javi

Hi! I'm the one running this clown-car. You can find the source code here:
https://github.com/johnHackworth/goblin

Soft. dev by trade, all opinions my own, etc.

Pronoums: He/Him

Public Key

npub10qnth6pt3he2v7afdp0y26p3enl5xa55jp8s0u5eyhpw4draaats59kqvw

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs8sf4maq4cmu4x0w5kshj9dqcuel6rw62fqnc872vjtsh2k37774cprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmntkaezrm

Publishing to

relay.momostr.pink

Author Public Key

npub10qnth6pt3he2v7afdp0y26p3enl5xa55jp8s0u5eyhpw4draaats59kqvw

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Last Notes

2026-03-23 23:14:05 GMT

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This is literally in the document:
"in some cases, when ads are enabled on New Tab, additional browsing and interaction data (including interactions with our advertisers) may also be processed locally on your device to measure the effectiveness of those ads; the shortcuts feature also uses browsing data locally on your device to select top shortcuts, some of which may be sponsored. Any such data will only be shared with Mozilla and/or our advertising partners via our privacy-preserving technologies on an aggregated and/or de-identified basis.
"
That's almost exactly the same of how, for example, Facebook ads work.

2026-03-23 21:07:41 GMT

Firefox updated their [Terms of Use](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#notice)? Let's see!
> As you type a search query within Firefox, Firefox offers search suggestions to provide you with faster and more direct access to what you’re looking for. Some of the search suggestions come from your search provider (“Search Suggestions”). Others come from Firefox, and are based on information stored on your local device (including recent search terms, open tabs, and previously visited URLs), or content from Mozilla and Mozilla’s partners, including paid sponsors and internet resources like Wikipedia (“Suggestions from Firefox”).
Here chat. Here. This is where Firefox dies.
"information stored in your local device" and "content from mozilla's parners" and "paid sponsors".
This is a very convoluted way of saying "we use your personal data to segment you into something we can sell to advertisers".
This is EXACTLY what chrome does, this is exactly why a lot of us stopped using Chrome and moved back to Firefox.
> In some circumstances Mozilla’s partners will receive de-identified search and interaction data, in order to serve relevant suggestions and measure user engagement with suggested content.
This is making me really mad. THIS IS JUST CORPO-SPEAK TO DESCRIBE HOW THE ENTIRE INTERNET ADVERTISEMENT INDUSTRY WORKS. This is HOW FACEBOOK WORK. This is how GOOGLE WORK. This is how the entire programmatic advertisement industry work. This is what we call "sell your personal data". No, no one sells your address, no one sells your name. BECAUSE IT'S ILLEGAL IN A SIGNIFICANT PART OF THE WORLD.
> We also work with advertising providers to deliver relevant sponsored content using programmatic technologies. To support this, we may share limited, non-identifying information — such as device type, IP-derived location information, and category of content viewed — to help determine which ads to display. We don’t share any information that identifies you. You can turn off sponsored content in your New Tab settings at any time.
Oh it's so nice of you Mozilla, to do THE MINIMUM LEGAL REQUIREMENTS when selling our data. You don't share information that identify me? so nice of you! you know how else does that? Meta! Google! Tiktok! Somehow big tech mega corporations are willing to comply with the minimum legal requirements as you do, mozilla!
> In some cases, we may share or publish aggregated and anonymized data to facilitate research or as part of the lawful business purposes outlined above (such as sharing aggregated insights with advertising partners).
This is called "advertisement segmentation" and it's what it paid for Zuckenberg fortress in Hawaii!! Going places, Moz, you are operating exactly as how Facebook used to do in 2016!
> To provide our services as described above, we may disclose personal data to: Partners, service providers, suppliers and contractors
"We never disclose your personal data!!! well, unless it's one of our partners who pays us for it, of course!"
oh wait! they include a table of what kind of data they share with partners!
> Technical dataLocationLanguage preferenceSettings dataUnique identifiersSystem performance dataInteraction dataSearch dataBrowsing data
The SHARE FUCKING EVERYTHING. THEY ARE SELLING EVERYTHING. "Unique identifiers" is the closest to personal identifiable data they can sell. That's what advertisers can use to make a profile of you: They may not know your name, but they will know everything else about you.
This is the same information that google collects and sells from you. THE SAME.
Fucking ghouls. This is where Firefox died, folks.

2026-01-20 17:42:33 GMT

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Didn't the US embassador already joked about annexation too?

2026-01-17 18:58:40 GMT

EU, it's time to go after US tech corporations. Force then to pay corporate taxes in the country they generate profit from. Get serious about privacy violations. Break monopolies. Subsidize our own alternatives.

2025-11-15 11:38:36 GMT

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Earlier this year they acquired and incorporated into Firefox an ad-tech company founded by two of the top marketing guys of Facebook in the 2010s. They kept them as heads of ads or something like that.
When I said this was a terrible move and made Firefox future look dire I was called all kind of names 🤷

2025-11-08 23:53:51 GMT

Uhhhm, I wonder who is that "group" that clearly upset you so much when your saw that "punch [group]" slide you mention. No one could ever know, I guess. It's a mistery why you found it upsetting.
https://goblin.band/files/webpublic-b7621072-8752-48f9-bd02-bcd878611efe

2025-10-26 20:18:38 GMT

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I've been thinking a lot about this lately, with all the WordPress/rails/framework meltdowns
I think it's time to recognize that there is not an open source community. There's two. There's always have been two.
One of them comes to open source from a purely ideological point of view. Open Source is about collectivism for us, about getting together and building the Commons. About common ownership of our means of production.
The other one comes from libertarianism. They don't care so much about the Commons or collective ownership, but about their own personal right to tinker and modify their tools.
Different communities lean towards one or the other, but the differences of ideas are pretty much irreconcilable and have been creating tension since three decades ago.

2025-10-15 20:47:31 GMT

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oh my god, WHAT THIS TIME?

2025-10-14 19:50:01 GMT

Ok, now that Israel and Palestine seem to be back to their pre-2023 October 7th status quo, people may be shocked by news like this, from today:
So it's time for everyone who may not have been aware before to learn what the pre-october 7th status quo was.
For example, how from January 1st to October 1st 2023, Israel killed 232 Palestinians. How before October 7th 2023, Israel kept 1200 Palestinian hostages (palestinians abducted from their homeland and kept indefinitely without charges).
So basically, if we are back to the status quo, that means that we will see news of the Israel army killing five unarmed civilians about once per week, every week, forever.
https://goblin.band/files/webpublic-34c883c6-7508-4773-96a6-7d1fc8ea41eb

2025-10-09 10:27:49 GMT

Long story short, Framework Computers have been openly endorsing and promoting some open source projects that have openly embraced the "woke is death, fuck your feelings" far-right line of thought coming from some of the silicon valley tech oligarchs.
When confronted about this subject in their own support forums, the official answer is "we want to create a big tent that can contain everyone in open source, no matter their political beliefs":
https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-right-racists/75986
Honestly, in a moment like this when a significant share of the open source community is in actual, real-world danger of being targeted by state actors, I think any organization offering any kind of support for projects that openly align with that ideological current is bad and makes me want to stop to be involved with them, but I understand business having to play both sides to a certain degree.
But willingly, openly, using your social media to disproportionately boost and promote projects that are actively trying to be hostile for [everyone that's not a white or asian cishet male] (ref: https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/issues/1913) shows your cards pretty openly, @npub15f7…m7wr

2025-05-05 11:19:41 GMT

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As a spaniard, I find it pretty hilarious when folks in the US or in the UK talk about how trans people are some kind of a recent development. For all my living memory, Pedro Almodovar has been the most famous spanish cinema director, by far. And he has been making films about trans people since the 1980s.

2025-05-02 11:28:29 GMT

Apagón histórico en toda España y Portugal, normalidad recuperada en unas diez horas; Ayuso: "bochornoso, desastre"
Nevada historia en Madrid en 2021, la comunidad entera colapsada casi una semana; Ayuso: "mi gestión ha sido un éxito".
Claro que sí, guapi

2025-04-25 06:33:08 GMT

This week I saw the first instance of someone almost pushing a (partly) AI-generated piece of code that would have broken production. It was the kind of thing AI agents are supposed to be safe for (a piece of code manually written and tested in a browser, use the agent to add multi browser support). A very good, very senior engineer realized about the issue when reviewing the pull request. "Very good, very senior" as in "there are probably less than 100 people in the world that knows more about this" kind of senior.
I don't think I would have catch it if I was the one reviewing that code. I also don't think it would have happened to begin with if the author of the PR would have spent 10 minutes looking for that info manually instead of asking the agent to polyfill their code.
Future is scary, y'all.

2025-03-20 22:03:12 GMT

You know shit has hit the fan when random tech platforms advertise themselves as "made in Europe"
(for two decades, the #1 thing to do for any European tech startup that managed to gather a bit of money was to incorporate in Delaware and open an office in either NYC or SF, so they could pretend to be good cornfed Kansas boys or whatever)
https://goblin.band/files/webpublic-219be5d7-9395-4d49-b376-08c6a11e27a6

2025-03-12 10:38:59 GMT

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to be honest, I don't know if I made that up, it just sounded like the best way to make it past tense :D

2025-03-12 10:33:18 GMT

no, but seriously. If you think about it, when the first 'bundlers' started being a common artifact in front-end development stacks, it was mostly to address real issues related with how browser development was an absolute clusterfuck: every browser supported different APIs, the syntax was different between them and sometimes even between versions, you had to polifill half the standard API here and there, the early versions EcmaScript were horrible for the work they were supposed to do with them and you ended having to use huge helper libraries (jquery, underscore/lodash, etc). To handle all that, bundlers came into place.
Now, only a few years after that, the browsers got their shit together and suddenly it was relatively easy to write a single version of the code that would run (mostly) everywhere with just minor tweaks, helper libraries weren't no longer necessary because Javascript APIs suddenly started actually being useful on their own, etc.
We could have gone back to just write js code and, at most, have our scripts minimized before uploading them to the server. We could have yet the bundlers to the sun. But by then, there was an entire generation of devs that saw them as an inevitability and started to build on top of them, expanding their use, etc. Give that process 15 years and you end with aberrations like Tailwind.
We fucked it up, folks
#note170a…nnr6

2025-03-12 10:20:50 GMT

Honestly, front-end development went to shit the moment when we started having to build our code. What the fuck was wrong with us.

2025-02-23 14:42:24 GMT

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That's the point of my post, saying "Europe needs to assert itself" is buying into that narrative: Europe doesn't need to assert anything, because Europe had been in charge of its own defense for decades: the current number of US troops here is about 10% of the peaks of the cold war, and a significant amount of them are focused in controlling the middle east, not defending Europe.
The combined militaries of the EU members make the second largest army in the world, only behind China: it's around same size as the Indian army, larger than the US', larger than Russia's.
And let's remember that not only NATO defend Europe: EU members are also bound by a military alliance: you attack one, and your attack all of us.
Europe will be perfectly fine without the US without any change in the current situation.

2025-02-21 21:25:55 GMT

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Look at you using image editing tools!! See? Isn't it much more fun to play with your jpgs than spending time whinnying on the internet??

2025-02-21 21:21:20 GMT

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Oh my god are you ok? I may have been too harsh with you

2025-02-21 21:17:59 GMT

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Oh aren't you the most special snowflake? Everyone treat you so unfairly!

2025-02-21 20:38:25 GMT

"The US taxpayer has been subsidicing the defense of europe"
Look at me in the eyes. Look at me while I say this:
Bollocks.
BOLLOCKS.
BO.
LLOCKS.
The US 'defense' of Europe is carried out by around 65k US soldiers based in a couple of dozen US military bases in EU territory. The combined armies from the EU countries (and this is not even counting non-EU european countries, like the UK or Norway) have something between 1.5 and 2 million active troops. It doesn't feel those 65k USians are the ultimate line of defense of Europe.
Do you know for whom those soldiers and military bases are crucial, instead? For THE FUCKING US OF AMERICA.
Because, hear me out, WITHOUT EUROPEAN BASES THE US CAN'T PROJECT POWER INTO THE MIDDLE EAST NOR NORTH AFRICA. Yeah, sure, a carrier group is very impressive and the ultimate modern weapon yadda yadda. Good luck sending it to them to the persian gulf straight from the US East Coast. And even better luck trying to supply them without airbases in Europe. Ane even better than better luck putting troops on the groups anywhere in the old world without those bases.
Without their European military bases, the US is no longer a global military power. A major one? sure. But one that's MUCH more local than they have been until know, more similar to Russia or China.
So honestly, maybe it's time to get them to fuck off of our continent.

2025-02-20 00:44:30 GMT

you may have read that Trump Gov has instructed its embassies across the world to send a letter to their providers giving them 5 days to certify they don't have any kind of DEI program in place or drop it if they want to keep being providers of the US embassy.
Now the fun part: Since last year, every company over 50 employees in Spain has to have a defined gender equity plan if they want to do business with the spanish public sector. Which I suspect is a MUCH bigger deal than keep being a provider for the US embassy.
Looking forward for the US embassy in Madrid running out of running water or electricity next week <3

2025-01-29 08:23:23 GMT

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... Why not? EU has an enormous capacity to welcome migrants. We showed it with Ukrainians. The only people that push back against that is people who wants to keep migrants from the global south and the middle east out because they are racists.

2025-01-28 23:03:54 GMT

Let's say it again: the EU should pressure its members to grant asylum to trans people from countries with anti-trans legislation

2025-01-25 17:58:27 GMT

We got a digital food scale that has no battery. Instead, it has a small dynamo and a wheel your need to spin a couple of times so it's powered for a few minutes. I love this stuff, I wish more small devices didn't depend of lithium batteries even for the smallest things
https://goblin.band/files/5826237f-0b7a-4e17-a203-dde347401a39

2025-01-24 08:45:27 GMT

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Wait wait you are onto something here. Maybe we actually need to start promoting real vandalism against teslas as a day to day way to push back. But let's use paint, not paper

2025-01-07 14:25:50 GMT

holy fuck. Zuck finally went full Elon in public.
Full text of
his threads' [thread](https://www.threads.net/@zuck/post/DEhgYx4JbEG):
zuck: It's time to get back to our roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms. Here's what we're going to do:
1/ Replace fact-checkers with Community Notes, starting in the US.
2/ Simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.
3/ Change how we enforce our policies to remove the vast majority of censorship mistakes by focusing our filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations and requiring higher confidence for our filters to take action.
4/ Bring back civic content. We're getting feedback that people want to see this content again, so we'll phase it back into Facebook, Instagram and Threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.
5/ Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.
6/ Work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world and the best way to defend against the trend of government overreach on censorship is with the support of the US government.
It'll take time to get this all right and these are complex systems so they'll never be perfect. But this is an important step forward and I'm looking forward to this next chapter!
https://goblin.band/files/webpublic-29d667f0-2692-40f0-a5e3-b867c7c92923

2024-12-20 17:47:55 GMT

If you don't work in the WordPress ecosystem, you may not understand how HUGE this post is
https://joost.blog/wordpress-leadership/
Joost is probably the second biggest figure in the entire WP ecosystem, only after Matt M himself. He is the biggest voice from the "Enterprise WordPress" world.
This is not anymore open source contributors complaining about governance. This is the Business WordPress demanding a leadership change and suggesting it either happens or a hard fork, backed by big business, is on the way.

2024-12-12 08:23:56 GMT

Just saying, the rest of the world should start getting ready to ban any US company that freely harms our common environment from doing business outside of the US.
We can't police them poisoning USamericans in their own soil, but we absolutely should banish any company harming the planet on industrial scales from our own countries, even if here they abide to our environmental regulations.
https://goblin.band/files/9ba63769-eac0-4229-bd6b-a9270b45ccdc

2024-11-11 10:50:33 GMT

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Also: puedes elegir la variante de género que te apetezca: ho/ne

2024-11-02 12:18:18 GMT

The horrific storms flooding half of the Spanish Mediterranean coast were the result of climate change and warmer than usual sea temperatures, and for once no one seems to be arguing against that.
The 200+ deaths (and counting) deaths were the result of capitalism (the right wing Valencian government refused to issue an alert or order to close business and transport networks when the national meteorology agency raised the alarm level to the max, and didn't do it until 12 hours later, when the storms were at their peak and plenty of towns were already flooded) (most of the people who died did it in their cars, coming back home from work, etc) and politicking: the same Valencian government refused the help the Spanish (centrist with a sprinkle of left) government (who wanted to send the army to find survivors) was offering for an entire day, missing the critical first 24 hours where they could have been critical in finding people.
The right wingers will kill us all in the end.
https://archive.is/vvStr

2024-09-29 15:10:41 GMT

The entire WordPress drama would be a non issue if Matt was consistent with his own words and changed the license.
A project where companies need to pay a license to use if they are over certain size can't be GPL. It still can be open source, he can change to a license scheme similar to Red hat maybe. Then it would be ok, and expected, for for-profit companies to be required to pay (either in money or work).
But GPL? No fucking way. Everything Matt has being doing and saying go against the entire spirit, and even the letter, of the license.
Just change the license to match your ideas, Matt. And then the community could choose what to do

2024-09-27 09:53:11 GMT

So, why anyone is doing something to stop Matt Mullenweg to keep pulling crazy stunts in his conflict with WP-Engine, you may ask?
Let me lay the players out to you. Matt leads two different organizations:
The WordPress foundation: A non-profit in charge of fostering all the assets of WordPress, the GPL open source project, receiving donations to maintain everything, organizing events, etc. It owns the WordPress trademark.
Automattic: his for-profit business, with several business lines, but the most important of them all being [WordPress.com](http://WordPress.com), a for-profit web host, the only one in the world that gets to use "wordpress" in its domain name, because the foundation has ceded the trademark use to this company.
Both organizations have a board who is supposed to watch over the CEO. But.
In the case of automattic, Matt controls 84% of the shares with voting rights. That means that even if the entire board is against him, he could just vote them out and put someone else in their place. Their only real power would be to complain loudly, or to walk out publicly. But they have no way to actually check his behavior out.
In the case of the WordPress foundation, the board is composed by three members:
Matt himself
[Mark Ghosh](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dir-engagement-software-devops/), who used to have a news site focused on WordPress abandoned a decade ago and that, according to linked in, hasn't been involved in WordPress at all since then. Actually, the only mention of WordPress in his linkedin is being a "member" of the WordPress foundation with no mention of having one of the three board chairs.
[Chele Farley](https://www.linkedin.com/in/chele-farley-b26b3611/), a republican party politician, who doesn't have any kind of connection with WordPress (or even the tech industry) and that she even mention the WordPress foundation in her linkedin.
All the work in the foundation is handled by Automattic employees, the only people with signing power over the bank accounts of the foundation are automattic employees (or Matt himself of course), etc.
So, as you can figure, Matt control over the WordPress project is absolute and unchecked. No one could force him out, neither from his unicorn SV company, nor from the foundation that controls the software powering 43% of the web.
Nice uh?

2024-09-25 22:37:23 GMT

Just seen on a WordPress-focused discord:
**'The discussion I will be having with my boss is not "how can we move off WP Engine?", it's "how can we move off Wordpress?'**
Mullenweg is killing two decades of trust in the project any agency or hosting company could have. He's fucking killing his own Gold-eggs-laying goose with this crazy ego-trip
#note1ut4…cvh4

2024-09-25 22:00:31 GMT

It looks Matt Mullenweg has ordered [WordPress.org](http://WordPress.org) servers (managed by automattic) to block servers using the IP ranges owned by WP Engine.
That means that people trying to use wordpress servers installed in WP Engine servers can't no longer access to plugins, themes, or updates, for example
This is despicable.
This is breaking entirely with the principles of open source. It's ghoulish.

2024-09-23 23:54:58 GMT

Ok, I should be sleeping right now, but what's happening is SO FUCKING CRAZY.
Long story short: WPEngine is suing Matt Mullenweg, Automattic and the WordPress foundation for slandering them. In return, Matt is suing them for trademark violation.
But, BUT, WPEngine has fired their first shot. And what a shot it is, friends:
[Link to the full letter](https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Cease-and-Desist-Letter-to-Automattic-and-Request-to-Preserve-Documents-Sent.pdf)
Some extracts:
> Stunningly, Automattic’s CEO Matthew Mullenweg threatened that if WP Engine did not agree to pay Automattic – his for-profit entity – a very large sum of money before his September 20th keynote address at the WordCamp US Convention, he was going to embark on a self-described “scorched earth nuclear approach” toward WP Engine within the WordPress community and beyond. When his outrageous financial demands were not met, Mr. Mullenweg carried out his threats by making repeated false claims disparaging WP Engine to its employees, its customers, and the world. Mr. Mullenweg has carried out this wrongful campaign against WP Engine in multiple outlets, including via his keynote address, across several public platforms like X,YouTube, and even on the Wordpress.org site, and through the WordPress Admin panel for all WordPress users, including directly targeting WP Engine customers in their own private WordPress instances used to run their online businesses
> During calls on September 17th and 19th, for instance, Automattic CFO Mark Davies told a WP Engine board member that Automattic would “go to war” if WP Engine did not agree to pay its competitor Automattic a significant percentage of its gross revenues – tens of millions of dollars in fact – on an ongoing basis. Mr. Davies suggested the payment ostensibly would be for a “license” to use certain trademarks like WordPress, even though WP Engine needs no such license. WP Engine’s uses of those marks to describe its services – as all companies in this space do – are fair uses under settled trademark law and consistent with WordPress’ own guidelines. Automattic’s CFO insisted that WP Engine provide its response to this demand immediately and later, on the day of the keynote, followed up with an email reiterating a claimed need for WP Engine to concede to the demands “before Matt makes his WCUS keynote at 3:45 p.m. PDT today.”
> In parallel and throughout September 19 and 20, Mr. Mullenweg embarked on a series of harassing text messages and calls to WP Engine’s board member and also its CEO, threatening that if WP Engine did not agree to pay up prior to the start of Mr. Mullenweg’s livestreamed keynote address at 3:45pm on September 20, he would go “nuclear” on WP Engine, including by smearing its name, disparaging its directors and corporate officers, and banning WP Engine from WordPress community events.
They... they have text message captures. In the pdf. Matt Mullenweg was trying to extort them ... by text messages. They seem to have the entire thing in the writting.
> In the final minutes leading up to his keynote address, Mr. Mullenweg sent one last missive: a photo of the WordCamp audience waiting to hear his speech, with the message that he could shift gears and turn his talk into “just a Q&A” if WP Engine agreed to pay up
They finish requesting Automattic to "preserve, and not destroy, any and all documents or information in their possession, custody, or control that may be relevant to any dispute between WP Engine and Automattic". They are going to war, big time.
All this crap is just because they refuse to pay his protection money. And the guy has been stupid enough to put everything in writting.
Holy. Fucking. Shit.
HOLY FUCKING SHIT.
They are going to toast him alive
https://goblin.band/files/ccae0c7e-bcad-4df8-833e-198c82647f14

2024-09-17 19:19:31 GMT

Israel injuring 2k people in Lebanon by remotely detonating hacked pagers is so comic book villain that I can't fucking believe this timeline.
They are entering on their Joker era.

2024-09-12 11:47:40 GMT

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Me apuesto algo a qué en realidad lo que quieren prohibir es usar nada que venga con GPL u otras variantes de licencias virales

2024-09-02 11:41:00 GMT

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to be clear: People sending their private API keys to public github repositories has been a problem since forever. This just makes it very easy to find one

2024-09-02 11:17:51 GMT

OMFG this is real
https://goblin.band/files/76585c97-342a-4635-b8ca-587bcd0803cf
#note1aa2…6f44

2024-09-01 22:17:24 GMT

There is this show on Netflix where an USian visits areas of the world where there is a higher-than-average centenarians density and try to dig into their customs to see why in X country "people live 8 years more than in the US on average".
But then they never address the fact that in every single case the people they talk with have lived in countries with socialized health care and strong labour rights. It's kind of hilarious.
There is this moment where they are talking with this Japanese woman about the fact she is part of some kind of social club, trying to suggest this may be a factor in her longevity, and she casually mentions how she has been retired for over 40 years... And I DON'T KNOW MAYBE THE COUNTRY WITHOUT ANY PUBLIC PENSION PROGRAM NOR MANDATORY RETIREMENT AGE HAVING A SHORTER LIFE SPAN MAY NOT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH HOW OFTEN JAPANESE 80-SOMETHINGS MET WITH THEIR FRIENDS TO SING TRADITIONAL TUNES TOGETHER.

2024-08-31 19:16:50 GMT

I've just read the best theory about the reason behind all the tumblr migration fuzz: after a few years of Wordpress market share growing at a ridiculous pace, its growth had stagnated in the last couple of years. WordPress market share is the reason why Automattic gets millions every time they do an investment round.
So the theory is the MM wants to hide WP stagnation by force-migrating a few hundred of millions tumblr blogs.
I still think it's entirely impossible for the migration to happen, but at least this theory would explain the rationale. And "he is trying to con the investors" sounds more plausible than "he just does it for the likes"

2024-08-31 10:45:50 GMT

**Elon musk**: Brazil demanding we ban nazi accounts posting racist shit is against free speech and puts democracy at risk
**Random Twitter user:** ... Cisgender.
**Elon musk:** this cannot be tolerated! You are permabanned !!!

2024-08-30 08:38:29 GMT

I got a couple of asks like this on tumblr, but I don't feel that posting about Automattic there first-hand is a good idea, so I'll answer here.
Yup, it looks they are looking for someone to work on the [tumblr-to-wordpress](https://automattic.com/work-with-us/tumblr-migration/) migration for real. However, this doesn't mean it's going to happen. That job posting makes me think several thinks:
1) Tumblr selling our personal data to the AI ghouls have, probably, made tumblr profitable for the first time ever. In my three years working on tumblr, everything, EVERYTHING, was about making it stop losing money. Every single project went through the "is this going to make us lose less money" sieve. But again, we know Reddit got 60Mill from openAI for selling their users' content. Tumblr was 10Mill/year in the red when I left. If they got a similar deal for selling them (and midjourney) the pictures of my kids ( among other things) without my permission, that would have covered all the losess Automattic incured because of tumblr, and left money to fund it for a couple of years. Opening the door to ego-related projects from the CEO.
2) This recruitment-drive may come from the current tumblr & WordPress engineering teams being pessimistic about the project / having tried to discourage Management (Matt) to pursue it, or he (Matt) thinks they don't want to do it. Automattic looking for external people to work on a speciffic project is EXTREMELLY rare. As in "I've worked there for 8 years and I only have seen it happening with low-priority, no-important projects management didn't want in-house engineers to lose time with". It's pretty telling they are hiring for this.
3) Matt SEVERELY understimate the scope of the project. The idea was scrapped after last year some devs did some exploratory work and declared it a gargantuan task. And now I got through the grapevine that this has been kickstarted again due the CEO's own direct request. So it's happening because of him pushing for it to happen against the best judgement from engineering. And he seems to be thinking he can hire a small, dedicated team to make it so. And once again, this is HUGE.
Matt and people who don't know anything about Tumblr codebase may think "oh, it's just mapping tumblr's API endpoints to similar WP API endpoints, convert the data formats, and work on some migrations so the tumblr posts can live within the WP database structure", but that's a very, extremely naive take.
The problem is tumblr data architecture / product features are entirely uncompatible with WordPress data architecture. Every little corner of the tumblr dash I look into gives me headaches when thinking in how to make that work with WP.
For example, let's think hashtags. They are a MAJOR feature for tumblr users, one of the most important pieces of the platform. And they work in an entire different way of how they work in WordPress. They'll need to write a WordPress plugin to make them work as they do in tumblr, even just for the API. Same with comments of a post. Same with counting post interactions (one of them really doesn't even exist in WordPress as a concept). Etc, etc, etc. It's almost fractal, every single part of tumblr I can look at would, no matter how small, mean a small nightmare for the people working on porting it.
Fuck, they don't even know if WordPress.com is going to explode if they fill its tables with everything that's on tumblr (tumblr db has orders of magnitude more contents than [wp.com](http://wp.com)... Hell, it creates about 10 million new posts PER DAY nowadays). Half of the tumblr backend code is about handling that crazy volume, and [wp.com](http://wp.com) is not even close to be ready to handle it as-is.
Long story short, I think there's little of the current WP backend API that could be used as-is. If they manage to actually find a team to work on this, their job will be:
Re-write the entire tumblr backend code as WordPress Plugins. A quick find/grep in my old work laptop there were over 5000 php filles in tumblr's backend project last year. The share of the code that could be discarded by reusing similarly-meaned parts of the WordPress API is negligible.
Migrate something like 500 billion posts, stored in different post formats, to the (uncompatible) WordPress post format and see the DB doesn't explode (fun story, tumblr old posts are stored in a different format than the new ones, because we couldn't find a safe way to convert them to the new format without risking losing some of the content ... so good luck doing that into WordPress)
Work on optimizing and caching everything so entire servers don't come down everytime someone loads a post (which in wp means doing a bunch of very heavy cross-table lookups, which when your post database is in the billions, your hashtags are stored in a different table with also billions of rows, and every post may trigger a dozen other lookups for other posts due the reblog chain, is going to be FUN)
Now do 1-3 again, but with tumblr's API v1 (which is still in heavy use, even if tumblr started migrating to v2 years ago).
And this is JUST for the API endpoints. We are not even talking about migrating the hundreds of tumblr themes to WordPress, or adapting the mobile apps to stop creating posts in the tumblr-format, etc.
The best/worst part is that even if they get people to do this, even if they get to actually do all the work in whatever time they need to do it, the result would be a so heavily modded WP instance that would look nothing like WordPress, at all. It would look like the current tumblr backend, but shoehorned into using wp-shaped db tables somehow. But I guess MM doesn't really care about that, he just want to get the dopamine-rush of getting some sweet sweet media attention.
So yeah, this is just a CEO who is extremely detached from the reality of the actual work thinking he's smarter than his own team (which already told him this was a pipe-dream a year ago) and trying to hire a team to empty the sea using a sieve. Good luck to them ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://goblin.band/files/51d47f2d-0219-449a-82d7-e052847ff872

2024-08-27 07:25:50 GMT

My daughter just communicated me that the only city in the world she refuses to go on vacation is San Francisco. Why? "because they only serve Broccoli pizza there"
Thank you Pixar's Inside-Out for inspiring an entire new generation of neo-luddites :D

2024-08-13 17:44:57 GMT

Because he fired 95% of the engineers, next question
#note1kdu…295y

2024-08-13 07:10:18 GMT

Quick Spanish lesson! The proper thing to say when someone sneeze is 'Salud'. The proper thing to answer back when you are the one sneezing and someone say it to you is "Y república".

2024-08-12 07:03:26 GMT

Extremely disappointed with pinboard here. I used to think he was one of the good ones.
#note1egu…5wt9

2024-08-09 20:19:04 GMT

I want to find whoever runs pillowfort Tumblr's and shake their hand enthusiastically and buy then a full cake.
https://goblin.band/files/webpublic-143a12cd-6332-4363-961c-2bb8b43dbe54

2024-08-09 11:38:14 GMT

Matt always has been utterly unable to understand tumblr's reblog chains and he had been asking for something like Twitter's threaded replies since way before I left the company: I had a conversation with him trying to make him realize that reblog chains are a better conversational tools than threaded replies around three years ago. With no success.
I guess tumblr staff finally had to pay him some attention in this area 🤷
https://goblin.band/files/webpublic-a4af10d7-dcc3-493e-b86b-276f43d98fa1
#note1zgx…3e5t

2024-06-12 06:18:08 GMT

Do you remember back when 404 media reported that Automattic was mass-selling user data to openAI and the Automattic CEO responded with this?
It's been a month and... *Crickets*
https://goblin.band/files/1f72e285-6d5c-4422-ab65-87abd7ab7d14

2024-06-09 06:30:56 GMT

People cheering for the release of 4 hostages achieved by killing 210 random people in a refugee camp is the perfect gist of the entire Palestinian recent history. Somehow those 4 hostages are fellow humans who serve a happy life (they are), but the 210 palestinians just disposable vermin that don't even get mentioned in the news.
Oh: and two reminders:
Israel keeps broadcasting their war crimes full of pride about them (soldiers entering combat zones disguised as non-combatants is EXPLICITLY forbidden by the Geneva convections)
Israel still kept about 2000 palestinian hostages themselves (people abducted without any formal accusation nor giving their loved ones any news of their demise) and no one ever talks about their release

2024-04-28 18:50:28 GMT

Look, USians, I don't want to step into your internal politics, but you see, 45 years ago, we spaniards had the occurrence to write in our constitution that the head of state (the king) has immunity from prosecution for anything they do while they are in the job, and now we have an ex-king with a Wikipedia page that includes a "alleged corruption" section 55 paragraphs long.
And it's only "alleged" because he can't be taken to court even with the piles of evidence that exist.
Just saying.