Readit NewsSort of moot point considering the multiple HN archives that would still have the original username attached
> what if AI was used to imitate a person saying something blasphemeous?
Yes this violates any EU citizen's right to be forgotten under GDPR. Welcome to silicon valley.
I wouldn't call any of the listed problems "real problems" in the context of my long winded disability and homelessness lmao. I used to be in their community, the mods, and indirectly, them, were abusive as hell. Their community is, last I heard, hemorrhaging queer folk (or maybe it's bled dry and queer folk just don't stick around there anymore!) because they have repeatedly shielded abusive members and placed them in positions of power, and ignored, silenced, and ejected their victims when they finally kicked up a fuss about it. Part of the move from an internal chat to Mastodon was specifically so it would take the pressure off them having to actively perform any sort of moderation duty or deal with the abusive people directly.
They are, fundamentally, rich people playing at being poor and living in a tiny sustainable island while the rest of the world burns. Their stuff is very interesting, sure, but stating "real problems they face" ignores the fact that every one of the problems they are facing are ones that they themselves have created. I actually really love some of the things they've come out with, but it's important that all of their work comes with the context that it was formed in, at least in my opinion.
edit: I forgot about the 'cult' thing... they are absolutely a cult. at least one of their members made explicit reference multiple times to being part of a cult and it was never actively denied outside of a "well, not yet, we don't have the numbers ;)" kind of thing.
Towards the end it says:
> I really like WordPress, as I’ve stated many times, but Matt has become an irresponsible and damaging actor. He urgently needs to step down from WordPress.org leadership, or he risks undermining WordPress’ popularity and driving the community away.
But it makes at best, a really weak case for how he is “irresponsible” or a “damaging actor”. Sure there may be some minor controversies like this redirection thing it mentions, but that really doesn’t seem like a big deal or anywhere close to requiring anyone to step down. I find the accusation that Matt Mullenweg is doing something wrong by mixing in commercial interests to be ridiculous - he CREATED Wordpress. That was 20 years ago. Given its success and adoption, I think he deserves the commercial spoils of it.
> WP Engine was acquired by a private equity firm, Silver Lake.
It is hilarious that this blog post does not actually talk about Silver Lake or private equity at all. PE is a cancer on society - all they do is acquire assets and financially optimize them to squeeze money out at the expense of everyone else - employees, customers, society. They don’t actually add value to the product or affected people around the product. Silver Lake is one of the worst of them. This is a firm that was literally called evil by Wired magazine (https://www.wired.com/2011/06/skype-silver-lake-evil/), for firing employees right before the Skype sale in a purposeful scheme to rob hard working people who built the company of their equity. Why should anyone trust WP Engine or its leadership? Let’s start there, because it sounds a lot like Matt Mullenweg is right.
No he didn't. Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little forked Michel Valdrighi's b2 cafeblog in 2003 to add new features and an admin panel. Wordpress is GPL because b2 was GPL. Matt built most of the early XHTML while Mike integrated patches and worked on the backend. Mike and Ryan Boren wrote large parts of the code early on. Christine Tremoulet came up with the name. Without them b2evolution or one of the other forks would've most likely raced ahead.