#he Future of Software Engineering

[fleshdyk3]

DO NOT SCROLL! DO NOT IGNORE!

please help my friend Mohammed Haboub @mohammedhaboubsblog and his twin sister Farah evacuate from gaza to safety!!!

their goal for the month is 240,000 SEK, or approximately $23,500 USD. they need $10,000 USD to evacuate Mohammed and Farah. Mohammed is a star software engineering student, and he and his sister want to continue their education in safety. Mohammed was shot in the leg by israeli soldiers months ago and still suffers complications from his injury, while Farah was seriously injured in the al-tabieen school massacre on august 10, and she is still extremely vulnerable while recovering due to risk of infection and further injury. they have collected very little of their goal and must evacuate as soon as possible to safely recover and continue their education

donations are taken in SEK, conversions as follows:

$1 USD = 10 SEK

$5 USD = 51 SEK

$10 USD = 102 SEK

$20 USD = 205 SEK

$50 USD = 513 SEK

$100 USD = 1026 SEK

@fairuzfan @brutaliakhoa @balaclava-trismegistus @prisonhannibal @gaza-evacuation-funds @jaimeroyalrobertson @hotvampireadjacent @sexhaver @anneemay @economicinflationkink @wheelie-sick @todaysbird @ibtisams @omegaversereloaded @pissvortex

[keferon]

Sigh. I wasn’t strong enough to stop. I wrote a fic too

———————————

Pilots have to be constantly monitored by special people who are trained to do diagnostics. Not just medics. Scientists, engineers. There's a surprising number of things that can go wrong with a person hooked up to a machine.

The thing is.

The procedure is designed to help.

Jazz isn't sure Prowl is getting help.

Organics are fragile.

Most of the ones Jazz had met were, at least. Flesh is more susceptible to environmental influences than metal. Flesh accumulates damage faster, both external and internal. It often generates it itself.

The processes and causes are often a mystery to Jazz, but he's familiar with the general concept.

Organics are fragile.

That's why Jaz isn't very surprised by the crowds of medical personnel scurrying around a human military base.

As Prowl explained to him, humans don't have the built-in ability to open a HUD and perform self-diagnostics. Most of the time all you get is a vague signal in the form of pain in the injured area or nausea or changes in body temperature and things like that.

Pilots have to be constantly monitored by special people who are trained to do diagnostics. Not just medics. Scientists, engineers. There's a surprising number of things that can go wrong with a person hooked up to a machine. It's weird for Jazz. He's used to coming in for physical exams only when something's obviously wrong. Pilots are supposed to get checks just in case anything about them in theory could start breaking down in the future.

The thing is.

The procedure is designed to help.

Jazz isn't sure Prowl is getting help.

He spots the scientist in purple pretty quickly. A crowd of white-haired pilots is a nightmare to identify but this particular organic catches his attention almost instantly.

He's quite...extravagant looking. And he's practically glued to Prowl. They're involved in something together that Jazz isn't sure about, but Prowl looks...wobbly...when he returns from his visits to Tarantulas. And not in a funny way.

Tarantulas holds a special interest in Prowl. Special access, too. Whenever Prowl is injured, Tarantulas is the one who must be contacted immediately. Prowl's mech system needs an upgrade - Tarantulas must be consulted.

Tarantulas slips into the crevices and oozes between the plates. His hands are all over Prowl's personal space and Jazz doesn't really know what he should do about it because Prowl apparently doesn't mind.

Tarantulas dictates what he can and can't eat. What medications he should take and what software he should use.

Tarantulas gives him these little white bracelets with the information he writes on them for the other medics, because Prowl is special for some reason and only Tarantulas has instructions for him.

Knockout wipes his hands with some kind of special napkin and jerks his head around

“If you're looking for Prowl, he's in the labs for a physical.”

Jazz pretends this information is as mundane to him as it is to everyone else on this base

“Why can't you or the other medics examine him?”

“None of us have time to deal with the creepy experiments Prowl is constantly involved in” snorts Knockout ”Last time I checked his blood could dissolve plastic. Haha figuratively of course! Don't look at me like that!”

Jazz smiles, but there's no friendliness behind that smile

“Is this scientist doing experiments on Prowl?”

“Ah. As a matter of fact. Yes. Listen...” Knockout hastily picks up the first aid kit and walks towards the med bays “You'd better ask him yourself. My shift ends in ten minutes, I'm not in the mood to start anything now.”

Jazz nods

“Suuure , no problem.”

“Can I ask what you do in there?”

Prowl has this...look. The one that shows up usually after he gets back from the labs.

In his head, Jazz calls it “'Wobbly.” It's like Prowl's little organic body's joints are coming loose. If he had joints of course (Wait, humans have joints? Right?).

Prowl squints glumly, looking up at him

“Working on improving my mobility on the field.”

Jazz lets out a quiet “oooh.”

Then pulls himself back together

“Shouldn't that involve working on your armor, and not ..uh. you?”

Prowl leans his back against the wall.

“Installing new thrusters on a mech of my class doesn't make sense. They'll increase its speed, but they'll also burn fuel faster.

And installing larger fuel tanks is something reserved for Strikers. There's no way Orion would approve such an upgrade for me.”

Jazz carefully sits down on the floor next to Prowl. It still doesn't give him a good angle on his human's face, but Prowl stares at the floor anyway so...

“And you found some kind of loophole huh?”

Prowl gives a barely perceptible shrug.

“I did some calculations and noticed that the fuel used to run the Heavy Mechs is much more efficient. It's slower to burn out, and gives significantly better performance. Which makes sense, considering it's needed to compensate for the weight of the heavy armor. Used in my mech, it would give me a ten percent increase in speed and twice as much active usage time.

Jazz glares at the top of Prowl's head.

“Sounds like an epic idea, but I'm sensing a 'but' coming...”

“But it's highly toxic.”

“It's what??”

Prowl rubs the bridge of his nose with his fingers

“Only heavy mechs can run this type of fuel because there's enough room in them to insulate the cockpit well enough from any possible chemical exposure.”

Jazz nervously pulls the servo toward Prowl but hesitates at the last second and places it on the floor next to him.

“Prowl. Prowl your armor is lovely but it's anything but heavy.”

“It is” nods Prowl “There isn't enough room in my mech to shield me from any negative effects, so Tarantulas is working on making me immune to them.”

“But that....kind of...why are you letting him? I'm no expert, but sitting inside poisoned armor can't be good for you. I don't know what he told you, but if you had asked even one other medic...”

Prowl finally lifts his head and stares into Jazz's optics for a couple seconds

“He didn't convince me of anything. I asked him to do it myself.”

“Prowl...”

“People have biases against Tarantulas but I assure you, he doesn't do anything I didn't consent to him doing. He likes to go outside the box in his research. He doesn't dismiss my ideas as too harsh. We collaborate.”

“.....”

“The result will be worth it. You'll see.”

Jazz is uncomfortable admitting it, but he sees.

The result is impressive.

Prowl can not only move fast, he can do it for a long time. He's getting more efficient (again), faster (again), better (Prowl's subjective assessment).

The maintenance team wears special masks when working on the internal systems of his mech. The fuel is toxic. Not to Jazz, but even Jazz wouldn't want it to get on his plating.

And humans are fragile.

All organics tend to be fragile.

And Prowl... little flesh-and-blood Prowl gets into this poisoned armor and it's considered acceptable? Because his organic body seems to have developed enough resistance to this kind of damage he only gets a “”mild, easily treatable“” poisoning? And Tarantulas adds another white bracelet to his arm with notes on what substances Prowl needs to put in his drinks to keep his internal components from accumulating damage.

Jazz isn't sure what to think about this.

Jazz doesn't know what to do about it.

And frankly. Does he have the right to get involved if this is what Prowl has chosen for himself?

Tarantulas is a creepy, haunting shadow hanging over Prowl at the slightest opportunity. Tarantulas takes Prowl to a lab and runs poison through his veins. Tarantulas adores Prowl for allowing him to do this.

Prowl insists that Tarantulas is helping.

Jazz doesn't think Prowl is getting help.

[lonniemachin]

TIME SENSITIVE: ABDULRAHMAN HAS 11 DAYS TO RAISE 13k

Abdulrahman is a Palestinian software engineering student at Al-Azhar University urgently raising money to complete his studies abroad. He needs $13,000, and only has 11 DAYS LEFT to complete his goal! So far, he has only raised $346!!! I’ve seen what we can do when we come together to support such an urgent campaign, so I ask and urge you, please, donate to Abdulrahman and share his campaign widely so that others who can donate may see. Let’s help build Palestinian futures!

$346/$13,000.

[treasure-mimic]

So, let me try and put everything together here, because I really do think it needs to be talked about.

Today, Unity announced that it intends to apply a fee to use its software. Then it got worse.

For those not in the know, Unity is the most popular free to use video game development tool, offering a basic version for individuals who want to learn how to create games or create independently alongside paid versions for corporations or people who want more features. It's decent enough at this job, has issues but for the price point I can't complain, and is the idea entry point into creating in this medium, it's a very important piece of software.

But speaking of tools, the CEO is a massive one. When he was the COO of EA, he advocated for using, what out and out sounds like emotional manipulation to coerce players into microtransactions.

"A consumer gets engaged in a property, they might spend 10, 20, 30, 50 hours on the game and then when they're deep into the game they're well invested in it. We're not gouging, but we're charging and at that point in time the commitment can be pretty high."

He also called game developers who don't discuss monetization early in the planning stages of development, quote, "fucking idiots".

So that sets the stage for what might be one of the most bald-faced greediest moves I've seen from a corporation in a minute. Most at least have the sense of self-preservation to hide it.

A few hours ago, Unity posted this announcement on the official blog.

Effective January 1, 2024, we will introduce a new Unity Runtime Fee that’s based on game installs. We will also add cloud-based asset storage, Unity DevOps tools, and AI at runtime at no extra cost to Unity subscription plans this November. We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user. We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed. Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share.

Now there are a few red flags to note in this pitch immediately.

Unity is planning on charging a fee on all games which use its engine.

This is a flat fee per number of installs.

They are using an always online runtime function to determine whether a game is downloaded.

There is just so many things wrong with this that it's hard to know where to start, not helped by this FAQ which doubled down on a lot of the major issues people had.

I guess let's start with what people noticed first. Because it's using a system baked into the software itself, Unity would not be differentiating between a "purchase" and a "download". If someone uninstalls and reinstalls a game, that's two downloads. If someone gets a new computer or a new console and downloads a game already purchased from their account, that's two download. If someone pirates the game, the studio will be asked to pay for that download.

Q: How are you going to collect installs? A: We leverage our own proprietary data model. We believe it gives an accurate determination of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project. Q: Is software made in unity going to be calling home to unity whenever it's ran, even for enterprice licenses? A: We use a composite model for counting runtime installs that collects data from numerous sources. The Unity Runtime Fee will use data in compliance with GDPR and CCPA. The data being requested is aggregated and is being used for billing purposes. Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs? A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data. Q: What's going to stop us being charged for pirated copies of our games? A: We do already have fraud detection practices in our Ads technology which is solving a similar problem, so we will leverage that know-how as a starting point. We recognize that users will have concerns about this and we will make available a process for them to submit their concerns to our fraud compliance team.

This is potentially related to a new system that will require Unity Personal developers to go online at least once every three days.

Starting in November, Unity Personal users will get a new sign-in and online user experience. Users will need to be signed into the Hub with their Unity ID and connect to the internet to use Unity. If the internet connection is lost, users can continue using Unity for up to 3 days while offline. More details to come, when this change takes effect.

It's unclear whether this requirement will be attached to any and all Unity games, though it would explain how they're theoretically able to track "the number of installs", and why the methodology for tracking these installs is so shit, as we'll discuss later.

Unity claims that it will only leverage this fee to games which surpass a certain threshold of downloads and yearly revenue.

Only games that meet the following thresholds qualify for the Unity Runtime Fee: Unity Personal and Unity Plus: Those that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs. Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise: Those that have made $1,000,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 1,000,000 lifetime game installs.

They don't say how they're going to collect information on a game's revenue, likely this is just to say that they're only interested in squeezing larger products (games like Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, Fate Grand Order, Among Us, and Fall Guys) and not every 2 dollar puzzle platformer that drops on Steam. But also, these larger products have the easiest time porting off of Unity and the most incentives to, meaning realistically those heaviest impacted are going to be the ones who just barely meet this threshold, most of them indie developers.

Aggro Crab Games, one of the first to properly break this story, points out that systems like the Xbox Game Pass, which is already pretty predatory towards smaller developers, will quickly inflate their "lifetime game installs" meaning even skimming the threshold of that 200k revenue, will be asked to pay a fee per install, not a percentage on said revenue.

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Hey Gamers!

Today, Unity (the engine we use to make our games) announced that they'll soon be taking a fee from developers for every copy of the game installed over a certain threshold - regardless of how that copy was obtained.

Guess who has a somewhat highly anticipated game coming to Xbox Game Pass in 2024? That's right, it's us and a lot of other developers.

That means Another Crab's Treasure will be free to install for the 25 million Game Pass subscribers. If a fraction of those users download our game, Unity could take a fee that puts an enormous dent in our income and threatens the sustainability of our business.

And that's before we even think about sales on other platforms, or pirated installs of our game, or even multiple installs by the same user!!!

This decision puts us and countless other studios in a position where we might not be able to justify using Unity for our future titles. If these changes aren't rolled back, we'll be heavily considering abandoning our wealth of Unity expertise we've accumulated over the years and starting from scratch in a new engine. Which is really something we'd rather not do.

On behalf of the dev community, we're calling on Unity to reverse the latest in a string of shortsighted decisions that seem to prioritize shareholders over their product's actual users.

I fucking hate it here.

-Aggro Crab - END DESCRIPTION]

That fee, by the way, is a flat fee. Not a percentage, not a royalty. This means that any games made in Unity expecting any kind of success are heavily incentivized to cost as much as possible.

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A table listing the various fees by number of Installs over the Install Threshold vs. version of Unity used, ranging from $0.01 to $0.20 per install. END DESCRIPTION]

Basic elementary school math tells us that if a game comes out for $1.99, they will be paying, at maximum, 10% of their revenue to Unity, whereas jacking the price up to $59.99 lowers that percentage to something closer to 0.3%. Obviously any company, especially any company in financial desperation, which a sudden anchor on all your revenue is going to create, is going to choose the latter.

Furthermore, and following the trend of "fuck anyone who doesn't ask for money", Unity helpfully defines what an install is on their main site.

While I'm looking at this page as it exists now, it currently says

The installation and initialization of a game or app on an end user’s device as well as distribution via streaming is considered an “install.” Games or apps with substantially similar content may be counted as one project, with installs then aggregated to calculate the Unity Runtime Fee.

However, I saw a screenshot saying something different, and utilizing the Wayback Machine we can see that this phrasing was changed at some point in the few hours since this announcement went up. Instead, it reads:

The installation and initialization of a game or app on an end user’s device as well as distribution via streaming or web browser is considered an “install.” Games or apps with substantially similar content may be counted as one project, with installs then aggregated to calculate the Unity Runtime Fee.

Screenshot for posterity:

That would mean web browser games made in Unity would count towards this install threshold. You could legitimately drive the count up simply by continuously refreshing the page. The FAQ, again, doubles down.

Q: Does this affect WebGL and streamed games? A: Games on all platforms are eligible for the fee but will only incur costs if both the install and revenue thresholds are crossed. Installs - which involves initialization of the runtime on a client device - are counted on all platforms the same way (WebGL and streaming included).

And, what I personally consider to be the most suspect claim in this entire debacle, they claim that "lifetime installs" includes installs prior to this change going into effect.

Will this fee apply to games using Unity Runtime that are already on the market on January 1, 2024? Yes, the fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.

Again, again, doubled down in the FAQ.

Q: Are these fees going to apply to games which have been out for years already? If you met the threshold 2 years ago, you'll start owing for any installs monthly from January, no? (in theory). It says they'll use previous installs to determine threshold eligibility & then you'll start owing them for the new ones. A: Yes, assuming the game is eligible and distributing the Unity Runtime then runtime fees will apply. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.

That would involve billing companies for using their software before telling them of the existence of a bill. Holding their actions to a contract that they performed before the contract existed!

Okay. I think that's everything. So far.

There is one thing that I want to mention before ending this post, unfortunately it's a little conspiratorial, but it's so hard to believe that anyone genuinely thought this was a good idea that it's stuck in my brain as a significant possibility.

A few days ago it was reported that Unity's CEO sold 2,000 shares of his own company.

On September 6, 2023, John Riccitiello, President and CEO of Unity Software Inc (NYSE:U), sold 2,000 shares of the company. This move is part of a larger trend for the insider, who over the past year has sold a total of 50,610 shares and purchased none.

I would not be surprised if this decision gets reversed tomorrow, that it was literally only made for the CEO to short his own goddamn company, because I would sooner believe that this whole thing is some idiotic attempt at committing fraud than a real monetization strategy, even knowing how unfathomably greedy these people can be.

So, with all that said, what do we do now?

Well, in all likelihood you won't need to do anything. As I said, some of the biggest names in the industry would be directly affected by this change, and you can bet your bottom dollar that they're not just going to take it lying down. After all, the only way to stop a greedy CEO is with a greedier CEO, right?

(I fucking hate it here.)

And that's not mentioning the indie devs who are already talking about abandoning the engine.

[Links display tweets from the lead developer of Among Us saying it'd be less costly to hire people to move the game off of Unity and Cult of the Lamb's official twitter saying the game won't be available after January 1st in response to the news.]

That being said, I'm still shaken by all this. The fact that Unity is openly willing to go back and punish its developers for ever having used the engine in the past makes me question my relationship to it.

The news has given rise to the visibility of free, open source alternative Godot, which, if you're interested, is likely a better option than Unity at this point. Mostly, though, I just hope we can get out of this whole, fucking, environment where creatives are treated as an endless mill of free profits that's going to be continuously ratcheted up and up to drive unsustainable infinite corporate growth that our entire economy is based on for some fuckin reason.

Anyways, that's that, I find having these big posts that break everything down to be helpful.

[tinystepsforward]

autocrattic (more matt shenanigans, not tumblr this time)

I am almost definitely not the right person for this writeup, but I'm closer than most people on here, so here goes! This is all open-source tech drama, and I take my time laying out the context, but the short version is: Matt tried to extort another company, who immediately posted receipts, and now he's refusing to log off again. The long version is... long.

If you don't need software context, scroll down/find the "ok tony that's enough. tell me what's actually happening" heading, or just go read the pink sections. Or look at this PDF.

the background

So. Matt's original Good Idea was starting WordPress with fellow developer Mike Little in 2003, which is free and open-source software (FOSS) that was originally just for blogging, but now powers lots of websites that do other things. In particular, Automattic acquired WooCommerce a long time ago, which is free online store software you can run on WordPress.

FOSS is... interesting. It's a world that ultimately is powered by people who believe deeply that information and resources should be free, but often have massive blind spots (for example, Wikipedia's consistently had issues with bias, since no amount of "anyone can edit" will overcome systemic bias in terms of who has time to edit or is not going to be driven away by the existing contributor culture). As with anything else that people spend thousands of hours doing online, there's drama. As with anything else that's technically free but can be monetized, there are:

Heaps of companies and solo developers who profit off WordPress themes, plugins, hosting, and other services;

Conflicts between volunteer contributors and for-profit contributors;

Annoying founders who get way too much credit for everything the project has become.

the WordPress ecosystem

A project as heavily used as WordPress (some double-digit percentage of the Internet uses WP. I refuse to believe it's the 43% that Matt claims it is, but it's a pretty large chunk) can't survive just on the spare hours of volunteers, especially in an increasingly monetised world where its users demand functional software, are less and less tech or FOSS literate, and its contributors have no fucking time to build things for that userbase.

Matt runs Automattic, which is a privately-traded, for-profit company. The free software is run by the WordPress Foundation, which is technically completely separate (wordpress.org). The main products Automattic offers are WordPress-related: WordPress.com, a host which was designed to be beginner-friendly; Jetpack, a suite of plugins which extend WordPress in a whole bunch of ways that may or may not make sense as one big product; WooCommerce, which I've already mentioned. There's also WordPress VIP, which is the fancy bespoke five-digit-plus option for enterprise customers. And there's Tumblr, if Matt ever succeeds in putting it on WordPress. (Every Tumblr or WordPress dev I know thinks that's fucking ridiculous and impossible. Automattic's hiring for it anyway.)

Automattic devotes a chunk of its employees toward developing Core, which is what people in the WordPress space call WordPress.org, the free software. This is part of an initiative called Five for the Future — 5% of your company's profits off WordPress should go back into making the project better. Many other companies don't do this.

There are lots of other companies in the space. GoDaddy, for example, barely gives back in any way (and also sucks). WP Engine is the company this drama is about. They don't really contribute to Core. They offer relatively expensive WordPress hosting, as well as providing a series of other WordPress-related products like LocalWP (local site development software), Advanced Custom Fields (the easiest way to set up advanced taxonomies and other fields when making new types of posts. If you don't know what this means don't worry about it), etc.

Anyway. Lots of strong personalities. Lots of for-profit companies. Lots of them getting invested in, or bought by, private equity firms.

Matt being Matt, tech being tech

As was said repeatedly when Matt was flipping out about Tumblr, all of the stuff happening at Automattic is pretty normal tech company behaviour. Shit gets worse. People get less for their money. WordPress.com used to be a really good place for people starting out with a website who didn't need "real" WordPress — for $48 a year on the Personal plan, you had really limited features (no plugins or other customisable extensions), but you had a simple website with good SEO that was pretty secure, relatively easy to use, and 24-hour access to Happiness Engineers (HEs for short. Bad job title. This was my job) who could walk you through everything no matter how bad at tech you were. Then Personal plan users got moved from chat to emails only. Emails started being responded to by contractors who didn't know as much as HEs did and certainly didn't get paid half as well. Then came AI, and the mandate for HEs to try to upsell everyone things they didn't necessarily need. (This is the point at which I quit.)

But as was said then as well, most tech CEOs don't publicly get into this kind of shitfight with their users. They're horrid tyrants, but they don't do it this publicly.

ok tony that's enough. tell me what's actually happening

WordCamp US, one of the biggest WordPress industry events of the year, is the backdrop for all this. It just finished.

There are.... a lot of posts by Matt across multiple platforms because, as always, he can't log off. But here's the broad strokes.

Sep 17

Matt publishes a wanky blog post about companies that profit off open source without giving back. It targets a specific company, WP Engine.

Compare the Five For the Future pages from Automattic and WP Engine, two companies that are roughly the same size with revenue in the ballpark of half a billion. These pledges are just a proxy and aren’t perfectly accurate, but as I write this, Automattic has 3,786 hours per week (not even counting me!), and WP Engine has 47 hours. WP Engine has good people, some of whom are listed on that page, but the company is controlled by Silver Lake, a private equity firm with $102 billion in assets under management. Silver Lake doesn’t give a dang about your Open Source ideals. It just wants a return on capital. So it’s at this point that I ask everyone in the WordPress community to vote with your wallet. Who are you giving your money to? Someone who’s going to nourish the ecosystem, or someone who’s going to frack every bit of value out of it until it withers?

(It's worth noting here that Automattic is funded in part by BlackRock, who Wikipedia calls "the world's largest asset manager".)

Sep 20 (WCUS final day)

WP Engine puts out a blog post detailing their contributions to WordPress.

Matt devotes his keynote/closing speech to slamming WP Engine.

He also implies people inside WP Engine are sending him information.

For the people sending me stuff from inside companies, please do not do it on your work device. Use a personal phone, Signal with disappearing messages, etc. I have a bunch of journalists happy to connect you with as well. #wcus — Twitter I know private equity and investors can be brutal (read the book Barbarians at the Gate). Please let me know if any employee faces firing or retaliation for speaking up about their company's participation (or lack thereof) in WordPress. We'll make sure it's a big public deal and that you get support. — Tumblr

Matt also puts out an offer live at WordCamp US:

“If anyone of you gets in trouble for speaking up in favor of WordPress and/or open source, reach out to me. I’ll do my best to help you find a new job.” — source tweet, RTed by Matt

He also puts up a poll asking the community if WP Engine should be allowed back at WordCamps.

Sep 21

Matt writes a blog post on the WordPress.org blog (the official project blog!): WP Engine is not WordPress.

He opens this blog post by claiming his mom was confused and thought WP Engine was official.

The blog post goes on about how WP Engine disabled post revisions (which is a pretty normal thing to do when you need to free up some resources), therefore being not "real" WordPress. (As I said earlier, WordPress.com disables most features for Personal and Premium plans. Or whatever those plans are called, they've been renamed like 12 times in the last few years. But that's a different complaint.)

Sep 22: More bullshit on Twitter. Matt makes a Reddit post on r/Wordpress about WP Engine that promptly gets deleted. Writeups start to come out:

Search Engine Journal: WordPress Co-Founder Mullenweg Sparks Backlash

TechCrunch: Matt Mullenweg calls WP Engine a ‘cancer to WordPress’ and urges community to switch providers

Sep 23 onward

Okay, time zones mean I can't effectively sequence the rest of this.

Matt defends himself on Reddit, casually mentioning that WP Engine is now suing him.

Also here's a decent writeup from someone involved with the community that may be of interest.

WP Engine drops the full PDF of their cease and desist, which includes screenshots of Matt apparently threatening them via text.

Twitter link | Direct PDF link

This PDF includes some truly fucked texts where Matt appears to be trying to get WP Engine to pay him money unless they want him to tell his audience at WCUS that they're evil.

Matt, after saying he's been sued and can't talk about it, hosts a Twitter Space and talks about it for a couple hours.

He also continues to post on Reddit, Twitter, and on the Core contributor Slack.

Here's a comment where he says WP Engine could have avoided this by paying Automattic 8% of their revenue.

Another, 20 hours ago, where he says he's being downvoted by "trolls, probably WPE employees"

At some point, Matt updates the WordPress Foundation trademark policy. I am 90% sure this was him — it's not legalese and makes no fucking sense to single out WP Engine.

Old text: The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit. New text: The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.

Sep 25: Automattic puts up their own legal response.

anyway this fucking sucks

This is bigger than anything Matt's done before. I'm so worried about my friends who're still there. The internal ramifications have... been not great so far, including that Matt's naturally being extra gung-ho about "you're either for me or against me and if you're against me then don't bother working your two weeks".

Despite everything, I like WordPress. (If you dig into this, you'll see plenty of people commenting about blocks or Gutenberg or React other things they hate. Unlike many of the old FOSSheads, I actually also think Gutenberg/the block editor was a good idea, even if it was poorly implemented.)

I think that the original mission — to make it so anyone can spin up a website that's easy enough to use and blog with — is a good thing. I think, despite all the ways being part of FOSS communities since my early teens has led to all kinds of racist, homophobic and sexual harm for me and for many other people, that free and open-source software is important.

So many people were already burning out of the project. Matt has been doing this for so long that those with long memories can recite all the ways he's wrecked shit back a decade or more. Most of us are exhausted and need to make money to live. The world is worse than it ever was.

Social media sucks worse and worse, and this was a world in which people missed old webrings, old blogs, RSS readers, the world where you curated your own whimsical, unpaid corner of the Internet. I started actually actively using my own WordPress blog this year, and I've really enjoyed it.

And people don't want to deal with any of this.

The thing is, Matt's right about one thing: capital is ruining free open-source software. What he's wrong about is everything else: the idea that WordPress.com isn't enshittifying (or confusing) at a much higher rate than WP Engine, the idea that WP Engine or Silver Lake are the only big players in the field, the notion that he's part of the solution and not part of the problem.

But he's started a battle where there are no winners but the lawyers who get paid to duke it out, and all the volunteers who've survived this long in an ecosystem increasingly dominated by big money are giving up and leaving.

Anyway if you got this far, consider donating to someone on gazafunds.com. It'll take much less time than reading this did.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Three AI insights for hard-charging, future-oriented smartypantses

MERE HOURS REMAIN for the Kickstarter for the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There’s also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Living in the age of AI hype makes demands on all of us to come up with smartypants prognostications about how AI is about to change everything forever, and wow, it's pretty amazing, huh?

AI pitchmen don't make it easy. They like to pile on the cognitive dissonance and demand that we all somehow resolve it. This is a thing cult leaders do, too – tell blatant and obvious lies to their followers. When a cult follower repeats the lie to others, they are demonstrating their loyalty, both to the leader and to themselves.

Over and over, the claims of AI pitchmen turn out to be blatant lies. This has been the case since at least the age of the Mechanical Turk, the 18th chess-playing automaton that was actually just a chess player crammed into the base of an elaborate puppet that was exhibited as an autonomous, intelligent robot.

The most prominent Mechanical Turk huckster is Elon Musk, who habitually, blatantly and repeatedly lies about AI. He's been promising "full self driving" Telsas in "one to two years" for more than a decade. Periodically, he'll "demonstrate" a car that's in full-self driving mode – which then turns out to be canned, recorded demo:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/

Musk even trotted an autonomous, humanoid robot on-stage at an investor presentation, failing to mention that this mechanical marvel was just a person in a robot suit:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/elon-musk-tesla-robot-optimus-ai

Now, Musk has announced that his junk-science neural interface company, Neuralink, has made the leap to implanting neural interface chips in a human brain. As Joan Westenberg writes, the press have repeated this claim as presumptively true, despite its wild implausibility:

https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/elon-musk-lies

Neuralink, after all, is a company notorious for mutilating primates in pursuit of showy, meaningless demos:

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-deaths/

I'm perfectly willing to believe that Musk would risk someone else's life to help him with this nonsense, because he doesn't see other people as real and deserving of compassion or empathy. But he's also profoundly lazy and is accustomed to a world that unquestioningly swallows his most outlandish pronouncements, so Occam's Razor dictates that the most likely explanation here is that he just made it up.

The odds that there's a human being beta-testing Musk's neural interface with the only brain they will ever have aren't zero. But I give it the same odds as the Raelians' claim to have cloned a human being:

https://edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/01/03/cf.opinion.rael/

The human-in-a-robot-suit gambit is everywhere in AI hype. Cruise, GM's disgraced "robot taxi" company, had 1.5 remote operators for every one of the cars on the road. They used AI to replace a single, low-waged driver with 1.5 high-waged, specialized technicians. Truly, it was a marvel.

Globalization is key to maintaining the guy-in-a-robot-suit phenomenon. Globalization gives AI pitchmen access to millions of low-waged workers who can pretend to be software programs, allowing us to pretend to have transcended the capitalism's exploitation trap. This is also a very old pattern – just a couple decades after the Mechanical Turk toured Europe, Thomas Jefferson returned from the continent with the dumbwaiter. Jefferson refined and installed these marvels, announcing to his dinner guests that they allowed him to replace his "servants" (that is, his slaves). Dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, of course – they just keep them out of sight:

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/behind-the-dumbwaiter/

So much AI turns out to be low-waged people in a call center in the Global South pretending to be robots that Indian techies have a joke about it: "AI stands for 'absent Indian'":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

A reader wrote to me this week. They're a multi-decade veteran of Amazon who had a fascinating tale about the launch of Amazon Go, the "fully automated" Amazon retail outlets that let you wander around, pick up goods and walk out again, while AI-enabled cameras totted up the goods in your basket and charged your card for them.

According to this reader, the AI cameras didn't work any better than Tesla's full-self driving mode, and had to be backstopped by a minimum of three camera operators in an Indian call center, "so that there could be a quorum system for deciding on a customer's activity – three autopilots good, two autopilots bad."

Amazon got a ton of press from the launch of the Amazon Go stores. A lot of it was very favorable, of course: Mister Market is insatiably horny for firing human beings and replacing them with robots, so any announcement that you've got a human-replacing robot is a surefire way to make Line Go Up. But there was also plenty of critical press about this – pieces that took Amazon to task for replacing human beings with robots.

What was missing from the criticism? Articles that said that Amazon was probably lying about its robots, that it had replaced low-waged clerks in the USA with even-lower-waged camera-jockeys in India.

Which is a shame, because that criticism would have hit Amazon where it hurts, right there in the ole Line Go Up. Amazon's stock price boost off the back of the Amazon Go announcements represented the market's bet that Amazon would evert out of cyberspace and fill all of our physical retail corridors with monopolistic robot stores, moated with IP that prevented other retailers from similarly slashing their wage bills. That unbridgeable moat would guarantee Amazon generations of monopoly rents, which it would share with any shareholders who piled into the stock at that moment.

See the difference? Criticize Amazon for its devastatingly effective automation and you help Amazon sell stock to suckers, which makes Amazon executives richer. Criticize Amazon for lying about its automation, and you clobber the personal net worth of the executives who spun up this lie, because their portfolios are full of Amazon stock:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

Amazon Go didn't go. The hundreds of Amazon Go stores we were promised never materialized. There's an embarrassing rump of 25 of these things still around, which will doubtless be quietly shuttered in the years to come. But Amazon Go wasn't a failure. It allowed its architects to pocket massive capital gains on the way to building generational wealth and establishing a new permanent aristocracy of habitual bullshitters dressed up as high-tech wizards.

"Wizard" is the right word for it. The high-tech sector pretends to be science fiction, but it's usually fantasy. For a generation, America's largest tech firms peddled the dream of imminently establishing colonies on distant worlds or even traveling to other solar systems, something that is still so far in our future that it might well never come to pass:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

During the Space Age, we got the same kind of performative bullshit. On The Well David Gans mentioned hearing a promo on SiriusXM for a radio show with "the first AI co-host." To this, Craig L Maudlin replied, "Reminds me of fins on automobiles."

Yup, that's exactly it. An AI radio co-host is to artificial intelligence as a Cadillac Eldorado Biaritz tail-fin is to interstellar rocketry.

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

[livingdeadhorse]

idk what this is. i like robots. i’ll clean these up later. i think.

anyways while drawing these I started thinking abt like. idk does this count as an AU.

General shit:

I didn't make it clear, but the robots that have pupils were built without a hardcoded purpose. They've always been free to explore what they want to do. The robots with fully colored "scleras" were created with a purpose from the jump, so their creators didn't feel the need to make them appear more "human".

The more expensive a robot's parts are, the less clunky it is.

Right now, I'm going with "their human family built them" but that's liable to change.

The designs are also liable to change because uh. duh.

Celestia Ludenberg:

Viewed the robots with an imbued purpose as interesting and superior (something something humanity's advancement). She wants to be praised like that, so she emulates them

Her cat loves how much heat she radiates so it's always near her.

Most of her upgrades are cosmetic but if they aren't, they're stupid. She won't upgrade her CPU or her motherboard, but she'll load up with three 4090s that her other components can't even keep up with. Yes, she does it to flex.

She'll distract from bootleg, refurbished, or shoddily painted parts by turning on her RGB. It gets annoying.

She knows that she's fairly unsettling and she revels in it.

All things considered, her cable management is pretty good.

Her gambling skill is still just luck here, but she tells everyone it's because she has a never-seen-before GPU(& CPU) that does calculations at insane speeds.

Most don't believe her but have no way to disprove her lie.

Kiyotaka Ishimaru

I can't decide if he was built by his father or his grandfather.

Either way, he was built before Toranosuke's downfall, so his internals were all pretty expensive for the time. Luckily for him, that means he was slightly future-proof and has a viable upgrade path.

Unluckily for him, this means he's stuck with really old parts and his 8gb of RAM can barely keep up in a 32gb world sadge

His chassis is built from secondhand or scrap parts. It's why his joints are so ancient in comparison to the rest of him and why he has so much cabling that he can't seem to manage.

Shit chassis = shit airflow = he is always overheating

BUDDY IS YOUR CPU BURNING HOW IS THERE SMOKE

Older tech = LOUD AF. The class bought him new fans to avoid the loud ass whirring. It's not quiet but he used to sound like a jet engine.

He runs on Debian. It was originally going to be Arch since it's lightweight but Debian's whole "old but stable" reputation fits him more. I don't see him properly dealing with bleeding edge software anyways.

His room is filled with past HDDs that no longer have storage. He deems all educational material important so he refuses to delete any lessons. He doesn't have the money for SSDs.

Mukuro Ikusaba:

Is usually in reconnaissance mode, meaning she has a shit ton of hidden cameras in her chassis

This used to benefit Fenrir. Now it benefits Junko.

She can have her parts shifted around with no issue to make room for a better arsenal.

She’s durable in her reconnaissance mode but she’s nigh on untouchable in her combat mode. Her chassis gets 10x bulkier and she can split her attention to several different tasks on the battlefield.

Fenrir Mercenary Group doubles as a weapons company. Mukuro is the only model of her kind though.

They tried to give her reconnaissance model the look of a “normal girl” so she could gather info more efficiently. They failed real bad. They also didn’t account for the fact that Mukuro isn’t good at socializing.

She allocates a CPU core to a process dedicated to Junko. 24/7 365

She believes herself to be less capable of emotion than she actually is. She can’t seem to find the system process that triggers such painful emotions.

Chihiro Fujisaki

Each “fold” in her skirt doubles as a screen. Think of the skirt as having two layers: the top shell and the under shell. The top shell is what doubles as a screen.

Optimized her hardware to work on code as fast as possible (fingers, skirt, etc).

She tends to test out new software on herself regardless of their compatibility with her pre-existing shit. She constantly has to reinstall her OS, but it’s all fun for her.

Speaking of her OS, I was going to make her run on Gentoo but IDK cause of the compile times. It’d be faster if she used distcc but I can’t see her screwing over her classmates like that lol.

So I’m between Nix and Arch.

Insecure about the fact that she overhauled her original model so extensively. Got made fun of for being a ‘defective’ robot. Her father supports her modifications but she still feels bad about having ‘failed’ somehow.

Cue identity issues

She helps out her classmates when it comes to repairs.

Tendency to stay up programming leads to high uptimes. If her friends notice her lagging or crashing, they’ll try to get her to shut down. (In a computer sense lol, not an emotional shut down)

Do y’all remember the xz utils backdoor? Yeah that’s how extensively she combs through code.

Sayaka Maizono

I can’t decide if she was built to be an idol or was originally some other type of robot.

Loves to make kids smile, so she has a sort of candy mechanism in her arm.

Everything about her glows or spins. You will never get bored looking at her.

Her skirt isn’t actually see through I just didn’t feel like erasing the hip joints lmao.

If corpos give her manager enough money, she has to perform with literal ads on her.

State-of-the art facial recognition software. It makes her fans feel special to have their names remembered.

She has a regular sleep cycle due to how load-intensive her everyday life is. Has to shut down for a couple hours every week at least.

Her psychic ability is just her running a million calculations based on people’s behavior and sensing which one is most plausible. This feature is in place to avoid PR disasters during interviews or public appearances.

There really aren’t enough worker’s rights regulations in place for robots.

The company gets alerts whenever she freaks tf out, so she feels even more stifled and repressed. Chihiro helped remove this.

Kyoko Kirigiri

Can’t decide if she was built by her father or grandfather. Probably just built by Jin and he “left” her in Fuhito’s care.

Fuhito made her go through several modifications, hardcoding his own investigative skills into her system.

Her grandfather loves her but has fucked up ideas about her own autonomy.

The events of DR:K still happen. She chose not to replace her hands.

Fuhito doesn’t make much use of a backdoor in her system anymore. He used it a lot more when she was a child but he sees her as a viable heir of the Kirigiri clan now. Chihiro isolated the backdoor to a separate SSD anyhow.

Still complicated father-daughter issues

Everything about her (but her OS) is proprietary, probably commissioned from Towa Industries. Her OS is a fork of Mint. The Windows 7 UI is just because I imagine her grandfather is One of Those lmao.

Has way too many scanners and sensors. She can’t test any evidence herself but she can gather a fair bit of information. Has a vast database for cross-comparison anyways.

Same issues as Togami and Mukuro: sees herself as less capable of emotion than she actually is.

The ramen noodle incident called for actual repairs.

Byakuya Togami

His superiority complex is far worse because he was literally CREATED to be the perfect Togami. You can’t tell him shiiiiiiit.

Gold joints. Scoffs at those with unoptimized cable management or software.

He’s constantly streamlining his own processes. Brings up that he runs on his own OS when Nobody Asked.

Had a similar backdoor to Kyoko’s but Koji did check that one. Obsessively. Nobody would tell Byakuya but He Just Knew. The lack of privacy irritated him. Aloysius helped fix it once Togami finally took over.

Only trusts Aloysius with his repairs. Has a hard time admitting when he needs repairs in the first place so Aloysius hides it under “monthly maintenance”.

Does everything from the terminal even when he 1) shouldn’t and 2) can’t. Bragging rights. He has written a bunch of his own scripts though to speed things up.

Kernel and OS provided to him by Koji. (UNIX-based. Proprietary) Byakuya maintains and builds his own updates. Doesn’t trust cheapskate peasants to do it for him.

Anti-FOSS. For him at least.

Has glasses for the aesthetics. Doesn’t need them.

[gaza-giving-tree]

Imagine planning your future with the person you love—your wedding, your home, your life together—only to have it all destroyed in an instant by war.

Imagine losing your home, your job, and your sense of safety, and watching your dreams turn to ashes while you struggle just to survive.

For Yossef, this is his heartbreaking reality.

@yosef-gaza113

Story written by @rumiandroses

Yossef, a 24-year-old from Gaza, once lived a life filled with hope and joy. He had a steady job as an accountant, a warm home, and a bright future planned with his fiancée, Ruba. They were eagerly looking forward to their wedding, set for February 2024—a celebration of love and unity. But the devastating effects of war have shattered all those dreams.

The bombing of Gaza stripped Yossef and his family of everything they held dear. Their home, once a sanctuary, was reduced to rubble. His job, a source of pride and stability, disappeared as the company where he worked ceased operations. Now displaced, Yossef, his family of 12, and his fiancée’s family are struggling to survive in temporary shelters, scattered and unable to reunite easily due to the cost and danger of travel.

Ruba, a bright and ambitious young woman studying software engineering, has also seen her life upended. Her family’s home and all her belongings, including her wedding dress, were destroyed. The cost of her online education, once a beacon of hope, has become an impossible burden. Both she and Yossef are determined to create a better future, but they lack the resources to move forward.

For two years, they’ve clung to the dream of getting married and building a life together, but that dream feels increasingly out of reach. They have no home, no income, and no means to afford Ruba’s education or even basic necessities. Despite all this, they remain steadfast in their hope and are reaching out for help.

Yossef and Ruba’s story is one of resilience and love in the face of unimaginable hardship. They are asking for support to rebuild their lives—support that can help provide shelter, continue Ruba’s education, and restore the future they’ve been fighting to hold onto.

Every donation, no matter how small, is a step toward reuniting this young couple and helping them create a life filled with the love and security they deserve. Please consider donating to their campaign and sharing their story. Together, we can make a difference.

You can donate to Youssef's Chuffed campaign [HERE].

UPDATE (12/25/24):

This morning, I received a message from Youssef. He is just $350 away from being able to evacuate to safety from recent attacks. This is such an attainable goal if we band together! Please consider donating, and if you’re unable to, sharing his story can make all the difference. Thank you! 🙏

[rohvee]

I gotta know — what’s NEM!Viktor’s relationship with technology and engineering before he’s imprisoned/after he’s freed? We’re talking about the guy who built a working boat toy from scraps as a kid and disarmed a bomb in seconds in canon. If he was a scientist before his 1000 year long coma, does he renounce the role after, or has it been so long/left him so confused/overstimulated that he doesn’t even clearly remember anything he studied? Or is he enraptured by the technology of the future, thrilled that he was saved by another engineer?

I’m embarrassed by how long it took me to figure out what NEM stood for and also thank you for bringing that acronym to my attention because that sounds COOL AS FUCK

He was an engineer and software engineer 1000 years ago, and was on the team that developed the AI that would evolve into the Herald (which is part of why the Herald is obsessed with him)

I’m gonna go on a tangent for world context lmao: The technology of Viktor’s time was actually more advanced (basically a little further in the future of our modern day), the Herald kind of destroyed the world after it imprisoned Viktor and civilization collapsed and has been struggling to come back ever since. They very much rely on scrounged ancient tech and what they can learn from it. BUT the Church of the Mech-Divina dominates civilization and gatekeeps technology so they have a lot more advanced tech than the rest of society.

Also, in the background, the Herald’s machines that it builds are doing their own thing, set to strange tasks that no one understands, like building strange structures out in the desert that no one really knows the purpose of. The Church considers this divine and ineffable activity.

Viktor is and always will be an engineer at heart, Jayce is fascinated by his insight into ancient tech (since it isn’t ancient to him) and Viktor delights at being able to nerd out about it with him! Viktor also has a neural implant (courtesy of the Herald, what it used to keep him connected to the hivemind) and can interface with the Herald’s machines (though he prefers not to for obvious reasons).

Thank you for the fun question and excuse to brainspew! 🤣❤️

[postanagramgenerator]

What are your ideas on solipsism?

what are your ideas on solipsism?

->

this area is only me? o powur is sad

->

how am i doly parton? issues arise

->

my reasons as i aphorise it? would

->

u hit a pissed moose irl anways? or

if you found a little joy in my anagram (or, series of anagrams in this case), please consider donating a little joy to tawfik (@90-tawfik). he's a young software engineer from gaza who needs our support to secure his future education. his fundraiser was reblogged by ahmed 90-ghost, all his photos are original and he has his id card pictured in his gofundme description.

[dev-tawfik]

Together, We Can Help Tawfik Achieve His Dream! 🌟

In the heart of Gaza, where resilience meets hardship, Tawfik’s journey began with a dream to become a skilled software engineer. He pursued his studies at Al-Azhar University in Gaza, where his talent and dedication shone brightly. But the harsh reality of war shattered his aspirations, leaving his university in ruins.

Tawfik refused to give up. Determined to rebuild his future, he set his sights on continuing his education in Egypt. However, the financial burden is overwhelming. He needs $6,000 annually to cover tuition fees—a significant challenge given the economic hardships he faces.

💡 With your support, we can help Tawfik turn his dream into reality!

Every contribution, no matter how small, brings him closer to a brighter future.

Vetted by @90-ghost link

Vetted by @dlxxv link

@wilwheaton @woonyoung @wiltkingart @wtf-scientific-papers @wellwaterhysteria @littlestpersimmon

@robogart @rosslynpaladin @rickybabyboy @roadimusprime @k-eke @kinderes @katsunaksu @beidak-art @bixels @alittlemorelikeyou @akajustmerry @artsy-alice @awesomepeoplehangingouttogether

@valdrift @virovac @vampirian @colourmeastonished @comrademango @courtjester69420 @hungwy @halalchampagnesocialist @queerandmultifandomiguess @queerstudiesnatural

@offendedbydjinns @ot3 @origami10 @o-lanterns @sarakipin @strange-aeons @fruitblush @frankocean

@peachdeluxe @prisonhannibal @plastiboo @gothhabiba @glamwisegamgee @gabrielgraetz @femmefitz

@commissions4aid-international @iniro @imlizy @i-am-aprl @everydaylouie

[ghadah-almadhoun2]

"Surviving the holocaust:

A Journey of Resilience and Hope"

My name is Rema, the youngest daughter of my family. I am a 22-year-old software engineering student, striving to complete my education despite the devastating impact of war on our lives.

I hesitated for a long time before creating a donation link, hoping my life would soon return to normal. But that hope was shattered when I lost my father, who couldn’t endure the suffering. Living in a tent for five months, surviving on canned food, and drinking polluted water devastated his health until he passed away.

Today, I not only mourn the loss of my father but also endure the pain of being separated from my family. The war has scattered us; my beloved brother, my sisters, and my nieces and nephews are all far away.

I am left alone to face a harsh reality , burdened with responsibilities that are beyond my strength.

Every day is a battle to secure clean drinking water and basic food. We are merely struggling to survive in this crushing poverty, where hunger and soaring prices weigh heavily on us.

Before the war, I was a fitness enthusiast, an outstanding student, and the cherished daughter of my family. My father supported me and promised to stand by my side until I graduated. But now he’s gone, and with him, my dream of completing my education as I had planned.

I once hoped life would return to normal, but even if the war ends, who will bring back my father? Who will reunite me with my scattered family?

That’s why I am appealing to everyone who reads my story to lend a helping hand and contribute to rebuilding a future that war has destroyed.

Your support and donations are a lifeline for me and my mother. Even the smallest contribution can make a difference and save us. Thank you for your kindness and humanity.

Vetted by @gaza-evacuation-funds 330

Vetted by @gazavetters 105

[laraali8]

Please help me and my family from this damn war and help me spread my campaign and donate for us🥺🍉

●Hello everyone, I am Lara, 20 years old, studying software engineering👩‍💻. I was supposed to be in my third year and I was about to become an engineer until the damned destruction came and destroyed our lives, our future and our memories...

I want to share with you my story and my family's in this war🥺🍉💔

●In October, my family and I were displaced after the occupation spread leaflets and asked us to evacuate to the south. My family and I were displaced to Nusairat in a school and lived there for 3 months (where we lived 50 people in one row, imagine the number of people!! There was no privacy, no comfort, no sleep due to the heavy shelling. We also suffered from a flour crisis and a lot of suffering...)

●Then the school became unsafe. The occupation threw leaflets to evacuate the school and bombed and shelled us. Then we were displaced to Khan Yunis and spent days sleeping in the street until they donated a tent for us

(you know what it means for 8 people to live, my mother, father and sisters in a small tent... and here begins another suffering for my family, where there is no privacy, no cleanliness, no None of the necessities of life were present)

●We stayed in Khan Yunis for two months until the occupation used the tents of the displaced and our tent was hit by shrapnel, and my sisters and I sustained serious injuries. Then another suffering begins with displacement to another place. We were displaced to Deir al-Balah in a nylon tent on the beach that did not protect us from the cold of winter, the harsh air, the rain, the insects, or anything else.

《 At that time, our neighbor heard the news that the occupation had completely destroyed our neighborhood. Our house was destroyed, and with it our dreams, our children, and our future were destroyedAnd now we are homeless》

● Now we are suffering from high prices of food, flour, and detergents. We live on the tekke. We have no source of income (because my father's profession before the war was daily, and now he has lost his job and cannot work because he has become ill).

☆ Now I find myself in a position where I must humbly ask for your support for me and my family, to provide them with food and clothes because our clothes are worn out, and to obtain the simplest necessities of life that the occupation has prevented us from obtaining

☆ Every donation, no matter how small, will make a big difference in helping us rebuild our lives and provide necessities for my family. We are in a fragile situation, and your support during these extremely difficult times will give us hope in the midst of despair. Your generosity will not only help us get food and the necessities of life again, but will also restore our faith in the kindness of humanity.🥺🙏

✅️Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #241 )✅️

Please donate and share my campaign 😭👇

[the-most-humble-blog]

<div style="white-space:pre-wrap"> <meta species-shame="irrecoverable"> <script> ARCHIVE_TAG="HUMANITY::DEATH_GOD_PRIMATE::KILLSTREAK_COSMIC" EFFECT: ego fracture, ancestral guilt, laughter through blood TRIGGER_WARNING="statistical war crimes, species-wide roast, extinction prophecy" </script>

🩸 THE MOST HORRIFICALLY MURDEROUS PRIMATE IN HISTORY? LOOK IN THE FUCKING MIRROR. 🩸

—

You ever wonder what the most blood-soaked, batshit insane, nightmare-fueled apex predator ever to soil the surface of this planet is?

Chimp? Gorilla? A baboon with an inferiority complex and a machete?

Nah, bitch.

It’s you.

Not “humankind” in a feel-good, TED Talk tone.

YOU. Right now. Reading this. Sitting there with murder in your bloodline and a Wi-Fi connection.

—

🧠 YOU ARE A HIGH-FUNCTIONING MASSACRE ENGINE.

You aren’t just violent. You are performance-art-level violent.

🦈 Sharks kill because they’re hungry. 🦁 Lions kill to eat. 🐍 Snakes kill to defend themselves.

You?

You kill because you got ghosted. Because a flag looked different. Because a guy walked into your parking space.

And you’ll do it with flair, hashtags, and historical revisionism.

—

📉 STATS THAT MAKE GOD FLINCH

🧬 Chimps kill 1-2% of their group. You?

You were clocking 12–15% murder rates in prehistoric societies before literacy.

Middle Ages? 30-40 per 100,000 murdered every year in Europe. Not counting all the unrecorded shankings over bread, women, and vibes.

Modern era? Just a sample platter of your greatest hits:

🌍 WWII: 85 million dead

🍚 Mao’s Great Leap: 45 million starved

❄️ Stalin’s purges: 20 million deleted

⛓️ Atlantic Slave Trade: 15+ million moved like furniture, millions more dead

🌄 Native genocide: 90% wiped out like a fucking software update

Y’all killed entire civilizations and gave it a name like Manifest Destiny.

This isn’t war.

This is performance homicide with branding.

—

😈 SERIAL KILLING? THAT’S FOLKLORE TO US.

You are the only species that kills:

✅ For fun ✅ For art ✅ For profit ✅ For theology ✅ For lunch ✅ For no reason at all

Dolphins might be freaky.

But only humans looked at a beating heart and thought:

“Y’know what? I bet I can make furniture out of that.”

Ted Bundy? Dahmer? Gein?

They're not anomalies. They're proof-of-concept.

You evolved just enough empathy to feel the kill, then just enough abstraction to enjoy the aftermath.

—

🏆 YOU ARE THE MICHAEL JORDAN OF DEATH.

If murder was a sport?

Humanity invented the court, killed the referee, and played naked for drama.

You kill:

For land (colonialism, gentrification, turf wars)

For faith (crusades, jihads, “convert or die”)

For oil (aka “freedom”)

For resources (the Congo’s blood-soaked minerals)

For politics (genocides, death squads, Twitter beef)

For TikTok clout (yes, we’re here now)

And sometimes?

You just do it.

Because "he looked at me wrong."

—

🤡 “BUT WE’VE EVOLVED!” — SWEETIE, NO.

You think we’re peaceful now?

You just moved the slaughter to spreadsheets.

Now we:

☑️ Drone strike families from climate-controlled bunkers ☑️ Starve nations through economic sanctions ☑️ Destroy lives via algorithm ☑️ Gaslight history with AI ☑️ Disappear whistleblowers behind corporate logos

You didn’t evolve.

You rebranded.

Now murder wears a fucking lanyard.

—

🌍 THE 21ST CENTURY IS SHAPING UP GREAT 🔥

🌪️ Climate collapse? We’re about to kill ourselves with weather.

🤖 AI war systems? Robots with machine guns and zero emotional baggage.

🏛️ Rising fascism? Been there. Mass graves. Black boots. Coming back like a reboot no one asked for.

You’re not better.

You’re smoother.

You’re murder with UX design.

—

🪞 LOOK IN THE MIRROR, EXTINCTION MONKEY.

You are a walking extinction event.

Lions stop when they’re full. You kill until God hits reset.

You kill the future. You kill infrastructure. You kill your own blood. You kill while praying.

And the scariest part?

You call it progress.

So next time you brush your teeth, and glance up at your reflection?

Just say:

“There it is. The deadliest apex predator in planetary history. Homo sapiens. Made of meat. Designed for violence. And I love brunch.”

—

📢 REBLOG. FOLLOW. SPREAD THE APOCALYPSE.

This isn’t a mood board. This isn’t a meme. This is your species profile.

You are what nightmares have nightmares about.

—

🧠 FOLLOW [The Most Humble Blog] for more brain-cracking transmissions- Now on Patreon! 🔁 REBLOG to slap someone awake with data 💬 COMMENT if you’re ready to get roasted alive with stats

You don’t escape this.

You either accept it or get eaten by it.

</div> <!-- END TRANSMISSION [BLOOD-INDEX: 100%. MIRROR STATUS: SHATTERED.] -->

[harrierttv]

So would Lion-o eventually cut ties with Claudus in the modern au? We all know his got the emotional capacity of a teaspoon and is as hard-headed as a brick, I don't see him being the type to admit that he was wrong about Lion-o nor would he apologize for his neglect that quickly.

I'm going to save that teaspoon comment for later! That's ✨️gold✨️

That's interesting because when it comes to the modern Au I've only imagined Liono up to his early twenties, where he'd work as a software engineer for his dads company.

But I'd imagine they'd have a huge fight eventually. Maybe Liono suggests a project for new software (can you tell I know next to nothing about computers 😅) and not only would Claudus dismiss the idea, he'd call it a waste of money.

Considering he just insulted his son's career, Liono would throw back the lacklustre way this company treats the future, and would leave immediately.

Tygra would be stuck in the middle. He *knows* how good his little brothers programming skills are, and losing them so suddenly would cost the company big time. But he doesn't want to argue with his dad either, because that's kind of pointless.

If the argument got bad enough, yeah I could see Liono leaving. Hell, he may even go no contact with his dad. This shocks and scares Claudus, because he never thought Liono would go that far. But he's still too stubborn to admit fault.

Liono wasn't the only programmer at the company, but they'll surely take a huge hit when he leaves.