You can have paid MicroSlop slop that gives them access to your data for training models or open source CraftSlop slop that doesn’t. Neither works worth a shit, so pick your poison. Either that, or just use slop-free LibreOffice.

Can’t disagree in principle, but of course, the article is pretty idealistic.

Yes, the tech bros want everyone talking about how dangerous AI is so regulations are made to solidify their ownership of what is probably the greatest heist against humanity the world has ever known.

The course of action a lawful and ethical government would take is to shut them down, put the thieves in prison, and demand all of the collected data be deleted since it was taken unlawfully. Of course, we all know that will never happen.

The data is also not going to be forcefully publicized. Even if the dataset were leaked, the sheer size makes it impractical to store and distribute.

Best we can realistically expect is what Chinese companies are already doing where they are opening the weights while keeping their stolen datasets private and under their own control. Not the best option, but at least it does distribute the control the oligarch would otherwise have over the tech. The Chinese companies aren’t publicizing the means of production (their stolen datasets), but they’re at least incrementally less capitalistic than their American counterparts.

I’d sure like to see Adobe and their ilk get their comeuppance, so I won’t mind being wrong about this. We shall see.

Believing these apps will succeed is based on an assumption along the lines of LLMs being able to produce quality code at 100x the speed of a competent human engineer. Maybe they can produce slop that fast, but using LLMs in a disciplined fashion to produce a quality product usually means LLMs are only providing a modest productivity boost in my experience.

It’s not realistic that these apps are anything but slop given the timeframe and scope spanning multiple complex apps that each took a decade or more to develop.

In my 20+ years of experience as a software engineer, I’ve never seen a successful project that hastily pumped out a massive pile of buggy code and then went back and fixed all of the problems later without doing a complete rewrite. You have to build incrementally and bake in quality every step of the way. LLMs may make the process a little faster, but the same rules still apply.

A poorly built codebase will always eventually collapse under its own weight. What I anticipate is that they’ll play whack-a-mole for a while and then give up. If they were targeting a small subset of one app’s features over a timeframe of months, I might believe it, but several massive apps all at once and it will all be done weeks from now? Stop bullshitting yourselves.

In all fairness, I haven’t investigated it thoroughly myself, and my skepticism mainly comes from the proposed timeframe. I’d be less skeptical if they said they were going to focus only on, say, Photoshop and spend a few months reproducing a small subset of its features without decompiling the code while creating a public audit trail of their clean room process that a lawyer helped them create.

I use LLMs for coding every day at work and also use local LLMs at home. From my experience, LLMs can be used to create a better end product than humans alone if the proper discipline is followed.

However, my impression is that ArtCraft is a bunch of vibe coded slop where the goal is to reproduce several apps as quickly as possible by letting the LLM go wild. In that case, you usually end up with something that seems to work in many respects, but eventually collapses under its own weight.

We will see whether ArtCraft ever gets out of alpha and shapes up to be solid, but as someone who has been a software engineer over 20 years, hastily creating a mountain of code and then expecting to come back and fix all the problems later never works. It’s always better to work incrementally and add one feature at a time while building in quality every step of the way.

What I expect is that they will continue adding features and trying to fix the problems, play an extended game of whack-a-mole, then eventually get frustrated and abandon the project.

I detest companies like Adobe and I’d be delighted to have my skepticism be proven wrong and see them end up with replacements for the whole suite that work well and are on solid ground legally. I’d also feel better about this if they were using local models, since spending a fortune in tokens to support a company like Anthropic is certainly not on higher moral ground than supporting Adobe with subscription fees.

Yeah, as much as I’d like to applaud this sort of thing, ArtCraft, for example, is going to end up with some major legal woes, in addition to the fact that it’s a pile of slop that doesn’t work worth a damn. The only winner is Anthropic or OpenAI getting big money for all those wasted tokens.

Never was my distro of choice and guess that won’t be changing.

Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.

Benjamin: Yes, sir.

Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?

Benjamin: Yes, I am.

Mr. McGuire: Plastics.

Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean?

Mr. McGuire: There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?

A great future they said. 😭

It would seem so and I’m guessing it might do better with REA and something that isn’t math-heavy. What surprised me most is that it dove right in even though it’s supposed to refuse RE.

Mint is good if OS tinkering isn’t where you want to spend your time and you want something with sane defaults that just works. Immutable distros like Bazzite, Aurora, or SteamOS are arguably more newb-friendly and turn-key, whereas Mint is more readily customized (and broken).

I tested REA with Qwen 3.8 27B with a narrow solver capability from some commercial 3d software and it was quick to extract 20,000 lines of Ghidra C-like pseudocode, but painfully slow to turn it into actual C++. It struggled interpreting all the matrix math and making something that actually worked. I stopped after a couple days of it churning, figuring it could spend a couple weeks and end up with worthless slop. I’m a software engineer and don’t have a background in RE, so maybe someone with more experience would do better.

I ran Konstakang LineageOS on a RPi4 a few years ago, but the hardware decoding didn’t work well. It might work better now. I will probably use Bigscreen once it’s available in an immutable or LTS distro, but for now, I’m using Pegasus frontend on a Linux mini PC. It’s clunky, but kind of gets the job done. Jellyfin desktop and VacuumTube work ok, but I mainly use it for games anyway. I really want Linux HTPCs to be worthy of a daily driver, and Bigscreen is the best hope as you said.

Sounds like sort of a hybrid between a VM and WINE where programs get access to a real Windows kernel. Sounds promising and it’ll be interesting to see how this turns out.

The tech bros are pushing the “AI dangerous” narrative because it not only hypes the tech, but allows them to position themselves as the “safe option” compared to competing open models that they’d like to see kneecapped with regulation.

In reality, tech bros and corrupt governments are the reason why AI is dangerous because they’re using it to build a digital cage to spy on the populace and control the flow of information.

This is the classic Problem-Reaction-Solution technique.

They’re useful—especially to avoid over-using other punctuation such as semicolons; I also use them to avoid back-to-back sentences with exclamation marks!

ReactOS is a great idea in concept, but development has been too slow to make an impact. Maybe this will help? Not sure why they’re making a fork instead of contributing to the main project.

Not sure why the updated model is called “Westernized”. Is there a “Politically Neutralized” version?

It’s just for making a Personal Home Page, so not a big deal either way, right?