The fact that CIA was associating with them is direct proof that they were.

Also, it’s really funny how people think that private ownership by a small percentage of the population is somehow better than state ownership. It’s peak temporarily embarrassed billionaire mentality.

conditioning

If you think that restoration of capitalism, which is what they were trying to accomplish was legitimate then there’s really nothing else to say to you. And you’re entitled to your opinion which conveniently ignores the power of western imperialism and what happened historically when it wasn’t countered with force.

Just because people spent a lot of time learning a specific skill doesn’t mean it has intrinsic value to it. The reason most people aren’t making lace by hand is because it’s more efficient to automate the process. But nothing stops people learning skills because they enjoy doing them even if these have been automated. I do kenjutsu, it has no practical application, but I enjoy it. I don’t see what the problem here is to be honest.

Like I said, it’s usable as is for random things I do day to day like making memes. Maybe I’ll run into some show stoppers, but I’m fairly optimistic so far. I suspect most people who aren’t graphics designers don’t really have terribly sophisticated workflows. Both Photoshop and GIMP are huge, and everyone who’s not a professional uses a small subset of the overall features.

And I just don’t see why we should care whether this post might help some company in some unspecified way over whether these apps might help people on this forum. Especially given how niche of a forum Lemmy is in the grand scheme of things. The reason this story made it here in the first place is because it already got mainstream coverage. As you point out, the business model these companies have is unsustainable, so I don’t really spend time worrying about how many customers these companies get in the short run. We’re very obviously in a bubble here, and there’s no credible business model. These companies are basically subsidizing people having fun, and I don’t really see much of an issue with that. The bubble will pop and most of the negative side effects will go with it. My expectation is that local models is where things are headed after the bubble.

And yeah that video is precisely why I think Photocraft is fine. He’s a professional designer, and he is used to using parts of the tool I just don’t need. The basic levels adjustment is all I ever use for example. But take something like adding a stroke to text. This is a common thing I do if I make a meme. In Photocraft, I just add some text, go to blending options on the layer and add stroke. Done. In GIMP, this is a whole adventure last I tried.

I don’t think how they went about it is really worth arguing about since we’re both just speculating here. Ultimately, it’s the end result that’s relevant not how the sausage was made.

And we’ll see if Adobe goes after them on the basis that it’s warez or not. I think it’s entirely likely that they might even if there’s no legitimate ground to do that. Companies are well known for bullying open source projects that are viewed as a threat to their profits.

OK, I’m taking that to mean that you haven’t actually identified any specific features (or PSD compatibilities) that PhotoCraft has over GIMP besides the UX?

Just to reiterate this point. I do not care what level of feature parity it has with Photoshop or GIMP. My only interest is that it works for my use case, and that’s what I tested. It solves a problem for me as an individual by providing me with a tool that has the UX I like and the functionality that I need.

Meanwhile right now we’re drowning in new 1M LOC slop projects overpromising and underdelivering.

But what is the actual problem here. It’s not like I’m forced to look at any of these projects, or use them. I keep seeing people talk about this like it’s some software apocalypse, but I personally have yet to be affected by any of this in a negative way. My experience so far is that I got a few useful open source apps now that let me replace proprietary ones.

And I also maintain open source projects and libraries. I haven’t seen any flood of LLM generated pull requests on them either. Maybe it’s a bigger issue for large and popular projects, but it seems that even there people are split on whether they like getting more contributions or not.

So, I see more upsides than downsides here on the whole.

I don’t know what’s so hard for you here to understand to be honest. Genuine grievances did exist, but they were exploited and fomented artificially by the CIA. Both things happened at the same time. That’s exactly how the CIA operates.

The student movement, the factory strikes, the elected workers’ councils, all of that is documented. They had real complaints about living conditions. But real anger doesn’t mean the uprising wasn’t steered and fomented externally. The CIA and Radio Free Europe agitated for unrest, amplified it, and pushed it toward insurrection. They advised insurgents on how to build barricades and fight Soviet troops. They dangled the false hope that the West would intervene. Dulles saying “we encouraged them but we cannot save them, the propaganda value was enough” tells you everything you need to know about this uprising. They never intended to help, but they wanted a spectacle for anti-communist propaganda and an opening for intelligence expansion, so they helped create the conditions for one.

So the question isn’t whether grievances were real. It’s who exploited them and whose interests they served. The CIA fomented the uprising to advance its own Cold War agenda to manufacture the insurrection. That doesn’t negate the legitimacy of the complaints in any way. It just means the uprising itself was not the organic expression of the Hungarian people that you’re making it out to be.

As for Béla Király, you’re right that the timeline doesn’t support him being a CIA plant before the revolution. He was arrested in 1951, sentenced to death in 1952, and only paroled in September 1956. The CIA relationship came after the revolution, when the Hungarian Freedom Fighter Federation was founded in New York in 1957 with Király as its chairman. But none of that actually matters here because the CIA didn’t need a single agent inside to steer the uprising. They had Radio Free Europe, they had leaflet drops, they had a whole information warfare apparatus in place, the operation of which is explained in great detail in the book I linked you. They didn’t need to train militants in the mountains when they could push people toward insurrection through propaganda.

The weight of historical evidence isn’t on the side of a reactionary coup in the sense that the grievances were fake. The uprising itself was exploited and fomented artificially by the CIA. Both things are true at the same time, and the real discontent of Hungarians was used to serve American imperial interests.

Given how close the project matches the original, I have a hard time imagining this could’ve been done without examining how the original functions. And whether it’s copyright infringement or not is of little interest to me since I view copyrights as being inherently harmful. However, since the implementation is using a different language, that does make the implementation itself a clean room one.

Ultimately, it’s a moot point whether they decompiled or wrote a spec from scratch though. What matters is that the apps work and it mimics what Adobe ones do sufficiently well to be useful.

And it still takes time to add features using LLMs. It’s not magic, and I’m more amazed how much they managed to add already rather than it not having parity yet.

Reimplementing Photoshop is obviously a much bigger effort, but I’m just using that as an illustration that LLMs are pretty good at reverse engineering work. Which makes it plausible to me that they could get a lot of the features figured out quickly.

I’m not a designer, so my needs are meagre. I want layers, to be able to select objects, add text, do color correction, and so on. Both GIMP and Photoshop are huge, so I haven’t had a chance to explore the depths. All I can say is that I was able to get the things I normally do without any real friction. It does appear to work with PSDs fairly well, but again I don’t have really complex ones because I use the tool in an amateur way to begin with.

What I can definitively say is that the UX is strictly superior to GIMP. Doing stuff like text manipulation like changing size or selecting fonts has always been a pain in GIMP, and as much as I want to like it, I find it painful to use. Photocraft apes Photoshop UX which I find to be superior. So, the feature parity isn’t really the stumbling point for me, it’s the UX.

But that’s my whole point here, most people are in the same boat as me. They do a few specific things with a tool, and if those things work then the tool solves the problem.

How long it’s been developed is… two weeks, as of today. How many users? It’s far too soon to say.

But this is something that’ll sort itself naturally over the coming months. If the developer stays active and continues working on it, then it’ll keep getting better. If they abandon it and move on then it’ll either die or somebody else picks it up. But it is in a fairly usable state as is from my experience, and I’d argue a lot of the hard work has already been done. So, we’ll have to just wait and see what happens with it.

Another point to mention though, is that it is becoming viable to maintain your own tools now. For example, if Photocraft got abandoned. It works well enough for me, and I could have an LLM fix any gaps in the way I’m using it. I don’t have to maintain a general tool that everyone can use, I can just have one that does what I need.

The barrier before was that you had to spend a lot of time to figure out how any one app works to make meaningful changes to it. And you only have so much time in a day, so you can’t really take ownership of a bunch of tools like that. But with LLMs it is becoming much more practical. Grab an open source app, adopt it to work the way you want, and just keep using it. If you ever need new features, you just have the LLM add them in for you.

And if we get to the point where all this stuff can be done using local models, then we really could see Stallman’s vision for GNU become a reality. Regular people, who aren’t developers, could use fully open source stacks, and they could modify software to work exactly the way they want. If we’re lucky this might kill closed source software entirely in the long run.

likely a big factor

It’s not what I think, it’s what documents released by the CIA say. You’re the one who keeps pretending that it was some organic worker movement. Meanwhile, the book describes with numerous examples, of how these reactionaries are groomed and used by the west. It’s obvious that you’re going to continue believing whatever you need to believe, so there’s really no point continuing the discussion.

Have you seen anyone claiming that this brand-new vibe-coded thing has better compatibility (and/or feature parity) with the proprietary applications it claims to replace than the mature free software solutions currently do?

Given that people are literally just reverse engineering these applications by having the LLM decompile it and observe what it does in memory, yeah I expect these will be compatible much faster than manual efforts. I did something similar recently where I had an LLM figure out the proprietary format for the way my Nikon camera stores RAW files. There’s currently no open source implementation for it, and now I can read them using my own library. So, something that used to be a herculean effort before, is something you can now do in a few days using an LLM.

I haven’t played with the Office stuff, but I am using his PhotoCraft and LightCraft, and they work fine for what I need. I can process my photos using completely open source tools now that have a UX I’m used to. Yet, I’m aware that LightTable exists, and I’ve tried using it, and it was not a great experience. Given how fresh these projects are, it’s absolutely incredible to me. And with LLMs it’s possible for me to fix whatever issues I have with the app myself. The reality is that most people don’t really need to do anything incredibly complex with these tools. So, if they do what you need you have an app you can keep using indefinitely. The hard part has always been to build out the initial features and the UX which was just too hard to do by hand.

It’s made it so easy that there is currently a deluge new projects which often seem plausible at first but mostly turn out to actually be garbage upon closer inspection.

You’re saying this as if NPM ecosystem didn’t exist before LLMs. The reality is that there has always been a ton of garbage projects. Over time people gravitate towards projects that actually work and are useful to them. And this isn’t hard problem people keep making it out to be. You look at the number of stars a project has, how long it’s been developed, how many users it has, and so on. This gives you an idea of whether it has legs or not. I’ll certainly trade having to rely on proprietary software for the problem of having too many open source options.

It’s irrational not to be skeptical of a two-week-old project claiming to be ready (or “almost” ready, lmao) to replace multiple 30-year-old suites of software.

Seems to me that the rational thing is to try the project, see if it does what you need and decide based on that. But that’s just me.

The tsar tried to flee Russia by train during the revolution, and the rail workers caught him.

How the education system adjusts to this tech will be interesting to watch. I expect that humans who understand how stuff works is going to be a requirement for the foreseeable future, and societies will inevitably adjust. There’s always been panic and chaos every time new a disruptive technology has been invented, but humanity inevitably adjusts to it. I don’t see any reason to think this will be any different.

There are already chips being developed specifically for running LLMs, so it’s almost certain this will become akin to having a GPU in the future.

• https://www.anuragk.com/blog/posts/Taalas.html
• https://wccftech.com/alibabas-tsmc-built-5nm-risc-v-chip-xuantie-c950-now-runs-qwen-3-8-27b-model-natively-unlocking-massive-vertical-integration-tailwinds/

And this tech is now being developed in China as well, so you might not have to rely on western hardware either going forward. Chinese companies are building stuff on top of RSIC-V like the Alibaba chip I linked above, and I fully expect there will be a lot of focus on Linux as China continues to decouple from the US tech stack.

I can see a completely different kind of future where local models that run on commodity software get good enough for what most people need to do. At that point we’d be in a world that Stallman envisioned with every user having full control over what’s running on their machine, and being able to build whatever features they want. We already see how it’s becoming trivial to reverse engineer complex apps like Photoshop, or to crack PS5 games using LLMs. We are likely end up in a world where closed source is dead because code itself no longer has any value because anybody can copy and reproduce any application trivially.

And we are already starting to get there. Qwen 3.8 27b is comparable in terms of capability to Opus 4.6 which was a frontier model just half a year ago. If Qwen 4 gets to about Opus 5.5 level sometime next year, that’s going to be good enough for making vast majority of software that people need. After that it’s just a matter of further optimization or hardware getting better so it can run on most computers. But just to reiterate, it’s already running on consumer grade hardware, and it can do real work today.

I completely agree, using an open model would be far more inline with the spirit of open source.

lifting import controls on renewables from China would be a good start

It does look like software devs are starting to wake up. Amusingly, AI is really helping people realize they don’t live in a democracy. A lot of the complaints we see from software developers boil down to the fact that they don’t get to decide how the technology evolves or how they work with it. The idea that people in the west live in a democracy and they get to make all the decisions drilled into them from a very young age. AI being pushed on them without them being able to have any say in the matter is jarring because it exposes how liberal democracy has an underlying class character to it.

exactly