cojo
Just wanted to reiterate that I really appreciate what you have done with both OpenRegulatory and Formwork, as it was a big unlock for one of the companies I helped a few years ago as we navigated our way into the QMS / FDA / med. reg. world.
While reading this as a many-times-over-founder myself, I deeply felt multiple emotions which this would bring upon me if I were in your shoes after all the work I know you’ve put in.
I hope you are able to navigate this to a happy / successful outcome for yourself and any others involved for the relevant compan(y/ies)!
I am grateful for what you have contributed over the years on the software and documentation fronts with OpenRegulatory and Formwork both.
Took some research and timing but couldn’t be happier with no longer having to worry about ink clogging / going bad if I haven’t printed for a while.
Toner cartridges aren’t exactly cheap, but they will print a ton of pages, and they take way longer to go bad from what I’ve experienced so far…
Which is a bummer, as I went looking after your comment - Toniebox is great but I agree it feels overpriced on the content side (perhaps it isn’t, if their competitor couldn’t make the business model work…)
https://old.reddit.com/r/jooki/comments/1eltdcm/muuselabs_ha...
- and then debugging / figuring out how to hack together a version that would compile in Visual Studio (back when you had to have a license… in theory…) as a preteen -
had a way bigger impact on me than I gave it credit for at the time. I think seeing the sheer scope of that codebase and realizing how much I didn’t understand and still had to learn is part of what put me in my path into both the game industry and software startups. I found both Valve’s and Gabe’s stories that much more compelling after gaining an appreciation for how much there was under the hood.
Cheers to everyone who has worked on this engine, this project, and this company over the years. I suspect your influence runs deeper than you know.
I had just assumed that for sure this would be the year I upgrade my M1 Max MBP to an M4 Max. I will not be doing so knowing that it lacks WiFi 7; as one of the child comments notes, I count on getting a solid 3 years out of my machine, so future-proofing carries some value (and I already have WiFi7 access points), and I download terabytes of data in some weeks for the work I do, and not having to Ethernet in at a fixed desk to do so efficiently will be a big enough win that I will wait another year before shelling out $6k “off-cycle”.
Big bummer for me. I was looking forward to performance gains next Friday.
I've been pushing over the past six months or so for multiple clients, from healthcare companies with basic mobile apps to deep gaming companies / products, to adopt Rive over Lottie and other past solutions, as I think it's finally hit its stride and is "ready-for-adoption".
This was the last piece that came up in some of those discussions as a potential concern (latest renderer being "closed source" / not quite final).
Really excited to see this problem space continue to improve thanks to this decision and the work the Rive team is doing in general (drop shadows, blur, etc. are all going to be very exciting as they ship)!
I really enjoyed how this article covered a variety of different "hacker-spirit" things; real-world entropy into "digital-world" meaningful use cases, plus a whole extra "one more thing" timelock encryption example at the end.
As someone who uses Cloudflare Workers / Pages heavily these days whenever I can, it's quite fun to see both "how the sausage is made" as well as the culture (playfulness?) behind it. Kinda makes me want to go visit the Austin office since I'm local.
Kudos and thanks to the Cloudflare team for writing stuff like this up! One of the more enjoyable tech pieces I've read in the past couple of weeks, and I learned multiple things along the way.
I have my reasons for thinking things changed later on, but they are subjective / personal opinion based on personal experience, so I respect anyone who would disagree and exclude him from a list like this.
I wonder to what extent Silver Lake drove this overall decision (vs. others on the board potentially initiating it)
I posted before that comment, which was definitely helpful - that context (and some other helpful replies here and elsewhere in the overall thread) have changed my assessment as well.
What I meant in my original comment was, "wow, this seems like a hire that is only focused on finding someone with lots of experience managing, and not at all on the gaming industry / customer goodwill".
So I think you're right - and I also think this shows how I misjudged how I originally thought a scenario like this would have played out.
It's interesting that after-hours / future trading doesn't seem to have responded positively (yet). Maybe that's just another symptom of lost trust as well.
Other commenters in the thread have also given good thoughts / potential scenarios in similar veins - essentially that this was actually a failure of messaging, sticking to the plan, and / or both, plus some other combination of "no, seriously, we need to make money and become profitable, nothing else matters as long as the boat still floats, make it happen and keep this ship going."
And I do suspect that Whitehurst will likely be a better fit for that. A seasons gaming industry executive (regardless of investor / revenue focus) may actually be a negative if that's the goal right now... I'll be very interested to see how this all turns out.
To be clear, I know essentially nothing about James M. Whitehurst other than what is readily publicly available (IBM / Red Hat, advisory roles, etc.).
But my read on a lot of the Unity crisis, as a long-time game industry veteran myself, was that one of the increasingly common "management consulting" / investor- & revenue-focused type of gaming executives (e.g. Riccitiello, Don Mattrick [Zynga replacement CEO when Pincus stepped down], Kotick [Activision-Blizzard]) had finally overstepped their bounds and let revenue goals drive decision-making just a bit too far without customer consideration.
So, I had assumed that if Unity did make a leadership change here, it would be in a direction away from that - i.e. a more industry-seasoned executive with less of a pure revenue / "business" focus.
I think I clearly misjudged the situation here in light the Whitehurst pick; while it's possible that is truly just an interim role and they will still pivot to this in the final hire, or that I simply misjudge "the label on the tin" and Whitehurst is very culture / customer focused, I don't think I would bet on it. This seems like the board actually "doubling down" on driving revenue results - and fast.
"Bro, there is no way you have a PDF parser that can't handle multiple pages..."
But in all seriousness, this is a fun idea. Albeit with quite the narrow funnel dropoff right out of the gates... ;P...
Typically if you are laid off, your health insurance coverage will run at least through the end of the current month as of your last day before COBRA would kick in. This isn’t a hard and fast rule necessarily, and some layoffs extend healthcare coverage longer anyways, but I know for a fact multiple layoffs I’ve been involved in over the years have timed for the first of the month for this reason.
Intuitively I had a rough idea around why this was both a) a blocking issue ("why can't we just YOLO-try some version of it anyways?" came up at least a couple times on our side internally during alpha evaluation) and b) a hard issue, but I didn't know the details re: SQLite being single-writer specific (at least for the time being).
Valuable for my own knowledge, in addition to being useful re: understanding the steps involved for Cloudflare to enable this in the future.
I was already excited about Smart Placement regardless, but now doubly so knowing it is adjacent to what will enable a more generic solution for D1. We used DOs very heavily on the project I mentioned in my previous post, but as you call out, they are more complex to reason about, and in practice it limited who could work on them effectively on our team.
I always appreciate your comments in Worker / DO-related threads here on HN and have found them very insightful / helpful in learning more about what's under the hood! Thanks for taking the time to continue posting here - I know there's lots to do elsewhere.
Not being able to meaningfully use any external services that didn’t support an HTTP / fetch API was one of the biggest consistent pain points.
Arguably it was the one with the biggest negative architectural ramifications. Given how long (understandably) it has taken to move D1 forward in the ways that matter most (e.g. transaction support), this is a huge step towards production viability for a more diverse range of products.
When I left my company in April I had Cloudflare as a “glad I tried it, but not ready for production use / that was a mistake” - this week has it back on my list for evaluation on whatever I do next.
Congrats to the Cloudflare team! I admire your intuition for what customers need and your willingness to compete with yourself on stuff like this (actively support other DB providers while building D1 - respect).
Sibling comments are correct, on review, that it seems you can work around it by holding down in advance.
Unfortunately by the time I verified that I had run out of time since I spent most of what I had trying to make it work on my own before returning to the thread to offer this feedback.
Personally, I think the idea is good enough that I will try to return on desktop later when I have time… but for the devs - if you read this - you could really enable a lot more people to get a lot further in this presumably great creative experience if you made the controls respond better on mobile.
Currently we have a cooperative "pub trivia" game, a jigsaw puzzle suite, and a "co-opetition" word scramble game where you are working together but competing to be the best of the group as well.
If you do give it a try, I'd love to answer any questions & hear any feedback you have at cory [at] playpad.com - we are still in early alpha and iterating rapidly / trying out new ideas directly based on the feedback we receive!
I truly do not think it is an exaggeration to say that it changed the course of my life. I was frustrated and angry with all sorts of things when I walked into that room, and I still was after I left, but in that hour I saw a glimpse of what life could look like if I stuck with it through the hard stuff, and it was the first thing in a long time that really got me genuinely excited about my future.
I will forever be grateful to Randy Pausch for his positive attitude and for his willingness and effort in sharing this when he did - especially since he never got to hear the gratitude himself directly from me or so many countless others I know he impacted positively as well. I am strangely emotional just thinking about it again now - a bright light of positive memory in a dark year.
I know this is referring mostly to the `cat` portion and not the `splice` portion of the article, but I'll throw in a quick shoutout to `splice` for giving me one of the single biggest build performance wins in my time at Zynga (and possibly across most teams at the company at the time).
We had a ruby script which ran the majority of the build, and as the game grew we found that by far the slowest part was a loop which MD5 hashed each individual asset and used that as its filename on our CDN for per-asset-versioning.
At its worst it was taking nearly an hour and a half; the code was basically as inefficient as you could make it - multiple shell calls for each file rather than any sort of inlining of the hashing process.
I wrote a basic C program using splice and an MD5 library which took the whole process to under 10s. A bit overkill, perhaps, but the naive speedup I tried first still took over 1-2 minutes, and I figured 99.99% was worth the extra few hours to put it together knowing how many builds we ran each day.
Definitely gave me a healthy appreciation for the cost of transferring to user space that has stuck with me.
While it "worked" and the resulting engine / suite of games ended up net profitable, and I'm a fan of Haxe's features as a language (I am really missing the pattern matching and macros in Typescript these days), I must say the build pipeline and available tools for OpenFL / Haxe games was lacking at best.
On the plus side being able to fork and fix issues we ran into was a game changer over Unity IMO.
Not sure if the ecosystem has evolved / improved on the build and tooling fronts in the last 18 months since I last interacted with it directly, but that would be the one word of caution I'd offer to anyone after they read this article. Be prepared to roll up your sleeves and get a little dirtier than usual if you really intend to ship on both web and mobile.
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