At least there's only a single way to tell the computer "ok, execute this command". And you see the command written in plain text before you.
And, no, no useful interface is intuitive because computers just have too many functions. There's no intuitive appliance in the world with more than a temperature knob and a timer knob. Knowledge is always required, be that cultural or by RTFM.
3d not being required makes a hell a lot of sense and of course it wasn't people have been drafting on paper for ages. They might've ended up on Mac or maybe Amiga, but an SGI workstation is quite an investment when you don't even need to spin polygons. IRIS GL dates back to the early 80s, doesn't seem so much to be a timeline but price and need thing. And it's not like you can't have a 3d view without acceleration, just would take a while to render and a frame every five seconds might still be usable.
There apparently was an IRIX version at one time but with no user base preference, more likely they were thinking "where's my C: drive" so once 3d acceleration hit the mainstream everyone happily switched back to Microsoft. Meanwhile you have 3d artists complaining that they can't move windows with meta+lmb on windows.
I mean back in the days they should have been running on IRIX, and SGI switched over to Linux when they made the switch to x86 CPUs. Plenty of movie studios switched over to Linux workstations because of that, porting from IRIX to Linux is trivial compared to porting to Windows, why didn't the same happen with CAD?
Wintel-PCs for the longest time just weren't suitable for 3d work, they were office machines.
AutoCAD
It's always funny with 3d. Graphics? You need Houdini? Of course it runs on Linux, it's a UNIX-native program after all, first version ran on IRIX because what else would you use for 3d work but an SGI workstation and Linux is the commercial successor to IRIX. Blender, the same, just 5k bucks cheaper (and not everything is nodes, not yet). CAD? Everything's suddenly windows-only because... how the hell did that came to be? Were they running 1990's CAD software on Excel machines?
OpenEXR. Though it probably could use a spec upgrade, in particular add JPEG-XL to the list of compression algorithms. It's not like OpenEXR's choices are bad, the lossy ones are just more geared towards fidelity than space savings, kind of the opposite of what you want for the web where saving space is often paramount and fidelity a bonus.
Bonus: Supports multi-channel, so not just RGBA. Not terribly useful for your run off the mill camera, very useful in production where you might want to attach the depth buffer, cryptomatte etc and I guess you could also use it for the output of light field cameras. Oh there's also multi-view so you can store not just stereo images but also whole all-around captures and stuff. There's practically nothing pixel-related you can't do with it though it might require custom tooling.
EU fines are working. Not in the sense that they would prevent companies from trying to do shit, but in the sense that they shape up once it has been levied: Understand that those 800m are a shot before the bow. If the behaviour continues, there's going to be daily punitive fines that very quickly become very unaffordable.
I mean, what is the money being used for?
Goes towards the EU budget, reducing the amount the member states have to pay in. In other words Berlaymont doesn't gain anything from levying fines, their budget stays the same.
It's still quite obscure to actually mess with AI art instead of just throwing prompts at it, resulting in slop of varying quality levels. And I don't mean controlnet, but github repos with comfyui plugins with little explanation but a link to a paper, or "this is absolutely mathematically unsound but fun to mess with". Messing with stuff other than conditioning or mere model selection.
Trump wants adulation, not conquest. Push come to shove you can get him out of the oval office by making him figurehead Emperor, as long as it comes with immunity he'll accept.
On a scale of Mussolini to Hitler, he's like 250% towards Mussolini.
The problem is: Data is code, and code is data. An algorithm to compute prime numbers is equivalent to a list of prime numbers, (also, not relevant to this discussion, homoiconicity and interpretation). Yet we still want to make a distinction.
Is a PAQ-compressed copy of the Hitchhiker's guide code? Technically, yes, practically, no, because the code is just a fancy representation of data (PAQ is basically an exercise in finding algorithms that produce particular data to save space). Is a sorting algorithm code? Most definitely, it can't even spit out data without being given an equally-sized amount of data. On that scale, from code to code representing data, AI models are at least 3/4th towards code representing data.
As such I'd say that AI models are data in the same sense that holograms (these ones) are photographs. Do they represent a particular image? No, but they represent a related, indexable, set of images. What they definitely aren't is rendering pipelines. Or, and that's a whole another possible line of argument: Requiring Turing-complete interpretation.
The company is based in an EU, EEA, EFTA, or DCFTA member country.
So Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia included, but not Turkey (only tariff union), neither are Belarus, Russia, UK, and much of the Balkans. Iceland is included, Greenland isn't, Faroer should be via Iceland, same goes for Monaco via France, San Marino via Italy etc. Switzerland in particular is included because EFTA.
Not to mention ARM chips which by and large were/are more efficient on the same node than x86 because of their design: ARM chip designers have been doing that efficiency thing since forever, owing to the mobile platform, while desktop designers only got into the game quite late. There's also some wibbles like ARM insn decoding being inherently simpler but big picture that's negligible.
Intel just really, really has a talent for not seeing the writing on the wall while AMD made a habit out of it out of sheer necessity to even survive. Bulldozer nearly killed them (and the idea itself wasn't even bad, it just didn't work out) while Intel is tanking hit after hit after hit.
Chances are that any new large commercial platform will enshittify, sooner or later prompting another exodus, and each exodus will at least have some people choosing a community platform.