TFA is the aerospace equivalent of rolling your own crypto. Outsiders often don’t know what they don’t know, resulting in fatally-naive “solutions” to the problems.
An immutable linux base, like Flatcar, combined with dockerized apps for isolation and easy per-container updates could come pretty close if some engineering were put into UX.
You'd need to have unattended upgrades, or perhaps a companion app where you can send the user a push notification to say "hey bruh update your shit". Would also need engineers to support those updates.
The containerizing is almost a capability based security system. Instead of adding that layer to block everything except a certain resource, why not change the defaults in the OS so that it defaults to NO access instead? Saves resources, provides much better security.
>"Unbundling BI" is absolutely where things are headed now that more people have agents, coding agents, agent computers to help with work.
Agreed. Coupled with bento[0] for slide decks, I think this type of project is a very welcome development, helping us move away from walled gardens and proprietary software suites.
Thanks for sharing this too. It reminds me of GistDeck a super old project that turned a gist into slides. Infinitely better than powerpoint or GSlides.
I'm not a Lisp connoisseur, but the parts of GNU Emacs that bothers me are more all a) the C-based glue... single-threaded single process monolith b) giant ball of mutable state that seems to let anything step on anything else and break things in confusing ways.
IMHO there should ideally be a minimal shared transactional blackboard space that processes can coordinate in and then each buffer should be its own isolated process/thread -- like a chromium tab.
My GPG key is renewed expire date every 2 years, and the main key and sub key are separated (the main key is stored offline, and the sub key is on YubiKey). The private key does not need to be updated regularly, so it can be directly encrypted and saved in the backup.
I think this is a good balance point, and I estimate that if we want to rotate the keys completely in the future, we should start using new key algorithms. (I estimate it will take another 5-8 years)
> Keys should be something you don’t hesitate to throw away and rotate at the first hint of a compromise.
Yes, when certain situations arise, it is necessary to rotate the keys as soon as possible, but in the absence of such situations, losing key backups can be catastrophic.
>Friends that worked their described the "beef" as being a weird loaf of pressurized mewt-like protein before its sliced
It's just deli meat. Arby's is extremely open that their roast beef is deli meat roast beef. It's no different from what you find at the deli counter in your local krogers.
Have you or your friend never seen deli meat before?
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.
Because they're not paying only for Wordpress-the-software, they're paying for scalability, maintenance, etc. $100k/mo is probably cheaper than a team of high-end WP experts.
Same reason a ton of us pay for AWS/GCloud/Azure instead of dealing with bare metal. (And I say this as someone running an edge fleet. If I didn't need to, I wouldn't.)
News sites can be very large - so running on Wordpress.com infrastructure can cause such amount. With cloud storage (provided by WP), additional support etc.
That doesn't sound like poaching to me? I mean, if it's a public endpoint, the person who finds it could be an independent contractor hired to work on the site, or a random person on the Internet probing the site for fun.
What you describe sounds more like a cleverly hidden ad. Google and others were famous for this during silicon valley's growth phase when you could get a job as a software engineer if you had heard of Java in passing and could fog a mirror.
Intent matters: a hiring campaign doesn't rise to the level of poaching unless there is some concerted effort to attract specific employees and/or talent from a specific company.
Finally, poaching is a perjorative term, but the practice of hiring another company's talent (even if they are a competitor) is not illegal or unethical. Companies SHOULD have to compete against each other for top talent.
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.
You’re from the Matt “WordPress is 45% of websites” school of statistics. WooCommerce is nothing compared to Shopify, barely a blip, inconsequential. WooCommerce is “installed” on millions of websites but it processes perhaps 1% of the volume of Shopify.
WooCommerce isn’t bad, acquiring it was a good call for Automattic, but to put it in the same league as Shopify is pure fantasy.
As for cost control, I’m not sure why you think Shopify is more expensive. Moving from WooCommerce to Shopify is expensive because migrations are expensive but day to day running costs are pretty much equivalent.
And keep in mind most major Shopify users are building out their own front ends so these BuiltWith numbers are underreporting on big Shopify customers, whereas WooCommerce is almost never used without a WordPress front end. These are the most favorable numbers to WooCommerce and they are still bad.
edit: it’s even worse than I thought. Woo’s own stats cite storeleads.app which lists the biggest Woo stores as… some blogs? Shopify has most of the top stores from brands we all recognize. Woo has zero. Woo’s involvement in actual commerce is pitiful, I think 1% of Shopify is optimistic.
edit edit: one of Woo’s most popular stores is billyparisi.com. A recipe website that sells a couple of t-shirts. A WordPress blog that drives all of the traffic and a WooCommerce tacked on for the sake of it. And that’s one of Woo’s best.
I did write a mangled sentence late at night and you are correct to object to it.
But you seem kind of angry and have decided something about me, and are now cherrypicking things off the woocommerce site to try to make me look foolish (as if that site’s gallery is necessarily authoritative?)
Did I explicitly say “shopify is more expensive”, for one thing? You are putting those words in my mouth.
However. I just looked at the numbers. Shopify starts at £19 per month. I could set up a speculative woocommerce store on good hosting for about £40 per year.
Several of the people I have set up stores for over the years have had no certainty that they would make a sale for months and yet needed customisations in their setup that no hosted e-commerce company could offer in their cheap plans.
I have written dynamic product functionality, installed weird extensions, even used Wordpress as the prototype storefront in a multi-vendor, multi-supplier fulfilment network demo.
Woocommerce exists. It functions. It can be rolled out for tiny, tiny money on hosting you control and can customise. It is OK. Not that fun to administer but it’s a complete open source store with a huge ecosystem. It’s exceptionally widely deployed. For people who want to run shoestring customised store experiments or sell on tiny margins or for charities, it’s clearly an option.
> Like isn't WooCommerce an absolute also-ran compared to Amazon, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, etc?
You said that WooCommerce is more widely deployed than Shopify. Yes, it is installed as a WordPress plugin on more websites than Shopify but that is completely meaningless when discussing whether WooCommerce is an "also-ran" compared to Shopify.
So, if your comment was intended only to explain that WooCommerce is a widely installed Shopify plugin, I apologize for suggesting you have something in common with Matt, but your comment read to me (and I guess everyone else) like you were saying WooCommerce isn't an also-ran and is an important product for online commerce. It isn't, in the context of business, it doesn't belong in the same conversation as Shopify or any other serious commerce business.
(e.g. just this afternoon: Godin guitars. One of the longer-established multi-brand companies in the guitar world.)
And embedded in really odd stuff, like behind member walls — companies selling spare parts for washing machines and hoovers, all of that stuff. It's absolutely the long tail of ecommerce.
I will grant you that in the last year or two some pretty big stores (particularly in the media and music world) have migrated to Shopify (they have a tool for that).
I don't blame them for migrating away and it's not hard to see purely strategic reasons why they would that are tied into all of this nonsense with Matt's very obvious implosion. Like I said in my comment, I'd prefer not to be running WP at all.
But a lot of the work I do is at the very small, very speculative or very custom end of things. I'm looking for various ways out that still let me help individual people.
> About a third of all non-big-box/amazon online shopping runs through Woocommerce installations. Much more than Shopify, which is the next biggest.
Source? This source [0] puts Shopify 10x ahead of WooCommerce on GMV. They're close on number of installations. That roughly matches my experience working in this space in 2022, though it's definitely possible our customers weren't representative of the market as a whole.
The link that you provided largely confirms what parent said: it puts WooCommerce ahead of Shopify in terms of store count, with a number (4.34M live stores) which is consistent to the one mentioned by parent ("over four million stores").
> They're close on number of installations.
2.84M vs 4.34M is quite a wide margin, wouldn't you agree?
It's true that the link puts Shopify at roughly 10X in terms of GMV but parent did not claim otherwise.
I think any interpretation of this that would measure "a third of... shopping" by number of individual sites rather than dollar volume is disingenuous at best.
> About a third of all non-big-box/amazon online shopping runs through Woocommerce installations
And as for this:
> 2.84M vs 4.34M is quite a wide margin, wouldn't you agree?
No, I wouldn't. I think that's within the margin of error for the typical methodology of this kind of research. They're the same number.
Pocket Casts was originally developed by a South Australian startup, Shifty Jelly. Sold to a consortium of public broadcasters which included NPR. Then there was a change of heart the the public broadcasters decided that they actually don't want to be in the game, so was divested in a firesale.
Automattic has picked up a few of these assets for peanuts, Tumblr and Pocket Casts are amongst them. All are assets which were once much more high flying, but still have a core of dedicated users/fans.
SimpleNote is outstanding. I've gone through countless note apps over the years and this was the only one that stuck long term. Every other option was either too complex for what I needed, got enshittified, or needless UX churn broke my workflow to an unacceptable degree.
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.
>I’m not sticking up for car manufacturers, but at what size or capacity should you be required to document and publish these things? It requires employer time and effort and has a cost associated with it.
You're talking about things that by definition have to be documented and internally published in order to design and build the powertrain in the first place. You can't design a computer-controlled automatic transmission without documenting the shift points.
The cost is therefore essentially nothing, because the information already exists. Just copy paste it into a PDF and put it on your website.
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