Used Maya and cinema 4d for years.. just started switching to Blender because I heard the buzz around it.. and it is legitimately the biggest win for consumer open source software by a huge margin. Absolutely great product, I think I can get workflows as good or better than Maya out of this.. and Maya costs thousands of dollars a year.

So if I open a new small business and want to advertise it on AdWords or elsewhere on the internet I have no recourse? Word of mouth is random and unreliable even if you have a good product. Advertising is a healthy and essential signalling mechanism to broadcast the availability of a new service and there is absolutely nothing morally wrong with it in its self. The non-benneficial side-effects like extensive user tracking and practices that drastically harm user experience however are bad and a seperate issue to be dealt with.

> So if I open a new small business and want to advertise it on AdWords or elsewhere on the internet I have no recourse

Ad tech was extremely profitable before personalisation and wholesale trading of private data.

> Ad tech was extremely profitable

That was the era when marketers were dumb, drank the internet look aid and were taken for a ride by the industry. That's not quite true anymore.

They will work just fine today, too

Ah yes, the power-mad dark wizard. You should avoid that guy and hang out with the laid back hippy zen wizards.

Spare me the snark and negativity.

That analogy would only make sense if you built the universe inside the telescope.

No: telescopes are tools to study the universe, just as computers are tools for studying computation.

I don't look at computers as tools for studying computation. Instead, they are tools for performing computation.

"A scientist builds in order to learn; an engineer learns in order to build." - Fred Brooks

perhaps performing computations is to studying computation as observing the universe through a telescope is to studying it.

> perhaps performing computations is to studying computation as observing the universe through a telescope is to studying it.

This is an interesting thought, but the two seem fundamentally different in nature (active vs passive).

Yes, and to a certain extent, you can study computation without a digital computer. Computation can be abstracted away from the devices that perform it. You can, for example, study Big O notation and theoretical computational complexity of algorithms without actually using a computer.

This is not how people wrote html in 1999

Everywhere I have ever worked has relied on advertising for its existence, especially the ones that aren't household names. I understand how annoying some ads can be but, in general, the concept of advertising is essential to all of us having jobs.

Doing work that ultimately neither makes anyone happier or healthier nor furthers progress in any other way is essential to all of us having (full-time) jobs. So you aren't wrong.

> the concept of advertising is essential to all of us having jobs

Citation needed.

You should check this thread out. https://www.reddit.com/r/valve/comments/8zmp07/former_valve_...

That all sounds terrible, but to some extent I wonder if those problems are driven by the "self-organizing company" aspect or if they are the result of it being in the gaming industry.

I think that every company in the gaming industry has the problem of not needing to treat their developers very well. There are so many CS students in college dreaming of building computer games that there are always a dozen people outside the door trying to get in. That gives the company a lot of leverage over its employees.

just make sure you lock the screen rotation before your demo then.

It also says a 5kt explosion would have "levelled" Minsk and Kiev. They are 200 and 60 miles away, so that's just made up.