schizo @ schizo @forum.uncomfortable.business

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1 yr. ago

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.

Uh, you might have linked the wrong thing?

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.

Hot take/unpopular opinion/downvote me to oblivion incoming: Section 230 is actively harmful and should be repealed.

Attach liability and the tech bros will change course on moderation so fast you'll end up with a TBI.

While I wasn't directly involved with content moderation, the abuse/fraud circle overlaps quite a lot since it's the same group of assholes doing sketchy shit. (And then not paying for it, which is where I got involved.)

The really dirty secret is the tech bros could absolutely get rid of state-sponsored propaganda bots if they wanted to, it's just not in their interests to do so. Finding bot accounts is usually not THAT hard, since any given bot will have a variety of fingerprinting methods. The good ones (which I always assumed were state-sponsored) are harder to find because they don't do stupid shit like use the same user agent or a naming pattern you can suss out a regex that will identify them, or sign up from the same email domain, or all connect from a single ASN or VPN provider, etc., but uh, you can find them if you have enough determination and logs and ability to correlate a large enough data set.

(My qualifications to even make that statement: ~8 years chasing botnets around a major cloud hosting provider and booting somewhere in the rough area of 1,000,000 malicious user accounts. It absolutely wasn't all of them, and they popped back up as soon as they figured out how they were being caught with a new set of TTPs to get around the changes made to keep them out, so it was fun if never-ending.)

Also, fun thing: those shitty AI chatbots everyone hates? Well, before they were "AI" they were "machine learning" and you can absolutely feed a proper ML model a whole pile of, for example, Nazi propaganda posts, then dump a giant dataset on it and tell it to go find all the Nazis, based on content and phrasing. It's a shockingly simple trick and it's why Elon immediately killed Twitter's API and firehose, because you can do this with like, one guy who knows python and a laptop, and then find all the Nazis, and all the friends of the Nazis, and all the bots boosting the Nazis with the data Twitter was providing.

I'll also argue just slightly about the 'there used to be responsibility!' and that's true, and only just barely true. When Limbaugh was cheering and thanking god for dead gays and reading their names on the radio, who exactly was going to stop him? Regan's FCC?

That reasoning only works if you think the government can be trusted to act in your best interests and isn't subject to a rug pull every 4 years, which unfortunately, it mostly is.

That's not to say you couldn't build a legitimate and viable regulatory structure, it's more that the one the US has that could regulate this (FCC and maybe the FTC) is utter crap right now, though the FTC is making some progress with antitrust things for the first time in decades.... unless Diaper Don wins, and then welp so much for that.

Big tech strikes again, kinda?

Whackjob nonsense generates lots of activity, lots of activity pushes it to the top of the algorithm, people see a way to grift money with whacko nonsense because it gets on top of the algorithm, so people s tart pushing lots more whacko nonsense.

But, at the same time, it's not new: AM radio was the InfoWars of the 80s. Rush Limbaugh absolutely ruined more people's lives and families than Alex Jones, and he did it with a handful of quartz crystals and 500,000 watts.

Contrails, immigrants replacing you, gays stealing your children, jewish space lasers, flat earth, weather control, blah blah blah.

Same shit, different medium, it's just that we've allowed billionaires to shove the nutso nonsense in front of everyone's faces because it makes them money, instead of stuffing it out of mind for anyone that's not explicitly looking for it.

No idea what the solution is, but I suspect even if we 'fix' social media, they'll find some other way to grift using conspiracy nonsense.

Well, that's a lousy article, but at least they brought up the 'nukes used floppy disks!' canard again.

I want the things in charge of world-ending devices to be reliable, understood, stable, tested, tried and boring as shit.

I do not want NukeGPT in charge of shit like that, I want some guy with a 8" floppy disk doing it instead.

Progress for the sake of progress is not always useful progress. It's motion, not movement.

Government should be slow to react, boring, stodgy, infested with well understood rules and regulation and only move to add new shit when someone can actually explain to a boring-ass career bureaucrat what the benefit to the new shit is.

Which, frankly, is probably the real issue: nobody can come up with a good use case that's not ungodly more expensive than the current solution is for limited or no actual improvement.

Not to say there's not room for improvement, though. The IRS comes to mind: I bet 99 times out of 100 the issues you've got a human dealing with COULD be dealt with by a reasonable chatbot, thus freeing up people to handle the things that are actually complicated.

You could also, for example, replace most of Congress with ChatGPT. It wouldn't be generating more gibberish responses and hallucinations than the current meat-puppets that are infesting it are coming up with now, and could even lead to a substantial savings!

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.

Yeah, this feels more like keeping Debby from accounting from stealing her work laptop and thus making it useless for MOST people, while not making it a total unrecoverable brick, since they very much could if they wanted to.

Cool, cool. I know there's some issues with Apple Silicon being somewhat uncooperative with removing MDM in a way that Intel ones aren't, so you don't need to deal with that at least?

I've used https://github.com/assafdori/bypass-mdm before and it DID work, but it's been a while.

Might be worth trying since it's stupidly straightforward and you're wiping and reinstalling stuff anyways.

....maybe?

It depends on Intel/Mx and what version of OS X was installed.

If you google 'mdm profile removal' you'll land on a LOT of options that may or may not work depending on how old these laptops are and what exactly was configured, how, and what options you have re. version of OS X installed.

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'.