Mandelmus

Blender was extremely hostile to UI change suggestions as well until only recently when they changed things drastically with the insanely successful Blender 2.8 project. From then on donations (including corporate sponsors) grew massively. Blender has made massive strides in the past few years, and much of it can be attributed to them changing their stance on UI/UX changes.

I’d also much prefer to work in such a team than one where people keep their cameras off.

> There should be no requirement to have the camera on, it really adds very little over voice alone

I couldn’t disagree more. You can see if people are agreeing, disagreeing, confused by something someone said, even if they won’t say it out loud. There’s a million important and valuable cues that get lost when people do meetings without a camera.

Ans “work was done by voice alone for decades” is just not true in any significant way. Most teams that needed to communicate and have meetings regularly were in the same room. People flew (and still fly) around the planet to have a single meeting with a group of people.

I’m just a student and employee, and therefore in no position to make anyone behave in any particular way when it comes to Zoom calls. But I think it’s rude and uncomfortable to have work meetings or lectures to a faceless crowd because someone “isn’t comfortable on camera”. If you don’t enforce any minimum etiquette for such meetings, it all just converges on the least effort, lowest engagement, minimum communication version because every person who drops off camera makes it creepier for the remaining ones to talk to a bunch of black rectangles.

There are so many shops in Berlin where I constantly wonder how the hell they make enough money to even afford the rent.

I suspect that the rapidly rising real estate prices in Berlin will make most of them infeasible soon, but so far Berlin is still relatively cheap compared to other cities of similar political and cultural capital.

AR will become a game changer once the hardware is there, i.e. glasses than can be worn comfortably and anywhere. Everything before that is just practice for the software and UI.

I don't think I'm merely being a luddite or overly conservative when I say that the exponential rise of parasocial entertainment worries me greatly. There's a rising loneliness epidemic in much of the developed world, and entire industries that profit from selling a virtual simulacrum of the experience of hanging out with friends (Twitch) or intimacy (OnlyFans).

Much like Facebook and social media, these products cannot truly satisfy the interpersonal/social/sexual needs of their users, but they provide enough of an illusion that many people will spend their time, money, and social energy on those sites instead of getting so consciously lonely and bored that they'll undertake the much greater effort to meet real people and form true social/romantic bonds–which comes with many complications, compromises, conflict-resolution needs, and reciprocal dynamics.

I'm not so much outraged that there's sex involved, I'm actually equally concerned about parasocial Twitch streamers/influencers and OnlyFans. Learning what social relationships and hanging out with friends is like from performative ad-supported performers is like learning what sex is like from porn; both are bad influences on (especially but not only) young people that can significantly stunt them.

I'm not trying to avoid that recognition at all! But somebody put those systemic objectives and incentive structures into place. The fact that societies like the ones described in the podcast have such different incentive structures is proof that it's possible for humans to collectively design a different system, rather than assuming it's all just fallen from the heavens, i.e. the inevitable outcome of immutable "human nature".

I did not mean to come across as unempathetic, on the contrary! My view is that only if you admit some level of design in our inhumane system can you even expect that we can change anything about it. If it were all automatic, doesn't that make it basically inevitable and merely 'natural'?

That escalated quickly. From disagreeing with my comment to lamenting I exist is a bit of an extreme jump, wouldn't you say?

> Animation: Maya and Blender are comparable

I’m a VFX artist who loves Blender but unfortunately they’re not even close when it comes to animation, even less so rigging (the process of making a 3D mesh animatable). Maya allows for much more sophisticated rigs, and to have them perform at much higher framerates than Blender, which is crucial for animation workflows.

So far Blender is a much better Maya substitute for modelling and rendering than for rigging and animation.

It's surprising especially since Tim Cook said:

> "We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution."

I'm surprised they don't consider the cloud storage for all their services, which they're trying to make a bigger and bigger part of their revenue mix, a primary technology.

> thoughtful in a similar way to Lex Fridman

I don't think that's a great plug tbh.

It's a collective design that's been arrived at iteratively over many generations but it's still designed insofar that it's composed of countless consciously created and refined incentive structures, cultural norms, legal constructs, and institutions that in concert further our current system.

>I don't want things modern and clean. Please stop making things modern and clean. I want things that are human and have some kind of soul left in them instead of being antiseptically scoured of anything resembling personality.

It seems to me like you're complaining about a trend you associate with the wording rather than the specific changes to Firefox here.

Or which of the changes to Firefox do you associate with having "less soul" or "less personality"?

> “Isometric perspective is interesting, because nothing recedes to a vanishing point,” Rudnick says, “and therefore it also eliminates the variable of time.” He points out that this type of design is particularly popular with fintech and mortgage companies – playing down the passage of time is particularly advantageous to firms selling financial products that you may end up paying off for years.

What the fuck do vanishing points have to do with time?

This Apple Music “spatial audio” just means Dolby Atmos. It is not the same gyroscope-based spatial audio that they use on Apple TV.

I think there are huge differences between being a carpenter and being an assembly-line worker though.

I agree with this. I’ve had a very adventorous and fulfilling sex life in my teens and especially twenties, including polyamorous relationships, etc., and now I’m 33, in a monogamous relationship for close to three years,p and fully content. I don’t feel like I have anything to prove anymore sexually and it’s quite liberating.

It's long been a pet peeve of mine (to put it mildly) how our entertainment industry aestheticizes violence, tragedy, dystopia, and criminals, but then claims to intend the opposite.

Walter White in Breaking Bad is supposedly the protagonist in a tragic story about the corrupting effects of criminality, greed, and the drug trade, yet the most memorable and culturally cited impressions are of how badass and powerful Heisenberg is.

Games are notoriously bad at this (the favoured term here is "ludonarrative dissonance") where some games pretend to denounce violence in their stories or cutscenes, but the gameplay makes mass violence the most gratifying and fun part of the entire experience.

And if anyone were to criticise the educational/cultural impact of such aesthetic distortions, the inevitable killer argument in return is "free speech" and "artistic freedom" and instant panic about the threat of censorship.

(As an aside, as a European I find it especially striking how depictions of even artistic and consensual adult sexuality or even just plain nudity are considered far more corrupting and "taboo" in US culture than depictions of violence. I think that's fundamentally fucked up. Some brief nudity? Rated R. People getting shot? PG-13.)

It works flawlessly on my iPad in Safari.

It does, but we’re increasingly so busy, distracted, and “up in our heads” all day that the time and energy required for that kind of mindfulness becomes unaffordable to many people “having to function” day-to-day. The way we structure modern society and work life is antithetical to both mental and physical health (“sitting is the new smoking”).

They say “what gets measured gets managed”, and if your internal biological sensors don’t get used enough because your attention is busy processing other, seemingly more urgent, instructions all day, the watch can help take on some of those tasks and theow in an interrupt to “take a break, go move” every once in a while.

Meister Eckhart: ”Be willing to be a beginner every single morning.”

> Babies because they don't have value in their current form, they need more work and iteration before they have value.

That’s a highly disturbing and misguided framework if you ask me.

In life, society and politics, most things aren’t strictly immutable or mutable in a binary way though. What may be impossible for a single person to change, may still be subject to collective action - and collective action arises from the cumulative pressures, tensions and frustrations of many individuals. If all those individuals avoid information that could evoke these pressures, that collective action will never come into existence.

Do you mean the XPS 13? I've never seen an XPS 15 in recent years without an NVIDIA card. The cheapest XPS 15 from 2019 that I can find still comes with the mobile NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650, as does my own XPS 15 9560 from 2017.