Blender has been “white listed” to be taught at schools in the U.S. | Hacker News Reader

Blender has been “white listed” to be taught at schools in the U.S.

twitter.com

77 pointsTomte9 comments

Seems a bit misleading.

From the twitter thread it seems that US schools always have been allowed to teach Blender, it's just some firewall provider (that is not mandatory in US schools) now permits blender to be downloaded.

Not mandatory by law perhaps, but how much power did e.g. a single teacher that wanted to teach Blender have to go around this policy? If almost every school uses the same firewall, and only software with lobbyists behind it gets whitelisted, that can be just as effective at suppressing free software as banning the teaching of Blender by law.

Even more effective, actually. A law is out in the open, plainly stating its function, easy to point to and vote to change it. But this kind of amorphous, corrupt, entrenched bureaucracy is much harder to uproot, or even identify.

not American, but reading about this feels like yall came up with a system to feel good about doing bad things without admitting you were doing bad things. feels very living in denial-y

Basically, if a shareholder somewhere benefits, _it must be a good thing_. Multiply by market share to determine tie breakers.

thats just so many words for "greed is better". see, bad thing, dressed up as good thing.

Not nearly every school used this. Also - at least for my highschool- teachers had unrestricted intetnet, and could grant it to students. For my highschool journalism class, students in the class were granted unrestricted internet for me example. I don't think letting blender through would be too hard.

Are schools a federal responsibility in the US? I would have assumed this was a state responsibility.

The actual schools are run by the states, but as with other nominally state/local domains (e.g. roads) the federal government offers supplemental funding via various programs and can apply requirements/restrictions to that funding.

I'd love to learn more about blender, but 3D design is often a rabbit hole of obsession. There are mobile phone apps that do body scanning and video editing that is far more simple and easy to use than blender... Although the quality is nowhere near as comparable; the time savings. ease of adoption, and learning curve are immensely more favorable than taking years to learn a program with literally millions of options that will likely experience a major refactor again by the time you graduate. A focus on very "niched" skills can hurt an artist career-wise in the long run as the tech landscape evolves... The reason why blender is so niched is because of it's complexity.

This is not to say there isn't serious talent and skill involved, but take for example photography... Many people racked up student debt to go to photography school and they're now struggling underpaid to pay off those loans because camera phone pictures (and photo editing apps) are increasingly their biggest competition. A person cannot just rely on the ideal that quality will make them shine over the competition...

Camera phone photogs can churn out and upload their work much faster than traditional photographers, and even though the quality is lower, it floods the market to the point where quality is an after thought. The same is happening for film (Netflix) and the music Industry (TikTok)... And we really can't complain about it all... Simple, fast, and better just wins.

Design and development tool workflow needs to make leaps in being BOTH SIMPLER AND BETTER. The latest update of Blender moved towards that, but not fast enough in my opinion, and the workflow is still quite complicated in nature.

As an artist with bills to pay, one can't afford to sacrifice the time or money to gain an immersive education in blender right now, because they're likely far too busy working to make money within editing right now with more simple and faster tools... :/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com