WordPress VIP Support Lead 👨💻 WordPress contributor & developer ✍🏼 Technical writer 📢 Occasional PC Pro podcaster & international speaker ⚤ http://pronoun.is/he
This account is for all things tech and WordPress. Go to Threads or Bluesky for my personal stuff.
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Over the last week I've seen this said on social media about anyone who still works at Automattic...
"sycophants and people who can't speak out"
"everyone now has learned to swallow critique, be wary of dissenters, and pretend to agree with The Great Leader"
"a cult of personality"
And this was from supposed academics and journalists.
Let me be clear on what I think of this... it's lazy, insulting and just plain wrong.
And, yes, I'm looking at you Ian Betteridge and Mark Dingemanse.
Oh dang, he's so right. Every single one of the over 1.5k of us are EXACTLY like this. No wonder he's an academic /s
@[email protected] Let me get this straight. You've forced your most principled critics out and let the rest swear loyalty — so you're now left with sycophants and people who can't speak out because they're too dependent on you for job security. This creates a culture of fear where everyone now has learned to swallow critique, be wary of dissenters, and pretend to agree with The Great Leader. How is this not one of the worst moves to make for company culture?
Can you find WP Engine’s contributions to WordPress 6.6?
Courtesy of Daniel Bachhuber
https://artiss.blog/2024/09/can-you-find-wp-engines-contributions-to-wordpress-6-6/
WPE & Trademarks
I've been writing and talking about WP Engine a lot in the last week, but I want to be crystal clear about the core issue at play. In short, WP Engine is violating WordPress' trademarks. Moreover, they have been doing so for years. We at Automattic have been attempting to make a licensing deal with them for a very long time, and all they have done has string us along.
I just donated, personally, $5 to the WordPress Foundation, a charitable organisation, to help further the mission of the WordPress open source project and to help the wider community.
This is more than WP Engine has donated. WP Engine this year made $400 million*.
Now how many R’s are in ‘Strawberry’, ChatGPT?
Last month, the latest ChatGPT oopsie went viral - the fact that, if you asked it how many r's were in the word "strawberry", it would say there's 2. However, get it to spell it out and it changed its mind and got it correct. For some people it would not only double down but would, when pushed, even change it's mind and say it's just 1.
https://artiss.blog/2024/09/now-how-many-rs-are-in-strawberry-chatgpt/
Bazalgette: Diary of a WordPress Plugin – Part 1
Back in the 1980s, I loved reading game development diaries in Zzap!64 (these days I subscribe to Freeze64, which also includes developer diaries) and, so, I've decided to try one out myself, albeit for a WordPress plugin rather than an 8-bit video game. Bazalgette is a plugin that I've been trying to complete for a number of years, each time being partially coded and then abandoned, for varying reasons.
https://artiss.blog/2024/08/bazalgette-diary-of-a-wordpress-plugin-part-1/
If anybody had any doubt that Google's "Do No Evil" was a thing of the past.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/16/24221755/google-team-pixel-reviews-influencers
Be careful posting on Reddit: Cult of Mac may take your content!
There's lot of news about Reddit selling their content to various companies, particularly for AI, but not, that I'm aware, to Cult of Mac, an Apple news site. But Cult of Mac are using it anyway. Oh, and then adding their own affiliate links on top of other people's content, and all without telling them about it.
https://artiss.blog/2024/08/be-careful-posting-on-reddit-cult-of-mac-may-take-your-content/
Matt Mullenweg
