If you do the smoothing steps it can be OK, especially if you sand it in a sealed environment or with a HEPA vacuum handy to suck up all of the particulates. Once it is sanded you can do a short acetone treatment and the surface will be melted smooth. It can take some practice, but you can seal it up pretty well without sacrificing quality. Just be mindful of air quality and filtering at each step so you don’t undermine your goal.

Also, no matter what the microplastic impact on the environment is less than a mouse made in a factory thar doesn’t pay attention to any of its air quality standards.

No, it’s still true. They are being accused of being brown in the USA. Or being a political rival. Remember, the government can accuse anyone of anything, due process sorts out if the accusations have merit… Oh wait.

Because a browser is several orders of magnitudee more complex than a website.

Ummm, 3DS is owned by Autodesk, so you may as well consider them the same thing for this conversation, and Arnold is a renderer (also owned by Autodesk) and not a DCC, so not really relevant unless you are specifically comparing Blender’s built-in render engines to it. The reason I am not is that there are lots of plugins for Blender which can output .ass files to be rendered by Arnold, so it can be utilized if you want to pay the subscription.

Blender is a DCC. Not one that I am super familiar with, I’m a Houdini guy myself, but honestly it is better in a lot of ways than the steaming piles of shit that Autodesk puts out. The question is not one of quality or feature at this point, but one of capital and market share where it counts. If they could figure out what is needed to get the likes of Disney or MPC on board, or even smaller (though arguably still very large/high profile) houses on-board, then they would be seeing much more investment.

Gonna call you out on this, at least partially. It was SideFX, a real threat of a proprietary vendor who has sizable market share in 3D/VFX, releasing an entirely perpetually free learning edition and a low cost indie license who put the screws on Autodesk. Blender contributed to the decision, but it was absolutely not the primary pressure source.

Source: I have a Masters Degree in VFX, have studied the industry for over 35 years, and have worked professionally in it for going on 15.

If I wasn’t shit with UI Dev I would offer as this sounds like a great app, but alas.

Damn it… I literally just found draw.io like 2 weeks ago.

Oh hell, I have not had that one yet. I am already leaning away from it with just the random pins showing up on my nav that were not searched for.

Aside from 3 you are essentially creating Stumble Upon.

This, and as long as the company is legally structured to prevent restructuring things will be fine.

As an American and avid rights understander, it is not the 5th Amendment which this risks violating (which you did cite correctly), but the 4th Amendment, which guarantees protection from undue searches and seizures of your person, property, or effects. This is the whole reason for the warrant requirement and the reason you hear us bitching whenever something comes up that lets police or agents of the government acquire non-public access to information or property in a warrantless way.

An example: the police are investigating Mary’s death and suspect you of having planned the murder in the Notes app on your phone, so they want to get into your phone. Without a court order (warrant), you have to give them permission. With the court order, you must give the passcode and/or unlock the phone.

Now, at this point, if your passcode happened to be ‘I killed John02&’ you could argue 5th Amendment protection because divulging the information would incriminate yourself in the crime, or a different crime.

“A company should be able to decide not to do business with individuals for ideological reasons.”

Twitter, Facebook, etc. start filtering misinformation and banning offenders.

“Mah freedoms are being infringed!”

Gotta love this shit. Conservatives/companies: “Let the market decide!” The market: “We are tired of you cramming ads down our throats and fundamentally do not want it and will actively fight you on it.” Companies: “Waaaaaa, they are fighting us.”

I will look at QuickConnect as that sounds potentially ideal.

I honestly don’t trust MS as far as I could throw them. The amount of ads they are forcing into the OS level is evidence enough for me to believe that they are willing to abuse customers. And if DropBox is any indication of how ToS and EULAs can change in the blink of an eye to include all files, past and present, to be used for AI training with no recourse to opt-out, then MS’s current ToS doesn’t really give any fuzzy feelings.

I will definitely have to look at dyndns as I need to find a way to provide a static endpoint to gain access to ethically sourced AI training materials for my own works and that sounds like it might work.

And yes, I do work in AI, which is why I am so focused on not allowing the megacorps to ignore even the most basic regimes of ethics or customer respect.

I’m not above getting my hands dirty and this sounds like it could have promise. Thank you.

I don’t mind self-hosting, I just need something that can host from a dynamic IP since static is too expensive right now.

Ideally, as easy to interface with as possible for non-tech literate users. My mother-in-law once told my wife “I don’t know why you would ever want to strengthen your mind.” in response to confronting my wife on why she was reading a book outside as a child instead of playing physically. This is a mantra she has continued well into her 50’s and is still going “strong”. I need something she can access and download pictures from to print off and hang on her wall like she does from FB now. This is essentially the low bar. Everyone else should be more competent than that.

Thank you on the congrats! We are so happy and he could not be more adorable.

Also thank you for the suggestion, I will dig into it.

This has potential in many ways. I will have to set it up and see how it feels.

I will happily look at the alternatives. We avoid Apple like it carries the plague, mostly on my objections to their licensing policies alone. Also, I love that you linked to something about The Fappening, have a 💯 and my heartiest appreciation for you as a scholar and a gentleman.