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  • Hacker News
  • One not mentioned in the article, but being built by someone I know is https://schist.app/
  • People are recompiling games, vibecoding Photoshop clones in the past week.

    What does this mean for the American economy, 80% of GDP attributed to services? Will every country have their own ecosystem like China?

    What stops Canada from decoupling from US tech, and making their own software ecosystem? Considering the Europeans were already moving in this direction, can't they just recompile their own versions of software?

    Is the future of software just cloud software? Advancements in local encryption like TPM?

  • Vibecoded photoshop will never work.

    If you're a casual user, just use AI directly - upload image and tell model to remove background, or make it cinematic, etc.

    If you're a professional, you'll want the best.

  • For people interested in a Photoshop clone, https://www.photopea.com/ was amazing long before LLMs existed. It runs in the browser and was built by a single person!
  • I feel like a major problem here is that people are more interested in vibeslopping their own Photoshop clone than contributing to an existing one. This results in a situation where theres a million clones that split the market and don't gain any traction.

    I'll stick to gimp I guess.

  • The thing is: there are color spaces, correct filtering etc, etc.

    Sure you can do a Photoshop clone as in "Ps in 1990" if you just ask an LLM because then (and for years after) Ps itself got all this stuff wrong and people used it, professionally nevertheless.

    But getting these things right requires, as-always, in-depth understanding of the theory behind it or the LLMs will gladly omit those parts.

    Not least because the majority of OSS code dealing with those things gets it subtly wrong. And they've been trained on that.

    A good start is btw. to ask your agent of choice to copy all theory/basics from OpenImageIO.

    How do I know? I'm maintaining a closed-source, heavily LLM-assisted Rust crate that is the backbone of all image processing we do at my employer (kringers fossed it will be OSS eventually).

    The amount of subtly-wrong- bites-you-eventually bugs I fixed (or had an agent fix, rather), despite tight specs and good tests, over the last 10 months, is ... noteworthy.

    That said, for a lot of users it probably doesn't matter if interpolating between red and green means getting a muddy brown or that you get subtely wrong colors when you downsample and some (or quite a bit ) of aliasing when you do so more than 2× etc.

    But while a lot of people want to prompt a clone of app X and an unexpected many also seem to have the patience for it: few have the background to get sth. out of that endeavour that will be genuinely useful in the end.

    The CAD/parametric 3D modeling segment is another category I'm watching closely where a lot of people have the same issue w/o (yet) realizing.

    And ofc, there are always exceptions where seemingly someone is behind the project who actually do know what they're doing. :)

  • I think people aren't thinking enough about the second-order effects of this.

    The immediate reaction is to ask whether any of these would be good enough to replace Photoshop (or Pixelmator or whatever). That's a first-order question and it's an open one --- you probably couldn't replace a real workflow with vibe Photoshop today, but I wouldn't bet against that being the case a year from now.

    But the second-order questions include consideration of the people who can't use Photoshop, either because of cost or (to me, more importantly) because of lack of platform support.

    In a world where 90% of the functionality of things like Photoshop and Word are replaceable with personal apps, how much does platform support matter anymore? How much do platforms matter anymore? I'm a committed macOS user and have been since the TiBook. Will I be 5 years from now? I'm deeply uncertain, but one thing I'm pretty sure of is that if I'm not a macOS user, I also won't be a Windows or Linux user.

  • By the way, PhotoSuite is just a stolen copy of my project www.photopea.com , which I have been working on for 8 hours a day for the past ... 14 years? :D

    It was discussed here on HN yesterday and then, the anonymous person behind it removed the "Issues" section completely from their Github

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49972730

    https://replayweb.page/?source=https://archive.org/cors/gith...

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