rook
Not sure where there’s a good summary of the drama, but it started (I think) back in February with some serious concerns about transphobic moderation on tumblr. Openly trans user predstrogen posted
I hope photomatt dies forever a painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere
and he took it a bit too seriously, including banning them for dubious reasons then looking them up on twitter and listing all their old alt account names to their followers, because he’s totally not a transphobic stalker y’all and this is a reasonable thing to do when you’re worth half a billion.
Today’s entry in the wordpress saga: seizing plugins from devs. The author of this one appears to be affiliated with wpengine, which possibly signals more events like this in the future.
We have been made aware that the Advanced Custom Fields plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress dot org.
A plugin under active development has never been unilaterally and forcibly taken away from its creator without consent in the 21 year history of WordPress.
More details here: https://furry.engineer/@cendyne/113296240801713427
I spend an inordinate amount of time at my C# day job adding documentation comments about exclusive access and lifetimes and ownership… things which are clearly important but which dotnet provides little or no useful support for, even though it has a perfectly good garbage collector. The dotnet devs were well aware that garbage collection has its limits, especially when interacting with resources managed outside of the runtime, and so they added language features like IDisposable and finalisers and GCHandle and SafeHandle and so on to fix some of the things GC won’t be doing for you.
I’d happily use a garbage collected language with borrow checking.
Ploopy kinda fills that niche, as the bits are replaceable and the non-generic parts don’t require stuff like your own injection moulding equipment. Not quite there yet, nor do they have a the full range of stuff you might want (and what they do have isn’t cheap), but it’s a nice start.
The notion of “professional moderator” should perhaps ring some alarm bells. Sure, some people will be good at that sort of things, but:
- being a moderator can be stressful or even traumatic, depending on the sorts of stuff your site is subjected to. Mods must take breaks from time to time, and modding several sites at once to pay rent seems like a route to a mental health disaster.
- mods opinions should broadly reflect the ethos of the site and at least some portion of its user base. Selecting mods from that user base is one way to do this… finding non-users who don’t need time to get up to speed with the local situation seems challenging, unless you’re running a very generic bland corporate platform.
- ACAB. People who seek out mod powers should be given a good deal of side eye. Assholes lurrrve positions of power and authority, asshole mods wreck communities, and finding non-assholes in good mental health who have the time and are prepared do the often unpleasant task of moderating your community seems challenging.
treehouse.systems had a nice thread recently about their modding arrangement, but I can’t find a handy link to it right now.
Eh, there’s a chance that machine learning might help here… there’s some interesting stuff come out of that area of research, like radio antennae and rocket engines and so on, but I’d bet anything that a) no LLMs were involved and none ever will be, and b) “ai” only appears in marketing copy and funding pitches.
One or more of the following:
- they don’t bother with ai at all, but pretending they do helps with sales and marketing to the gullible
- they have ai but it is totally shit, and they have to mechanical turk everything to have a functioning system at all
- they have shit ai, but they’re trying to make it better and the humans are there to generate test and training data annotations
You should try what these folk are selling.
I have faith in the ability of the UK public sector (or rather, the relentlessly incompetent outsources they hire) to catastrophically fuck up delivery of any software project.
For example, capita has already lined up at the trough: https://www.capita.co.uk/news/capita-advances-approach-next-generation-ai-microsoft
If you’re unfamiliar with capita, that’s probably a good thing. I’m not aware that they’ve ever been successful in anything, other than their continued ability to fleece the government. They’re basically too big to fail in the uk, because HMG’s procurement processes mean that they basically can’t stop giving them money.