That's how it went for Craig Wright, famous Satoshi imposter-- prior to his bitcoin infamy he stole millions via fraudulent GST refunds and fraudulent refundable R&D tax credits then got caught attempting tens of millions more. He fled Australia, repaid part of the fraud and has generally been living it up elsewhere in the world with no further consequences from his tax fraud.
If you’re going to commit crimes, be ambitious. Theft, murder, and lying all have lesser punishments the bigger you go with them because you get grouped with the investor class that does these things all the time and has immunity from severe consequences
It really is the case-- Post Covid Wright's style of GST fraud[1] went pretty much viral and they did start heavy enforcement actions, but their videos are full of raiding the homes of people living in public housing who stole a few thousand. I guess if you stole enough to pay for a fancy law firm like Wright did, you're much better off.
[Wright's whole Satoshi cosplay seems to have resulted from this fraud because when the ATO did catch him they asked the obvious question: "Where did the money you were supposedly spending come from in the first place?" Bitcoin was just hitting the news bigtime then so he claimed to be an early bitcoin miner, but the amounts in question were so large that he needed to eventually extend it to being Satoshi to try to make it make sense.]
[1] in AU instead of not charging resellers sales tax businesses just apply to have their sales tax paid refunded, and it more or less works on the honor system. So you can spin up a bunch of on-paper businesses, make some sham sales between them-- the buying side claims the GST refund, the selling side just goes out of business without ever paying the sales tax.
Now that AI has ruined the emdash for punctuation enthusiasts like us... I've been thinking of switching to the double emdash (⸺) and worst case, fellow humans, there's always the triple: ⸻
Speaking of pause. I like double period for pause.. it’s like a more polite and shorter pause than the DOT DOT DOT that screams awkwardness and doubt.
But I agree that triple em-dash for pause is not half bad either. I could see it becoming a thing, with how it goes the opposite direction and is so over the top :)
Starting to look like Emacs Lisp source code now, coding standards for which include snake-casing identifiers (standard for Lisp), but since there's no notion of namespacing in the language, identifiers private to package foo start with 'foo--', not 'foo-'.
I'm just catching up.. can someone please explain why this part is unreasonable?
- WordPress code is open-source.
- WP Engine is entitled to use the source code.
I don't see how that entitles a for-profit entity such as WP Engine, to use the non-profit wordpress.org theme/plugin repository resources and infrastructure for free?
If you were WP Engine, wouldn't you want to have your own copy that you control anyway? Am I missing something?
The WordPress community of developers/contributors has been under the impression that the dot org site was under the control of the nonprofit WP foundation. However Matt recently declared that dot org has been his personal website this whole time, and that entitles him to solely decide when someone else can no longer use it. However documents of the founding seem to indicate that dot org is indeed under the foundation: https://x.com/sneakytits85/status/1881119968215142462?s=46
Because the Wordpress organization is a nonprofit, the organizations assets can't be used to the exclusive benefit of a for profit- Automatic. And therein lies the issue- Mullenweg attempted to weaponize the nonprofits assets against WP Engine in favor of his own for profit. Whether or not those actions were legal is being decided in court, but it doesn't look good for Mullenweg. And it certainly wasn't in the best interests of the wider Wordpress ecosystem, which is what Wordpress.org the nonprofit was setup to serve.
This is interesting in terms of Github. They could pull the same thing and say only the porceline git client and MS approved clients can pull. After all it is their servers. The open source licenses are orthogonal to this and are between authors and users.
Open source doesn't give you carte blanche to leech off someone's infrastructure. Remember when Netgear hard coded someone's NTP server into their routers and all hell broke loose?
Back in the day if you caught someone hot-linking images from your web server it wasn't uncommon for admins to redirect abusive referrers to goatse etc. That usually got them to knock it off real quick.
Using WordPress.org services isn't some rogue hotlink, it's hardcoded into the WordPress source code. And Matt explicitly refuses to add a config option to switch servers[1] - you have to manually patch WP to do so.
Legally, he may be in the right (I'm not a lawyer and I'm not going to pretend like I can accurately predict the outcome of the ongoing lawsuit), but morally I think I can reasonably say that Matt is pretty squarely in the wrong when he's trying to abuse WP.org services to blackmail WP Engine out of 8% of their revenue.
Curious what you'd make of these holdings, I'm not up on all the nonsense that's happened:
- It was reasonable, in that it is fair and sensible, in that it was not trying to attain an unjust advantage. It might not be generous. But that's life in the big leagues.
- Going about it boorishly (ex. the login checkbox), then reacting poorly in an attempt to own the haters, definitely crossed a line (I'm sure stealing their plugin did as well, assuming they overrode someone else's code with their own in people's installs)
Nothing entitles a for-profit entity such as WP Engine, to use the non-profit wordpress.org theme/plugin repository resources and infrastructure for free
I wanna be really ultra-clear here, because I might say this and be perceived as defending wordpress or thinking it's a good thing: this is bad!!!
I, unfortunately for myself, have some legal background and that's a...choppy...reading of it.
Let me explain:
The court found WPEngine is likely to succeed on its claim that WordPress.org/Automattic/Mullenweg intentionally interfered with WPEngine's existing customer contracts through specific harmful actions taken after September 20, 2024, including:
- Suddenly blocking access that had been freely available.
- Taking over and modifying the ACF plugin without authorization.
- Forcing WPEngine's customers to declare they weren't affiliated with WPEngine.
- Making it difficult for WPEngine to service its existing customers.
- Actively trying to get WPEngine's customers to break their contracts.
The court viewed these as potentially illegal interference tactics, especially since they appeared to be retaliatory after WPEngine refused to pay the demanded 8% revenue share.
However, this is different from a finding about WordPress.org's general right to implement a fair charging system in the future. The issue isn't that WordPress.org wanted to charge money - it's that they allegedly used improper interference tactics to try to force payment and harm WPEngine's business relationships.
Noting again for the record, I deplore the behavior here. However, you are allowed to charge people: just not start doing only with one singular entity, as a gish gallop of nonsense that affects the one singular entity's customers.
(the shortest smoking gun on this is footnote 11, but it might be too legal-ese to parse the plain meaning, which is "hey this makes sense if you're complaining about a one-off surprise of fucking with only your customers, but I can't justify it in the long term, and you know that, you're not trying to either")
Footnote 11: "In its briefs, WPEngine refers to its “interference claims” but only addresses the elements of theclaim for intentional interference with contractual relations. See Mot. at 26-28. For this reason,the Court does not separately analyze whether WPEngine is likely to succeed on its claim forintentional interference with prospective economic relations.")
In the abstract, yeah, that'd probably be fine. Maybe not 100% legally -- the injunction that WP Engine got seems to imply that blocking one specific competitor from using the infrastructure might not be cool -- but if it was a restriction that was in place from the beginning, it'd probably have been acceptable.
It's mostly that WordPress maintained that infrastructure for a very long time without having any sort of restrictions on who could use it -- whether you're a self-hosted WordPress site, or you're using some sort of managed hosting (like WP Engine or WordPress.com). Plus it's literally hardcoded into WordPress to use it; you can't change that without maintaining your own patched version. So everyone involved in the WordPress community viewed it as a general public good for all users of WordPress... and it suddenly getting weaponized didn't play well. For one thing, it put up a lot of people who were just users of WordPress as collateral damage.
(And the cost of the infrastructure doesn't seem to have been one of Matt's complaints, in general. If it was, and he'd been up-front about that, I suspect reactions might have been different.)
Most people's expectations of what a "basic website" should do have gone way up over time.
Even as a programmer, I've fallen into the static site generator trap a few times.
It's annoying to start a side project with a static site generator and then realise I want to add a small feature and suddenly I wish I'd just started with a simple Rails or PHP app.
Nowadays, if I want a static site I just start with a folder of html files.
It's way less complicated and quicker to go from idea -> execution without bike-shedding or procrastination on tools.
I'm pretty happy writing html and css manually though—I don't recommend it for everyone.
The other cool thing is if I then decide to "abort" to rails.. I can copy the folder of html files into the rails public/ folder.. pretty easy upgrade path.
Maybe you just haven't found the right static site generator for your needs?
Jekyll is the most well known in Ruby space, but it's tailored to a specific niche - authoring a blog with Markdown or another lightweight markup language. You can certainly massage it into doing other things, but it's not that ergonomic as a general purpose static site generator.
If you want something that's easy to copy/paste into rails, a rack based static site generator like middleman is great because you can start writing with erb/haml and ActiveSupport from the very beginning.
If you're looking for the simplicity of handwriting HTML and CSS but you want some niceties like includes, partial templates, link helpers, nanoc is a good static site generator that's progressive. Start with plain HTML/CSS, only add additional features as you need them.
> Even as a programmer, I've fallen into the static site generator trap a few times.
> It's annoying to start a side project with a static site generator and then realise I want to add a small feature and suddenly I wish I'd just started with a simple Rails or PHP app.
Hard to discuss without examples. I started using Pelican over a decade ago, and am still happy with it. Every once in a while I write code to customize the behavior, but it's once every few years. It's simple and just works.
There are things I miss from dynamic sites, but I don't see how a simple folder of HTML files is in any way superior to Pelican...
I've been posting to my personal website for 20+ years and it's been something like: basic HTML -> Drupal (whew) -> Wordpress -> basic HTML (via Jekyll).
The fundamental rule I've set myself against feature-bloating in my website is defining what I want it to be: an archive of things I've done. As an archive, I want it to be very durable in time. Thus, static file that are dead-easy to copy around, mirror and make it work in any hosting platform.
It did take me a while to nail having a bilingual site, though :) but at least it's a price I paid once.
For blogging I use Hugo because it is just easier to focus on content, not on style. That is why I don't like writing pure html files. Changing style can also be a problem, if something is hardcoded into html file.
For more advanced tasks I write in django, because it so easy for me to add features.
> Nowadays, if I want a static site I just start with a folder of html files.
Same here. I've considered adding a .md —> .html step for content, but just haven't found it necessary — yet.
> The other cool thing...
I like being able to—easily—view my site via a local sever. The best case would be one that I can view via file:// too, but I couldn't quite crack the organisation and ended up with a 'make local' step that generates a separate copy for file-based viewing.
I run a blog for an organization. We do one post per business day on average, with typically around 3 posters. I set it up years ago with Django/Wagtail/Puput and it has happily chugged along ever since. I can’t imagine how annoying it would be to manage if people were creating their own new files for every post and writing their own HTML…
But you've had to maintain that Python/Django stack, as well as a server.. Right?! I've done hundreds of Django release upgrades. They're not automatic or time-free.
Most SSGs, especially those geared to blogging accept nicer markup systems like Markdown. Keeping track of things, even in a multi-user system isn't hard.
Getting non-technical people used to a git workflow is the hardest part.
Yes, it depends on the target audience. For a personal website which the article was about, it would probably be fine for most hacker news users. If someone can’t manage to send me a mail, they probably wouldn’t see my website anyways. If you do your grandparents personal website, a proper form with a backend is better though.
How are you handling commonality between pages with plain html pages? As long as you don’t use iframes, you have to manually sync everything that’s shared or almost the same on alle pages (header, footer, navigation). That’s pretty annoying.
> Nowadays, if I want a static site I just start with a folder of html files.
? With that argument, we can also calculate 10 million digits of pi in HTMl by renaming our C files to .html. If someone tells me they’re using a collection of html files, I’m assuming they mean static html pages without server side scripting.
Yeah nah, for me it's exactly that: plain html/js/css files. For simple things, I copy/paste.. not a big deal.
If it's getting more complicated, I'll abort and upgrade to rails to use layouts etc.
The middle ground of static site generators are a trap in my personal opinion.
If I need to add a feature, I've found it's easier for me to implement it directly rather than try mess around configuring a static site generator with plugins etc.
Amusing how underneath this comment, there are several comments saying "ah, you just haven't found the right SSG, this one is good". Well-intentioned, but completely missing the point.
I'm not sure if it's helpful, but if you want some perspective from someone that's interviewed a few hundred software engineering candidates..
I ask this question to every candidate I interview. My expectations for this question are very low.
I find it's a very effective screener for low effort applications. A lot of candidates I interview haven't even looked at our company website.
If you're the kind of person that's doing zero preparation for a job interview, I've already learned something about you.
Many people I interview just answer the question very directly:
- "I got laid off"
- "My current company is returning to office and I want to work from home".
- "I've been working at X for 5 years now and I'm bored"
- "I want to make more money"
- "I want to work with an international team"
.. honestly, that's all totally fine.
I agree that there's no need to pretend about your motivations—I'm not expecting a lot of enthusiasm about writing boring business software at my company.
On the other hand, if you've done some basic research about the company or the role and can ask some good questions—I'm learning something about your intelligence, conscientiousness and self-awareness, which are actually the things I'm testing for.
Job interviews are full of latent variables like this. As an interviewer I want to find out if you're good at X, but I can't just ask "are you good at X?". I need to test you out by asking other questions that demonstrate X.
It sounds like you want the candidates to answer a different question than the one you asked. You want them to demonstrate knowledge of the company, but instead you ask them to muster up something enthusiastic to say about working for a company which they can only have superficial knowledge of - not having ever worked there before.
- Working from home for long stretches.. feels more like "living at work" for me. Hybrid is good. Some boundaries in my life are healthy.
- Most people hate their commute. I ride my bike to work and it's the best bit of my day.
- I'm in a three person startup.. a ton of the software engineering and business problems I work on get hashed out talking over lunch and coffee—or in 2 minute hallway chats.
Influx provides customer support teams that can flex and scale monthly. Influx enables companies to deliver consistent and high quality service 24/7.
We're looking for an experienced engineering leader to build out a new team. Our stack uses Ruby on Rails and Postgres with infrastructure hosted on Heroku and AWS.
The Influx engineering team is small but growing. There will be enormous opportunities for learning, personal growth and taking on more responsibility as the team continues to expand.
What we’re looking for:
- Someone that is curious, collaborative and ready to take ownership and responsibility.
- Comfortable being part of a small, autonomous and distributed team.
- Top-notch communication skills are essential.
- Eager to learn and grow.
Email me at dennis@influx.com to apply or ask questions. Thanks! :)
