Seems like nobody is actually reading the TFA which is a shame because what the article describes is truly mind boggling:
>However, the board’s plan did not go smoothly. Seemingly declining to depart, Mullenweg booted other admins out of the company Slack and told employees everything had been worked out and that he was back in control of Automattic
What the article is actually reporting is that no one at Automatic is giving a straight answer not that the board caved and reversed their decision.
It seems like the larger problem is he maintains access of keys and systems as opposed to the board and can boot out anyone not loyal to him ( or any other admin who could remove him).
> It seems like the larger problem is he maintains access of keys and systems as opposed to the board and can boot out anyone not loyal to him ( or any other admin who could remove him).
So what happens when the courts get involved?
Because "he won, because we was the only one with the passwords," seems like a software engineer fantasy.
It's a true power struggle. As a software engineer I have actually fallen into the trap of thinking that because of the law or a contract something would happen. It is a softer power than I expected.
The board wants to make money, that's why they hold shares and positions. If Mullenweg has the power to destroy value, that will be powerful leverage over them. If his employees side with him, if he holds the accounts, they'll have to negotiate carefully.
Of course, you would need a lawyer to determine when this crosses from a civil dispute to a criminal dispute because at some point him using the keys when he's not authorized could be a crime and if they can get the cops involved that certainly changes the dynamic.
Holy shit. You are, if anything, underselling the article.
> When TechCrunch asked Mullenweg if his comments about being back as CEO were legitimate, he promised a blog post was coming. When it arrived, however, it was about him buying a houseboat. When we asked if his comments about being back were also him trolling, he replied, “I’m not a troll I’m a pirate, obviously.” Mullenweg never provided any official comment about his return, but noted on X that this was likely the fifth time he’s faced a “coup.”
And like all well-run companies, it's not clear who the ceo is.
A lot of WordPress enterprise users will be upset after finding out that after paying $20-100k a month, Wordpress actually poaches their employees. Just inspect a Wordpress enterprise site's response to certain endpoints using cURL or Postman, it will actually tell you to apply for Automattic. I have been meaning to write about this for a very long time.
Eh I mean this is common default no? If you inspect element on many sites it links to the career page. Reddit, discord, etc.
Maybe a little distasteful since I suppose since these WordPress sites are not owned by WordPress, but I wouldn't really say it's unique or necessarily poaching
All I know is Wordpress and Beeper, are any of their other products good? Like isn't WooCommerce an absolute also-ran compared to Amazon, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, etc?
Woocommerce is everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. Over four million stores.
About a third of all non-big-box/amazon online shopping runs through Woocommerce installations. Much more than Shopify, which is the next biggest.
Because it’s a plugin for WP you might not ever notice a store is Woocommerce until you get the store emails that people often don’t customise much and have an identifiable look to them.
It’s fully possible to run a simple Woocommerce store without giving anyone a cut beyond your payment provider’s normal fees.
It’s not too difficult to extend; custom payment gateways and order processing hooks, inbound APIs, GraphQL etc.
If you are judicious about your install — just run Woocommerce, WP, customise one of the core themes or a well-known good theme like WP-Start or an Anders Noren theme, use the Stripe or Paypal payment gateway —- it’s pretty solidly secure, too; you’ll get automatic updates.
It’s definitely not the most fun thing to configure and administer, but it’s not Magento at least. I have never enjoyed that.
Automattic’s acquisition of Woocommerce was absolutely a blessing at the time. Some of the more complex extensions to Woocommerce are paid addons, which is where they make their money (as well as payment gateway referral fees, which was a little-noticed part of the squabble with WP Engine, who modified Woocommerce to change the referrer to point to them). Woothemes (the previous owner) were unpredictable and a little rapacious; they changed their pricing in ways that caused concern (and Woocommerce itself started as an acrimonious and hostile fork of a plugin called Jigoshop).
I would really like to stop using WP over time, and it feels more urgent each time an Automattic story hits the headlines.
But I don’t think there are many better small e-commerce offerings than Woocommerce that offer that level of open-source control or cost control for people who need to run a modestly large store on a true shoestring.
All I care about is my favourite podcast app, Pocket Casts, which Automattic bought in a dumpster fire a few years ago.
But even if I don't personally use WP, the fact that something like 25% of the web runs on software which this lunatic has this much control over, is problematic in itself.
>It's always been my understanding that virtually everyone cheats
I'm sure it's prevalent in absolute numbers but I didn't and the vast majority of people I know in college didn't. I think it exists in pockets and specific environments but, it's like watching too many mafia movies and thinking every laundromat is a front.
I think most people have done "a bit" of cheating of some kind. Asking older friends about what to expect from tests. Asking older friends about how to approach a difficult assignment. Reading older assignments to see how they got their grades. Looking up an answer in the bathroom while taking a test. Getting carried on a group project. Sharing answers for a busywork assignment.
But there is massive disparity in who cheats and how. In high school, my fellow APUSH students all shared their weekly "write the definition of these 100 words" assignment (yes really, that was a regular assignment) because they thought it was stupid. I didn't cheat on it because I thought it was trivial. Those same students did not cheat on lots of other tasks and much harder assignments, and they eventually were caught and penalized for that cheating.
Many of the engineering students at my college had access to a shared folder with a crowd sourced collection of all assignments from many students, and sometimes people would just resubmit these older assignments. They did this because at least one professor was a Grade A asshole, whose philosophy was "If you do everything I asked exactly right, you get a C. To get an A, you need to go far above and beyond" which of course meant he just graded everyone on a curve to get his stupid desire for most of the class getting a C. Those same students did not cheat on other assignments, including much more difficult ones from classes that weren't part of their core degree.
If I ask a fellow classmate for their implementation of a function on an assignment, is that cheating? If I find that my class is itself borrowing it's curriculum from a (open) MIT class and in fact several students of MIT have published their assignments as Github projects, is reading those cheating? Was it cheating when my mother was the French Teacher so I could ask her way more questions about assignments than other students?
I think a lot of these things are "Light" cheating and I think a lot of people have done some of those things occasionally. However, almost nobody was ever doing these things as much as they easily could! People were willing to choose to not cheat even in the face of it.
That's very different from what seems like a lot of people who say "Everyone cheats" and by that they mean they haven't done any of their own work in a decade. I think these people, at least formerly, were only a few percent of people. It's actually fascinating how it has evolved though. Online translation was an option for my mom's students for decades, but only with the advent of LLMs are students doing it in large number.
Is this because it's harder to catch LLM cheating and therefore you are less likely to be punished? Did we build a society that exclusively rewards cheating and young people see no value in learning legitimate skills anymore?
You’re portraying a lot of these things as if they exist in a continuum along a fuzzy line from ‘not cheating’ to ‘cheating’, but the reality is it isn’t fuzzy at all. It’s cheating to submit work you didn’t do for assessment as if it is your own. That is cut and dried cheating.
None of these is cheating: Asking older friends about what to expect from tests. Asking older friends about how to approach a difficult assignment. Reading older assignments to see how they got their grades. Getting carried on a group project.
Most people did not done this: Looking up an answer in the bathroom while taking a test.
I think this is a two things can be true situation, where our colloquial meaning of coding is not quite adequate to indicate the full range of criteria that really matter, but also, that criteria as a totality (maintainability, reliability etc) is something that can also be targeted and optimized for.
This reminds me a bit of a PhD Comics webcomic that confidently claimed we would "never" cure cancer, on the grounds that cancer is not one thing. And I don't know that we will ever actually cure cancer, but that wouldn't be the reason. Correctly noting the problem space is bigger than a layperson would initially appreciate is a lot of things, most of them helpful, but the one thing it's not is a formal a demonstration of optimizing against the problem space as a whole.
As ever, identifying danger exclusively with human willpower and detaching it from means at their disposal commits you to absurdities where butter knives, guns, and AGI are indistinguishable risks.
So, I agree entirely with the article, though perhaps my model would be more like social media addiction lawsuits than airbags, though each comparison has their merits. The really interesting implication of this article is that training that's currently happening may be putting Sam Saltman et al on the hook for steep fines and penalties, years or perhaps decades from now as legal paradigms and research catch up to the societal impacts of these models.
>Agent-2, more so than previous models, is effectively “online learning,” in that it’s built to never really finish training. Every day, the weights get updated to the latest version, trained on more data generated by the previous version the previous day.
That seems to me to be a natural progression, from discrete models to models that are just continuously improved. Maybe we'll end up with different models with different rates of improvement rather than static differences in performance, and methodologies for that improvement will be the thing we care about. Maybe over time, even benchmark tests will be primarily concerned with that kind of efficiency.
I think a huge debate right now is the relative value of the "frontier" models from Western companies at the cutting edge, vs distilled versions of those models that are good enough and exponentially cheaper coming from China. But a paradigm of 'always training' means an always active, always advancing frontier, which is a stronger moat than a one-off model that's more advanced for a few months.
Once again, hot off of AnyHumanEver, I want to say a positive thing for vibe coding because I think it inspires interesting pet projects and lowers the threshold of achievability for them. At its best it gets out of the way and you simply get to simply experience something that was another person's creative vision.
I mean this one makes me want to hold my nose, but it's also the friction of idiosyncracy that I want to see in real people being creative.
I suppose because you still bought the game, after all, and on some level it was about catching up to expectations for what you would have paid for out of the box.
That said, I don't agree with their take at all. Hello Games offered a mountain of content that's right in the bullseye center of game's core vibe and identity; and continuing to hold the original critique against them based on the "not procedural enough" argument is increasingly equivocating between two different things. You've been given a game that's more than worth the cost of admission, and you'll see dozens, hundreds, of slop space games come and go with less than one tenth the value proposition of NMS. That should be more than enough to quell 99% of the criticism.
The fact that it's not procedural enough amounts to, say, feeling that The Odyssey was good, not great. For however true that is, it's not a scandal.
You pay for a game——if the game is not good, and patches are provided "for free" that doesn't mean much.
Here, NMS launched with abysmal content and atrocious systems. Now at least it doesn't have abysmal content. A bad game is a bad game (yes, my opinion).
I still think it's a remarkable success story and they can and should be incredibly proud of what they've built. But this vision of what is meant by cosmic depth and expansiveness seems to tragically miss the point.
Compare it to even our own solar system where even so much as a new high-res photo of the hexagon storm on Saturn comes with stunning new and specific detail, or the "heart" on Pluto, we're practically ambushed with novel configurations of atmospheric dynamics and geology. It's frustratingly rare for games to truly activate that feeling of wonder.
I think NMS is still an unbeatable deal for what it is as a game but it's a frustrating near miss flyby of what I think people want a true space exploration game to feel like.
Outer Wilds is really an amazing game. I highly recommend playing it without looking at anything online: when I started I reached for google every time I was stuck, just to realise I could have found answers if I has searched just a little bit more. After a while I stuck to a rule to never look at answers online, and it was such a bliss to finally crack puzzles after trying lots of different things.
In case you want to enjoy it anyway, I've got a recommendation: there are quite a few mods for the game, including one which quadruples the time limit, essentially making the time between major events 4 times as long.
In that configuration, the mechanic is still there but you aren't feeling on a clock anymore and can explore and play around with stuff at your own pace.
As someone hating any kind of timed missions in games, that's what made a frustrating game into a masterpiece for me personally.
one of those games where i wish i could erase my memory just to play it again, still think about it, i think it's like a year ago i played it, maybe more. idk. great game.
I played it recently. Very good game (although mediocre ending if we're being honest). The thing they did really really well is that it's true exploration in the sense that you could complete the game very quickly if you've already played it, because the only thing you need to complete it is some knowledge that you discover by exploring.
For example there might be a wormhole that takes you to a different destination if you fly through it backwards. You're very unlikely to find that out by chance, but if you explore you'll find a thing that tells you (probably behind some other puzzle).
I couldn't get into every day dialog etched in stone. It's one thing to find an old ruin that has some profound sounding thing like "All men are created equal". But it's beyond the pale for people to write tablets that are effectively mundane things like "Woke up and had breakfast".
I think Elite Dangerous had this same issue, at least the years after it was released when I played it. You have this whole to-scale galaxy to explore, but the vast majority of them contain no story, no life, no space stations, no other players, and are just similar rocks and noble gas bags over and over. Once you've seen about 100 systems, you've seen them all. Which is likely what our real galaxy is like, too.
The game is 2 million light years wide, but a meter deep.
I always find it interesting to read takes like this. I get it, I also bounced multiple times off Elite Dangerous due to boredom.
But in the end it was always intended to be Euro Truck Simulator in Space.
The main problem was that (just like ETS2 interestingly) there was no real satisfying end-game money sink.
For me the colonialisation update fixed that.
But I also find interesting that it seems to be very personal. For me it is motivating that eventually you will have one or multiple systems that you made "your own" (I loved playing X2 and X3 back in the day for the same reason). But lots of people played Elite for years and just hauling cargo and honking systems for the heck of it, and just watching the credit balance go up was motivating enough seemingly?
Have you played Outer Wilds? It nails this feeling. If you haven't played it, don't read or watch a single thing about it and just play it with zero expectations.
100%. I installed and began playing Outer Wilds on gamepass thinking that I was playing Outer Worlds. After about 10 minutes I knew I was wrong, it didn't feel like an Obsidian game. One of the best mistakes I ever made when it came to gaming.
There's the Kerbal Space Program approach, where space exploration is tough and you need to learn a LOT to succeed at it. The tradeoff of this is a high sense of accomplishment, where simply landing and returning from another body feels like you did something incredible.
There's also the Outer Wilds approach, where the story carries it. Moving around isn't hard at all, but you have specific goals to accomplish that move you towards a final ending. Diversity in how you accomplish those goals makes it feel fresh.
Mass Effect is similar, where you have some freedom to explore, but it's again in the pursuit of this broader story. So exploration feels like a rich side quest more than the main point of the task.
I think the principle isn't necessarily wrong, but it skips the major step of access to infrastructure, which is still deeply human mediated. Robotics and automation could foom in its own way, I think, and AGI can still do a lot of bad stuff in the present day. But I think economic irrelevance will depend on more automated robotics handling physical work.
Which is to say, scalable and open-ended capability of ramping up physical infrastructure.
I don't know that that's achievable yet. Though the era of increasingly advanced and automated robotics seems to be around the corner which could create a cycle, vicious or virtuous depending on how you feel about it.
>However, the board’s plan did not go smoothly. Seemingly declining to depart, Mullenweg booted other admins out of the company Slack and told employees everything had been worked out and that he was back in control of Automattic
What the article is actually reporting is that no one at Automatic is giving a straight answer not that the board caved and reversed their decision.
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