I haven’t used Maya since the early 2000s when they had the Personal Learning Edition. I remember being put off by the 3 mouse button requirement and the weirdness of the UI at the time, but found C4D drastically more intuitive. Maybe the Maya UX has improved a lot since then, but I found Blender 2.8 slightly less intuitive than C4d when I first started, but not bad overall, compared to being completely put off by earlier versions of Blender’s UI as I had been with Maya. The expensive subscriptions for both Maya and C4D are definitely more off-putting than anything else, though.

I was contemplating switching from Cinema4d to Blender for a long time, but the UX of C4d was so nice and Blender’s frankly sucked. Then 2.8 came out with a UI overhaul that changed all that and now I’d never dream of switching to another 3d package when Blender is so easy to use, extensible with Python, and has a huge community around it. Blender’s popularity soared after the UX changes. Sometimes, a UI overhaul can make all the difference.

Even where Blender falls short, there’s usually an addon that fills the gap, often paid, but still open source, which is 1000x better than competing options that almost always involve a subscription.

The benefit of a community of open source software around it also can’t be overstated. For instance, MakeHuman kicks ass, Auto-Rig Pro makes it usable for mocap and character animation, etc. Blender Studio’s projects like Flamenco render farm and automated Blender Studio pipeline built around the also open source Kitsu that I self-host are also amazing. Collectively, it all blows Autodesk out of the water and should be a shining example to all other open source projects.

Steam Deck will not be able to compete with Switch 2 for first party titles since it can barely emulate Switch games at a decent frame rate. Will likely need a proper gaming PC to emulate S2 first party titles. For all other games, Steam Deck wins because the games don’t cost $80, vastly bigger selection, mods work, etc.

That takes away much of the appeal of physical copies since Nintendo can still still control how it’s used after it is sold and will eventually no longer offer it for download while their DRM will make it difficult to make and use a backup copy. Buying would not be owning in that case, so what’s the point?

Either that, or the powerful gaming PC you put the Switch 2 money towards that will eventually emulate the Switch 2. Seems like a better investment than buying a locked down console with a GPU less powerful than a RTX 3050 that can only play $80 games.

I don’t plan to buy one because proprietary, locked down hardware isn’t a great investment compared to PC hardware that can serve a lot of different purposes, but am eagerly awaiting the news of Nintendo’s well-earned pwnage.

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I think paid open source like GPL Blender addons from BlenderMarket, Gumroad, etc. is a good option. You pay for it to support the devs while also owning what you bought.

I haven’t really compared the specs of between them recently, but I have the Pro, and the main decider for me at the time was that it was $50 more and has Ethernet. That being said, I added a USB Ethernet adapter to an Onn device and it works, though the first one I tried didn’t work. It was worth the $50 at the time not to deal with that for the Shield.

Anyone successfully installed LineageOS on Nvidia Shield or Onn devices? I ran the Konstakang AndroidTV build of Lineage on a Raspberry Pi 4 a couple years ago, and it was nice in how uncluttered and non-spywarey it was, but I ended up buying a Shield because hardware decoding never worked well and the frame rate drops were unbearable.

I don’t want any device for my TV that makes it hard to install free apps like Jellyfin without logging into an account. I tried fake accounts with Apple devices in the past and ended up with a couple devices that were basically bricked when the fake email account I used got disabled due to lack of activity.

Same. I think it’s also possible to flash them with LineageOS, but swapping out the launcher and using adb to remove anything superfluous is all I’ve done so far.

I currently use rclone with encryption to iDrive e2. I’m considering switching to Backrest, though.

I originally tried Backblaze b2, but exceeded their API quotas in their free tier and iDrive has “free” API calls, so I recently bought a year’s worth. I still have a 2 year Proton subscription and tried rclone with Proton drive, but it was too slow.

I don’t see a problem with thumbnails that accurately portray the contents of the video, since only a small number of characters can fit in the title and a screenshot of one frame from the video doesn’t say much, so it can be difficult to get a sense for the video at a glance otherwise. I do get really annoyed with thumbnails that are deceptive in any way. If the thumbnail seems like it might be deceptive, I’ll usually read the comments before watching the video, or quickly scroll through it to see if it’s BS or not. Sometimes, the thumbnail advertises something that happens at the end of a 20 minute video that could’ve been 30s, in which case, I’ll scroll usually through to the end instead of watching the whole thing. If it weren’t for the thumbnail, though, I might not have watched it all.

Although I think Steve Jobs was a real piece of shit, his product instincts were often on point, and his message in this video really stuck with me. I think companies shoehorning AI in everything would do well to start with something useful they want to enable and work backwards to the technology as he described here:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=48j493tfO-o