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I tried the Samsung one with the same form factor in a store , and that is pretty nice. As someone traveling via plane or train, I can easily see myself using this and not carrying my tablet with me. However, just too expensive for my taste. I get a lot of new batteries for my current 12 pro for that price .

I guess I wouldn't use it, but I just bought two of the asset packs of the pixel artist instead.


I am using Blender since my Master thesis in 2017. It is impressive how much has happened. Also giving some money to them because they don't get that much donations (if you compare it to Thunderbird for example).


Wait, Thunderbird is getting more donations than Blender?

I was under the impression that Thunderbird is on life support, while Blender is everywhere.


At one of last Blender conferences, the founder (and at that time CEO) gave some insights about funding and compared it to Thunderbird. https://youtu.be/VZ5022VaMmA?si=m1hD9wEQ16s8Zu3b&t=1297 ;

Fore More recent numbers: In 2024[1] (last info I found), Blender had 3.1m € in donations (600k more than the year before) and Thunderbird had around 9m € [2].

I kind of get it, Blender is way more niche than Thunderbird, but imagine what they could do with even more money.

[1] https://download.blender.org/foundation/Blender-Foundation-A... on page 76 [2] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-... I did the money conversion based on today's exchange rates


> Blender is way more niche than Thunderbird

Is that true though? I mean sure, more people use email - but I would guess there are more Blender users than Thunderbird users in the world.

There's plenty of competition for an excellent free email experience. Very little for 3D modeling software.

Update: Looks like I guessed wrong. I found some approximate user numbers:

Thunderbird has analytics that show around 10 million active daily installations: https://stats.thunderbird.net/

Blender stats are harder to find. They reported 23 million total downloads in 2024, which suggests daily actives significantly lower than 10 million: https://download.blender.org/foundation/Blender-Foundation-A...


Mozilla invests more time in being a foundation than software so makes sense their donations are higher.


> but imagine what they could do with even more money.

Quite potentially some really great stuff, but I’m skeptical that this is actually a great way to kill a good thing. Ideally money isn’t an issue and everyone is paid well, and somehow the organization managers know how to feel out and draw a line on scale/ambitions.


wow thunderbird gets so much and achieves so little? amazing in a terrible way


I’ve got to imagine there’s examples of orgs stopping donation intake when they get into the “money is nice but we cannot in good faith utilize all this without scaling into something we don’t want to be.”


A quick AI Google search and some fact-checking later, and yeah. At least as of 2 years ago, Thunderbird was getting 3x the contributions that Blender was.

It just goes to show you how badly managed Thunderbird is, since Blender is doing so much more with the money. I'm more and more disappointed with Mozilla all the time.


It couldn't possibly be that Blender simply has much more volunteer contributions?

Since hacking on a 3D DCC in your spare time may be more than three times as enticing to people than doing the same on an email client?

I'd wager Occam's razor favors this explanation.


Or Thunderbird is much older and has a lot more users


Blender is actually much, much older than Thunderbird.


wow, did not expect blender to be 32 years old, thanks for correcting me.

but still, they were open sourced about 1 year apart. I still think having a bigger user base is a good reason for the difference


That's relevant to why it historically had bizarre UX issues, like ctrl+s being the shortcut to erase the scene and start a new one: it predated most of those conventions, and has its own UI tooling. It's also always been designed to use three mouse buttons, coming from the Unix world, which used to be problematic when not everyone had a mouse with a clicky scroll wheel.

It's come an absurdly long way since I first dabbled with it in the early 2000s, and has gone from a niche FOSS tool to something widely used in its field.

Nowadays, Blender is an example of masterful UX for a professional tool. Immediately responsive, information dense UI with keyboard shortcuts for absolutely everything. Actions are composable, like with vim: something like "ex5" will extrude five units on the x axis.


UI standardization, CUA, X11, Motif date from the late 80s.


Right, but those are for simple tasks. Much like vi or emacs, the keybindings are esoteric and historical but so much of what makes the tools great is reliant on on said historical and esoteric behaviour that changing any of it becomes an exercises in futility


Isn't this because thunderbird contributions are not ring-fenced but go to mozilla?


Thunderbird did manage to buy out K-9.


Oh did it? I remember using K-9 on my Android phone years ago and being pretty happy with it.


Yes, K-9 has been shut down and Thunderbird for Android is what used to be K-9.


Market size is different: everyone needs a mail client, but not everyone needs 3d modelling.


The audience may be larger, but I don't feel like it's anywhere near "everyone". Personally, I don't know anyone who still uses a dedicated email client except in specific institutional settings. I haven't touched one outside of a corporate office myself in 20 years. Webmail has been good enough for longer than many people have been using computers.


I started pre-1.8, in the C-key era. Haven't used it in many years so looking at it every now and then is genuinely shocking to me how much it's progressed. I remember a family member who worked at a triple A game dev studio giving me a tour and when I talked to the 3D modeler guys there and told them I used Blender they stifled a chuckle. To be fair, it was a very rudimentary tool back with UI flows invented by and for aliens. And now it's used all over the place in both amateur and professional settings.


Yes, I remember fumblefutzign around in 2000 or 2001, and I can't believe its current state. I'm a writer, not an artist, so I doubt I'll ever get back into it, but I'm so happy to see where it's at.


If you have the time, taking some time to learn the basics, even just for fun, adds a neat skill to your toolbox. You never know when you might have a use for it. Even if you don't, sometimes learning a new creative tool gets the idea juices flowing


Thanks for the encouragement. I'm knee-deep in writing three novel-length fanfictions when I'm not being a stay-at-home parent to three young children. One day, though, I'm sure I'll get around to it.


I hope for the EU to come after Sony. Before you could argue that you could buy games as a disc and just play them. It of course was a monopoly before, but now it is pretty clear


> astronomical productivity benefits

I can't take the article seriously...


I work with these tools every day, and I’d say my productivity increase is on the order of astronomical.

This isn’t true of everyone, but depending on pre-existing skill sets and context, there’s a group of people who are actually multiples more productive than they were in 2022.


I wouldn’t either if I’d missed the previous word, “reporting”.


If this wouldn't be under Mozilla/Thunderbird Org on Github, I would have considered this to be fake. It looks very unsubstantial ...


Since the rise of AI systems I really wonder how people wrote code before. This is exactly how I planned out implementation and executed the plan. Might have been some paper notes, a ticket or a white board, buuuuut ... I don't know.


I am a huge fan of OpenSuperWhisper (https://github.com/Starmel/OpenSuperWhisper). Works local and is more than enough for me.


Not only is the website layout horrible to read, it also smells like the article was written by AI. My brain just screams "no" when I try to read that.


Don't worry, it's not supposed to be read. The idea is to induce FOMO and subscribe to authors newsletter to get more "insights".


Seems like a reasonable feeling to have. Anything that's not worth writing is not worth reading imo.


Eh, you're going too far with that IMO.

The other day we were discussing a new core architecture for a Microservice we were meant to split out of a "larger" Microservice so that separate teams could maintain each part.

Instead of just discussing it entirely without any basis, I instead made a quick prototype via explicit prompts telling the LLM exactly what to create, where etc.

Finally, I asked it to go through the implementation and create a wiki page, concatting the code and outlining in 1-4 sentences above each "file" excerpt what the goal for the file is.

In the end, I went through it to double-check if it held up from my intentions - which it did and thus didn't change anything

Now we could all discuss the pros and cons of that architecture while going through it, and the intro sentence gave enough context to each code excerpt to improve understanding/reduce mental load as necessary context was added to each segment.

I would not have been able to allot that time to do all this without an LLM - especially the summarization to 1-3 sentences, so I'll have to disagree when you state this generally.

Though I definitely agree that a blog article like this isn't worth reading if the author couldn't even be arsed to write it themselves.


It’s also just fluff and straight up wrong at parts. This wasn’t checked by a human or at least a human who understands enough to catch inaccuracies. For example for “Plan-then-execute” (which is presented as some sort of novel pattern rather than literally just how Claude Code works right out of the box) it says:

“Plan phase – The LLM generates a fixed sequence of tool calls before seeing any untrusted data

Execution phase – A controller runs that exact sequence. Tool outputs may shape parameters, but cannot change which tools run”

But of course the agent doesn’t plan an exact fixed sequence of tool calls and rigidly stick to it, as it’s going to respond to the outputs which can’t be known ahead of time. Anyone who’s watched Claude work has seen this literally every day.

This is just more slop making it to the top of HN because people out of the loop want to catch up on agents and bookmark any source that seems promising.


Last thing I did when I was a student was to buy the Apple pro apps bundle for education. It still haven't regretted it :D

So, if you are a student, you can get logic, final cut, motion, compressor and mainStage for $199.99 for ever.


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