The irony is that there is one and only one reason WordPress is where it is, and that is because, back in the Triassic Age of the web, the blogging software that everyone used back then, Movable Type, changed its license.
Movable Type was commercial software; there was a free personal version, and a relatively expensive pro version. This didn't get in their way for a long time, because the terms of who qualified for the free personal version were generous. But when they released version 3.0 in 2004, they tweaked who qualified for which license in such a way as to make it look like lots of high-traffic bloggers were suddenly going to have to pay for a pro license.
As you might imagine, the entire blog world lost its collective shit. Lots of influential bloggers decided that the solution was to find a truly open source alternative, and WordPress, which was relatively primitive but 100% GPL, had shipped its first version the year before. A stampede off Movable Type and onto WordPress began, giving WP the boost it needed to go from Yet Another Blog CMS to a real contender. And so began the long march that led to "43% down, 57% to go. WordPress."
I eventually migrated my own sites from MT to WP too, and let me tell you, that migration hurt like hell. Because MT was much better software in 2004 than WordPress was. I would argue that in some ways, MT in 2004 was better software than WordPress is TODAY. But when the big bloggers fled, it dealt MT a killing blow. The software spiraled into an endless attempt to keep existing pro customers satisfied, dragging it farther and farther away from what the ordinary user needed or wanted.
All of which is to say, fortune in this market is extremely fickle. You can do everything right for years, but you only have to do one big thing wrong to send all your users running. And once they start running, they don't come back.
The irony is that there is one and only one reason WordPress is where it is, and that is because, back in the Triassic Age of the web, the blogging software that everyone used back then, Movable Type, changed its license.
Movable Type was commercial software; there was a free personal version, and a relatively expensive pro version. This didn't get in their way for a long time, because the terms of who qualified for the free personal version were generous. But when they released version 3.0 in 2004,...
@jalefkowit Oh wow, I remember. I was far from an influential blogger but known in my circle and I remember making the move from MT to WP (I still maintain a few blogs using self-hosted WordPress). It was really a thing!
Kind of surprised this story hasn't generated more discussion.
Cummins is a company that, among other things, makes automotive engines used in a variety of vehicles. In independent testing, the EPA discovered that the Cummins diesel engines in 630,000 Ram trucks made between 2013 and 2019 had included a "defeat device" to let them pass emissions testing when they should not have.
The Justice Department, EPA and state of California all filed suit, and Cummins eventually agreed to a settlement that requires it to both pay for a recall of all the affected vehicles, and to pay US$1.675 billion in civil penalties. That's the largest penalty ever levied under the Clean Air Act in its history -- larger even than the one Volkswagen had to pay over Dieselgate.
Kind of surprised this story hasn't generated more discussion.
Cummins is a company that, among other things, makes automotive engines used in a variety of vehicles. In independent testing, the EPA discovered that the Cummins diesel engines in 630,000 Ram trucks made between 2013 and 2019 had included a "defeat device" to let them pass emissions testing when they should not have.
@jalefkowit I mean, to me, the fine isn't worth it unless it's 3x the profits of everything sold during that time. I've seen it discussed, but the auto industry is pretty quiet, but the EV news sites like @show did a report on it.
Neat trick, getting certified by gaming power-vs-NOx to show low NOx in the known test driving pattern, but going ungoverned in other normal use driving patterns. And then relying on expense of direct NOx testing of all vehicles to stay under the radar.
Prevailing sentiment among owners seems to be "WTF Cummins?" We'll see how well they meet or exceed the software update/fix target percentages required, though.
This is a good look at how Standard Ebooks runs their whole operation off a single relatively modest VPS.
There is a lot of wisdom here that is unfortunately deeply unfashionable these days. If you can serve mostly static files, it's easy to scale like crazy. If you can fit your data entirely in memory, it's easy to scale like crazy. Your database is almost always the first bottleneck you hit, so if you can do without a database, it's easy to scale like crazy.
Developers have poured out sweat over the last couple of decades to get you working in ways that make it hard to scale like crazy. But you can always just... not do that.
This is a good look at how Standard Ebooks runs their whole operation off a single relatively modest VPS.
There is a lot of wisdom here that is unfortunately deeply unfashionable these days. If you can serve mostly static files, it's easy to scale like crazy. If you can fit your data entirely in memory, it's easy to scale like crazy. Your database is almost always the first bottleneck you hit, so if you can do without a database, it's easy to scale like crazy.
@jalefkowit Except the answer is actually "We have a very dynamic Web site running PHP stuff, but the database is cached in RAM because we only have 630 records."
@jalefkowit A very refreshing read! I also got more and more convinced of that approach of using just files when possible and only using builtin features of the language.
I also went down the shady hills of changing frameworks, dependencies, APIs and cloud. I stopped.
Today I feel relief when I find something that’s 10 years old and doesn’t need a full rewrite just to check how it looks/works. This is particularly meaningful if you have long periods of “downtime” as a person.
“Marra’s October 2023 meta-analysis found that two [vaccine] doses reduced long COVID likelihood by 36.9 percent and three doses reduced it by 68.7 percent. And in a study published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association, other researchers found that the prevalence of long COVID in health care workers dropped from 41.8 percent in unvaccinated participants to 30 percent in those with a single dose, 17.4 percent with two doses and 16 percent with three doses.”
“Marra’s October 2023 meta-analysis found that two [vaccine] doses reduced long COVID likelihood by 36.9 percent and three doses reduced it by 68.7 percent. And in a study published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association, other researchers found that the prevalence of long COVID in health care workers dropped from 41.8 percent in unvaccinated participants to 30 percent in those with a single dose, 17.4 percent with two doses and 16 percent with three doses.”
I filed “multiple vaccine doses provide substantial defense against long COVID” under “big if true” when studies indicating that emerged last year, but now that there are multiple independent confirmations it seems safe to move it to the “just plain big” file
Goddamn it. I just spent ten years watching them rename everything “Mozilla” to “Firefox.” Am I now gonna spend the next ten years watching them change it all back
A fun thing about Git is that if you accidentally get sensitive information like passwords into your repo, the only way to get it out again is to fight God with your bare fists
Every week there's a story about "look at these clowns, they leaked their AWS credentials through their GitHub," how many thousands of weeks d'you think it will take before people realize the problem is with Git and not with the users
CloudFlare’s entire business model since Day One has been “let’s give away free network services until the clients and the servers for half the fucking Internet have to go through us to reach each other, at which point there will be no end to the ways we can leverage that position for profit,” so it probably should not surprise people as much as it has to discover they are Problematic
Like, the whole point of CloudFlare is to someday become a toll booth on your daily commute. They’re not giving this stuff away because they love you, they’re giving it away because that’s the only way to build the toll booth
In the early days of the Cold War, the British produced a secret weapon intended to stop any Soviet invasion of West Germany in its tracks.
Codenamed Blue Peacock, the weapon was a remotely triggered atomic land mine. Based on Britain’s first domestically produced atomic bomb (codenamed Blue Danube), Blue Peacock weighed 16,000 pounds and was armed with a warhead able to produce an explosion equivalent to 10,000 tons of TNT. Ten were ordered in 1957.
Blue Peacock’s size and weight made it impractical to deploy on an active battlefield, so the plan was that the ten weapons would be buried along the inter-German border if war ever appeared to be imminent. They could then be detonated remotely if war actually broke out. Detonation would create a crater hundreds of feet in diameter and irradiate terrain for miles around, making the area difficult for Soviet forces to safely cross.
However, there was a problem. The NATO allies had divided up West Germany into sectors, with each ally being responsible for the defense of a sector. Britain’s sector was North Germany, where winters can get quite cold. Engineers were concerned that in winter, sensitive components would freeze or fail in the multi-day time window between burial and intended detonation.
Various proposals were explored to solve this. One was to include a live chicken inside each Blue Peacock, with a week’s worth of food and water. The chicken’s body heat, it was argued, would keep the components above freezing point. (Until the chicken expired, anyway.)
The problem was ultimately never solved, because Blue Peacock was canceled in 1958. Not because of the thermal issues, but because British planners finally decided that planning to drench all of North Germany in radiation might potentially be taken the wrong way by their German allies.
The Blue Peacock program was held secret until mentions of it were found in newly declassified documents in 2003.
In the early days of the Cold War, the British produced a secret weapon intended to stop any Soviet invasion of West Germany in its tracks.
Codenamed Blue Peacock, the weapon was a remotely triggered atomic land mine. Based on Britain’s first domestically produced atomic bomb (codenamed Blue Danube), Blue Peacock weighed 16,000 pounds and was armed with a warhead able to produce an explosion equivalent to 10,000 tons of TNT. Ten were ordered in 1957.
@jalefkowit Yeah, I'm sure the West Germans would love having this go off in their territory. Soviet invasion or not. This is just more evidence that West Germany was merely used as a pawn for the cold war.
The 286 was the successor to the 8086 and 8088 CPUs that powered the original IBM PCs. It offered a huge step forward from them.
Those older chips always ran in "real mode," where memory locations had fixed addresses, and any running program could modify the contents of any address. This meant that you couldn't have two programs running at once, because one might try to use a bit of memory the other was already using, and blammo!
The 286 introduced "protected mode," which prevented programs from being able to mess with memory allocated to other programs. Instead of addresses corresponding directly to blocks of memory, in protected mode they were treated as "virtual" addresses, and mapped to memory allocated just for that program.
Protected mode meant the days when one program could reach into another one and mess with its memory would be over. And that opened up all sorts of possibilities. You could have real multitasking! A whole range of crash bugs would be instantly eliminated! Suddenly the PC began to look like a machine that you could put against a UNIX workstation with a straight face.
But there was a problem. To maintain backwards compatibility with the old chips, the 286 had to boot into real mode. It could then shift into protected mode on demand. But -- and this is a big BUT -- once it was shifted into protected mode, IT COULD NOT SHIFT BACK. The only way to get back into real mode was to reboot the PC.
Which was a problem, because every PC user owned a huge library of DOS software, much of which could only run in real mode. So the 286 gave you multitasking -- but if you ever needed to run a real-mode program, you had to reboot your PC (and lose all the other running programs) to run it.
This was, as you may imagine, not ideal.
Unless you were there, you really cannot appreciate how much damage Intel did to the PC ecosystem with the 286.
The 286 was the successor to the 8086 and 8088 CPUs that powered the original IBM PCs. It offered a huge step forward from them.
Those older chips always ran in "real mode," where memory locations had fixed addresses, and any running program could modify the contents of any address. This meant that you couldn't have two programs running at once,...
@jalefkowit this whole story describes very good why IT is such a trash fire. Even a current AMD Ryzen must be compatible with 30 year old technology that (hopefully) nobody uses anymore. It is not turtles all the way down. It is compatibility all the way down. The good thing about arm. It does not have the PC/Windows ecosystem. That’s why arm can sell aarch64-only chips. Because Windows ia64 failed and amd64 (with compatibility all the way down) succeed.
And these are just the ones that broke out regionally or globally. There were lots of smaller epidemics as well that you've never heard of, because they only affected people who live in the Global South.
COVID was just the first one to break through the global system of disease containment. Barring some serious changes in how we relate to the environment, it will not be the last.
People think this is a problem that started with COVID. It is not.
And these are just the ones that broke out regionally or globally. There were lots of smaller epidemics as well that you've never heard of, because they only affected people who live in the Global South.
Gregory's Server
@jalefkowit good riddance to Perl. Glory to php! /s
@jalefkowit Oh wow, I remember. I was far from an influential blogger but known in my circle and I remember making the move from MT to WP (I still maintain a few blogs using self-hosted WordPress). It was really a thing!
@jalefkowit@octodon.social So as someone re-entering the space after a decade gone... what alts to the monolithic WP should I be considering?