technobabbler

IMHO for general purpose business use and internal sharing, Google Slides allows very basic animations (fades, transitions, slide-ins, etc., kinda like powerpoint) but is free and viewable to all on the web. It creates low-barrier explanatory slide decks for documentation, and I frequently use it to share complex topics with stakeholders. It works well... (but you do need to keep in mind a lot of presentation best practices though, which don't come naturally).

You can also export to a video there.

It's easier to store a highly dangerous thing for a decade than a slightly dangerous thing for millennia, though.

Chernobyl and Fukushima have been interesting studies in what low-dose long-term radiation can do to ecosystems (not much? things seem to adapt ok), but we should still take what precautions we can and not just irradiate things willy-nilly...

I believe the argument is that it may be the lesser of many evils, not that it's harmless. I think it's a matter of evaluating our remaining realistic alternatives. Like:

1) Re-embrace nuclear power, do our best to safeguard the waste, knowing that someday (50? 100? 10,000 years?) from now, it will be an issue we'd have to deal with. It may be at a local, national, or global scale... hard to say. Could leak naturally, from unexpected disasters, terrorism, warfare, whatever. But it buys us some time, and can help slow down climatic impacts so the world has a few more years to adapt. It still won't be pretty.

2) Pretend like the world is suddenly going to get behind renewables and clean energy and drastically cut emissions AND recapture much of the carbon we emitted already. One, this isn't going to happen, and two, it's already too late. Best case, this makes the future decades a bit better for first world countries, but it's already too late for most of the rest of the world.

3) Do nothing: The mostly likely outcome, with or without more nuclear power. Life carries on, many humans will perish from climate change domino effects (draught, floods, desertification, habitat loss, whatever) and the resulting international instability. Many more other species will perish. The remaining life will adapt and carry on, and the world keeps going, but it's gonna be a painful few decades/centuries and our kids will hate us, but on the plus side, we've been saying that for decades now so it's already an intergenerational norm. Each generation leaves the world a little worse for the next, until enough humans die off, the planet recovers a little, and we do it all over again.

Arguably embracing nuclear power is the least evil of these realistic remaining options, though it's highly unlikely enough people and nations could be convinced. People in the aggregate are phenomenally bad at evaluating risk, especially long-term, whether it's nuclear or climate impacts, so absolutely nothing will get done.

But the advocacy isn't wrong in and of itself... nuclear is a measure of last resort, especially now that the IPCC has proven completely ineffective at persuading countries to take other meaningful measures. Nuclear can't save us, but it can lessen the pain to come a little bit, kinda like hospice for the planet.

If you don't need PPV (pay per view) or fancy monetization, you can just put them on Vimeo or even YouTube for very cheap.

Or CloudFlare Stream, maybe: https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/

Edit to add: Please, for the love of god, do not self-host your video as a static file. There is a LOT of thought that goes into modern video streaming, such as on-the-fly transcoding to different resolutions & bitrates, pre-caching the next few seconds, seeking support, thumbnails, auto-captions, hardware decoder support... absolutely none of that is trivial to implement, but they make a huge difference in end-user UX. You may design your video on some sort of 5k supermac, but a lot of your viewers will be watching them on cheap Androids. The video providers spend a lot of time optimizing their streams and networks for such use cases. You will not, and your users will suffer for it, if you try to self-host. Please, please don't do this.

Signed, that guy who hates it when you're expected to download a 50 meg MP4 to understand a product.

Hi dang,

I fear the line between a political "discussion" and "flamewar" here may be quite thin, and not easily distinguished for the layperson. There is not a neat separation between politics and technology/surveillance/policing/violence anymore, and in this day and age remaining apolitical isn't really a possibility for anyone who engages even shallowly with society at large. The tech world has been dragged kicking and screaming into the rest of society, and with it, the messiness of culture and politics and values. There's no going back.

This story in particular is inherently about the intersection of technology, culture, and politics, the exact sort of thing any good hacker SHOULD be interested in. Whether it's Stallman, Linus, the EFF, Mozilla, Snowden... there is no such thing as apolitical, value-less technology anymore. What good is code in a bubble? Technology has impacts on society, and society impacts technology.

If the goal is to restrain the discussions here to only technologies that have no obvious political connection, the realm of theoretical comp sci as opposed to anything applied or public-facing, well... that's unfortunate, but that's your call.

I hope you will reconsider this viewpoint, but I doubt my single voice holds any sway in the grand scheme of things. You and others probably want to prevent this place from becoming like r/worldnews, which I understand, even if I don't completely agree.

I don't think I can do what you're asking for -- remain apolitical in the face of political technologies -- without completely sacrificing the spirit of meaningful discussion. Too many of the world's evils are created and maintained by people who just work on technology without thinking of their larger repercussions, and I cannot in good conscience do the same.

Anyhow, you're probably sick of hearing stuff like this. I shall refrain from further posting, and return to lurking, and not further disturb your community. Thank you for a fun few months.

> I think the issue is that even if Mozilla did do that, to achieve the same level of configurability for privacy and security, in ways that the user.js and all it's options offer, or with the many objections they've had to new standards, they would end up needing to fork Chromium to a point where it might become debatable whether the effort was worth it in the first place.

Yeah. That's basically what happened with Blink/Webkit. But that chasm is narrower than Gecko/anything, since at least they share a common heritage. And with Chromium, we already have Chromium/Brave/Opera/Edge/Samsung/Silk/Vivaldi/etc., all of which have fewer problems than the entirely separate Gecko, to say nothing of SpiderMonkey vs V8 & Node.

A browser is more than just the renderer, as those alternatives have shown. The world might need an underdog nonprofit browser, but it doesn't need an alternative renderer.

Life-critical industries like airlines, cars, healthcare, etc. are probably the exception?

If a restaurant ran out of some menu item for a few days because a supplier didn't have a good harvest, eh, it happens. If a bookstore doesn't stock a certain book, no big deal. Grocery store self-checkout broken yet again? Oh well. Band got too drunk and can't perform? Reschedule it. No snow at the slopes? Climate change.

In the real world, shit happens, and most of it isn't critical.

If you offer a 99.999% guarantee and your customers pay for it, well, you better deliver -- subcontractors or not. But many businesses don't need to do that and a few hours of downtime a year is just a minor inconvenience. To go from "a few days of downtime" to "a few hours" is really easy; just about any provider can offer that. To go from "a few hours of downtime" to "a few seconds" is a huge investment and not worth it to many folks.

IMHO these are entirely different skillsets, and a division-of-labor question rather than some sort of insurmountable generation gap. It's not like infrastructural know-how isn't relevant anymore; they just became CDN engineers or DevOps or senior scaling or reliability engineers. Their jobs are no easier than before, especially when you have to consider network traversals across layers of virtualized/containerized services across multiple data centers owned by disparate parties and maintained by different vendors.

Virtualization aside, we haven't abandoned basic infrastructure, but centralized it in the hands of a few huge, expert providers. IMO this is a good thing, and was both necessary and natural as the Web grew to offer more and more opportunities to more new professionals. In detaching HTML from HTTP from ARP, etc. we gave rise to entire new professions like full-time UX (which arguably the Old Guard was never good at beyond a small audience of academics and engineers), or various flavors of front-end developer, or serverless ecosystems.

The Web and associated technologies advanced so quickly it was impractical for a single IT or network department to know all of it anymore, and some of the newer webapps wouldn't have been possible if that same team or company had to also manage all of their own basic infrastructure like it was the 90s still.

Now you can be a front-end only shop, or a UX consultant, or a network engineer who never has to touch HTML, or, or, or... maybe big enterprises always had and could always have all of those in-house, but the division of labor has been a huge boon for small businesses and startups and nonprofits, who just don't have the same resources.

As someone who grew up configuring zmodem and running BBSes and having to (mis)configure NetBIOS all the time, I am so, so glad I never have to worry about OSI layers and such ever again. It's boring to me, and the experts at it are SO much better at it, might as well let them handle it. Especially when the cost of that outsourcing is often like <$100/mo. Well worth both the time and money... and sanity. The division of concerns lets you focus on the things you're either interested in and/or good at.

Our professionals haven't gotten worse. The stack has gotten much deeper.

If you're going closer-to-the-metal cloud, then yeah. I think that's part of the allure of newer, more abstracted cloud hosts like Vercel, Netlify, Gatsby, etc.

They take care of all the infrastructure for ya, and if something breaks, you just twiddle your thumbs while they twiddle the dials.

Of course this sort of laziness is not a valid approach if you're a huge enterprise or running some live-saving project that needs seventy nines of uptime, but for non-critical websites, it's a great sigh of relief...

Obviously, the answer is to pay for a cloud dashboard-of-dashboards that show orange lights when AWS's is falsely green.

"We need this new fancy dashboard to monitor our other dashboards in one place, more accurately!"

Y'know, debates about cloud vs in-house uptime aside, there's one thing I'm really grateful to the cloud vendors for: making downtime somebody else's problem.

Rather than a late-night panicked run to the smoking server, now we can just shrug and wait a few hours and it fixes itself. Most websites aren't that critical, and it's nice not having to lose sleep over devops issues.

> Having some kind of message when you update is not abnormal.

But having new adware every time IS abnormal. When any other modern browser* self-updates, it does so unobtrusively. Maaaaaaaaybe (very rarely) opens a new tab with a changelog -- even that's rare, though. I don't get that issue when I reopen Safari once in a while, despite never using that either.

With Firefox, there's always some new adware being shilled. It decreases trustworthiness a lot. Every time I open it, I can't help but be turned off by wondering what new shady partnership they've joined this time, or what terrible UX change they've decided to unilaterally implement because they have too many designers with time on their hands.

The whole Mozilla operation went from "let's make a really lean and mean engineering powerhouse browser" to "incompetent technocracy with too many people and not enough vision". It's just a mess. The new anti-features they keep adding aren't useful to anyone except maybe their execs... every new release is a desperate, flailing attempt at relevance instead of core improvements. The LAST thing I want is a new browser experience every few months. Just let me check my email and get out of my way, damn it.

*Except maybe Edge? Haven't used that in a while, understand it's gotten pretty intrusive lately too.

> Until their followers leave, they won't change anything. Greedy execs.

That's already happened, and they still haven't changed anything. Even Microsoft was wise enough to jump ship to Chromium, and arguably their last in-house Edge was a superior product to Firefox -- lean and mean and well-thought-out, but still failed because it wasn't Blink. Firefox doesn't even have that, but they stay the course because what, stubbornness? Ideological purity? Poor leadership? I dunno.

Firefox just isn't a meaningful contender on any front anymore. UX is slightly worse than other major browsers, privacy isn't significantly better than Safari or Brave, syncing is more complex than Apple/Google because the Mozilla ecosystem is browser-only, its ads are more intrusive because they're bundled as built-in adware, etc. It doesn't do anything better anymore. It's just riding its coattails from the 2000s, like Opera (which also jumped to Chromium).

If Mozilla wasn't a nonprofit sponsored by Google (oh, the irony), it would've been bought out by a no-name Chinese venture firm a long time ago.

I think that's proof more of an idiosyncratic IT department than of Firefox's secret popularity... a single university, or school system even, wouldn't meaningfully affect the statistics.

If anything, Chrome and Safari (or at least their webviews) have a huge edge because of default mobile installations. Gecko will never be 100% compatible with Blink & Webkit, regardless of UA masking.

It's obsolete not because it lacks nuanced discussions, but because the world has moved on and left it behind. The Firefox team can argue all they want about whether they want to play catch up, but they're always playing catch up and getting further behind every year.

There's no such thing as web standards anymore, only what Chrome and Safari do.

Edit: I think that discussion is a good example. Reminds me of the Ents' council in LOTR that endlessly debated what to do while the battles were fought without them. Firefox is just living in its own little bubble. The rest of the world keeps lurching forward under the Apple-Google duopoly, and Firefox gets more irrelevant every year. It was once a glorious challenger, now it's just a forgotten has-been celebrated only by ideologues and purists. I wish they'd give up on Gecko and just officially work on Chromium to make that better instead.

Firefox is obsolete.

The Republican party stands for one thing and one thing only: power. Nothing else matters.

Point is they get to make ad blocking harder.

> What is interesting to me is a distribution of accurate, inaccurate, but also debatable critiques.

Yeah, that is interesting, isn't it? It reads at times like a high school essay written by a somewhat informed, yet not entirely world-wizened, teenager.

Thing is, it really isn't hard to meaningfully critique US policy and society... we have soooo many social issues that you don't have to exaggerate at all to make us look bad. So why do it?

I wonder if some of it might be dog-whistling to domestic propaganda talking points that Westerners don't hear or respond to? The style reminds me a little bit of North Korean propaganda and its frequent calls to Juche values (but much toned down), which to outsiders often seems ridiculous on its face but maybe has more emotional impact on their own citizens?

Maybe it's also a translation thing. I wonder how it reads in its native language.

It absolutely has every time I've launched it in the last 5-10 years.

To be fair, though, what would you do if you were the decision maker?

Would you really give up one of your yachts this year just to save ten thousand lives?

More like "Google AI murders user, sends notification to Android phone."

"Android 14 is here! Android 13 had some bugs that led to an inadvertent use of deadly force. The error has been rectified and lethality should decrease in this version."

Do you really think Google gives a damn about the FCC, much less the state governments? They'd probably just ask them to submit a feedback request with a screenshot.

This is like expecting politicians to self-report their corruption...

Wonder who wrote... oh wait.

Total hit piece/propaganda, but does have a few good (obvious) points. Wonder who the audience though. If you don't already know and believe this stuff, I doubt China would be the one that convinces you...

I think this is a fluff piece written to market Scaleway by injecting M1 as an irrelevant SEO keyword.

I don't think this is as intractable a problem as some of the doomsayers here make it out to be. It just takes work and tedium. Working for small businesses, I've had to do this several times and it wasn't a huge deal, just a few weeks of work. If you're getting paid to do it, why not do it, and then brag about it on your resume later?

Here's how I would approach the problem:

First, evaluate the source content (your big zip file). Did the old CMS output relatively clean HTML? Are certain sections (header, footer, main menu) etc. relatively consistent and thus easily templatized? Is the body text all in one div that can be parsed out? If you're lucky, the CMS was structured to begin with, meaning the title is always one field that produces one consistent HTML output, the hero image is another field, etc. If you're NOT lucky, the old CMS might've allowed rich text fields which become custom HTML. That may be trickier, but still not unsolvable.

Once you understand the source content, investigate your use cases. Who needs to be able to edit this stuff, and how often? What's their level of technical expertise (e.g. can they work with raw HTML, or do they need WYSIWYGs)? Do they need a proper publication workflow (drafting, user roles, previous versions, etc.)? You know, of all the stuff a good CMS does, what is mission-critical to retain during this "temporary" period -- but keep in mind that chances are likely that new CMS will keep getting pushed back, because if it's not a priority now, it never will be. So basically, you're being asked, despite what they say, to design a system that will likely BE the new CMS.

Here's the fun part. Now you get to compare and choose a new architecture for all this content. Your options, in no particular order:

* A bunch of flat HTML files that only devs can edit, by hand, with no modularization or templatization. Bad idea if you want to maintain any sort of consistency between pages. And you have to really love regex if you ever need to do bulk updates (e.g. updating a broken link, or changing a sponsor logo, across all the files).

* Move it into ANOTHER, cheaper cloud CMS. It would be dirt-cheap to host a Wordpress instance, for example, especially if you were coming from an overpriced "enterprise" CMS. If your bosses can't afford $1000/mo, can they afford $80/mo for a good Wordpress host (Pantheon, WPEngine etc.)? There are also headless options like DatoCMS, GraphCMS, Sanity, Prismic.io, etc. Headless means you get to design the frontend to your spec, and importantly for your use case, it means you detach # of visitors from the CMS costs (because you're caching the frontend with a CDN, and the backend CMS never knows or cares how many hits you get). Prismic, Sanity, and Graph offer free plans up to thousands of records; if you do a static frontend against that and cache it, you may be able to keep using that headless CMS for free or very cheap. Even if you have to upgrade, the starter plans can be affordable. There is a LOT of variance in CDN pricing, from ridiculous ripoffs targeting enterprise managers to very reasonable options targeting small-time devs who know such things shouldn't cost so ridiculously much. Negotiate with the wallet people to find a good balance between dollars and hours.

* If they really won't spring for that, how about a self-hosted CMS like Strapi, Ghost, Grav, Pico? Some of these use databases, others use flat-file Markdown folders, but in general they cost zero dollars (just a lot of time to configure and deploy)?

* If you really can't use a CMS in the meantime, you can make your own "janky CMS" by templatizing the reusable parts of the HTML code (headers, footers, etc.) into plain ol' PHP serverside includes, like the 90s. Then process all the other pages to replace those parts with the new templates, such that each individual page only has its unique content and not all the site structure boilerplate around it (now handled by your includes).

Next is the hard part. Once you decide on an architecture, you have to do the semi-automated extract-transform-load work, bulk processing your flat HTML files and either stripping them down to unique content and/or importing that content into your architecture, but it a cloud CMS (repeated API calls) or a self-hosted flat-file system (lots of new files, possibly HTML to Markdown conversions). But either way, you will end up in a much better place than with a billion flat HTML files. In other words, even if you don't CALL it a CMS, you should make yourself a CMS of some sort.

Assuming you get all the data in someplace, then you have to build a new frontend on top of it, reusing those HTML headers, footers, etc. that you previously stripped out. If it's Wordpress, you're building a Wordpress theme. If it's a headless CMS, I'd recommend using Next.js along with Vercel or Gatsby or Netlify. If it's a flat-file CMS, it's entirely up to you... whatever language or framework you're comfortable with. Symfony and Laravel are still good choices, if you like PHP. Other languages have different frameworks.

Eh... that's a simplified overview of the workflow. Feel free to ask for more details. This really isn't an impossible problem, just an annoying one. I'd also do it for/with you if you pay me...

Here's a transcript for you without the timestamps: https://pastebin.com/66WHkRAH

On YouTube, just click the 3 dots and go to Open transcript to see it.

You know, kudos to Mozilla for trying so hard... but Google is just better at it. shrug. By all means, they can keep fighting that losing battle if they want, but the world has already moved on and forgotten them. Nobody cares anymore except a tiny niche on here and what's left on slashdot.

Maybe the ideology of it is really important to you. To me it's just a browser, and not worth fiddling with. Chrome does one thing really well, and that's getting out of my way. Firefox constantly interrupts, whatever the reason. I don't really care if they're struggling, sorry. Maybe that's an indication of their plummeting value to society. It's just not a useful product for most of the world anymore. If they can't afford to keep the lights on, maybe they could go the Brave or Opera route and make it a Chromium reskin without the Googly bits, and deprecate Gecko altogether. Maybe Firefox has some value as a nonprofit browser, but Gecko, as far as I can tell, does not -- to me and to most of the world.

Besides, it's not like the internet is any more open with Firefox... 90% of the content is just served from like 5 huge tech companies anyway. Third party tracking is less significant when all the first parties track everything directly and they host most of the content to begin with. And at the end of the day, the internet is just a time-waster full of crap, not some beautiful ideological hill for humanity to die on. We already lost that battle in the 2000s, and capitalism won.

As for Google, I already don't see any Google ads anywhere. The only effect I notice from their dragnet is that my Google News feed is annoyingly based on my browsing habits, which is unfortunate indeed. Other than that, Chrome is wonderfully unnoticeable... YMMV may vary, of course. And if they deploy those changes to the extension model and break uBlock, sure, I'll consider another browser. Probably Safari or Brave. Still not worth the hassle of Firefox.

Google services are deeply invasive, but also tremendously useful. It's a tradeoff.

Firefox ads are just pure spam.