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How to disable WordPress 7.0’s new AI features

Released this Wednesday (20th), WordPress 7.0’s headline feature was supposed to be real-time collaboration. But in the final stretch, after beta versions, Matt Mullenweg, the project’s leader, postponed the feature and promoted LLM integration to be the version’s centerpiece instead.

(Matt’s leadership was a shitshow, with delays, new demands with unrealistic deadlines, and as always, plenty of finger-pointing. “What’s wrong with WordPress?”, asks the only person with the power to change WordPress’s direction.)

If you don’t see the value in or are wary of an infusion of generative AI on your website, blog, or online store (a plausible concern, I must say), fortunately there’s a way to disable all this new AI stuff. If you have access to the wp-config.php file, add this line:

define( 'WP_AI_SUPPORT', false );

If the file is beyond your reach, install the Turn Off AI Features plugin.

You can’t imagine my relief watching this drama from the outside. In early May, we migrated this Manual do Usuário to ClassicPress, a lifeline that I discovered back in 2022 and which, six years later, remains active and better than ever. How can you not love the idea of free software?

Still thinking about Google I/O…

Google presented “AI agents” capable of doing people’s work in countless scenarios, none of them very believable for real people. (Who needs AI to organize a neighborhood block party?) At TechCrunch, Sarah Perez writes a solid critique of this questionable utopia that Google is trying to sell us.

On my end, I think we’re living a “Groundhog Day” moment of that Google Now feature from ~2012, which would notify you via push notification that your flight’s gate had changed. As if that information wasn’t already on your face the whole time at the airport. For 15 years Google has been using different technologies, each increasingly complex and expensive, to try to solve problems that no human being has ever actually had.

Cool links of the week

I collect cool, interesting links spread all over the web and share them here in daily posts. Hope you enjoy! More of them in the archive.

Singularity (6min31s). The new short film from Blender Studios, from the renowned open-source 3D editor. I thought it was pretty cool.

The AI Resist List (in English). A database of initiatives resisting the AI empire. Among the site’s creators is journalist Karen Hao, who is launching her latest book in Brazil, The AI Empire, published by Rocco.

Fits on a floppy. A manifesto for small software (in the sense of: taking up little memory space). The page itself includes a semi-hidden game where you have to click on flying floppy disks. For those under 30, “floppy disks” are the save buttons. Tip from Rafael.

Parallel Cities. Literally which cities are at the same latitude. A shout-out to folks in Pretoria (South Africa) and Windorah, latitude “neighbors” of Curitiba.

Hexagon world map. The map is dynamic and renders in just 10 KB of code.

Weather Replay. A weather forecast history for the whole world since the 1940s, based on data from the Copernicus Observatory of the European Union. (Works in Brazilian cities and any other country too.)

Where Now? A kind of “personal Foursquare,” this app marks the places of interest you’ve visited — and everything stays local. Markings can be manual or automatic. Free, for iOS.

Google wants to be the interface for the web

The opening of Google I/O this year (35-minute video recap) showed a Google less shy about transforming the web into raw material for its AIs.

Search will become (even more) a souped-up ChatGPT, and also the checkout counter for every online store, and YouTube will use video clips to create answer pages.

Notice that in all these announcements, Google/YouTube transforms itself into a curator and interface for web content, without attribution or with minimal credit given. You won’t visit websites anymore; you’ll visit Google — and you’ll stay there. On the flip side, whoever calls themselves a “content creator” is actually a content supplier for platforms. It’s always been that way for Meta (Instagram), TikTok, and YouTube; now it’s also the case for Google, even if unintentionally (myself included!).

All of this amounts to a complete betrayal of everything Google once stood for (and was) back then. Maybe people like this new incarnation because the web, poor thing, has long suffered from the pernicious incentives and destructive influence of Google itself, but nothing is so bad that it can’t get worse.

By the way: Manual do Usuário project offers an instance of SearxNG, a metasearch engine that displays ten (or more) blue links to actual websites. It’s free. Use it and spread the word.

Cool links

Editor’s note: Missing the daily links? They became “weekly links.” After a year, keeping up the daily pace started to take its toll. The longer gap between posts brings another advantage: a focus on cool links, leaving aside the news items — which I used to include in the daily posts to add more substance. After all, when I created this section the goal was to share and celebrate the good things that pop up on the web. Let’s get back to basics.

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Taken. This page lists and explains all the data that any website collects from your device the moment you access it.

Night and Day. A world map showing in real time where it is day and where it is night. There are controls to adjust the map in the upper right corner of the page.

Killed by Apple. It’s not just Google that has a killing streak with products and services. (Although Apple’s “lifespan” seems a bit longer on average.)

The Thirty Under Thirty Fraud Watch. A site that tracks and explains every Forbes “30 Under 30” honoree caught committing fraud. The list is long and includes superstars of the grift, such as Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes.

Email.md. A Markdown editor for generating responsive emails. Looks good! One of these days I’ll test it in the Manual newsletter.

Momotaro. A new pomodoro app, but with an adorable visual style. Free, for iOS.