These will be words I will probably have to eat in the future (or when I research that guy's other opinions), but just based on the BS that was thrown at the guy in HN comments, this guy deserves respect for the power move of not giving a shit about these kinds of politics.
He's indignant that WP Engine is eating his market share and not giving anything back in terms of OSS contributions.
It's not at the same scale that AWS and GCP suffocate database vendors, but it rhymes. And it's easy to see why he's mad.
If a very vocal part of the OSS community wasn't so averse to letting small amounts of monopolization happen, we might see open source products that reach significant commercial scale. Where a single vendor or entity can profit and grow big without irrelevant competitors abusing the license to latch onto the product. An open source monopoly could collect good margin and build ambitiously.
It's hard to build a defensible open source business without using fair source licenses, having source available enterprise offerings, or even using an open core design that keeps important parts hidden and out of the commons. That's the only way to defend the magic bits and grow big.
If OSS folks were more tolerant of this, we'd probably see more funding for OSS and extremely viable and defensible open source businesses.
I highly doubt that version is true, though he likes to repeat it. If he doesn't like WP Engine eating his market share while giving little back (they did give back, just apparently not enough, whatever that even means in a volunteer ran open source project) then he would've not responded by pulling his own contributions off of WP.org as well, stealing their plugins, banning their developers, and so forth. Like, what even is that? You don't want to play in my sandbox according the rules that I set so I won't play in my own sandbox either? Not to mention that if there's anyone doing monopolization in the WP world, it's Matt himself, by buying up basically every WP company there is.
His so-called "democratize publishing" persona is just a complete facade.
Nope. WPE gave hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to the Foundation and community. Hell they put $70K to the PDX event where he got on stage and shit talked them, after banning them from attending and sponsoring the event (no refund though). They give to the OSS community in plenty of resources.
Guess who owns an irrevocable, free, exclusive and universal commercial license for WP? Automattic. They got it the same day the project was gifted to the Foundation. Matt’s claims pushed for WPE to give damages to Automattic, not the community or foundation.
WP is OSS because it is as built on other projects and had to be.
Yes. There's pretty extensive evidence that Mullenweg engaged in an extortion campaign against WP Engine, threatening to use his position at the WordPress Foundation to sabotage their business unless they agreed to pay Automattic a bunch of money.
Like many sociopaths, he prefers not to draw a clear distinction between actions he's performing for his own benefit and those he's performing on behalf of others, so he often tells a very different story about this. He claims to think, and may actually think, that there's nothing strange or alarming about the open source WordPress project taking sides in a commercial dispute between two vendors.
Indeed, I suspect if you sat down with him in private he'd explain to you that things like the Wordpress Foundation or fiduciary responsibility to Automattic shareholders are legal fictions. In his reality, he's the WordPress guy, and anything which seems to limit or constrain his control of WordPress is just some nonsense he signed off on to keep the suits happy.
Would that be wrong? What makes him not "the WordPress guy"?
Legal stuff aside I mean. Are there other people that put in significant amounts of work that he is not giving credit to/downplaying their contributions or similar?
This site is rife with psychopaths and sociopaths, neither of whom have any moral compass whatsoever. This is the legacy of Silicon Valley: working so closely with tech the people become machines themselves, incapable of interacting with their fellow humans. When one has the temerity to say this outloud, well, the predictable consequences follow. :)
Dude you're a man in your 50s. Look at this reply. Look at yourself.
Look at your AI nonsense.
What is this. This is shameful.
I hope there was just alcohol involved in this.
This was well-thought-out feedback you were explicitly asking for by posting here. I've engaged with your stuff in good faith.
Show some respect, man.
___
Also, by reading the other comments and contemplating..
What I said breaks what you actually wanted to do with this.
It seems to me that you wanted other naive people to take their time and enter data so that you can then bring out some thought leading text or whatever, that is a digest of that.
Questioning the form inputs breaks that. So you reach for a Twitter dunk in the hopes that no one looks to closely.
Which leaves me wondering:
Didn't you make it? Your GitHub profile says ex big tech and all
Don't you have more than enough cash for you to not instantly throw away the veneer of civilty when some new bad-faith marketing game fails?
Or are you just in it for the game itself and the thrill?
Either way. Damn.
Just saying nothing at all would've been exceptionally more wise PR wise.
yeah, you're right bro. sorry for the glib response; you were engaging in good faith, i just didn't really take it that way
not anywhere close to my 50s, and this isn't "bad-faith" marketing game; everything i do is 100% free and open source and just genuinely trying to help advance convos around AI in a positive direction without caring about making money like most people
> However, I think sometimes we overvalue thinking from first principles
The problem isn't the thinking though, but the lack of grounding.
You don't have a problem with people coming up with a technically better solution. Your problem is with the people not realizing that they exist in reality and not in a vacuum.
Please don't question the act of thinking itself. It is the wrong target.
> Personally I think it's time for the personal car to disappear anyway.
Yeah I dunno.
I think the majority of people will fight to the death if one tries to take away the individual mobility (and replaces it with either nothing or corporate-owned assets).
So yeah maybe that prediction in the first sentence is actually accurate, depending on how strongly that opinion is held and pushed.
In America maybe. Here in Europe it's not really viewed as a birthright like that. And don't forget, America artificially created a dependency on the car with its city design, for economic reasons.
And no I don't think anything corporate-owned is the answer, as corporations are the main reason we're in this mess.
But like I said it is my personal opinion. The challenges we face as humanity, like pollution (not just global warming), and infinite growth can't be solved without some big changes. Quick fixes just won't do it which is why we're not actually solving anything.
I don't think it will happen though. There's too many vested interest in just burning the world until it's gone.
> Here in Europe it's not really viewed as a birthright like that.
I have never left Europe in my life, and I can with certainty say that this is wrong.
We do have a bunch of city-dwelling people that can do without, yes, but once you leave those perspective-skewing places, there is no way to pleasantly exist without some sort of car.
That said, I agree that more could be done without them, and I think that eBikes are doing a ton of work there to enable people to use the one car they have to own less. If only they weren't by now priced like actual cars..
__
Also bonuspoints for not doing the dumb thing and buying a special-purpose-only cargo bike but the smart thing of owning a regular eBike, a trailer hitch and a bike trailer. You can get so much done with a bike trailer.
If you're in europe, go check out hinterher.com. Great stuff
> Also bonuspoints for not doing the dumb thing and buying a special-purpose-only cargo bike but the smart thing of owning a regular eBike, a trailer hitch and a bike trailer. You can get so much done with a bike trailer.
Cargo bikes are great for kids. I would be far too terrified to put them in one of those trailers.
That's also what the LLM said when I stress-tested my comment, but I grew up seeing many kids being driven around in fairly safe looking trailers, so I'm not 100% sure if that holds up.
I mean, psychologically, you're completely right. But realistically, a trailer is probably fine - as long as you understand object permanence and drive safe and like there's your kid behind you.
Europe is a big place. For example, if you are a farmer living in Finnish countryside, good luck surviving without a personal car. Lots of city folks also have relatives or summer cottages in the countryside, and own some cheap car just to reach them. And for families living in smaller cities, the public transport system is often inadequate, in rural areas it's non-existent.
I don't drive much, but the little I do improves my quality of life significantly. Personal cars shouldn't disappear, but cities should be designed to minimize need for them, and public transport systems should be improved. Those of us who need a car to reach rural locations still should be able to own one. Taxation should focus on car usage, not ownership, and tax usage more in cities than in areas where cars are more necessary. Owning a car is not inherently worse than any other form of ownership.
> America artificially created a dependency on the car with its city design, for economic reasons.
That's nonsense. Most American cities were built after automobiles were already a thing, that's why our cities are designed around automobile transportation. Many European cities are much older than cars, of course they were laid out based on the transportation of the day.
And I don't get your dig at the end related to American city design being some for economic reasons. What city wasn't design in part for economic reasons? Homes, businesses, roads, etc are always positioned in a city in part based on economic impact and value.
American cities are better for the general public anyway. Would you personally choose to spend over half your pay renting an expensive micro apartment in the middle of the city, or drive a 30-60 min commute to your big house on cheap land in the suburbs? Europeans don't get that choice, since land is so scarce.
I live in Canada (Toronto) and choose to live and raise my family downtown. We bought a multi-bedroom condo in a slightly older building (better layout and larger size than more modern buildings). My child walks to school and we socialize with the parents during dropoff, is constantly meeting the neighbourhood kids in the public parks, and my commute is a 15 minute walk. We are also within walking distance to all the amenities the city has to offer (aquarium/museums, shops, etc). I sometimes think we live in Sesame Street w/o the muppets; my 8 year old runs the cash register for me at several stores we shop at because the owners know us so well.
Any "savings" I would have moving to the suburbs would be cancelled out by the thousands in commuting costs (I'd have to buy, maintain and insure a car, which I only now use car sharing and the occasional old school rental). All being equal, a larger home would be nice, but then I'd be in a position where I go out less.
I'm not saying urban life is for everybody, but you make it sound like a choice between dystopia and utopia (it was awful during the height of COVID, though). The fact that the American cities that are closest to the urban ideal are so expensive does signal that people would like to live like that, but for very various reasons (ranging from zoning to historical gov't mortgage insurance only applying to houses) has not been expanded much elsewhere.
I meant to compare (caricatures of) cities, not lifestyles within a city.
I'll struggle to explain myself concisely.
Basically, the Urban ideal is gatekept - you can't access the benefits without paying for them. The general public is better of moving to smaller cities where land is affordable. They will earn a bit less but keep much more for themselves.
> Any "savings" I would have moving to the suburbs would be cancelled out by the thousands in commuting costs
Absolutely.
1) Within a city, these tradeoffs are balanced by the market
2) If there's more cheap land outside city (outer suburbs), this balancing brings prices in the inner city down
3) As that outer land becomes exhausted (new outer suburbs too far to commute), inner-city prices skyrocket
4) A small city is surrounded by more underdeveloped land and hence workers capture a larger share of their own production
5) Improved public transport helps to rebalance inner and outer suburb prices
If there's a fixed amount of land and a large population, best you can do is lots of 5) (urban ideal). It's not a bad thing. If there's land available though, you also have the option to spread out further into more small cities (suburban ideal). There's obviously a continuum between the two.
Within a big sprawling city like Toronto, public transport investment would be a net positive. But people would be even better off IMHO if they instead spread further out into new cities.
> The fact that the American cities that are closest to the urban ideal are so expensive does signal that people would like to live like that
Desirability is a function of price. What's desirable at 100k might not be at 1M.
People living close together with good transport is economically far more efficient than the alternatives. That's the value - everyone is more productive. To access that benefit though, you have to live there. So the people who own the land have leverage to charge you more for it. You earn more but pay more for housing/land.
If you can afford it comfortably, highly Urban cities are almost certainly better for you. Working people though left high-value European cities en masse for dirt cheap land in America, Canada, Australia, etc. They earned much smaller salaries yet ended up wealthier - because they kept more for themselves.
It's really a personal choice. I would definitely choose the city apartment, as long as I can afford to not have a car I'll choose that, at least for now. Can't fathom the idea of having to drive to the office/city centre/shops when I can just walk.
> Europeans don't get that choice, since land is so scarce
don't think that's true, there's plenty of satellite towns and rural areas around every city
It's a choice, sure, but the tradeoffs available are different. Those rural areas tend to be more expensive than e.g. American suburbs.
In my sprawling Australian city, the nation's median earner would need about a 45-minute commute to get to an affordable 800 sqm block with detached house. I'd say that's about the smallest block which justifies suburban life. Until covid, it would have been about 30 mins. I've got a backyard, veggie garden, sheds, greenhouse, large patio, and I live walking distance to trainline, multiple parks, multiple shopping centers.
Simply not an option in London, Paris, etc. Gemini suggests Leipzig or Bordeaux might compare. But although salaries are lower in Bordeaux, I was not able to find a listing online for over even 600 sqm which was comparably priced to my own house. There's a few castles/manors in need of some tlc if you have deep pockets though.
I'm American and also spent a few years living in Europe. I actually much preferred the smaller homes and more walkable cities in Europe, I don't need a McMansion to feel happy.
We moved back primarily because immigration laws are always tricky, our families were still in the US, and I didn't want to watch Russia invade Ukraine from a front row seat. If the decision were only about cost and lifestyle of home and city design we would still be in Europe.
I'd rather live in a smaller city where I earn a bit less and things are a bit less convenient, but I don't have to give all my money to the bank / person I bought the land from / landlord / etc.
If you can comfortably afford it, highly urban is usually better.
I resent the idea of masses of people spending their whole lives just transferring money from their boss to their landlord. Small cities with drivable suburbs dispersed over a great continent is to me a symbol of escape from millennia of tyranny. Each to their own, I guess.
The main challenge I have with living in densely populated areas these days is how fragile they are. Any disruption to power, water, fuel, food, etc and the I don't know what people in a dense area will do.
If the trade off is moving from transferring money from my boss to my landlord or from my boss to the dozens of systems I deeply depend on to live, I don't see too much difference there.
We absolutely, 100% do. Not everywhere, just like it isn't universally true in the US, but it definitely is a choice that many in Europe have. We just aren't chained to a car even in this case, public transport is still great even if you don't live in the city center.
It might be great where you are but it definitely isn't where I am in Norway, nor was it in quite a few of the rural places I visited in the UK this summer.
I'd take the short commute for sure. I'd rather not waste so much of my life trapped in a metal box that is statistically one of the most likely things to accidentally seriously injure or kill me. And its not like I'm overly afraid of cars or whatever; cars have been a long hobby of mine and I ride motorcycles recreationally, but its very different than being forced to sit in traffic commuting. Time is the one thing I can't just make more of. Hours wasted commuting is hours I can't spend with my family or do my hobbies, especially if the commute is driving alone.
In a lot of metro areas, its not like that mortgage on a "big house on cheap land" is really that much cheaper than the smaller apartment further into the city. And these days that cheap "big house" is often a small near zero lot line house far away from anything interesting.
Oooh wow yeah I can get a house way out in the sticks. It'll take me an hour to get to any real job opportunities, entirely dependent on my car. Sure, there's no real city amenities anywhere around, but hey you've got that tiny little backyard for all those activities! Sure, there's no city pools, there's no city parks, there's no sports complexes (unless you're in high school), there are no theaters, there is barely a library, there isn't really public green spaces but hey you've got a few square feet of Bermuda grass to mow. All for probably a little over $2k a month. Quite an affordable utopia.
I'd much rather live in a place with city parks, with municipal recreation centers, with good public libraries, close to actual job opportunities, lots of choices of cuisines when I choose to eat out, access to transit opportunities to get around the larger metro areas in multiple ways, etc. Its more expensive, and I won't be able to afford as much square footage, but hey having actually functional bike trails and sports leagues to participate in and not having to drive for hours to catch a sports team I like to see or catch a show in a theater sure beats just being alone in a cheap box with an empty small yard way away from anything fun to do outside of the home.
I've only had one long commute in my life, and I carpooled so I wasn't even the one driving it. It sucked wasting so much time shuffling around in the car in traffic. I don't think I'll ever willfully choose it. I get that's just my opinion though, and some people do prefer being way out in the middle of nowhere. But to me and seeing what it actually is these days, it doesn't seem like the utopia people paint it as. But hey, I live in what was "way out there with nothing around" in the past. Things do change and evolve.
The complaint about cars resonates with me. I feel the same way about being tied to an apartment though - why work so hard just to give it all away to the landlord?
The sad truth is time lost to commute is no different to time lost paying for a more expensive apartment closer to work. They are balanced by the market. Unless you're wealthy, you have to trade to time to survive.
Looking in that area, there's some amazing cheap houses with lots of space
It's not for everybody, but options like this simply don't exist at all in Europe.
As for me, I paid around 400k in Australia and I'm near / walking distance to parks, rec centers, aquatic centers, cinemas, all kinds of sports facilities, libraries, shopping centers. Many high paid jobs for engineers nearby. I don't commute every day, and when I do I listen to podcasts, or think about ideas I've been working on, or make phone calls.
> I feel the same way about being tied to an apartment though - why work so hard just to give it all away to the landlord?
Comparing a $424k house, you can get significantly closer into the city and have a much better commute and still own your home. It's a false dichotomy to think one needs to rent at those kinds of prices further into the city, or at least a city with actual city-like amenities and wide job prospects within a 10 minute drive. You just might have other tradeoffs, like a smaller lot or an older house.
My current home is slightly larger than that first example, there's a bus stop outside, I ride my bicycle to the office, take the train to my favorite sports games, and is somewhere around the same value with recent appraisals. But I've got significantly less grass to mow, and my property taxes are a bit higher.
My parents have just entered the era in their lives where they can no longer drive. Because where they live has 0 public transport, it means they have to rely on family for transport (which thankfully I have siblings living nearby).
Their individual mobility disappeared almost overnight (stroke, and my mom had a botched cataract surgery). Everyone is just one major health event away from losing that mobility.
Public transit, beyond just being better for the environment, is a public good and I can't overstate how amazing it is to live with good public transport. I lived in England for 2 years without a car and I didn't miss it for a day. I could get buses and trains anywhere I wanted to go and the layout of cities there are such that you usually just want to go to the town center and back any ways.
I've been recently thinking about custom fonts and ligatures to create a captcha mechanism that is easy to solve for humans but confuses LLMs.
Something like a dynamically generated font where some letters look different, and you have to count details or write down a word or [idea not yet fleshed out].
Won't stop someone dedicated, of course, but nothing will.
A lot has been said about DHH, but, I think the moment where you can see that the guy has _clearly_ lost it is this quote:
> It is impossibly fast. And you know what? The binary? Half a megabyte. Half a fucking megabyte. I— you could fit that on a floppy disk almost. With a little compression. This is the other payoff.
The guy now(?) thinks like a lossy abstraction that speaks in tropes.
He has become the LLM - I would say, if I didn't know that even a 9B one can tell me with absolutely certainty how much space there is on a fucking floppy.
There is no reason to get into all the politics stuff when this is where the guy is at. Basic fact retrieval.
(Pedantically, one could now argue that it was not clear which floppy format the guy was referring to. And yes, that would be true, but by thinking that thought, you have thought about the sentence more than its author has.)
If we are talking about the standard 3.5-inch High Density (HD) floppy disk, which is the universal cultural icon for "floppy disk" (and the save icon in your software), the capacity is exactly:
1,474,560 bytes
This is equal to 1,440 KB (using 1024-byte kilobytes).
It is marketed and universally referred to as 1.44 MB.
Now, let's run the exact math on DHH's keynote claim:
If you put his "impossibly fast" 0.5 MB binary onto a standard floppy disk, you would have nearly a full megabyte of free space left over. You could fit almost three of his binaries on a single disk. You do not need "a little compression." You need a basic understanding of less-than/greater-than operators.
The Preemptive "Reply-Guy" Shield
Now, just in case a Hacker News pedant is reading this and wants to argue that DHH was talking about a different format, here is the absolute certainty on the rest of the historical hardware:
3.5-inch Double Density (DD) (1980s): 720 KB. (A 0.5 MB file still fits easily without compression).
3.5-inch Extended Density (ED) (1987): 2.88 MB. (Fits five of his binaries).
5.25-inch High Density (1984): 1.2 MB. (Fits two of his binaries).
5.25-inch Double Density (1981): 360 KB.
8-inch Original IBM (1971): 80 KB.
To make DHH's statement mathematically correct, we have to pretend he was standing on a stage in 2024, hyping up modern web framework binaries, while indexing his storage metaphors to a 5.25-inch Double Density disk from 1981.
__
Thank you, Gemini. Much appreciated.
Also, I love the tone.
(You can tell that it is actually that LLM by it thinking that it is still 2024)
That is true, because they're good for actually understanding wtf the model is doing.
I'd argue that they're a necessity if you want to use the LLM as a tool instead of a black box that just does stuff for you.
It gives you a lot finer control over where the solution ends up when you can follow along the thinking trace and modulate your inputs based on what you saw in there.
And, additionally, it gives you a lot more understanding of what the model can or cannot do. Strengths and weaknesses and all that.
Using claude is like buying a car where you cannot legally open the hood. It tells you that there is something specific under there, and often it actually drives like that too, but how exactly it looks you will never see.
For some people this is fine. I do not think that these people will survive. Figuratively speaking but also literally speaking.
World's changing. Opaque abstraction like that is a luxury depending on (geo)political stability.
I gave it some vibecoded patch someone created with Opus 5 with the task of together figuring out the real root cause and what to do about it.
Big mistake. The rest of the session was all claude-speak up until I've rage-quit and restarted with Qwen and no context other than "here's what I think we've missed in the current implementation. How could we approach that?"
GLM felt like it got at least 20 IQ points dumber just from being exposed to claude's writing.
Truly an impressive play.
reply