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"Easy to remove" is not opt-in, it is opt-out. Thankfully, the opt-in part is still true, as installing Ubuntu is still an opt-in choice.

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Honestly, this may just be as simple as buying goodwill and continuing to normalize AI companies by doing things that legitimate companies do.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Jarmer

So we've been working back from silicon advancements and architectural improvements

So basically a guarantee SD2 will be arm based? Especially with their recent advances in fex?

I know very little about hardware, so this question isn't a diss but is genuinely for information:
So, would that be good if it were arm based?

Unlikely to very unlikely. SOCs don’t become performant just because they use ARM. The ISA of a SOC has much less to do with efficiency (performance/watt) in this application (10-20 watts) than general good design and robust software support. Most modern x64 SOCs are largely RISC with legacy CISC fallback support bolted on in microcode. For ARM, your “CISC fallback” is just Fex running in userspace. I think ARM still scales down better than x64, which is why you see it in Steam Frame where the SOC is running at half or lower the peak power of the Steam Deck SOC with idle power requirements in the milliwatts (Steam Deck is idling at 1-2 watts IIRC).

So it’s not a given that ARM will be in the next Steam Deck or anything else. Valve has been really good so far at understanding nuances of what’s available on the market and choosing the best off-the-shelf or nearly off-the-shelf product on offer. They likely won’t go for a TRUE custom SOC until they’re selling units in the hundreds of millions. Until then, this semi-custom approach of choosing a good performing cheap chip that would otherwise be written down as scrap for these hardware companies and optimizing the crap out of their software stack to make a fun performant device has been very smart and scrappy. The only way I see ARM spreading to other Valve hardware is if Qualcomm or another ARM player has a very good chip that sells well enough to justify its existence, but too poorly to achieve their sales goals that just happens to fit the requirements of a product Valve want to work on so that Valve can buy the scraps for cheap to enable their new product. That’s exactly what happened with Steam Deck, exactly what happened with the Steam Machine GPU (RX 7600M), and is likely a contributing factor to why they’re using a non-VR-specific Qualcomm chip in Steam Frame.

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Blender don't take their RAM blood money 😭

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My God.

I remember well online tournaments in fighting games thanks to ZSNES. Glad it is coming back.

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Pocket money for an AI company.

But welcome.

Blender should become Blendet IA. Nobody will realize its IA instead of AI and they will be rich.

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Quoting: Jarmer

So we've been working back from silicon advancements and architectural improvements

So basically a guarantee SD2 will be arm based? Especially with their recent advances in fex?

I know very little about hardware, so this question isn't a diss but is genuinely for information:
So, would that be good if it were arm based?

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Quoting: scaineIt doesn't mention opt-in or opt-out at all, only saying that in future we'll see AI features land in Ubuntu as snaps. It doesn't talk about "easy to shut off" or even that this is optional, only that they're snaps, which might infer as much.

Even going only by the parts Liam quoted, they did say that AI-centric features would be there "for those who want them", so it was obvious that there has to be either opt-in or opt-out. I will grant you that this specific quote isn’t entirely clear regarding whether that also applies to AI-based improvements of existing features.

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They were going to release a week earlier, but decided that wouldn't be on brand. ;)

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LLM tools are available since around 2022 for Blender in form of plugins and Anthropic may just has an interest to deliver their own plugin. I

from their pov blender is great for that since they wont need to care about paying royalites on an asset store.

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great, fund the software that help the artists...
now artists maybe wont complain that your ai took their jobs?

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Quoting: CaldathrasDid you have to do anything to disable GOG's wrapper?

in my case gog wrapper still stay, however with ddraw use native, builtin in winecfg

😀

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: EWGGreat. Help me rename, tag, and sort all of my photos and other images.

Same with text files and other documents. Fix my Markdown mistakes. Convert MD to basic HTML to post on forums. Provide a TOC from headers on longer articles I've written.

Help me manage my workspaces and windows. Prompt me with sensible window rules automatically and nudge me to be organized. Take a look into which Librewolf profile I'm using and ensure it stays in the proper Activity.

There are simple, useful usecases for more advanced, personalized computer help tools.

Some of that is stuff I wouldn't do, and the rest sounds absolutely horrible. I do not want some idiot AI deciding how stuff gets named and sorted.

MusicBrainz has been doing it with music, without the "ai", for a long time now. Good practice is to use it on a copy of the files or to require a review before final writing/saving.

Specialized LLMs can be incredible. I was at one nerd con or another and spoke with a guy who worked in the medical industry. The company he worked for spent a long time feeding it books and other such papers. People could search using human terms and it would present exactly the right information quickly and concisely.

I'm really curious to see how Canonical, Red Hat, KDE, MZLA, etc all begin using these newer sorts of tools. I do have faith that they will implement everything in user conscious ways. Newer CPUs contain instruction sets for it. Let me get the most of out my machine, get my money's worth, and save time on menial tasks so I can spend more time slacking off. 😆

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I was excited for this game pre-release, but after looking into it, I have very little faith this will succeed in much outside of becoming filled with monetisation-motivated (AI) slop.

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Quoting: Doktor-MandrakeSo is there any confirmation if steam-input/steam is required for it to work?

Might get one on my next payslip, same time I'm pretty happy with my 8bitdo 2c ultimate which is a fantastic controller especially for the price

I would guess that Steam would be required. At least at launch.

I didn't own the original Steam Controller so I could be wrong. But from what I understand it was initially tied to Steam. A separate driver did eventually surface, to use it as a generic HID USB gamepad. But it was developed by third party, not Valve.

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Quoting: JarmerSo basically a guarantee SD2 will be arm based? Especially with their recent advances in fex?

This would make so much sense. It works unbelievably well already. I dont even own a retro handheld with a snapdragon kit (mine has a mali chip and was way cheaper), and even with that it is astounding what you can play on it with some cobbled-up settings on GameNative. The ones with the snapdragons... they just run. ARM is so power efficient, its fantastic.
So yeah - i have no doubt the next Steam Deck will be ARM based.

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Ok.... 1 registering to post on this site was not fun, not fluid, it took me 5 tries

Now, I have been following this project for a while now... I'll look at it, this is kinda a passion project... Person didn't like how unity was turning out and tried to do his own thing...

It's open source, so look at it, add to it, fix it... Don't complain about freeish stuff... Now that it's released, I'll look at it more, initially it was a toy that I pointed my kid at because he programs and does Roblox, garys mod, Minecraft, etc

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So is there any confirmation if steam-input/steam is required for it to work?

Might get one on my next payslip, same time I'm pretty happy with my 8bitdo 2c ultimate which is a fantastic controller especially for the price

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Well, if I were the Blender people I'd happily take the money. I'd think of it as hastening, ever so slightly, the bursting of the AI bubble. Maybe Anthropic will go under five seconds faster because of this.

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Quoting: EWGWould it be technically possible to externally have achivements if a game didn't have any to begin with?
It'd be cool for active communities to nominate and vote on player submitted achivements.

Is there any kind of standardized, open protocol for achivements?
Imagine if indie devs could simply build a small structute to talk to Sentinel and the community handles what is an achivement, the SS of it or other graphic representation or reward, name of it, and guides to accomplishing them.

No idea if any of that is doable in any capacity but, those might be really interesting next steps to expand Sentinel.

That said, I only pay so much attention to achivements to begin with but, it is nice getting them. I am curious to see what's available and make some amount of effort on obtaining what I think I can.

that exists for old games in form of https://retroachievements.org/

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Quoting: EWGGreat. Help me rename, tag, and sort all of my photos and other images.

Same with text files and other documents. Fix my Markdown mistakes. Convert MD to basic HTML to post on forums. Provide a TOC from headers on longer articles I've written.

Help me manage my workspaces and windows. Prompt me with sensible window rules automatically and nudge me to be organized. Take a look into which Librewolf profile I'm using and ensure it stays in the proper Activity.

There are simple, useful usecases for more advanced, personalized computer help tools.

Some of that is stuff I wouldn't do, and the rest sounds absolutely horrible. I do not want some idiot AI deciding how stuff gets named and sorted.

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Since Blender is one of my main creative tools it doesn't feel right at first. What if Anthropic asks for implementing their tools to Blender or removing the donations? On the other hand Blender said they use it towards for the core features, so they are hopefully not interested in these features.

I think it has another, but similar reason. LLM tools are available since around 2022 for Blender in form of plugins and Anthropic may just has an interest to deliver their own plugin. I was using one of these FOSS plugins myself at the very early time to learn more about neuronal network tools.
In this case I fully support the donation, because the money will be used in a good way and Anthropic could create such plugins with or without donations. So better getting something back.

...

I just researched quickly and found [Anthropics statement](https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-for-creative-work):

The Blender developers have created an MCP connector, which is now officially available for Claude. For example, 3D artists can use the Blender connector to analyze and debug entire Blender scenes, or build custom scripts to batch-apply changes to objects in a scene. And using Blender’s Python API, the connector lets Claude add new tools directly to Blender’s interface.

Anthropic has joined the Blender Development Fund as a patron to support the Blender project as they continue to develop their Python API, which makes integrations like this possible. And because the connector is built on MCP, it is accessible to other LLMs in addition to Claude, a reflection of Blender’s commitment to open source and interoperability.

That underlines my plugin theory and I am fully fine this way. As told, LLM for Blender as third party tool was a thing from begin with and it will stay anyway, no matter if Anthropic also creates third party tools or not. As long as these stay third party, there is no reason to complain about.

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Huh. Epic Games and Netflix make sense. Why Anthropic? Are they working on an LLM to generate 3D models? 🤔

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Quoting: mattaraxiaIf you're them, having something like Blender, that collects no licenses, crush something like Unity, that does, is great.

Because then the money shops were spending on Unity . . . goes to agents instead. See they weirdly want all royalty free development platforms too, just . . . maybe not for good reasons . . .

They may also just be burning cash at an absurd rate and want their logo out there, it's just marketing. They think it will create goodwill with people who will become customers.

Unity isn't a 3D modeling application, it's a game engine. That would be if they were funding Godot.

I don't know much about the commercial/licensed 3D modeling programs though, so I can't say I'd make a better comparison.

Anthropic supporting open projects when their whole thing is "AI can't be open because then crazy idiot hackers will end the world with magic computers" is hypocritical. If you look up "Anthropic open source" on DuckDuckGo, they have a program to let open source developers use their AI...the AI itself in that case is all gratis, no libre. They want to be in control.

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Anthropic's brand is the "nice" AI company. They're arguably crazier than others in some ways with the emphasis on AI doomsday talk, and they still have the TESCREAL ideological connections, but it's still unusual for any large corporation in 2026 to care about their reputation at all, so they do succeed at being "better" compared to companies that will reliably do the wrongest thing available to them.

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At least if they pay in cash and not in tokens...

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€240k per year is nothing for Anthropic that constantly raises investments in the $8-30B range.
They probably spend more than that on espresso capsules.

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Quoting: mattaraxiaThey think it will create goodwill with people who will become customers.

I think that this sums up the "why" quite nicely.

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Not affected myself, but to share a different opinion:

TTS and STT are great tools for accessibility and for people who rely on such tools, they should be installed by default in terms of accessibility. However, free software communities should rely on free software tools, which big tech AI is not (even if it is open weight, it is not open source nor free software). Respecting licenses and users is the way to go:

• Train AI on texts that allow the text usage.


• Name all authors of original texts in the way licenses are telling.


• Pay speakers or ask for volunteers for the speech training and add them to the credits.


• Specialize TTS and STT tools and run them locally in an efficient and private way. They don't require a lot of computing resources and also no internet connection.

And it may is a good idea to give users the choice to install them or not on Ubuntu-installation process - even if it is just for the trust.

Such neuronal network tools have pros and cons and while slops and energy consumption are huge concerns beside others, TTS and STT are actually useful applications if done the right way. All bigger FOSS communities and companies should just work together to create such tools to not rely on proprietary "open weight" models or worse. These tools are not bad by default, but they are created and used in a bad way most of the time, because hype and money are never good innovation drivers, but calm minds that are looking for the best solution and behavior are.

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Quoting: Renzatic Gear

Quoting: Liam DaweWhen I eventually get one, it will be the true size test. I have tiny hands.

In the meanwhile, Linus Tech Tips did a review of it, who also has small hands. The size itself is roughly comparable to an XBox controller, but he did complain about the span between the edge of the controller, and the analog sticks.

It's not a dealbreaker for me (I have regular non-gnomish hands), but I could see how it could be an issue for some.

I can guarantee I have smaller hands 😆🙃

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