FormFollowsFunc

That’s a reasonable explanation. It would be so easy for them to show the offending application rather than the user closing all applications and it’s still locked and then having to restart Windows.

They are also breaking EU law by not including VAT in their prices for EU consumers. You only find out the final price when they try to charge your card.

The arrogance of tech companies is unbelievable. How dare ordinary people get in our way. We don’t care if we are causing a nuisance to residents - we’re a $100 billion company don’t you know.

By that stage the firm was a big user of Catia especially on the production side of things. They probably used Rhino at the design stage.

I was big into Gehry as an architectural student. His work was so different and exciting compared to other architects. He was the "father" of what was called the Santa Monica school. There was a good few architects in LA doing interesting stuff. I travelled from Europe to LA to try and work for him but never got past the reception. I prefer his earlier work in the 70s and 80s and less of a fan of his later work after Bilbao when he got more mainstream fame. I attended a talk of his at USC in the 90s and he was really funny, he was like a stand-up comedian.

I agree it’s very difficult to debug them. I sometimes rewrite my shaders in Vex and debug them in that. It’s a shader language that runs on the CPU in Houdini. You can output a value at each pixel which is useful for values outside the range of 0 to 1 or you can use printf(). I’m still looking for something that will transpile shaders into JavaScript.

You’re right, it’s not universal. It would be more about extending unemployment benefits beyond the current 6 months in the US until you qualify for a pension.

It’s kind of how it should be. Otherwise people not paying by credit card are subsidising people who do. It might encourage the card companies to lower their fees.

Am I wrong in thinking that Grasshopper is procedural modeling and not parametric modeling? Parametric modeing is used in software like Solid Works where you don’t have nodes but have parameters, a constraint system and construction history. Solid Works was developed in the 90s while Grasshopper came out in 2007. Another is example is Pro/Engineer from Parametric Technology Company (PTC) which came out in 1988. Patrik Schumacher, an architect coined the term parametricism in 2008. His employees created node graphs in Grasshopper while he just tweaked the parameters. I wonder if that’s why he came up with the term. Grasshopper has parameters but what makes it different from industrial design CAD is that you construct geometry with a series of nodes i.e. a procedure.

That may be true but the latest media to be hit by the internet is film and TV. YouTube and TikTok are eating their lunch and streaming isn't making up for it. The same happened to music with the rise of streaming but it occurred a little earlier. AI generally isn't the cause of their demise but I suppose the fear is that AI will just make things worse when it's more broadly adopted. The internet has mostly destroyed media jobs and the only people making money from it nowadays are the platform companies.

They have always treated their customers like crap and in the past it hasn’t hurt their sales. Though recently they have had to sell tickets lower than they would have liked to boost sales. They would like to give the impression that they are always the cheapest option but it’s not always the case and customers are too lazy to shop around. Other airlines have copied their tactics so the alternative isn’t always that much better.

Yes. It’s the end of zero interest rates after 23 years because the baby boomers are retiring and drawing down their savings and has caused a white collar recession. The world is de-globalising - trade wars between the US and China. Climate change is hitting us. Birth rates are declining in Europe and Asia which causes all sorts of problems.

Would implementing the utility first approach of Tailwind in Sass be better i.e. a Sass interpretation of their @apply directive? Packing a bunch of class names into HTML doesn't seem like a great developer experience.

I think it's related to the business culture in Ireland. Interacting with local businesses here, they don't seem to have any problems with ripping you off. Irish people don't complain enough. Also there's no enforcement of the law. Ryanair gets brought to account by the British CAA (civil aviation authority) now and again because of it's dodgy practices never by the Irish one. Government has told it's regulators to have a soft touch on businesses so that the country is attractive to foreign companies.

I wonder if imposter syndrome is due to the expanding work developers are expected to do while management and business types don’t get their hands dirty because they can use the excuse that they don’t know how to code.

According to another article the glass wall of the vial stops the radiation.

https://www.argonelectronics.com/blog/litvinenko-and-the-per...

One thing that VR gives you that a monitor doesn’t is 1:1 scale. It’s so easy to get that wrong when working on a scaled down version of the model. Though you can just place people in your scene for reference.

Or buy a white case. That’s what I did and it seemed to work, as a Sat Nav device at least. Not sure about recording video which will produce more heat.

Some companies provide free non-commercial versions for learning e.g. Houdini and Nuke. I wish more companies would do it.

They’re doing them on the GPU using Core Animation framework. The iPhone has used the GPU for smooth animations since the start while GPU usage on Android depends on whether the device has one.

Hopefully they have been working away on RealityKit. The current version seems to be far from complete.

In places like Ireland companies like Twitter have flouted the law for things like lack of consultation but the government probably won’t punish them because the tech companies are such a big employer there.

Could you not check against the country that the credit card is issued in?

I agree, using SDF for everything is probably not a good idea but it can be useful as a feature along with standard modeling tools. I sometimes use SDF volumes in Houdini to get that blended look. nTopology which is a specialised standalone 3D software use it for advanced 3D printing. You can do things like blend two different infill patterns.

But as a webapp, it is cool looking. I'm curious how he managed to get it to work in a browser.

TomTom started with mapping software for PDAs/smartphones. I remember using CityMaps on a PocketPC phone edition (with a separate GPS device) in the early 2000s. They only got into standalone devices in 2004 probably because they were more profitable than software alone. It's only when smartphones (with built-in GPS) went mainstream in ~2010 that standalone devices didn't make sense anymore.

You could get away without a car in London because the public transport is good. Outside of London it isn’t great, depends on where you are - you will probably need a car. London is not a great place for cycling. It’s very congested. I got knocked off my bike every year there. Maybe not as bad as the US but the UK is still a very car centric country.

It's growing in popularity in 3D software. Blender, Cinema 4D, Maya and Vectorworks have added nodes in the last few years. Houdini, SoftImage, Generative Components (Bentley) and Grasshopper were early adopters. nTopology and Modo take a stack approach to parametric modelling. It looks less complicated but you quickly run into their limitations.

Nodes were popular in compositing software in the 90s - Nuke, Flame, Shake.

Code is better when the programme gets bigger but they're less scary for non-programmers to get into.

Inflation in America has more to do with the COVID lock downs in China. Ukraine is having more of an effect on Europe which is highly dependent on gas from Russia.

Dynamo [1] has a similar feature set and is technically open source but it won't work without Autodesk's geometry engine and I presume it's mostly Autodesk engineers contributing to it. Useful if you want to do procedural modeling in Revit though Grasshopper also supports Revit.

Not open source but Nodepen [2] is kind of like Grasshopper but web based.

[1] https://dynamobim.org/ [2] https://nodepen.io

Mind maps tend to be hierarchical. I think a network diagram like what Scapple provides might be better for less structured thinking.