To answer your question “why will this one work when the other attempts didn’t?” - from my perspective, this one got my attention enough that I’m going to try it. I’ve seen lots of ‘annotate the web’ things and none has piqued my interest.
So I guess “clickbaity title” maybe actually means “clear vision to attract people” and “good storytelling to engage users”.
Not a fan of WPE, which destroyed Flywheel, one of the most brilliant companies and teams I’ve ever dealt with.
Also not much of a fan of Wordpress.org after using it for 15+ years (and recently ditching it), but that’s mainly because of having to field questions from non-technical friends who have bloated awful Wordpress sites riddled with malware or abandonware.
Even less of a fan of Wordpress.com
But in the bigger picture Wordpress - or the idea of Wordpress - is a good thing.
But who on earth is advising Mullenweg here? Or is he so powerful within the Wordpress ecosystem that he can just do crazy things like this and everyone bends to him as WP BDFL? (Though arguably now more D than B)
I thought his presentation where he kicked off this war was a little odd. He seemed either very nervous or very amped up, there were a lot of awkward vocal ticks/tremors/nervous laughter/heavy breathing in his run up to his “big reveal”. Or maybe he’s always like that. This was my first time watching him speak and I came away thinking less of him and less of WPE. But mainly less of him because I already had a pretty febrile opinion of WPE.
This latest salvo is just crazy. As someone else in this thread has said it’s Muskesque.
But maybe that’s the strategy. “Just be out and out crazy and burn everything to the ground to try and save it”.
I wonder how many “normal” wordpress users are aware of this stuff, or whether it’s confined to a little bubble of tech industry folk reaching for the popcorn?
I had been a customer - for a decade or more - of a company that WP Engine acquired. A couple of years after the acquisition I began to get persistent - VERY persistent - calls and emails from their ‘product specialists’ who were determined to get me a “better deal”.
It turns out that their idea of a better deal was to move me onto a more expensive plan with lower limits than the plan I’d been on for 10+ years. They kept trying. I kept saying “I’m not interested”. But I got tired out of their constant spamming. So I left.
Over my time with them I’d spent somewhere in the region of $40k I think. I referred a fair few people to them as well. Not a huge amount in the grand scheme of things I realise, but you’d think it would count for something. Apparently not.
I’m no longer a customer of WP Engine. I could have stayed another ten years. I’m taking my next $40k and spending it elsewhere.
I was a customer of that same company that was acquired by WPengine. It had the highest ever performance benchmarks and customer approval until WPE got hold of it. I had also used WPE a couple of times earlier in its history. The service has always been bad. The business model has increasingly become squeezing the customer far beyond the point where any meaningful quality can be delivered. This year support has turned from aggressive upsells to aggressive blaming the customer for simply running the same software they've had in place for over a decade. WPE has a lot of shared hosting hidden behind its marketing cover. Classic old multitenancy problems. No one with any technical awareness and experience in WP hosting will say different. I ran into a former Flywheel tech at WCUS and heard their story of the dumpster fire that is WPE from the inside. Not surprised they fired a contributor from saying WPE as an employer discourages contributing to WordPress.
I really loved Flywheel. Everyone I interacted with from sales to support was extraordinary. It must have been very sad for the folk working there to have the company gutted by WPE.
But I think if you photoshopped someone into an advertising image in a way that made them appear to endorse your product you would probably very quickly be hit (and lose?) a lawsuit right?
So I’m increasingly of the opinion that it’s not the tool that needs to be regulated, but the use of the output.
Clone voices? Fine. Clone voices for deceptive or commercial purposes without the person’s consent? Not fine.
But then how do you prove it, what is deceptive, what is non-consenting voice cloning, yadda yadda.
I imagine we will shortly see a raft of YouTubers adding “do not clone my voice” notices to their channels like the Facebook “by posting this notice you remove all rights for Facebook to steal the copyright in your photos” spam posts that were doing the rounds at one point.
>you would probably very quickly be hit (and lose?) a lawsuit right?
A lawsuit from a private individual or business entity is very different from the federal, state, or municipal government attempting to silence you, the latter is prohibited by the First Amendment.
I find it appalling that this needs to be spelled out.
I wasn’t replying to the comment about the First Amendment, I was responding to a (what I assume was a somewhat satirical) comment about making photoshop illegal.
Fully aware of the difference between a civil lawsuit vs government lawsuit though so you can pop your italics back in the box and rest easy!
I imagine it would then depend on the intent and how that voice was presented.
If you got Bob who sounds awfully like Mr Very Famous Guy to record vocal that you then use to train your AI and use that vocal clone to sell your nutritional yeast extract as though it’s Mr Very Famous Guy selling it that would likely be a problem.
If you used the vocal clone to sell it, but said something like “oh hey it’s Bob here lots of people tell me how much I sound like Mr Very Famous Guy but I’m not him” then Mr Famous might have a case for his name being used without permission, but probably not the vocal clone.
But it’s all so new and there’s no precedent.
Given the lawyers are all busy working out whether using copyright protected books and music to train generative AI is legal or not - and have good arguments on both sides - it’s all a bit unclear how stuff like this will work out in the end.
Kind of impossible to give any advice without knowing what the tool does.
I’m assuming it’s something marketing related if you are targeting marketing people though.
Do you come from a marketing background? As in - is the tool
something that you knew there was a need for, or have you built a product based on consulting/market research/etc.
Seems this is part of a bigger thing where he laid in to WP Engine during a conference presentation for contributing what he sees as a disproportionately small amount of time to the Wordpress community, which he says is because WP Engine is owned by Private Equity investors Silver Lake.
WordPress is ubiquitous. That's an uncontentious statement. When your open source software literally runs a double digit percent of the internet, complaining about how much contribution you get from anyone is really just whining: WP Engine competes with WordPress.com and they're clearly doing well enough to exceed what Automattic puts out for some customers.
Any attempts to introduce nuance around "WordPress hosting" versus "hosting for WordPress" or whatever legally acceptable phrasing satisfies the legal requirements will hurt far more little guys than WP Engine, and stunt the future growth of WordPress as a project. WordPress isn't enterprise software that you buy support contracts for, like ElasticSearch or Mongo. At this point, other than just making noise on Twitter, the only effect any of this will have is putting people off from using WordPress.
Possibly idiotic question: I'm fairly new to actually writing code myself in any thing more than a tinkering way. What do you use for programming where you can choose the typeface?
You mean a text editor where you can change your font? I am pretty sure most of them support that feature, VS Code just to mention one. Or do you mean other kind of tool?
The article is from February 2024, so you probably noticed them going around the time it was published! For some reason people seem to be talking about it again as though it only just happened, I’ve seen this and similar articles/threads posted a couple of other places this week.
It's odd, because I haven't seen cache links on Google for years. I used to rely on them quite a bit and once in a while would try again and run into "oh yeah, they seem to have dropped this feature." This whole thread is strange to me, sounds like they've been around for people much more recently? Or maybe moved location and I haven't found them (which is weird cause I looked...)
Not just you, I haven't seen links to the feature, even when I've gone looking for it, in years. Even the link on archive.is to use Google's cache if the page wasn't already archived hasn't worked in quite a while.
> It's odd, because I haven't seen cache links on Google for years
For quite a time they stopped being a simple obvious link but where available in a drop-list of options for results for which a cashed copy was available.
Not OP, and yes they "hid" it that way too. But I got the distinct sense that they removed it many years ago for certain websites (and more and more over the years I guess till now). They probably had some sort of flag on their analytics dashboard that website owners were given the privilege of changing so that people couldn't see the cache. Or for all we know it was some sort of "privacy" feature similar to "right to be forgotten".
So I guess “clickbaity title” maybe actually means “clear vision to attract people” and “good storytelling to engage users”.
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