Because I have access to wp-config.php, I added the following to my file:
define( 'WP_AI_SUPPORT', false );
…
A useful tip.
Personally, I’ve got what feels like an even-better approach (for me, at least) I switched to ClassicPress a year and a bit ago, and haven’t
looked back! It’s a stripped-down fork of WordPress with no Gutenberg, lighter JavaScript, and a handful of other features… plusClassicPress is already AI-free and staying that way.
This isn’t to say that you can’t use AI with ClassicPress. Just that you’re not having to install the feature if you’re never going to use it. With WordPress’s good plugin architecture
it seems strange to me that such divisive features would become part of the core product, but that just seems to be the direction that the project’s been going in for a while now.
Three Rings CIC is, and always has been, a fully-remote organisation. We were doing remote working almost two decades before the Pandemic
made it cool (and well before tools like Slack and Zoom were a thing: we cut our remote-first teeth using IRC as our collaboration
tool!), but, there are still sometimes occasions when it’s good to have as many people as possible physically in a room.
When, last year, the Nightline Association announced it was closing down, it put one of their key services, Nightline Portal, which helps
Nightlines to take and handle calls these days, in serious risk: someone had to host and maintain it, and that had always been the Association. At the point the announcement was
made, in February, the Portal team had about four months to find it a new home.
It took me some degree of back-and-forth with the Nightline Association on one side, and it required some careful governance and planning at our end (as well as a few shifts in
short-term priorities!), but – helped by the fact we all wanted the best possible outcome for Nightlines – we got an agreement in place, a budget plan agreed, and were able to ensure Portal would keep going, for free faster than I think anyone had
expected.
That mattered to Nightlines, because to them, it’s critical infrastructure. And it mattered to us, because Nightlines were where Three Rings began, back in 2002. Today, we
support everything from major national charities to tiny community shops, but Nightlines remain close to our heart. Almost all our team – across a wide range of “x decades ago”! –
started as Nightline volunteers; we’ve nearly all spent the night awake, quietly waiting out the small hours, in case one of our fellow students needs someone to talk to in a crisis
and offering a listening ear when they called. We weren’t going to let that community lose something it relied on.
But adopting Portal meant a lot of work, against the clock. Data validation, new agreements, rebudgeting, and, once that was all done, a full migration to shift Portal from the
Nightline Association’s server infrastructure to ours. So to get that done, we organised an in-person meetup, “Portal Camp,” in a reasonably central hotel. Volunteers gave up their
weekend, left their homes on Friday evening for two more days of work, and we brought everyone together. We spent Saturday morning planning, carrying out test migrations, preparing
comms, and agreed yes – we can go.
…
About a year ago I helped look after the technical side of the “lifeboating” of Portal into Three Rings, right through the point that everything went wrong and my developers almost missed dinner (and, indeed, had to eat at their laptops!). I mentioned at the time my awe and pride of
them, but JTA’s post goes deeper and further and hints at the (much bigger) structural and procedural changes that were needed to adopt Portal.
A great thing about volunteering with Three Rings is that we get to ask, on any given day “how can we do the most good?” Not “will this give value to shareholders?” Not “what’s the
marketing strategy for this?” Not “can this deliver return on investment?” Those are questions for a very different kind of organisation to us. We get to ask, each and every day, “how
can we do the most good?”
That question is why, for me, adopting Portal into the Three Rings family, last year, was a no-brainer. Dozens of voluntary organisations depended upon it, and we had the skills and
volunteers and technical infrastructure to stop it from dying.
Anyway: JTA’s post on LinkedIn is better, and more-interesting, and
somehow also funnier than mine, so go read that. And if you want to talk volunteering with me, I’d love to chat!
No surprises here, but it’s interesting/staggering to see quite how large the disparity between spending and profit is for some of these companies.
I enjoy the fact that there’s a real-time ticker on the site so you can watch Amazon (for example) burn five thousand dollars a second.
When I tell people that generative AI, as it’s currently used, is unsustainable, this is what I’m talking about. Unless there’s a quantum leap in AI efficiency (for which I’ve seen no
evidence of the feasibility) or a dramatic increase in the charged cost of LLM services (on the order of a tenfold increase assuming the increased cost does not drive any customers
away; more if it does), this whole thing looks like a house of cards.
To celebrate the site’s 25th birthday this year, Wikipedia is encouraging/challenging
people to read one Wikipedia article a day for 25 consecutive days. I felt that I could do one better than that: not only reading an article but – where I found one that was
particularly interesting – to write a blog post or record a podcast episode for each of those days, sharing what I learned. For each entry, I’ll hit
“random article” a few times until something catches my interest, start reading, and then start writing! Everything I’ve written below came from Wikipedia… so you should check other
sources before you use it to do your homework. Happy birthday, Wikipedia!
Just sometimes when you’re playing the “hey, Wikipedia, give me a random page” game, you get a hole in one. That’s what happened today when I landed on the article for… Carl Person.
Whatever else you can say about him, he looks pretty dapper in a suit. Photo courtesy Carl Person, used under a Creative Commons license. Knowing that he has a Wikipedia
account (which he used to upload this photo), I took the time to browse the article history and check for any obvious signs of tampering, sockpuppetry, or other foul play, but it
looks reasonably clean.
Yes, Person is his actual surname. Speaking as a person with a stupid name, it pleases me to find people whose names probably cause them at least as much
trouble as mine does. Wikipedia wasn’t any help at understanding where the surname Person comes from (and Carl himself isn’t
even noteworthy enough to appear on the list of “notable people with that surname”, it seems).
However I did enjoy discovering jazz saxophonist Houston Person (which sounds like the beginning of a news headline about
somebody from Houston!) who once released an album called… Person to Person! Excellent. Also, actress and
filmmaker Marina Person whose documentary about her father, filmmaker Luis Sérgio Person, was titled simply Person. I think the name might be related to Swedish
surname Persson – literally, “son of Per” – where Per is a Scandinavian
variant of Peter. This probably means that there’s a “Per Person” somewhere in the world, and I want to meet him.
Anyway: back to Carl. He trained as a lawyer and spent the 1960s working in a variety of corporate law firms. These included the one for which Richard Nixon was a partner, during that period after Nixon failed to get elected as Governor of California and announced that he was
retiring from politics… only to come back six years later to be elected president and, well, you know the rest.
Paralegals! All of the work; a fraction of the pay!
Anyway: other things he did as part of his legal career were –
Represented other members of The Teenagers (then The Premiers, because confusingly the band changed their name to “The
Teenagers” when they got older) in their efforts to reclaim shared copyright of their 1956 hit Why
Do Fools Fall in Love from lead singer Frankie Lymon and Gee Records.
Represented playwright Mark Dunn in his successful claim that The Truman Show was based upon his 1992 play, Frank’s Life, whose script he’d previously attempted to sell to
Paramount.
Helped Ralph Anspach (whose book I read before writing this 2013 blog post!) in his
appeal against a ruling that Anspach’s board game Anti-Monopoly was derivative of Parker Brothers‘ stake
in Monopoly: the appeal was successful at least in part because Person and Anspach were able to prove that Monopoly was, itself, derived from Lizzie Magie‘s The Landlord’s Game. (Fun fact: this was
the second time Carl successfully took on Parker Brothers; the first being the Masterpiece case,
representing Christian Thee!)
I let the elder kid choose her lunch. She chose a pizza so huge that each slice is larger than her entire face. Needless to say, she needed a little help with it!
To celebrate the site’s 25th birthday this year, Wikipedia is encouraging/challenging
people to read one Wikipedia article a day for 25 consecutive days. I felt that I could do one better than that: not only reading an article but – where I found one that was
particularly interesting – to write a blog post or record a podcast episode for each of those days, sharing what I learned. For each entry, I’ll hit
“random article” a few times until something catches my interest, start reading, and then start writing! Everything I’ve written below came from Wikipedia… so you should check other
sources before you use it to do your homework. Happy birthday, Wikipedia!
My random landing page today is a genus for which there’s only a single species, so I hopped over to that species’ page.
And what a species!
Somehow it looks more like an alien than octopodes normally do! Drawing produced by Carl Chung in 1910.
This is the blind cirrate octopus (cirrothauma murrayi), a species found beneath the oceans all around the world but at such a depth that they’re not
well-understood. We’re not even sure whether the specimens we’ve studied represent a single species or two separate species!
The Latin name comes from oceanographer John Murray, best known for his Challenger Expedition from 1872–1876, but whose four month North Atlantic Oceanographic Expedition in 1910 – which he
self-funded – was the first to find this unusual species. It was described by Carl Chun, whose previous claim to fame had been the
discovery of the (also amazingly alien-looking) vampire squid, seven years earlier.
(The vampire squid is its own amazing thing: did you know that it turns itself inside out to evade predators, exposing the inner surface of its spiked tentacles? Also it can
spit glow-in-the-dark mucus to dazzle an attacker.)
You can tell it’s a cirrate octopus by those fins on its head. Cirrates are one of the two major families of octopodes: they’re the ones that do have a pair of
mini strands dangling off each sucker on each tentacle, but don’t have an ink sac. They’re also notoriously fragile, and when we’ve pulled them up for research purposes
they’re often in poor condition by the time they’re on the surface… and that’s especially true for deep dwellers like the blind cirrate octopus.
As for blind: well – it’s got eyes… but those eyes don’t have lenses. As a result, they’re probably able to tell light from dark but probably
can’t make out the particular shapes of objects. (This is a great example, contrary to claims of irreducible
complexity in the eye by proponents of “intelligent design” of an eye with only some of the components that seem essential to a fully-functional organ that still
provides value for its host!).
Vertebrate (left) and cephalopod (right) eyes have several distinct differences which suggest different evolutionary origins. In cephalopods, the retina (1) is routed in front of the
nerve fibres (2) that connect to the optic nerve (3), meaning that cephalopods do not have the “blind spot” (4) that vertebrates do.
Like all cephalopods, they have no blind spot because their retina is in front of the nerve fibres instead of behind them.
Like squid and possibly cuttlefish, they can differentiate the polarisation of light. (I believe that sheep and goats can, too!)
Their pupils automatically rotate to stay horizontal, no matter which way up they are!
There’s some debate about whether or not octopodes and other cephalopods’ eyes evolved from a shared
ancestor or are an example of convergent evolution, and the arguments for both are really interesting.
Of course, our friend the blind cirrate octopus is, umm… mostly blind. Very different from other octopodes.
As I said, we know so little about it! We don’t know what it eats (we think it probably eats whole shellfish). We don’t know how it breeds. We don’t know how commonplace it is or
whether its environment is under threat.
But what we do know is that it’s a freaky-looking thing from way down deep. Thanks, Wikipedia, for telling me about this strange beast. Let’s see what you have to share with me
tomorrow!
I spent a while failing to interpret this sign. It seemed to be saying that if you didn’t clear your tray… then you’d get ketchup poured on your wrist?
It turns out there’s a baby bottle warming station on the other side of the bins.
(It is possible they my brain is struggling from a lack of sleep.)
My random Wikipedia article of the day was Milices Patriotiques, who were a 22,000-strong communist group and
part of the Belgian resistance in the Second World War. Which sounded really interesting, but their article was tragically short so that’s pretty much all I have to say about them!
My 12-year-old was interested in learning some HTML and CSS and making her own website. If she were anybody else I’d point her at something like Nekoweb as a starter host because their web-based (VSCode-based) “Nekode” text editor makes writing your first static site simple.
But I’ve got a NAS sitting at home on a fibre connection, so I figured: I might as well just host something similar here.
Here’s how I did it:
1. DNS
I pointed her domain at my static IP, plus a subdomain for the “backend” interface. Suppose her site would be at example.net (and www.example.net) with the admin interface at
admin.example.net: my DNS configuration might look like this:
The templates directive means that, if/when she wants to, she could use Caddy’s built-in SSI-like
features. Or if she decides someday she’d prefer a static site generator then I can sort her out with shell access or something.
I used the OpenVSCode Server Docker image to provide a browser-based VSCode interface in which she could edit HTML, CSS and
JavaScript and drag-drop files from her local machine. I’m using Unraid on my NAS so I didn’t have to think much about running a new Docker container,
but I guess that if I did then I’d have typed something like:
dockerrun-d\# 7890 is the port on my NAS that I'll proxy Caddy to:-p7890:3000
# /mnt/user/example.net is the path on my NAS;# /example.net is where it'll appear within VSCode:-v"/mnt/user/example.net:/example.net"\# this tells OpenVSCode-Server to mount the directory to begin with:-eOPENVSCODE_SERVER_ROOT=/example.net\gitpod/openvscode-server
Now all I needed to do was point Caddy at it. For the time being I simply restricted access to only “computers on my local LAN”, but it’d be easy enough to add authentication using basic auth and/or client
certificates if she wanted to be able to work on her site from elsewhere:
admin.example.net{
# Restrict access to 192.168.* LAN:@allowed{
remote_ip192.168.0.0/16}
# Proxy permitted folks to the container:handle@allowed{
reverse_proxyhttp://nas:7890}
# Block everybody else:handle{
abort}
}
That’s literally all it took to put together a web-based editing environment that publishes directly to a static website. And because it’s on my own infrastructure, it’d be
trivially easy to modify it in the future if she decided to go in a different direction, e.g. a PHP site, or continuous
deployment from a repo, or static site generation from a shell.
That’s all!
Here’s a test site I threw together using exactly this stack, demonstrating the entirely browser-based editing workflow (not shown is drag-and-drop to upload, but I promise that works
too!):
Today‘s random Wikipedia article was Jim Marshall (photographer). I enjoyed
reading about him and even looked up some of the many photographs that he took of musicians in the 60s and 70s, but decided that because I was
literally just writing about a photographer that I learned-about on Wikipedia, it probably wasn’t the time to write about another!
But here’s a fact for you: Jim Marshall was the official photographer for the Beatles‘ final concert in San
Francisco’s Candlestick Park, and he was head photographer at Woodstock. There we go; that’s my Wikipedia article of the day!
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