the brandensite

Wordpress Leadership Explosion 2024 Dec 20
Slowly exploding in front of the world since September is WordPress's leadership. WordPress, for anyone who doesn't know, is software used to make and run websites. A lot of websites. Something like 43.3% of the websites on the internet. Everyone from your neighborhood cafe to the State of California to Sony Music. (the brandensite does not use WordPress – I find it bloated and burdensome.) And while WordPress is an Open Source project, it's de facto controlled by its creator, Matt Mullenweg. This hasn't mattered outside of project leadership – Matt's direction has rarely courted controversy – until recently.

Because recently, Matt decided that one of the big for-profit WordPress hosting companies, WP Engine, even though they were obeying their contracts and agreements, still wasn't contributing to the WordPress project enough money, wasn't giving back enough to the community. So he used his control over the WordPress project to throw a public tantrum and shut down their link to WordPress, stranding all their customers' websites. WP Engine responded like the adults in the room, with a PR-crafted letter and lawyer-crafted lawsuit, and the courts have since forced WordPress to play fair. So Matt, who is worth somewhere around $400m, in turn threw another public tantrum and shut down all WordPress.org account registrations.

Which is what spurred Joost de Valk, probably the second-biggest name at WordPress, to write the linked blog post, where he basically says (in polite words) that it's time for WordPress to get rid of Matt Mullenweg and move to proper board-of-directors-style leadership, and oh yes also that he's actually already taking the steps to do so. Matt commented on Joost's post:

I think this is a great idea for you to lead and do under a name other than WordPress. There’s really no way to accomplish everything you want without starting with a fresh slate from a trademark, branding, and people point of view.

Which I read as a very polite "fuck off."

Of course, if you check on Matt Mullenweg's website yourself, this is all a smear campaign and Matt's of course being a completely reasonable dictator and all his dictatorial actions are justified. Naturally.

Yet still, you can't tell me it's better for this software that's so massively important to the web to be under the control of one person, especially one person who acts like a spurned child on a playground lashing out against the people with whom he's offered to share his toys when they play with his toys in a way he doesn't like.

Spotify playlists are full of low-effort slop, and nobody notices 2024 Dec 19
This is a Harper's article about "ghost artists" – sound-alike muzak created for "mood" playlists that Spotify encourages the creation of because it's cheaper to play these tracks than music created by real artistic effort. It's presented as yet another eking away at musicians' ability to make a living from their art, yet the deeper issue I wonder about is the listener's inability to tell that they're listening to pandering, derivative slop. Quoting one of the musicians hired to create these tracks:

Honestly, for most of this stuff, I just write out charts while lying on my back on the couch. And then once we have a critical mass, they organize a session and we play them. And it’s usually just like, one take, one take, one take, one take. You knock out like fifteen in an hour or two.

It comes as little surprise that the muzak companies behind this have close financial ties to Spotify, and are also starting to lean into AI-created music, because of course they are.

And then there's this Hacker News comment about the Harper's article, from a person claiming to run one of these muzak firms, which passes no judgement, but does add a new point-of-view:

I run a label that has direct deals with certain major DSPs. We do over a billion streams a year.

The entire “wellness” music category is programming driven. Much of my energy is spent building and maintaining relationships with the programmers, even with our direct deals. We take a reduced payout on the master side in return for preferential treatment on playlist positions.

I have an active roster of extremely talented producers. It’s a volume play. I’ve made tracks that I’m quite proud of in 90 minutes that have done 20+ million streams.

It’s a wild system but we’ve made it work. Not really a critique or an endorsement - just making a living making music.

Edit: fun fact, Sleep Sounds is generally the #1 streamed playlist on the entire Apple Music platform.

Not to be a snob, but... (I am a snob) listen to real fucking music, people.

Flickr: Your Best Shot 2024 -- Urban 2024 Dec 19
Hey look, my photo got featured in a Flickr-curated gallery as part of the "Your Best Shot 2024" contest. That's neat.

Esperanto has 1,000 native speakers? 2024 Dec 17
In light of Zamenhof Day (two days ago, whoops), the wiki page for the constructed language Esperanto's creator, L. L. Zamenhof, claims the language has an estimated 1,000 native speakers. It does? Really?

The wiki cites sources, as it should, giving us two. The first is Ethnologue, a group which studies all languages, and which contrarily makes no claim towards there being any native speakers of Esperanto. Huh.

The second wiki source listed, though, is an article on the online language school Babbel's website called What Is Esperanto, And Who Speaks It? The article text is as you'd expect from the headline, and includes this quote: "And even though Esperanto was made to be an auxiliary language, there is a cohort of about 1,000 people who speak Esperanto as their first language, a few of whom were interviewed in the video above." The 'video above' is six minutes of casual interviews with ten-ish people entirely in Esperanto (and with no subtitles, in any language), so whether these people are native speakers and if so, how they came to be, is not possible for me to determine.

The next line of the Babbel article claims, "The most famous native speaker is Hungarian-American billionaire philanthropist George Soros, whose father was a devotee of the language." George Soros is a Jewish banker, liberal political donor, and conspiracy magnet, but he is also the son of Tivador Soros, an Esperanto author who changed his family name from Schwartz to Soros supposedly because of the Esperanto meaning will soar (or maybe he just was a fan of palindromes). But the Soros family was very much living in Hungary, and even if Tivador did teach his children Esperanto at a young age, surely they must have primarily used Hungarian in their day-to-day life, right?

This 2016 article from Tablet with a title referencing George Soros and Esperanto claims that while the invented language has an active and thriving community, it has no native speakers: "It’s probably better to spend your time learning Lithuanian or Tamil, which, unlike Esperanto, stand at the center of a living culture, with native speakers and a literary tradition." And later, "Esperanto was never supposed to be a native tongue, but rather an adaptable second language that would form a bridge between foreign speakers." But what about George Soros? Here, the article contradicts itself: "One currently world-famous Jew is that rarest of birds, a denaskulo (native speaker of Esperanto): George Soros." That and a few sentences following is his only mention in the article, although it does go on to mention an "Esperantist refuge called Bona Espero in rural Brazil." There, presumably, children could be raised speaking Esperanto natively... unless "the children prefer to speak Portuguese rather than Esperanto." [Aside: the article's worth a read for its detailing of the complicated relationship between Zamenhof, Esperanto, Judaism, and Zionism.]

In 2010, the New York Times says about George Soros: "He also recounted what it was like growing up in Budapest in the 1930s and ’40s in a home where Esperanto was spoken, making him one of the few native speakers in the room, if not the planet." But this contradicted by a Transparent Language Esperanto Blog 2011 post by (founder of the Esperanto-language wikipedia) Chuck Smith where the word "native" is crossed out in the quote "George Soros is the wealthiest native Esperanto speaker." Smith, in an interview with Esperanto advocate Humphrey Tonkin, prompts Tonkin into saying: "George Soros is not a native Esperanto speaker. Esperantists have made that claim on numerous occasions (it’s all over the Internet), but it’s simply not true. Soros learned Esperanto from his father when he was growing up, but his native language (his only native language) was Hungarian." (Tonkin also disputes that the name Soros was picked with its Esperanto meaning in mind.) But What Tonkin says makes sense, growing up learning a language even from childhood is not the same as being a native speaker. A native speaker of a language is a term without precise definition but connotes the person's mother tongue – the language in which they think.

Unreferenced on the Zamenhof wiki page is another wiki page, called Native Esperanto Speakers. While explicitly stating George Soros is not a native Esperanto speaker, it lists only five claimed native speakers by name, all notable people. First is Daniel Bovet, who won the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of antihistamines. His wiki page claims he's a native Esperanto speaker (sourced to fellow tertiary source NNDB, which itself cites no sources) while neither his biographies at the Nobel Prize nor the Royal Society even mention the language. He also once claimed that tobacco increases its user's intelligence, so, um...

Second is Petr Ginz, a novelist and teenage Holocaust victim whose diary was published posthumously. While he was the son of Esperantists and fluent in the language, his novels and diary were written in Czech, arguing against him being a true native Esperanto speaker. Third is Carlo Minnaja, a mathematician and author of the Esperanto-Italian dictionary. While undoubtedly fluent at a young age, being that by the time he was 20 he was on the board of the World Esperanto Youth Organization, I can find no further claim that he is a native speaker.

But then we have people who may actually be the real deal. Kim J. Henriksen's claim is strong since he has had said about him by American linguist and Klingon-speaker Arika Okrent that he "appeared not to appreciate how bizarre it was to be a native speaker of an invented language. Esperanto was the medium of his parents' relationship and of the entire home life of their family." She then adds, "Before you start getting indignant on his behalf, know that growing up he had plenty of contact with the world outside his home and learned to speak Danish as a native too. But he considered Esperanto his true mother tongue. For Kimo, Esperanto was a completely normal fact of life in the same way that Polish would have been if both of his parents had been Polish."

And lastly we have Ino Kolbe, an author and proof-reader of the Esperanto-German dictionary. The wiki says "Her parents were so dedicated to the Esperanto movement that the only language they used around her was Esperanto; therefore before entering school she learned her German only from other children," and that she grew up in a hotbed of Esperantism and at a time when even the League of Nations was considering the language's use in its General Assembly. (The source is a German newspaper; the link is dead but presumably trustworthy.)

So are there really 1,000 native speakers of Esperanto out there in the world, as the original statement claims? Are there 1,000 people who were raised by dedicated, diehard Esperantists, speaking the constructed language in their households and utopian villages? The existence of at least three scholarly papers would seem to argue towards this claim's substance, each being a study of native speakers of the language. The 2001 study by Benjamin K. Bergen of the UC Berkeley Linguistics Department of eight native speakers claims to be the first ever (investigating the 'nativization' of Esperanto), even though the 1996 study by Renato Corsetti, an Esperantist, (in Italian and Esperanto) documents 350 families with Esperanto-speaking children, saying the closest linguistic parallel seems to be the Hebrew revival. The 2005 study, again by Corsetti and now joined by Maria A. Pinto and Maria Tolomeo, traces development of Esperanto-speaking children but points out that they all have "two or three mother-tongues."

Let's end this long, pointless, rambling entry by linking to another Transparent Language Esperanto Blog post, this one from 2013 and titled 3rd gen native Esperanto speaker: Nicole! Here, Chuck Smith says, "Some people don’t believe that native Esperanto speakers exist." Yes, this is true. And while the article is updated with the face-palm correction that she's actually only a 2nd-generation native speaker, a native speaker she is. Nicole when asked about it says, "Well, I can’t compare that to what my life would’ve been like as a non-native Esperanto speaker, of course. However, it wasn’t annoying at all, and often it was nice to have a 'secret' language. It’s difficult to describe, but it was part of the family and somehow always felt 'nice.'"

Dangling prepositions 2024 Dec 17
Whether or not it is grammatically correct to end an English sentence with a preposition is a topic on the verge of becoming cliche, yet even in the year of our lard 2024 when monsignors Merriam, Webster, et al attempted to inform the public of this via the Insta, they were met with fierce backlash, refusal, and denial. This Grammar Underground article reminds these backlash-icans that they are, once again, wrong.

The power of lens compression 2024 Dec 13
I'm having fun reading around the rants on this Hollywood Visual Effects Artist Todd Vaziri's website, and this linked post in particular is right up my alley, talking about how using a very long lens to get dramatic visuals isn't actually a visual effect in the Hollywood sense. Worth reading his other blog posts, too.

How to repair the Windows 11 right-click menu 2024 Dec 11
In Windows 11, when you right-click in the interface or file explorer, you are by default given the new "streamlined" context menu. This new menu, in Microsoft's infinite wisdom, hides the text labels for many of the more common operations, making them accessible only through their icons.

This is terrible. Luckily, a quick creation of the registry entry Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\CLASSES\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32\ with a blank default key is enough to restore the "classic" context menu. Thanks, HowToGeek.

Censorship 2024 Dec 11
Seventeen years ago The Count taught us all a lesson in the beauty of censorship.

AI-generated feature movies 2024 Dec 11
Well, the future is here. And it's shit. Linked is a 404 Media about TCL's effort (the TV manufacturer) to create a streaming service of their own based on AI-generated "vomit" "content." And 404 co-founder Jason Koebler went to the premiere of their first efforts, which turns out, despite all the talent and money TCL has thrown at this, are unwatchable.

"But this is just the beginning" and "It's only going to get better from here" people say. Well, yes – it's difficult to see how they could get worse. "These tools are inevitable" and "we should get ahead of them" others express. The same has been said about mobile phone cameras, yet their use in Hollywood remains a gimmick.

404 Media really sums up the main prospect of AI-generated slop in this paragraph:

For every earnest, creative filmmaker carefully using AI to enhance what they are doing to tell a better story, there will be thousands of grifters spamming every platform and corner of the internet with keyword-loaded content designed to perform in an algorithm and passively wash over you for the sole purpose of making money. For every studio carefully using AI to make a better movie, there will be a company making whatever, looking at it and saying “good enough,” and putting it out there for the purpose of delivering advertising.

To extract from the article one salient point, if I may, it's that there's a reason the first company to lean hard into AI-generated shows is a company only tangential to the entertainment industry who employs zero creators.

Colton Allen: 1979-2022 2024 Dec 9
Colton Allen passed away just about two years ago, and unfortunately I am only learning this today. He was a photographer I knew through Flickr where him and I "followed" each other's photostreams and communicated in groups and comments. He began shooting photographs shortly after being diagnosed in 2008 (at age 28) with ALS, and he was never held back knowing his days were short. Near the end, he outfitted his wheelchair with custom camera gear to keep him shooting despite his failing limbs. His photos are genuinely fantastic – subtle and nuanced and majestic. I used his portfolio as material when I taught middle school photography, and I am lucky enough to have one of his photo books on my shelf. I knew when he stopped putting new photos on Flickr in 2022 that it was not a good sign, but lack of information there left me only speculating. Well, today I stumbled across the sad news, and am now grieving.