Although I think Steve Jobs was a real piece of shit, his product instincts were often on point, and his message in this video really stuck with me. I think companies shoehorning AI in everything would do well to start with something useful they want to enable and work backwards to the technology as he described here:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=48j493tfO-o
I love me some self-hosted ML models, such as Fooocus.
I love Blender and am glad to see a popular feature film made with it, although I can’t say I’m a fan of the visuals or the movie in general.
It’s a jack of all trades for sure, but it also has features paid software doesn’t, like it’s 2d animation system with Grease Pencil. There are also paid extensions on BlenderMarket and the like that make it more competitive with more specialized features in other software. Extensions are GPL licensed, so I’m happy to pay for them as opposed to the rest of the toxic CG ecosystem where everything is subscription-only.
Edit:
I wish all paid software were GPL. It’s nice buying something and being able to look at and change the code, write code that calls their code, or even snag a bit of it for to use in your own thing.
I don’t see a problem with thumbnails that accurately portray the contents of the video, since only a small number of characters can fit in the title and a screenshot of one frame from the video doesn’t say much, so it can be difficult to get a sense for the video at a glance otherwise. I do get really annoyed with thumbnails that are deceptive in any way. If the thumbnail seems like it might be deceptive, I’ll usually read the comments before watching the video, or quickly scroll through it to see if it’s BS or not. Sometimes, the thumbnail advertises something that happens at the end of a 20 minute video that could’ve been 30s, in which case, I’ll scroll usually through to the end instead of watching the whole thing. If it weren’t for the thumbnail, though, I might not have watched it all.