Techinically I can build a Postgres DB on Durable Object on Cloudflare right? I'm kinda tired of SQLite migration cascading all of my tables now. Has anyone tried to implement that on DO?
Why is bullshit detector ringing as hell right now??? This sounds like another billion-dollar-Markov-chain-IP that claimed to change the world, opening with a paper with flying colors.
AV1 is not new anymore and I think most of the modern devices are supporting them natively. Some devices like Apple even have a dedicated AV1 HW-accelerator. Netflix has pushing AV1 for a while now so I thought that the adoption rate should be like 50%, but it seems like AV1 requires better hardware and newer software which a lot of people don't have.
Dont forget that people also view Netflix on TV’s, and a large number of physical TV’s were made before AV1 was specced. So 30% overall may also mean 70% on modern devices.
Uh what. (Embedded) hardware lasts a long time (and it should!). TV's around the globe are not all built after 2018. H264 is still the gold standard if you want to be sure a random device has hardware acceleration.
I make use of this by taking a USB hard drive with me on trips. Random TV's rarely have issue with my H264 catalogue. It'll be a while before I look at AV1 for this. Sure, I wish I could benefit faster, but I don't want people to throw out perfectly good hardware either!
Hey I think I've just found a new marketing stunt for a new vibe-coding platform:
"Worried your vibe-coded app is about to be broadcast on the internet’s biggest billboard? Chill. ACME AI now wraps it in “NSA-grade” security armor."
I've never thought that there will be multiple billion-dollar-AI-features that fixes all the monkey patching problems that no one saw them coming from the older billion-dollar-AI-features that fixes all the monkey patching problems that no one saw them coming from...
I think Valve is not some kind of God who free the human from the hand of Microsoft, they are a private company, they are just protecting their business and protecting their business "accidentally" also protecting the customer's benefits. The movement towards Linux benefits Valve the most since they have invested on Linux Gaming for 10 years now and that movement "conveniently" benefits the gamers too. That's a win-win situation, users can escape themself from a bloated Windows and Valve has the pioneering advantage.
> they are just protecting their business and protecting their business "accidentally" also protecting the customer's benefits.
part is wrong. From my observation, they are protecting their business through protecting their customers' benefits.
Plus, they're building a moat collectively and from an open source stack. So, given the stack gets enough momentum, having Valve or not as a company won't matter anymore.
It's trying to get the elephant out of the bag, and once it's out, then there's really no way to put it back, because it's being out is better for everybody. Game companies and gamers alike.
> From my observation, they are protecting their business through protecting their customers' benefits.
Yeah that's what I mean too, that's why I put the "accidentally" in a double-quote.
This sounds like what Red Hat is doing, they created an open-source software, prove the importance of it in the community then sells the support package to enterprise who interested in using it.
Hope that they will not close the door when Microsoft, AWS or Oracle making their own GabeCube and call it SatyaCube, BozosCube or LarryCube
Microsoft already has the XBox and despite being backed by one of the biggest tech companies in the world it's a rather weak product. To add to this, with every major studio acquisition they have done there has been a noticeable increase in game monetization and decrease in quality.
AWS has tried to get into the gaming market and only succeeded in creating giant money sinks even if some of their products were technically appealing.
Oracle making anything consumer-facing, much less something that isn't a total nightmare, seems inconceivable.
Valve is able to completely outmatch competitors in a chosen field because of what they are like as a company. No shareholders that expect quarterly growth. No massive bureaucratic corporate structure, just highly skilled engineers for the most part.
Microsoft is also moving more and more away from hardware exclusivity. Even their Xbox Game Pass service is now not tied to the console.
More broadly, AAA gaming as a whole is also moving away from hardware exclusivity. Third-party developers (like Square-Enix) have been making recent releases for all major platforms, and even some first-party console titles are now coming to PC (eg, the Horizon games from Sony).
I'm optimistic about the future of non-locked-down gaming.
I think this calls out a subtle, but significant difference between private and public companies.
Public companies as an asset class have to compete with an open market of other investments, so the incentives drive a min-maxing approach to revenue and value. The shareholder mandate dictates the company pursue maximal return in order to stay competitive amongst a sea of other potential investments.
A private company doesn't have this same concern. They still need to pursue profit, but not necessarily MAXIMUM profit. This means that in a sea of hypothetical directions, they are free to choose one that is slightly less profitable but has an abundance of positive externalities, vs. one that is maximally profitable but carries many negative externalities.
You are absolutely correct. Valve's linux push was driven by developments in the windows platform, specifically around the release of windows 8. Microsoft was pushing a windows store similar to Apple's app store, and Valve was unequivocally stating that they were worried Microsoft would basically lock down the platform and only allow software sales through their own store, destroying their steam business. Gabe said it plainly himself (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18996377):
> Mr Newell, who worked for Microsoft for 13 years on Windows, said his company had embraced the open-source software Linux as a "hedging strategy" designed to offset some of the damage Windows 8 was likely to do.
> "There's a strong temptation to close the platform," he said, "because they look at what they can accomplish when they limit the competitors' access to the platform, and they say, 'That's really exciting.'"
> This is seen by commentators, external to be a reference to the inclusion of a Windows Store in the Microsoft operating system.
Having an open platform is good for consumers, but Valve is primarily looking out for themselves here. Gabe realized that windows could take Apple's IOS route (i.e. https://blog.codinghorror.com/serving-at-the-pleasure-of-the...) and lock down their OS, and everything he's done since has been an effort to protect his company against that existential threat.
GabeN was the lead developer on Windows 1, Windows 2, and Windows 3. When Windows 95 launched, he was a bit upset that no one was making games for Windows. He did a rough port of Doom to prove the viability. Around the same time Alex St. John, Craig Eisler, and Eric Engstrom were building DirectX, GabeN saw the potential, left to create Valve, and proceeded to try and making Windows gaming a great thing.
I can only imagine that he was heartbroken to see Windows go the way it did with Windows 8, 8.1, 10, and now 11.
Well actually they tried with Windows Phone, Windows RT and Windows 10 S but failed miserably. Even Apple didn't even try to lock their macOS from installing 3rd party app.
Valve's Steam platform is well liked and actually wanted by gamers. Gamers move their games to the steam launcher and often wait for games to come to steam (e.g. with Anno games from Ubisoft).
This is in contrast with EA's Origin, Microsoft's Xbox PC and Ubisoft's Connect, which everyone hates.
I always think Valve as the "ideal" capitalist company, because what they do fits the idea of "invisible hand" perfectly, that each individual acting in their own self-interest end up benefiting everyone.
And you'd be right, that Valve is nothing special, if that idea is correct, because in that case most companies will be like Valve. But just look around, do you see many companies like Valve? No, that's because capitalism is bullshit and that makes Valve stand out.
I have been a big fan of Valve since the Orange Box days and I always dreamed of working there, but let’s not kid ourselves. This is all enabled by the massive monopolistic cash-cow that is Steam that requires a tiny team to maintain. Similarly their top games have minuscule teams and still rake-in millions in microtransactions, fueled by a shadow economy of gambling and speculative trading aimed at kids.
Yes to a large extent they got those monopolies by building truly outstanding products in good faith and by being pioneers in quite a few areas. And certainly they are an exemplary case of investing that wealth into legitimately innovative and widely appreciated long-term endeavors.
My point is that Valve is not all that special for being nice, many organizations do crave to be like that but they don’t have the luxury to have hit that jackpot. For people with mountains of money, they are among the best, but it’s not exactly a high standard, and they are remarkably inefficient in leveraging that advantage.
They’ve long lost the organizational know-how to make good games, and they have delivered remarkably few public facing successes in the last decade: mainly Valve Index and Steam Deck, both still relatively niche and wide apart, both primarily attempts at expanding Steam’s dominance to fairly uncharted markets, with mixed success. The first iteration of Steam Machines was dead on arrival, as was their long-anticipated game Artifact. CS 2 was not a significant enough upgrade to Go to really count. Half-Life Alyx was popularish I suppose. Anything else of note?
> acting in their own self-interest end up benefiting everyone
I'm so sick of people acting like Valve is some saint that does no wrong. Their market dominance means game developers wanting to reach the PC gamer market must comply with Valve's terms. Why do you think every Japanese visual novel released on the platform is a cut down, all-ages version that requires an off-site patch to restore the full game (and often even then it's censored in weird ways)? They got sick of being delisted while Valve turns a blind eye to all the trash porn games.
Ask yourself, does a marketplace that exerts creative control over specific studios' works while threatening financial repercussions if they don't comply benefit everyone? That sounds more like the mob to me.
Valve cuts 30% of your revenue no matter how much you earn. They also cut 15% of the transaction by being the middleman on the market.
They also ignored the gambling/trading plague for too long, until a lot of countries threatened them to stop indirectly promoting gambling (which definitely hit them financially).
They are sitting on a money printing machine and their job is making it print no less to buy GabeN another yatch. They are like the cigarette company who donates shit load of money to the charity and cancer prevention lab while making more cigarrate then ever because people love smoking it.
I don't think they wanted or planned to be monopolized, but they are definitely taking the advantage of being it.
It’s funny, because Zach Barth (of SpaceChem and many other wonderful games fame) worked at Valve and then described them as the ideal anarcho-communist type of organization.
oh that's funny. do you have a link to where he had said that?
i guess Yanis Varoufakis did work at Valve, so there's some basis. but then again, what an organization is internally and how the organization behave as a whole can be different.
The trick is to get your egoistic interests to align with what is good for the world.
Environmentalists also only do what they perceive as doing good (and may as well be objectively good) because not doing so won't jive with their self-image. But that in itself doesn't devalue the thing they did.
If Valve shows anything it is that not being a pushover and trying to align your business interest with your values (and not vice-versa!) can also pay of economically.
They are a significant actor in the market, and as a non-pc-gamer I am glad that their business goals align with Linux users. I don't believe that they do it out of kindness, but that's actually a good thing for a long term investment.
I don't get it, why did they allow GitHub bot to modify and merge pull request automatically? Yeah I agree that MS is ruining everything with AI, but this problem is avoidable, if they turn off the bot's auto merge feature, or turn it off completely. The reason they move to a lesser known Git provider sounds more like a marketing stunt.
> The reason they move to a lesser known Git provider sounds more like a marketing stunt.
We had technical problems that GitHub had no interest in solving, and lots of small frustrations with the platform built up over years.
Jumping from one enshittified profit-driven platform to another profit-driven platform would just mean we'd set ourselves up for another enshittification -> migration cycle later down the line.
What are you referring to? I may be missing a line from the article but it seems mostly focused around a lingering GitHub Actions bug and the direction of GitHub.
Then... don't use GHA and move to other CI/CD/Workflow platform.
If you try it, don't like it then don't use it, GitHub does not force you to use GHA anyway, and moving away from GitHub due to their direction sounds like a political movement. It's like someone who stop shopping from Walmart, not because they sells bad product but because they support the Republic, then going to a local shop that sometimes close unexpectedly sound unreasonable.
Neat feature to make use of Containers. I'm thinking of wrapping my video renderer in Containers and use sandbox to spawn the rendering job, but I'm not sure about the limitation of CF containers, such as how much vCPUs I have, how many capability I can get from containers (like SYS_NICE), how many RAM I have and how many jobs I can run at the same time, is there any built-in queue like Runpod (which I am using) to ratelimit the job, etc. I will give this a try.
It’s good that CF is actually trying to improve its platform instead of blaming others for smearing its product. Still, the breakneck pace is a mixed blessing. Things change so fast it’s hard to keep up, and launches often outrun polish. The R2 Data Catalog still lacks Iceberg v3 support; Wrangler has shifted dramatically in just a few months; and Pages seems to be on the way out, leaving me with Workers Assets that are painful to migrate. Configs that worked in Wrangler 3 didn’t carry over cleanly to Wrangler 4, and it feels like Wrangler 5 will introduce yet another interaction model.
> Configs that worked in Wrangler 3 didn’t carry over cleanly to Wrangler 4, and it feels like Wrangler 5 will introduce yet another interaction model.
There were no changes to the config format in Wrangler 4. The reasons for the major version bump didn't affect 99.99% of users. They are listed here:
Personally I pushed back on bumping the major version at all, because I know even a no-op major version update creates pain. But the team wasn't comfortable given the obscure edge cases. We have resolved, though, that in the future we'll build ways to manage all these issues without requiring a major version bump (e.g. support multiple versions of esbuild, so that you can upgrade wrangler without updating esbuild).
> Pages seems to be on the way out, leaving me with Workers Assets that are painful to migrate.
Pages are not "on the way out". Workers Assets are just a new, more flexible implementation of Pages, which makes it easier to use other Workers features together with Pages. If you don't need those other features, you do not need to migrate. Eventually, we will get to the point where we can auto-migrate everybody, we just aren't there yet.
That said I can't actually find a place where CF says pages are deprecated. pages.cloudflare.com seems all-in on it, as does developer.cloudflare.com/pages. I see a reddit post where somebody implies they're deprecating pages, but the page they link to [1] doesn't mention anything about pages going away.
That doesn't take away from the rest of what you're saying, it's just the part that made my heart skip a beat.
It's not deprecated. There's confusion because the implementation is changing to be better-integrated with Workers, and currently it's manual migration to get the new implementation, but eventually it'll be automatic. It'll still be called "Pages" when that happens.
> Workers will receive the focus of Cloudflare's development efforts going forwards, so we therefore are recommending using Cloudflare Workers over Cloudflare Pages for any new projects
Generate the files locally and then push them to the worker? Even with a JS based SSG that's the only way to do it and the difference between worker and pages. (workers have no build step)
I was under the impression that workers are just lambda functions, and therefore would fall under different billing rules than pages which serve static files (with unlimited bandwidth).
But workers apparently have a 'Static Assets' feature that just serves static assets (like pages) and comes with free unlimited requests, unlike worker function invocations, so as you say it seems to be essentially the same as pages.
What I meant the same as worker, is that under the hood, pages are just workers. The Static Assets feature was probably added because the by-request billing wouldn't make any sense for static assets.
CF used to encouraged people to move to Workers instead of using Pages. They recently removed the message in their landing page that said so (just checked, you could visit Wayback Machine to verify), so I guess Pages will still be available anyway. Btw the best thing that Pages gives out is allowing people to use different domain from another domain registry when Workers force user move their domain to CF.
Not the domain registry but CF wants to manage the DNS to make it work. If you do not want them to manage your DNS and want to work by simply pointing your CNAME, they ask you start with their business plan ($250 / per month)
Right, but that's not the same thing and is intrinsic to how CF works - routing DNS requests from different areas to different IPs. Is there any good reason not to just let them serve your DNS if they're serving your website?
They don't accept delegated subdomains, at least not for .net and .com domains (I haven't tried others).
I don't see how it's "intrinsic to how CF works" that they need to host your DNS records, especially when they don't require it on more expensive plans.
That being said, I don't mind them hosting my DNS records, but it would have been nice if they supported importing zone files from Azure DNS.
Fun thing is that this started because somebody claimed that Cloudflare is faster than Vercel. Then somebody who knows what they are doing did benchmarks that showed the opposite. And then worked with Cloudflare to make it faster
They might flip the emergency switch that burns a little more money to improve the cold start, schedule more CPUs to each V8 process or remove the `sleep(100)` somewhere in the code. I kinda doubt that they have actually made any code improvement but just a marketing stunt that make everything seems to be faster for a month then everything will be just as slow as it is, or they are buying time to actually improve the code.
And nobody on the benchmarks mentioned that Vercel runs it on 2 gb. Instances ( and much more expensive) while Cloudflare is competitive with 128 mb. instances.
I guess that's the difference between building on top of AWS and actually building your own infrastructure.
Theo knowing what he’s doing died for me when he did a dive into this fancy new data format OpenAI started using to stream responses from the server and how wasteful it is (SSE) (and this was in 2025)
I don’t except everyone to know everything but it made me very careful about differentiating Theo-the-engineer from Theo-the-social-media-dude.
