Thread

1. echelon · 1791162243 · focus · HN ↗

   Haha, I wasn't ready to post this to HN. It's not anywhere close to ready. But thank you aghuang. (I want to post this again when we clear Beta phase.)

   These are still super early alpha. All MIT/Apache licensed. No telemetry.

   I'm going to try to drive these to 100% parity but it's going to take a minute. And I'll need lots of help. (Anyone want to join me? I'll pay stipends and bug bounties.)

   I'm going to do Microsoft Office, AutoCAD, and Solidworks too. Probably a lot of stuff to collapse.

   It's not just SaaSocalypse. Everything can be open source multiplatform Rust now.

   Party like it's 1999 and the Internet / tech scene belongs to us again. We can literally deenshittify the world without breaking a sweat.

   1. 4b11b4 · 1791162716 · focus · HN ↗

      I like this mindset but damn that's a lot of tokens? At what cost? And then to continue to maintain and .. idk.. I suppose it'll work? If the motivation is strong enough and momentum is sustained?

      1. echelon · 1791162992 · focus · HN ↗

         Only have to pay the price once.

         I'm sick of Gimp, Krita, and Inkscape being the best Linux and open source have to offer.

         1. dofm · 1791163571 · focus · HN ↗

            I m not really a fan of GIMP but Krita and Inkscape are both serious and competent apps with their own principles and features, made by people who care and who seriously understand their knowledge domains, and I would rather have either than AI-slop clones of Adobe apps that enshrine Adobe’s dated workflows in open source that no human wrote.

            I think you can do this project of yours without being dismissive of the work (and the merits of the work) done by real people over years.

            Be careful of what you might damage by doing this.

            1. amlib · 1791165850 · focus · HN ↗

               >I think you can do this project of yours without being dismissive of the work (and the merits of the work) done by real people over years.

               Specially when the LLMs he is using to make this software were 100% trained and likely heavily influenced by the software he is shitting on.

            2. alightsoul · 1791171573 · focus · HN ↗

               Those dated workflows are what people seem to want, they say any creative app that doesn't behave like adobe is not worth considering

               1. dofm · 1791174722 · focus · HN ↗

                  Maybe.

                  Affinity works both similarly and differently and is now pretty popular.

                  It’s different but really not inferior to Photoshop, for example (better live filters, cross model curves, better layer blending), and it’s not inferior to InDesign or Illustrator, mostly. It does have a file format that allows all three to coexist (in fact it effectively always did).

                  They all have sufficient familiarity (the basics of the tools and layers are now pretty much a standard “medium” that most photo/painting apps implement, after all) but they have their own advantages. The integration between the three apps is way ahead.

                  I just don’t see why anyone would make open source apps that don’t move things forward (Krita and Inkscape do, in their own ways).

                  It’s also a pretty hollow demonstration of AI, ultimately, to use it to just clone ripoffs, but it does have a sort of fractal self-similarity I suppose.

                  1. alightsoul · 1791175546 · focus · HN ↗

                     Affinity is not open source so there's that. There should be an OSS Photoshop drop in alternative like affinity tries to be

                     1. dofm · 1791175925 · focus · HN ↗

                        Is there an open source “drop-in alternative” for really any desktop app of substance? Plenty of excellent alternatives, very few that drop in and don’t have some kind of conceptual differences (even LibreOffice, which after all started as a closed source app).

                        I don’t think anyone is served well by pursuing blatant cloning in open source. But if this is the shoddy destiny of AI coding then I am at peace with it. People can use lazy knockoffs if they want.

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