Chances are that any new large commercial platform will enshittify, sooner or later prompting another exodus, and each exodus will at least have some people choosing a community platform.

At least there’s only a single way to tell the computer “ok, execute this command”. And you see the command written in plain text before you.

And, no, no useful interface is intuitive because computers just have too many functions. There’s no intuitive appliance in the world with more than a temperature knob and a timer knob. Knowledge is always required, be that cultural or by RTFM.

3d not being required makes a hell a lot of sense and of course it wasn’t people have been drafting on paper for ages. They might’ve ended up on Mac or maybe Amiga, but an SGI workstation is quite an investment when you don’t even need to spin polygons. IRIS GL dates back to the early 80s, doesn’t seem so much to be a timeline but price and need thing. And it’s not like you can’t have a 3d view without acceleration, just would take a while to render and a frame every five seconds might still be usable.

There apparently was an IRIX version at one time but with no user base preference, more likely they were thinking “where’s my C: drive” so once 3d acceleration hit the mainstream everyone happily switched back to Microsoft. Meanwhile you have 3d artists complaining that they can’t move windows with meta+lmb on windows.

I mean back in the days they should have been running on IRIX, and SGI switched over to Linux when they made the switch to x86 CPUs. Plenty of movie studios switched over to Linux workstations because of that, porting from IRIX to Linux is trivial compared to porting to Windows, why didn’t the same happen with CAD?

Wintel-PCs for the longest time just weren’t suitable for 3d work, they were office machines.

AutoCAD

It’s always funny with 3d. Graphics? You need Houdini? Of course it runs on Linux, it’s a UNIX-native program after all, first version ran on IRIX because what else would you use for 3d work but an SGI workstation and Linux is the commercial successor to IRIX. Blender, the same, just 5k bucks cheaper (and not everything is nodes, not yet). CAD? Everything’s suddenly windows-only because… how the hell did that came to be? Were they running 1990’s CAD software on Excel machines?

OpenEXR. Though it probably could use a spec upgrade, in particular add JPEG-XL to the list of compression algorithms. It’s not like OpenEXR’s choices are bad, the lossy ones are just more geared towards fidelity than space savings, kind of the opposite of what you want for the web where saving space is often paramount and fidelity a bonus.

Bonus: Supports multi-channel, so not just RGBA. Not terribly useful for your run off the mill camera, very useful in production where you might want to attach the depth buffer, cryptomatte etc and I guess you could also use it for the output of light field cameras. Oh there’s also multi-view so you can store not just stereo images but also whole all-around captures and stuff. There’s practically nothing pixel-related you can’t do with it though it might require custom tooling.

EU fines are working. Not in the sense that they would prevent companies from trying to do shit, but in the sense that they shape up once it has been levied: Understand that those 800m are a shot before the bow. If the behaviour continues, there’s going to be daily punitive fines that very quickly become very unaffordable.

I mean, what is the money being used for?

Goes towards the EU budget, reducing the amount the member states have to pay in. In other words Berlaymont doesn’t gain anything from levying fines, their budget stays the same.

It’s still quite obscure to actually mess with AI art instead of just throwing prompts at it, resulting in slop of varying quality levels. And I don’t mean controlnet, but github repos with comfyui plugins with little explanation but a link to a paper, or “this is absolutely mathematically unsound but fun to mess with”. Messing with stuff other than conditioning or mere model selection.

Trump wants adulation, not conquest. Push come to shove you can get him out of the oval office by making him figurehead Emperor, as long as it comes with immunity he’ll accept.

On a scale of Mussolini to Hitler, he’s like 250% towards Mussolini.

In one incident, after two video game companies cancelled their sponsorship deals with Neom, Nasr threatened his communications team, saying that he would “take a gun from under my desk and shoot you” unless he was told who was responsible for the deals falling through.

Now if they were trying to make deals with me, I’d say you. Nasr, you’re responsible.

Well there’s no explicit ban there’s simply no Rechtsgrundlage. Also, a decision of the constitutional court which I can’t be bothered to unearth now regarding the establishment of the ZDF, which was initially supposed to be a federal broadcaster because the ARD was too left (according to the CDU).

All those stations, radio or TV, broadcasting in the whole republic (ARD, ZDF, DLF) are based on inter-state treaties because only the states can set such a thing up. It gets even more complicated because originally DW was a short-wave station set up by the ARD, then it became fully federal, now it’s still federal but also part of the ARD, but as said doesn’t broadcast domestically. Internet doesn’t count, there, just actual airwaves.

The target audience is all abroad, both the diaspora (hence German language programming) as well as general foreign propaganda. As in “broadcast the German view of things”. Similar to BBC World, France24, Voice of America and… RT. Just that RT sucks donkey ass, even more than VoA, because the Russian regime does suck even more than the CIA. Can’t divorce those broadcasters from the states running them.

Their reports on Gaza are quite unambiguous in who’s suffering and who’s at fault, but that’s by presenting facts, not interpreting them, or doing much drilling. Generally speaking they avoid talking about Israeli politics as much as they can: If the foreign ministry doesn’t want to talk about it you won’t see it on DW, there’s no direct ties just some kind of telepathic connection.

Compare that with their reports on e.g. the reparations discussion with Namibia, it’s night and day when it comes to covering detail.

They’re in fact forbidden from broadcasting within Germany, doubly so: First off they’re not public but state TV. secondly, they’re federal while broadcasting is state prerogative.

Expect their editorial policy to align with Germany’s foreign policy, and there’s some selection and framing going on occasionally in the sense of “we’ll report about a problem but only in the context of it being addressed” kind of deal. They’ll report about arguments within Germany, but they won’t start any. When it comes to raw factuality they’re highly reliable.

I think the ARD membership is just about access to each other’s programming, there’s zero overlap when it comes to editorial staff, running the channel etc. That would be highly unconstitutional.

Arte does have some English, Spanish, Polish, and Italian stuff but it’s quite limited and generally only subtitles. Other languages if they happened to have bought it from somewhere else, say a documentary about Kafka where you can select the original Czech audio. News won’t be among the English subtitled stuff but there’s a good amount of documentaries, background and big-picture stuff. Not just society and politics, all kinds of topics.

Just go browse. And, separately, a metric fuckton of live concerts from all genres.

Algorithmic patents amount to patenting maths which, by very longstanding precedence, is not a thing, for good reason. Same goes for business methods and other stuff.

In the EU there’s only one way to patent software and that’s if you’re using it to achieve direct physical ends. E.g. you can patent washing machine firmware in so far as you patent a particular way to combine sensor data to achieve a particular washing result. Rule of thumb: If, 30 years ago, you’d have an electromechanical mechanism to do the task then you can patent the software that’s now replacing it.

Oh: It’s also possible to patent silicon, that is, you can patent your hardware acceleration methods for video decoding. That doesn’t extend to decoders running on general-purpose hardware, though.

If you want to monopolise your brand-new hash algorithm there’s a simple way: Don’t publish the source, use copyright to collect royalties… though that doesn’t mean that reverse engineering is outlawed, especially if necessary for interoperability. Practically speaking nope hash algorithms just can’t be protected which is fair and square because it’s academia who comes up with that kind of stuff and we paid for it with taxpayer money. Want to make money off it? Get tenure.

Just for the record, and context: That wasn’t misogyny, it’s not calling any woman anything (though using a word vulgarly referring to female genitalia), it’s the established insult for Merz. Really doesn’t translate well, not so much word-wise but connotation and implication-wise. Cf. the American vs. English vs. Australian usage of the word, doesn’t translate at all and that’s within the same language.

It’s an imputed high-school nickname calling him, in my reading, an immature braggart. You know, 12yold brags about their extensive sexual experience, gets called “pussy hunter” in return to make fun of him. There’s also the additional linguistic quibble that the word, to the amusement of the rest of the republic, simply means “face” in Bavarian and can be used there more or less in the sense of “gob”, as in “shut your gob”. He indeed has a big one.

The EU is a defensive pact in itself and while “defend our brothers” sentiment is not tightly woven, there’s a tripwire cascade. You cannot attack Estonia without every single Finn being personally offended, and you cannot separate Finland and Sweden in military matters, the list goes on and on. The effect flattens out the further away you get but you’d be hard-pressed to find a member thinking twice about sending arms and MREs. Poland would have boots on the ground before Spain gets the call.

Estonia. The fuck has Estonia ever done to anyone. They’re essentially a mascot of the EU: Them being, willingly, part of the pack is witness to the EU actually being a post-colonial project. They’re way too precious to be left hanging. I can’t even bring myself to make an alcoholism joke right now.

They aren’t strong enough to take on each separately, either. For Russia to attain their coveted superpower status they’d need to stop fucking around and actually invest in themselves. They do have more than enough land and resources, they have a reasonably well-educated population, it wouldn’t take that long trouble is they’re a kleptocracy and the chief kleptocrat thinks being a superpower is measured in land mass.

The EU accepts countries with border disputes into the union (in fact there’s a couple very fun ones between member states, generally low-intensity though, e.g NL and DE even agreed to disagree in perpetuity), the EU is also a defensive pact, trouble being getting into the EU is quite a bit harder than getting into NATO: Vastly stricter rule of law and democracy standards, on top of that trade integration, economics and everything.

OTOH the EU is also not above creating new ad-hoc treaty structures with unimaginative names so a… DCENSV, “Deep and Comprehensive European Neighbourhood Security Vehicle” is absolutely within the realm of possibilities. People are basically waiting for Trump to move while preparing responses for every scenario, very little if any of this kind of preparation will reach the public eye.

NATO member Finland has a land border of many hundreds of kilometers with Russia’s mainland territory. That doesn’t seem to be hurting anyone or anything, except perhaps Mr. Putin’s ambitions to one day reconquer Finland.

Fun fact: The border is essentially unmanned on the Russian side, they moved pretty much everyone to Ukraine. Doesn’t look like they’re expecting to be invaded. You may or may not be interested in what military installations exist up on the Kola peninsula and how many roads and rail lines go south.