I changed company names before posting and broke the clarity, sorry.

Imagine I wasn’t a idiot and had said Walmart pharmacy, which is somewhere you’d expect that kind of advice.

I suspect that it’s going to go the same route as the ‘acting on behalf of a company’ bit.

If I call Walmart, and the guy on the phone tells me that to deal with my COVID infection I want to drink half a gallon of bleach, and I then drink half a gallon of bleach, they’re going to absolutely be found liable.

If I chat with a bot on Walmart, and it tells me the same thing, I’d find it shockingly hard to believe that the decisions from a jury would in any way be different.

It’s probably even more complicated in that while a human has free will (such as it is), the bot is only going craft it’s response from the data it’s trained on, so if it goes off the rails and starts spouting dangerous nonsense, it’s probably an even EASIER case, because that means someone trained the bot that drinking bleach is a cure for COVID.

I’m pretty sure our legal frameworks will survive stupid AI, because it’s already designed to deal with stupid humans.

I’d also bet against not hardware failure.

Traditional RAID5 (and others) is subject to data loss in the middle of a write that can break entire arrays if it happens.

Seen it on various LSI controllers, mdraid in Linux, and even a Windows implementation in Storage Spaces. I mean it’s rare and mostly won’t, but if you get unlucky and lose just enough data from just the right places, well…

Wouldn’t imagine that any particular NAS appliance is using some magic sauce that prevents it from happening if you get unlucky as to a crash/power outage.

From what I understand running high bandwidth things like video streaming through cloudflare tunnels

Not at present; section 2.8 is gone.

It is true they frown very bigly on doing stuff like that through the normal cached CDN, but that’s mostly because the CDN is vastly vastly more expensive than some traffic through a tunnel and is still pretty much enterprise-or-you-can’t territory.

The bigger issue is the tunnels are relatively slow, and the performance for real-time stuff like streaming really sucks.

So probably won’t get banned, but it’s also not going to work very well.

Nothing is stopping anyone from doing that, other than perhaps the scale.

WordPress is like 40-something% of all websites: it’s the most used blog/cms/whatever platform by a huuuuge margin.

If you wanted to fork it, you’d need pretty substantial resources, a lot of committed people, and the willingness to head a giant-ass project that has millions of users, all who want different things.

It really isn’t a trivial undertaking, if you’re serious about it.

I would, however, expect that the big providers (Flywheel, Cloudways, WPEngine, etc.) will probably make a corpo-sponsored fork sooner rather than later, since their business depends on it, and they’ve got the aforementioned money and people to do it.

You have to subscribe to their OnlyFissures.com account, duh.

If it doesn’t yell at me about unexpected creepers in my house area, I’m going to be VERY disappointed.

I mean, for a $15 thing that does 4k your options are pretty much a Roku, or whatever Amazon’s thing is called.

I’d MUCH rather have the Roku. And the Plex and Jellyfin apps work great, so what else do you need ;)

The really hilarious part is that he’s hijacking the link to ACF.

The link that contains the ACF trademark, since WPEngine owns the trademark.

So, the guy mad about trademark infringement is… busy hijacking links and committing trademark infringement?

Good show, I’m sure his lawyers are VERY happy about this one.

gets you cancer if you arent subscribed

No no, the cancer is a Patreon-exclusive benefit.

Non-Patreons only get lead poisoning and holes in their brain.

‘slow and clunky’ part might be a Roku specific issue

Almost certainly. I have a couple of them and they’re like, fine, but the app quality is uneven AF. They’re written by the provider and/or some random 3rd party, so some apps work well, some work poorly, and some are flaming piles of crap.

The Disney app being a flaming pile does not, however, surprise me in the least.

Linus is a character, but he’s not the kind of character that’d have this kind of public breakdown and start demanding everyone pay him. Which is good, considering that he’s also the shepherd of a shocking amount of hard and soft power since the world has decided to mostly run on his little kernel.

I’ll disclaim this by saying I hhhhaaaaaate Wordpress, but that’s mostly because it’s an insecure buggy mess that has made most of my 25 years in IT an absolute chore every time it gets anywhere near me, lol. (And I think Wordpress in general is as bland as a bucket of warm wallpaper paste, and we should bring back MySpace, but that’s not really relevant to this discussion.)

I think the ultimate end here is going to be that we have a hard fork, and the commercial providers will just fuck off with the code and go make NewPress or something. It’ll still be GPL and thus open, so there’s a limited amount of enshittification you can do there, but this whole thing kind of covers why I’ve always been leery of projects that have someone who owns IP rights in it, and also owns the primary commercial provider of hosted services of said product without there being a proper firewall between the two organizations.

That’s two VERY opposing sets of interests, and it’s far too easy to, well, do what he’s doing now and regardless of if he’s right or wrong, he’s still going to torch a ton of trust in wordpress-the-software since the people who actually use it are not going to give half a shit why they couldn’t update a plugin or whatever and got hacked, they’re going to (rightfully, in my opinion) go ‘fucking wordpress!’ and move to something less open, like Wix or Squarespace.

I’m not saying they shouldn’t contribute; I’m saying there’s no universe in where you should be forced to give 8% (or any amount of) of your revenue to another business as a tithe to be allowed to use GPL software.

It’s the method of extraction I’m disagreeing with here, not that they shouldn’t contribute to what their business runs on.

And yes, technically it’s the Trademark we’re discussing rather than the software, but, ultimately, not being able to use the name of the thing is the same impact from a business perspective. Especially because Matt made sure that only Matt has a license to use the name and Matt is the only one who can decide if Matt should allow someone else to use it, also.

It’d be like Linus saying that Canonical can’t use the Linux trademark, and then going on an unhinged rant in public about how it’s theft that they’re using his trademark.

community that is supposed to lift us all up

Sadly, Matt is busy lighting that community on fire because he thinks he’s owed something for a business (which he also used to own a major portion of, for the extra lols) using GPLed software, which is also something I, in general, disagree with: the whole point of free software is that it’s free. If you want to get rich, make some proprietary software that everyone must use.

creating and sharing WordPress

The hilarious thing here is that WordPress is, itself, a fork of GPLed software. Not saying he didn’t spend an enormous amount of time and resources on improving it, but B2 is the reason it’s under GPL (since Matt would probably have picked a different license, if he could have.)

There is when you’re actively sabotaging the other company trying to use the open source thing you wrote.

Which is what’s happening here: Wordpress started out with blocking WPEngine’s access to plugins on wordpress.org, which fine, Matt runs it so he can do so. But that’s clearly a conflict of interests that he has the unilateral ability to block anyone’s access because of a business dispute.

Then he moved on to adding a checkbox that requires you to swear you’re not related to WPengine in any way to access wordpress.org as well as banning people that asked any questions on the developer slack, which again, is fine, but it’s clearly indicating that Matt has some conflicts he’s unwilling to resolve.

Then he forked the most popular wordpress plugin (which is the property of WPEngine) which again, is fine. What WASN’T fine is he redirected the ACF url on wordpress.org to his fork. That’s, again, a clear sign he’s conflicted as hell and taking actions that are utterly absolutely unaccptable.

If he had just made it a 404, or whatever, then cool. But to just silently give you a different piece of software? He can fuck off with that nonsense.

That’s the problem here: he’s doing lame-brained nonsense because he believes the opensource side and the business side are both his (because he’s structured it so they are) and is actively, and aggressively, doing shit to screw with people he doesn’t like because they’re a threat to his business.

Not remotely acceptable, and he needs to be slapped down so hard he ends up being six inches shorter.

usually 20% or lower where I live

Yeah, you probably can since it appears you live in the desert. It’s not like the filament is going to magic up water that’s not there.

I’m somewhere that is more like 40%, and I don’t have the endless wet-filament-problems some people have but I’m also printing just PLA and PETG which aren’t really the filaments most impacted by a little bit of wet.

Eh, someone who just discovered that there’s more to Linux than just desktop uses probably.

It comes as a shock that the world mostly runs on Linux to some people and they have to let us know that “HEY GUYS! Your phone uses Linux!”.

It’s cute.

Yay minor dyslexia!

I keep reading this as “Privacy Shield” and keep wondering why a dead DPA is somehow helpful for preventing streaming.

I’d like to preface this with the fact that I do donate time, money, and on occasion PRs to open source projects.

But frankly, I don’t believe anyone has any obligation to donate to an open source project.

I also don’t think anyone has any obligation to give 8% of their revenue to a project that’s completely under the control of a man that ALSO runs a commercial entity extracting money from the same project.

And I REALLY don’t think you have any obligation to give a guy worth $400 million one damn cent for using his GPL-ed software.

It’s not like he’s going to take the money and give it to the people in the community developing it, it’s going to go into his business - and thus right into his pockets.

This is just CEO corpo greed, and frankly, screw Matt. He has enough, and if his business is falling over because he got greedy and got into bed with VC and bought a failed social media network, well, that’s his problem and not everyone who uses Wordpress’.

open-source approach and commitment to secure coding practices

Yeah, because open source has a track record of being 100% secure.

Oh, wait, no, it very much does not.

What an incompetent, dangerous, smoldering line of bullshit.

wait a little while

I cancelled Prime and discovered that… everything shows up in 2 days anyway.

I guess being near a warehouse means you get super-fast shipping even if you don’t pay for it?

And like, not just a one-time fluke: of the last ~15 or so orders, all but one showed up within 2 days, and maybe 1/3rd of them were next day. Same shipping time but no free money for Bezos? Okay, sure, I’ll take it.