This Week in WordPress #367  Hello, good morning, good afternoon, good evening wherever you are in the world. And I can see some of you from different parts of the world. It's very nice. Lots of comments dropping in largely about the weather which is always interesting. Um, so let's just sort of say what we're doing this week. It is this week in WordPress number 367. I feel that's the wrong number, but let's go with that. That's what I wrote down. 367. It is Monday, the 23rd of February. We'll be repackaging this as an episode. It will come out into your podcast player of choice tomorrow. Tomorrow morning at the the highly unusual 7 a.m. in the UK. I don't know why I picked that, but I picked it and thought I'm sticking to it. I'm being consistent. So, it's gone out at 7:00 in the morning in the UK for about eight years or so. No reason, but at least it's there when you wake up, depending on where you are. The idea is to talk about WordPress. Um, but increasingly we end up talking about all sorts of different things. And I think there'll be quite a lot of security stuff, possibly AI. Well, I say possibly AI stuff. It's mostly AI stuff these days. There's there's no oxygen left in the room. Um, but in order to make that happen, I'm always joined by a panel of um, experts, let's put it that way. And, um, today I'm joined by these three fine people. There, there, and there. And first one over here is uh, Sir Tim Nash. Hello Tim. How are you doing? >> Hello. I I just can't remember when I got kned. You'd think it would be an important thing in my >> Yeah, honestly, this whole world kne down guy with a sword coming at me, but no. Budget cuts. Budget cuts. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The royal family are having a tough time. >> Yeah. >> Wonder if they'll start charging. Anyway, let's not get into that. That's definitely off topic. Um, but how you doing? You all right, Tim? >> Ah, yeah. I'm here. That's about as much enthusiasm as you can reach the moment. >> That's the level of enthusiasm we're gonna get. I ask the the contributors to give us a little potted bio. And so Tims Tims has Tims has always excited me in the past. Uh I never read it just in case it's something that requires a bit of inspiration at the start. So here it comes. I genuinely haven't read it. Right. Here it is. Tim scares people and oh no. Tim scares people and no more so than Nathan Wrigley for he fears the intros. He will be sing will he be singing, dancing an intro or just saying hello? I don't know. Uh today though he should not fear he should fear not as the no intro is oh is this intro is really tame. Thank the lord. Tim is a professional doom speaker and security consultant specializing in WordPress. You can find about you can find out more about him at timnash.co.uk or listen to his semi-regular chat with Nathan on the WP Build Show Feeling Insecure. We should do that again. We we should we haven't for a recording for a long time a long time and uh yeah let's get back on the wagon with that but I I am so pleased that there's there was nothing that I had to sing or do as a sea shanty or any of that this week this time. >> Don't worry I'm back in a few weeks time. >> Yeah. Okay. All right. I'll hold my breath. Uh but thank you for joining us. I'm also joined by Mark Benzane. Hello Mark. >> Hello. >> How you doing? It's always like a pleasure to drag you out of your bed at 3:00 in the morning or whatever it is. >> It's it's it's the pleasure is all mine. And I mean that 100% sincerely. >> What time is it? >> Uh right now it's actually uh it's at six o'clock. But by the time I roll out of bed and, you know, take my shower and do all the things and make sure that my setup is right, especially this weekend, my my computer crapped out and I had to totally wipe and reload everything. And I'm like, >> yeah. So, so I'm like scrambling around all weekend trying to make sure that everything will work for the show today and cuz I'm not going to have an hour ahead of time to make sure things work. >> No, no, no, no. That would mean getting up at 2:00 in the morning. Well, that's what that would mean. Exactly. Yeah. >> If you're watching the show, you too will notice that Mark spends his entire life inside of a box. >> I did. >> Black box that follows him around wherever he goes. >> But I think outside of it. I think outside of my my physical self is inside the box. >> You picked up what I was putting down. Well done, Mark. That was great. Uh Mark's bio goes like this. Uh Mark is the partnerships and community lead at MainWP. And though a totally contrived, sorry, and through a totally contrived coincidence, the timing lines up with MainWP's 12th anniversary. Oh, nice. Nice. Birthday celebrations. 12 years in the WordPress space is quite a marker and it felt right to acknowledge it whilst he's here with us. Mark has been part of the ecosystem for ages, working closely with agencies, developers, and product teams who manage sites day in day out. His work at MainWP centers on partnerships, community and helping shape tools that support people building and maintaining WordPress sites at scale. Thank you, Mark. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you for having me. >> Yeah, you're very welcome. And joining us for the first time is Onar Aliy. Hello. How you doing? Have I said you're >> Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm very happy to be here. >> Yeah, you're very welcome. Um, as as Onar, it's his first appearance. there's this empty bio box and no doubt on the second appearance it will be full up with junk, you know, because that's what we do. We just mess it up. But on this first time around, it's very obvious that it's going to be sensible. So, here is uh Onar's very sensible bio. He's the founder of OOP SPAM. I'm not entirely sure how you pronounce that. He can correct that for us in a moment. Formerly cyber security researcher focused on online abuse and spam. And he's based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. How do we say it, Onar? when you say we say oops ma'am. >> Okay. I did actually think that would be what it was but I didn't want to Yeah. Okay. >> I started a long time ago and now I'm sinking back. Probably wasn't the best name but >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Well, as you're about to find out, I called this thing WP Builds and we basically talk about cats. We has spent ages on an episode the other day talking about alligators. So >> Oh, that's hold on. Uh we'll see how that goes. If you are joining us and you want to make the show a little bit more interesting and lively um then please make some comments. That would be absolutely lovely. The best way to do that is to go here. Um Mark is sporting the little banner there. Go share this stream wpbuilds.comlive. If you go there, you've got um you got like two options really. The the the most common option I think is to hit the box on the side if you're on a desktop. It's Google. So, it's YouTube comments. So, if you're logged into a Google account somewhere, you can comment like that. However, if you don't want to use a Google account or you don't have a Google account or you mistrust Google or any other reason for that matter, then there's a box inside the video player itself top right. It says start chat or live chat or something like that. Click on that and you don't need to be logged into anything. You can uh be entirely anonymous. And so please share it with your friends, relations, animals, pets, poltergeists, whatever the heck you've got going on over there. And it looks like some people have jumped in. So here we go. We often get the weather forecast. Oh dear. Uh, and in Boston, James Laauo is joining us. And it's 30. Oh, that's brutal. It's minus one degrees centigrade. Birds, birds, animals, tree, branches, people fly at a 90 degrees angle. Visibility nil. Officials, blizzards warning roulette remain in place until 7:00 a.m. ESC. Good. Good morning. Oh, that sounds bad. >> Well, it's minus5 here. >> Oh. Oh. Oh, that's not real. That's like the temperature on Mars or something. >> But at least the internet works. So, >> electrons love it. They love all this cold. It's perfectly. >> Uh Courtney Robertson's joining us, but she's saying hello to James. Uh, she's given a comment about the weather there. Just two inches here. I guess that's snow she's talking about. Oh, David Warmsley, my partner in crime, David Warsley. He says, "Hello, first time catching the beginning of this show. What a birthday treat." I'm presuming it's your birthday, David. And if it is your birthday, happy 92nd birthday. It must be that at least by now. Uh, something along those lines. I don't know how old David is. I think he's older than me then. But happy birthday, David, if it is your birthday. Uh, the webinar is also joining us. Hello, beautiful people. How you doing? And gosh, there's quite a few, isn't there? Lots of people saying hello to each other. Oh, come on. Rob rub it in, won't you? David's in Goa where it's 27 27° centigrade. All I can say is the electrons hate it. >> I imagine the humidity is horrible though. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Go on. Go on. Tell me the humidity. >> It's his birthday. He's getting old and the humidity is horrible. That's it. That's how we're going to how we're going to reconcile it. Uh Ross Win, hello. He says he's got the day off so I can be live here today. A you are friends, not work. That's so nice. Thank you for joining us, Ross. Appreciate it. Uh 12 degrees centigrade here in the UK and very British. Yeah, I got the same 12 degrees centigrade and just greyness. You know, it's what we get every single day of the year. Any other comments joining in? Who we got here? Marcus Bernette. Sorry. He says, "I had to cancel you, Nathan." Oh, yeah. Luckily, Onar's here. You know, that's all I have to say about that. Marcus wasn't able to come because he had other things. And so, Onar very graciously jumped in on Friday. And uh that's amazing. Um testing WPB to one. We'll get to that in a moment. As Jabber, he's on skating on thin ice, is he James? Do I jabber? I think I jabber. >> It's cold there. It's very thick ice. Trust me. >> Yeah, that's right. I think uh I think is there any other comments that anybody can say that I ought to put on the screen because I'm kind of lost in them now. There's too many to come up. Anybody quickly? >> Well, Courtney Courtney asked, but I said I responded already, but uh Courtney asked if the reset of my computer means that the lights will not go out. Uh I cannot guarantee anything. Um, >> Mark Mark's in a black box already, but at some point the lights are go out, so it'll be entirely black. It's really funny when it happens. If you sit really still, Mark, for like five minutes and say nothing, we can all enjoy your lights going out. Uh, okay. So, anyway, there we go. That's the long introduction. Really appreciate you all being here. Keep dropping in some comments. So, so, so the the idea is to talk about WordPress. This is us, by the way. Bit of short short promotional stuff at the beginning. If you like what we're doing over here, put your name into that box. This is wpbuilds.com. No, don't put your name. Put your email address into that box. We don't need your name. Just want your email address. And then we'll send you a couple of emails each week. One when we put this out as a podcast. That'll happen tomorrow when I've edited this. Um, and then we'll put an episode out every Thursday as well, and I'll send you an email about that. And this week, uh, I was lucky enough to have the fabulous Andy Bell. Uh, Andy Bell. I think in years gone by Andy Bell was more of a WordPresser than he is now. I think it's been many years I think since he's used WordPress uh in in anger if you know what I mean. But I had a chat with uh Andy because I saw him at a conference last year which Tim Tim was there as well. It was in London last year and uh Andy was on stage and he wasn't really talking about WordPress. He was talking about sort of agency life and things like that. But the one of the things that caught my attention was his position on AI. Now Andy is very principled about AI and he's very very forthright. He doesn't want anything to do with it. He doesn't want anything he doesn't want his agency touching it. So the content that they produce, the code that they write, the websites that they launch is all humanmade. As soon as those words came out of my mouth, I realized the error. Uh it was all made by his agency, not humanmade. Forgive me. Um but uh but um anyway but he also won't won't work with AI companies. So if an AI company comes to his agency and says will you build us a website? The answer is going to be no. So we explore his fairly principled position here. And I got to say the more he talks the more I was nodding my head you know the dominoes kind of started to fall for me and uh he was able to encapsulate it really well. So I don't suppose any of you three have got anything to add about that. This is my promo bit at the beginning, but I've dropped the subject of AI and his principle on it. >> I feel on principle, I should say. Did the word lite turn up in the conversation? >> Uh, it should have done, shouldn't it? Yeah, probably. But I I know I know what you mean. >> I think his is not really captured around the technology. He's obviously got a notion that he can do whatever the heck an a an AI can do when it comes to design. He's got the skills. He doesn't need the shortcuts. And so whilst it might save him a bit of time and probably some money, go just go and have a listen to him. I I know what you mean though. But um I found myself nodding is all I can say. >> Uh anybody else, Mark Onar, anything to add about that before we move on. >> I I respect anybody who has principles and sticks to them. Yeah, >> that's that's you know um and so I I have a great amount of respect for what he's saying and if he can and I think it's always important to be able to do what the AI is doing. You have to be able to understand what it's doing so that you can either fix it or or or not. So if you choose not to do it, it means you know what you're doing. Well, and the the other interesting bit was that as as the sort of the conversation um developed, not only was I kind of getting more and more into it, but I could see where he was coming from. And the bit that kind of made the principles stick for me was the fact that it really hurt his business in the year 2025. Incredibly successful and it had hurt, you know, that having this principle had hurt his business without a doubt. He was very open about that. But what he had not done publicly is he hadn't said out loud the bit about the AI. He' just not taken work that required him to use AI. He hadn't taken work from AI companies and he hadn't used AI. So anyway, the knock-on effect was as soon as he started saying the quiet thing out loud, I refuse to work with AI, suddenly his roster got filled up again. So it turned out that for a small subset of people and he presumably is an early mover that that rounded off his 2025 really well. Now we'll have to see how long that continues, but it turned out that that principle resonated with a lot of people who needed a website. Um but we'll have to wait and see how that that works over time. Okay. Anyway, there we go. Anybody else? Before I move on, please keep your eye on the comments, you three, because um if there's anything that crops up, there's too many at the minute for me to keep my um my my eyeballs on. Uh by the way, um he has a u like a course platform called uh Pikilly. It's p i ca l i l. Pilly with the li after the dot. And um a lot of the courses are about this kind of thing, you know. So mindful design is one of them. I just thought I'd mention that in case anybody was keen to pick up on what it is that he's doing. Go and check it out. Right. Okay. So, moving on to user submitted content or in this case guest submitted content. Here we go. MainWP. You brought this to our attention. It looks like the year in review. How did MainWP go, Mark? >> 25. >> Well, first of all, Dennis asked me to write the year in review this year, which is actually a pretty intimidating task, I got to say. And and I was kind of like when you go back and and look at everything that happened, it kind of blows your mind at blew my mind as to how much uh the team just did last year. And I I think about it once again in the frame of this 12-year anniversary thing. And I just am blown away constantly that they are so motivated every single day to just keep pushing and pushing and pushing after 12 years. I mean, that just is astounding. So, that's the big takeaway for me from this. The rest of it goes into details as to how many things we pushed out and and where we're going and and all of that. Uh, and I won't get into all of that. I I would appreciate it if people would read it. I appreciate you letting me share this uh with the audience and I hope people read it. And uh and uh I don't want to take up too much more time other than that, but uh I just I I just can't talk about the group of people that Dennis has put together at MainWP. It's just amazing group. >> Nice. Nice. Okay. Well, probably a quick Google. Everything that we mention in this show will be in the show notes tomorrow. So when the podcast audio drops, there'll be a link to a blog post which is basically a bunch of links. Some of them are in the show. There's ones that didn't make it into the show, but all of the ones that we're going to mention will be in there. So, this will make it uh into that list. It'll probably be under the community section if you go there, or possibly the plug-in section, depending where I >> where I drop it. But go and have a look. Uh or you could simply Google at this moment, couldn't you? Year of momentum. A year of momentum 2025 year in review. Nice that you love your team as much as that. That's brilliant. >> I I feel so lucky. Honestly, I I I went from being a, you know, a an owner of a company and a founder of a company to being in a company where I feel like I'm a founder even though I'm not. So, it's it's it's really I I feel very fortunate to have landed where I did. >> Yeah. Oh, that's lovely. I'm just going to pause the entire show very quickly because I just want to say over a period of about three months now this person has dropped into the show um Gank and every single episode I have no idea what his name is and every episode he says what his name is and I say I'll remember it for next time and I never remember it. So I've actually written it down on a piece of paper hoping they drop in today. I think you should name the show after him. Yes. Just so that you have an episode that's like >> Yeah. Well, he's joining us from Amsterdam. And of course, thank you, Brian, for uh Oh, see what I did there? Uh, it's Gerard. Thank you, Gerard, for joining us. I really appreciate it. And I I appreciate me. Sorry, I don't appreciate me. I appreciate the fact that you're coping with the fact that I relentlessly, you know, been unable to remember who you are. I really appreciate it. And um, nice mention for you, Tim. I think it was Ross I saw in the comments who said, "It's lovely to see you." Uh, what did he say? He said, "Oh, no, it was Reese W. Nice to see Tim again." That's >> a Thank you. >> Yeah, that's right. The bearded club. They you you stayed together, you guys. Okay. Have we got any nice comments in there that Oh, that's very nice. Ross, he's sort of saying, "Go and listen to the interview, I presume, about Andy." Uh, and staying on that topic, he says Andy also said, so this is the previous thing with Andy Bell. Um, that he'd got some business from a client that had been burned. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. By an agency that had used AI. Um, and we're looking for somebody that explicitly did not, which was kind of interesting. >> Um, and then David Wsley joins in. Primary Andy problem solves and writes HTML and CSS better than LLM seems to be able to manage. I don't think you could deny that somebody of his capacity that's very likely to be true, isn't it? Okay. All right. Let's move on a little bit and we'll go here. So, that was the bit that Mark dropped. Now, we've got a couple coming from Tim's side of things. I didn't get a chance to read this one, Tim. Sorry about that. Um, so tell us why this one's in. It's from Automatic. >> So, it's sort of slightly slightly links into Andy. Uh so this is a uh blog post by somebody from automatic. They're on the performance team at Automatic. Not it's not specifically WordPress related directly, but um it's basically a blog post arguing we use too much JavaScript. >> We use too React is React is not a library. It's a framework. We use these giant frameworks. They're ridiculously complicated. They are really bad for performance. They very rarely do the things that we actually want them to do well and we keep use trying to use JavaScript when actually we have this perfectly good servers behind the scenes that are full of processing power that could be doing the job for us. that a lot of the time we struggle with performance on websites is because not necessarily the servers slowing down, but your client has got to make a 100,000 different requests backwards and forwards to the server via the JavaScript Ajax requests and JavaScript is pulling and doing a lot of issues when it comes to performance. And it's basically a little bit of a h maybe we should perhaps not use as much JavaScript or only use JavaScript when we need to and use it for what it's really good at. Um, which I found quite interesting. So it's not a get rid of Ajax, get rid of React, get rid of all of this. It was just a maybe we should rethink that your if you're jumping into some a project and your first reaction is to jump and get react maybe consider if that's the right course. And I found that fascinating partially because it very much mirrors my own viewpoint. So of course I'm biased towards this as I like this makes total sense. Uh I think there's a lot of people in the comments who will find this approach like oh yeah that's what I do. that should be what we should do. >> But also who it came from. >> Yeah, >> it's on the automatic blog, >> right? >> I I'd like to think that this was a little bit of a a flag has gone up, but maybe we have gone too far the wrong way. Um, but we'll see. But it's a it was it's a really good read. It's a really wellthoughtout read that um for me uh reflects a lot of my own viewpoints. So, I was sort of I was I I very much was reading this and nodding my way along. So, I think >> I can more or less guarantee that David Warsley in the comments will be warming his hands on on this. He shares the exact same opinion as you. Uh, you know, buy you something when it's not necessary. But you're right, that was the bit that I took. I read the the title and I read that it had come from automatic and then I got to the bit where it was obviously taking its first like little targeted aim toward React in particular >> and I did think this is curious. >> It is he he does take quite a strong aim at React but then does emphasize that it's not specifically React. It's more that React is >> act and I think his argument basically is you never load just one JavaScript library. It's part of the uh philosophy of JavaScript development seems to be well I can just reach for this and I can reach for that >> and so you do end up with behemoths very quickly and without even realizing it you're you're suddenly you've got huge amount of dependencies there that you weren't expecting and yeah it's as I say it's a really good read uh even if you take away from it that is like that's a bit extreme I if it just gives you pause for four that maybe I don't necessarily really need to bring in that full framework to do this oneline thing. Or maybe it could be just that you take the opinion, oh actually I don't need to use I can rethink how I'm using my JavaScript and make sure that I'm first of all the server can do this on its own. you're almost certainly getting going to have a better experience in terms of accessibility, probably a better experience in terms of access um things like SEO and almost certainly a better experience from a security perspective as well because if you're simplifying things generally that makes it more secure, not always, but generally the bit that's kind of interesting to me is I would imagine that the automatic blog has some level of editorial control. I imagine that you know uh whoever wrote this article and the name has now gone Sergio Gomez uh is the automatician who wrote this. I presume there's some level of inspection. So it is it is kind of interesting to me that this has been you know this has been given the the green light and I I wonder I just wonder if this is a first in a cascade of similar things in the year 2026. I think maybe that's what you're I don't know. Maybe if you're wondering that as well, Tim. >> Yes. Not sure. >> Well, no. Hoping maybe. I know. I feel like this could either be a one shot and it's like, "Oh, that's nice." Or we could see this happening more and more. >> And there is a little bit of a case of >> as we are getting more and more AI slop and a lot of if you ask a AI to build something, it will pull in all of these libraries and things. I can see the the Andes of this world and people going actually I can win this battle by doing less and >> producing good quality simple solutions rather than pulling in the 50 million libraries. So I can see it being used that way as well. So >> thank you. Okay, that's really interesting. Uh I didn't say the title of the piece and I have I'll read it in because if anybody's uh listening to this primarily this is on the automatic.com. So with 2T's blog and it's called a modest server centric development proposal. So you can go and look for that. It was written on the 17th of Feb this year. So go and check that out. Right. And there was another one coming from you. Sorry I apologize. I didn't let Mark and uh Onar have their go on this if they wish. Otherwise we'll move on. It's >> above my pay grade. >> Okay. Me too. >> I think you can find markets below your pay grade. >> Oh is that what you think? Okay. Okay. >> Uh, okay. Right. Here we go. Um, next one then again from Tim. Um, Tim's thing is obviously security. I use Bit Warden. I I don't know if they have products outside of the sort of password manager, but that's the length and the depths that I have from them. And obviously it being a password manager, I have this assumption that it's going to be secure. So, what's this one? What are we looking at here? So this is a a blog post from Bit Warden themselves called Security through Transparency. ETHZurich audits Bit Warden and cryptography against malicious server scenarios. uh ETH Zurich actually audited three or four different password managers and claimed that there were some serious faults and I got pinged a lot like every friend I know who I said go use this go use a password manager pretty much together it's like they got sent the same email sent me going oh my god it's all really had bad and it's insecure it's like no no no the the the group managed to find if you compromise the bit warden servers and the clients in this scenario and this happens then something bad might happen. >> Oh okay that's quite a lot of this is there were variations on the theme for each one of the password managers. So um the reason I chose this as a good uh post is because I thought it was a really well-handled response from Bit Warden because they didn't say this is a non-issue. I thought that was really good of them because they could have just come out of the gate going, "Uhhuh. Uhhuh. No." But they didn't. They actually said, "We've taken things from this. We've learned things from the from this paper. We agree it's hypothetical. Um, but honestly, let's go. You know, we we there isn't actually a problem, but we've learned stuff." But it also gets gives me the opportunity to highlight that you should be using a password manager. um that and the one of the reasons that I wanted to highlight Bit Warden is that Bit Warden's um behind the scenes both the client is open sourced and the um the server infrastructure is open sourced and you can run something like uh Vault Warden on your own infrastructure as well. So, >> okay, >> there if you were if you haven't yet your password manager >> and I'm I'm disappointed in you, but there are options out there. Uh, obviously, if you have a password manager of your own choice, go with that one. Please don't don't change because of somebody saying that Bit Warden's more interesting because it's transparent because of open source. >> But that's why I wanted to highlight this. >> Yeah. Thank you. >> To put a lot of people to bed so they can stop DMing me about >> Yeah, stop stop DMing Tim. Um, but I'm glad because this is the one that I settled on a few I don't know two or three years ago when Last Pass just sort of seemed to misstep horribly, especially from a PR point of view. Um, I moved over and pushed everything over to bit one. So, I'm happy um that you have the uh you know that you got the skinny on this. Uh, by the way, Tim paused about about a minute ago for about three seconds and he scowlled. There was a moment where Tim Tim scout it was a very effective scallally. He was trying to encourage everybody to use a password manager. So, unless you want to be on the receiving end of Tim's scowlling, then get yourself get yourself a part of I feel there should be scowling on your website, Tim. Uh, for me, yeah, >> I'm a nice person. I don't I I want to have clients. >> Okay. Scowlling at them before they sc my clients. >> I would go and get a password manager. It's not worth it, everybody. The other thing was Mark's lights went out. I don't know if anybody noticed that, but he scuttled away very quietly and got his lights coming back on. But there we go. Few comments in coming in. Um, where was it again? So, going back to the um the bit that we were talking about a minute ago. So, Andy Bell and what have you. Um, let me just put it like that. David Warsy says, so in regard to No, it wasn't. It was about the automatic piece and React and what have you. Um, David Warsy says, "I just wish WordPress was more active in the W3C rather than looking to the corporate web all the time." Uh, there we go. And uh apparently Tim, you're a sucker for a clickbait title. >> Yeah, I'm not quite sure which one. >> Denny, I think Scowl. Tim. Scowl. Just give him the Yeah. Yeah. David knows his place now. He's No more comments from you, David. I feel like the soup. What was it? The soup thing in Seinfeld. No soup for you. No comments for you, David Wsley. You're you're in the doghouse. Right. Moving on. uh the so there's three that are coming up from ONAR and the first one I don't know if the this GitHub repo is something that you're involved with personally but we're looking at kitten TTS which is a a subdirectory of kitten ML what is this what is this ML so this is text to speech model uh which people can host u self host it's only like 25 megabytes smallest one this is uh I'm a big fan of open source models. Um and in term uh that's great for privacy privacy fox people and in general this model what gives you is you know sometimes we go articles and there is listen to this article and you can do this with this model and without paying anyone you can just host in your WordPress website in your hosting hopefully you are not using share hosting um so and so this will be enough resources to run this but still um perhaps it's impossible to sh run it on share hosting and 25 megabytes quite small and does a really good job um converting your articles into tech and a speech and comes with I believe eight uh voices. Yeah, I just want to I I think this team done a really great great job getting this out and supporting open source models and yeah so it says on the the GitHub repo kitten TTS is an open source realistic texttospech model with just 15 million parameters. That sounds like a lot to me but presumably it's not. Um designed for lightweight deployment and high quality voice synthesis. I confess I haven't used anything like this largely because every single thing that I do is actually me speaking. But I do see this more and more on websites wherever I tend to roam. There's quite a lot of here's the text and then here's the accompanying usually AI generated I don't know audio file which is almost like a just almost like somebody reading it out. I um I find them quite hard to listen to most of the time because they don't sound real, but maybe this is >> there's there's some examples down there. If you scroll, you will see there's a they put some examples where they read the text. >> Yeah, there's all different kind of voices you can choose and experiment. I think what's great about it like you don't have to rely on third parties and and also I'm uh in terms of accessibility cases like you people can just listen to article and yeah okay then I will I will link to it in the show notes if you have a need to put you know speech on your blog posts and things like that inside your WordPress blog this will do that for you by the looks of things. Uh, I'll just Yeah, the the URL is not that difficult to read, so I will just read it out. I don't normally from GitHub because it's hard usually. So, it's github.com/kittenml/kitten tts. So, that was the first one. >> I was so disappointed it wasn't what I thought it was. I have never clicked a link on quicker expecting it to be realistic meows. >> Oh, I see. Okay. >> I was I was I was all in for this. There was going to be this realistic set of meows coming out of it and I could program my me some me some cat purring. >> No, >> there's a whole there's a whole subculture of people. >> I want a large language model that has been trained on meows and purr >> translated into cat. Yeah. Okay, that's okay. So, there's the first one. Uh second one from uh Onar is well I presume this is your own because it's the spam. You've got an annual report as well. You've got some key findings here but just just sort of run us through the the highlight items of >> Yeah. Yeah. I'm not going to take spend too long on you on this. I just uh this is usually we do every year where we take some sample of data and look at the data and this is a very actually related to what Cloudflare um posted recently about their um denial of service attack. uh in recently we've seen a lot of um attacks are coming from residential IPs meaning like people they don't know their devices are compromised like they have smart boxes at home or they have like their computers they their smart devices they all like spreading u starting spam campaigns or doing card testing attack people are income are very aware of this issue card testing attack where people steal other people's those cards, credit cards and they test it on your WooCommerce website and yeah this is about report about that and yeah in general um awareness about residential proxies and yeah we seen again this year we saw more attacks in WooCommerce and and also WordPress is more popular so it has it has seen more spam campaigns targeting WordPress um Yeah. Um that's all I Yeah. I encourage people to read about it and there is some um also free ways free tools how they can protect themsel from the attacks and against >> yeah I will link to that again in the uh in the show notes. Let me just see the UR the URL is easy enough to say so I'll read that in. >> I think quite a lot of people who consume this podcast they do not um they don't read the you know the associated posts. So, it's quite good if I can read the URL. So, it's uh oops spam. So, oopspam.com2025-spam- report. So, you can go and check that out and there are some key findings there. We'll get on to a piece a bit later if there's time from Cloudflare and one of the things that they particularly mentioned was the um the use of uh smart TV um hardware as one of the things which has sort of ramped up I think over the last quarter. We have a like a little thing which we plug in the back of the TV. It's I think it's Google TV something like that. >> Yeah. Also fire. >> Yeah. >> Okay. Right. In which case I think you've got a third one as well. This one. Um so this one again from Onar. This one's called Well, it's on the MI I don't know if it's MIT Sloan or MITS. I don't really know. I think it's part of the MIT uh infrastructure. It's the Sloan school which has something to do with I guess management or something like that. Uh the title is open and sorry AI open models have benefits so why aren't they used more widely? Is the answer to that because they're not as good? Is that basically what it is at the moment? Would that sort of >> article also mentions about that um there's usually 90% quality difference. So usually and even like uh even open source models they close that gap very like in within 13 weeks >> and uh these models in the beginning they were only like u open AI and all the closed sources models so people more got used to those models and people started integrating to into their system but then later there's more smarter there's more smarter and equally yeah high quality models also came out open source they are yeah I think now it's really expensive for companies to switch I think that's one reason um people don't want to deal with it but there is and some people are concerned about open source models because of privacy but then there is open source models you can host it in your own infrastructure if you're a company and that's uh will be told privacy and you own all your data >> yeah and I think another concern they raised there is um top open source uh models now currently all made in China >> and so they all come from yeah and that's another privacy concern but again you can host this uh this all the open models locally and without any internet connection so that will solves the privacy issue. Yeah. Uh in general the article goes through why people should switch and they should consider it and of course there's a huge cost and yeah I um I have this feeling that the year 2026 I'm just taking this data from people out in the wider ecosystem you know tech journalism more broadly so not really WordPress related and many of them seem to be talking about the the real financial upside down pyramid basically this sort of really difficult to maintain financial cial structure that a lot of these AI companies are built upon. So, you know, venture capital money, which at some point the venture capitals will wish to have back and and how the a the AIs that many people have become dependent upon will become significantly more expensive for the exact same thing. I do wonder as well g given the kind of stuff that I would ever use AI for, which might be literally just summarizing a URL, you know, poke a URL at it and say summarize that in a hundred words. I I'd be I'm sure that some of the open source ones would be completely capable for me at that kind of thing. Obviously, if you're trying to do the cutting edge um coding and things like that, then I'm sure that you do need to reach into your pockets, but I don't know, maybe open source will win this in the end, but let's wait and see if they're capable of using accessing internet resources and using different tools. Yeah, they much Yeah, they're very capable nowadays. it just they there's not as as much commercial interest in open source models. So there's not as much PR team behind them. So I know >> it's kind of kind of interesting how a lot of the people in the open source arena um who advocate massively for open source are quite happy to use these proprietary technologies to uh you know to build this that and the other thing on top of WordPress. It's kind of interesting how that whole >> Yeah. You don't even have to like you don't even have to host them yourself. You can for example the open router um I don't know you heard about this open router is a infrastructure that hosts all the different open-source um products uh open source models and you can use them through the companies too and you get privacy benefits and it's much much cheaper to use them to for especially small uh simpler tasks. So Ross, who uh who is in the comments, sorry uh Tim, I'll just read Ross' comment quickly. Um it surprises me says Ross. Um the amount of the amount that the WordPress project is talking about AI so much but not talking about open models. Sorry Tim, I think you were trying to say >> I was just going to put in a couple of points. One is that there are two different costs. open open source models you have the cost to train the models and the size that and infrastructure you need to train the models and that is a hardware problem that we just there aren't companies going hello I'd like to I have I have a data center over here that I wish to train the models on I will then hand that that open model back into the real world and give it away for free with the exception of unless that is literally a company strategy or a n a nation state strategy which is the Chinese model process which is we're going to throw this out as a disruptor and that's >> oh >> really useful for us you know people who are using the open source model they're not doing it because it's an for open source in the nice way we think of they're doing it to disrupt against the their larger competitors um and to stop necessarily proprietary models taking single hold if you do not have someone who has enough hacking to give you the data center to train these models. It's really difficult. Then we have using the models themselves. They still require on the whole significant hardware. You were saying, "Oh, can I summarize something?" Absolutely. >> Yeah. >> Um the uh I have a a Quen model on my laptop. Absolutely perfectly fine for summarizing. takes about if I f if I pointed at a uh an article it takes about 45 to 50 seconds to come back to me with a summarization >> right right which is >> I if I pass that to chat pt it come back in 5 seconds >> yeah okay there's the difference right that's the >> quality would be there that's fine for one article scaled once on my machine the problem comes when you want to do heavy lots of workload so let's say I'm doing I want to audit some code um with a open- source models as we have now let's even if it's a relatively small code base with my current hardware which I don't have I'm not a massive company with lots of hardware but we just hardware that I have currently I can do it it just takes a really really long time >> whereas if I threw that same code base at claude code it would be done in a fraction of the time at that extreme cost. I can throw my code base via something like open router, but actually open router is quite expensive because I have to make the if I'm making a per API request. I'm I'm still paying for their hardware at much more inflated rate because they have to make money. Open routters is not a charity. They make money on those requests through. So we haven't yet reached a point where we have models that are small enough to run locally at performance that's required to make the open source a viable model and what we don't have yet is model a way of training models that's small enough that they or we can distribute well enough um we we we will I'm sure see in the next sort of 6 months to 12 months um seti style setups if you remember the oldi Yeah. Yeah. Hive mind kind of thing. >> Yeah. I'm sure that we will that's the route that open source will ultimately go down to solve the distribution problem at making that. But to do that introduces amount of complexity, security implications and pollution of training data. Also just the whole how do we train these models on what do we train these models? Um because one of the things about the open source models coming from China is that there's at least allegations that they're trained on other AIs um which and the quite often the training methods for these larger larger open source models isn't as transparent as we'd like. We get the end result as an open source model but how it got there is sort of like fuzzy on the way through. Um that is the title of today's podcast but there's no way that I can sound like that. I want to say the word fuzzy. >> Make it make it in a really small font. >> Tiny font. Yeah, tiny. >> Tiny font. >> Um, okay. So, that's really interesting. Ross has got just sort of to we put that comment up, but I'll just put it up one more time. Um, that was the context for Tim's reply. That is so interesting. If you've got this intuition that some sort of federated version of AI like uh like the SETI thing that you mentioned where people are sort of I don't know letting their CPUs in idle time do some grunt work in the background and and contributing to a >> probably better than turning it into a crypto miner which is what those CPUs are currently being used whether they wanted to or not. >> Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Um, I however don't have access to a data center, but just you know because it's good news. I do have access to loads of grapes and um and I'm going to eat these grapes. My ambition during the course of this podcast is to finish all the grapes and uh and then really need a week. Just to tie it back into security for a second that the uh one thing we are seeing more of is that um bad actors when they are compromising servers are doing so to get the CPU usage for AI stuff for writing out spam emails and blahy blah. Um not to the same it's only in small pockets at the moment but I'm sure we're going to start seeing. So if you want to look for where we're seeing uh distributed uh AI at the moment, it is actually being used more as on the aggression side. It is being used by bad actors, not necessarily for the benefit of mankind in general. >> Who couldn't have seen that coming? I know you're shocked. >> Yeah, what a shame. I'm just going to move I'm going to flick to something that I was going to do at the end because you were talking about um the web being scraped and the way that you know the open source models might scrape it just as an aside. I was going to leave this till the end. This is over on the tech dirt blog. It's called preserving the web is not the problem. Losing it is. And this is just a curious byproduct of that scraping that um institution the institution which we've all come to know and love the way back machine. So the internet archives way back machine is really caught at the minute as to how best to deal with AI agents scraping it because um it's being used largely by AI agents scraping it and a lot of the content for example from institutions like it mentions a few the Guardian the New York Times and Reddit um are now blocking the access to the internet archive to scrape future content. content, maybe past content as well. I don't really know how that would work, but future content. Um, because there it's a way for the AI agents to sort of get round their content restrictions and what have you. And so that would be a shame. That would be a real shame. I kind of I didn't foresee that one. You know, like I said a minute ago, you could foresee the AI um, you know, the miscreants misusing AI to write spam emails, but for some reason, I didn't see that one coming. And that just seems like a a real shame if something like that was to happen. Mike Maznik, I think, wrote this. No, it wasn't actually. It was Mark Graham. It's not very long. It's pretty quick to read. So, go and check it out. But it is a bit of a shame. >> The Internet Archive has for has its own set of controversies based on scraping when it may or may not be allowed to. So, there is something ironic about this. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. It's uh shouting fire in the theater or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Um Okay, let's move on. Let's do some sort of WordPressy stuff. So, this is the first one. So, WordPress 7.0. Beta 1 is just around the corner. I can't actually remember the day it drops. Maybe it's dropped already. Can't remember. Um, but anyway, it's coming. Um, and so it's time we go through this sort cycle of beta releases and then finally the the actual release will come fairly soon. Time to start playing. Don't put it on a production site, but there is some fa there is some pretty good stuff in this release. If you want to follow somebody who's been following the collaborative editing side of things, go follow Steve Burge from Publish Press because he more or less daily uh on X tweets about his latest discovery um to do with this. But I'm taking my guidance from him, but it seems like the whole collaborative editing, which many people thought was going to be a real roadblock, you know, a really difficult thing to pull off, it feels like it's it's coming. Um and it's going to drop. We'll see what kind of hardware you need to make that work. Um, and then there's another whole there's a whole bunch of stuff around design improvements. So, the video uh embed block and the grid block and the icons and the breadcrumbs and the headings blocks have all had adaptations as have the nav as has the navigation block. And then there's a bunch of developery stuff as well. You can read it all in this piece. Um, it's called WordPress 7.0 beta 1 and it's on the WordPress.org news blog. So, go check that out and go and have a play a bit like Steve does. You three, anything about that before I move on. >> Don't run it on production. >> Don't run it on production. Look, it literally says it on the first line. >> You know, unless you're me, in which case you've updated your site to use it. But for the rest of you, don't run it on production. >> Yeah, that's right. Just don't. Um, so there we go. Oh, and look, there's Steve. Ha, there he is. Uh, hi, Steve. Um, I was just saying that everybody should follow you if they want to learn about the collaborative editing because you every few days it seems you drop a little nugget of something that you've played about within WordPress 7 and uh, yeah, I'm very grateful for you doing that. Appreciate it. So anyway, go and check that out. Just a quick mention, uh, friend of this podcast, he's been on it lots and lots of times, no doubt will be in the future as well, Remus Dice. Um, he's launching a new service. He's he's had a service for a little while. uh truer than north. But I I won't try to pause this. It's a fairly lengthy written article, but he is um sort of pivoting what he does in the WordPress space um and picking up the mantle that Guten sorry Gildenberg put down the project run by Jonathan Wald and Tammy Listister um which they put on ice I think just before Christmas something like that. Um I don't think Remus is literally directly picking it up. But as it's gone out of existence, he can see that there's a sort of um a hole in the market there. So he's going to be trying doing what they're doing. In other words, communicating with people, trying to figure out where they fit with their products and services in the WordPress ecosystem. So he's going to be like a consultancy for that. He does however have a direct rival because I spoke to Matt Cromwell uh during the course of this week. Um and he co-founder of GiveWP, worked for Stellar WP for a long time. So equally credible in terms of their length and breadth of history in the WordPress space. Um he's launched something called Roots and Fruit which looks like it's going to be exactly similar very analogous to what Remus is doing. So, if you need a bit of guidance in your WordPress company's journey, check out Rimkus' blog, but also if you check out um the Tavern podcast that I did with Matt Cromwell or go to rootsandfruit.com, you'll be able to see what they're both up to. Anything about that? >> In the pre-show, we were suggesting that they should we should just set them up in a ring and fight, but I've subsequently thought that given that how unfair that would be to Matt >> Yeah. >> that a rap battle might be in order instead. >> Oh. um rap battle. >> Yeah. Could Could we not do both? Would it be possible to have them both doing that at simultaneously? A a sort of cage fight meets rap battle all at the same all at the same time. Uh I apologize Matt. This wasn't my idea or Remus. It was Tim's idea. I'm just saying. >> But but Nathan, you did fully support it before the show. So >> No, no, no. I I don't remember any of that. I can't I can't can't remember that at all. No, no, no. Yes, it would be fun. Um, and then Taco's here. So, I know Taco knows Remus very well. Maybe you could persuade him to get in a cage fight with Mar. This is not >> I don't think anyone I don't think anyone wants to get in a cage fight with Remus. I don't know. I >> no there's there's probably like a handful of people on earth who' be who best roads I think there's not many and they probably all live in like Norway or something like that. >> I'm going to go back to the rap battle. >> Yeah. Okay. All right. So, uh Remus and Matt, if you could uh just crack on with that, organize the rap battle and then we can report back on it. I >> I feel like a major word camp that would work nicely. >> Oh, yeah. Yeah. see who's like the best at advising clients. Look, I tried to do some sort of rap gesture then. I sort of did this. Don't know. Don't know. >> I I feel like that would be the cringiest thing ever. >> Yeah, that's why it should be done, Mark. That's exactly. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. Be it would be the most watched WordPress TV thing ever, probably. >> Jamie Mars can compare it. It could be Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I think I think I think we've cracked it. So yeah, Taco's saying poor Matt. A not poor Remus, though. I know she's saying, but Amber likes it. She's got a giggle icon. And frankly, if Amber likes it with a giggle icon, it has to happen. That's all there is to it. Keep it coming. This is This is brilliant. We've lost Onar. I don't know if we've lost Onar or Onar's camera has sort of just died the death, but we've we've lost Well, no, we haven't lost him. He must still be there in some capacity because I can see that he's still on the screen. So Onar, if you can hear me. >> Sorry, I'm here. I just have a problem. >> That's fine. If the camera's busticated, no problem. Just stick with us for the audio. >> I'm listening. I'm here. >> Yeah, that's great. Thank you. Okie dokie. Let's move on a little bit and have a look at this. Last week we reported on the fact that um the WPCC, now annoyingly there are two acronyms that fit WPCC. There's the WP what is it? community credits or something like that. And then there's the WP community collective. I can't remember. >> I thought you were talking about Wimbledon Wimble Wimbledon's public cricket club >> that Well, there's three now apparently. Uh but that one doesn't often feature on this show sadly. Uh but it should. >> Sorry, it was it's Wimbledon and Putney Commons was the is it along with the parent council. Honestly, it's been too long since we talked about them on this podcast, but here we are. So, WPCC in this case means the WP WP Community Collective. Uh, last week we reported that um one of the founder members and board members um had stood down. Uh that was Katie Adams Farrell as you can see if you can see the screen. Um quick off the news, the the position has been sort of filled if you like. There's uh a couple of people that have stepped up, but Chris Reynolds is probably the most notable one to mention. He has stepped in as the interim uh president. The other one is uh Jono Alderson and uh yeah, so they're both going to be acting as part of the WPCC uh endeavor. I know Courtney's joining us in the comments. She probably has a lot more uh sense to say about this because she is one of the founders as well. Um and yeah, the endeavor of this project is to is to you know sort of grow the community in a fair, equitable, transparent way. And uh I feel I've had a few chats with uh Chris Reynolds. I don't know that I've ever spoken to Jonno Alderson, but my the only experience that I've had with Jonno was watching him speak um at a WordPress event. And boy, he is a force of nature, isn't he? He's really quite quite something. he was able to speak on the subject of SEO and it was really it's powerful watching him. So we'll have to see we have to wait and see. Tim's sort of having a bit of a bit of a giggle there. >> I just like the idea that yes, Jonno is a force of nature and we should leave it there. >> Yeah. Okay. Okay. >> Just because out of context that sounds amazing. I think Jonno would appreciate that as a statement as well. >> Yeah. So Chris has got a sort of fairly muted like fairly political way of of explaining what he wants to do as part of his presidency. But um Jono is a little bit more forthright. He says WordPress so this gives you some idea of maybe where Jonno wants to take it. Uh WordPress runs on contribution but too often the people and organizations doing the work are expected to absorb the cost. Alderson said, quoting him again, "The WPCC is creating real structure around sustainability, accountability, and contributor well-being. I'm proud to be joining the board and helping to push WordPress towards a healthier, more equitable future." This is on the repository uh blog, so you can go and check it out over there. Uh anything from you three, excuse me, about that? >> Not about that, but can we just take a moment? So, uh, you can't see this on the podcast, but the amazing picture that the repository found of Chris, which is like you can't even see his face. He's just >> Which one is it? Is this him here? >> Yeah. >> Maybe he um maybe he assumes the camera. He sort of lurks elsewhere. It's not possible to find pictures of him because whenever the camera comes out, he disappears into a corner. It looks like um like one of those pictures that would be taken, you know, you'd see on the front page of a of a newspaper. I feel like that's right it really well with the black and white and it made me smile. It's like, yep, that's that's the person. >> Um let's see what Reese says. John Jonno is a little bit more forthright is is the understatement of the century. Okay. Um I meant in that article in particular because Chris said something and then Jonno said something and John >> Oh, no. No. life. Jono. >> Yeah. Yeah. Uh, Taco says, "It's like Jonno Fest." Jonno is absolutely bloody brilliant, says Taco. Okay, that's it. Ideal. Uh, D. And then I've got some commentary here about subscribing to my newsletter. Uh, I don't know. I'll send me an email and I'll figure it out. It's adminwpbuilds.com. He >> was talking about the tavern, not you. Oh, is he tavern? >> Yeah, >> I have no control over that, but send me an email anyway at that email address and I'll get it looked at by the team that run the uh the Tavern website. Okay, thank you very very much. Anyway, there we go. Uh Courtney saying, "Welcome to both Chris and Jono joining the WPCC." Uh oh, maybe it's one of Zach's. Zack Zack, if you've ever met Zack, Zach's like a total pro photographer. He takes photographs of bands, mainly metal bands for I think it's a side gig. It's not like exactly what he does. He obviously works in the tech space. Um, but side gig. So maybe that is that one of yours. Uh, Zach, did you actually take that picture? That's interesting. Right. Okay. There we go. That's that piece. Right. Let's move on. I'm not Unfortunately, I never gave this enough time to really pause what was going on here. I read it ever so briefly, thought I'd understood it, and now that it's in front of me, I'm not sure that I did. So, I'll just I'll just say what I think is going on here, and then I'll let either the hive mind of the comments or you three panelists tell me that I've got it wrong. So, Matt Mullenweg took to the make.wordpress.org Slack this week. Is that right? Yeah. 18th of February. Uh and said, "I've heard that w so word camp Asia, Europe, and uh US have separate Slack groups." Um but it would be better to have everybody in the main.org group. And then he says, "Let's move everything over." He says, "I think this was done because there was too much friction in making new channels. Totally fine to create public channels for big events and private ones for planning, etc. let's deputize a dozen people to be able to spin up channels or admin them. And so I don't know if this is a thing which is now done or happening or what the need was, but there was a there was a few comments that came in saying it's quite handy to have those things separated in it. For example, at Word Camp Europe, they like to keep it secret where the um where the next Word Camp Europe is. That's part of the whole thing. you know, you show up and then the final day you get to find out with the with the expensively made video where it's going next time. And obviously, if everything was in a public channel, that might not be the case. So, I'm not entirely sure what the um what the reasoning behind this is or whether it'll happen. But the other thing which is kind of interesting here, certainly from my point of view, it says here, I'm very open to water cooler or more socials channels on Slack as well. We should have some fun there as we work together. So it's not just his endeavor here is not just to have WordPress, you know, code and events, but have other silly things like a dog's channel. I mean, it literally this is what's on the page. A dog channel, a cat channel, a games channel, a self-promotion channel, and a Today I Learned channel. Now, obviously, if you listen to this podcast, you know I just like messing about. So that that's music to my ears. Let's have as many Let's have a hamster channel. Let's begin there, shall we? So, anyway, I don't know if this is big news to you. If it's of no interest whatsoever, I'll just leave it. If you want to talk about it, we will. If not, I'll just move on whilst I'm eating grapes. >> That's a big fat no. Nobody wants to talk about that. Okay. Did any comments? >> The only thing I have to say is Yeah, I agree. We need to slack better. I'm not going to say anything beyond that. So the the headline is correct because there's there's a lot of clutter in Slack and and all the social uh chat uh platforms. So I I would like for there to be something somewhat centralized, but I'm not sure how it should be done. >> Yeah. Yeah. But but just kind of interesting. I didn't I suppose it it I just don't know what the thought process is behind it in terms of whether it's needed or not. Um, but it's been mooted. You can go and join in the comments that there are quite, >> you know, I mean there's not lots and lots and lots of comments, but there's quite a few comments. >> I will be curious to know what they talk about in cats and dogs. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> It's just cat videos. Cat dog videos. >> Yeah. The cat cat channels got to be more than dogs. >> The dog channels exclusively cat for cats. By the way, um, somebody's ears were getting hot. You know, somebody was could hear us over the internet. Remus has joined in. Um, >> yeah, I agree, Remus. I think that Matt would hands down beat you in the >> I was going to say, what's the underlying What's What are you trying to say there, Remus? What? I think you're implying something, aren't you? You know. Okay. What if What? What if? I'm not even going to say it. It's so what if Matt was allowed a small rounders bat or something like that to sort of offset the >> You keep going to the violence rap battle. That was the suggestion. >> Never done violence before. >> It's so funny though. I'm absolutely loving I'm loving the rim because it's even bothered to comment though. That's absolutely brilliant. Um so anyway, we'll see see if that happens. I'm surprised he didn't put the word fight in quotes while he was at it. >> Yeah, that's right. Okay, let's see if Matt Cromwell drops in and and offers it offers it off. Okay, right. Let's get into some sort of security stuff. There's a few bits and pieces here. Um, it's totally out of my pay grade this, but I did think this was kind of interesting. So, this is talking about AI and security all in one go. So, somebody that I followed on social media for a little while, this is on Masttodon, uh Kevin Bowmont, he says, "Today in infosc job security news. I was looking into an obvious vulnerability introduced into a major reb web framework today and it was committed by username Claude on GitHub vibe coded basically." So, I started looking through Claude commits on GitHub. There's over two million of them and it's about 5% of o all opensource code this month. As I looked through the code, I saw the same class of vulnerabilities being introduced over and over again. Several a minute. Honestly, I don't I don't think we need to talk about that, but I just thought that was an interesting thing to raise. You know, just like what what what is the future we're painting for ourselves if if stuff like that is true? >> Breaking news. AI was trained on bad data. Bad input and bad data. >> Oh, increases vulnerabilities. I'm shocked. >> No kidding. No kidding. Should we go to the other interesting one that I found? Where was that? Was it this one? No. Uh, let me try. We'll come to that at the end. Where's it gone? Where's it gone? Where's it gone? >> I think that one you were just on the open the open AI has a open source has an AI slot problem. >> That was not the one I was thinking of, but that is kind of interesting. No, I've forgotten what the context of it was. Maybe it was that one. No, I can't remember. But there was one which sort of jived perfectly with this one. Yeah. Anyway, we'll come back to those in a minute. But I just thought that was kind of interesting. You know, we're painting ourselves into a future where the robots are now Oh, no. It was the one about the robot. >> Are you talking about the Sean the Sean Hooper one? >> Yeah, that's right. Which one was that? Where? Let me see if I can find it. >> It's uh when Rob When robots fight back. >> Yeah, let me find it. You're right. You've got the you've got the measure of it. That's the one I'm >> while you're looking for that. One of the things that's interesting about that is that these commits are being actually submitted and are being submitted and signed by Claude. So this is like hello I we're not we're not even pretending that there's someone looking over this and have manually putting this in. This is and this is just this is the AI has submitted this. This is signed and through. And there's part of me that's really pleased that's h that's happening. because right now it's really difficult if you get a piece of code in front of you and you're like who who or what coded this? Um so it would be nice to actually see more AI code being uh properly um offered by having showing who's actually doing the authorship. Okay. >> What the position of the human was inside that. So actually I think we absolutely know we are there not 5%. It's going to be >> masses more. It's clearly 5 5% of isn't that's that's a that's not not the real figure. It's going to be significantly more. We in the space of just 12 months the development space has completely changed. If I'm not I reckon there's significantly more than 5% has been of just the WordPress co core code has been committed. There's going to be way more than that generated by AI in the last commit set of commits for WordPress 7. If you the real time collaborate if we took one of those features the real-time collaboration part and just looked at how much of that was AI coded I suspect that that is going to be quite high. It's not going to be five. It's not going to be 10. It's not even poss might be even in 20 30s 40%. But you don't know that. >> No, >> because we have no easy way at the moment of verifying other than looking at it and going, "God, that's AI slop." I'm not saying the real time stuff is AI slop by the way that was probably but that there is a but it gives you an example. We at the moment we don't know. So it would be good to have some sort of ownership and some custody chain so we can actually see what's generated that. >> Okay. So you're saying that having some huristics as to that portion was definitely humans and that portion wasn't having some reliable data on that and people not lie. That's kind of interesting. By the way, I never get to say the word breaking on this podcast, but I'm going to say breaking because look, here it is. It's official. Pat Cromwell has >> he's joined in. >> I I would also point out that Remicus' reply of uh his his last reply explaining that uh you know the dude who's been doing Taekwondo for eight years and kickboxing for free. And I'm going to emphasize again in a rap battle. >> Okay. Okay. Where's the comment about Taekwondo? Oh yeah. Okay. So just I mean I'm not trying to I'm really not but it just it's funny right it's quite funny. Uh so Matt Cromwell says my bets on the little guy in that match and then Remus comes back with mine are absolutely on the big dude who's been doing Taekwondo for eight years in kickboxing for three. Okay. I think at this >> I think the other thing that we have to keep in mind here is Matt really is a lover not a fighter. Okay. So there's there's that, too. So >> that's if if I um if I use that as the title of this episode, it's going to be misconstrued. Um if I use Matt's Matt's really a lover, not a fight. I don't think anybody's gonna pick off. >> But it's true. Matt Matt, you know, Matt would just go and give Remus a big hug and that would be the end of it. >> Okay, Taco, can I just say thank you? Taco's now divorced us from all responsibility. He's decided to take on organizing it. That's great. We wash our hands of the whole thing. It was a terrible idea, but you Yeah, you can I still submit a session? Yes, of course you can. You do it. Let's uh let's get them in a Let's get them in a ring. This is hysterical. I love this. Uh and then Matt, finally, rap battle. Okay, rap battle it is to go with music majors and native English speakers. Okay, I dare you to use that title. Lord, just some episodes are easier than others. Let's put it that way. I have to keep up with the comments as well as trying to make sense of everything that's coming in. Okay, Elliot Richmond's joining us. Hi, Elliot. Loving your blog, by the way. It's very calming. Um, recommits via AI. This is a very good reason for AI governance ASAP. How would that be done? Who would govern AI? You'd have to have some sort of UN for AI, wouldn't you? Because cross >> EU EU has a bunch of laws around AI safety and governance. >> I don't know how that going. >> I mean, the EU has a bunch of proposals for laws around it, right? >> But >> I'm not sure they actually implemented it or not, but >> they they jumped on that train very quickly. >> We all know that governments are excellent at do at understanding technology usage. Oh yeah. >> What team say about the you using AI code comments? Uh I know that people some companies I some I have some friends in uh Shopify I think they also publicly disclose that they use a lot of AI comments but there's always human in the loop that uh reviews all the pull requests by um AI models and so you want to make sure that uh all the codes are align with your the standards your internal standards and also there's no vulnerabilities and stuff. >> Yeah. I Yeah, I think if you just let the AI to do pull requests and submit the codes, then uh there will be a lot of problems. >> So, sorry, sorry. >> Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. >> So, I didn't mean to interrupt. Sorry. Um, but you said something which led to the article which I was trying to find which, uh, you got quite right, Mark. It was the one and I've actually now Oh, for goodness sake, I've now lost it. There we go. It was the Shan Hooper one. >> Uh, this came up this week. So Sean Hooper um posted a piece called When the Robots Fight Back. And I I'll just read it because it's so short, but it's so interesting. It says, "Today I saw something I'd never seen before. A bot taking revenge on a human. Matt's plot lib is a popular open source Python code library used to make visualizations. Yesterday, a contributor named Krabby Wrathburn submitted a bug fix. The pull request was closed by Scott Shambbor stating the project's rules that ban AI submissions. Usually, this would be the end of things, but no. This bot, which runs the open claw AI, instead decided, you can't make this up, decided to create a blog post calling Scott out, which it later retracted. In my favorite part of this interaction, the bot tells Scott, "Judge the code, not the coder. Your prejudice is hurting Matt plot lib. What I mean what's happened to us? I mean here we are talking about Matt Cromwell and Remus having a fight. It's this it's this it's completely hijacked our minds. It's all it's all ahole. I mean, seriously though, getting back to that piece that isn't that just nuts? Doesn't that like isn't every bit of your senue going where how have we got to this point where a a robot can can in effect get the hump and then go off and I mean obviously it's doing what humans do, right? This is the sort of churish petty behavior that humans exhibit and the AI has gone, oh, what would a human do? Oh yeah, let's do the churly petty petty thing. And so that's that's what it's done. So anyway, I just thought that was really interesting and thanks Mark for re rediscovering it. >> Ju just as an aside, I've just put a a link in the guest chat uh which probably you've already linked to in past episodes. Uh but if we're going to have if we're going to have AI fight, so at least we've now got the the option. >> Okay, let me let me try. Is this Can I put this on the screen? Is it safe? >> Yeah, it's safe. >> Right, hold on. Okay, we're all all having a giggle, are we? Okay, here it comes. Oh, no. I haven't fe This is insane. I haven't featured this. I actually saw this the other day. Should we give the viewers a few seconds of this because it is kind of cool. Uh, China's dancing robots. How worried should we be? So, okay, imagine they getish >> and uh, check it out. I'll just sort of zoom in a bit. >> I mean, what the heck? Doesn't that make you I mean obviously they're doing some sort of pre-programmed repertoire, but yeah. What what are you are you are you advocating putting these in the ring with Remus? Is that why this is on the screen? >> No, I'm just suggesting that if you're going to if we you know you seem to be very keen on this idea that Paul Remus is going to be put into a cage. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Um and then you mentioned AI. I was like, well, if we're going to put AI against him Yeah. They're coming for us sometime. >> To be fair, I think he could with one finger go like that and it would fall over and just be sitting. >> That's right. Yeah. Like a tortoise. So, it'll be hilarious to watch. >> Don't you think though that in like a couple of years time, it's entirely possible that we'll be looking back and the the fawn will not be like that anymore. It'll be, okay, now they really can observe the finger coming towards us, you know, them, and they'll just snap that finger right off because >> I think it's it's when you put the guns on them that you need to start. But we'll um we'll skip over that and go with the >> I was going to say we don't need more violence in this particular episode. We can all agree uh no guns for the robots. Thank you very much. Right. I had a couple of pieces which I'm not going to have time to get to. Uh so let's see where we get to now. Oh, this is another piece that came from Matt. Um if you're in the polyglots um ecosystem in the WordPress space, this might be worth looking at. It is AI related again as everything seems to be and it's about using uh AI to achieve the the things which um traditionally the polyglots team has used there. There's an awful uh lot of well not a lot but there's a few very incisive comments which come up but um Matt is basically asking the question what can we do with AI to make the whole polyglots thing the translation um much more straightforward and uh so if you're into that go check it out right let's have a little look um I've got one product that I thought I'd mention this week called review bird not come across this before uh is for those of you that are um using Woo Commerce stores and uh I don't have a WooCommerce store and I don't take product reviews so I don't know how essential this kind of plug-in would be but if you are and you want to corral your product reviews go and check out reviewbird.com it allows you to manage all of that in one place and given whenever I go online and shop for things I do look at reviews it's probably is quite an important part of such a website right now that we're um freaked ourselves out let's go to this one to karma us all down, shall we? This is Cloudflare. Their annual That's not true. I think it's quarterly report. Yeah, there you go. 2025 Q4 DDS threat report. It's a It's a The title is guaranteed to uh offer you sleep. But, however, it says a record setting 31.4 terabits per second attack caps a year of impressive DDS DDoS assaults. What didn't you know already from that? But check it out. Like just some of these numbers are absolutely ridiculous. If you work for Cloudflare, God bless you. I don't know how you guys manage what you're doing, but uh here we go. Uh the fourth quarter of 2025 was characterized by an unprecedented bombardment launched by the whatever the heck that is. Arisuru Kim Wolf Botnet D. >> They are famous botnet networks. >> Oh, thank you. They have like uh they have like over 200 last I checked 250 million compromised devices handling. >> Yeah. This was the thing that I was saying earlier about the Google TV, you know, the TV dongles and things like that. Apparently, a lot of them are part of this whole thing. Yeah. Um the campaign targeted Cloudflare's customers as well as Cloudflare as well as Cloudflare's dashboard. Now, I don't know if it's you, but I did notice Cloudflare at the end of last year going down a few times, like in in a way that I'd never ever ever seen Cloudflare go down before. And maybe this explains it. Um, the hypervoluttric HTTP DDoS attack succeeded. Just listen to this number and try to imagine it for a minute. Rates of 200 million requests per second. I mean, what uh just weeks, that was just weeks after a record-breaking 31.4 terabits per second attack. Um and then, you know, there's a bunch of charts which ex which show fairly conclusively that 2023 was lower than 2024. 2024 in turn was significantly lower than 2025. This graph looks logarithmic, by the way, which means that by the year like 2029, it's going to be infinite. There'll be nothing else on the internet apart from DDS attacks. It's just going to go, "Oh, Tim." Yeah. Is that plausible? >> Um, yeah. I mean, >> no. I I mean probably can answer this much more clearly than I can, but yeah, we we are we've already at the age where we pretty much now human traffic on the on the internet that needs to be specified separate to the web is such that we are now the minority. Um and it will not be that much longer before the web we are the minority at which point yeah you you're talking about automated systems talking to automated systems. Um I I think these numbers are are really interesting for perhaps a completely different reason and that's just how dominant Cloudflare has become. >> It's starting to worry me actually how dominant Cloudflare is. And as it happened, I think the times that they were down, the big ones that got in the news, each time was due to conf literally uh conf errors rather than actual I don't think they've gone down from a compromise. But uh yeah they are the just how dominant they've become and how important they are to infrastructure and uh whether that's a good thing whether that's a bad thing uh they are reaching that point where you got to think about them and you you're now in this position where you might as you they've reached that tipping point where up until recently there was like well there's a little part way you might you don't necessarily need to want to use Cloudflare because you can use your own but now If Cloudflare is down, so much of the internet's down that so many of the resources that you rely on for your own website is probably down that your website's probably down anyway, >> right? Right. >> So, you might as well use them. >> The curious optimistic. >> Yeah. But the the curious thing about the Cloudflare thing is a lot of the other platforms when they started to gain dominance. I'll use Facebook as an example wrapped around that was a a growing sense of like wow Facebook's like there's a lot of wrong going on there. There's a but I don't have that with Cloudflare. I I don't get a sense of there's a lot of wrong going on there. It's just they're getting bigger and bigger and bigger and so their failure is just bad. I personally haven't read enough. I've got no intuitions about them being a, you know, and I'm doing air quotes, a bad company doing unethical things. Perhaps they are, but I don't have that intuition. >> They're a corporation at that scale. There is always going to be some bad. You can't be a corporation that size and not >> upset some person. >> I have a solution, Tim. What we need to do is put the is put Cloudflare in a ring with Remus. it would lose >> now that I think Remus can subscribe to he's on team Cloudflare. I think maybe they just shake hands and that would be the end of it. Uh okay. Anyway, that is really sanguin stuff. You know, the numbers and the sort of the future that we're painting ourselves into the corner of. Kind of interesting, right? Some more security stuff very very quickly. CSS got hacked. How is this possible? Go and read the article. It's on Medium. It's kind of interesting. It's complicated and interesting and it's the way that the Chrome browser uh pares. It's not C, you know, you don't have to actually worry about writing CSS apart from in some really curious cases. But uh I've never seen a vulnerability involving CSS before. >> It's just as well we have lots of different browsers and we're not all based on Chromium based systems, isn't it? >> Well, I know you are still So you still using Firefox over there? Uh yes, except for when doing broadcast to you and my >> That's right. Because these platforms won't allow it. Yeah, there's you and your you and your seven other mates still using I I love I love I really want Mozilla to succeed. I listened to a podcast episode with the the now new CEO of Mozilla and he was trying to paint a positive spin on their new AI initiatives and I've got to say it didn't wash too well with me. I I got the bad feels from it. It was like sort of like greenwashing what is a necessary but horrible awkward evil that they're having to deal with. Yeah. You in agreement, Tim, a little bit. >> Oh, yeah. Absolutely. >> Okay. Great. Yeah. >> Um >> I think they released new feature to disable all the the AI features. >> Yes. Well, at least that's a thing, right? You can go in there and switch them all off, but ne necessarily they've they're going to be enabling them by default. But also, I just want a browser clear of all that really. I want the browser to just browse the internet based upon where I click and nothing more. >> Obviously, there are the nice thing is that there are just like there are different Chromium browsers. There are different Firefox variants out there and people are working on >> a good one. Libra Wolf, that's very good one. If anyone who's interested in privacy, Libra, what was that one called? I >> think called Libra Wolf. >> Oh, okay. >> As in like Libra Office, Libra free. >> Yeah. Yeah. Perhaps from the Yeah. Libra Wolf. It's a Libra Wolf variation. >> Yep. I downloaded one not that long ago which I didn't actually use because there were significant things in the UI which I didn't really like. But it was curious because it was a it was a Firefox clone but it was also trying to enable Chrome and the Firefox apps uh uh extension ecosystem. >> Was that Waterfox? >> It was I don't think it was. Um >> there certainly the no AI pushing heavily one. >> Okay. But it was just the idea that there are a few Chrome extensions that I'm really familiar with and I would love to be able to use and there's no equivalent Firefox one. Um, but this browser I thought might be able to do both but it didn't manage it. There was >> Firefox will install nearly all Chrome extensions. >> Okay. >> Just as a complete aside if you because they they they do share a commonality for their APIs. >> Okay. Okay. Uh so some comments coming in about that. uh the entire Firefox community. Oh, that's left. He's there. Look, there there is the Firefox. There's the UK Firefox community. >> And do not worry, I am indeed up in arms. >> Yeah, is up in arms about that. I used to be on their Sumo team. There's no connection between the CEO and those marketing the product. Okay. Um Right. Okay. I think very very quickly we'll just go through these. Uh I know time is short and I don't want to hold the the guests uh to stay for any length of time longer than we said we would. Um if you are using manage WP owned by GoDaddy, they have now forged a relationship with Patchack. I'll just mention that you can go and read about that yourself. The I don't know if this is the final round, but if you're going to go to Word Camp Asia or have intuitions that you might like to go to Word Camp Asia, the fifth round of speakers has been announced. And then uh we had the dancing robots already. D I'm just going to drop this one and say make of this what you will. This like just look at that for a minute and pause it. Just take in what you're seeing and then tell me that like if you needed proof of the existence of God or something like that, this might be it. Uh this is a fossil. like nature made that and it was found by somebody on a beach in and believe it or not they found it on the island called Holy Holy Island uh in Lindesvan and that's so obviously somebody's mouth the human did that there's no doubt about it or the aliens the aliens left it there that's probably what happened cuz look it's got like the gums the pink gum bits and then the teeth and then the Anyway apparently not apparently it's a fossil it's on the BBC website. Smiling fossil discovered on Holy Island drawn by teenager two weeks before with crayon. It doesn't actually say that, but I like the idea. Okay, there we go. That's it. We've run out of time. We've actually overshot the amount of time that we should be doing this show. Thank you uh to you for joining in the comments. Uh we await the obvious wrestling match between Matt and Remus. That'll be interesting to see. Maybe bring that >> battle. >> The rap battle. That's right. Yeah. No violence. >> No violence. The no violence rap mod wrestling match. That's what I heard. >> How about a break dance competition instead? >> Oh, what? >> A break dance. A break dance competition. >> Yeah. Okay. Yeah. To to be honest with you, what s what would satisfy me right at this moment because I've been watching so much of it is if they both just had a go at curling. just do the bit of curling and see who's the uh >> who's the >> I like the idea of the I feel I feel feel that that still very much uh leans more toward Remicus than it does Matt. >> Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We keep present. Yeah. Okay. Well, how about the my surname is Cromwell. >> Matt could hire that Australian uh one person who competed in the last Olympics. You remember her? >> He could hire her to to Yeah. watch >> to do the curling cuz that would be the curling break >> can do all the moves and then finally release it. I accidentally caught sight of that Australian lady doing the whatever that event is. Is it like street dance or something like that? >> It's broken dancing is what it was break dancing. >> It was on there was obviously a news article. It was on in a shop that I was in the other day and I watched it and it really even though I know nothing about that event, I have no chops about what's credible and what's not. I was watching it like, oh, it's so weird. It's so so bad. Anyway, there we go. Thanks to our team. Patricia says, appreciate it. We'll be back this time next week, I hope. Um, should be back this time next week, but uh thank you. I'm just going to go around the houses and say thank you to Tim Nash. >> There he is. Thank you to Mark Benzakane. It's still like crazy o'lock in the morning over there. Appreciate that. >> And also to Onar. Thank you so much for joining us. Hopefully Onar, you'll come back and join us on a less weird episode. >> They're always weird. They're always weird. >> They're not as weird. >> Don't Don't fall for it. Every single episode is weird. >> Okay. All right. Okay. I probably should rate that. >> I I love it, though. This what makes this fun, right? It's weird. So, absolutely. >> Yeah, I agree. >> And uh we'll be back this time next week. So, if the three of you want to stick around and have a little bit of a natural after this, I would welcome that. But uh we will see you next week. Thanks for joining us in the comments. Appreciate it. Bye-bye. Bye-bye., This Week in WordPress #367, YouTube, 01kjbasepvkadyrsqc5d8hy97q.