jamalaramala

Oh my god, this is ugly as fuck.

It reminds me a study about the perception of beauty among students of arts.

Before they start their studies, their perception of beauty is similar to everyone's.

But as they go through their course, their perception starts to shift. What they see as "beautiful" doesn't match the perception of others.

They learn what "skeuomorphism" is, and suddenly everything must be flat and undifferentiated.

* Step 1: Ask for $100,000 to fund the start-up

* Step 2: Open source project

* Step 3: Find other streams of revenue (donations, grants, subscriptions, sponsorships)

Yes, $100K was a relatively small sum -- but the company that owned the rights was going bankrupt, and Blender was going to die.

For a lucrative game, a reasonable value would be 2 to 4 years of earnings.

For example: if the product makes $10K/month:

    $10k × 36 (a mid-range multiple) = $360,000

With this amount, the author would have at least 3 years of headway, with a much larger open source community.

Blender had moderate success when it was closed source, but not enough to pay its development, so it was going to die.

After its creator raised €100,000 to release it under the GPL, Blender became the leading open-source 3D tool it is today.

And they make enough money from recurring donations, service subscriptions, merchandise, conferences and trainings.

Looks like a really nice and polished project!

A note to the author -- if you ever considered going open source, you could use the same strategy used by Ton Roosendaal to open source Blender:

In July 2002, Ton launched a campaign called "Free Blender" to raise money (100,000 EUR) directly from the community. To everyone's surprise and delight the campaign reached the goal in only seven short weeks.

In October 2002, Blender was released under the GNU GPL. Roosendaal created the Blender Foundation to manage development, and the project kept growing from there. Today, Blender is one of the most popular 3D creation tools, used by professionals, hobbyists, and even studios.

Being free and open source allowed Blender to power countless creative projects, including the 2025 Oscar-winning film Flow.

This would've been much harder if the tool had stayed behind a paywall.

They were essential for branching with GOTO and GOSUB.

Example:

    10 PRINT "HELLO ";
    20 GOTO 10

This would create an infinite loop that you could break with Ctrl+C.

You could then type:

    15 PRINT "WORLD ";

And when you listed the source code (with the command LIST) you would see:

    10 PRINT "HELLO ";
    15 PRINT "WORLD ";
    20 GOTO 10

Chinese EV makers are very popular in Europe and Asia.

There was an interesting text, by Isaac Asimov, where he explained in a very clear way the historical importance of logarithms -- they allowed Kepler to finalize his work by replacing tables of multiplications (which were difficult and error-prone) with sums.

It probably depends on the benchmark you choose; according to Chatbot Arena, Deepseek-R1 ranks similarly to o1-2024-12-17; and Grok3 is just 3% above these models in "Arena Score" points.

> Even more concerning was Devin’s tendency to press forward with tasks that weren’t actually possible. (...)

> Devin spent over a day attempting various approaches and hallucinating features that didn’t exist.

One of the big problems of GenAI is its inability to know what they don't know.

Because of that, they don't ask clarifying questions.

Humans, in the same situation, would spend a lot of time learning before they could be truly productive.

Not all bugs are crashes. It could be a copy text or price calculation.