JakeAl

try .scn files from SoftImage XSI. Need a way to convert them to a format that can be used in Blender or Maya/FBX without losing any of the structure. Autodesk basically told the old users to bugger off leaving them with Gigs of files they can't use anymore.

You lost me when you started talking about seeking money and what sells an idea to VCs, not value creation. If your goal is the money and not the product, ypu've already lost.

This is misleading when you dig into the data. For starters every state and nation does not record deaths and causes of death consistently, so there's a lot of apples and oranges comparisons going on. Second, in the US depending on the state, any death within 90 days of giving birth is labeled as a pregnancy-related death. The person could be hit by a car, or die of a drug-overdose, and it would be still be identified as a pregnancy related death.

All private companies do that. Ever heard of Virgin? It's Branson's MO. Create a company with a high public profile that's private. Hype it up and sell it based on the value of it's perception. Watch it go out of business years later or be sold to someone else buying it for the name/market share to pad their own numbers for their own reports. At the very least it ends up being good for a a tax write off by the new owner. This is how business works.

This is awesome. Now do stock options and every other derivative.

I'll do you one better. The Market Makers are Vanguard, Blackrock and State Street which are majority shareholders of 80% of the SP500. They control the price using swarms of HFT bots, most likely running Blackrock's Aladdin algo which they license. The largest shareholder of Blackrock, is Vanguard.

Didn't help Jeep when Biden did it, either. Stellantis is going out of business.

US debt to GDP ratio is >120%. By IMF definition that's an economic death spiral. The death spiral becomes irreversible by 2028 because by then the interest on the loans for all that money we've been printing for decades to prop up the fake economy will only cover the interest, no longer the principal, which will continue to accrue interest, meaning it can never be paid down and the US will be insolvent (cease to exist) by 2042. That road we've been kicking the can down for decades -- this is the end of it. Social Security will be insolvent in a decade. Medicare -- don't ask. Historically about this time 1 or all of 3 things happen: 1) Global Depression/Massive Austerity 2) World War 3) A new monetary system and all the things that go with that, most notably a new world order and loss of civil liberties and rights in exchange for security, housing, food (indentured servitude). The economy is quantifiably worse than it has ever been. Money in the economy is contracting (disappearing) at the highest rate in history (look up the M2 Real.) It just takes a while for the trickle of trickle down economics to make it all the way back to the spout. All those jobs they keep revising down after the fact turned out to be government jobs, so the only thing growing is actually the government, and the only economic growth is coming from fiscal (government) spending that has been slowly making it's way into the economy after years. It's pretty nuts. We're literally borrowing money from China to send to Ukraine and Gaza. Those illegal immigrants--I mean "refugees" are costing each taxpayer over $9,000 a year. Kids are born today owing the government over $100,000. Their kids, right now it'll be $250,000. Dark Age onset type stuff we're witnessing if you've ever read a book about how the Dark Ages (Bronze age, Fall of the Roman Empire) happened. You know that "This is Fine" meme. Yeah, that. Even Apple's growth rate is the slowest it's been in 5 years. Wall Street and Big Tech have been hoarding money and are pouring it all into the AI revolution so the robots can take over and restore order when the Technological Singularity happens by 2028 thanks to the billionaires Accelerationism plans. Good times if you like dystopian sci-fi movies. Next 20 years are going be a real hoot. I've always wanted a battle van. And thank Elon we'll finally have one that can be solar powered. Eat your heart out Mad Max. See you in the wasteland, cowboys.

LOL, mass shootings. Mass shootings are largely crime-related shootings, so you may as well be talking about stopping crime, drug and alcohol use and looting. It can be done, but not without a totalitarian military surveillance state. In other words give up your freedom for alleged security and instead give the power to the State to get away with mass mass shootings, crime, drug and alcohol abuse and looting. Freedom means accepting the good with the bad, accepting out of wedlock births, uncivilized teens without healthy parenting, people who cant control their emotions. The alternative is literally Orwellian or Huxley-ian(?), which was the whole point of those books. The lesson is do better yourself for yourself, your family and your local community. Teach people to be better, don't coerce them to. The vaccines and Big Pharma have a problem -- they abused their power and now children get 8 vaccines stacked and as the former head of NIH herself said, there's links between vaccination and severe illness, autism being one. That doesn't mean all vaccines are bad, but there's a problem that needs to be addresses and it starts being open about clinical results, not stacking vaccines, testing a person's health between vaccines to make sure their immune system is ready to accept another, quantifying the risk on a case by case basis that justifies the vaccine and more. Big Pharma and vaccines are subsidized by the government, so they will look for any and every excuse to give one. They get paid to. Remove that incentive and make the entire process science not money based and see what other alternatives appear, such as recent research in the effect of bacteria on the health of the immune system, or essential vitamins and compounds such as zinc, Vitamin D, CBD, and ion transport facilitators like hydroxychloriquine. And that doesn't even address a healthy diet, or processed foods. There's loads of quantifiable research on all of this but it (including crime and mass shootings) has been propagandized/politicized. Follow the science and you'll find it keeps leading you to the money. It needs to stop. Use your heads and stop playing these glib 'let them die' tribal games. Civilization is only as vast as cooperation and distinction is the basis of rationality. Informed nuanced conversations are required. Save the rest for Reddit.

I go through this every time I have to ask for a refund and tell a business I just want a refund so we can part ways instead of filing complaints with the Better Business Bureau and with the FTC.

This. Salesforce, is a great example of this. I can't tell you the number of companies that exist just building a simple application that does the one thing customers bought these bloated app suites to do that they liked and became burdened with the developers ecosystem or constant enhancements they make just to justify their dev teams existence. Adobe and Microsoft are also notorious for this, as well as just about every cloud company.

The question to ask is why a traditional protein-based platform isn't being tested next to the mRNA-based platform.

Been dealing with this since my 40s. And good luck hiding it on your resume, most application forms these days require dates and even addresses. I am also discriminated against based on location. Some companies won't even interview you unless you are local, even for remote jobs, even if you're willing to relocate.

On this note, the invention of the printing press led to The Reformation with the first printing of the Bible, which up until that point had been duplicated by monks by hand, and The Word controlled and interpreted by the Church, who wielded their power like modern governments and institutions deciding what is or is not mis- or disinformation.

I would say instead it's a PEOPLE problem, not a technology problem.

To quote Neil Postman, politics are downstream from technology, because the technology (medium) controls the message. Just look at BigTech interfering with the messages by labeling them "disinfo." If one wants to say BUSINESS POLITICS, then that's probably more accurate, but we haven't solved the Google, MS, DuckDuckGo, Meta interfering with search results problem so I don't think we can trust BigTech to not exploit users even more for their personal data, or trust them not to design AI so it inherently abuses it's power for BigTech's own ends, and they hold all the cards and have been guiding things in the interest of technocracy.

I did some consulting and tried starting my own company but I don't have the resources (co-founders, money, programming skills) and the market is dramatically different today.

Funding until 2020 was chasing the next big thing, (VR/AR/XR, Crypto, Metaverse, NFT, now AI) and after 2020 the US has been in an economic death spiral due to our debt to GDP ratio so there's a lot of competition for a lot less money and more and more the products are just infrastructure as markets are contracting. Even my peers who still have their own companies are fighting over or collaborating on/for scraps tossed to them by the giants like Amazon, Google or Microsoft.

It's a much longer nuanced discussion but the summary is if I had the resources I could create and build something great but we are no longer in an economy where large investment takes large risks to create a better/revolutionary version of Facebook or Twitter or the digital advertising industry that doesn't rely on antiquated or exploitive business models (sunken costs). That's not to say there aren't opportunities and I don't have killer revolutionary ideas, there's just a lot of barriers to entry. No one can afford the risk these days. It's something I've struggled with since before even Facebook existed.

Technically I've been unemployed for 9 years. When I say I can't get a job to save my life, I mean that literally. Today I'm looking for a full time job as a manager of software product design and development or production in other industries and burning through my retirement savings.

I do some software design and development on the side to try and keep up with all the changing tech but nothing I can invest a lot of time in if it's not going to earn me a living wage. I taught myself technical analysis and watch a stock chart all day between sending out resumes and teach people online what I know about reading stock charts and how the markets actually work to try and keep people from losing money unnecessarily. It makes me feel useful and keeps me a active as a coach and mentor.

I'm still a fan of the show. It was innovative and we wouldn't have Vince Gilligan and Breaking Bad let alone mythologies and serials the way we do now if it wasn't for The X-Files.

I created an online fan forum for The X-Files back in 1993 on the Delphi vax-based network as the web was starting to emerge. I created ASCII art of logos and stuff since it was a text-based menu-driven system. Newscorp bought the company and their marketing managers started asking me to create ASCII art for them. It turned out my fan forum was the biggest on the service with 25,000 members (that was a lot back then.) This got the attention of executives who wanted to use this new digital medium to market their properties not just for FOX Broadcasting but TV Guide, Harper Collins, FOX Film, FX Cable Network, etc. They decided to create a web-based online service to do it and hired me away from my job as a lab researcher working on gene therapy and moved me to Los Angeles to create and run the official X-Files web site. They liked me because I knew the tech and what fans wanted. I basically invented what was then the TV/film marketing web site. All I really did was assess what marketing resources were available and figure out a way to put them online. I was literally the first person to put TV show trailers online Not film trailers, just TV. No one thought anyone cared enough about T shows to download a 1.4MB 320x240 TV spot over 14400bps. Crazy times. I spent $1000 on the video capture card to digitize tv spots on VHS tapes they sent me. This was when the Pentium 90 had just come out. They never followed through creating the web-based online service for Newscorp, but since I had created a web site and online community with millions of users I ended up managing all of the web sites for the television network (and coded most of them) and even worked on sites like FOX Sports when it first came out and became the goto guy on the FOX lot when it came to online content and understanding what the fans wanted out of web sites. I moved on to create and work on ecommerce sites during the dot com boom, later worked on the original Star Wars Battlefront 1 and 2 and created the mod tools (the classic/good ones), worked for Sony Pictures Imageworks Interactive ultimately Sony PlayStation where I managed the production on all of the PS1 Classics available for digital download as well as some less notable stuff. That was my last full time job. Today I can't get a fulltime or even freelance job to save my life, despite nearly three decades of experience managing technology initiatives and software production that generated tens of millions in revenue. Entertainment is a different beast, you age out if you aren't an executive, and other industries don't seem to care about transferrable skills unless you're an individual contributor (programmer).

Just a reminder they tried the same political hit on Elon at this exact time last year. This is pure party politics. They see him as a threat to their power.

https://jonathanturley.org/2022/11/17/clinton-linked-dark-mo...

Right there with you. In the process of extracting myself from all things MS. Even when they do something right they have to keep changing it until it's crap.

I'm okay with you calling it a dumb take. Try "unsophisticated" to pacify the sensitive, or "mentally underdeveloped," if it gets you grief.

"To be replaced soon by the monster they created."

Niiice.

Because someone is being paid, and someone is being given power/control that gets them paid.

They don't care about safety they care about lock in to their ecosystem. I'm not into ANY of these ecosystems. I don't want MSFT installing Edge ever, or OneDrive, or having Phone sync software on my PC that links my contacts to Office/Outlook Online, or have Bing web search forced into my search bar or Google for that matter, ALL to track you and push ads on you from the people they get their money from.

And don't even get me started on cars tracking everything you do. In many cases you don't have a choice. I want a smartphone that doesn't lock me into all these ecosystems. I want a car that lets me turn off all tracking, bluetooth sensors to monitor my tire pressure, etc.

The reality is people are stupid. They couldn't manage using a computer safely so the industry gave them a phone and sold them on safety. The fact that something like 80% of people are getting their news on a phone and not a computer should tell people they are trapped in a bubble that controls what they see, know and think. What good is having a choice if you don't know you have a choice? They simply want consumers.

and NFT JPEGs. I agree, there's a lot of things people spend their money on, the collectibles industry for example is known for this. Luxury goods appeal to people projecting status because of brand names. Your question is valid, why do we only care about this specific form? In this instance I think it's because it's about designing apps to be addictive, although I don't really agree with that being the case here. There's online or even digital slot machines that are not designed to be addictive, they are just virtual slot machines. Then there's trading crypto, options and stocks, industries whose marketing and pump schemes are all about projecting an image and manipulating emotions to convince people to buy into what are often scams if not an inversion narrative (which is where you buy into a system rigged against you by some kind of monopoly that when you look at the mechanics functions exactly the way a Ponzi scheme does). I also don't think you are deflecting.

Here's what I do, I use Brave for YouTube and another browser for everything else. Brave apparently bocks the ads and they don't get to spy on me anywhere else but their own site.

Remember APE. The right medium is always the most

Accessible Powerful cost Effective

relative to your audience and available resources.

I'm getting sick of a right-click "copy" pop up appearing as I try to scroll pages these infinite scroll pages on my touchscreen, too.

US debt to GDP ratio is greater than 120%. The IMF defines that as an economic death spiral. By 2028 the loan payments we make on all that debt/money we printed will only cover the interest, no longer the principal, and the death spiral becomes irreversible with US insolvency by 2042. Historically, we are at the point where there's a depression, war, and/or a new monetary system. That's how they reset and seize more power. We need not only a balanced budget amendment, but massive spending/entitlement cuts and austerity, as well as boost in GDP/exports because we can't service our own debt and have relied on other nations to buy our bonds. They are selling our bonds and not buying these days. Markets WERE looking at a lost decade, but the past week or so have been looking at 30 year treasuries, so 30 years.

They've been playing games with the numbers but it's true, we're looking at a depression not a recession as it's going to last much longer. US debt t GDP ratio > 120% which by IMF definition means the US is in an economic death spiral. By 2028 the payments we make on all that money they printed (at our expense) will only go to the interest and no longer the principal. After that the death spiral becomes irreversible with US insolvency by 2042. Historically, inside the next ten years is when we have a depression/massive austerity for everyone, war, and/or a new monetary system. Which if you ask me is more stupid and irresponsible than a balanced budget amendment and single line item spending bills. Social Security will be insolvent in 10 years, too, and I've also heard the medicare liabilities ae being hidden because they paint an even darker picture about how far gone things are.

We've known this for a while BTW, I first learned about the timeline in 2014 watching the budget committee hearing on CSPAN. They showed the slide with the timeline yet no one talked about it. Austerity back then was scheduled to start by 2020 but we got stimulus, like they were steering into driving off the cliff.

This guy wrote and updated his book on the topic. https://www.amazon.com/COMING-COLLAPSE-AMERICA-BALANCE-FEDER...