Which is what, exactly? As far as I can tell, it seems more about what he wants to not allow. At the end of the day I respect an author's choice whether to close source to something even if I disagree with it, but it feels a little euphemistic to describe that as "allowing" something.
The backlash is so completely unwarranted. This is a piece of free software where the creator is making it easier to use on free software platforms. If you don't want PDN on Linux because you hate AI no matter what, then don't use it. Don't rage attack the creator so that others can't use PDN.
Thanks Rick Brewster! I love PDN. It isn't as capable as Photoshop, but it isn't a rental, and it does 99% of what I need it to do. I've even bought it on the Microsoft Store just to support it.
At the risk of opening up the usual can of worms, I feel like the terminology "free software platform" is not something I've seen used in the sense that you're describing paint.net as "free". I genuinely got confused the first time I read your comment because referring to Linux as "free software platforms" made me assume that you meant the other type of free, which paint.net is not.
English only has "free". PDN is gratis, free as in beer. While the free software platforms (WINE, Linux) are libre, free as in speech.
I still think the argument holds though that people who have maybe used PDN but haven't contributed time, code, money, or even bug reports have no business raging at its author because he used AI to make it run on WINE/Linux. Literal ingrates.
It's not clear to me what argument you thought I was making. To reiterate, I was saying that I had never heard someone say "free software platform" and not mean "libre", so I found it a bit odd to refer to paint.net supporting Linux as "free software on free software platforms". You're welcome to disagree with me, but I'm struggling to understand how you came to the conclusion that I was not aware of free as in beer versus freedom based on what I wrote.
I wasn't disagreeing. I even upvoted your comment. I was just clarifying which kinds of free I was intending. Your previous comment said that PDN is not "the other type of free" without defining or clarifying what kind of free "the other type" is.
It looks like the original post was removed, but there are some screenshots going around (unfortunately X doesn't let you view full-size unless you're logged in): https://x.com/ChrisCroy/status/2094867317163540937
Outside of tech communities like HN, I see anti-AI rhetoric everywhere. A very large number of humans see AI as a purely evil and parasitic thing, no matter how it’s used. It’s an especially common view among artists and young people.
Whether or not you agree about AI, when you’re communicating to a wider audience, you have to read the room.
Yeah, Bluesky is pretty much singlemindedly focused on hating AI at this point. It's odd. Sort of feels like it's becoming a sanctuary (though definitely not a healthy one) for people who just can't deal with the post-2020 world - a lot of yelling about people who don't mask up, who dare to use AI, etc.
I constantly hear this refrain, but almost everyone I know is insufferably pro-AI. I myself am neutral to skeptical, I think it’s overhyped and only semi-useful (to me personally) but not the end of humanity.
> Al haters are basically a very small minority and almost all of them are online. It isn't a large number.
Without even getting into the AI part of this claim, how can you have any confidence about a claim like this when there are always going to be several orders of magnitude more people who are online than people you interact with offline? You could replace "AI haters" with "people who live in <continent I don't live in>" and end up with something that's pretty much entirely true in your subjective experience but quite obviously false objectively. How do you tell what's your bubble and what's actually what most people think?
Because the most vocal people are always a minority and I can use my own good judgement.
I am also not in any "bubble" group and I am one of those people that are very suspicious of cliques.
I spent as much time talking to people that are neutral, positive and negative on AI.
Most of the AI haters IME of interacting with them irrational and are full of very poor arguments for their position. Almost all of it is emotional and/or out of ignorance. I've seen the exact same arguments made on US and UK based websites.
A lot of AI-skepticism I've encountered IRL/more-normie space comes from fears of what their children will do for work and the large data centre projects being approved by government without enough consultation of local residents. I think these are both valid concerns.
I think you might be misunderstanding what I mean by the word "bubble". It's quite literally impossible to talk to a representative sample of people the size of the internet, so judging purely by people you've interacted with is to me by definition a bubble. The fact that you claim to have sought out conversations with a variety of viewpoints but someone are of the opinion that the people online can't possibly represent a substantial group or are worth taking seriously rather than maybe just people you haven't talked to directly is a bit hard not to be skeptical of.
You seem to be under the impression that I’m only talking to a small group of people. I’m talking about conversing on forums and Discord, reading different news articles, watching different media, and hearing it discussed by people who are both IT/software professionals and people who work in other fields. I am deliberately avoiding taking my information from a clique or a bubble, as I’ve already explained.
Moreover, I personally find this sort of discussion point / tactic to be very frustrating. It essentially stops any form of discussion, doesn't provide me or anyone else new information and doesn't really point anything out that is incorrect with my rationale than it isn't statistically sound when I wasn't pretending it was. I've factored that into my thought process and I am open to changing my mind.
My rationale is relatively simple:
- It is known that the most vocal/extreme people (on any side of any issues) are a minority, there is nothing controversial with this statement.
- It is also known that there is a technological adoption curve (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle) which is basically a bell curve. This model is well known and I don't think there is much that is controversial with the basic premise of it.
- When anything that is pushed too much and AI has been hyped massively, there will be a reaction and people will push back.
I can then use this knowledge and then apply it to what I am seeing online and IRL and then form my opinion, which I have already stated.
Now I understand that some people can get drawn into cliques and "bubbles" where they only see information that confirms their own confirmation bias. That is why I bothered listening to people that hold opposite opinions to my own.
I've found many of the arguments to simply be poor including people that many people laud like Ed Zitron (you may have seen there was a blog post by Danluu saying he has been consistently wrong that was on this site a few days ago). I also think that they are essentially in their own bubble.
So this idea that I (or anyone else) cannot be cautiously skeptical and attempt a level headed assessment of sentiment based on what I am seeing online and IRL because it isn't rigorously statistically sound is a nonsense and just derails any discussions into where I having to defend what is a relatively normal (albeit informal) decision making process.
I don't frequently downvote but you deserve one. I cannot see the racial slur, other posters cannot either; you know the story about the boy who cried wolf, you're doing exactly as that boy and therefore you are unhelpful your cause!
I do think it is worth questioning why an entire thread is filled specifically and exclusively with cartoon character avatars. Pick a thread, pretty much any thread on bsky with 20+ replies and I believe you'll have trouble reproducing these results. I have had trouble finding one.
Feel free to locate some and point them out to me. Let me know how many threads it took you to find one. I am genuinely curious.
My guess is they are hobby artists who think that AI and piracy are the only things preventing them from making it big. There’s more of these out there than you would think.
If you look at the quality of their avatars it becomes clear why they aren’t making money as artists.
I didn't quite want to say it myself since I've been so negative sometimes lately. But it was something I noticed and picking a random profile to view was pretty stomach turning.
But I get there is backlash. Not everyone lives in the bubble HN does. Not even everyone here is accepting of AI. I don't even know where I stand many times. But something feels off about this response. It's certainly looking brigaded.
On my home feed was another AI announcement. Few comments. Zero hate. And I definitely expected more there.
Paint.NET is (partially) art software. The art community has a negative view of AI. Therefore announcements of AI use in Paint.NET get a negative reaction, more so than something like AI startup #491000
I see your point, but I always got the impression that Paint.NET was a barebones image/photo editor for power users. Typically something full featured like Photoshop, Krita, or Illustrator would be more in the art software camp, IMHO.
A basic AM/FM radio does receive radio, but you wouldn’t lump it in with a Yaesu or even a Baofeng.
I’m just surprised to see so many strong opinions from people who probably don’t even use the software (although they pretend they do).
I honestly suspect that if he said he was using OpenAI instead, the results would be completely different. Ever since the DOD thing, pretty much every sub, thread, or reference to Claude, has resulted in vitriol. It mostly materializes as one-line comments and harassment.
What I noticed in this is that literally every single poster has a cartoon avatar. I assume they farm their karma in threads related to a game, movie, show, etc.
Sure - they even unselfishly share all their noises with as much people as possible. As much as the engine can produce (i.e. better be a rich biker, then you can make your engine share a lot more or it).
Just FYI, Honda Goldwing (the archetypal Huge Luxurious Expensive 1800cc Motorcycle For Your Mid-Life Crisis) has about the same noise level as any ordinary car. I had one for years. Please don't lump everyone up under "they", you only notice the loud ones.
Then you are not a "biker". You just ride a motorcycle. (The most major) Part of being a biker is to disrupt with noise. Or why do the machines (typically) get louder and louder with the price tag? Because technology doesn't know a way to do better? Sure... Vote me down, but don't ask me to be naive. The major part of that hobby is to be unpleasantly loud in public spaces (the more people around the better).
The irony is as well, I would almost be willing to bet almost every single one neither uses paint.net nor linux, and that these changes would have literally zero impact on them whatsoever.
Paint.net is just one of those freeware apps that became a sorta figment of retro identity for some people, akin to winamp. Even if they havent touched it in over a decade, they feel entitled to become vengeful for their nostalgia being "tainted".
I don't see the issue. The thing I can't move past with generative AI is that it wouldn't exist without the labour of people who post things for free on the internet, but it's displacing those same people from their day jobs. Legal or not, I think having your own work used against your will to harm you is something to be justifiably angry about.
And many pro-AI communities sweep the issue under the rug, consider it invalid in some way, or just over-discussed and boring. They have to, because it's uncomfortable and it has no solution. There is no generative AI without scraped datasets. But the consequence of ignoring the issue is that you might be surprised when you encounter a large group who are still very (justifiably) angry about it. Bluesky has a large community of people who post art for free on the internet.
You can't expect them to be civil either, when so many countries are in a cost of living crisis. No one faces losing their home or health insurance and thinks "I'd better be polite to the people doing it," and a high profile developer posting publicly about implementing a long-asked-for feature with AI is exactly what the AI marketing machine needs. A lot of devs are wondering whether AI-generated code is good or slop, and it's the opinion of other respected devs that sways them.
Also, let's not forget that PDN isn't FOSS. Linux platform knowledge was scraped from FOSS Linux software, trained into AI, and is being used to port a closed source program to Linux where it will displace FOSS alternatives. And the dev expects a pat on the back from the community? Why?
Bluesky is pretty decent and has features that I like over X, but much of its user base are from the Great Xodus (pardon the pun): people who frame their switch to Bluesky as some kind of boycott of X, ie, a bunch of moralists. They didn't leave X because it's a hellscape of trashing and toxicity, no, they left because the politics changed. And so Bluesky is now saturated with people who are very opinionated, very loud about it, and very willing to engage in trashing.
Nah, Twitter is still absolutely rotten with toxicity. The Great Xodus happened due to the rapid chuddification of Twitter under its new management: it was over politics, not toxicity. As such they brought the toxicity with them like a plague.
Bluesky has this nice feature where you can mute lists, so someone made a MAGA list (https://bsky.app/profile/skywatch.blue/lists/3l53cjwlt4o2s), and yet I was still seeing MAGA stuff on my feed because all the Twitter refugees were screenshotting Twitter nonsense and laundering it into my feed. Utterly ridiculous.
I find myself agreeing with this a lot, as well as the secondhand amplification many do. I get some want to brigade but often times that very action is what leads to all sorts of awful content coming upon social media feeds in general, because they simply have to show others how awful this thing they saw was.
Its not exclusive to bluesky by any margin, but it does become especially concerning as a double standard to filter lists.
There’s nothing surprising about Bluesky’s audience being toxic to any mention of AI. It’s the dogma over there and anyone who doesn’t agree has long left or never joined.
> It’s the dogma over there and anyone who doesn’t agree has long left or never joined.
Tell me you aren't on literally any other social media site without telling me.
Even HN has it's fair share of anti-ai criticism.
The only place that might not be like that also doubles as a child porn factory. I'll take anti-AI bias over visiting a pedo paradise any day of the week.
> Alright everyone, message received. I was not expecting this response, I honestly had no idea before I made the post
The source got deleted, what is the backlash even about? People don't like .net software running on Linux?
> Like I said, the code is experimental. A proof of concept showing that PDN-on-WINE is possible. It's not finished. I can literally just delete it. It won't be part of the next build.
This almost sounds like sarcasm and a reference to the whole "The Bun-rewritten-in-Rust branch is just a prototype and probably means nothing" Tweet that initially made the frontpage when it. But I think it's in earnest, just very similar to how I remember that Tweet I suppose.
>Paint .NET-on-WINE has never been possible because of Direct2D, which WINE has really struggled with (for good reasons).
>So like ... why not reimplement Direct2D-in-Paint .NET? Remove the dependency on WINE completely. Clean room reverse engineering ...
>Thanks to Claude Code, it's now a reality. More story in the link above.
>It's buggy and slow, but real progress is being made.
>And I have no idea when/if this will be "production ready" or "supported" or even "good enough." Maybe next year, maybe next month, maybe 2035.
>Claude made more progress on this in 3 weeks than we've seen in the 12 years since PDN started using Direct2D in 2014.
>This isn't to talk down to the WINE folks, btw. Direct2D has a really complicated effects system, and probably only PDN really uses it, so the ROI was very low.
>AI doesn't care. And it doesn't get tired. And this is the perfect task for it: it already has the design (D2D's docs and API), and it already has a known-good implementation of it and an app to test against and bang its head against.
>So that's what it did: it banged its head against d2d1.dll and paintdotnet.exe for about 3 weeks until it was able to boot up PDN. In WINE. For real.
>Here's PDN on .NET 10 win-x64, in WINE 11.14-dev, on Ubuntu, in WSL2, on Windows 11. And yes it works on real Linux too.
There is a very vocal section of the userbase who are vehemently anti-AI. Blocklists help avoid them (using them or being on them). However there is also a really good AI community on there. It's generally a lot less commercially-focused than on Twitter, for better and worse. It helps that atproto itself is really good for agents. They know how to use it, and the data is all open and accessible. Lots of people have been experimenting with agents that "live" on Bluesky, some of which are really interesting.
I wouldn't say it's a "really good AI community". There's not really much discussion that happens on new papers, techniques, new GPU kernels, topologies, etc etc. There's a few folks whose content I enjoy that generally revolves around philosophizing around how widespread LLM-style intelligence will affect society for both good and bad which is fun to read from time-to-time but not the level of context I desire out of an AI discussion.
Unless I'm not following the right people which can totally be the case. I've stopped using the platform regularly because of how present this mob mentality toxicity is on the site.
Why not just ignore them? Most of them are probably not Paint.net users anyway. Why listening to some randos most of who wouldn't be using your software anyway.
I wonder if we will ever get AI-optimized language sets, ie code instructions given specifically to AI agents to develop code for a JIT interpreter. This gives the same results each and every time the instruction to AI is given no matter the version of LLM used.
That's not true. The Bluesky team are themselves pretty pro-AI and open about how LLMs are used to build Bluesky and are necessary for moderation.
Lots of SWEs on Bluesky (e.g. me) use LLMs a lot and follow other people who do too.
On the other hand, artists and writers on there generally hate AI and will gladly take time out of their day to loudly gang up on anyone they see as betraying them.
I think they just meant it as "Bluesky the community" rather than "Bluesky Social, PBC employees". E.g. just like "HN loves corrections" (hello!) refers to the HN community and "Reddit discusses the title" the same.
We're in a reply chain discussing a mob of digital artists exercising verbal violence against a digital painting software author who used LLM to assist with the code. This is literally an analogous situation.
What does verbal violence mean non-hyperbolically to you?
>Verbal abuse (also known as [...] verbal violence [...]) is a type of psychological abuse that involves the use of oral or written language directed to a victim. Verbal abuse can include the act of harassing, labeling, insulting, scolding, rebuking, or excessive yelling towards an individual.
On the contrary I think that's an apt comparison. Look up the history of e.g. the Luddites. This isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened in human history.
From my perspective, with all of these different web APIs, I imagine Mozilla are walking a tightrope: if they refuse to implement all of them, there's a good chance that websites will ask the user to use Chrome, pushing it further into obscurity. Go too far, however, such as implementing Google-driven proposals like Topics, and you weaken the privacy advantages of the browser.
I'm glad that they take both a moral and technological stance here - someone needs to.
I’ve noticed the some of YouTube’s auto-generated captions will sometimes hallucinate “Heat” during long music segments; probably an older model though.
This is so nuts. It’s literally a multi device mouse - supports 3 bluetooth connections in memory, but I need to install the options app on every single pc/mac I want to use it on. Nuts!
I have a "G" series 512 keyboard. And it seemingly can't save anything into the memory (on windows I had to use the logitech's bloatware). And the absolute worst part is that it is set to RGB colors moving around by default, so I've been running openrgb every OS boot to set the lights to a neutral, non-flashing, much much less intensive color. Happy to see alternatives to that.
On a matter of principle, it is not shocking to me that it is so big.
The offline installer has to bundle data for all supported products, platforms, languages and dependencies, even the ones you don't need, because you can't tell in advance. The online installer will just download what it needs.
1.2GB is absolutely ridiculous and I hate the bloat we see with pretty much all modern software today more than most people, but I have decided not to complain about it for once :) Know that it doesn't mean I think less of it.
Maybe there are some fancy animations illustrating RGB effects and stuff like that, these can add up, and I can almost (but not quite) excuse them if it is the case. At least, video animations are not a mess of frameworks and libraries that eat your RAM and CPU and introduce vulnerabilities.
Haven’t tried it but apparently there is an unofficial port of the full version of uBlock Origin to work on manifest v3, the largest challenge being that, on manifest v3, the webRequestBlocking permission is only available to enterprise sideloaded extensions: https://github.com/r58Playz/uBlock-mv3
Great but as soon as Google decides to completely strip the `webRequest` API from the codebase, it's game over. Now that it's deprecated it's only a matter of time. This also means Brave, the last Chromium-based browser to support it, will also be unable to support it
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