickets (e.g. booking a seat) makes sense on only a small handful of routes in the UK, for example, and may even result in you being offered fewer possible options.

There are some quite infrequent routes in rural areas where missing a connection is a bigger problem, but on those journeys I tend to consider my arrival time at that connection to be the starting point.

For the train journeys I take it’s pretty normal to have two or three changes, often including a trip across London. I rarely get into a situation where missing a train is a problem, because of the nature of the train timings. The last time I was delayed significantly was due to catastrophic flooding.

The fundamental difference between air travel and train travel is that missed flights have to be rescheduled. Missed train journeys, not so much. In the UK if you miss the train you had booked a seat on, you can usually still travel on another one if it's a travel period covered by your ticket (e.g. only travelling at peak with a peak ticket). You just don't get a seat guarantee.

---

An aside:

Train travel is a flow state/mindset thing. Get one train earlier than you strictly need, find something to do while you're on the train (bonus points for something you can still do while standing). And then try to remember your journey is no more important than anyone else's, maybe a lot less, and you have no more right to timeliness or expedience than anyone else... maybe a lot less. As long as your journey is progressing, things are fine.

The other week I was on a train and there was a thirty-something woman and her parents, taking up a lot of space around me and chatting incessantly and being silly, and I was just about to performatively put my headphones on (the rudest you're allowed to get when people are crossing the threshold of appropriate levels of noise) when it dawned on me that they were being silly because this thirtysomething woman was going to a hospital to find out whether her tumour had returned. And then it dawned on me from their route-planning discussion which hospital it likely was, and what that likely meant for her, and I hugged myself and read my book.

I was on a train about 15 years ago, on a local journey, that was held outside a station about three quarters of a mile from where I worked. Stuck for three hours on a cold train in winter with no working toilet.

About an hour and a half in, people were getting very angry, until a member of the rail staff walked the line back to the train, boarded, and went through the carriage explaining carefully but respectfully exactly why the train couldn't get into the station and why we couldn't all walk along the track. Once they knew why, the angry people started chatting and sharing snacks and talking to strangers like they were old friends for whom life had suddenly become too short to be angry.

if your train leaves at 0700 you can’t plan to get there at 06:59

Millions of train commuters in the UK optimise for just this sort of thing. Not one minute before, because the doors typically close 30s to a minute before departure, but 06:55 for sure.

I am not a commuter, but later in the day I don’t leave the house much earlier than twelve minutes before the train I want to get will leave the station, which is a third of a mile away on foot, and I will have time to get a ticket from the machine.

This is indeed closest to Men's Shed, which is a fairly global phenomenon:

https://menssheds.org.uk

For this reason I think WFH is a massively more risky social experiment than most realize. It works for folks who were either already inclined to "go out and do things" or those who already had established social groups. We will see how this pans out in a generation or two.

Right on all points, I think.

If you don't have "interests" that is in its way a separate question, and it is one that is worth addressing on its own.

It is shockingly common, in the modern world, to have only a job and watching-TV-while-doomscrolling-exhausted.

But it is worth thinking about. Beyond planned activities, beyond hobbies: what appeals to you at all?

Another way to look at it is outwards: what things do I know how to do that could be socially valuable and need an outlet? Like, do you know how to use a 3D printer, do you still vaguely remember how to play a musical instrument from childhood, do you find gardening easy?

The solutionism exhibited in discussions like this flies in the face of reality.

The solution I identify in my comments does not fly in the face of reality, because it is how I went from being crushingly lonely and weird in my early 30s to having the kind of friends who (just today) said "are you really doing Christmas by yourself? Fly out to <another country> and come to us, you'd be very welcome", and they absolutely mean it.

I'm still someone who lives solo and the covid lockdowns were a difficult, lonely time. But I have friends because I found myself introduced to an event on the fringes of a much bigger social scene, and I decided to turn up more and take an active part in it.

You find a thing that is bigger than yourself, whatever it is, you show interest, and you keep turning up. It's not solutionism: it's how friendship starts, for most people. You offer or accept help. You share a task that needs doing. You share an activity that is fun. You expand your personal circle to a dog, and they expand your circle to the owners of other dogs. Whatever.

Of course humans are all different, but essentially all the adults at a grown up social group, community project, activism event, regular club, dog park, have something in common: they are adults who want friendship. That may well be the only thing they have in common apart from their interest in some shared endeavour.

But let's be honest, you normal people can smell when someone isn't part of their tribe, even with a good mask on.

I am a long way from normal and it worked for me. People genuinely thought I was confident and outgoing simply for turning up and chatting, and eventually it began to be a lot more true. Even if I had to leave earlier than most to find some quiet.

Any shared activity that has enough participants has a role for people like us -- helping set up/tear down, organising, making coffees and snacks (the kitchen is an easy place to be), taking photographs, shuttling messages between organisers. Any shared activity has little bubbles of social grouping, fun and friendship around these functional parts. At a music thing: sound engineers, merch tents, collecting donations on the door -- lots of little bubbles of odd people finding their own speed.

As long as you take time to relax and enjoy it as well -- I find this part difficult -- then there is a life for you. For me, I was a photographer, I helped with the web and email side, I helped with AV, whatever. I became indispensable. And then I found my people around the edges of it. I struggle again now, post-lockdown-fragmentation and a bout of depression, so I stepped back from active involvement in the same way, but I know my people are out there and they still value me just for turning up.

Try not to assume there are "normal people" who want to lock you out. It's cynical, a little rude frankly. It is also a form of fundamental attribution error. Any large social functioning/gathering of adults is a gathering of people who have the same need for adult friendship and connection as you; many of them are lonely at other times. Why else would it even be happening?

Side note: as true as the "sportsball" clichés might be, stop thinking that. Never, ever, ever say it out loud.

If it's not for you (it isn't for me), so what? Never murder an enthusiasm. It's rude.

There are obviously some adults who have severe limitations on their ability to socialise and nobody is implying they are lazy.

But a wider social scene I have been part of has people with evident learning difficulties, people with obvious neurodivergence, people with physical disabilities.

If you show up and show interest in sharing a common goal with a large enough circle of people, then those people will find you a way to participate at your own speed.

If you have a way to show up for social activities, or assistance to show up, you could show up, you have a desire to show up, and you don't show up... some of that really is laziness at worst and avoidance at best.

It's not a projection. I think it's a core truth you've discovered.

You need to find a thing that is bigger than yourself to be a part of. And then show up and be willing to pitch in.

Other adults who know that adult friendship is important will be there.

The rest sorts itself out pretty fast, because almost everyone enjoys the company of someone who is willing to put themselves out there, even a shy, awkward person.

There are of course people who can't "show up" so easily -- people with limited mobility, people who are physically severely isolated. But the internet does offer some spaces where those people can have a lot of what face-to-face friendship offers. Again you just have to find a shared activity and show up.

It's not!

You just need a shared interest or objective in as close to 'real life' as you can get it, and you need to dedicate time to it that you would otherwise give to TV and doom-scrolling.

Gamers make real friends. Open source enthusiasts can make real friends. Music fans can make real friends (though your local scene is considerably better for this).

It does take management and maintenance, and if you're a single person then covid lockdowns will have broken many ties; I am definitely a more insular person than I was before.

But stop wasting your time watching TV, make a plan to make your social media more focussed on local activities and less focussed on personal drama, and try to be part of something a bit bigger than yourself. Get a dog, maybe.

Pure, refined “but humans also”.

Taylor Swift had a rich daddy buy a record label for her. For everyone else, why bother?

Taylor Swift (an insanely hard-working artist) started gigging when she was like 12 or 13, and her dad invested in (didn't buy) a startup record label, that built up a roster of artists and did very well on its own terms. (Despite being attached to Toby Keith)

Record labels, publishing companies etc., do not cost much money to start up, actually. His investment was likely small, and also likely comparable to the cost of seeing a child through a college education. Less, perhaps.

A quick google suggests he got 3% ownership for perhaps as little as $130K, which indeed is comparable to the total cost of getting a child through higher education in the USA.

And of course her parents were helping her: she was 13. Did her dad make a pretty smart decision to ensure some influence over the people responsible for his daughter? Of course he did. You would.

More generally: hang around your local (proper) music scene sometimes, and pay attention to which young starter bands have helicopter parents, and which do not. And then try to correlate that with success. Pushy helicopter parents are very often an active disadvantage, because promoters hate working with them. And they are inherently uncool. Even -- perhaps especially -- when they used to be cool.

I would bet that it would make zero difference in the amount of plays those tracks got.

Well given that they are inserted into generated playlists and offered up as "similar" playlist suggestions instead of tracks by authentic artists, probably not.

For this to really be resolved they would have to stop putting these tracks in those lists or suggestions panels.

The fact that they evidently list the same track under completely different titles suggests that they are not going to act ethically here.

I see you toned down the "defrauded" rhetoric to a much more ambiguous "yeah, it was against the spirit of the deal".

I didn't, particularly. It's just another angle on it.

I do think "defrauded" has both legal and moral dimensions, don't you? This is obviously abject shitty treatment or they wouldn't have been secretive about it.

I'm not convinced this isn't both dimensions, though -- not clear who is being defrauded but both the labels and the musicians unions should do their best to establish whether it could be them.

Spotify have crossed a pretty obvious line here. Weird that you appear to think it's, like, no harm no foul if the customers don't notice. Fast food service logic.

There is already quite extensive legal precedent and practice about supermarket own-brand stuff; fifty years of it, with supermarkets retaining teams of lawyers, operating proper clean-room reverse-engineering processes, etc. It's well-trodden legal territory. Supermarkets work right up to the line. But it's no secret that they do, and brands sometimes push back against own-brand deceptions. Mostly supermarkets threaten each other over their own, own-brand stuff. Caterpillar cakes, vodkas etc.

If Spotify were honest that they were adding "own brand" music into the mix, then this would be a different discussion.

(Amazon are required in the UK and EU to identify which are their own brands, and they mostly comply)

Does the contract say anywhere that Spotify would never provide their own generated music to users of their platform?

If the contract between artists and platform provides no such limitations, I fail to see how anyone is being defrauded of anything.

Then why does Spotify refuse to talk about it? It's clearly outside of the spirit of the deal they are striking with artists generally.

Ultimately, they will get away with it because of just the same quasi-justification you're offering: Oh we're not screwing any of them individually, we are screwing them all at once.

Congratulations I guess, your argument is on the winning side!

But certainly Congress, the UK parliament, EU parliament, Swedish parliament etc. should be looking at this through the lens of regulation and competition law. And for once I hope the record labels -- big and small, because so many of them are small -- sue.

1) It's clearly a problem to artists who have contracts with Spotify and are being defrauded at scale by a secret process to dilute the value of the platform they believe they are being distributed on.

2) > If generic slop Spotify created to increase their own profits satisfies the listener the same way a song created with labor and love by an actual artist, well, this is saying something. I am not sure either of us will like the message.

Again: users do not know they are being fed this stuff.

If this was an official, named Spotify product, and users preferred it, then your anti-anti-slop argument might have some weight.

Spotify are doing this in secret because they know it is fraud on likely a contract level but certainly on a cultural level. They'd be rolling it out with press releases if they didn't know it was underhanded.

That is the issue. But then again HN is a place where people really don't mind if companies break laws on an epic scale, destroy worker protections, and deliver worse products like AI chatbots replacing human support, if customers don't really notice.

So maybe I shouldn't be too surprised by (veiled as much as full-throated) endorsement of secret padding prole-feed.

But it's in the context of an alternative to a Spotify product, right? With millions of users.

Exactly where the slop is generated, or by whom, is essentially irrelevant: at scale, slop is the only outcome from these tools. It always will be.

And presumably in a resource-limited environment, slop quality is even more likely.

This argument makes no sense to me. Musicians with small niche audience that rely on word of mourh and such are harmed in which way when Spotify adds slop to slop playlists?

They are harmed because part of the intrinsic deal with Spotify is that you put your music on there so that their discovery systems make it possible for people to hear it who might not otherwise.

If Spotify is deliberately diluting that mechanism it is bad enough. But they are doing it IN SECRET which they would not do if they didn't think artists, industry people, musicians unions etc., would construe that as harm.

I'm not conflating anything. I am just answering the question of why slop can be the only outcome.

On a Spotify-level scale, web-level scale, slop can be the only outcome.

Even if the AI produces a pearl, it is going to drown it in shit. Because it is an automated operation.

No new AI content generation advance has so far escaped being used for the equivalent of SEO spamming, long-tail flooding the market to mislead consumers and lazy “passive income” bullshit.

No AI content generation advance ever will; it’s not like industry is going to hold back and say: not this one, guys. It’s too good. We’re going to let it have three years in a custom built home studio to make its magnum opus.