So… money laundering and a tool for storing assets in non-liquid form, as usual with the high end art world.

except for flooding you with more ads between video recommendations

That’s literally it. The advertising and marketing teams within Google have politically maneuvered themselves into running the show, and the software/product engineering teams that want to maximize the quality of the system they work on (search, youtube) are overridden by insipid metrics that advertising needs more user interaction with ads.

They literally have been commanding that things be made more shitty to optimize their malformed metrics. You absolutely can get more people to click the sponsored search results… if you keep making them less distinct from the actual results. And advertising needs those good click through rates nooooow!

There are email chains documenting this sort of shit going on that have become part of the public record due to various court cases.

Wonderful article about it all here

If you’re talking about crowdstrike… They didn’t all blue screen. That was caused by third party software that caused the same sort of issue (kernel crash/panic) on Linux boxes not even 3 months earlier.

Man, he still isn’t over how Thiel snubbed him with Paypal and how his original “x.com” online bank idea failed, is he?

For a bit more context than “really old”: I had an Intel Core 2 Duo in 2009.

I’ve lost count of the amount of posts and comment threads on here about “all the horrible ads and spyware” where the solution was to flip literally a single switch in Settings, Personalization.

I’m sorry, what about their comment made you think they were asking for reccomendations?

So… blocking an instance as a user just hides the instances communities, if I’m remembering the implementation details right. It doesn’t block interaction with the instances users. Stupidly misleading.

You’ll still need to block the users one by one.

Corporations are only publicly as right or left politically as helps their profits and PR, outside of some exceptions with CEOs that overestimate their importance (see Musk).

Disney repeatedly blames right wingers for the failure of their more diverse programming, yet removed/minimized John Boyega in the Chinese releases of the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy. They’re just one of the most obvious examples, not an exception or anything.

I did not ask you to or insinuate that you should kill yourself. Complete lie.

You stated multiple times that you wanted to shoot him because he used the excuse that “it’s just a game”. That’s a thin distinction at best.

You also use a separate account for your normal posting than your admin account, which feels needlessly sneaky.

Look, taking down the post was right call, and removing him from the mod position for arguing about it too. But the rest of this?

Telling someone that you want to injure them, then going on a multiple paragraph rant that is more about dunking on someone and venting than actually trying to inform isn’t a good look for an admin.

I can’t read their full responses that you deleted, but what you quoted from them reads like the kind of scared “stop yelling at me I don’t understand what I did wrong please don’t hit me” responses I gave to my mother while she was busy giving me reasons for therapy.

Normal users can get away with this sort of aggressive behavior because they don’t have a position of power, but you do. You are inherently setting the example of what you want from your users and it’s not a good look from the outside.

Now let’s see if this criticism gets me banned too… hope not.

Create the metrics that show RTO reduces productivity. It’s the only thing they even pretend to care about.

So… most workplaces? Most companies have department wide goals and metrics that don’t change just because half of a department walks. Even in good workplaces, hiring to “right size” a team takes time, and most of the time the work still needs to be done, and there’s only so far management can stretch until it starts impacting external customers.

It sucks terribly. It’s not fair. Life isn’t.

Ugh. Righteous ideas about how things should work don’t change the fact that these network appliances doing it the wrong way still have years of time left before the bean counters consider them depreciated and let us replace them. Or that we’re locked into a multi-year contract with this business system that requires updating certs through a web UI.

Yes, there are almost always workarounds and ways to still automate it in the end, but then it’s a matter of effort vs stability vs time savings.

I love automating manual sysadmin actions, it’s my primary role on my team. Still, ignoring the complications that will unavoidably arise in trying automating this for every unique setup is incredibly foolish.

Any number of numerous appliances and hideously malformed business systems that don’t have ways to automate cert changes.

Not everyone gets to work in their simple little world of standards-following lab servers.

Scanning texts is OCR and has never needed modern LLMs integrated to achieve amazing results.

Automated tagging gets closer, but there is a metric shit ton that can be done in that regard using incredibly simple tools that don’t use an egregious amount of energy or hallucinate.

There is no way in hell that they aren’t already doing these things. The best use cases for LLMs for NARA are edge cases of things mostly covered by existing tech.

And you and I both know this is going to give Google exclusive access to National Archive data. New training data that isn’t tainted by potentially being LLM output is an insanely valuable commodity now that the hype is dying down and algorithmic advances are slowing.

Mullenweg, CEO of tumblr in addition to everything else, is harassing a trans woman for “reasons” (don’t know why, not diving deep enough to find out). Is publically connecting multiple of their disconnected sfw and nsfw identities by using internal tumblr data, and harrassing them across all of those identities apparently.

Most AI agents don’t have that level of access to the systems they are running on. What purpose would anyone have to teach it how to dowload a repo, let alone allow it to arbitrarily run excutables based off input data (distinctly not instructions)?

There are ways to break out of the input data context and issue commands, but you’ve been watching too many movies. Better to just do things like hide links to a page only a bot would find and auto block anything that requests the hidden page.

This buries the lede quite a bit.

Mullenweg effectively runs both the non-profit organization Wordpress.org and is the CEO of Automattic, a for profit conpany that sells support for Wordpress (and a direct competitor to WPEngine).

A large part of Wordpress functionality is kept behind an Automattic plugin that forces any Wordpress site using it to collect telemetry/data for Automattic.

The update servers for Wordpress plugins are hardcoded to use Automattic’s servers, and this is not configurable or changable unless you modify the Wordpress source code itself.

With Mullenweg’s position over both the non-profit org and Automattic, he has direct control over these choices. If he’s doing this for the sake of open source, why is he gating things that should be core functionality behind a data collection scheme? If there are problems with load on the update servers, why has no effort been made to allow the community to host update servers themselves that check update hashes against Automattic? That would significantly reduce the load on the for-profit resources (that you called APIs). At the very least, the setting needs to be something exposed to the user and configurable without modifying the source code. Otherwise he’s complaining about a problem he has created.

It’s also worth noting that at no point has Mullenweg tried to set up any sort of free vs paid tier of access to his update servers. This is a specifically targeted campaign. He has also not publically provided evidence of the increased load by WPEngine despite publically shooting off about a ton of other things that would be best saved for the courtroom.

Mullenweg has also publicly stated some very questionable things about how the resources of the non-profit and his for-profit are intermingled, which may have some legal repurcussions. But that’s more of a footnote.

Wordpress’s license makes explicit exception to copyright to allow anyone to use “WordPress” or “WP”.

The initial reasoning (and I believe the lawsuit) for Mullenweg’s attempt to claim 8% of all WPEngine profit, is explicitly based on the claim that they are breaching copyright due to their use of “WP”.

So while I agree that lack of upstream contribution and the amount of load on the upgrade servers are important and valid reasons to try and seek some contribution, that is not the angle he took to start this.

At one point during all of this, he switched off the WordPress plugin update servers for all users with no warning.

Now he’s done a direct hostile takeover of his competitor’s plugin. Of the two security issues, WPEngine disclosed both of them themselves and had already fixed one. There was no evidence that they were going to stop and not fix the other, and the issue is of questionable severity. The main change Automattic did to the plugin was to remove the code that checked for an upgraded/upsold license, effectively cracking the plugin to offer paid features for free.

With the long history of WordPress, I find it incredibly hard to believe that there are not a considerable number of other plugins containing upsells, so the implication that those somehow are in violation of terms is weak.

In my opinion, we have someone in the perfect position to make changes to ensure the upgrade server load (the only quantifiable reason for all this mess) never would have been able to be a problem in the first place. He has singled out the largest competitor to his own for-profit company and targeted them specifically instead of announcing blanket changes that would apply to anyone causing their level of load on his systems. He has taken incredibly poorly thought out and reactionary steps intended to spank his competitor that have had far larger negative effects for the rest of his users and customers. He has and continues to make very piblic statements that any sane lawyer would tell him to keep his fucking mouth shut about. Now he has once again singled out his largest competitor, taken one of their paid products, and modified it to be free rather than creating his own implementation with the problems fixed and no upsells.

Matt Mullenweg has not done anything explicitly evil, wrong, or super obviously illegal. But he’s doing a hell of a lot of very concerning and questionable things when he had every opportunity to prevent any of this from ever being a problem in the first place.

I have no love for WPEngine, but Matt isn’t a saint and is ridiculously mismanaging all of this.

Holy crap he is just continuing to build the case against him. His own for-profit automattic’s plugins have built in upsells and add additional data harvesting code that you can’t opt out of while you use them.

He just keeps treating the non-profit .org stuff and his Automattic for-profit as interchangable.

It’s time for the community to find a solution for distributed update servers that at most only rely on Mullenweg for hash checking to prevent tanpering. This is blatantly just a vendetta now.

So, some important context: you can disable Recall still. The only thing you can’t do is delete the files for it.

So it’s another potential attack surface for malware to target, something that Microsoft could enable in an update (so use Group Policy to disable it, they way they give companies with legal requirements to do so properly), and some space on your harddrive wasted.

This is NOT Microsoft requiring people to enable Recall for Explorer to work.

Still an egregious amount of bullshit, but not as much as the headline might lead you to believe.