MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: MCP server for Blender that builds 3D scenes via natural language
by prono | 2025-07-20 06:01:45+00:00
Hi HN!

I built a custom MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that connects Blender to LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and any other llm supporting tool calling and mcps, enabling the AI to understand and control 3D scenes using natural language.

You can describe an entire environment like:

> “Create a small village with 5 huts arranged around a central bonfire, add a river flowing on the left, place a wooden bridge across it, and scatter trees randomly.”

And the system parses that, reasons about the scene, and builds it inside Blender — no manual modeling or scripting needed.

What it can do: - Generate multi-object scenes like villages, landscapes, from a single prompt - Understand spatial relations — e.g., “place the bridge over the river” or “add trees behind the huts” - Create camera animations and lighting setups: “orbit around the scene at sunset lighting” - Respond to iterative changes like: “replace all huts with stone houses” or “make the river narrower” - Maintain object hierarchy and labels for later editing

Tech Stack: - Blender Python scripting - Node.js server running MCP - LLM backend (OpenAI / Claude, easily swappable)

Demo: https://blender-mcp-psi.vercel.app/

GitHub: https://github.com/pranav-deshmukh/blender-mcp-demo/

Curious to hear thoughts from folks in 3D tooling, AI-assisted design, or dev interface design. Would you find this useful as a Blender plugin? I’m open to expanding it!

Please try it and give it a star on github
by MangoToupe | 2025-07-20 06:02:30+00:00
> It is the most incredible technology ever created by this point in our history imo and the cynicism on HN is astounding to me.

TBH, I still think LLMs have a long way to go to catch up to the technology of wikipedia, let alone the internet. LLMs at their peak are roughly a crappy form of an encyclopedia. I think the interactivity really warps peoples perspective to view it as more impressive, but it's difficult to piece together any value as a knowledge-store that is as impressive as clicking around the internet from 20 years ago. Wikipedia has preserved this value the best over the years. It's quite frustrating how quickly obviously LLM-generated content has managed to steal search results with super-verbose content that doesn't actually provide any value.

EDIT: I suppose the single use case of "there's some information I need to store offline but that won't be on wikipedia" is a reasonable case, but what does this even look like? I don't use LLMs like that so I can't provide an example.

Here's an example: I was trying to figure out details about applying to a visa last week in a certain country. I googled the problem I was having, and the top five results or so were pages that managed to split the description of the problem I was having into about 5 sections of text, and introduced the text indicating that there should be a solution (thereby looking to search results like I might find the solution if I clicked through), but didn't provide any actual content indicating how to approach the problem, let alone solve it. And, of course, this is driving revenue to some interest somewhere despite actively clogging up the internet.

Meanwhile, the actual answer was on another country's FAQ—presumably written by a human—on like page three of the search results.

At least old human-generated content would waste your time before answering your question, aka "why does this recipe have a 5000 word essay before the ingredient list and instructions" problem.
by khebbie | 2025-07-20 06:03:10+00:00
Just a heads-up from Denmark: card payments went completely down last night, and it wasn’t just a local glitch. Stores all over the country were affected—POS terminals dead, ATMs offline, even online transactions failed in some cases.

The payment provider Nets has confirmed the outage, but says they still don’t know what caused it. According to their statement, there’s no sign of terrorism or foreign interference—just a mysterious, wide-scale failure in the core infrastructure.

Zettle also reported a "major outage" for card processing in Denmark around the same time. Everything was back online within before midnight, but the incident left a lot of people (and businesses) stranded, unable to pay or be paid.

This is one of the most cashless countries in the world, and it really showed how brittle the system can be. No clear cause. No clear prevention. Just… silence and fallback to cash (for those who had any).
by matsemann | 2025-07-20 06:03:23+00:00
I was once interviewed by my country's biggest paper about "strava art" I make, aka biking/running with a gps logger in order to create some kind of figure on the map.

It was edited into this video about people drawing dicks on maps using this technique. Aka the intro was loads of penises on maps, and then "someone that enjoys making this kind of art is Mats here" and then the video interview started. When they ask why I "make this kind of art" I answered because it's nice for the motivation and makes me run longer routes. They then overlaid a growing "longer" text as a dick joke.

Now, the theme was anyways a silly one, so I don't mind. But made me realize how easy it is to edit stuff to suit what they want to show, no matter the context.

* I do admit I have also ran a penis, so it's not entirely incorrect. But all questions in the interview was in a general context and didn't know this was gonna be the angle.
Show HN: New Audiobook Generator for Nvidia Using Chatterbox TTS
by beboplifa | 2025-07-20 06:03:33+00:00
I am an audiobook addict that coded this https://github.com/cpttripzz/Chatterblez. I am using it all the time and it works nice. I have only bothered to get it working on windows but it should be cross-platform as it uses pyqt, I would be happy for contributors to help get it working on macos and linux and also ATI and other video cards.

If you are stuck without a video card I recommend using https://github.com/cpttripzz/audiblez it can generate an audiobook in around 4 hours with a decent CPU
by tombarys | 2025-07-20 06:05:08+00:00
> "Consumers don't care if art is generated by AI or humans"

Maybe not yet. The real "art" consumers were always very sensitive and asking for originality (thus scarcity). It is an essential principle of the art that it is a result of thousands/millions of deliberate choices. If you use machine for creation, you less choices. You delegate most of your talented/crazy/hard choices to the model (which is based on such choices of already talented but combines them in a random way). The result is thin, diluted even it seems like deliberate. In my opinion the most art lovers will continue to seek for the dense art made by human, asking for some kind of proof. :) The real art will be even more appreciated. I guess.
by moomoo11 | 2025-07-20 06:05:54+00:00
It is what we make of it. I'm 34 M.

I'm from a immigrant family, zero connections, and we are all workers.

I missed the chance to purchase a home in 2018-2020 time period. My friends who bought homes at that time are doing well, going on vacations and stuff because they were able to buy property for like 500-800k in California that has now doubled in price. They're paying like 2% interest too.

Oh well, no point in comparing. Worst case scenario, I'll figure it out and make my ancestors proud for getting me to this point lol. So, I have no choice but to be grateful and keep pushing.
by ashdksnndck | 2025-07-20 06:06:01+00:00
I have two primary complaints about Java, relative to Rust:

1. NullPointerException. I get some object with a bunch of fields and I don’t know which of them are null. In Rust I am given a struct, and usually the fields aren’t an Option unless they need to be.

2. Complicated design patterns with inheritance. Maybe it’s more of a problem with the culture/ecosystem than Java the language. But Rust doesn’t have inheritance, and traits are less complicated. So you rarely get the same smells.

Compared to C++, Java is easier to debug, but I still have a lot of “wtf” moments trying to understand what the author was thinking. It is almost like the language is so simple to write, people are making the program more complicated on purpose just to make it interesting.
by fifthace | 2025-07-20 06:08:17+00:00
The way I read it:

Vertical: industry specific (functionality that can only be used in one or a few industries). The ultimate case of this would be a completely custom solution a bank uses to do x, with a custom integration to their databases etc.

Horizontal: Can be used by many industries as they all need it (accounting software, communication & marketing etc.) Office 365 or Slack are classic examples.
by MangoToupe | 2025-07-20 06:08:53+00:00
Maybe it's my frequently-flagged ass, but this comment doesn't seem to contribute less than most other language-oriented commentary. In fact, it seems more honest and wastes less of our time than most. There must be thousands of vapid opinions shared about programming languages on this site each week, most of which are actively distracting to fruitful conversation, and many of which engage in openly-counterproductive bike shedding over syntax, arguing over phrases like "low-level" vs "high-level", whether or not rust's borrow-checker is the key to nirvana or a major distraction holding back our best hackers, etc. It truly makes any discussion about programming languages difficult to stomach.

The above comment at least seems concise, pushes a narrative that actually makes sense (you should pick the right tool for the job, even if I personally think rust is better as I noted in a sibling comment 7 hours before you). The person is openly stating a feeling as a feeling rather than as some kind of nuanced position, which is better than most HN commenters can manage to admit. It certainly doesn't come off as flame bait or a generic tangent, certainly not even compared to most of the commentary in this or related threads.

Also, I don't know how to vouch for said comment. I really don't like the flagging system, and I really wish we could opt-out of respecting it from the view of our logged-in profile. Even the whole 'show dead' thing still preserves the semantics of flagging restricting interaction.

> "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

If this standard were consistently enforced, this site would be a graveyard. At some point we must grapple with how this obviously not-enforced rule is leveraged in seemingly-arbitrary places.

---

In short: I have no clue why this particular comment is singled out when most engagement on programming language is a distinctly more flagrant violation of the rules. Even if I happen to disagree with it.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-20 06:08:55+00:00
C's simplicity is oversold, when taking into account that in practice it isn't the second edition of the K&R C book, adapted for ISO, rather a plethora of extensions, several standard revisions since 1989, zero care for security.

Dealing with security issues is one of my occupations, when having a DevOps role in project delivery, and I rather use that time elsewhere.
by 1718627440 | 2025-07-20 06:09:23+00:00
Making statistics about sex, age, number of children, clothing choice, walking speed without consent, sounds illegal. I think it isn't forbidden for the company, but for the individual already, because that's voyeuristic behaviour.

Watching what is bought is fine, but walking around to do that is useless work, because you have that in the accounting/sales data already.

There is stuff like PayPal and now per company apps, that works the same as on the web: you need to first sign a contract. I would rather that to be cracked done on, but I see that it is difficult, because you can't forbid individual choice. But I think the incentive is that products become cheaper when you opt-in to data collection. This is already forbidden though, you can't combine consent with other benefits, then it isn't free consent anymore. I expect a lawsuit in the next decades.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-07-20 06:09:48+00:00
a subject that is close to my heart as I've been accused recently of being AI by someone who evidently didn't like what I wrote.

Admittedly it did make me chuckle that they thought AI sounds like a depressed character in science fiction, which was what I was writing. Poor AI.

I do use my share of em-dashes but hardly ever use the word delve, unless discussing something that Adam and Eve did, or if I were to write about Dwarves, Kobolds, Lovecraftian horrors and their worshipers because in those cases I would expect delving to occur.
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-07-20 06:09:51+00:00
It basically comes down to the fact that the AI that exists now will enrich and empower corporations and the government, but won't do much for anybody else.

The pro-AI astroturfers are building the popular consensus of acceptance for what those in power will use AI for: disenfranchisement and oppression. And they are correct because the capabilities of AI right now will enable that, as stated above.

The AI denialists are correct as well: current AI isn't what it is popularly billed. The CEOs are falling over themselves claiming they can cut headcount to zero because of their visionary implementation of AI. It's the old prototype/demo but not the real system snowjob in software sales, alllll over again.

Any actual benefit of AI to the common man comes with the current state of how tech companies "benefit" a consumer: with absurd degrees of privacy invasion, weaponized psychological algorithms, attention destruction, etc.

Here's a fun startup that in invariably in the works: the omnipresent employee monitoring AI. Every click you make, every shit you take, every coffee you sip, and every meeting you tune out. Your facial expressions analyzed, your actual "passion" measured, etc. Amazon is already doing 80% of this without AI in the warehouses.

The only saving grace to that is Covid and WFH, where they don't have the right to intrude on your workspace. So next time you hear about the return to office, remember what is coming....
by apawloski | 2025-07-20 06:10:25+00:00
> Just five years after the 14th amendment was ratified, the Supreme Court said [...]

Cool, but the 14th amendment was ratified. At least we can agree on that. And this is what it says:

> All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

You can try to weasel out all you want, but it's at the disrespect to the words of our constitution. Whatever interpretation you are justifying this month, it is radical and lonesome.
by xpressvideoz | 2025-07-20 06:11:00+00:00
> there will be a proposal at some point to actually have an AI math Olympiad where at the same time as the human contestants get the actual Olympiad problems, AI’s will also be given the same problems, the same time period and the outputs will have to be graded by the same judges, which means that it’ll have be written in natural language rather than formal language.[1]

Last month, Tao himself said that we can compare humans and AIs at IMO. He even said such AI didn't exist yet and AIs won't beat IMO in 2025. And now that AIs can compete with humans at IMO under the same conditions that Tao mentioned, suddenly it becomes an apples-to-oranges comparison?

[1] https://lexfridman.com/terence-tao-transcript/
by baron816 | 2025-07-20 06:11:09+00:00
The supply of housing is more elastic than you think. Some people have spare bedrooms, or second homes in LA. They may have previously chosen to leave them vacant, but for many people the higher rates they can get on Airbnb can entice them to list them. This happens at the margins—it’s not an all or nothing thing. So the higher people can earn renting out available space, the more they’ll be willing to rent. At some price point, even a billionaire will rent out their garage.
by brucehoult | 2025-07-20 06:11:36+00:00
Well, yeah, management was dropping the ball on that side too. Should have hired Jensen, eh?

They did release a few updates to InfiniteReality but none were architectural, mostly just bumps to the size of texture and image RAM (32x!).

By the time InfiniteReality3 was introduced, NVidia already had GeForce 256 (and corresponding Quadro) which was was designed with input from former SGI engineers including ones who worked on InfiniteReality.

So, again, serious management fumble to lose those guys.

(regarding SGI and MIPS as one management entity, as they were until 1998-9)

SGI ended up using Quadro4 in their high end machines, as well as ATI cards in lower end ones.
by hakfoo | 2025-07-20 06:13:00+00:00
It's two different problems. Yes, if you absolutely positively have to be in London in four hours to Sign The Big Contract, you'll pay whatever the Concorde replacement charges and put up with whatever experience it offers.

But there's a huge market in conventional tourists that have more flexibility and could choose from more options.

A typical tourist-class trip is going to be one day of "Travel Misery Time" followed by "Actual Vacation" followed by another full day of "Travel Misery Time".

Yeah, theoretically it might be less than a full day door-to-door, but if you're not an experienced traveler with expert experience in managing timing, baggage rules, TSA procedures du jour, and navigating the facilities, you're probably writing off the whole day of arrival and departure. Nibbling away a couple hours in the metal death cylinder doesn't solve that.

What if we said "we can swap one day of Travel Misery Time for two days of Resort on Wheels Time?" You might get fewer days at the destination, but an overall more enjoyable trip. Rail can offer that. Even today's Amtrak long-hauls offer a comfortable sleeper room, real food, and actual scenery, and no airport suffering, and there's no reason future offerings couldn't introduce other amenities (i. e. a spa car, or scheduled entertainment).
by seec | 2025-07-20 06:13:06+00:00
It's interesting and all but in typical "Apple switcher" fashion, a preposterous comparison is/will be made: the M4 Pro MBP is around 3K€, replacing a laptop that seems to go for around 1K€ at best.

When something costs 3 times as much, it should be better. It's a bit like comparing an entry level Ford to an S class Mercedes.

I think the best "feature" of Apple computers is that it prevents cheapskates from making bad choices they will regret.

In my family, they use iPhones and I'm glad for it because if they would use Androids, they would just buy the cheapest garbage they could find and the experience would be miserable. It's funny how a corporation greed is actually useful to prevent some people being fucked by their own greed (stinginess is a form of reverse greed, particularly true when you actually have money).
by ghuntley | 2025-07-20 06:13:32+00:00
> That means, sooner or later there will be a great rebalancing where people will be required to do significantly more work; probably the work of other developers who will be fired.

Correct - covered here in my talk - https://ghuntley.com/six-month-recap/

AI isn't going to take anyone's jobs. Your co-worker who knows how to use multiple agents at a time and automates their job function will.
by hcnews | 2025-07-20 06:13:32+00:00
> Almost nobody sets prices manually. You either use Airbnb's pricing algorithm, or one from a third party. Either way it's set automatically based on local occupancy rates/hotel prices/etc.

This seems pretty undesirable. Very easy for Airbnb/third party to increase prices even without demand just to increase their prices.

We recently saw a similar price fixing lawsuit for renters. Landlords, co-ordinating together, ended up increasing prices of Condos across major American cities (via means of a third party). The consumer ends up paying unnecessarily high prices in an inelastic market.
by socalgal2 | 2025-07-20 06:13:59+00:00
What kind of cheese? If you want something strong like blue cheese you can try fermented tofu

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermented_bean_curd#/media/Fil...

I haven't tried it as a blue cheese sub dressing but if I just taste it on my chop sticks I feel it's at least in the same general direction. I'm pretty confident I could blend it into a a dressing or put it on a burger as a blue-cheese substitute.
by Moto7451 | 2025-07-20 06:14:26+00:00
The test setup ignores the digestive system. There are going to be a lot of substances you can pour on a culture of brain cells with negative affect that your body produces or happily consumes. That’s the point of the parent.

Add milk, an alcoholic beverage, or some lemon juice and those cells are unlikely to survive. Meanwhile the standard path of consumption handles the situation just fine before your brain is ever involved in metabolism.
by amingilani | 2025-07-20 06:15:25+00:00
> if you have trouble remembering how a knight moves, you can't be that good at Chess anyway.

Non sequitur.

It’s also still a valid question. I play the scales really well on the guitar. And because the frets are all laid out straight, shifting up by one fret means I’m just playing my chords and scales sharp. It makes transposing music incredibly easy.

I still don’t understand why the piano can’t be laid out like that.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-07-20 06:16:16+00:00
Nuclear EMP is a big risk to all electronics in a huge area. Solar EMP is millions of times weaker and measured in volts per kilometer. Anything unplugged or even just off-grid won't notice. Even on the grid the biggest risk isn't really the extra voltage on long wires but that some big transformers and other equipment are too noise intolerant and magnify issues.
by tombarys | 2025-07-20 06:16:39+00:00
Good point! Thanks.

I like the perspective of "choices" during creation. It is an essential principle of the real art that it is a result of thousands/millions of deliberate choices. This is what we admire on the art. If you use mostly machine (or other kind of ways that decide instead and for you) for creation, you as an creator simply do less choices.

In this case, you delegate many of your experienced/crazy/hard decisions to the model (which is based on such decision made already by other artists but combines them in a random way). It is like decompressing JPG – some things are just hallucinated by machine.

From the perspective of pure human creativity, the result is thin, diluted. Even it seems like deliberate. In my opinion art lovers will seek for the dense art made by human, maybe asking even more for some kind of "proof" of the human-based process. What do you think?
by dangero | 2025-07-20 06:18:54+00:00
Have you had the realization that you could never go back to dealing with all the minutia again?

LLMs have changed me. I want to go outside while they are working and I am jealous of all the young engineers that won’t lose the years I did sitting in front of a screen for 12 hours a day while sometimes making no progress on connecting two black boxes.