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.

Yes, I agree it’s possible that Adobe goes after them for something even if they didn’t decompile photoshop - and also even if it isn’t really a threat to their profits.

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.

Cool, if it works for you then I wouldn’t tell you not to use it! I’m just skeptical that it actually will; I assume you haven’t used it enough to really find out how well it works in practice yet.

It’s not like I’m forced to look at any of these projects, or use them.

I guess we’re not forced to look at them but to avoid looking at them we’d need to stop reading the internet. I only looked at this one because I was conflicted about if i should delete this post from /c/opensource here - the discussion has been informative so I certainly won’t now, but i’m still conflicted about the fact that by leaving this post here we’re potentially helping this genAI huckster get more paying customers for his token-reselling business which this project is obviously a loss-leader for.

Btw I found the video I mentioned earlier, here is a link to the part comparing PhotoCraft’s Levels adjustment to Photoshop’s: https://youtu.be/Oc51Ty9h-68?t=216 (and later he compares other basic features).

And whether it’s copyright infringement or not is of little interest to me since I view copyrights as being inherently harmful.

But from that perspective it would be much easier and more effective to simply use an LLM to make a crack for pirating the original software than to try to reimplement the whole thing. Or, to actually decompile and recompile it to get something (pirate-)source-available with actual feature parity. (People are also doing both of those things with various proprietary software, of course.)

However, since the implementation is using a different language, that does make the implementation itself a clean room one.

That isn’t what “clean room” means in this context. It is widely accepted legal doctrine that direct ports of software from one language to another constitute derivative works under copyright law.

This project’s claim to be “open source” would be false if it is actually an automated port of the output of a decompiler of proprietary programs; that would make it warez.

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.

Indeed. But if they haven’t gotten around to adding more than the most basic features in the Levels adjustment window (probably one of the most commonly used features of Photoshop) I assume they’re missing a lot of other stuff too.

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. […] So, the feature parity isn’t really the stumbling point for me, it’s the UX.

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? It seems to me like using an LLM to improve the UX of GIMP, on top of all of its existing (presumably far greater) set of features, would make a lot more sense.

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.

I concur, in six months or a year I can either eat my words or say “I told you so” :)

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.

I wouldn’t hold your breath, but perhaps with a lot more advances and if/when local models can perform coding tasks at reasonable speeds on affordable hardware… maybe? Meanwhile right now we’re drowning in new 1M LOC slop projects overpromising and underdelivering.

people are literally just reverse engineering these applications by having the LLM decompile it and observe what it does

Have you seen the creators of this particular project claim anywhere that they decompiled anything? I’ve seen several commenters claiming that but I think they’re incorrectly assuming that that’s what they did.

For one thing, decompiling and recompiling Adobe or Microsoft code would surely be viewed as copyright infringement if there isn’t a clearly-documented “cleanrooming” process in the middle (having an LLM write a spec (in English) from the decompiled code, and having another session without access to the copyrighted code write new code from that spec - a fun LARP many people are doing lately).

But also, if they were actually doing that then I’d expect more feature parity than I’ve seen in the few youtube videos I’ve skimmed through showing these apps. I’m too lazy to find the link now but I watched one comparing PhotoCraft to Photoshop, and one example was that PhotoCraft’s Levels diagram is very primitive in comparison to Adobe’s (or to GIMP’s for that matter).

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.

Congratulations, that’s awesome (and I don’t doubt it). But implementing a RAW format is a lot easier than re-implementing all of the Photoshop features which are required to be able to say (honestly, a least) “this has .PSD file format compatibility” without a long list of caveats.

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.

I am curious how much you’ve actually used it. Eg, can you confirm what I saw on youtube showing the Levels adjustment dialog lacking most of the features found in Photoshop’s and GIMP’s? (Is that still the case in the current version?)

And have you noticed it having compatibility with (or at least some support for) any modern PSD file format features which GIMP lacks?

You’re saying this as if NPM ecosystem didn’t exist before LLMs.

yes there was a lot of crap before 😭 but don’t you agree it’s 1000x worse now?

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.

This project has a lot of stars but only because it just got a ton of clickbait press grossly exaggerating its completeness. I assume the vast majority of the stars are from people who have not tried running it. How long it’s been developed is… two weeks, as of today. How many users? It’s far too soon to say.

I’ll certainly trade having to rely on proprietary software for the problem of having too many open source options.

I agree with you here! But I’m assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that this particular one is not likely to ever become a particularly good option.

I don’t think any decompiling was involved here; if it was, Adobe and Microsoft would have DMCA’d it off of github already.

LibreOffice is fine, although compatibility with MS Office is still spotty

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?

I would be surprised if it actually does anytime soon.

It’s very obviously better to have open tools than closed ones.

I agree, if it works well and it’s freely licensed it’s a good thing. It isn’t clear how well this actually works though, and the fact that the author is disparaging existing free software solutions to advertise his business selling genAI tokens is not a good indicator.

This whole screeching about slop is both incredibly tiresome and irrational in the extreme. These are new tools that make software development easier […]

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.

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.

Let me know if I’m mistaken, and anyone other than the author tries it and credibly claims that this thing is actually a better (in any way whatsoever) replacement for MS Office than LibreOffice is.

Is OpenOffice still maintained?

The descendant of it called LibreOffice has been the well-maintained thing to use for the last 15 years.

this meme is exaggerating for comedic effect; there are much shorter routes which can also make it good gas. (eg)

Not sure where you get the idea that I posted this as a marketing ploy reselling genAI tokens?

Sorry if it seems like I meant to imply that that was your intention; i did look at your profile before asking and saw that you aren’t a spammer :)

However, it seems like reselling tokens is the primary business model of the company which has presumably just spent a significant amount of dollars worth of tokens to vibe code this suite of software.

Whether they have actually produced a dozen useful apps which many people will actually use, or merely made something which is just barely functional enough to get a bunch of free marketing hype, is not yet clear to me. They have certainly succeeded in getting a lot of press, though.

Should this be allowed here in !opensource@lemmy.ml?

It is obviously built using Claude, but it is not (as I first thought) a project that started a month ago - the first commit in the current repo is from a month ago but it refers to their previous (“multi-hundred GB” lol) git repo. So this is actually built on something with history going back to before the vibe coding era. (edit: actually i take it back, i see now photocraft started on september 30 and the commit message on the second commit is “one-shot” 🫠)

I see the project lead’s two most recent posts on the site formerly known as twitter are disparaging LibreOffice and Gimp and Kdenlive.

Until yesterday this part was under a “fair source” (meaning not open source) license but now it has been relicensed MIT + Apache 🤔

Have you actually tried any of these 12 apps yet, OP? Are they any good, or are they just marketing for a service reselling genAI tokens?

I wonder why they are doing that that 🤔

For people browsing from non-US IPs who want to read the paper, it’s archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20260928181926/https://flocksurveillance.org/docs/formal-research-paper.pdf

this BBC article “Trump’s AI rebrand causes ‘unprecedented’ demand for Slovenian website names” notes that it was updated after publishing to stop implying that domain squatting is an illegitimate business 🤡

i see you’re replying to the joke comments but ignoring the ones posted many hours earlier which helpfully explain what is wrong with the premise of your post (eg, this and this and this).

And other times 0.1 + 0.2 = 0.3000004

It’s Alistair Hennessey:

!badnews@lemmy.ml

More Women Drone Pilots

cross-posting my comment from another thread:

Nice, 🍻 to the people who made this happen.

I couldn’t make it through that interview with the former Google employee, though. A few minor fact checks from before I stopped reading:

I don’t know if you know this, Mike, but the word “boycott” was actually coined in Ireland. Boycott was an individual, an Irish person, and that person actually got boycotted.

Almost correct, except the part about Charles Boycott being an Irish person. (He was unsurprisingly actually English.)

I worked for Google. I worked for Google at a time when… I don’t think they were as evil as they are now. And I worked for Google at a time when they did not use their technology for warfare or for governments. I really enjoyed my time at Google. And I am personally heartbroken at the path that they have taken, and I fully support the boycott of Google in order to support the Palestinian people.

I wonder when it was that this person thinks Google “did not use their technology for warfare or for governments”. I guess they probably think Google only turned evil in 2018, when Project Maven started getting more press? Anyway, such a time never existed; the project which became Google was created by and for US intelligence. https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e

And it’s sickening to think that an organization like Anthropic can come in here, be given tax breaks, being given great publicity, and yet go on to commit the murder of over 160 schoolgirls in Minab, in Iran, but the Irish government says, “Welcome, Anthropic.”

Fuck Anthropic for (among other things) their Department of War contracts, but them taking the blame for the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School massacre is some bullshit: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blame-for-the-iran-school-bombing-the-truth-is-far-more-worrying

so hopefully there will be some local opposition present.

update: https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2026/07/03/wicklow-hotel-cancels-secretive-peter-thiel-conference/ ✨

i would be surprised if it is true that “If you don’t remove that it shows your personal account to anyone who receives it so that they can chat directly with you”, and a search just now didn’t find anything to substantiate that.

It’s a very recent change

is it though? if so, how do you actually find out the profile name from the si parameter?

obviously tracking parameters from URLs should be removed in any case, but afaict only google can use this to find which user generated the link.

after some more reading i found conflicting reports but i think this might actually be happening; apparently it is only visible in the app?