Dan Q
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
This Bleptember pic looks a bit like a political poster to me. Vote Dog, for a future with More Ham, Fewer Vacuum Cleaners!
The YouTube channel @simonscouse has posted exactly two videos.
The first came a little over ten years ago. It shows a hand waving and then wiggling its fingers in front of a patterned wallpaper:
The second came a little over five years ago, and shows a hand – the same hand? – waving in front of a painting of two cats while a child’s voice can be heard in the background:
In a comment on the latter, the producer promised that it’s be “only another 5 years until the trilogy is completed”.
Where’s the third instalment, Simon? We’re all waiting to see it!
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If you’re active in the WordPress space you’re probably aware that there’s a lot of drama going on right now between (a) WordPress hosting company WP Engine, (b) WordPress hosting company (among quite a few other things) Automattic1, and (c) the WordPress Foundation.
If you’re not aware then, well: do a search across the tech news media to see the latest: any summary I could give you would be out-of-date by the time you read it anyway!
Like others, I’m not sure that the way Matt publicly called-out WP Engine at WCUS was the most-productive way to progress a discussion2.
In particular, I think a lot of the conversation that he kicked off conflates three different aspects of WP Engine’s misbehaviour. That muddies the waters when it comes to having a reasoned conversation about the issue3.
I don’t think WP Engine is a particularly good company, and I personally wouldn’t use them for WordPress hosting. That’s not a new opinion for me: I wouldn’t have used them last year or the year before, or the year before that either. And I broadly agree with what I think Matt tried to say, although not necessarily with the way he said it or the platform he chose to say it upon.
As I see it, WP Engine’s potential misdeeds fall into three distinct categories: moral, ethical4, and legal.
Matt observes that since WP Engine’s acquisition by huge tech-company-investor Silver Lake, WP Engine have made enormous profits from selling WordPress hosting as a service (and nothing else) while making minimal to no contributions back to the open source platform that they depend upon.
If true, and it appears to be, this would violate the principle of reciprocity. If you benefit from somebody else’s effort (and you’re able to) you’re morally-obliged to at least offer to give back in a manner commensurate to your relative level of resources.
Abuse of this principle is… sadly not-uncommon in business. Or in tech. Or in the world in general. A lightweight example might be the many millions of profitable companies that host atop the Apache HTTP Server without donating a penny to the Apache Foundation. A heavier (and legally-backed) example might be Trump Social’s implementation being based on a modified version of Mastodon’s code: Mastodon’s license requires that their changes are shared publicly… but they don’t do until they’re sent threatening letters reminding them of their obligations.
I feel like it’s fair game to call out companies that act amorally, and encourage people to boycott them, so long as you do so without “punching down”.
WP Engine also stand accused of altering the open source code that they host in ways that maximise their profit, to the detriment of both their customers and the original authors of that code5.
It’s well established, for example, that WP Engine disable the “revisions” feature of WordPress6. Personally, I don’t feel like this is as big a deal as Matt makes out that it is (I certainly wouldn’t go as far as saying “WP Engine is not WordPress”): it’s pretty commonplace for large hosting companies to tweak the open source software that they host to better fit their architecture and business model.
But I agree that it does make WordPress as-provided by WP Engine significantly less good than would be expected from virtually any other host (most of which, by the way, provide much better value-for-money at any price point).
Again, I think this is fair game to call out, even if it’s not something that anybody has a right to enforce legally. On which note…
Automattic Inc. has a recognised trademark on WooCommerce, and is the custodian of the WordPress Foundation’s trademark on WordPress. WP Engine are accused of unauthorised use of these trademarks.
Obviously, this is the part of the story you’re going to see the most news media about, because there’s reasonable odds it’ll end up in front of a judge at some point. There’s a good chance that such a case might revolve around WP Engine’s willingness (and encouragement?) to allow their business to be called “WordPress Engine” and to capitalise on any confusion that causes.
I’m not going to weigh in on the specifics of the legal case: I Am Not A Lawyer and all that. Naturally I agree with the underlying principle that one should not be allowed to profit off another’s intellectual property, but I’ll leave discussion on whether or not that’s what WP Engine are doing as a conversation for folks with more legal-smarts than I. I’ve certainly known people be confused by WP Engine’s name and branding, though, and think that they must be some kind of “officially-licensed” WordPress host: it happens.
If you’re following all of this drama as it unfolds… just remember to check your sources. There’s a lot of FUD floating around on the Internet right now9.
With a reminder that I’m sharing my own opinion here and not that of my employer, here’s my thoughts on the recent WP Engine drama:
1 I suppose I ought to point out that Automattic is my employer, in case you didn’t know, and point out that my opinions don’t necessarily represent theirs, etc. I’ve been involved with WordPress as an open source project for about four times as long as I’ve had any connection to Automattic, though, and don’t always agree with them, so I’d hope that it’s a given that I’m speaking my own mind!
2 Though like Manu, I don’t think that means that Matt should take the corresponding blog post down: I’m a digital preservationist, as might be evidenced by the unrepresentative-of-me and frankly embarrassing things in the 25-year archives of this blog!
3 Fortunately the documents that the lawyers for both sides have been writing are much clearer and more-specific, but that’s what you pay lawyers for, right?
4 There’s a huge amount of debate about the difference between morality and ethics, but I’m using the definition that means that morality is based on what a social animal might be expected to decide for themselves is right, think e.g. the Golden Rule etc., whereas ethics is the code of conduct expected within a particular community. Take stealing, for example, which covers the spectrum: that you shouldn’t deprive somebody else of something they need, is a moral issue; that we as a society deem such behaviour worthy of exclusion is an ethical one; meanwhile the action of incarcerating burglars is part of our legal framework.
5 Not that nobody’s immune to making ethical mistakes. Not me, not you, not anybody else. I remember when, back in 2005, Matt fucked up by injecting ads into WordPress (which at that point didn’t have a reliable source of funding). But he did the right thing by backpedalling, undoing the harm, and apologising publicly and profusely.
6 WP Engine claim that they disable revisions for performance reasons, but that’s clearly bullshit: it’s pretty obvious to me that this is about making hosting cheaper. Enabling revisions doesn’t have a performance impact on a properly-configured multisite hosting system, and I know this from personal experience of running such things. But it does have a significant impact on how much space you need to allocate to your users, which has cost implications at scale.
7 As an aside: if a court does rule that WP Engine is infringing upon WordPress trademarks and they want a new company name to give their service a fresh start, they’re welcome to TurdPress.
8 I’d argue that it is okay to do so for personal-use though: the difference for me comes when you’re making a profit off of it. It’s interesting to find these edge-cases in my own thinking!
9 A typical Reddit thread is about 25% lies-and-bullshit; but you can double that for a typical thread talking about this topic!
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
A round of especially-crazy zoomies on the morning of this Twenty-Sixth of Bleptember was apparently too much for this little pupper, who’s now looking like she’s in need of a morning nap.
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
Happy Twenty-Fifth of Bleptember from our adorkable doggle.
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
The Twenty-Fourth of Bleptember will go down as a Good Day in the diary of our warmth-loving dog. It was finally cold and autumnal enough that we lit the fireplace, affording her the opportunity to snuggle up as close to it as we’d permit her too.
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
Our doggo’s sleepy face this rainy Twenty-Third of Bleptember seems to say: “Mondays, am I right?”
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
Sofa time is best time.
This checkin to GC3WYMN Tactically Clever Placing reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
I solved this puzzle ages ago but when I came to find it the GZ was so full of dubious and disgusting litter that I didn’t want to go poking around.
I decided to return today for a fresh search, figuring that the recent rains might’ve made it a more pleasant place to explore. I soon found the logbook, loose and damp, sitting alone on the floor. No sign of the cache container, whatever it once was. SL, and tried to return the book to a sheltered spot in its hiding place as well as possible but this is urgently in need of CO attention.
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
It looks like a rainstorm is imminent this Twenty-First of Bleptember, but that won’t stop this optimistic blepper from waiting near the front door in case anybody’s willing to take for a walk.
(She hates the rain, but sometimes if she’s found it to be pouring down out the back door she’ll insist on checking out the front door to see if it’s raining there too.)
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
When she’s in need of some love and attention, like this Twentieth of Bleptember, my dog will place herself underfoot at my desk. She won’t necessarily put her blep away, though.
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
I’ve never been even remotely into Sex and the City. But I can’t help but love that this developer was so invested in the characters and their relationships that when he asked himself “couldn’t all this drama and heartache have been simplified if these characters were willing to consider polyamorous relationships rather than serial monogamy?”1, he did the maths to optimise his hypothetical fanfic polycule:
As if his talk at !!Con 2024 wasn’t cool enough, he open-sourced the whole thing, so you’re free to try the calculator online for yourself or expand upon or adapt it to your heart’s content. Perhaps you disagree with his assessment of the relative relationship characteristics of the characters2: tweak them and see what the result is!
Or maybe Sex and the City isn’t your thing at all? Well adapt it for whatever your fandom is! How I Met Your Mother, Dawson’s Creek, Mamma Mia and The L-Word were all crying out for polyamory to come and “fix” them3.
Perhaps if you’re feeling especially brave you’ll put yourself and your circles of friends, lovers, metamours, or whatever into the algorithm and see who it matches up. You never know, maybe there’s a love connection you’ve missed! (Just be ready for the possibility that it’ll tell you that you’re doing your love life “wrong”!)
1 This is a question I routinely find myself asking of every TV show that presents a love triangle as a fait accompli resulting from an even moderately-complex who’s-attracted-to-whom.
2 Clearly somebody does, based on his commit “against his will” that increases Carrie and Big’s
validatesOthers scores and reduces Big’s prioritizesKindness.
3 I was especially disappointed with the otherwise-excellent The L-Word, which did have a go at an ethical non-monogamy storyline but bungled the “ethical” at every hurdle while simultaneously reinforcing the “insatiable bisexual” stereotype. Boo! Anyway: maybe on my next re-watch I’ll feed some numbers into Juan’s algorithm and see what comes out…
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
She might not have completely slept through me serving her a dog treat this Nineteenth of Bleptember, but our dog was still dozy enough from her nap that she didn’t notice for a while that I’d placed it directly onto her bleppy tongue. 😅
In an article about the accessibility of emoji characters to screen readers, Steve Faulkner said:
…
Note that there are differences in how they are described in some cases:
- “grinning face” is also “beaming face”
- “beaming face” is also a “smiling face”
- “open mouth” is described by JAWS/Narrator but not by NVDA/VoiceOver
- “big eyes” are described by NVDA/VoiceOver but not by JAWS/Narrator
- “cold sweat” is “sweat” and also “sweat drop”
…
The differences don’t matter to me (but I am just one and not the intended consumer), as I usually experience just the symbol. Reading the text descriptions is useful though as quite often I have no idea what the symbols are meant to represent. It is also true that emoji’s take on different meanings in different contexts and to different people. For example I thought 🤙 meant “no worries” but its description is “call me hand”, what do I know 🤷
…
What Steve observes is representative of a the two sides of emoji’s biggest problem, which are
But the thing Steve’s post really left me thinking about was a moment from Season 13, Episode 1 of Would I Lie To You? (still available on iPlayer!), during which blind comedian Chris McCausland described how the screen reader on his phone processes emoji:
I don’t know if it’s true that Chris’s phone actually describes the generic smileys as having “normal eyes”, but it certainly makes for a fantastic gag.
1 I remember an occasion where a generational divide resulted in a hilarious difference of interpretation of a common acronym, for example. My friend Ash, like most people of their generation, understood “LOL” to mean “laughing out loud”, i.e. an expression of humour. Their dad still used it in the previous sense of “lots of love”. And so there was a moment of shock and confusion when Ash’s dad, fondly recalling their recently-deceased mother, sent Ash a text message saying something like: “Thought of your mum today. I miss her. LOL.”.
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
“Is is walkies time yet? How about now? Now? What about now?” Her blep partially-engaged, our doggo buzzes with excited anticipation as I put on my shoes.
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