If you’re just looking to get started with 3d modeling, it’s hard to beat Blender. At the cost of free, it’s by far the most affordable way to dip your toes in some modeling tools.

For many workflows it’s world class. If you plan to do more organic forms or don’t need technical precision, then it’s very competitive or preferable to paid software.

You might find it lacking if you plan to do parametric or technical CAD-style modeling. Even then, I think Blender can be a low cost way to learn what you want in your software before investing in more specialized software. You’ll learn enough of the modeling basics to more fluently navigate what other software provides.

To some people, yes. To others, no. You’re replying to specific people who seem to be against the idea, and I’m guessing for them it detracts significantly from the experience.

At the end of the day all of the concepts we have in fantasy are derivative in some regard, so the line will vary just like it will vary for people that want to do total homebrew vs following a book.

My group dabbled with AI when it was at its peak buzz, and if I’m honest, my head cannon sort of ignores those bits. They don’t carry the same authenticity that I came to expect from my group. It detracts from my experience because I play ttrpgs primarily to learn about my friends and how they’ve interpreted a shared world, not to hear algorithmically mid fanfic. I’m also not crazy about following a book. With a book, at least I know someone willfully released the work into the world and is getting appropriately compensated.

These are not the same. Here are some of the ways someone may be fine with reusing existing material while being against AI:

• Someone may value thoughtful and coherent world building, while feeling like the AI generated amalgamation dilutes the cohesiveness of the material.
• Someone can be for public sharing of ideas, while simultaneously against AI companies disregarding licenses attached to those ideas to build AI products.
• Someone can value the personality and individual perspective that a content author or DM injects into material and feel that AI-generated material lacks this character.

Don’t reduce the use of AI down to the reuse of material. It also averages out material into some sort of lowest common denominator - sacrificing exactly the things that many niche fandoms value: personality and imagination.

Oh! Awesome experiment! Yes, they’re shorter because of perspective (foreshortening). With a mirror surface it’s better to think of a duplicate of the object flipped across the mirror plane, then you can apply the same tricks to draw in perspective, which may make it look shorter.

In your example here, since we’re viewing from the side the perspective is not going to factor in as much, so we land at “roughly the same size”

If it helps, think of the water first like a perfect mirror. If it’s a perfectly flat mirror then it would look like there’s another duck upside down below this duck. If you want to be extra precise, it’s mirrored across the plane where the duck meets the water.

But water isn’t usually perfectly flat mirror, and here you have little nods to there being ripples or waves. The choppier the wave, the less it reflects, so you’ll often see people break up the mirrored reflection at the choppiest parts of the wave. Similarly, waves aren’t flat, depending on the part of the wave/ripple you’re at, you’d be reflecting higher or lower as though the mirror is tilted to the angle of the surface.

The last tricky part is that most surfaces are more reflective at a glancing angle than head on, so often reflections are stronger further in the distance and closer up you’ll just be looking down into the water. On a more technical note, you can look up the index of refraction to learn more about this phenomenon.

To tie it all together, this is why those long shots of sunsets have a sun reflection that is really long (much longer than the size of the sun in the distance) - because it’s at a distance it’s a strong reflection and because all the waves are reflecting at different angles you’re getting all the glancing reflections of the sun on the top of each wave. It typically being dark at sunset also means the bright sun reflection blooms to make it look brighter and larger than just the tip of the wave.

Conversely, in water sports like wakeboarding, you might not see much of a reflection at all because all the water is choppy and non-reflective.

Looking down into a pond, you might not see a reflection either because the angle is too steep to reflect.

In short, yes, in this case the reflection should probably be roughly the same size.

Permissive licenses permit a broader range of use compared to “copyleft” licenses.

“copyleft” here just being a cute way of being the opposite of copyright - instead of disallowing others from what they can do with “copyrighted” code, “copyleft” requires that they (upon request) share modifications to your code.

Permissive takes away this requirement to share your modifications. “copyleft” is considered more free and open source (FOSS), permissive is more business friendly.

If everything was equal (scale of production, subsidies, decades of shipping logistics worked out) I’d agree, but I don’t think vegan cheese is anywhere near that.

A good start would be to remove subsidies for livestock and their feedstocks. I think that would already bring the cost of vegan alternatives a lot closer.

I’d bet that they symlinked /ubuntu to the server’s home root - probably for continuity with some previous file structure. It sure looks silly, but I’m sure the reasons for doing it were pretty reasonable.

For those that look at this and still think the solution might just be more money, first recognize that Google donates only to keep Firefox as a viable competitor to avoid anti-trust legislation.

If we raised half a million dollars, we haven’t saved anyone any money except Google - they’d simply donate only 100k next year so Firefox remains competitive, but not successful.

I don’t disagree with the sentiment of the post, but we also have to realize that we’d only be improving things after the first ~600k.

I don’t know anything about being an electrician - commercial or otherwise, so I’m curious to hear your side.

When all those people go to working remote, it’s not like they’re no longer in need of electricity. Presumably their home demand is higher and we might even see people adding new office spaces to adapt their home. Maybe the public grid needs to change to support it? Won’t this mean that there will just be a different type of demand for electricians?

Are there reasons this would be less attractive to electricians? Pay, job security, or something else?

For anyone who’s curious, this is the state of discussing this feature: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/8572

I’m not an authority on the helix ethos, but I’ve contributed a bit and hung around long enough to have a good read on their stance on most topics. The project is still young and managing the growing pains of getting a lot of traction relatively early. I think the devs value keeping the maintenance footprint small to keep the project sustainable.

The philosophy of helix’s design is to be a more convenient kakoune, not necessarily a vim. vim is much more widely known, so that analogy springs up more often, but this idea of using piping out to an external command for most operations comes from kakoune.

For features that would introduce significant maintenance overhead, may jeopardize the performance of a more common workflow or where the design goals are still maturing, the team tends to push such suggestions toward being developed as plugins when that system is added. I get the impression that they see the value of this workflow, but would prefer to see it battle tested as a plugin first.

I’ve been there, but over the years I’ve gotten better at avoiding being in this situation.

If you are implementing something for yourself, and merging it back upstream is just a bonus, then by all means jump straight to implementing.

However, it’s emotionally draining to implement something and arrive at something you’re proud of only to have it ignored. So do that legwork upfront. File a feature request, open a discussion, join their dev chat - whatever it is, make sure what you want to do is valued and will be welcomed into the project before you start on it. They might even nudge you in a direction that you hadn’t considered before you started.

Be a responsible dev and communicate before you do the work.