pknight

That's a very misleading quote.

The new Home Secretary wants to institute a different regime from day one of no deal, which deviates from original plans and creates a whole range of issues for EU nationals with and without settled status who are resident.

While it is aimed at voters to show that they'll be treating new arrivals differently, the systems and laws and all of the bodies that deal with EU nationals are not equipped to differentiate between existing residents and new arrivals.

Only about a third of EU nationals have applied for settled status and this new messaging from the incoming Home Secretary is saying the hostile environment measures must be eagerly applied to all EU nationals without it. Employers, landlords, banks, health service providers and border officials all have the burden to verify a person's legal status and the majority of EU nationals will be unable to demonstrate their status from day one. Their status furthermore isn't protected by primary legislation and for most people only amounts to being in a digital system that must be checked online.

Most parties involved in having to check resident's status is not trained in doing that, in so far it is even practicable from day one of no deal. And it most certainly will create discrimination, making it more likely that those that have a harder time demonstrating their rights will be unfairly rejected or skipped over, or be faced with additional burdens to prove status.

The real world consequences for people affected could be not finding a place to rent, being evicted, losing a bank account or being unable to open one, being denied health services or being asked to pay for services that should be free, being denied a job, being let go, or simply being skipped over by employers. This all can happen to people who have been in the UK for decades but are unable to easily demonstrate their status. This is not hypothetical stuff, this already happens but the occurrence would jump up by an order of magnitude as the result of the course taken here.

The sovereignty argument for Brexit in practice is counterintuitive, it often implies it enhances ones choices and power over things.

But being an EU member state doesn't give away sovereignty, it's a way of expressing your sovereignty; it's pooling it with others in order to do things you can't do on your own. A leaving member state has a different menu of choices it can make, but because it's position is weaker, the choices are at best narrowed down, or at worst set by other parties.

In the case of the UK, it can choose between favouring a US market over a EU market, but each choice imposes restrictions set entirely by others. The EU will insist on a higher bar of conduct to pass, as part of its level playing field approach. The US will insist on limiting the UK's ability to raise the bar where it sees fit, so that US companies can more readily exploit the UK market, unencumbered by impediments it finds today in the form of things like food safety standards.

And you have to pick one or the other. Today the UK was able to influence the environment that most affected it, because it was a member of the EU. Tomorrow larger parties are shaping what the UK can choose from, with little say in it for British voters. This is a form of sovereignty shrinkage.

The idea that Brexit returns sovereignty is misleading and I suspect a lot of people will be disappointed when they find out in practice what it means.

I would urge people to tell Matt Mullenweg and core WordPress developers that they don't want AMP in WordPress core. Since WordPress runs on >30% of the web, if WP adopts it, it will make the choice for most of the web that websites must shape themselves in the way Google wants it. Google is currently doing a stellar job penetrating WordPress and using its increasing influence to support its own business interests.

I suspect it's nowhere near live yet, but it's relevant to this topic. There will be a massive new database and it's a terribly unlikely that this data will not be leaked or shared at some point.

>There is no centralized database for EU citizens photos or fingerprints (not even at national level in many countries).

"The database will aggregate the details of more than 350 million people, including their identifying information, such as names, passport number, dates of birth, as well as biometrics like fingerprints and facial scans."

https://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/3074472/eu-parliament-v...

Would have been better form to more substantially attribute Stephen Porges' work here, only a small mention is placed under his chart.

Clickbait headline with a jumbled post that contains very basic inaccuracies and arbitrary technicalities. What was the point of that?

Nuclino is also a very strong offering in this space.

Well, it's not a neutral word and this is an age where flawed filters and people might erroneously flag a search/posting history as fire arm related. It might be a low probability of causing any issue, but it's an unnecessary risk and one that would continue to niggle at me if I became dependent on the tool.

Is this related to OrbitJS?

The project's choice of name deters me from even trying this unfortunately.

Great hook! I'm needing the opposite: non-devs. A more general purpose platform for recruiting teams would be great. I imagine I'm not alone there.

> This hypothesis was refuted by Max Tegmark in the 90s.

No it wasn't and Tegmarks earlier criticisms were proven fundamentally flawed. What scientifically compelling arguments has Tegmark produced for his theories?

For clarity, I'm not trying to make the suggestion this is about the pursuit of revenue, because I don't think that at all. My impression is that this is about survival and growth.

I've long emphasised the symbiotic relationship .org has with Automattic in positive terms. Up until fairly recently I would say this relationship was almost wholly to the benefit of the overall project. My impression is that WP.com under your leadership is now behaving more like other conventional tech companies - it's preoccupied with growth. That preoccupation with growth by implication operates in the context of wp.com competing with other commercial companies who compete for the same customers.

When I look at the success of WordPress through the years, I'm seeing growth arriving as a side effect, not as a specific end unto itself. Decisions were made because wrong or right, they seemed like a better, more powerful way to do things. When it becomes about growth, other things become a little less important. Through the lens of the need for growth, options are judged to the degree to which they are vehicles for further growth. Unfortunately this also leads to relaxing other principles that should be central to WordPress.

Before React changed its license, it had already heavily adopted for Gutenberg and Calypso and you had been poised to bless it had there not been so much turbulence. It was adopted because it had been the fastest way to move forward. The same militant zeal that was applied to 3rd party developers using non-GPL licenses was not applied to the adoption of React, because React was a useful tool in the pursuit of growth. Of course, you can say, but it's now a success story because I've no doubt that FB's change of license was influenced by WP. Community consensus was however a second order issue, as was the original licensing, what matters was what would make the people working for you happiest and most productive in the short term. (Credit to you, you were willing to abandon React at one point, that must be noted)

WordPress will soon be adopting AMP in core, given your support. Again, immediate growth will be the primary reason this happens, because AMP is the fastest way to cut down on bloat that is holding back performance for mobile users and users on slow connections. It's a shortcut, it's a shiny looking vehicle to continued growth, delivered on a plate by some of the worlds best engineers. This decision won't be made based on community consensus or a discerning look at whether it's good for the open web, or what other options there are. It will be stressed that AMP is developing web standards and is an open source initiative with many other players that have bought in, saving the web and helping poor users.

Because growth is the imperative, things that hinder growth are treated with the same baseline hostility as red tape is to businesses. Accessibility and privacy are inconvenient obstacles that ultimately need to take a backseat to building forward momentum, rather then the very means with which to democratise publishing and development.

Because growth is front and center, artificial time pressure needs to be created with which to force the issues. And like a conventional tech company that has grown into a monopoly, it starts to take advantage of its privileged position. It becomes aware of its own latitude, like now the ability to introduce a degree of breakage and concentrate all core development on the delivery of a flagship feature.

I'm seeing this and I'm thinking, many of the decisions that are being made are at best following the letter of stated principles, but not the spirit. Each decision can be somewhat rationalised and the pretense can be offered that it's in the interest of increasing the pie for everyone, or to reaching more users, general survival and for spreading OSS practices even further.

What I'm seeing is a web of monopolies that are interacting in such a way that their influence continues to grow. To have the web shaped by a few select players is not good at all, and I certainly haven't worked with WordPress all these years because I care about market share. I was motivated by the degree to which WordPress empowers people, how it brings people together and champions freedoms as well as its role in keeping the web open and independent. Now it's a slave to growth, nakedly pursuing monopoly status, boosting the role of problematic monopolies elsewhere while selectively applying its stated principles.

I have enormous, genuine respect for people working on WordPress, including you and the many people that work at Automattic and elsewhere. I believe strongly that every single person involved is working with the best intentions in mind. But the prioritisation of growth has corrupted the character of the project, and I can't express in words just how sad that makes me.

If that were true, why are so many existing users apprehensive about Gutenberg? Self-hosted users of WordPress have different priorities even if most would like a nicer editor, it matters how it comes about and it matters what other sacrifices are made in pursuit of the project.

Yes and I'll concede that Gutenberg has a lot of room to grow and will even make plenty of people happy straight away. But I wouldn't call this about user happiness outweighing developer happiness, I'd say it's the other way around. It's based on asserting that we know what the future user wants, not the actual users. Right now user happiness is skewing negative.

And Gutenberg's development is precisely characterised by developers/designers prioritising their own happiness. It's a small group of people working mostly at agencies and companies doing enterprise level work who took Matt's idea around blocks and feverishly adopted the tools they personally wanted to use while developing and making decisions at a pace more rapid than other contributors could cope with. That is in part why we lost the accessibility lead.

Because it's a case of a for-profit company competing for paying customers of other hosted platforms. Most WordPress sites don't have that competition, they run the self-hosted version and they are already well served by 3rd party solutions for their more complex needs. So now the community project is trying to prioritise the goals of the for-profit company at the expense of carefully developing solutions to meet its own users in a proportionate way. That's how we've ended up thinking of accessibility/custom fields/theme development/backward compatibility as things that are secondary priorities, if that.

The UI does interfere, you, as a theme developer, have to adjust to it, as do content creators. This is getting to the point I'm trying to make, that the project wasn't invoked to solve technical problems. It's not answering to technical problems but to the motivations of the project leader.

You bring up how Gutenberg solves some of the issues it creates, i.e. how theme developers supply editor styles to match what is seen in the front-end. Until recently Gutenberg didn't even prepend block specific selectors, it was even more broken than now. Why did it even start out that way? How is that even possible to have Gutenberg develop that far without properly thinking about how to style for it? Why is it this solution patched on? (same can be said for meta fields, accessibility and so forth). Because the project didn't start with a clear idea of the technical problems it wasn't going to have to solve, it wasn't a priority.

So, for theme developers Gutenberg is more labour intensive (though it can be rewarding). It wouldn't need to be more labour intensive had it started with the full breadth of priorities in mind at the very start. You say 'you don't need to worry about the soup of UI markup, but you do. You have to work around the quirks of the editor or constrain yourself. Say you want to target every 2nd heading, or the paragraph after a blockquote, you can't do that elegantly, because the markup is different in the editor as it is in the front-end and it's not solved by prepending block selectors. Gutenbergs editor styles solution isn't elegant either. It is not a complete disaster, but it's indicative of the fact that the project is imposing its own paradigm over the problems its trying to solve. It's literally creating new problems to solve.

> they are not without downsides too. In-browser editing is a compromise and balancing act.

I'm not convinced at all that a different approach to how the UI manifests itself in the DOM would have entailed any meaningful trade offs at all. I've been working with this prosemirror implementation recently and the basic example pretty much matches my demo posted earlier: https://tiptap.scrumpy.io/

I think you've missed the point a bit. I'm trying to make a distinction between what is driving Gutenberg and what it's trying to solve and why. Improving the editing experience is a valid justification - of course - but it's not happening because users are demanding it or because their problems are not being met already. It's primarily vehicle for accomplishing other goals, i.e. improving .com's competitive offering and managing the transition to a JS centric code base. Those things are more important.

Understanding the priorities in play explains in part why Gutenberg is causing friction better than saying it exists because it is trying to solve technical problems for users. That would lead you to think that the technical problems were thought about really hard and that is some primary goal. It's not. It's just WordPress trying to modernise an interface.

> You can style the editor with CSS, and re-use much of your front-end theme styles in the editor stylesheet via Sass.

The reason I bring up the editor and WYSIWYG is that it shows the disconnect between some lauded goal of providing a more seamless experience and the thought that went into the technical solution. My feeling is that we ended up where we are not because we were trying to solve a problem in the best way, but because we were just trying to cram in a new JS way of doing things. It explains better how we arrive at the following mess. Let me show you it through the lens of styling a post:

https://imgur.com/a/AThzNns

> The “mess” in editing mode is needed to help people style their content more intuitively; you can't have a WYSYIWYG web UI without adapting the page content with scaffolding to enable styling controls.

Look at the gallery I posted and tell me honestly, are you really saying this is the only way to provide 'intuitive editing'? Of course that is not true, it's simply how Gutenberg decided to implement it. Of course, you can compose your CSS workflow to fit around how Gutenberg's editor functions and you'll get fairly good results if you do. But this is a workaround, it's made the UI a first class citizen at the expense of the rest. So theme developers have to think in terms of the UI, not just what the markup looks like on the front-end. And content creators are forced to think in terms of blocks. It's an UI that is altering how people interact with it, for its own sake.

I think it is a mistake to view Gutenberg as something designed to solve problems for users.

> Adding complex content in a visual way is a real problem in pre-Gutenberg WordPress

It's not an actual problem though, is it? That cottage industry already fulfills the needs of those the subset of users that need more than what the tinymce implementation WordPress offers out of the box.

It's better to understand Gutenberg not as a problem solving project but as a reaction to two things that the project leader has trained his focus on.

First, there's this premise that everything is moving to javascript and php is legacy, so WordPress should evolve to run on javascript while casting aside PHP somehow. Fail that and the project could go under is an anxiety that exists.

Second, there's the itch for WordPress.com to compete on more level terms with the state of hosted solutions like WIX, Weebly, Squarespace who offer increasingly simple visual building experiences. This is where wp.com wants to compete and win new users choosing between other hosted providers. Mullenweg wants to have WP be an even bigger monopoly. These are two anxieties driving Gutenberg.

Gutenberg channels energy toward accomplishing a conversion from a PHP-centric project to a Javascript one, while making a play for new users who are choosing between the hosted version of WP and other hosted solutions.

On a technical level, Gutenberg doesn't really convincingly solve technical problems. It makes it easier for developers to tack on GUI driven content elements, which was possible before, but something that many developers didn't get right or didn't know how to do.

It doesn't provide a better WYSIWYG experience. The editor screen and the front-end are going to look and feel very different. The biggest new obstacle to arriving at a better WYSIWYG is the fact that in Gutenberg the interface markup is a first class citizen, with the content merely existing deeply nested inside its components in editing mode.

While editing, every paragraph, every image, every element is surrounded by endless amounts of divs and scaffolding. When designing a document's CSS you style according to the markup that is shown to users, now with Gutenberg you have to take into account the fact that while editing elements are nested deep inside a convoluted set of divs. So we're still storing messy blobs, but now we're going to split up those blobs and add more mess while in editing mode.

Actually, no, companies still would be facing sudden & unwanted barriers and there would still be the unresolved issue of whether the UK would diverge from the Single Market or not. It would still have the potential to wreck several sectors, with companies being forced to trigger their contingency plans. Even just taking the IT industry, with the UK slated to leave the Digital version of the Single Market while repelling talent, it is a disaster by design.

The first example is about "power posing", it's suggested that this has been "debunked". This has become a controversial topic for some reason (the idea that posture influences mood and mindset is not particularly surprising, but ok) but the episode has less to do about a surprising study being wrong and more to do with people getting carried away with findings.

It's interesting that we treat the debunking treatment with the same appetite for salaciousness though. Very little actual skepticism is reserved for those doing the debunking, because just as people yearn for positive results, they also like to see people being taken down. In Amy Cuddy's case it is particularly strange how personal people got who have attacked her and her line of research became and how eager people are to use the pseudoscience label despite the fact that this is serious research striving to understand a topic that isn't even that controversial to start with. Where does all that passion come from?

In any case, when follow-up studies fail to reproduce earlier findings or when other authors spot issues with the experimental methods used, this is just science working properly. Unsuccessful studies in the wake of a surprising study don't immediately indicate that the earlier study was a failure and to suggest so is to do the scientific method is disservice. A good line of research is going to produce successful and unsuccessful studies, calls for moderate interpretation of findings should go both ways and with respect to how we develop an understanding in the first place.

And for what it is worth, a further analysis of 55 studies from 2017 does show that the line of research has merit. See:

P-Curving a More Comprehensive Body of Research on Postural Feedback Reveals Clear Evidential Value for Power-Posing Effects: Reply to Simmons and Simonsohn (2017)

See also the recent alpha release of SystemJS https://guybedford.com/systemjs-2.0-alpha

Excessive quotes or italics detracts from the readability of your comment.

> Yes, AMP was developed/sponsored by Google, but that does not make it "bad"

Having Google shape the web is what is definitely bad.

> For the vast majority of Publishers who already use Google Analytics including the AMP JS on the page is not a concern. (you are already sending all your usage data to Google...)

Every site owner gets to decide what analytics package they use without it impeding their results in the search engines. The defaults that websites adopt should not be set in favour of one corporation. Having Google monopolise every space is bad for the web.

Nonsense on stilts. More serious exploits are routinely found in everyday tech. This is not a serious exploit, a stock install of WordPress isn't vulnerable. The idea that WP somehow is especially complacent about security compared to other major software projects is just a trope.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that WP need not be exposed when a site can be delivered with static files. That's a fair argument that I agree with. But no one's advocating abandoning IOS or Windows or Android because if you install a certain app, or if you use a browser or open a certain type of file you run the risk of exploits. To advocate the throwing out the baby with the bathwater over a bug like this suggests you cherry pick your concerns and/or have an axe to grind.

Another day, another browser vulnerability

And people still justify using it 'because it's easy and simple for non-tech folks.' The non-profit world is _riddled_ with it.

Another day, another OS vulnerability

And people still justify using it 'because it's easy and simple for non-tech folks.' The non-profit world is _riddled_ with it.

Another day, another Android vulnerability

And people still justify using it 'because it's easy and simple for non-tech folks.' The non-profit world is _riddled_ with it.

Another day another PDF/flash/etc exploit

And people still justify using it 'because it's easy and simple for non-tech folks.' The non-profit world is _riddled_ with it.

Another day another security breach of a major non-WP website

And people still justify using it 'because it's easy and simple for non-tech folks.' The non-profit world is _riddled_ with it.

Nothing ignorant about the statement that the UK will still be abiding by EU laws long after Brexit day, this is a fact. There's the possibility of diverging in some areas but even so the UK will largely align with the single market to maintain the levels of access it needs.

> Voting Leave != Does not like EU Commission making Laws by people the UK did not and cannot vote out.

And this betrays a very poor understanding of EU law making while hiding behind the shallow notion of who is elected and ejected on the behest of voters. The UK's political system is not exactly setup to satisfy that notion even after Brexit, since voters have no real choices & accountability is not seriously practiced. Bad politicians even after breaching ministerial code are simply reintroduced after a brief periods in the naughty box. Some are even rewarded for lying by getting high ranking cabinet jobs. Nothing so hollow as Brits handwringing about EU democratic processes while ignoring the problems with its own system.

> It also takes a certain level of desperation to be vocal about it today because it's so taboo.

It's not taboo though is it. People go on and on about immigration and there are entire media outfits that are devoted to casting foreigners as threats while promoting the idea that 'these people are not as good natives, have lower IQ, are more violent and less productive', which is typically based on outright lies and prejudice. Beliefs about immigrants are entirely warped to cater to a smaller subset of the population which has a hard time dealing with change while they grip with tremendous entitlement to mythical constructions of the past.

> You only have to go back 2-3 generations for homogeneity to be the overwhelming norm

A very curious statement. Europe's history is one characterised by migration and constant changes in demographics. There have always been groups of people at odds with one another because they were different enough to be seen as a threat. Every generation has struggled accepting new groups of people with both good and bad results.

I'm not advancing the claim that high levels of diversity bring about happiness, I'm scrutinizing the belief that populations are happier because they get to be homogeneous in composition. It's been my observation that the people who push back against the idea of diversity the most tend to be quite miserable even when living in homogeneous communities.

These are all modern economies, most of which operate immigration-friendly regimes. Sweden, Netherlands, Switzerland, Iceland, Denmark, Norway and Finland are all signed up to freedom of movement, which doesn't discriminate on the basis of religion, ethnicity or place of birth, provided you are a citizen in the EEA or Switzerland, or if you are married to such a citizen.

Anyway, the point is not that diversity cultivates happiness (no simple answer to that), the point is that some people believe in keeping communities homogeneous and argue that this promotes happiness. That happiness boost is nowhere to be seen when looking at real world examples.