The sharpest ideas, honest moments, and quotable insights pulled straight from our conversations across OpenChannels FM.
A Federated Approach to Package Distribution
“Yes, the outcome of this weekend is like we wanted to make sure, we wanted to see if the FAIR protocol is really so robust in a way that we can actually make use of it. Before we had our own bubble and now what we’ve accomplished so far is actually take all of our extensions and bring it into a fair compatible format at the same time, modify our core system to also fetch data from a fair compatible repository, any repository. In this way, it’s really the federated approach. That we can now dock into any kind of system and it doesn’t matter if it’s from typo3.org or from any other platform. Obviously we only currently only support Typo 3 extensions, but that’s a different topic because it can be any kind of digital goods, but we’re talking the same language and I think we can accomplish that and announce this.”
— Benni Mack, FAIR Package Management for TYPO3
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We Haven’t Thought About the Consequences
“I suppose the thing that’s troubling me about artificial intelligence is just how quickly and headlong we’re going into it, getting so many things full of all the AI that we possibly can. And there’s this idea of the alignment problem, the alignment problem being whether or not this wave of technology aligns with the best interests of humans. People always point to the past like, oh, the Industrial Revolution, everybody found jobs in other ways, the agricultural revolution, everybody found jobs in other ways. But I don’t think this is like that, because all of those technologies were really bound, they had real constraints. The Industrial Revolution was a bunch of metal that went round cogs and things like that, so it could do that, but it couldn’t think and it couldn’t simulate the work of a brain. And this stuff can. It appears to be able to learn how to play chess in a heartbeat, how to play Go in a heartbeat, and become better than every other human, and from that moment, nobody’s beating a chess engine ever again. That’s the bit that kind of worries me, that this stuff is going to be so profoundly impactful and we haven’t really thought about the consequences of it. That’s the bit that sort of churns me up inside.”
—Nathan Wrigley, Artificial [fill in the blank]
Using Site Health on Your WordPress Site for Hassle-Free Troubleshooting
“The Site Health plugin has a troubleshooting component to it where you can say, okay, I don’t know where the problem comes from…Did you test it with all the plugins off? Did you test it with a default theme? And the Site Health plugin has one button to do that, to take all the plugins out of your site and change the theme, but only for the admin user who has access to the troubleshooting…you as a site administrator can really test things when they go wrong…So you have quite an interesting iteration process that you, as a site owner without any developer involved, can test things out to narrow down where the problems reside.”
—Birgit Pauli-Haack, New Tools and Updates in WordPress 7.0 for Developers and Content Managers
