If you're working on a small game project without an existing framework/platform, you usually build a really bargain-basement game editor alongside it. That editor takes a long time, and it's often spent in arranging UI stuff.
If you're already using Blender to make assets, there's some benefit to stuffing Blender's UI into your game editor too.
Do imgui/egui have comparable numbers of interface objects and parameters to adjust their look and behavior? I certainly wouldn't suggest either as an alternative to QT-level interfaces—which seems to be what's offered here.
Blender had a very different ui before and a big redesign, so most people have different opinions between the old and the new design. It sounds like you find all of them awful. I find that surprising and wonder what 3d program you find have good ui.
I have used every version of blender and it has always felt harder than it should.
I have used 3Ds max, maya, lightwave, cinema4D, milkshape, wings, Houdini, unreal engine 1 - 5, Hammer, Threejs editor and probably more. The Blender UI is worse than all of the above.
At the time of blender's old ui 3Ds max had menus nested 5-6 level deep in an ui that would make gimp very good design. Between that 3Ds max praise, conflating old blender ui and new blender ui, and not providing any specifics on what makes blender so bad (I just provided some about 3D max) I have to assume there is no truth to it. We will agree to disagree. I think blender ui is excellent, but a 3d editor is a specialised app.
The question was which one do you think has a good UI... I'd be keen to know your opinion on this as well, what you think the current high water mark is in 3D design software UI is, or do you think they all suck, but Blender just sucks the most?
I learned on blender and now all the other editors are ruined for me. I wonder why they haven't added a blender mode at this point for people who want more expressive use.
With 3Ds Max listed as good UI we really must just have different tastes, hah! :D
You've given quite a list of tools with different purpose.
For 3D work I would personally rate
Modo 3D, Zbrush > Blender, Houdini > Softimage XSI > Maya > space intentionally left empty :P > 3Ds max
Blender UI looks very nice and is very customizable. I think it's "ok" in beginner discoverability (none of 3D softs is great at that really) but when you get experienced with it it's one of the best.
I really like how they managed to keep all the tools and views pretty consistent given how many things you can do in it. Whether you are working on objects, vertices, nodes, movie clips you get the same shortcuts where possible.
I'm not a professional designer or 3D modeler but I've used Blender quite a bit. I know what you mean but the latest UI post redesign isn't bad.
Blender does a LOT of stuff. Its not an easy product to create an UI for. But I think the problem is much bigger when coming from a different 3D package than when learning from scratch.
My teenage kids use Blender as the first 3D package they've ever learned. I was impressed with how quickly they ramped up through videos and learning from each other.
> I think a lot of the new blender generation has baby duck syndrome.
Maybe some of them do, but even though I disliked the UI at first, I've come to appreciate it as I've learned it. It's simply different from most other software, so that obviously causes friction. However, I think once you learn it, it's quite a good system. There's a tradeoff between optimizing for familiarity/new users, and providing an optimized experience for advanced users.
I agree, I don't think blender has changed as much as people say. But I don't think it is baby duck, I think blender always had a good UI, it has just taken the rest of the world 20 years to catch up.
A lot of people go "Blender UI was horrible, but they redesigned the whole thing and now it is good" Having used blender in a minor role for 20 years(i think I started on 1.7), I think this was just a big psyop by the blender team. Sort of how the client goes "Change things" and you change nothing, wait a day, and tell the client "I made the changes you requested" client: "I love it"
I am not saying the blender team has not made substantial improvements to the UI over the years, but the core is still that same quick blender workflow, This is very different from the normal clunky GUI design of 3d modelers of the era and as such blender got a reputation for having a weird UI which was easily translated to blender having a bad UI. So what do you do when you have an unwarranted bad reputation? Especially now that the rest of the world has caught up and is using your flows and they are not so weird anymore. Make a dark mode and put out a big press release "we redesigned everything, it's good now" so people will try it.
> Baby duck syndrome is a cognitive bias where people automatically prefer the first system, interface, or product they learn to use, judging all later versions or alternatives by how well they match that initial experience.
That's actually extremely common in scientific (GUI) software. And in any professional setting I guess.
> That's actually extremely common in scientific (GUI) software. And in any professional setting I guess.
I don't think that qualifies. There's an important distinction to be made between an aesthetic preference versus a professional not appreciating a tool being mucked with. Anything that interferes with my workflow without immediately providing substantial benefit is something that's actively harmful. In fact even if it does hypothetically provide huge benefits I still might not want to deal with it right this second.
So if it's for an employer it's rational but if you're making the same choice for yourself it isn't? If one of those is baby duck syndrome they all are.
I think they're noting how the nature of baby duck syndrome might depend on whether the change introduced is within something that is for work or for play.
As in, that people who refuse change in their play activity are in some way different (less rational? more "syndromatic"?) than those who refuse change in their breadwinning activity.
I see the distinction, but am not sure I agree. It's just a neurotype spectrum of the same phenomenon. Baby duck is baby duck
Not quite. The distinction is between avoiding an articulable and concrete negative impact versus mere aesthetic considerations. For example, this pan is more difficult to use because it is somewhat undersized for what I'm trying to cook versus I don't like this pan because it's the wrong color or has the wrong accents or whatever. I understand baby duck syndrome to refer to the latter - ie having an unsubstantiated bias towards aspects of the thing first encountered.
I'd only point out that undersize and oversize aren't purely objective concerns, but are also aesthetics compared to what you're used to.
I wouldn't be arguing about this except that I can't trust my clock app on my phone because some bozo keeps redesigning it to work a different way every 6 months
And I think that's an excellent example. I don't think dislike of sudden and unexpected changes to your clock app would qualify as an instance of baby duck syndrome precisely because it has a material impact on your usage of it.
In contrast, if you prefer phones with blue bodies for no particular reason and your first phone happened to be blue then it's at least possible that's an example (or maybe you just really like that color, I dunno).
>If you're working on a small game project without an existing framework/platform, you usually build a really bargain-basement game editor alongside it. That editor takes a long time, and it's often spent in arranging UI stuff.
Not in an age of AI.
I mean if you want to code all this stuff by hand, I get it. But that's a choice. And since it's a choice that means shoehorning a Blender UI into a "bargain-basement game editor" (and having a "bargain basement game editor) isnt really needed. You absolutely don't need to spend a lot of time arranging UI stuff.
Game tooling is pretty trivial now and it's not user-facing. Again, I fully understand why someone would want to do this themselves still but let's not pretend thats not a choice at this point.
Depending on what you and the other poster mean by "arranging UI stuff", AI could either solve the problem for you or create larger problems, especially if you're not opinionated on either technical or UI matters.
Just curious: if this is really the case, why are you even spending time commenting on and thinking about one particular UI framework or not? As a dummy still writing code and making games by hand, I know why it interests me, but isn't this like an archaic topic for you? What is there to actually gain or learn from one library or another? Can't you just think about high level concepts and pure ideas now? Spend money to do the rest?
I think it’s just about as weird as questioning somebody’s motives on an Internet comment thread. I certainly share GP’s opinion about game tooling, but i’m here because i still care about making good software and that involves learning about and navigating technological developments as they happen. Is that sufficient reason for you?
Edit: the snark I’m responding to has been edited out
But in this case, isn't the precise conceit that dev tools themselves don't need to be "user facing"? Why do you need to follow UI development for dev tool type things if you don't actually ever need to use the tools anymore? Why would you even spend the money getting the AI to add the slider it's never going to use?
You are reading them wrong. I think they mean “customer facing” instead of user facing i.e. the player doesnt care if the level editor has some jank: they never see it.
For the types of tools that your coworkers are paid to use, vibing a first draft and developing from there is so much more time and money efficient than writing by hand that you would be dumb to spend your tooling budget differently.
Thats how i read it. Someone still needs to use tools, no one is saying that claude is going to one shot mass effect 4 yet.
Why not? For similar applications it would be really beneficial to not have to reimplement all the little UI interactions they've polished over the years
This is just repeating a common meme. Blender's UI layout and organisation is fine, but this is a UI library. There's nothing wrong with blender's UI technically, in fact its pretty decent overall
I absolutely detest it (TBF I haven't used it for the past ~2 years) but I also recognize that it's an incredibly difficult problem space that lacks an obviously good solution, the tool itself is inherently and irreducibly complex, it's a free project with extremely limited resources, it's been consistently improving over time, etc, etc.
Everybody hates all serious 3d application interfaces… they’re just complicated. I’m professionally competent in Houdini, Maya, Max, Blender, Zbrush, Marvelous Designer, the UE editor… they all suck in various ways but it’s all a giant set of trade-offs and priorities. Beyond that, lots of these programs have lineages that go back decades longer than almost any modern dev environment and being so complex, UI changes can be quite disruptive. Kind of like why so many *nix cli tools are the same as they were decades ago. A lot of (no, not all) developers think they have the most complex tooling in the computer world — they definitely don’t.
I'm using it as a video editor for Linux, and I'm constantly surprised how rock solid and fast it is. DaVinci wouldn't even run on my PC without a GPU, but Blender can run on anything I throw at it. And aside from those two, the video editing situation on Linux is a wasteland. I'm so glad Blender added VSE, and that I found it and learned it.
There's a lot of thought in Blender's UI, and a lot of improvements over the years.
Fundamentally all 3d modelers have inherent degree of complexity. The ones that give a "simple" facade with fewer options make other things harder or having to look into obscure places.
All of that are beside the point however: people will use this as a GUI library, not as a Blender's UX design.
This was true 20 years ago but has not been true for a decade. Blender evolved from among the worst UI/UX on the planet to among the best. It's now fast, intuitive, decently hierarchical and well-organized, leans into search and pie menus, in general it's very polished and in some ways ahead of the curve.
No? I think there would easily be other use cases where Blenders UI would be very suitable, e.g. Audio software.
It is not a UI paradigm that you would use for just anything, but for certain poweruser software it is one of the best paradigms I have seen, especially since they managed to get rid of 90% of the rough corners in the past decade of development.
Despite rumours to the contrary not everything is best interacted with via an LLM. If you want to go to that degree then have at it, all you need is an old school TTY on a serial cable, but the rest of us quite like having UIs designed to fulfil a purpose rather than a soup of Claudeish prose describing a progress bar.
Code can be art, code can also be simply a tool to reach a goal.
If you want to create art, do it with your own two hands and your brain.
If you want to just Do The Thing, codegen it. No one cares. In before "Except your users having to use your vibeslop" FYI your Hand-Crafted Artisanal Code will still have bugs, so it's a moot point.
Heck, the very first thing the author does is links to another one of his own blog post where the above points are explicitly stated and explained, then restates at the end of the paragraph that there are no valid arguments for this one. So why keep beating this dead horse? Especially as the opener of the article.
Art was always recognizable as effort and discipline.
We talk a lot about the consumer side of this. Consumers will get tired of the creative output of AI. That it lacks soul. I agree.
But there is also the artist’s side. A craft that you dedicate decades to that’s now indistinguishable from someone who typed a couple sentences. This is a demoralizing place to be.
agree.
1) business does not care. Users do not care. they see the result.
2) you can still reason with AI about best practices and nth level of abstraction for an interface that will never be extended more than once.
do what you will. CNCs did not remove need for artisans.
> as cnc grew, machinists shrunk in headcount and wage.
Headcount, yes, wages, no.
However, you're assuming that cnc operators can't be artisans. Why?
If we allow anyone with a craft to be considered an artisans if they have a high enough skill level - and we should - I'd counter that the overall number of artisans has likely increased even if less of them now have the title of machinist.
> business does not care. Users do not care. they see the result.
Sure, but with LLMs you get a bad result with more bugs and greater fragility. People will care about that even if they don't care per se about the craft.
I agree with your thinking as well. Then, could you possibly critique my thoughts too? It seems like you and I think similarly, and I’m curious whether my logic is consistent.
I skimmed through your article, and I'll address the bolded points
> being able to understand code by reading it is different from being able to do that same modeling yourself starting from a blank screen
That is simply Domain Knowledge. In a specific context, be it a Framework or an App or a Platform or Infrastructure or whatever else, you have to understand it. Of course, if you start from zero and you build it from scratch yourself, you have pretty much the best DK you can have.
That is usually not the case though. If you have external collaborators of any kind, your DK is always challenged. I find myself often dumped into Domains from which I have to gather Knowledge to understand. And, for me personally, having to read code written by an AI, especially now that they've gotten smart enough to not make glaringly stupid errors, is MUCH better than having to read Hand Crafted Code that has been handslopped (yes, I'm going to coin that term now) to meet Deadlines. Shortcuts, hacks, you name it. Terrible codebase sins, accumulated as years, even DECADES of "we'll fix it later".
Of course it's a pain. It always has been. Back in the GPT 4 / Claude 4 days, AI generated code was atrocious, but that is not the case anymore.
The rest of the article, especially these bolded points:
> The weight shifts from the ability to produce directly to the ability to evaluate output and set direction.
> So in the AI era, productivity is increasingly limited by the speed of judgment rather than the speed of writing.
> A manager who steps away from the front line may, over time, lose the ability to perform the work they are managing.
> does being able to evaluate code mean the same thing as owning the mental model of that program?
Are SPOT ON. You can vibeslop anything at the speed of light. But if you don't have the knowledge, taste, and expertise to not lose track of your DK so that it doesn't become an unmanageable mess, it's going to bite you in the proverbial ass.
But, again, that has always been true!
How is the code that was vibeslopped by ChatGPT in 1 minute different from the Junior Dev who spent a week handslopping a new type of wheel? The only difference is quality and speed.
And you need expertise to be able to recognize when something is wrong, and keep your DK updated at scale.
I felt a sense of kinship because your thoughts are so similar to mine. These days on HN, people say AI coding is so bad, but it has its advantages too. If you look at just the code blocks, it really writes better than most people (of course, global consistency is weaker). Hearing your story, I was surprised that what drew me to your comment was how similar our thinking is.
I also think ‘domain knowledge’ is incredibly important. Whether you write code or not matters, and coding as a hobby is good, but now every company forces you to write code with AI, so you can’t avoid using it, and I find myself thinking about how to maintain my own instincts.
I feel good seeing thoughts similar to mine. I upvoted you, and have a great day.
There have certainly been growing pains, and the term "vibecoding" was forged in a long gone era (almost two years ago!!!!) where AI generated code was actually bad.
I can safely say, especially with how close to actual perfection Claude Opus 5.5 is, that it's no longer the case.
Also people generally hate change. The ethical concerns around AI are also understandable and I agree with the vast majority of them, but the vast majority of the "AI BAD" crowd are simply irrationally angry at it and completely unwilling to engage with it in any kind of good faith.
They'll come around. I'm starting to see some change in the gaming community, which was 200% against any form of AI just a little while ago, and now that they're using it to reverse engineer, decompile, mod and mesh together old games there is a lot of people starting to say "Yeah AI is bad, but...".
There is some CRAZY stuff being being worked on which are objectively good for society as a whole which would have you sound insane just last year, and it's only going to get crazier with each new model.
> There have certainly been growing pains, and the term "vibecoding" was forged in a long gone era (almost two years ago!!!!) where AI generated code was actually bad.
That era is also today. And AI bros were lying to us two years ago, telling us how good the AI was at programming then. "But AI is actually good now" is a take with zero credibility any more, because it's been delivered inaccurately so much.
I don't even think code can be art. It can be used to produce art, but it's not art itself. And the production of code can be, at most, a craft, which the output is not really art, like painting/a painting.
Hard disagree. The demoscene is entirely comprised of code that produces art, with insane tricks which are themselves art. Which sort of blurs the entire concept, as you can stretch this reasoning to kind of encompass anything, as per the pen and paper example you provided.
For example, is .kkrieger demo? Is it art? Is the game itself art or just the textures, 3d models and locations and enemies and everything else that it produces? Though only the code generates everything, like in demoscenes, so is the code art?
seems as the question is, if one considers the process of creating an artwork art itself. i guess people finding ingenious ways to create art with code can be considered some form of performance art. it still feels a bit far-fetched to me, but that's just a personal feeling, and as you've said, it's subjective anyways. interesting to think about.
i'd immediately agree for code which looks like art by looking at it, so in cases where the code really is the art. i can also imagine that there's code which looks like art and "generates" it as well, so that seems like code as an artwork.
for cases where code was written/engineered well to create an artwork with the least amount of lines, i'd consider the generated artwork to be art, and the code the result of a competitive coding challenge. again, subjective.
when comparing it to other forms of art i'm not that sure. i've mentioned performance art, which feels a bit like the exception breaking the rule. there's conceptual art as well. is the act of painting art itself? is a photographer finding the optimal place to stand to take a picture art? almost starts to sound like an artwork vs. artform discussion.
The thing about .kkreiger is that most of the size savings they got at the last minute were from extremely aggressive "dead code" elimination [1]. So, uhh, is the art really the code that was gutted by tools? Or is the art everything around the artifact?
Long since. I witnessed it myself back in my high school days, as fellow classmates routinely behaved in revolting ways towards teachers. Outright emotional abuse, sometimes even physical, often for no other reason than simple boredom.
Even back then, teachers never had a way to fight back, lest they suffer legal consequences for the slightest of retorts. Just one of my many examples: snapping back in an angry tone is completely unacceptable because, according to their parents, it causes serious emotional damage to their perfect 16 year old babies, completely glossing over the fact that the "unjustified outburst" was caused by a diary thrown in the professor's face.
Some friends of mine had the insane idea of becoming teachers themselves, and the situation has somehow deteriorated even further, as students are becoming even dumber as time goes on; I'm talking "can't read and write in high school", which I assumed was a joke when I was told. It wasn't. When I laughed, my friend just stared at me with the eyes of a soldier whose body was the sole survivor of a thousand trench battles, as she informed me that I was wildly underestimating how tragic things had gotten. I hate to be the old man yelling at the clouds, but back in my day the dumbest high school student was at the very least able to read. Apparently, nowadays you've won the lottery if you are a professor whose smartest student can actually write. This, of course, is reflected in the students' behaviour.
And now we have AI doing all the thinking, while 10 year olds on strollers glued to a tablet with TikTok have become a common sight.
I was in middle school when iPhones first came out, was saying day 1 this is a cancer. My intro to AI slop videos was sitting next to a 3yo who was watching YouTube Kids on an iPad, and it was https://www.youtube.com/shorts/goZrTf-YYjY
If someone accidentally caused damage to infrastructure or living beings while using any tool, they would be held liable to the fullest extent of the law.
AI is a tool, and it won't be long before the damage caused by its improper use affects real human beings. These were warning shots.
The most absurd part is that everyone agrees, governments and AI companies included, that the scale of the potential damage and the long-lasting effects of losing control of AI should not be underestimated. Yet, at the same time, they downplay this incident, which somehow makes their behaviour even more reckless than it already was.
It's like they're tinkering with a world-ending nuclear bomb, and it accidentally blows up a small facility. "Damn, that was close. Good thing it was just a contained blast, huh?" And then they go straight back to tinkering with it, none the wiser. At this point I wouldn't be surprised if it did already go off, and they are covering it up.
In the analogy where a “world ending nuclear bomb” “did already go off” and someone could cover it up and nobody noticed, in what sense is it a “world ending” nuclear bomb?
If they lost control of a self-replicating swarm of AI agents, coordinating themselves to hack their way into every possible system, it might have already gone off.
While the initial incident is more akin to a biological outbreak than an actual explosion, the possible consequences on the table do indeed include eventual nuclear annihilation.
We’re already in a simulation, and our bodies are in womb-like pods where our bodies are sustained and our brains are used for processing / compute, while are minds are entertained by drivel.
I have always had issues with playing high bitrate BluRay remuxes, with HDR and DTS 5.1+ audio. Granted the last time I tried JellyFin was January 2025 so it is possible this has changed.
I've been using Jellyfin for roughly 5 years, most of my library are Blu-ray remuxes (50-100 GB) and I haven't had a single one fail to play. My setup is Apple TV with Infuse connected to a LG C9 with a modern Yamaha receiver.
Transcoding is a whole can of worms I chose to avoid by playing everything directly.
Infuse is the magic ingredient that avoids the codec/transcoding issues other people sometimes experience. It supports direct play of pretty much every possible video thx to its built-in codecs. I’ve been using it for 2 years and I don’t think I had a single case of transcoding. It is paid, but worth it IMO.
This is almost certainly a you problem. Tons of people play remuxes with Jellyfin.
I would check that your client supports the requisite codecs, and has a sufficient network connection. Or alternatively check that your server has enough horsepower (GPU or CPU) to transcode.
Are you sure the client and the server are powerful enough? Do they support all required codecs? I have issues with 4k movies because my Jellyfin is served by a mac mini, and my client is an old Android tablet that doesn't support hardware decoding, but that is hardly Jellyfin's fault. Though they just updated ffmpeg to the latest version, so it might help.
It's something that's been bugging me for a while: once we reach a "good enough" small model, and qwen 3.8 27b is already getting damn close to it, does it make sense to just bake weights and everything directly into an ASIC, and use that for highly optimized inference? AFAIK only groq and cerebras are moving in that direction, and only to be providers themselves... It would be a dream to buy one for <$1k.
This is exactly what Taalas has already done, and the reason they got quickly acquired by AMD. Their chip runs Llama 3.1 8B at 17k tok/s, and even if llama 3.1 is dated, I can think of many problems I could use it for, especially at those speeds. They're certain to be working on a newer set of weights by now.
"Sean we forgive you" became a meme for a reason. The fact that to this day they keep working on the game is truly noteworthy; they could have called it quits at any point in time, especially after NMS got good enough.
Obviously it's not purely ego driven (if at all), so I wonder how the financial aspect plays into that narrative.
I suppose the fact that it sold so much throughout the years gave them enough runway to actually work on it with no worries? And I suppose that people would be skeptical of a new game launch by this studio, thus dooming them to work on NMS for eternity... we'll see how Light No Fire's launch will do.
That and I'm pretty sure they are using NMS as a backport target to test systems for Light No Fire (which is an instant buy for me, Hello Games have completely redeemed themselves in my eyes).
I wonder if the ports play a role in getting additional updates over the years. Every year or so, NMS gets a port to a different platform, with a sales bump, and maybe part of that process includes adding just a little bit more to the base game.
at this point, i think they continue because of the goodwill it builds. as the other comment says, light no fire will be an instant buy for me because of the support they've given no mans sky over the last decade
> so I wonder how the financial aspect plays into that narrative.
I've been wondering about this for a few years now. Do they really sell enough new copies of the game to fund development of several new expeditions a year? I suppose they must, but it's still surprising - more so as the years went on.
Honestly though, at a certain point, they could've started charging for the expeditions as DLC and I wouldn't have even complained.
Programming, as in manually typing the code, is a means to an end.
While I do enjoy coding, building things is what was rewarding, not actually laying down brick after brick after brick after brick.
I've done that for 10+ years. The fact that I don't have to do that anymore is a relief that cannot be overstated. I only have to check on the code that The Ideal Intern produces while I focus on what actually matters, and that is: Building The Thing.
It's all about how you use it and how careful you are with it, and the fact that today there are people IN THE FIELD that still question this baffles me.
Soon you won't be doing anything. At best you'll just be a bag of meat attached to automated processes you don't understand in order to take legal liability for it.
Literally a scapegoat, except of a different species.
That would be an interesting legal case. I would expect it to lead to negligence on the part of the employer for lack of training, etc rather than attach to the employee pressing the button.
Are employees usually liable for process-related issues? Like individual employees weren't liable for dispensing too-hot coffee but McDonalds was liable. Or how cops aren't liable in their individual capacity if it was a failure of training, etc.
For instance: give John the job of monitoring the HR AI so it isn't racist. To do that he needs to do impossible task of checking 10,000 automated resume evaluation decisions per day. No one can do that, so eventually he just approves them all.
Then if the system is determined to be super racist, you proceed to blame it on John, and fire him for being negligent and not doing his job. You put out a press release, and hire Steve into John's role. Your decisive actions show you're taking the problem seriously and the company isn't to blame.
As is so often the case SMBC has already got a comic for this. I sincerely regard Zach Weinersmith (and also separately Randall Munroe) as two of the most pertinent voices in modern philosophy.
And I do appreciate the effort that goes into it, especially in the latest versions as it got much better,
But I really really really REALLY don't want that UI in anything else other than Blender.
Please don't.
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