A lot of attention is paid, often in retrospect, to the experience of the first times in our lives. The first laugh; the first kiss; the first day at your job1.
But for every first, there must inevitably be a last.
I recall a moment when I was… perhaps the age our eldest child is now. As I listened to the bats in our garden, my mother told me about how she couldn’t hear them as clearly as she
could when she was my age. The human ear isn’t well-equipped to hear that frequency that bats use, and while children can often pick out the sounds, the ability tends to fade with age.
“Helloooo? Are you even listening to me?”
This recollection came as I stayed up late the other month to watch the Perseids. I lay in the hammock in our garden under a fabulously clear sky as the sun finished setting, and –
after being still and quiet for a time – realised that the local bat colony were out foraging for insects. They flew around and very close to me, and it occurred to me that I
couldn’t hear them at all.
There must necessarily have been a “last time” that I heard a bat’s echolocation. I remember a time about ten years ago, at the first house in Oxford of
Ruth, JTA and I (along with
Paul), standing in the back garden and listening to those high-pitched chirps. But I can’t tell you when the very
last time was. At the time it will have felt unremarkable rather than noteworthy.
First times can often be identified contemporaneously. For example: I was able to acknowledge my first time on a looping rollercoaster at the time.
The Tower of Terror at Camelot, circa 1994, was my first looping rollercoaster2.
The ride was disassembled in 2000 and, minus its “tower” theming3lived on for a while as Twist ‘N’ Shout at Loudoun Castle in Ayrshire, Scotland before that park
shut down. I looked at some recent satellite photography and I’m confident it’s now been demolished.
Last times are often invisible at the time. You don’t see the significance of the everyday and routine except in hindsight.
I wonder what it would be like if we had the same level of consciousness of last times as we did of firsts. How differently might we treat a final phone call to a loved one or the
ultimate visit to a special place if we knew, at the time, that there would be no more?
Would such a world be more-comforting, providing closure at every turn? Or would it lead to a paralytic anticipatory grief: “I can’t visit my friend; what if I find out that
it’s the last time?”
Footnotes
1 While watching a wooden train toy jiggle down a length of string, reportedly; Sarah
Titlow, behind the school outbuilding, circa 1988; and
five years ago this week, respectively.
2 Can’t see the loop? It’s inside the tower. A clever bit of design conceals the
inversion from outside the ride; also the track later re-enters the fort (on the left of the photo) to “thread the needle” through the centre of the loop. When they were running three
trains (two in motion at once) at the proper cadence, it was quite impressive as you’d loop around while a second train went through the middle, and then go through the middle while a
third train did the loop!
3 I’m told that the “tower” caught fire during disassembly and was destroyed.
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 quiteafewotherthings) 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!
I tried to draw a better diagram with more of the relevant connections, but it quickly turned into spaghetti.
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’ve heard Matt speak a number of times, including in person… and I think he did a pretty bad job of expressing the problems with WP Engine during his Q&A at WCUS. In his defence,
it sounds like he may have been still trying to negotiate a better way forward until the very second he walked on stage that day.
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.
Misdeeds
As I see it, WP Engine’s potential misdeeds fall into three distinct categories: moral, ethical4,
and legal.
Morally: don’t take without giving back
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.
The principle of reciprocity is a moral staple. This is evidenced by the fact that children (and some nonhuman animals) seem to be able to work it out for themselves
from first principles using nothing more than empathy. Companies, however aren’t usually so-capable. Photo courtesy Cotton.
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”.
Ethically: don’t exploit open source’s liberties as weaknesses
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).
There’s nothing to stop me from registering TurdPress.com and providing a premium WordPress web hosting solution with all the best features disabled: I could even disable
exports so that my customers wouldn’t even be able to easily leave my service for greener pastures! There’s nothing stop me… but that wouldn’t make it
right7.
It also looks like WP Engine may have made more-nefarious changes, e.g. modifying the referral links in open source code (the thing that earns money for the original authors of
that code) so that WP Engine can collect the revenue themselves when they deploy that code to their customers’ sites. That to me feels like it’s clearly into the zone ethical bad
practice. Within the open source community, it’s not okay to take somebody’s code, which they were kind enough to release under a liberal license, strip out the bits that provide
their income, and redistribute it, even just as a network service8.
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…
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.
In summary…
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:
WP Engine certainly act in ways that are unethical and immoral and antithetical to the spirit of open source, and those are just a subset of the reasons that I wouldn’t use them as
a WordPress host.
Matt Mullenweg calling them out at WordCamp US doesn’t get his point across as well as I think he hoped it might, and probably won’t win him any popularity contests.
I’m not qualified to weigh in on whether or not WP Engine have violated the WordPress Foundation’s trademarks, but I suspect that they’ve benefitted from widespread confusion about
their status.
Footnotes
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!
The “where’s my elephant?” theory takes it name, of course, from The Simpsons episode in which Bart gets an elephant (Season 5, episode 17, to be precise). For those of you
who don’t know the episode: Bart wins a radio contest where you have to answer a phone call with the phrase, “KBBL is going to give me something stupid.” That “something stupid”
turns out to be either $10,000, or “the gag prize”: a full-grown African elephant. Much to the presenters’ surprise, Bart chooses the elephant — which is a problem for the radio
station, since they don’t actually have an elephant to give him. After some attempts at negotiation (the presenters offer Principal Skinner $10,000 to go about with his pants pulled
down for the rest of the school year; the presenters offer to use the $10,000 to turn Skinner into “some sort of lobster-like creature”), Bart finds himself kicked out of the radio
station, screaming “where’s my elephant?”
…
…the “where’s my elephant?” theory holds the following:
If you give someone a joke option, they will take it.
The joke option is a (usually) a joke option for a reason, and choosing it will cause everyone a lot of problems.
In time, the joke will stop being funny, and people will just sort of lose interest in it.
No one ever learns anything.
…
For those that were surprised when Trump was elected or Brexit passed a referendum, the “Where’s My Elephant?” theory of history may provide some solace. With reference to Boaty
McBoatface and to the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, Tom Whyman pitches that “joke” options will be selected significantly more-often that you’d expect or that they should.
Our society is like Bart Simpson. But can we be a better Bart Simpson?
If that didn’t cheer you up: here’s another article, which more-seriously looks at the
political long-game that Remainers in Britain might consider working towards.
With 20+ years of kottke.org archives, I’ve been thinking about this issue [continuing to host old content that no longer reflects its authors views] as well. There are many
posts in the archive that I am not proud of. I’ve changed my mind in some cases and no longer hold the views attributed to me in my own words. I was too frequently a young
and impatient asshole, full of himself and knowing it all. I was unaware of my privilege and too frequently assumed things of other people and groups that were incorrect and
insensitive. I’ve amplified people and ideas in the past that I wouldn’t today.
…
Very much this! As another blogger with a 20+ year archive, I often find myself wondering how much of an impression of me is made upon my readers by some of my older posts, and what it
means to retain them versus the possibility – never yet exercised – of deleting them. I certainly have my fair share of posts that don’t represent me well or that are frankly
embarrassing, in hindsight!
I was thinking about this recently while following a thread on BoardGameGeek in which a poster
advocated for the deletion of a controversial article from the site because, as they said:
…people who stumble on our site and see this game listed could get a very (!!!) bad impression of the hobby…
This is a similar concern: a member of an online community is concerned that a particular piece of archived content does not reflect well on them. They don’t see any way in which the
content can be “fixed”, and so they propose that it is removed from the community. Parallels can be drawn to the deletionist faction within Wikipedia (if you didn’t know that Wikipedia had large-scale philosophical
disputes before now, you’re welcome: now go down the meta-wiki rabbit hole).
As for my own blog, I fall on the side of retention: it’s impossible to completely “hide” my past by self-censorship anyway as there’s sufficient archives and metadata to reconstruct
it, and moreover it feels dishonest to try. Instead, though, I do occasionally append rebuttals to older content – where I’ve time! – to help contextualise them and show that they’re
outdated. I’ve even considered partially automating this by e.g. adding a “tag” that I can rapidly apply to older posts that haven’t aged well which would in turn add a disclaimer to
the top of them.
Cool URIs don’t change. But the content behind them can. The fundamental message ought to be preserved, where possible, and so
appending and retaining history seems to be a more-valid approach than wholesale deletion.
A few nights ago I saw Jack White in concert. It was a wonderful night, and a big part of that was due to a new rule he has imposed on all his tour dates: no phones.
When you arrive, you have to put your phone into a neoprene pouch, supplied by a company called Yondr, which they lock and give back to you. If you want to use your phone during the
show, you can go into the concourse and unlock it by touching it to one of several unlocking bases. The concert area itself remains screen-free.
The effect was immediately noticeable upon entering the concert bowl. Aside from the time-travel-like strangeness of seeing a crowd devoid of blue screens, there was a palpable sense
of engagement, as though—and it sounds so strange to say it—everyone came just so they could be there.
…
The most-significant observation in this article, in my mind, was that even putting a 20-second delay to people using their phones – that is, having to walk out to the concourse to
unlock their bags – was sufficient to dramatically remove the temptation for their use. That’s amazing, but unsurprising: Veritasium recently did a video about boredom and how the desire to avoid ever feeling bored (despite its
scientifically-demonstrable benefits), coupled with the easy access of instant stimulation from our smart devices, leads us into the well-known check phone, replace, check again cycle
(or else “zombie smartphoning”).
I’ve been trying to be better about paying less-attention to my phone, this year, and it’s gone well… except that (as David also observes in the linked article) I’ve become
more acutely aware of the feeling of the conversational/interpersonal “void” created when somebody else chances a “quick check” of their phone under the table. I used
to blame social media mostly for this – and I still think that it’s an issue, and it’s certainly true that my Facebook/Twitter/Reddit-heavier-using friends are the biggest culprits for
getting lost in their devices – but I’ve come to see it as a bigger, more-human issue, coupled with the availability of the new technologies around us.
Similar to how we eat too much fat, and sugar, and meat… simply because it’s available, we crave the stimulation that we can easily get from the device in our pocket to such an
extent that we’ve become unhealthy in our habits.
For a philosopher, Helen Nissenbaum is a surprisingly active participant in shaping how we collect,
use, and protect personal data. Nissenbaum, who earned her PhD from Stanford, is a professor of information science at Cornell Tech, New York City, where she focuses on the
intersection of politics, ethics, and values in technology and digital media — the hard stuff. Her framework for understanding digital privacy has deeply influenced
real-world policy.
In addition to several books and countless papers, she’s also coauthored privacy plug-ins for web browsers including TrackMeNot, AdNauseum, and Adnostic. Nissenbaum views these pieces
of code as small efforts at rationalizing a marketplace where opaque consent agreements give consumers little bargaining power against data collectors as they extract as much
information, and value from this information, as they can. Meanwhile, these practices offer an indefinite value proposition to consumers while compromising the integrity of digital
media, social institutions, and individual security.
The Azure image processing API is a software tool powered by a neural net, a type of artificial intelligence that attempts to replicate a particular model of how (we believe)
brains to work: connecting inputs (in this case, pixels of an image) to the entry nodes of a large, self-modifying network and reading the output, “retraining” the network based on
feedback from the quality of the output it produces. Neural nets have loads of practical uses and even more theoretical ones, but Janelle’s article was about how confused the
AI got when shown certain pictures containing (or not containing!) sheep.
There are probably sheep in the fog somewhere, but they’re certainly not visible.
The AI had clearly been trained with lots of pictures that contained green, foggy, rural hillsides and sheep, and had come to
associate the two. Remember that all the machine is doing is learning to associate keywords with particular features, and it’s clearly been shown many pictures that “look like” this
that do contain sheep, and so it’s come to learn that “sheep” is one of the words that you use when you see a scene like this. Janelle took to Twitter to ask for pictures of sheep in unusual places, and the Internet obliged.
When the sheep is held by a child, it becomes a “dog”.
Many of the experiments resulting from this – such as the one shown above – work well to demonstrate this hyper-focus on context: a sheep up a tree is a bird, a sheep on a lead
is a dog, a sheep painted orange is a flower, and so on. And while we laugh at them, there’s something about them that’s actually pretty… “human”.
Our eldest really loves cats. Also goats, apparently. Azure described this photo as “a person wearing a costume”, but it did include keywords such as “small”, “girl”, “petting”, and…
“dog”.
I say this because I’ve observed similar quirks in the way that small children pick up language, too (conveniently, I’ve got a pair of readily-available subjects, aged 4 and 1, for my
experiments in language acquisition…). You’ve probably seen it yourself: a toddler whose “training set” of data has principally included a suburban landscape describing the first cow
they see as a “dog”. Or when they use a new word or phrase they’ve learned in a way that makes no sense in the current context, like when our eldest interrupted dinner to say, in the
most-polite voice imaginable, “for God’s sake would somebody give me some water please”. And just the other day, the youngest waved goodbye to an empty room, presumably because
it’s one that he often leaves on his way up to bed
“A cat lying on a blanket”, says Azure, completely overlooking the small child in the picture. I guess the algorithm was trained on an Internet’s worth of cat pictures and didn’t see
as much of people-with-cats.
For all we joke, this similarity between the ways in which artificial neural nets and small humans learn language is perhaps the most-accessible evidence that neural nets are a
strong (if imperfect) model for how brains actually work! The major differences between the two might be simply that:
Our artificial neural nets are significantly smaller and less-sophisticated than most biological ones.
Biological neural nets (brains) benefit from continuous varied stimuli from an enormous number of sensory inputs, and will even self-stimulate (via, for example, dreaming) –
although the latter is something with which AI researchers sometimes experiment.
“Ca’! Ca’! Ca’!” Maybe if he shouts it excitedly enough, one of the cats (or dogs, which are for now just a special kind of cat) he’s spotted will give in and let him pet it. But I
don’t fancy his chances.
Things we take as fundamental, such as the nouns we assign to the objects in our world, are actually social/intellectual constructs. Our minds are powerful general-purpose computers,
but they’re built on top of a biology with far simpler concerns: about what is and is-not part of our family or tribe, about what’s delicious to eat, about which animals are friendly
and which are dangerous, and so on. Insofar as artificial neural nets are an effective model of human learning, the way they react to “pranks” like these might reveal underlying truths
about how we perceive the world.
An Oxford book store is celebrating the success of The Good Place by selling the moral philosophy and ethics books referenced by Chidi
Anagonye (William Jackson Harper) in the series – and its efforts are going viral.
The popular NBC and Netflix series aired
its season two finale last week, and to commemorate that, Oxford’s Broad Street branch of Blackwell’s has put up a book stand titled ‘Chidi’s Choice’.
If you’ve not been watching The Good Place then, well: you should have been.
There’s a very famous Neil Gaiman quote among librarians and lovers of libraries: “Google will bring you back, you know, a hundred thousand answers. A librarian will bring you back
the right one.”…
I got my degree from a small, public college in upstate New York.
People went there, got their degrees and then went off to have quiet and sometimes boring lives. Although a degree from the State University of New York (SUNY) system is a valuable
commodity outside of New York, when you’re surrounded by hundreds of thousands of graduates in your home state, it doesn’t get you very far. And for most of the people who got a
degree from my school, and others like it, that was OK by them. A comfortable, unadventurous life was something they wanted. In part, that’s why they went to a state school in the
first place. As SUNY Potsdam will tell anyone who asks, most of their students come from within a two- to three-hour driving distance because they want to be close to home…
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