Chris Offner

Silicon Valley’s desperate search for love

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Most of [my] work at MIT and before that has been on robotics and autonomous vehicles. But now the dream is to create a system that you can love and that can love you back.

Lex Fridman

As a fellow computer science student I’m always saddened by Silicon Valley crowd’s desperate quest to find/create love within the machine. It seems the world would be spared a lot of technological missteps if they’d foster such ‘systems’ in the analog world, in the form of families and communities instead.

Trying to engineer technological substitutes for human love and connection strikes me as a fundamentally misguided endeavour. As fascinated as I am by the science and engineering, I think the work of technologists should be to develop systems that support and strengthen civilisation. One of those ways could be to automate necessary but dangerous, difficult, or mind-numbing work so that we can spend more time with our loved ones, create communities, engage and play in shared creativity, connecting on a physical level – all those most human things. Another could be to protect the environment. Build shared and sustainable prosperity for as many people as possible.

There are so many valuable goals. Building a machine capable of love is necessary for none of them. In my view it’s a massive distraction.

Blender, Maya & MODO: Context-Sensitive Behaviour

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In this video I talk about the concept of context-sensitive behaviour and how I personally find it highly beneficial as a UX design concept for facilitating a fluent and intuitive artist workflow. MODO, Maya and Blender have their different approaches and degrees of implementation of this principle but Blender’s modelling tools are where I found myself missing this paradigm the most – maybe others feel similarly and this video can serve as inspiration to further a discussion on this topic. 🙂

Blender and MODO Addendum: Knife vs. Slice

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Since I only touched on the most basic functionality of Blender’s Knife tool in my last video I want to append an addendum showing its other features and how they compare in particular to MODO’s Slice tool – which is separate from the Edge Slice tool with the buggy “Multi-Slice” option I demonstrated in video #4.

Okay, enough about knives and slicing for now. 😉

EDIT: I was wrong! I have just been informed that MODO also supports CTRL+LMB clicking on an edge for a mid-edge cut. You don’t have to activate the global snapping menu as I described. I never knew. My entire life has been a lie!

Blender and MODO Quick Take: Knife vs. Multi-Slice

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Now so far for the most part MODO and Blender have come out roughly even for me. On some things, MODO had the slight edge, on others Blender had the slight edge. But I just encountered a tool where Blender’s implementation absolutely blows MODO’s out of the water – and that is Blender’s excellent Knife tool.