creesch's recent activity
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Comment on Does Tildes welcomes “self-promoting” links to personal blog posts? in ~tildes
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Comment on Best way to setup email forwarding for a domain I own? in ~tech
creesch LinkYup, with your own domain you can have anything@yourdomain.com even without configuring each address. Just make sure the hosting provider you go with does support catch-all. If you actually want...Yup, with your own domain you can have anything@yourdomain.com even without configuring each address. Just make sure the hosting provider you go with does support catch-all. If you actually want to sent from those addresses you are looking for what are called mail aliases. There often is a limit to these, so I only configure them when I actually do need to send something from a specific address and otherwise rely on catch-all.
I have been a happy user of mailbox.org but there are plenty of other providers out there.
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Comment on Any search engines with information cards like Google? in ~tech
creesch LinkDuckDuckGo with "bangs" might help Like you can do !lb dune and it will go directly to letterboxd. I personally think Brave is a company of questionable morale and personally wouldn't want to use...DuckDuckGo with "bangs" might help Like you can do
!lb duneand it will go directly to letterboxd.I personally think Brave is a company of questionable morale and personally wouldn't want to use it but their search does have infoboxes.
Bing also does have infoboxes but as a terrible UX experience initially with an overload of clutter. Which you can mostly turn off but then you still get popups here and there and generally it is just as bad and often worse than google.
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Comment on Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all in ~tech
creesch Link ParentIf you stretch the definition of "they can" then yes, they can. If you look at practical use, then for all intents and purposes they cannot. Models perform worse with languages they have less...They can.
If you stretch the definition of "they can" then yes, they can. If you look at practical use, then for all intents and purposes they cannot.
Models perform worse with languages they have less training data for. Languages most common on GitHub like Python, JavaScript, Java, C++, etc generally show good performance where models score noticeably lower on things like Lua, R, Perl.Frontier models tend to compensate for this by leaning on languages that look similar but that only goes as far. So no, if a language is not in the training data a model will not be able to work in it as fluently and, depending on the language struggle noticeably
Mind you, this is about languages they have been trained on. If they have no training data whatsoever for a language it will be even worse. Possibly you can compensate somewhat by having a prompt include "this language most closely relates to Y". But then you are also going to deal with a things like wrong assumptions about semantics, patterns that work slightly different causing issues, etc, etc.
Tool calls can help here but those are just a patch and will not yield the same results compared to a model natively having been trained on a language. It will also just mean more token consumption. And eat up a lot of your model's context window. Which matters more than you might realize as it is well documented that an advertised context window doesn't mean the model will perform as well with the entire window in use. Since there is no training data you'd need all relevant data always in that context window. Depending on the complexity this can mean a substantial use of the context window, resulting in additional degraded use. Improvements have been made here but this is also an area where open-weight models generally tend to trail behind, with a smaller effective context window than advertised.
So far I have just written about this in the context of one language even. Over times we are talking also about things like protocols, best practices, etc. Yes, you can put it all in tool calls, skills, etc. But again, that will not perform the same as the model having native base knowledge about a subject and at some point there will really be no effective context left to have it actually do the thing you want. You might say that it only needs to pull information in where it needs it, but if most of the project is something it has no data on that just means it has keep pulling in that data.
To sum it up, in the short term I'll hand it to you. Sure, small changes to frameworks and languages initially you'd be able to compensate for with some small degradation in performance. In the long term, no they effectively cannot.
As far as fine tuning goes, it effectively has a similar problem. Tuning is good at changing behavior and style, less so at adding new information to a model that was not included in pre-training. Knowledge added through fine tuning is something models tend to hallucinate more over, to the point that retrieval (so the earlier mentioned tool calls) is seen as more effective. Which, in itself already has limitations as I went over.
Fine tuning also tends to change models overall degrading some things they already "know" which only gets worse every time you tune a model again. Talking about years of drift and multiple fine tuning rounds and I guess you'll have the next generation meme about model rot the same way people meme about JPEG artifacts.
Then there is the practical aspect of it all. It is one thing to tune a model on one additional subject. That's not going to be the case though, it will not just be one language or one framework but all additional data and knowledge I already mentioned earlier. Even if fine tuning was without flaws it would be a massive undertaking to keep models up to date on all of that (or even a subset). As it stands fine tuning is not up to task of doing the same sort of training that these labs do. And no, the popular narrative that the Chinese labs are doing this with barely any budget isn't quite true.
Which returns me to my original point. Open weight models are also heavily subsidized at the moment, without millions invested in hardware to train these models it currently isn't possible to reproduce their results. And as I hopefully have made clear now, the current models will not remain usable no matter what, yes you can keep running them, I am talking practical usage. That also means, that from my perspective, the entire LLM industry can effectively rug pull us as consumers. Not just the frontier labs by raising pricing, but also the Chinese labs by simply no longer providing these models for free. We could hope they'd offer them for less than the frontier labs, but that is also not a given.
I honestly think it is better to be realistic about this. And to be extra clear, I am not coming at this from a perspective of someone against the use of LLMs in general. I happily use them in all sorts of tasks. I am also acutely aware that the current situation isn't likely to last and that it might mean a significantly higher cost of using them in the future. I rather be wrong about that than to be wrong about firmly believing everything will be well in the future and nothing is really going to change.
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Comment on Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all in ~tech
creesch Link ParentYeah not really though. DeepSeek v3's final training run was reported to cost somewhere around $5.6M for the hardware. Which ignores training before that, personnel cost, prior research, etc. The...That was why DeepSeek had such an impact, because they published a paper that said they trained their model for a little over 100k usd, and they described how they did the training.
Yeah not really though. DeepSeek v3's final training run was reported to cost somewhere around $5.6M for the hardware. Which ignores training before that, personnel cost, prior research, etc.
The paper you probably mean is about R1 reporting it to have cost $294k, but *that is on top of V3 as the base model. DeepSeek also never claimed this was the total cost of building the model, just the final training. The actual hardware investment for example is estimated to be in the millions to over a billion dollars.
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Comment on Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all in ~tech
creesch Link ParentOkay, we are going in circles. I already addressed this.Why would those models no longer be usable? There is no reason to believe that these models will suddenly stop being runnable on hardware.
Okay, we are going in circles. I already addressed this.
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Comment on Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all in ~tech
creesch Link ParentTo which someone replied that it doesn't matter as long as open weight models are available. But that is only relevant if they receive updates and are provided for free. If they are no longer...The discussion was about if the current pricing can be rug pulled.
To which someone replied that it doesn't matter as long as open weight models are available. But that is only relevant if they receive updates and are provided for free. If they are no longer provided to the world for free you either end up with models that eventually will no longer be usable, or alternative the reason they are no longer free is because interference providers are now required to start paying for these models.
Regardless, also open weight models are mostly a thing right now because they are being subsidized. All things considered there are massive costs involved with these models that are hidden from the consumer end of things because everyone is still trying to either keep relevant or that moat.
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Comment on Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all in ~tech
creesch Link ParentBecause software development will continue to evolve. New frameworks made, new languages created, languages will receive updates, etc. Eventually, fairly quickly even models will end up being...Because software development will continue to evolve. New frameworks made, new languages created, languages will receive updates, etc. Eventually, fairly quickly even models will end up being outdated with nobody updating them. That's why.
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Comment on Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all in ~tech
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Comment on Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all in ~tech
creesch Link ParentMost open weight models still cost money to train. Maybe not as much as frontier models but why that is the case is also very much up to debate as these Chinese labs aren't exactly open about the...Only if you ignore open weight models. D
Most open weight models still cost money to train. Maybe not as much as frontier models but why that is the case is also very much up to debate as these Chinese labs aren't exactly open about the training methods. We can say for sure that they cost a lot more to train than the cost of "being made available for free". Which also means that they too are subsidized at the moment as companies aren't doing this out the goodness of their heart.
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Comment on Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all in ~tech
creesch Link ParentThat "as long as" is doing a hell of a lot heavy lifting here. What you are effectively advocating for is to have nobody understand the code base. LLMs don't have working memory or context...It does not matter that the codebase is not maintainable by a person, as long as LLMs can maintain it, it will be fine.
That "as long as" is doing a hell of a lot heavy lifting here. What you are effectively advocating for is to have nobody understand the code base. LLMs don't have working memory or context awareness. All they have is the code and whatever is documented around that code. They too benefit from that code being structured and developed according to good practices. As it helps them write actual working functionality.
That structure is not there by default and by default most code hardnesses there is only a tiny amount of structure provided. Without anyone further dictating that structure you'll quickly end up with an amalgamation of different structures and approaches in your code base. This will be barely noticeable in small projects or early green field projects. But once a project grows it will become an issue as the LLM will start to confuse it self due to the code base containing all sorts of mixed signals it created itself.Claiming you currently don't need to look at code is simply saying you don't care about overall quality. Or, somewhat more charitable, is based on you only inspecting small projects amd drawing conclusions from there.
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Comment on Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all in ~tech
creesch Link ParentWhile interesting, I'd also like to point out that there are already a lot of alternatives out there that do a lot. And, which to frank are good enough for 99% of personal use cases. For photoshop...While interesting, I'd also like to point out that there are already a lot of alternatives out there that do a lot. And, which to frank are good enough for 99% of personal use cases. For photoshop there are a variety of programs covering a variety of use cases like Gimp (with PhotoGIMP if you really want photoshop), Krita and Photopea as well as a few others I left out. For vector editing there are Inkscape and Graphite. For raw editing there is darktable, RawTherapee and RapidRAW.
These are just a few, there is a lot more out there depending on use case. As @raze2012 points out as well it often doesn't come down to there not being replacements available.
Having said that, I am interested to see where this project will end up. The lack of readme I do see as a positive indicator they are working on it for themselves and are not trying to give an impression of it being more ready than it is.
In the meantime I'll keep the great OSS software that is already there for most of my needs ;)
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Comment on Software developers are not okay in ~tech
creesch Link ParentI have to agree here, not just towards their own working conditions but impact in general. I am in a different part of the world but it still surprises me that when I try to raise ethical...I have to agree here, not just towards their own working conditions but impact in general. I am in a different part of the world but it still surprises me that when I try to raise ethical concerns, or just concerns towards user impact that a majority of colleagues just sort of shrug and move on. Basically as long as they get to do fun technical stuff a lot of people in tech seem to be utterly blind towards the world around them and the impact they do or don't have. To be frank, I am seeing it in this thread and the photoshop clone thread as well.
You still see people en mass repeat the mantra of "technology is neutral" while ignoring that even if that is true the implementation certainly is not.
Two decades ago I do think we were in a better place as most of the behemoths we know today didn't have this iron clad grip on the industry just yet. Negative press actually might mean something and there was somewhat more meaningful competition. Once these companies become more established all of this started to matter less. At this point it is easy to see how management slowly started to realize how little pushback they'd get internally from more questionable policies.
In hindsight it is really easy to see how we ended up with an industry that is enshittified from both the in and outside.
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Comment on Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all in ~tech
creesch Link ParentYou are thinking of the Pareto principle which is usually said to be 80% 20%.You are thinking of the Pareto principle which is usually said to be 80% 20%.
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Comment on Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all in ~tech
creesch Link ParentOf course it should be, because we are replacing one type of company for another type of company since this is done with proprietary frontier models. And these companies already have shown all the...I mean even if you have a raging hate-boner for greedy monopolistic companies like Autodesk and Adobe, it should be alarming that AI is currently in the state where it can be used to create working vibe-slop clones of proprietary software.
Of course it should be, because we are replacing one type of company for another type of company since this is done with proprietary frontier models. And these companies already have shown all the hallmarks of simply not caring about customers other than as an income stream.
I was not expecting this moment to have already passed.
I mean it hasn't, I am impressed by how far it has gotten. But as I wrote elsewhere it doesn't have near feature parity yet, plenty of bugs and all the hallmarks of a vibe project that is unlikely to leave alpha stage ever.
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Comment on Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all in ~tech
creesch (edited )Link ParentI don't think it threatens an industry standard. There have been alternatives to Photoshop and a lot of the suite and that didn't change a single thing. Affinity before they changed their...I feel like this is underselling how easy it becomes for someone to establish a working product that threatens an industry standard.
I don't think it threatens an industry standard. There have been alternatives to Photoshop and a lot of the suite and that didn't change a single thing. Affinity before they changed their licensing comes to mind. It was affordable, genuinely had a claim at offering most what Photoshop did and was largely ignored by the industry.
I'd also like to point out that outside of the industry there already are alternatives that do a lot. And, which to frank are good enough for 99% of personal use cases. For photoshop there are a variety of programs covering a variety of use cases like Gimp (with PhotoGIMP if you really want photoshop), Krita and Photopea as well as a few others I left out. For vector editing there are Inkscape and Graphite. For raw editing there is darktable, RawTherapee and RapidRAW.
Because now the opportunity exists to reach near feature parity almost instantly.
I think I have a different idea of feature parity than you have. For me it includes stability, both in it being bug free but also in the functionality being stable and working largely the same in a next release. If there is one thing with LLM driven development I have seen is that if not properly governed LLMs tend to suck at keeping functionality stable. They suck at cohesive memory for projects and the only way around that is by having a lot of documentation, memories and constant eye for detail from humans in the loop.
Given the insane commit history on the github repo I sincerely doubt the latter being the case here.
What if next time someone with some programming acumen decides to do this?
People with programming acumen have been doing this. They are getting decent results, generally speaking by tackling smaller green field projects or scoped changes at bigger existing projects. Generally speaking moving at a slower deliberate pace, practicing good development practices and making LLMs follow those practices.
it became a lot easier to become a real rival to industry standard software packages and the financial pay-for-entry that locked up certain areas of software has been erased.
Sort of, do we know how many tokens are spend here? What the actual cost of development was, how much of it this person has eaten out of pocket? We are just trading one locked in eco system for another here.
All things considered, it is possible that I am entirely wrong here. That the project moves forward, finds a balanced approach, reaches a stable point with complete feature parity as they claim. From what I have seen, looking at both this project and across the industry including my own experiments, I highly doubt that will be the case.
What I am 100% standing behind, no matter what, is that the vibe amount is high in this project.
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Comment on Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all in ~tech
creesch Link ParentWith the photoshop one I had weird selection issues across layers. There was also certainly something up with a variety of color tools. It also is pretty much besides the point as far as I am...I tried the illustrator one, and the photoshop one, and got some work done.
With the photoshop one I had weird selection issues across layers. There was also certainly something up with a variety of color tools.
It also is pretty much besides the point as far as I am concerned. With the insane commit frequency I am seeing I really do have my doubts how much human interaction is involved. Which, even with how impressive LLM driven development has gotten is still very much essential. LLMs still struggle with overall cohesion, consistency and generally avoid regression. A thing that is fixed by one prompt might be broken by another and approaches to testing and other things will start to drift over time.
I am not saying that LLM build applications can't work. Which a lot of people replying to me are saying. What I am saying is that you need a lot of human involvement still to make it work. And even then I have only really seen it work on smaller green field projects and have yet to see larger projects like this reach anything like a stable release and remain stable.
There was some old quote I forget but like, each person only uses 10% of word, but they all use a different 10% or something like that.
Also this, it makes the claim of reaching 100% feature parity in a month questionable at best.
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Comment on Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all in ~tech
creesch LinkLet me fix that title I am not going to deny it is pretty impressive that current frontier models can create pretty good alpha level products. That doesn't mean it is actually an alternative as it...- Exemplary
Let me fix that title
Solo developer
rebuildsvibe codes buggy Adobe Creative Suite "alternative" in Rust using ClaudeI am not going to deny it is pretty impressive that current frontier models can create pretty good alpha level products. That doesn't mean it is actually an alternative as it is currently a buggy mess and with a lot of purely vibe coded products getting past that initial proof of concept and polishing it up to an actual solid working product is one of those things that remains illusive.
To get ahead of a certain crowd. No, I am not talking about you who actually looks at the output, reviews it and still applies fairly decent basic principles of software development. I am talking about vibe coding in the way it was originally coined, asking the model to do a thing and blindly trusting the output.
Which I have no issue claiming this product is when you see claims like " targets 100% parity in one month". There simply is no way to do this other than blindly trusting all your LLM tooling to work it out.Edit:
Looking at the commit history shows how insane this is. Commits every few minutes simply means there is no human in the loop. It is all based on the hopes and dreams of people yelling into their prompts and telling the agents to please do a good job.
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Comment on Productivity tools on MacOS in ~tech
creesch LinkI no longer use a mac device. But, I used to have a macbook until three years ago for work. For me, the biggest annoyance was macOS window management. Although since I last used it some things...I no longer use a mac device. But, I used to have a macbook until three years ago for work. For me, the biggest annoyance was macOS window management. Although since I last used it some things seem to have improved, apparantly a tool like rectangle (Windows inspired window management) is less necessary although it is my understanding that it still improves the macOS implementation.
Some other utilities I really liked are:
- [not free] Dockmate giving you windows like previews of windows from your dock.
- [Open source] alt-tab bring the windows alt tab experience to MacOS.
- [not free] SoundSource giving you much more fine-grained sound control on macOS on a per device and app level. You get access to equalizers, other filters, easier device selection and a whole lot more. It certainly isn't cheap, but for me it was worth it.
- [Open source] Homebrew package manager, I assume you are familiar with it, but I just mentioned it in case you are not.
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Comment on Our minds aren’t equipped to handle AI in ~tech
creesch Link ParentIf you decide to purely focus on education you might have a point. I also do agree that the root cause is companies shoving it everywhere and having (for now) unlimited funds to offer these models...If you decide to purely focus on education you might have a point. I also do agree that the root cause is companies shoving it everywhere and having (for now) unlimited funds to offer these models for next to nothing.
However, that doesn't negate the fact that using of LLMs in itself can and often has a very negative impact on us individually. Something I have seen happen all around me. Something has indeed been changing. I have seen an alarming increase of lazy non critical use of LLM tools by people who should know better. Code spanning dozens of line trying to solve something that should only take one line. Code that completely ignores and conventions or design paradigms put in place. Code that goes directly against security practices. Suddenly downgraded dependency versions (because the models training data doesn't include the latest version). Verbatim answers from co-claude and friends and much more.
It really is basic human psychology as far as I am concerned. Our minds are wired to take the easy approach wherever they can, which historically makes a lot of sense. But that also means that many people will go down the lazy route of using LLMs to one degree or another. Is this amplified by how education works and many work environments? Possibly, but I firmly believe it is still an issue even without those factors in the mix.
You link to the previous post. Where people mostly ask you to at least also post a comment with a little introduction to the blog post. Which, even if it isn't technically in the tildes guidelines seems like a nice thing to do anyway.
If we do look at what you quoted
And I do have a quick look at your profile every other submission you do is to your own blog. Your comments a majority of them seem to be related to submissions you made yourself and then mostly (but not entirely) focused on your blog posts as well. So, from that perspective I can see why people feel like you are somewhat doing the self promotion thing.
But again, I get the feeling it is more related to overall participation and in this case "hit and run" type posting where you post the link but no submission statement. You can argue that a blog post stands on its own, but in that case you are just linking to one external source for the majority of posts.