Right. And there's nothing wrong with having regular scheduled downtime. That's obviously not appropriate for most massive scale global cloud services, but it's great for services that know their usage patterns well.
I'm no expert, but I suspect that a pattern of lashing out against opponents during in a high stakes business dispute would not typically be considered clinically significant on its own. I don't know how you or others in this thread are intending to use terms like "mental illness" or "mental health issues," but generally I don't think they're appropriate unless you're talking about problems where there's evidence of an underlying dysfunction and no other obvious immediate cause (like exhaustion). Of course, some may argue it's not appropriate to diagnose public figures either way.
I dont know any clinical information, but some (many, in fact) people assume mental illness when someone behaves in such a way that they believe their world view and mental model is absolute and fight to the last tooth and nail against any opposing view points (to the detriment of their own well being and others).
Well then, the founding fathers of the United States were all mentally ill. All of the greatest scientific minds that made breakthroughs in their field are mentally ill.
if one has a scientific mind, they will accept evidence which may be contrary to their personal views. If you dont, you cannot be said to have a scientific mind, let alone greatest.
> founding fathers of the United States
that may in fact, be the case, but chances are someone today of similar disposition would not be able to do the same.
> if one has a scientific mind, they will accept evidence which may be contrary to their personal views. If you dont, you cannot be said to have a scientific mind, let alone greatest.
Sane people adapt themselves to the world. The insane ones persist in trying to adapt the world to themselves. Therefore all progress depends on the mentally abnormal.
(Parody of a famous quote about "unreasonable man".)
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
— George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists[1]
If you win (like Jobs against Flash/Adobe) you're a hero, if you lose people trash your name.
A lot of stupid people are swayed by the bots paid by the dark PR firms that PE engages to astroturf things and two-brain-cell "technical" YouTubers that have never optimized milliseconds off code that runs billions of times a day, never set up a rack that terabits flow through...
It's quite apt that you mentioned Jobs, given that many former admirers have reconsidered their admiration for him in the light of his often being an inconsiderate jerk. One can be a winner as far as technical and business achievements are concerned, but ultimately a loser due to how they generally treat other people.
In my case, I'll take Woz over Jobs any day. Steve Jobs is not my hero.
Matt, for clarity, if you see this, since this is a thread I kicked off perhaps by being imprecise and certainly by being somewhat critical:
I am full of admiration for what you have achieved, I believe you should feel proud of it, and I think we in the wider WP and web world have benefited greatly from your assertiveness and confidence for literally decades. I think perhaps the tech industry has taken for granted what WP represents and what it has held at bay.
I also see that things are going badly wrong, and having experienced a couple of years of severe burnout where I too came fully unglued and have not exactly covered myself in glory, I worry.
As I have said elsewhere, I think there is a future where a lot of real differences and temporary difficulties are in the past.
I hope for you that you get to that place, and I think stepping back from the things you built that can look after themselves, and focussing your energies on your health and the broader things that have mattered to you is the way forward.
I can see people have taken issue with me saying “mentally ill” when I might have said “unwell”. But I say this because I think I think you are burned out while unable to take your hand off the tiller, that burnout is real illness, not just a series of bad days at work, and because I think it’s disingenuous to use euphemisms that diminish seriousness.
I think that you should sit back, let them take your hand off the tiller, and take the time to look at what you have accomplished and see what it will look like going forward.
“Cause I can see the future, and it's a place / About seventy miles east of here, where it's lighter”
My best wishes again and my apologies if this thread has been especially annoying.
>We still have the web at all basically because of Wordpress.
I strongly disagree with the premise.
Aside from that, "WordPress" is 100% controlled by one guy. A guy who has repeatedly demonstrated total and complete disregard for the community. Ergo "we" don't "have" WordPress; It's something we're allowed to use (until Matt decides to ban us for an arbitrary, petty reason that doesn't even require articulation).
That's not something that belongs to a proverbial "we". That's the point.
Dinosaur is often used to describe someone who has grown out-of-touch with their industry. It aptly describes the technical skills Matt was just breathlessly boasting about.
In case you missed it, Matt's boast was part of his attack on people like me who disagree with him ("stupid people swayed by bots") and his direct personal attack on YouTuber Theo Browne, whom he described as having "two brain cells".
In the context Matt established himself, "dinosaur" is pretty tame, no?
Yes, two wrongs don't make a right. I'll tone it down. But if you're going to police the comments, kindly consider applying the policing equally. Just because someone is a quasi-famous tech celebrity, it shouldn't give their behaviour a pass.
Edit: I just noticed that elsewhere in this thread he calls his opponents (myself included) "idiots", yet there's no policing on that comment. Apparently, it's only "dinosaur" that crosses your red line.
It's not the pattern, it's the fact he suddenly had a change in personality in 2024 causing him to destroy the community he created for no obvious reason. Then ignored basically everyone around him and doomspiralled until he got fired.
Not just the WPEngine stuff, but he went on a sabbatical at the start of 2024, got in a fight with the trans community (death sentence in tech), starts posting to WPDrama's subreddit asking what drama he should start in 2025, randomly fires people on the company Slack, etc.
I've never seen someone gleefully torch their relationships and career like this unless they were undergoing a mental health crisis.
In the video, the waitress said something, then the guy looked up on his watch what she said. Where's the part where he enables anything? Clearly it was already listening, otherwise it wouldn't have caught what she said.
I agree! And this is always recording. It remembers what people said and can produce a transcript of it; that's a record. The "hey siri" feature doesn't keep a record of what everyone said (except when it triggers incorrectly I guess).
If a Nissan commercial cuts right to someone cruising along a mountain road, would you assume that Nissans are always moving, never having to be started?
No, but I'm not sure what the point of this kind of feature would be if it isn't always listening. Do you usually plan out in advance when you're going to miss what someone said so that you can enable recording just for that?
Siri Recap records throughout the day without the user needing to constantly enable it. It provides AI summaries of conversations recorded including direct quotes.
Live Rewind shows an exact transcript of conversation but only of the 15 seconds immediately before the user activated it.
How is Live Rewind able to show a transcript of a conversation which happened before it was activated? That makes no sense, it needs to record stuff continuously in order to at any time tell you what was said 15 seconds ago
>Live Rewind, which can help users recall what was just said in conversation. A double press of the Digital Crown shows the previous 15 seconds of a conversation as a text snippet...Users can ask Siri about the content of the text or save it to the Siri app to revisit later.
Yeah so there's no input to activate recording, it always records what you're saying so that at any point in time, it can go back 15 seconds. When you double press the crown, it can't go back in time to start recording 15 seconds ago, it needs to have already recorded the last 15 seconds.
Surely it would be very rare to want to listen to music at its highest quality while simultaneously recording your voice. It’s perhaps conceivable for some sort of niche mode of music or audio production, I suppose.
I'm frequently listening to music or a video in the background. Join a zoom call early because I don't want to be late, instant AM radio. You can argue I shouldn't do this, I'll argue that it shouldn't matter and should just work. It's 2026, not 1926.
This is certainly the opposite of my experience. The sound quality from someone speaking via their MacBook microphone is noticeably worse than someone speaking via their AirPods microphone.
In what way does this violate the privacy of anyone around them? It doesn't even store audio recordings, which is something every smartphone has been able to do for 20 years.
15 seconds at a time, when the owner activates the feature. The scale of its recall is not meaningfully different than someone scribbling down 15 seconds worth of what they hear someone say (or even just remembering it), and does not pose a greater privacy risk than a scratchpad or human memory.
It’s also much less effective at recording people speaking for long durations than the audio recording feature that every smartphone for the last 20 years has supported.
This thread is so fascinating, I had no idea that because I'm comfortable having an intimate conversation with a friend means I'm also okay with a potentially permanent AI summary being generated based on it, and without my knowledge or consent!
Sure. But it's the exception. Most of my conversations are incredibly boring work stuff, where the records are extremely helpful to me too, or incredibly boring logistics discussion with family. Maybe you guys just have a lot more shocking secrets than I do.
"Siri Recap" records throughout the day without the user needing to constantly enable it. It provides AI summaries of the recorded conversations including direct quotes.
"Live Rewind" shows an exact transcript of conversation but only of the 15 seconds immediately before the user activated it.
iPads have the same issue (to a lesser extent) if you're really looking for a device primarily for fullscreen 16:9 video. To be honest, the iPhone Duo (and iPads) are much more suited for multiple tiled apps and multi-column app layouts than they are for fullscreen 16:9 video.
Only if "pure marketing juice" means "plainly telling people about a straightforward feature they're adding to one of their products." Which like, okay, that is what marketing is, but are you suggesting they don't tell people?
Two separate models from Huawei have swipe volume controls (freearc and freeclip). I’m not a earbud guru but my $25 anker buds have tap to hold volume controls (not swipe, I’m sure Apple is being specific for a reason), but no matter how you move the goalposts it’s a ridiculous claim.
No they don't. The two Huawei models mentioned are completely different form factors, that are much more open-ear and further from squishy silicone than any Airpods.
This is exactly the assumption that the carefully worded juice hopes you'll make. That Apple's claim to innovation precludes even a cursory glance at the competition
They don’t have the squishy silicone, but you sound so confident! Tim Apple or his replacement aren’t giving you any prizes for your shilling, it’s ok to like Apple products and see how stupid their marketing is.
can confirm my Huawei Freebud 4 have swipe volume controls, anc and do not have silicone tip. Which is one of the reasons I got them after my Gen 1 Airpods started to annoy me on Android.
Because they're being very awkwardly specific in order to make it sound like they're the first to do it.
For the average consumer who doesn't know that if you look outside of their disclaimer you'll find that it already exists and think that apple invented the feature
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