kemayo

Particularly not for the last reason mentioned -- declining an offered position because it's not in a place you want to live.

In the abstract, yeah, that'd probably be fine. Maybe not 100% legally -- the injunction that WP Engine got seems to imply that blocking one specific competitor from using the infrastructure might not be cool -- but if it was a restriction that was in place from the beginning, it'd probably have been acceptable.

It's mostly that WordPress maintained that infrastructure for a very long time without having any sort of restrictions on who could use it -- whether you're a self-hosted WordPress site, or you're using some sort of managed hosting (like WP Engine or WordPress.com). Plus it's literally hardcoded into WordPress to use it; you can't change that without maintaining your own patched version. So everyone involved in the WordPress community viewed it as a general public good for all users of WordPress... and it suddenly getting weaponized didn't play well. For one thing, it put up a lot of people who were just users of WordPress as collateral damage.

(And the cost of the infrastructure doesn't seem to have been one of Matt's complaints, in general. If it was, and he'd been up-front about that, I suspect reactions might have been different.)

The judge actually summarized it in vastly more detail than you say there. Take a look at the jury instructions if you want to see exactly what the theory was: https://www.nycourts.gov/LegacyPDFS/press/PDFs/People%20v.%2... (starting around page 29, or again around page 44)

Basically, the crime alleged was violating a NY election law saying that you can't try to influence an election through "unlawful means". They provided a sampling of said unlawful means: violating federal campaign contribution limits, falsifying other business records, and violating state tax laws about how the reimbursement to Cohen was handled. The jurors didn't have to unanimously agree about which of those things they think he actually did.

The reasons to not charge him for those separately would seem to be respectively: 1. that's the feds job, 2. statute of limitations expired for the non-felony falsifications during his presidency when he couldn't be charged with anything, and 3. Cohen directly committed the tax crime so all Trump's guilty of is conspiracy to commit a really niche bit of tax misrepresentation that didn't actually cost anything.

The unambiguous bit is that he definitely falsified business records, and so the squabble is over whether he's guilty of a misdemeanor or a felony. It was apparently persuasive to the jury that he did the felony version.

My recollection is that the prosecution was a combination of the mis-labeling of the payments, and the mis-labeling being in service of concealing a (federal) crime. Said different crime being the original hush money payment, which happened during the campaign. I.e. if he hadn't done something illegal while running for public office, there'd be nothing to charge him with.

Now, it'd be better if he simply got prosecuted for the initial crime. Absolutely agree there. But I'm not sure that "I can avoid prosecution for campaign misdeeds by committing them and then waiting to pay people back until after the campaign" would be a great precedent.

Yes he was. The payment in question happened after he launched his campaign -- in late October of 2016.

[EDIT to respond a bit to the now-expanded parent, which was only a single sentence when I replied]: I do totally agree that the hush money prosecution was a bit of a stretch, and wouldn't have happened if Trump wasn't famous. You're just wrong about it applying to a time when he wasn't running for office.

Personally I find it fine. It's a lot bigger than the Switch, but the grips make it more comfortable to hold overall.

Did you turn on beta OS updates? Because in my experience I have to restart it about every three months when Valve releases an OS update -- but when I had betas turned on, that was every few days instead. (Might also explain some stability issues for you.)

Also: I've seen one crash in the whole time I've owned one, the controllers work perfectly, and I don't think I've ever had to meddle with Proton in any way.

Dock cable going in on the top is a bit fiddly, though, I'll grant you.

> shake the baggage of being PHP

PHP is why WordPress was a success. PHP is available basically everywhere, for cheap. You can get a $5/month hosting plan that'll give you a VPS with mod_php and mysql and you'll be able to install WordPress. (Also, WordPress put some actual effort into having a quick-and-simple setup process. If you can upload some files onto a server, it can take it from there.) Thus anyone can trivially install WordPress.

There's "better" languages, but even today they tend to require more of you to get a working site deployed.

Yeah, they've been a bit slow on LLMs, but "machine learning" has been one of their buzzwords for years now.

This is actually one of those cases where the ease of doing it makes a real difference to me… iTerm2 does both of those on a single click, and that makes it vastly more likely that I’ll use them. (Completely a matter of taste, I’ll admit.)

There's some minor things that iTerm2 does that I like:

You can hold down command and click URLs to open them. (You can actually kinda do this in Terminal.app as well by right-clicking a URL and choosing to open it, but it's a bit fiddlier, and I got used to the hover feedback in iTerm2.)

You can click to highlight entire blocks of output from commands, which I sometimes find handy when things feel like they're blending together.

It'll keep a floating copy of the previous command prompt at the top of the screen so you can see what led to whatever output is currently at the top.

None of these are essential, for sure.

Huh, I'm honestly kind of surprised. Good to learn something!

Well, I'll take back what I said about the majority. I do still think that the remaining 1/3 of users who don't have enough storage to turn on iCloud Photos qualify as what lapcat was asking for, though.

Well, neither of us have any way of surveying the public about that, do we? My claim that those people would be okay with it has as much weight as yours that they wouldn't.

I can try to turn down my natural inclination towards cautious phrasing, if you'd like? Get us on the same level. :D

True, but I don't see how that relates to anything? You asked for a hypothetical set of people who'd have iCloud Photos disabled but would accept metadata being sent to Apple for better search. I can't help you if you want to move the goalposts after I give you that.

It's probably a pretty large set of people, perhaps even the majority, since I'd suspect that most people don't pay for additional iCloud storage and can't fit their photo library into 5GB.

In fact, I'm willing to bet that if they'd added this feature and gated it behind iCloud Photos being enabled, we'd have different articles complaining about Apple making a cash grab by trying to get people to pay for premium storage. :P

Yeah, we might quibble about what the default value of the toggle should be, but them adding settings for minor features like this is absolutely a good thing, and very much a sign that they're not trying to hide things.

If anything, the lesson Apple might take from this could be "adding the settings toggle was a bad idea, because nobody would have cared about this at all otherwise".

I don't think that's a fair characterization of what they're doing.

Insofar as the photos aren't getting uploaded to Apple for this, that seems a bit extreme.

(We could argue about it, but personally I think some kind of hash doesn't qualify.)

I'm not sure I agree -- asking users about every single minor feature is (a) incredibly annoying, and (b) quickly causes request-blindness in even reasonably security-conscious users. So restraining the nagging for only risky or particularly invasive things makes sense to me.

Maybe they should lump its default state into something that already exists? E.g. assume that if you already have location access enabled for Photos (it does ask!), you've already indicated that you're okay with something about this identifying being sent to Apple whenever you take a picture.

My understanding is that Location Services will, among other things, send a hash of local WiFi network SSIDs and signal strengths to a database Apple maintains, and use that to triangulate a possible position for you. This seems loosely analogous to what's going on here with the compute-a-vector thing.

I think it's that WP Engine might arguably have been being a jerk, albeit in a way completely allowed by WordPress' licensing and directed entirely at extracting some benefit specifically from Automattic's work.

...whereas Matt's being a jerk in a way that involves collateral for the general community of people who use WordPress. So everyone is more concerned about him, because he's threatening a lot more people.

It's not really editorializing, since that means adding opinions. The HN title is currently a factual summary of the situation, without any particular flavoring. It's not "Matt throws a tantrum, takes toys and goes home" or anything like that.

In cases like this where the original post title is pretty useless, I'm in favor of expanding it a bit.

He timed the initial meltdown perfectly, because it was just before the domains I'd transferred to WordPress.com's registrar when Google Domains got sold were up for renewal. So the net effect there was that Matt bought me a free year of domain hosting, and drove me away just in time for me to not start paying him.

When I click that I get "Your support means the world to us. We'll hide banners in this browser for the rest of our campaign."

> Wikimedia foundation could audit the admins who defend each other on a tit or tat basis and attack newbies.

The challenge here is that "the community" really doesn't want the Foundation doing that. The interview mentions the last major flare-up along those lines: FramGate, though it amusingly got mis-transcribed as "Forum Gate".

The WMF handed out a 1 year ban from English Wikipedia to an admin called Fram, who this interview describes as "gruff, not friendly, not the most empathetic", for unspecified harassment. There was a great big "community" revolt over it, and the WMF wound up backing down by letting the English Wikipedia arbitration committee undo the ban.

The Foundation has a lot of practical power, in that it runs the servers. On a pure technical level, it can do absolutely anything and nobody can stop it. But it worries a lot about driving away the admin structures that keep Wikipedia working. Wikipedia would melt down very quickly under its own weight if the entire admin infrastructure was legitimately pissed off and stopped contributing.

(I keep putting "community" in quotes because in wiki parlance it gets used to refer specifically to the set of people who involve themselves in Wikipedia governance, rather than the broader community of people who use and edit Wikipedia. There's a lot of power assigned to a fairly small group of people who invest their time in on-wiki politics. It's kinda like local school boards in that way.)

tl;dr it's the same feature he's talking about, but also he's wrong in a very Yudkowsky way.

I was curious about this so I hunted it down: https://youtu.be/AaTRHFaaPG8?si=NbIe3hBSovvOQA-G&t=4483

He speculates that Wikipedia got the idea from Arbital. Insofar as I can tell, that seems to be a wiki-like website that started around 2015 -- I had never heard of it, so it might be older? That does predate this specific implementation of popups on Wikipedia, which is from 2018.

The fun context here is actually discussed in the article -- the genesis of the Wikipedia popups was a community gadget on Wikipedia (Navigation Popups) that's from much earlier. Oldest version I could casually dig up on Wikipedia is from 2007. Unless Arbital is vastly older than I think (older than LessWrong itself, which is from 2009), the chain of inspiration is presumably in the other direction. Or completely independent.

The article is, overall, about why it took so long to go from that working example to something more robust.

Mostly, there's a large amount of CSS that has been written over the years that assumed it was on a light-colored website. In mediawiki itself, in mediawiki extensions, in gadgets and userscripts, and in site-specific overrides across all the Wikiprojects. Most annoyingly to deal with, sometimes hardcoded into pages -- table formatting on wikipedia is often using inline styles to get specific background colors, for instance.

You can see a few hundred tickets about dark-mode related issues if you're curious what's been done and why it's still in beta: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/8zofdVSnra...

(I work for Wikimedia. I didn't work on dark mode, beyond a few minor adjustments to components I do work on to be compatible with it.)

Depends on which part the coworker needed. If it was passing around a reproducible environment, sure, Docker works. But if they needed "here's a thing I can double-click and it'll just work" then Docker has no real advantages.

That would be a pretty impressively sweeping thing to accomplish with a software update launching Apple Intelligence. :D

For context, the parser I'm talking about in my first post is Parsoid on that list.

For the parser itself, there is work being done on something that's more structured. The new parser lets you round-trip from the wikitext to the generated HTML and back, which means that it's entirely possible to work with wiki content by just manipulating a DOM rather than having to work with the wikitext yourself.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid/Parser_Unification