Right. I mean, there are no heroes here, to be sure; but there are also no horrible dog-kicking villains, either. Just two entitled brats, both trying to take more than they’re owed.

What a bizarre headline. No it’s not. It’s proving why FOSS is important. In fact, it’s specifically the non-open part of the project (the servers Automattic owns) that’s the problem.

Speaking of which,

Mullenweg has demanded a royalty fee of eight percent of WP Engine’s monthly revenue for continued access to Automattic’s WordPress servers and resources.

tbh, that’s totally fair (well, the idea of being paid is, I don’t know if the actual cost is). Automattic owns the servers and makes them available to the community, but WP Engine is probably using more than their fair share of it. Probably a better way to do this would be instituting a “free tier” of server access that WP Engine would outcap; after that, either pay your fair share or find another solution.

Instead, Mullenweg throws a tantrum and tries to make this sound like some righteous fight against opponents of open source, rather than what it is: a for-profit company wanting fair compensation for services rendered. It’s not some moral thing.

This is the only correct response.

So I placed a grocery order a few days ago. I really only needed some herbs and spices, but to complete the full order I went ahead and ordered some stuff for dinner next week and a couple of splurge items. (I promise this will become relevant)

Anyway, they were having trouble with a few items, so my order got delayed, and I was starting to get frustrated. I was literally on the verge of canceling last night and just ordering it from a different store. But while I was scrolling Lemmy, I read your comment. And right as I was reading it, the doorbell rang.

And, well…

My thyme is finally here.

In all practicality, that’s probably what most people are going to do. But there will probably need to be a way of coordinating very long-distance (interplanetary-scale) science experiments and such.

You’re not wrong, so I think that a truly Universal UTC would have to include an observation point as a reference timeframe. (Side note: I realize the following is probably WAY too much overthinking, but I got into it and couldn’t stop. Also, for most practical purposes, probably any of these that involve Earth are going to be effectively equivalent. Also also, maybe for any practical purposes, these are going to be unnecessary because the most relevant form of timekeeping is going to be local time wherever you are, so a “universal” reference timeframe is probably unnecessary.)

So anyway, if our UUTC is going to include a universal reference timeframe, we might as well just use the existing UTC and call that observation point “the point where the Prime Meridian, the Equator, and Mean Sea Level meet on the planet Earth.” The 0-0-0 point on Earth’s surface, so to speak.

Yeah, that point spirals around the sun like a five-year-old ballerina, so maybe we’d want something with a little less movement? But pretty much anything with enough stability to be a good reference point would also have enough gravity that time would move significantly quicker near it, making it dramatically different from the universal average, so maybe that’s not a whole lot better.

I guess we could pick a point along the Earth’s orbit and use that 0-0-0 point on its surface at a specific time of year as that reference point? Say, January 1? But then we’re using time as a factor in the standard definition of time, so that wouldn’t work.

Maybe we just use Earth’s apogee or perigee from the sun, and call the reference point “the location, relative to Sol, of the 0-0-0 point on Earth when the Earth is at its apogee”? But Earth’s orbit and its rotation aren’t synced up; it completes an orbit every 365.256 rotations–that’s why we have Leap Year–meaning that the point would be changing by about a quarter of the circumference of the Earth every year, then snapping back again every fourth year. I guess you could average it, but then it would be somewhere else on Earth’s surface.

We could abandon the 0-0-0 point and just call the reference frame “the point at Earth sea level which is furthest from the sun during aphelion,” but then the actual location would change every year. Plus, the problem with using Earth as the measuring stick at all is that Earth’s orbit wobbles, and can be affected by other orbiting bodies in a seemingly non-deterministic fashion (the three-body problem), and it’s moving away from the sun.

So we could disconnect the reference frame from the actual orbit of the Earth, idealize it, and update it every few years: average out the exact location of Earth sea level furthest from the sun during aphelion over X years of recorded orbital history and Y years of predicted future orbits, and call that averaged location the reference point. Then go back and update it annually as orbital dynamics change and get better.

I think that might be my best (or least-worst) idea for that sort of thing, unless someone can figure out a way to get something out of the CMBR that’s easily measurable and can define a location non-subjectively. Well, subjective to the CMBR, at least.

On one hand that’s fair, but on the other hand Microsoft is the biggest name in software development and ffmpeg is a volunteer gig, this is probably a problem the megacorp can handle.

They offered a one time gift in the thousands of dollars. They were planning to do that anyway.

the FFmpeg version is currently used in a highly visible product in Microsoft. We have customers experience issues with Caption during Teams Live Event.

This seems like a “you” problem, Microsoft, and since you employ thousands of programmers with the experience to solve your problem and commit the change back to the FOSS project, I think this is also very easily a “you” solution as well.

The other answers are great, but if I were to be a bit more laconic:

Copilot is spicy autocorrect. It autocorrected that todo to insert that guy’s name because he gets a lot of todos.

Oh, of course. Thank you for pointing that out.

Ah right. Thank you for pointing that out.

And in “right to work” states, not even that much.

That’s the joke that the comic is making. Whether or not it’s reflective of reality, they’re joking about a company training a new AI model to calculate the area of rectangles.

When did the training happen? The LLM is trained for the task starting when the task is assigned. The developer’s training has already completed, for this task at least.

I don’t know that I agree. Or rather, I agree, but come to the opposite conclusion.

I think that as we take our first steps into the broader universe, we have to consider the ethics and morality that we’re stepping out with. If we choose people based on (let’s face it) arbitrary genetic variation, independent of their ability to perform the tasks assigned or their representative value to the human race as a whole, that means that as we plant our flag on the Martian soil, we’ll be taking eugenics with us.

The minimum viable population of a species is about 50. In order to prevent genetic drift over time you need closer to 500, but we’re sapient; we can implement genetic therapies when needed to help maintain allele frequency while the population is growing. And, in reality, operating a long-term Martian colony is probably going to need more than 50 people anyway; a recent NASA study suggested 25 would be enough, but previous research said 100+ would be necessary.

And keep in mind, an actual Martian colony doesn’t have to be self-sustaining in a complete vacuum (ha) for centuries. It will probably be only a generation or two before regular travel between the two planets will be possible. Plus, if we build and maintain a lunar colony first, the initial population of a Martian colony can be much larger.

In short, I think I’d rather work harder and send more people so that we can ensure we’re maintaining our values, than allow such a retrograde idea as eugenics to poison our first venture toward being a multi-planet species.

That sounds unsettlingly like eugenics.

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I’m considering Miniflux, though I don’t know if I agree with some of their opinions. The jury is out.

I like Feedly fine, but the fact that I can’t use their app without having an ad presented as a piece of content I requested is beyond the pale for me and the website is a little too jank to use on mobile even with uBO.