A similar story that came out around the time of the “Gulf of America“ debacle basically just said that the database they use for naming bodies of water had been updated, and therefore that carried through to Maps.
So it wasn’t really a decision one way or the other, it was a continuation of an existing policy of where names come from.
They could just not do it. Nothing would happen. It's a little moronic that they act so hands off. I get it having a policy is nice for actual controversies between nations but one person wants this (who has probably never used Google Maps), it would be harmless for them to ignore it but instead they piss off half of one country and all of the other.
Complete lack of judgment from whoever made this change happen
I think you are right, and maybe it just appeals to a different kind of user. I appreciate the way it's set up out of the box, and make pretty minimal changes that chezmoi and the /omarchy skill help me maintain easily across updates. I like that it's well-configured without me having to configure it, but I know that's not what a lot of linux users are looking for.
I really like Omarchy. I don't agree with all of DHH's (apparent) opinions, but I don't agree with all of TIm Cook's opinions, Steve Jobs' opinions, Linus Torvalds' opinions, or Bill Gates' opinions either.
I really appreciate this project. Who knows if it will become a viable standard, but I like that there's at least an effort to work on something open and interoperable with a bit more structure than just plain text. The small amount of structure and ceremony adds boatloads of utility.
I don't use Blender, so my admiration is from a distance but: Wow - what an impressive project. At least if I understand it correctly, this is a real pro-level piece of free and open software that's equivalent to thousands and thousands of dollars in closed-source commercial software.
Its history is also one of perseverance. Blender was never a runaway success story, but rather a matter of becoming a little better every day and eventually getting a recognition for that.
> Blender was never a runaway success story, but rather a matter of becoming a little better every day
Also some extreme ups and downs along the way, almost succumbing at some point(s) and more along the way. It's a miracle it survived, a miracle performed by Ton Roosendaal most likely.
It's not just incredibly powerful software, it's also incredibly fun and intuitive to use (once the UI has clicked with you).
There are still some areas where commercial competitors got edge, but Blender covers a wider base, is the more complete/universal software already. Lot's of people prefer Blender's UI. It's also rapidly developing, the competition is not. I am pretty sure it will become industry standard at some point. Maybe not for the big studios, who invested millions into custom pipelines, but anything up and coming.
> I am pretty sure it will become industry standard at some point.
I remember people saying this in 2004.
Blender is widely used in "the industry" (whatever that industry is). What is has really accomplished in terms of "the industry standard" has, from my POV, been preventing a proprietary system from becoming the standard. That's what happened in the DAW space, where ProTools was the industry standard, and it has taken 20 years to get to the point where that hegemony is no longer as solid as it once was (thanks, Ableton!)
There are several different choices for all the things Blender does, but the existence of a FLOSS tool that does them (and does them well) prevents any of the proprietary ones from being "the one".
You are right, Blender doesn't just serve one industry.
I had the movie industry in mind, because it demands the largest set of Blender's features. I believe Maya still has/had the edge in animation and particle stuff. Though, AFAIK the main reason is integration and custom tooling built on it, which makes switching to Blender less tempting than sticking up with license fees... which are rather negligible compared to overall operating costs.
I believe, Blender is creeping in with smaller studios, especially anime/cartoon kinda stuff.
I think one of Blender's biggest assets is its wide creative tool set. There is even a useful video editor included. Honestly, it's not far off from being the swiss army knife of digital creative work, a creative operating system. Maybe we get a DAW too at some point :D
Anyway, I think that's why Blender will dominate. Anyone starting out got everything they need for "free" (with a consistent UI you only have to learn once), but they still won't outgrow the software professionally either, now. That's totally unique.
For the DAW tool, just run Blender on top of JACK/Pipewire and use Ardour to get sample-accurate synchronization between the two, and all the features of both, without compromise.
I really hope a similar revolution comes to photo and video editing. While there are plenty of really good FOSS video editors (including the one blender has), none of them are truly professional level. For photo editing, the GIMP is pretty much there, but it's old and crusty and maintained by a handful of people
I have a vague recollection that twenty years ago GIMP paid some designers to come up with a great UI, but once the design was ready, GIMP was like "nah we don't like that" and kept their bad UI.
I do image stuff so rarely that GIMP is fine because it's free. But its UI is so bad. I don't know about now, but I remember a few years ago someone pointed out that GIMP had over a million dollars in a Bitcoin wallet and hadn't touched any of it in like a decade.
Gimp still has a lot of good features that I find myself crawling back for, on bigger projects. But Pinta has that good ol' fashioned Paint.NET feel to it that a lot of people still strive for.
I use blender constantly to make things for 3d printing and I haven’t spent a cent on it or any plugins I use for it.
So for anyone on the fence about picking up blender and reading this comment above, no it doesn’t require hundreds of dollars of plugins to be useful. Not for every use case.
Same - I make most of my living from Blender and I occassionally use 1 or 2 paid add-ons. With the recent improvements to the compositor and the editor, it has even replaced the last piece of Adobe software I was using - After Effects - very nice feeling. I donate to Blender after every paid job too.
Indeed, geometry nodes are revolutionary in some ways, and volumetric displacement brushes are magic.
The issue is Blender has been in perpetual Beta for decades. Every update something breaks, moves, permutes, or goes missing. It is chaos incarnate in some ways. =3
Every use-case differs. I like Blender even when they break my hobby projects every update.
OpenScad and FreeCad also works for 3D cad files. However, many people that own 3D printers will never sculpt, re-mesh, or cad up their own objects. =3
FreeCAD is great if someone mainly wants to print functional, usable parts. That’s totally valid and honestly even more powerful than Blender for that use case. Autodesk Fusion (prev. Fusion 360) is also a popular option.
I use blender because I also like to do a lot of 3d printed art, and as you mentioned, that sculpt tooling is one of many fantastic tools for that purpose.
Also LLMs know a lot about Blender, making it very easy to describe what I want to do, and then get a walk through of how to do it with Blender.
LLM are sometimes good at organizing the awful documentation for Blenders ever permuting API, but will not help you get better creatively. If you are interested in geometry nodes, than this channel offers a lot =3
There is no such thing as "free" unless the original author released files under CC0 or Public domain. The rest of the ecosystem is a legal minefield even for kids kit-bashing a project for fun.
We spent around $3k conducting a survey of the Blender ecosystem for a game dev project about 2 years ago, and continue to monitor the situation every update. A rather sobering experience in some ways.
Would recommend Poly Haven as the plugin is not required to access their free assets, but it is usually a good idea to support people that make things easier for everyone. =3
I’ve regularly used an M1 Max, M4 Pro, and M5 Max. They all get pretty loud when driving local LLMs. “Jet-engine” would be hyperbolic, but it’s definitely noisy.
Is it really? A 9B model is equivalent? Honest question, as I haven't spent that much time with the 9B variant or Flash 2.5. But that seems like a pretty bold claim for such a small model. I assumed Flash 2.5 was considerably larger, but maybe I'm wrong?
Second this, they keep getting performance upgrades too. Z Lab had been publishing dflash addons and boosting their tgen 2-3x. I'm looking at doing comparative evals right now
So it wasn’t really a decision one way or the other, it was a continuation of an existing policy of where names come from.
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