watermelongunn

Professional motion designer here (15 years): Blender is awesome and I highly applaud their team (and have donated to the org!), but it is absolutely not a replacement for After Effects. The ecosystem around AE (plugins/tutorials/templates) is way too large and useful to disregard.

And don't get me wrong, After Effects has serious issues and I often long for an alternative.

I get why hobbyists don't like subscription models, but the cost of Creative Cloud is pretty negligible for a professional using it daily to feed his family.

Use Spotify for discovery and convenience; purchase vinyl and go to shows to support the artists.

It stirs great jealousy in me as well... but as they say, are we not all standing on the shoulders of giants? And if the new [whatever] is an improvement, does it matter if it came from a rich kid? Sorry, I'm not actually directing these questions at you, but rather myself as I try not to feel any resentment toward people who were born better off than me.

Yeah, I wish the Hue switches worked better, they must have trouble waking up from sleep or something. For my office, I never even touch my physical switch or app; instead, a motion sensor turns the lights on when I enter and then off when there's no motion for 10 minutes. It's been working great for years now with the only annoyance being the need to occasionally change the battery on the sensor. That won't work in the living room where I like different lighting for different situations or times of the day, but that's where Homekit scenes come in handy (obligatory smart-home-enthusiast note: Home Assistant controls my house, but Homekit works great as a quickly accessible UI).

Ultimately, I just don't get the fervent anti-smart-home sentiment. Sure, there are all kinds of silly products out there, and no, I don't use the app for my grill, but... oh well, I guess?

Playing with home automation has been a net gain for me. It's part hobby / part genuine improvements. Yeah, there are annoyances, but problem solving is often fun. YMMV...

Ha, I also don't always think to turn off lights when I leave a room, so I'm not going to be militant about my kids doing it if I can't. Do you seriously object to me solving this problem with tech? Do you even have kids??

I've been using the same Hue lightbulbs for at least 8 years now and never had any of the issues you describe. When you have a home with children and a fair number of rooms, you'll find that turning off the lights at night is not just a simple matter of "getting off the couch and flicking a switch." Also, I've rarely encountered smart lighting that didn't have a physical switch as a fallback option (for example, my Lutron Caseta switches have buttons on them that will work just fine if the network goes down, and my Hue bulbs are all connected to dumb switches), so the idea it doesn't work "100% of the time" is a strawman argument.

AIs don't incarcerate people. People incarcerate people.

This is why the Fakespot extension is so great – that page is littered with "F" grades, and I would have never considered purchasing any of it.

I'll give you that health insurance is more expensive as a contractor (though not enough to significantly cut into $750k), but if your taxes are also higher then you really need to talk to a good CPA. If you are doing it right, paying less in taxes is one of the BENEFITS of being self-employed.

While I agree that kids could stand to get out more, I think everyone here is painting an absurdly rosy picture of the past. I'd like to know what percentage of kids used to spend their time doing hard labor or if their latchkey existence left them feeling so uncared about that they turned into nihilist assholes. Don't get me wrong – in a perfect world, kids would play outside 8 hours a day, but I have a hard time getting past the selection bias presented in the video.