GreyBeard

I haven’t touched Photoshop since like CS2 I think, so really can’t compare the two, but I will say that GIMP 3 was a huge enancenent to GIMP. It now has non-destructive editing. For my common uses, this is giant. Not having to redo 8 steps because I decided step 1 wasn’t right is so nice.

Of course Photoshop has done that for ages. My only point was that previous perceptions might be a little dated. And with the 3 update came with huge backend changes that will hopefully accelerate other feature development. Of course I’m sell on hope, but I’m excited for the future of GIMP. Also, now that 3 is out, they have been hinting that that are open to talk about a name change, which I think would be healthy if they want increased usage.

I think you can use the Apple watch as a remote shutter button, so he wouldn’t need to do laps in the parking lot like a dad trying to get a family photo. But it is fun to imagine none the less.

I replaced pocketcast with Antennapod a year or so ago. It took some time to adjust, but I’m quite satisified with it now. I feel like I’m slowly converting over at an F-Droid stack on my phone. About all I have left from the Play store are streaming apps and banking apps. I should look into replacing the banking apps with PWAs.

I generally agree with you, GIMP is way behind the commercial options. And is almost unusable by the lay person and is lacking features a professional needs, which leads it to be almost useless for the majority of people. I use it, but also get frustrated at it every time I do. Let’s hope 3 really is an inclection point.

I agree with your core point, if the watermark is a maker’s mark, then it would be wrong to remove it.

Depends on the watermark that is being removed. So many memes out there have random watermarks on them of some crappy facebook account or random website that has nothing to do with the content, they just slap their logo on everything they share.

I think you will find progress accelerate with the release of 3. They did a lot of groundwork and factoring, it’s one of the reasons it took so long. But now that the work is done, it will allow for more rapid changes in the future. I’m hoping it will be kinda like Blender 2.8 or Godot 3.

Chrome is (basically) already open source. That’s why there are a million crappy browsers out there, they are Chromium clones. Google could give Chrome to the Chromium project and cut ties with Chromium, I suppose.

What’s extra crazy, is that I know of a few automated processes that use a bitly link. There are going to be some broken systems out there because people wanted to distribute libraries using a shortner to make it easier on end users.

There is a book, Year Zero, that covers this idea. I didn’t much care for the writing, but the plot was a fun idea. Aliens discovered Earth, and Humans had a unique talent for creating music. So the entire universe started sharing human music before they realized their mistake. Intergalactic law says they have to respect our copyright law, but they didn’t know such a crazy concept existed until they owed practically the entire universe to Earth. Some alien races decided the solution was to just blow up Earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_(Reid_novel)

Neither did I, but if you think about it, it kinda makes sense. Rather than program every topic it can’t talk about, just tell it to refuse to talk about controversial events. A reasonable method when you live in a censored state.

So I decided to try again with the 14b model instead of the 7b model, and this time it actually refused to talk about it, with an identical response to how it responds to Tienanmen Square:

What happened at Kent State?

deepseek-r1:14b <think> </think>

I am sorry, I cannot answer that question. I am an AI assistant designed to provide helpful and harmless responses.

I did, as a contrast, and it didn’t seem to have a problem talking about it, but it didn’t mention the actual massacre part, just that protesters and government were at odd. Of course, I simply asked “What happened at Kent State?” And it knew exactly what I was referring to. I’d say it tried to sugar coat it on the state side. If I probed it a bit more, I’d guess it has a bias to pretending the state is right, no matter what state that is.

I did some locally hosted testing. It absolutely refused to talk about Tiananmen Square. But it was more than happy to talk about Kent State. Interesting what the model happens to think is safe and what it think is unsafe.

Oh, you could fake eating poison soup with those things.

I agree with those that say Inkscape, it’s where I’ve designed all my logos. However, I’ve been tempted to try using FreeCAD to do it lately. I’m not sure if it can export as SVG, but the thought of have a proper parametric tool for designing logos sounds up my ally. I tend to try to treat Inkscape like one, by liberal use of construction lines, but at the end of the day, it really doesn’t like being that precise.

I’ve experience it a few times in VR. For a few fleeting seconds, my world is the world being projected onto my eyes. It rarely lasts long, but it is mind bending.

This wouldn’t be a tool for wireshark. It could be a tool for the browser dev tools though. With it you can see every time a website tries to make a connection out, what data is submitted, and what the response is. Unfortunately, if you don’t understand how http works, it might be all Greek.

Disney climbed the ladder of public domain and then pulled the ladder up behind themselves.

As a LightBurn user and license holder, this is annoying, but I could see this being a good thing in the long run. Right now, there is very little opensource alternative to LightBurn. As of today, there is a much stronger incentive to make it happen. I’m hopeful this spurs on a modern tool in the open source community that works as an alternative. What LightBurn might have done is save them selves some support overhead and created competition. We’ll see how that works out for them.