The WordPress-WP Engine drama doesn’t look great for Matt Mullenweg and, by extension, the companies he controls, including WordPress.org, Wordpress.com and Automattic. It appears that Matt is extorting WP Engine and WP Engine did nothing to violate WordPress license — not even close.
The messy WordPress drama, explained — Emma Roth at The Verge.
If WordPress is to survive, Matt Mullenweg must be removed — Josh Collinsworth blog
Minnie strained her left foreleg doing zoomies this morning so I think I’m going to be walking solo for the next ten days or so.
Why Everything Is Suddenly Spiraling for Israel.
Israel is speeding down the road to self-destruction, says Thomas Friedman
… anyone with two eyes in his head knows that the only way to defeat Hamas is a strategy of “clear, hold and build”: Destroy the enemy, hold the territory and then build an alternative local, legitimate Palestinian governing authority. Israel’s strategy in Gaza, he said, has been: “Clear, leave, come back, clear again the same place, leave again, come back and clear again.”
In a legit scientific study, cats in little crocheted hats are helping researchers shed light on feline chronic pain. The custom-made caps hold electrodes in place and reduce motion artifacts during EEGs.
I am banging my head against the same multiplatform wall that @davew@mastodon.social and @molly0xfff@hachyderm.io are fighting. I’m currently active on Micro.blog, Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, Tumbr, Facebook and an email newsletter and that is just ridiculous and yet I can’t bear to walk away from even one of them. I rely on Micro.blog’s excellent automation tools for cross-posting and syndication, and a bit of cutting and pasting, and I just live with it, but I hate it. I want to be able to just post to one place and let everybody read it on whatever platform they prefer, in the native format of that platform.
In Canto 20 of Inferno, Dante confronts a pit where the sinners have had their heads twisted around backwards; they trudge, naked and weeping, through puddles of cooling tears. Virgil informs him that these are the fortunetellers, who tried to look forwards in life and now must look backwards forever.
In a completely unrelated subject, how about those election pollsters, huh?
In a century of history, we see a new pollster predicting elections with uncanny accuracy a few times, and then failing spectacularly, followed by another polling star repeating the cycle. And the failed pollster has an excuse. For example, after Nate Silver called the 2016 election for Clinton, he backpedaled by saying that he was actually right because he gave Trump a 28% chance of winning.
My $.02: All Silver was saying was that Trump might win. How is that in any way useful?
Allow me to call the 2024 election, based on my polling: Trump might win this one. So might Harris. Also, one or both of them might exit the race (death, disability, etc.)
Related: I regularly see headlines quoting someone who called the last nine (or whatever) Presidential elections, touting their prediction for this one. But tens of thousands of people publicly predict every election. Sheer luck will give one or more of them a perfect record. For a while.
Cory:
When it comes to serious political deliberation, questions like “who is likely to vote” and “what does ‘undecided’ mean” are a lot less important than, “what are the candidates promising to do?” and “what are the candidates likely to do?”
But – as Perlstein writes – the only kind of election journalism that is consistently, adequately funded is poll coverage. As a 1949 critic put it, this isn’t the “pulse of democracy,” it’s “its baby talk.”
Bosses are firing Gen Z grads just months after hiring them.
I admit I clicked on this clickbait headline. Most of the article turned out to be the usual folderol about how the Young People Nowadays are lazy and sloppy and don’t want to work. Same thing that was said about Millennials, GenX, Boomers and every other generation going back to ancient Greece.
The bottom of the article talks about the importance of having a good attitude in the workplace when you are in your 20s. Very true—I had a bad attitude in my 20s, spent much of my 30s unlearning that, and sabotaged my career because of it.
Now I’m working on not being that older worker who … well, who acts like he believes the kinds of stereotypes promulgated in this article.
Ellen DeGeneres returns to standup with a Netflix schedule. Maybe she did run a toxic workplace, but she seems self-aware and witty here.
She describes a set full of laughter, fun and games (like the game of tag she started around 2016 that lasted until the show ended). “We played tag, and I would chase people down the hallways. I would chase them all around the studio, and I would scare them all the time. I would jump out, and I would scare people ‘cause I love to do that – and you know, hearing myself say this out loud, I realize I was chasing my employees and terrorizing them. I can see where that would be misinterpreted,” she says.
I spent a lot more time on GEnie than CompuServe but I spent a lot of time on CompuServe too. Like other former CompuServe habitués, I still remember my login: 70212,51.
CompuServe was headquartered in my hometown-by-marriage, the Upper Arlington neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio. There’s a big ol' commemorative plaque on the spot now, the kind of plaque you find at historical battle sites and such.
The Raycast productivity app (one of my most-used apps) is coming to iOS (and Windows too, but I care about iOS). Hard to see how an iOS version would work; the app is extremely keyboard-focused. The developers say it’s a power-user tool for people who spend 8+ hours a day at their computers.
Caroline Ellison, star witness at the FTX trial, says she was obsessed with Sam Bankman-Fried. “The longer I worked at Alameda, the more my sense of self became inextricably intertwined with what Sam thought of me and the more I subordinated my own values and judgment to his."
Today I learned that Comma Separated Value (CSV) computer files were used in IBM Fortran compilers in 1972, and the term was first used in 1983. And that CSVs are extremely popular today for the most advanced AI applications.
I’m surprised CSVs aren’t even older. It seems like such an obvious way to structure data. Then again, sometimes brilliant breakthroughs seem obvious only in retrospect.
This came up on my YouTube recommended videos: “Is it normal to talk to yourself?”
I know the answer to that one: No!
Absolutely not!
It’s weird!
Talk to the dog instead.
This morning, I was reading a listicle of health tips and one of the most important things they said you should do is, “Get good sleep.”
“I’ll get right on that!” I said. “And I’ve always wanted to be a foot and a half taller so I can play pro basketball, so I’ll do that too!”