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> I plan to personally use it to encrypt and backup some of my GPG keys offline, then burn them onto M-DISC discs and store them in a bank safe

Won’t that make it difficult to rotate your keys?

Keys should be something you don’t hesitate to throw away and rotate at the first hint of a compromise.


My GPG key is renewed expire date every 2 years, and the main key and sub key are separated (the main key is stored offline, and the sub key is on YubiKey). The private key does not need to be updated regularly, so it can be directly encrypted and saved in the backup.

I think this is a good balance point, and I estimate that if we want to rotate the keys completely in the future, we should start using new key algorithms. (I estimate it will take another 5-8 years)


> Keys should be something you don’t hesitate to throw away and rotate at the first hint of a compromise.

Yes, when certain situations arise, it is necessary to rotate the keys as soon as possible, but in the absence of such situations, losing key backups can be catastrophic.


Tangential, but I have no idea who is eating at Arby’s. The food looks positively vile from the advertisements.

It used to be pretty good. Same as most fast food.

No. It wasn’t ever good. Tried it in the early eighties. It was barely dog food back then too.

Do you not like your dogs or something? I wouldn't give Arby's to someone I hated.

The food is pretty vile. Friends that worked their described the "beef" as being a weird loaf of pressurized mewt-like protein before its sliced.

I used to eat there occasionally because it was cheapish many, many years ago.


That company sounds like a clusterfuck. Good luck attracting good talent with such dysfunctional leadership.

A lot of WordPress enterprise users will be upset after finding out that after paying $20-100k a month, Wordpress actually poaches their employees. Just inspect a Wordpress enterprise site's response to certain endpoints using cURL or Postman, it will actually tell you to apply for Automattic. I have been meaning to write about this for a very long time.

People pay $100k/mo for fucking Wordpress in 2026?

News sites can be very large - so running on Wordpress.com infrastructure can cause such amount. With cloud storage (provided by WP), additional support etc.

Eh I mean this is common default no? If you inspect element on many sites it links to the career page. Reddit, discord, etc.

Maybe a little distasteful since I suppose since these WordPress sites are not owned by WordPress, but I wouldn't really say it's unique or necessarily poaching


It's not poaching to post an ad that someone who works elsewhere happens to see.

Humans are not cattle

Its called "free movement of labor" and its a very good thing. Arguably the reason that Silicon Valley happened in the first place.


Too bad because they have some incredible products

All I know is Wordpress and Beeper, are any of their other products good? Like isn't WooCommerce an absolute also-ran compared to Amazon, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, etc?

Woocommerce is everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. Over four million stores.

About a third of all non-big-box/amazon online shopping runs through Woocommerce installations. Much more than Shopify, which is the next biggest.

Because it’s a plugin for WP you might not ever notice a store is Woocommerce until you get the store emails that people often don’t customise much and have an identifiable look to them.

It’s fully possible to run a simple Woocommerce store without giving anyone a cut beyond your payment provider’s normal fees.

It’s not too difficult to extend; custom payment gateways and order processing hooks, inbound APIs, GraphQL etc.

If you are judicious about your install — just run Woocommerce, WP, customise one of the core themes or a well-known good theme like WP-Start or an Anders Noren theme, use the Stripe or Paypal payment gateway —- it’s pretty solidly secure, too; you’ll get automatic updates.

It’s definitely not the most fun thing to configure and administer, but it’s not Magento at least. I have never enjoyed that.

Automattic’s acquisition of Woocommerce was absolutely a blessing at the time. Some of the more complex extensions to Woocommerce are paid addons, which is where they make their money (as well as payment gateway referral fees, which was a little-noticed part of the squabble with WP Engine, who modified Woocommerce to change the referrer to point to them). Woothemes (the previous owner) were unpredictable and a little rapacious; they changed their pricing in ways that caused concern (and Woocommerce itself started as an acrimonious and hostile fork of a plugin called Jigoshop).

I would really like to stop using WP over time, and it feels more urgent each time an Automattic story hits the headlines.

But I don’t think there are many better small e-commerce offerings than Woocommerce that offer that level of open-source control or cost control for people who need to run a modestly large store on a true shoestring.


You’re from the Matt “WordPress is 45% of websites” school of statistics. WooCommerce is nothing compared to Shopify, barely a blip, inconsequential. WooCommerce is “installed” on millions of websites but it processes perhaps 1% of the volume of Shopify.

WooCommerce isn’t bad, acquiring it was a good call for Automattic, but to put it in the same league as Shopify is pure fantasy.

As for cost control, I’m not sure why you think Shopify is more expensive. Moving from WooCommerce to Shopify is expensive because migrations are expensive but day to day running costs are pretty much equivalent.

https://trends.builtwith.com/websitelist/WooCommerce-Checkou...

https://trends.builtwith.com/shop

And keep in mind most major Shopify users are building out their own front ends so these BuiltWith numbers are underreporting on big Shopify customers, whereas WooCommerce is almost never used without a WordPress front end. These are the most favorable numbers to WooCommerce and they are still bad.

edit: it’s even worse than I thought. Woo’s own stats cite storeleads.app which lists the biggest Woo stores as… some blogs? Shopify has most of the top stores from brands we all recognize. Woo has zero. Woo’s involvement in actual commerce is pitiful, I think 1% of Shopify is optimistic.

edit edit: one of Woo’s most popular stores is billyparisi.com. A recipe website that sells a couple of t-shirts. A WordPress blog that drives all of the traffic and a WooCommerce tacked on for the sake of it. And that’s one of Woo’s best.


> About a third of all non-big-box/amazon online shopping runs through Woocommerce installations. Much more than Shopify, which is the next biggest.

Source? This source [0] puts Shopify 10x ahead of WooCommerce on GMV. They're close on number of installations. That roughly matches my experience working in this space in 2022, though it's definitely possible our customers weren't representative of the market as a whole.

[0] https://www.sanjaydey.com/shopify-vs-woocommerce-why-brands-...


The link that you provided largely confirms what parent said: it puts WooCommerce ahead of Shopify in terms of store count, with a number (4.34M live stores) which is consistent to the one mentioned by parent ("over four million stores").

> They're close on number of installations.

2.84M vs 4.34M is quite a wide margin, wouldn't you agree?

It's true that the link puts Shopify at roughly 10X in terms of GMV but parent did not claim otherwise.


I think any interpretation of this that would measure "a third of... shopping" by number of individual sites rather than dollar volume is disingenuous at best.

> About a third of all non-big-box/amazon online shopping runs through Woocommerce installations

And as for this:

> 2.84M vs 4.34M is quite a wide margin, wouldn't you agree?

No, I wouldn't. I think that's within the margin of error for the typical methodology of this kind of research. They're the same number.


I stand corrected!

I'm a fan of PocketCasts as my podcast app on Android. It was bought by Automattic in 2021.

TIL! Am I crazy or was it at one point partly owned by NPR?

You're not crazy.

Pocket Casts was originally developed by a South Australian startup, Shifty Jelly. Sold to a consortium of public broadcasters which included NPR. Then there was a change of heart the the public broadcasters decided that they actually don't want to be in the game, so was divested in a firesale.

Automattic has picked up a few of these assets for peanuts, Tumblr and Pocket Casts are amongst them. All are assets which were once much more high flying, but still have a core of dedicated users/fans.


Not an enterprise product, but SimpleNote is great. I was happy that they bought it.

Matt famously used it himself and bought them the domain name (which was expensive) and gave it to them no-strings-attached.

A more optimistic, less chaotic and exasperating time.


All I care about is my favourite podcast app, Pocket Casts, which Automattic bought in a dumpster fire a few years ago.

But even if I don't personally use WP, the fact that something like 25% of the web runs on software which this lunatic has this much control over, is problematic in itself.


Eh, it's not a seller's market anymore.

>I’m not sticking up for car manufacturers, but at what size or capacity should you be required to document and publish these things? It requires employer time and effort and has a cost associated with it.

You're talking about things that by definition have to be documented and internally published in order to design and build the powertrain in the first place. You can't design a computer-controlled automatic transmission without documenting the shift points.

The cost is therefore essentially nothing, because the information already exists. Just copy paste it into a PDF and put it on your website.


Well you see, requiring companies to let farmers fix their own tractors is Socialism. And the USSR had "socialist" in the name, so Socialism bad. In the big, beautiful Land of the Free(tm) they don't do Socialism because that's commie shit.

The American Way is to let corporations fuck you over in any way that increases profits. Sure, they have the least efficient healthcare system in the world, ineffectual public education, massive wealth disparity, crumbling national infrastructure, and a different school shooting every week.

But at least they're not socialists.


not sure what's socialist about it. farming is a weird sector though (and a small one; crucial, of course)

>the least efficient healthcare system in the world

and the most advanced healthcare

>ineffectual public education

actually it's better than most rich countries after controlling for race/ethnicity

that said, healthcare, education, and most of all housing are massively far from free markets, they're the most regulated parts and it's hard to innovate. the more free you make those markets, the better they'll get.

>massive wealth disparity

because, and this is no exaggeration, we are way fucking wealthier than almost anything except oil-rich Norway and tiny Luxembourg. it's a lot easier to have disparity when some grasses grow tall.

>crumbling national infrastructure

depends; California and New York yes, Texas no

>and a different school shooting every week

not that often but this is an american pathology yeah


> and the most advanced healthcare

(ignoring Australia and other countries having longer life expectancies and better cancer recovery rates, sure)

> not that often

It's telling you have to downplay this at all.

> depends; California and New York yes, Texas no

and the more than 40 other states? See the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Infrastructure Report Card (spoiler, it's a C)


> the least efficient healthcare system in the world

> the more free you make those markets, the better they'll get.

How can you concede the first point and argue the second in the same breath? Are you about to tell me European healthcare is cheaper because its some bastiom of deregulation?


European healthcare sucks. Waiting for your appointment for months is not unheard of. (I can’t compare EU and US, but my guess is the problems are largely the same, just less pronounced.)

You have fallen for propaganda.

I recently moved to Ireland (an EU country).

When I wanted to get set up with a new GP, I was offered an appointment the same week. I wasn't ready to actually go in yet, so I asked for one the following week. My wife needed some specialty care, and when we made the appointment they were very apologetic that they could't give us an appointment until 2.5 weeks later. (For a non-emergency consult, preparatory to a specialty surgery.)

Meanwhile, in the US, when we tried to make GP appointments, they were routinely not available until 6-8 weeks later. And that's if it was even possible; we had 2 GPs just leave the area over the course of a few years, and in both cases we were left to find our own replacements, despite the fact that both were part of larger medical practices with at least a half-dozen GPs each (plus others).


I’m going by my own experience (Estonia) and stories by my friends (mostly Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK). Glad to hear it’s better in Ireland! I’ve also heard some good things about Poland.

***

From my experience in Estonia, any specialty care routinely has month+ waiting list. One example: I was trying to get diagnosed for ADHD, and a couple clinics were ready to make an appointment for me... where I could take the test, then wait a couple months until the actual psychiatrist can see me.

Then there’s dental care. I’ve had a chat with a nice girl who had, like, really bad teeth problems. Asked why she doesn’t get it fixed, and sure enough it’s nearly impossible to get an appointment on state insurance, and paying out of pocket was way too expensive for her. (We’ve joked about getting her a Russian visa so she could just go to St. Petersburg like I’ve been doing for my dental problems; of course, that was before the full-blown Russo-Ukrainian war.)

GP and emergency care are great. One night out I’ve twisted an ankle, decided it was not a big deal, so I got home, and woke up in the morning barely able to walk. Took an Uber, got to the nearest emergency room and got an x-ray and everything in maybe a couple hours. I haven’t been on the insurance plan at the moment, so at first I was quoted around 400 €, but after some back-and-forth I’ve learned that for same day accidents the rate is lower. Told them it was at 1am, so the final price was 5 € :-)

***

I don’t doubt it’s way worse in the US (never been!) My point is rather that regulation doesn’t really help here. We need to make incentives to have more affordable options, and make it easier to get to the market.

I’m now seeing a psychiatrist in Thailand for around $45 a session, and sure, everything is cheaper in Thailand, but the best part is I never have to wait more than a week to get a slot, and it’s all online. The most difficult part for me is going to Thailand every couple of months to pick up the meds.


I've heard stories of USians waiting months for their insurer to agree to pay...

>>crumbling national infrastructure

> depends; California and New York yes, Texas no

lol. lmao.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis


They didn't build sheds around the wells that were insulated enough so the wellheads froze up from the water in the extract, not due to crumbling infra. Now, whether they've fixed the problem, I guess we'll see the next time it hits 0°F.

so advanced healthcare that maternal death ratio is higher than russia.

> actually it's better than most rich countries after controlling for race/ethnicity

Our public education is so pozzed in Dem/Blue states, though; that has nothing to do with ethnic makeup in the students. Bloated budgets fueling insidious DEI agendas with openly consumer-hostile teachers unions. Maybe in sane states it's better.

> and the most advanced healthcare

We have miraculously great trauma medicine and surgery and diagnostics. The NICU medicine I've seen at work is like science fiction.

That said, I'd argue my family doctor is just a brainless expert system for prescribing toxic pharma products. There's nothing healthful about that aspect of our healthcare. The terrible US diet and these wretched drugs are why we're so sick and the trauma doctors are so busy. It's complicated why it costs a fortune and yet we're so sick.

Americans need consumer protections so badly!


> actually it's better than most rich countries after controlling for race/ethnicity

Yikes dude


>actually it's better than most rich countries after controlling for race/ethnicity

Can an American explain what this is supposed to be saying? Sounds like a right wing sound byte.

Are black people supposed to be inherently less healthy???


It's about schools. Black Americans have worse education outcomes on average because of poverty, racial bias, unequal school funding and a culture where education is not as valued as with, say, Chinese Americans.

Saying this is something you need to "control for" is complete statistical nonsense. You wouldn't say "the accessibility in this building is better than average after controlling for wheelchair use".


They actually said that about education, so we are supposed to believe that eg black people are inherently less smart. I stopped reading their post before this tho :)

"is Socialism" ... not it's not. I'm always puzzled how bad education must have been to those people putting the stamp "socialism" on everything they don't like.

Socialism is a political ideology centered (it's really at it's core!) the idea of "means of production must be in the hands of the people". In reality the "means of production" (capital, land, workforce) was in the hands of a small undemocratic elected ruling caste. But the core idea still prevails. In socialism banks were seized (capital), land was seized from the farmers and Kolchoses or LPGs (agricultural production cooperatives) were formed by force. Companies were seized and Kombinate" were formed. The underlying idea of all of this force is the "dictatorship of the proletariat", their way to tell themselves that cruelty and excessive physical and psychological force is okay, almost a must.

Right to repair has nothing to do with seizing capital, land, or pressing the workforce into mismanaged cooperatives.

Another central idea of socialism is the thinking of castes, err classes. Most notably the worker classes. That describes the situation in GB around the industrial revolution. But today? Won't fit in most countries.

Right to repair has nothing to do with working class. A professor (the "intelectual class") would also be able to repair his stuff.


Never has a man of straw been so completely eviscerated. An absolute massacre. Bravo.

Yep and they were fined a paltry 6 million dollars or so. For actively distributing and infecting users with malware. This on annual sales exceeding $3B.

That case sure put Mark Russinovich on everyone’s radars, at least.

Good times.


> What happens when cops are allowed real-time access to Waymo's in-car video footage?

Same thing that happens whenever cops get new surveillance powers. They’ll use it to stalk and harass women.


The size and scale of that problem absolutely pales in comparison to the number of people who will be screwed by a better ability to enforce unpopular or rarely enforced laws.

And the sick part is how many useful idiots will go to bat for all of it because "well they broke the law after all"


No, I know this is a minority opinion on HN but I think violence towards women is a larger problem than seldomly enforced laws being enforced more often.

You can repeal a law. The courts can strike it down. The same cannot be said about cops abusing women, which is statistically well established.


Whatever appeal to emotion crime you want to cook up, violence toward women, unfair targeting of minorities, etc, etc. That's all already not allowed either by law or rule.

Fixing that stuff by enforcing the existing rules against it wouldn't make these systems fine. The fundamental point of these systems is to let the government screw the people.


Sure, but the quote I was responding to was not "what will the government do", it was "what will cops do". Well, Flock and countless other examples have shown us exactly what cops will do.

35 years ago we didn’t have the cultural precedent/zeitgeist of getting cancelled for some stupid shit you wrote on a message board in 1991 so we were less guarded with our opinions.

Do we actually have a culture of cancelling people for the things they wrote when they were 12?

No, and we don't really have a culture of cancelling things for people they say now, either, when it comes down to it because if that were true, Trump would not be president given his long history of [waves hands], a large number of Republican politicians would also be out of work, etc.

So what is it that drives such phrases into common parlance as a description of the apparently-fictitious culture of rote cancellation, might one suppose?

I might suggest that "projection" is a primary motivator, although I work to avoid projecting on my own time.

(Edit: To disambiguate without vagueness: When some fucking party or other is talking about "cancel culture," they usually seem, to me, to be projecting about their own fucking party's fucking ugly policies and tactics.

And in a sane and pure world, I'd like to wish that they'd be recognized as being fucking scumbags for behaving in this way.

But it is my observation that we do not always live in a sane and pure world.)


It’s also in darkness for 2 weeks. Terrestrial radio telescopes experience sunlight too. That would seem to be a solved problem.

and the moon is over 200°F in that sunlight.

There is no atmosphere to speak of, so only if directly exposed. Hence that's a solvable issue.

The whole thing is incredibly expensive though, while it may be doable with current technology, the amount of money they'd have to set aside may be a hard sell for the miniscule potential of this research - at least from the lens of 2026... So the original position of the article makes sense, it may become functionally impossible, even if technically possible


So, less than the boiling temp of water. That is not outside the realm of solvable problems

Thank Prabhakar Raghavan for that. After destroying Yahoo’s search product he failed up and did the same at Google.

In reward for making Google Search materially worse in every way except ad revenue, he failed up again and was promoted to a cushy do-nothing role.

Everything wrong with the tech industry, embodied in a single person.


Well one has to look a level up and ask who the people are who hire such people and why

Do you have any source outside of the Ed Zitron article (which is highly specualtive?)

He wasn't the one who merged ads and search into the same org. The blame has to fall on Sundar, surely.

> promoted to a cushy do-nothing role

The people who this happens to are not perceived as successes. Everyone knows they are gentle firings.


If Google's ad revenue is going up he is keeping the shareholders happy.

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