He looks like if Macron shook his hand he would lose his fingers
He/Him. Web developer in the UK. I blog at https://matthewdaly.co.uk/ and created https://www.highperformancelaravel.com/. Also on Mastodon at https://mstdn.social/@matthewbdaly. I'm inventing a language for swearing in.
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He looks like if Macron shook his hand he would lose his fingers
In his own voice, Elon Musk is fully committed to a replacement conspiracy theory as his main lens on UK politics.
Plus maintaining WP on behalf of clients' probably isn't worth your time, particularly if it's vanilla WP rather than Bedrock, unless it's a favour for a friend or family. If you're a professional I suspect it's just not worth going after that business.
Moving off WP is the same. Find a solid, reliable modern PHP CMS with a decent core, get it set up for the client and they'll likely be fine. They'll likely benefit from a cleaner, more intuitive admin that isn't full of banners nagging them to buy a paid version of a plugin they don't need.
It's like with migrating from Windows to Linux. When Windows XP came out of support I moved my mum and dad who were in their early 60's from XP onto Xubuntu. They already used Chrome and LibreOffice so it's an easy move. The hard part wasn't adjusting to a new desktop, but the install process.
The trouble is getting started with WP if you're not a professional web dev is easy. So often people come to you and say "We have this website someone built with WP but are having issues with it". If someone said that to me I'd probably try to encourage looking elsewhere.
And it doesn't have to be this way. Honestly, work with any other PHP CMS and you'll likely have a better time. Yes, most of them have a smaller extension ecosystem, but that doesn't matter because the core is more flexible and powerful. You can do things with the core CMS WP needs 5 plugins for
Plus if you're going to work with it on a professional basis, you're a tiny fish in a huge sea of mediocrity. You're up against huge numbers of people who will work for peanuts. And now generative AI means those people can churn out bespoke plugins without writing a line of code that'll get worse
Not to mention that if, like me, you're an experienced, modern PHP developer, the code base makes you want to cry. If it wasn't already entrenched, just the fact it doesn't use Composer by default would rule it out for any serious work.
And the plugin ecosystem? A nightmare. Can't find the wood for the trees. If you have a use case that's even slightly specialised, good luck finding a plugin that does *exactly* what you want in a sea of ones that *sort of* do what you want.
And if you host it on a VPS, prepare for that VPS to get absolutely battered by attempts to break in. I've put together a load of fail2ban rules to block multiple attack vectors on Wordpress, we use Ansible to deploy that to new servers, and routinely use Wordfence on projects. Still not enough
The plugins are confusing too. For things that should be core functionality, like caching, you need to use a plugin, and it's typically got a specific product name rather than being just a descriptor, and you need plugins for things that should be core functionality, like custom posts
I'm starting to think Wordpress might be on its way out as a tool for digital agencies, and possibly freelancers too. Even if you use Bedrock, it doesn't scale well to use as a professional tool. It's just too much of a chore to keep the core, plugins, and themes up to date.
Only cycling games I can remember are Bully/Canis Canem Edit in the PS2 era (in the same way GTA is a driving game) and several 8-bit era sports games with cycling events that involved rattling the joystick from side to side to pedal
I think Byline Times asked at the one in Diss and someone admitted being from Lincoln?
If he was a Sim I would brick him up in a 1x1 cubicle and leave him there forever
I would wager some of those 3,000 are the same people over and over too. I live in Diss where there's a hotel which saw protests. I would wager few if any of the people there were local and likely came in from further afield.
Robert Jenrick is one of those people who if I saw them in the street I would feel duty bound to shout in true Alan Partridge style "Jenrick, you wanker!"
Yep. The Tories spent years twisting the media into a shape more receptive to their batshit insanity over Brexit. Labour need to take serious concrete steps to get it back into something at least vaguely objective.
I always intellectually knew that if someone objectionable took it over or it collapsed I could lose everything on there but that always felt abstract. Now it's concrete. I do still use Mastodon somewhat though and that will become my ultimate refuge if anything happens to this place.
I don't think I would go back to Twitter even if someone waved a magic wand and returned it to its height. It's still potentially vulnerable to exactly the same takeover by an arsehole in a way more distributed social networks aren't. And I'm once bitten twice shy in that regard.
Couldn't agree more with this. Twitter has basically morphed into Parler. Only way that could possibly change is if the weirdo at the top sold it on AND the purchaser took *extremely* strong steps to clean it up AND those steps cleared up all the arseholes. Even then I doubt it
He should be held accountable in Parliament but that would require he bother turning up
He's also so "loved" he claims he can't do constituency surgeries because someone might attack him. Not at all that he really can't be arsed and would rather fly off to America to suck up to Trump. Not what we expected from someone who had a terrible attendance record as an MEP, I'm sure...
I had one person claim to me that Twitter held records of their friends who were activists / reporters who had died and last thing they wanted was to be erased so strangers could play act opposition to fascism. That felt naive to me because Musk was basically free to demean and misrepresent them.
The only security guarantees Putin and the Russian leadership deserve are the ones provided by the prison they should be in.
If Reform don't want asylum seekers to be put up in hotels maybe they should offer to host them? What's good for the goose is good for the gander...
I work at a digital media agency yet somehow have a colleague in his forties who hasn't seen Nathan Barley
I was being a bit flippant for humorous effect, but I apologise if that part came across as disrespectful. My intent was to poke fun at the stupidity of Brexit.
I should add I almost certainly *wouldn't* do this, but it would be nice to have the option, particularly if there were a load of really Brexity types queuing with faces like thunder
I live in Diss. The Park hotel down the road is being used to house refugees and a few weeks back a bunch of arseholes decided to protest outside. I did work experience at that hotel. It's an absolute crap hole. What they did with the sauces there makes me feel sick three decades later.
Oh, I can find plenty of reasons to apply, but being able to do this would specifically be a "Brexit Benefit"
I realised there is a potential Brexit benefit... If I got the Irish passport I am entitled to I could conga through the EU gate at the airport going "I got an EU passport, I got an EU passport..." while everyone else looked on in misery.
Not just American. Same thing here in the UK. Exhibit A - Rwanda deportation flights.
Imagine getting bad A Level results and then on top of that being told that you could still turn out like Jeremy Clarkson.
Lettuce be glad she didn't...
I have a vague recollection of someone posting on there to say if you're a guy in your twenties buy a Rolex and go into debt if you have to. Rationale was it supposedly made you look like a financially successful person. Totally and utterly bananapants...
I have said before many times that if staff are so expensive that companies need to offshore their jobs to compete they need to start at the board level.
I want my country back, too. I want it back from the far-right and racists who prey on ignorance and xenophobia. I want it back from Tommy Ten Names, Farage & Reform UK Ltd, The Daily Mail, Telegraph, Express, Sun, GB News and every damned person and organisation that spreads hate and division
Strange sometimes the rabbit holes you go down with ChatGPT. Started asking it about plausible future recreational.drugs and wound up basically producing a high level concept for marketing cannabis infused chocolates to the Waitrose shopping, dinner party throwing crowd.
I heard it was supposed to be the inspiration for the "Peter File" joke used in Brass Eye's Paedogeddon special and then subsequently recycled in The IT Ctowd
Happened to glance at LinkedIn and saw someone listed in the "people you might know" with the surname Trickey. If that was my surname I would demand people play "It's Tricky" by Run DMC every single time I walked in the room.
Not exactly the same scenario but The Sims franchise offers something similar. Few days work, some training up in skills and establishing enough friendships consistently gets you promotion. If you get sick of a job it's easy to pivot to something new. And you can make art or grow plants for money.
Same here. The effort involved is typically negligible and if I have done my job right I will never need them in production, only in dev. I maintain a legacy app that uses Phinx and I appreciate the reversible migrations that has.
Good.
This is a big part of why I have absolutely no plans to verify my identity for the Online Safety Act on here. That and the inability to receive DMs is irrelevant as I turned it off deliberately.
One of the times he wound up in prison apparently an old man beat him up. I'm hoping for a repeat...
Where hopefully he gets beaten up by an old man again
Jesus fucking Christ on a pogo stick...
Don't plan on verifying I am an adult for the shitty Online Safety Act. I have DMs turned off deliberately and have no need for them.
The onion bhaji sandwich I have had in a Boots meal deal is one of the greatest things I have ever eaten.
OSA is gonna make us lose access to fucking wikipedia write to your MPs.
I went down Tesco this morning On the way back I saw a woman wearing a t-shirt with a Union Jack on the front and "Made in England" written underneath. Do you think anyone has ever told her?
At a similar age the kids in my year were playing WWF wrestling at school. Clotheslining each other and stuff like that. With hindsight I'm astonished no one was seriously injured.
Reminds me of the time Boris Johnson claimed "People I meet abroad PITY us in Starmer's socialist sogfest". Which probably say more about the circles he moves in abroad than anything else.
I went down for a work thing last month. No violence whatsoever on the Tube or in the streets. Worst I saw was a few twats in the City walking round with bottles of champagne on a Thursday evening.
Adrian Ramsay - Waveney Valley
Why is our media so in thrall to the dimwitted Farage? The man's wreaked havoc on this country, every single one of his ideas has been proven to be a fucking disaster and his parliamentary party has shed a third of MPs in a year. When do they challenge and stop treating him like some PM in waiting?
I have a Green MP and he's in the news far less often than any of Farage's crank bank. Probably because he's busy getting on with his job
Remember all that fulminating in the billionaire press about "free speech" (ie their freedom to abuse Muslims, trans people etc with impunity)? Now that people are being arrested for speaking about an issue of the utmost gravity, the self-appointed guardians of liberty have fallen strangely silent.
Shits stick together...
To be honest that's already the case right now.
I maintain what I consider a healthy cynicism about AI. Something that could create a cover of one song in the style of another artist (or even a particular era of an artist) on the fly shouldn't become a tool of the music industry. But, good god, it would be fun at parties.
I can't be the only person who uses "banana pants" as a phrase for something being insane
Bet she wouldn't say that if someone else had nicked the Crown Jewels
They fired the people answering calls for help. Hundreds of them. During the crisis.
Not all of us. But there's a very specific subset of entitled English people who behave like this. In my experience the Venn diagram of these people and Brexit voters is a circle.
I worked for an insurer handling endowment mis-selling complaints. I'm under no illusions about the financial services industry being full of utter shits. But there's at least a veneer of consumer protections. Good luck getting anything from the FSCS if you lose your money from a crypto exchange.
Worst financial advice ever...
In other words a bunch of fruitbat Tory former politicians who lost their seats and whose careers are now over have defected to a party even worse than their previous one because they have nothing to lose.
He would have been a fifth grader if he hadnāt been left back
I've always felt your nationality is about as arbitrary as it gets. I have a friend who was born in the USSR, but now the place where she was born is in Georgia. Similarly if where I lived became the People's Republic of East Anglia, to whom do I owe allegiance?
He definitely didn't understand Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy either. Completely missed the whole point about rethinking the economy along more equitable lines.
"Oi! Jesus! No!"
I donāt think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE. This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined. It is setting up to make whatās happening now look like childās play. And people are disappearing.
Brexit was āsingle stupidest thing a countryās ever doneā
We will be properly honouring āDaniel Hannan Dayā on Tuesday with all the requisite pomp, circumstance & documentary evidence of what an irredeemable arse he is that you would expect. Elevating our worldās wrongest man to the House of Lords will always be the essence of Brexit. Do join usā¦
š¤ Has Lord Hannan forgotten his 2016 vision of post-Brexit Britain? 24 June 2025 was to be Britainās Independence Day, celebrating the āreinvigoration of our economy, our democracy and our libertyā By Anthony Robinson
Somehow missed this on the day, but a story I wrote was apparently mentioned in Parliament this week š¤Æ "Thompson was referring to a @bylinetimes.bsky.social report saying Reform is massively exaggerating the amount it says can be saved by getting rid of DEI initiatives" Via the Guardian. Chuffed!
Here you go - www.reuters.com/investigates...
That's exactly the impression I got based on its media profile. Not surprised to hear real exposure to it backs that up.
I'd love to know how many kids who attended that place for their GCSEs stay on for A levels rather than look elsewhere. I would put good money on it being way below the national average.
Not to mention administering all those GCSE and A level exams
It's not just the pilots. There's a news story from a few years ago that mentioned someone who worked for SpaceX was crushed to death when they tried transporting a rocket component on a pick-up truck. They also said Musk discourages wearing high vis jackets because he dislikes bright colours
My headmaster at secondary school used to say when someone stole something that he knew who it was but was giving them the opportunity to admit it (but he almost certainly didn't know). This has the same vibe www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cx...
I would love to know the retention rate of pupils who choose to stick around at her school for A levels after GCSEs when they have a bit more agency. Would not surprise me in the least if it's in the toilet.
Put it this way, if I had had that weirdo as my headmistress I would be out of there the second I had sufficient agency.
I don't think it's all that unusual to not offer triple award. I moved school in year 11 and went from one that did offer it to one that didn't. New one offered all three science subjects at A level. Was thirty years ago though. And I suspect anyone with any sense goes elsewhere for sixth form.
I'd be outraged if they didn't
So basically she's gaming the system to get good Ofsted results rather than providing a rounded education? Doesn't surprise me in the least.
Is it something to do with it being one of those "free schools" that Michael Gove was so keen on? Don't know the details but I get the impression they have less oversight.
Knew I should have bought the next model up when I bought my Mac Mini. Am forever running out of space. Wanted to have a bash with TidalCycles but need to set it up on my old Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition as it's got more hard drive space.
This really bothers me... There are NO "jaywalkers" in London because that stupid, made up, victimless "crime" doesn't exist in this country.
I got spammed for custom work uniforms on my work email the other day. I work for a marketing agency and they knew it was a marketing agency, explicitly mentioning it in their email. I could understand it for other industries, but marketing?
I recently saw an article on the local news about the fire risks from a Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) and protesters who were unhappy with the level of risk. Not being funny, but I'm pretty sure a petrol station is a far, far worse risk.
I suspect she hasn't and is just trying to make palatable to the American crank circuit
Certainly better than Boris Johnson's column in the Mail, but then it wouldn't surprise me if he had ChatGPT write that.
I have no abilities with image editing but ChatGPT did a decent enough job...
