It is not meant to be used inside a DCC app, as-is.

If you import data of this complexity into a DCC app your workflow is broken/you are doing something wrong.

That said – I think it's very cool if you can import such heavy geometry and your DCC app doesn't crash. But in 15 years of working in VFX I never dealt with heavy data inside a DCC directly. Indirectly yes, through proxies.

The three most interesting metrics for this scene are, if you're a renderer author (sorted by importance during lookdev/lighting):

1. Time to first pixel (is it seconds or hours?).

2. Time to completion (does it take days/hours/minutes?).

3. Memory footprint (does it 'fit' or does it go into swap?).

Two more are: subdivs and PTex.

I.e. can the renderer do true subdivision surfaces (vs just subdividing the geometry n-times leading to silhouette artifacts under certain viewing conditions)?

And: can the renderer ingest PTex textures or do you have to create UVs somehow and convert all the textures into UV-based ones before you can use the original Disney dataset?

I am personally interrogating my response to this:

"Oh no! A trolley is heading towards 5 people who tied themselves to the track. You can pull the lever to divert it to the other track, killing 1 person who accidentally tripped onto the track instead. What do you do?"

I save the 5 over the 1. Only 15% agree with me. Why?

This is the first Absurd Trolley Problem (I think) that explained WHY a person was tied to the track.

I think the value of this hypothetical is in establishing the value of cultural relativism versus Kantian ethics.

In that framing, I'm really surprised that, on Level 27, 70% would rather send a trolley into the future to kill 5 people 100 years from now, instead of 5 people now. In almost 11K votes, this seems significant.

My view is that this provides evidence for the Bentham "hedonic calculus". (And I'm sure there are better scholars of Kant and Bentham than I that can argue for or against this.)

Here's a "political" example: Do you want to deal with problems now, or defer? 70% will defer. (I think this checks out, and is truly hedonic.)

So, I think the data, and the utilitarian approach shows: don't expect any of our societal problems (politically agnostic) to be solved any time soon.

Apple Arcade is a good example of this. With the subscription, they have a bunch of games which used to be gem games, but had that part of the monetization removed. And all of the games are better for it - they removed a lot of the frustration, gambling, unnecessary delays, which had been added to push people to buy gems.

I wouldn't be too surprised if every big CDN already does something like that internally as a competitive advantage, and if so then the incentives switch around and there's no benefit publically switching to JPEG XL - when everyone has it, there's no easy way to do better than everyone else.

Ah, so you're willing to trade privacy for convenience.

But I'm not "unable" to issue a refund.

In another case I may say "hm it's out of warranty but you know what, it really shouldn't have broken like that and you're a good customer, so I'll give a refund anyway." I can do that because I am able to issue a refund.

As for their policy, they are both the authors and interpreters of their own policy, so the "my hands are tied" argument is pure BS. If they are unable to reinstate accounts, why do they have an appeals process at all?

All of the anti-cheat solutions I've seen that run in kernel mode are none of those things. They make it well known that they're installing, are made by vendors that actively care about the security of their products, and are trivially easy to remove once they're no longer needed.

For many people in many countries, there is no concept of "retirement". It seems so silly to me that people would go and say "I'll work really hard and do all this stuff for 40 years so I can sit around and do nothing for another 30 years".

What's the point? It's unsustainable. It's like doing a crash diet - it may work for a minute, but to have long-term results you need to have a lifestyle change.

Focusing on financial independence means you can achieve better long-term results. Living within your means over the course of 80 years instead of balls-to-the-wall for 30-40 and then a quick and silent death for 30 seems to be a better course of action and would lead to longer lifespan.

Once you reach financial independence - whatever that means to you - you can take on other interests. It could be working at a startup, or a non-profit, or volunteering, or gardening. You name it. But financial independence enables such things. FI > RE.