The Flash era was the most fun I ever had as a developer. Flash was so ahead of its time, and it still feels like we're slowly crawling back after 20 years. Tools like Rive are helping us get closer, but there was something special about the Flash timeline and drawing tools that made it very approachable and fun to work with.
Director was such a fun app for creating CD-ROM content back in the day! I still have fond memories of learning the Lingo scripting language inside Director to make interactive "multimedia" apps, then uploading them to the web and playing them in the browser using the Shockwave Player. It felt like magic at the time.
That would be great! I usually search and end up on YouTube. Most videos for specific features are longer than needed when you only need to see how to do something quickly.
I recently dropped my cable service (cut-the-cord) after significant price increases over the past two years and switched to a few streaming providers. My household just doesn't watch enough to justify the costs. The plethora of streaming choices is overwhelming right now for consumers, so consolidation is a good thing IMO, assuming it doesn't come with a drop in quality.
As others have mentioned here, the majority of new content recently is mid-level sequels, spin-offs, prequels, etc. It's becoming much harder to differentiate, so people stick with what they know: Netflix, Disney, HBO/Max. I just don't see enough of a market for the other providers to persist long-term (given the high-cost of managing a streaming infrastructure).
I feel like Disney, in particular, should consider spinning off a few of their larger brands, like Marvel and Star Wars, opening them up for licensing revenue and new creative direction.
Blender has such a rich and amazing history! I used it for some hobby projects many years ago, but the UI was very complex and the learning curve was high. Recent versions have greatly simplified the UI and the features feel on par with many of the proprietary industry tools. The future definitely seems bright.
> “As we continue to execute on our FY24 plan, we need to also evolve how we work and what we prioritize so we can deliver on the key initiatives we’ve identified that will have an outsized impact in achieving our business goals,” LinkedIn executives Mohak Shroff and Tomer Cohen wrote in the memo.
Is this standard business communication lingo for layoffs?
Complaining about this stuff every time it comes up feels kind of tired, but at some point why do they even bother stating anything at all? I wonder if these execs could just use some internal biz-speak chatbot to generate this nonsense.
Well, they ran whatever calculations they run, and it came out that they need to reduce spending. They decided the best way is to lay off people. It's not like there's a special story each time - it's pretty much always the same story. It sucks for people affected, but there's nothing new or different about it, from time to time.
Such memos aren't written for people who were fired but the people who are left. Basically "you're lucky to be here, now get to work on reaching your goals."
Would it feel better if they hired a talented writer to write an heartfelt eulogy about how the loss of every single one of these 700 people makes their heart bleed tears of eternal sadness? Nobody would believe it. Everybody knows what it is about - they decided they have X people employed, and they want to have X-700 people employed. That's the beginning and the end of it. If you work for a small company, you will have personal relationship with decision makers, but in a corp where there are several zeroes in staff counts, that doesn't happen. So I don't think there's a point of being insulted about it - it's always going to be "we need less workers, and today it means less you".
It’s difficult to get that rich blow hard into that few sentences. I mean it takes a LOT of effort to get that much meaningless drivel into some kind of coherency that can be supported if you read it real slow. So… I’d say this is more top 10% of standard blowhard layoff notices. Definitely more blowhard than the standard stuff. This took honest blowhard talent.
Shroff and Cohen definitely deserve like a blowhard gold star for that. Rarely do you see such voluminous perniciousness that so effectively masks the real world consequences of ending peoples gainful employment. Real skill. Take notes.
Translation: We suck at running and leading a company so we are going to prioritize showing investors we can still return dollars to them this quarter by letting go of some peons.
We're in the same boat. I brought Confluence into our org almost a decade ago — it was the best collaborative wiki tool at the time. Over time the price has increased while the quality of the tool has not kept pace with other options. This seems to be the trend as software companies grow into large "enterprise" providers.
Looking at our Confluence usage over the years, I noticed that we use it primarily as a knowledgebase/documentation tool and less for collaboration. With our on-prem license expiring, we are migrating to a dedicated knowledgebase for our FAQ and frequently changing content and switching to a Markdown tool + Git for our more formal documentation.
>I brought Confluence into our org almost a decade ago — it was the best collaborative wiki tool at the time
I respectfully disagree with that assertion! I remember 2012 (okay, 11 years ago). I had just joined a new team at work, and the documentation for the team was a lot of vendor PDFs and some .txt files from the lead stored on a network drive.
The company was just implementing Confluence, but it was slow on client and server side with no HA. That is the fault of the server team, not Atlassian, but still the software was ick.
I spun up a shadow-IT Dokuwiki server that was much easier to use for a small team with text-based documentation needs. It had a naive "calendar" plugin that allowed the quick creation of pages based on date, which we used for oncall hand-off. Backup was zipping the data folder on the server.
It was probably 3 more years until our hand was forced to use the "enterprise standard" for business continuity purposes.
Sure. We're focusing first on converting everything to plain Markdown and using a Git repo to manage the content. Writers can use whatever Markdown tool they prefer for this. (I'm using Obsidian and others are iA Writer.) I have yet to decide on the docs publishing tool, but I'm testing Astro, Vitepress, and Markdoc for publishing. I'm leaning towards Astro since it's very flexible, easy to add small bits of interactivity via MDX, and has a nice collection of themes. VitePress is also very nice, super fast, and very easy to publish. Since only the developers and tech writers need to collaborate on the docs, we're following a docs-as-code approach — using GitHub issues, comments, and pull requests.
Here's some info about Astro for folks like me who didn't know about it before:
"Markdown is commonly used to author text-heavy content like blog posts and documentation. Astro includes built-in support for standard Markdown files that can also include frontmatter YAML to define custom metadata such as a title, description, and tags."
You should take a look at foam. It's a toolchain for notes and such, similar to obsidian, but open source. It's main interface is a vscode plugin, but has HTML generators and such, as well as just being markdown, so you can use Pandoc or anything else to make HTML out of it
I wish people would link software they recommend, because it saves me a lot of confusion when they are semi obscure. I believe this is the software you are referring to? (I'm using obsidian but don't like that it's not opensource and don't like logseq, except for their journals feature so I'm actually quite interested in checking out foam)
https://foambubble.github.io/foam/
Not speaking for the GP. I use MkDocs and keep my personal notes. The only weak spot for me is that I haven't fully grokked search and as my notes grow, it can be harder to find things. I alternate between figuring out how search and how to bolt on some other search utility.
MkDocs includes a utility to publish to Github pages but I keep my notes on a self hosted Gitea server and serve using "python -m http".
Author of Material for MkDocs here. We're currently working on re-architecting the entire search engine and rewriting it from scratch. We're currently based on lunr.js, which is unmaintained as of 2020 and has more or less run its course. We've learned a lot what matters in respect to efficient and user friendly documentation search, and can't wait to give the first version into the hands of our users. I'm convinced that the next iteration of search we'll be releasing will solve many of the shortcomings that our current implementation has. Of course, it will work on the client side as it does now, no server needed, but there will be other options as well, e.g. for when your search index is in the megabytes and too big to ship to clients.
The search works great. I'm using MkDocs with Material as my personal handbook because of the simplicity -- for example, I usually remember great articles in conversations but always forget their location. Since I started writing my newsletter https://opsindev.news/ including an MkDocs web archive, I can share interesting URLs way faster :) Or let folks discover it by themselves, using the search.
Material for MkDocs also has an insiders build, accessible through sponsorship. https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/insiders/ These features add more value to MkDocs -- I initially joined to get GDPR-compliant cookie banners and stayed to support a great project.
If I understand your question, it's a lot simpler than that. (Simpler as in not that functional.) It represents the directory structure as cascading menus.
I edit using VS Code and it provides help with linking from one document to another, including navigating to the file and even linking second level ('##') headings. MkDocs can report broken links when it builds the site.
Collaboration could be through sharing a Git repo. Perhaps other other ways I can't think of at this moment. Any way you could collaborate editing text files should work.
OTOH couldn't it be done with Cloudflare Zero Trust ?
Have the GH Pages (sub)domain proxied with CF, protect the URL with Zero Trust, for SSO itself there are several IdP available [0]. First 50 users are not billed.
I haven’t tried doing this, although I’ve thought of it to solve a similar problem, which I ultimately solved by not bothering and just letting GitHub render the docs. (Purely internal technical use cases, so not an issue.)
I haven’t experimented, but my first attack would be to query the GH Pages service directly and specify the host header. Bypass Cloudflare entirely.
GitHub Pages supports SSO with the enterprise cloud plan, of course.
I assume that means that every person accessing the pages also needs a github account? I don't mind a requirement for a github account for anyone contributing to the repo but I would like authenticated access for viewing the pages that doesn't require a Github account.
Obsidian has a feature called "Shared vaults" which teams use to collaborate. You can also use a shared Git repo, or other cloud/network storage (e.g. Dropbox)
I used it with a team of 10 folks at my previous job. Everyone worked in a common git repo, and with some smart usage of .gitignore, we were all able to collaborate quite effortlessly, even going so far as to push videos, images, etc to the repo with git-lfs to make the documentation rich and available. It can certainly be multiplayer with a modicum of effort.
Maybe Apple should consider dev editions for MacOS that allows more customization during setup. MacOS is still heavily used by web and mobile developers, so I'm sure this would be received well.
I do end up removing many of the Apple apps, but recently started using Safari, Notes, and Reminders more. Apple does an excellent job making their apps work seamlessly within the Apple ecosystem.
Interesting thesis. When used as intended, web analytics should be only one input to an overall strategy -- not the sole driver for all decisions. But I can see how an organization with KPI's tied to web analytics will lose objectivity -- especially when someone's job performance is tied to the analytics. It's a slippery slope.
I love this quote at the end: "Caring about quality is the heart of craftsmanship. Until you're hooked into those outcomes, micro-optimizing the individual parts is pointless."
Perhaps, as we move towards a web dominated by AI agents, quality will supersede metrics.
Duplo's were the go-to toy in my house for years. The larger size makes it much easier to find pieces in "the big box of Lego" than standard Lego's. Duplo and Lego, in general, have amazing longevity — they were the best toy investment we made over the years. :-).
As an aside, these articles are the gems that keep me coming back to HN.
