Except that's the "Massive Data Repository" which is mostly just about hoarding mass surveillance data. (Unless of course that's what THEY want us to think!)
A better approximation can probably be had by comparing against the performance of the top ones at https://top500.org/
Same. Every time I see LLM has contributed to the work I feel it greatly dilutes it. I'll push through if the topic is important and there's good points. But e.g. on YT, a sloppy script that barely stands on its own becomes a hard no on the very first "it's not X, it's Y".
But estimating distances is hard, as is estimating road size. You can only plan one straight line ahead, and there's no "glance how many blocks before I make a left turn". Now it's "scan and process the entire straight terrain section with eyes recognizing crossings to get the count" Alternatively, I'll have to task switch all the time to it to not miss on the turn. Some hybrid map visual overlay that makes reading it at a glance easier would go a long way here.
Also any points shown (e.g. destination, POIs) that are more than a few degrees away from straight ahead appear to be next to you, but following you which is quite confusing.
My first introduction to the man was Muppet Treasure Island, the video game. I didn't see the movie until I was adult but the game really, really stuck with me. It's not on GOG (yet) but a copy of it sits on archive: https://archive.org/details/MuppetTreasureIslandPC
It ran on W11 without too much trouble up until CD 3 started. There the whole game just seized up and refused to run. Weirdly no amount of uninstalling helped to get even earlier CDs running.
That being said it's a masterpiece, still, 30 years later.
Not to take things too off track but I worked at Egghead Software around that time and the looping recording we had on a TV for that game haunts me to this day.
I can't believe I'm not able to buy Every Fucking Website Premium with business focused ads and native advertising masquerading as quasi-educational infotainment. Also where's the sign-up with Spybook?
I "grew up" using Cinema 4D. Likewise I just find that the UI of blender is for whatever reason _incredibly_ not intuitive for me. I also don't really like the fact that everything is a youtube video nowadays; I guess it's easier to monetise for the kind people who make tutorials but when I learnt 3D modelling as a teenager (in ~2005 with a desire for 3D printing!) C4D just intuitively "clicked" and they had a lot of hugely detailed, technical information with a lot of physics in it. One of my dad's friends had a license for it, and I was somehow able to just internalise its various primitives and object based workflow.
I've tried many times to get to grips with Blender but for whatever reason I've found doing the simplest things very tiring. If there's a big, illustrated PDF manual out there for a recent version, I'd love to know of a link to it...or even better yet a conversion guide from C4D (!)
The official manual is more readable than you'd think. It actually switches back and forth between "tutorial" and "reference" style. The intro sections are often in tutorial style and the detailed sub-sections are more reference style. It worked well for me for intros to specific topics. https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/index.html
Maybe this'll get me torched but one of the more useful things I've had an LLM do is generate a little tutorial for Blender. Though I'm coming in with zero 3D modeling experience, and the tutorial was for the basics, what I got (and this was with a local quantized Qwen, I'm sure the big boys would've done a better job) was fairly workable.
My issue was yes, it's always a YouTube video, and also always for shit I didn't want to do. I don't want to make a donut. I don't want to model a coffee cup, I want to make something else.
It was full of little errors here and there (the human crafted ones are too because the Blender UI changes so often), but since it had gotten me started and "in" the UI I could usually figure it out myself or use a search engine to find what I was looking for.
"Torched"? Nah, not at all. But the donut tutorial is famous for a good reason. A donut is basically a torus, which is one of the basic shapes that Blender gives you, so you're starting from a shape that's nearly right — and then the tutorial teaches you how to deform it slightly so that it looks less perfect and therefore more "real". Which means that you're learning the process of modeling. That same tutorial then teaches you the process of texturing, of lighting... By going through the process of crafting an object you don't actually care about, you learn the steps involved in crafting the ones you do care about.
Perhaps, if the object I do care about crafting requires that process. I'd rather just learn the process I need when I need it, not waste my time doing a bunch of nebulous "this might be useful later" or conceptual stuff. Blender is an immensely flexible and well-featured tool. If I'm using it for 2D animation, making models for 3D Printing, or video editing, being able to make a donut is quite frankly, useless.
The donut tutorial is fine, but it is an error to believe it is appropriate or useful for everyone. Probably best for people who have more vague goals like "i want to be good at blender" and not "I have this very specific thing in my head that I want to make and none of the free models out there are close enough."
Many people start learning blender with the donut tutorial. It’s pretty famous.
It’s a general beginner tutorial, but blender can be so weird that many skills don’t transfer (like how you move the camera in the viewport).
The tutorial takes you through pretty much everything you need to know to get started with blender. Modeling, texturing, painting, modifiers, compositing, geometry nodes, and rendering. You can skip the parts that seem familiar, since you already know 3DS Max.
I think you need to start learning a lot of things from scratch. They are just very different programs with different concepts and layouts. You can sure transfer some things over but I think it might be best to just start from scratch, skip through the parts you feel familiar with. Try some beginner tutorials like the donut to get some overview and then learn how you learn new stuff. Just maybe try to not to think of it as 3ds Max but different. Blender is a very different experience and not looking it as a migration but a new tool might ease the frustrations.
I wish Autodesk had a Creative Cloud equivalent: imagine a 50€ / month subscription that gives access to all Autodesk apps, it would have sold like hotcakes.
By remaining expensive proprietary tools, they lost the new generations of developers who learned 3D with Blender and Houdini Apprentice and who will naturally continue to use them once they become professionals, so the customer base will keep shrinking.
I think people just pirate all this stuff anyway. I'm kind of surprised about the casualness (and often encouragement)of using cracked software in 3d communities.
When I started on 3.2 there was a series of 3-5 minute videos covering the absolute basics of the interface, voice by some european (nordic?) guy.(Maybe CGboost 2.8 series?)
Were the concepts basic? Yup. But watching a 5 minute video on 1.5x speed gets through it pretty quick and covers some edge cases for the topic at hand, which can be surprising even at a basic level.
THEN MOST IMPORTANTLY you need to practice using the keyboard shortcut keys which are pretty essential to feeling like a native in Blender.
After the first X number of videos, if you can predict what is coming.. well, then you are bored and you are ready to step onto the next thing and explore that instead.
Do tiny projects in Blender and just trudge through the horrible experience of having to look up a bunch of stuff. I also moved from 3ds Max to Blender, but back in the Blender 2.7 days, I'm sure it's easier today.
Basically take whatever you'd do in 3ds Max normally, commit to doing in in Blender and prepare to Google/Ask an LLM "I can do X in 3ds Max 2025, how can I do the same or equivalent in Blender 5.2?" A LOT. Nothing beats practice :)
Different minds learn best different ways I suppose, I could never go through a "tutorial video" for any visual programs, always done it "the hard way" by basically looking up action by action. But again, YMMV of course.
Yes, but I think for Blender specifically this is the hard way.
After a video tutorial I always concluded that I had a few really clumsily ways to work around my lack of knowledge. Some workflows really need an expert demonstration, or you won't even know what is possible. (I do pause the videos to look up the docu.)
The problem is you will develop an incomplete understanding, using a ton of weird workflows, and missing tools that are super useful that you didn't know existed.
Just pushing through one end to end tutorial will introduce all the main concepts than asking gemini for bits and pieces won't get. It's not as satisfying as doing your own project but pushing through at least one of them is well worth it.
I used to use 3ds Max and I find the Blender's UI really terrible after years of occasional use. It's very unintuitive and you'll have to learn everything from tutorials / reading Blender forums. It seems to have many annoying quirks, which make me angry every time I use it.
I read tutorials, but the UI was also more intuitive / discoverable than Blender. It's been over 20 years since I last used it though, but I remember it being much easier to use than Blender today. I could model, texture and animate a full game character from scratch by just learning the basic UI.
Very secure servers are openly documented (Kerckhoff's principle).
Snake oil purporting itself as secure is always very hush hush and comes with claims of security.
Besides, other messengers like Signal have already made the server open source, and they have native clients that end-to-end encrypt everything, so you don't even have to trust server.
Durov requiring you to trust the server shows he has no idea how to build secure systems. He and his team are amateurs in security engineering.
Telegram offering bells and whistles that leaks everything to the service provider is not an argument for Telegram the same way "it launches the video game" isn't an argument for video game cracks that carry ransomware.
Both are called Trojan Horses and are considered malware.
The bigger issue is Telegram advertises it as more private option to WhatsApp although Telegram collects more metadata, and also the message content. People think Telegram is more private, they don't use it as a public forum replacement. Also, institutions running Telegram have people form closer working groups that become groups for friends, who don't necessarily realize they should be moving to Signal the moment the members start sharing things they don't want everyone to know.
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