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I also ran into this problem. But it's possible to install an untested Linux kernel, and that fully solves the problem. As for Ubuntu — yes, it's terrible. Fortunately, there's a workaround.

I personally know Ivan. For many years of his life, every day, he programmed algorithm after algorithm in this complex online photo editing tool. Essentially, he devoted half his life to it. And now, when someone has literally stolen his work, nobody is reacting. And that's terrible. I think it's absolutely terrible. GitHub should respond to this.

I've seen people on Reddit writing things like, "Come on, what's the big deal? AI can write any code now." I disagree. There are hundreds of thousands of lines of code here, very complex code, which even AI wouldn't be able to write on the first try or in a single day. So this person stole this code from Photopea and built a product on top of it.


This is a very old problem. One of my first commercial programs was a wordpress plugin and as you know, you just distribute the PHP source code in a zip file and there it is

You will never sue your way out of this. Piracy will always exist. GitHub will respond to a legal notice but whack a mole is the game and legal notices cost money

The solution in the WP community at the time was variations of the plugin as a loss leader to get revenue with support or to leverage community visibility into larger contracts for work or hosting the platform for others.

If your business model depends on your code being a secret, JavaScript is not a good play. The business model needs to enhance what the code offers since it’s basically a commodity now


Aren't all Wordpress plugins GPL due to wordpress being GPL?


They need to be, but many plugin developers simply break the GPL.


Sure but developers would still add licensing checks, hosting some dependency offsite, or other obfuscation to try and force people into paying for the plugin

It just doesn’t work. Anyone who wants to will take it. I don’t see this problem going away


I have served many clients with wordpress sites who would much rather pay to license a supported plugin than use a "free" plugin they have to support themselves.


And then the authors realize this and make the free plugin a nightmare to manage to coax folk into paying for it

That is the entire business model of grafana


If they just use the api to create the plugins, no. (It's like Google vs oracle and the java API)


It's the position of wordpress that all themes and plugins are derivative work https://wordpress.org/about/license/

My understanding is because of the way PHP works all plugins are directly interacting with the wordpress code.


I understand, but if I create some code that use no wordpress code and only API access and don't ship it with wordpress, they can't enforce a gpl licence for my code.


Wordpress does absolutely nothing to enforce this, so their position on the matter is irrelevant.

Commercial plugins are a thing, next.


No.


Yes.


There exist many WordPress plugins that are not GPL-licensed, or plugins that are ostensibly GPL but are merely wrapping things (either code or APIs) that are not GPL, which isn't exactly a compliant use.

Whether we like that is not the question I was answering.


But in real life, no!


> AI can write any code now.

Because it is trained on code of people like Ivan


If you think an AI can't reproduce this without it being a copy of the code you are sadly very very mistaken.

I've had an AI reproduce astronomical formula functions without difficulty in whatever programming language I want. Graphical algorithms aren't even a challenge.

Might be time to reconsider the business model entirely, because Pandora's box is already opened.


I agree. It's so disheartening to hear Ivan in interviews talking with passion about what he built. And it's truly impressive!

But wow, how do you stand a chance in stopping anyone when your code is all there freely available in the browser


Do you have the same stance on using adblockers when browsing the web?


So, I apologize if this comes off rude in advance, but to explain my general apathy:

I already don't care that much about IP "theft" on a good day. And it just seems weird to me that Ivan is complaining about other people copying his code (or is he talking about the *Craft projects, which are LLM Rust ports of common tools?) when his product is itself just a blatant adware copy of photoshop.

Pot, meet kettle and all that. Would Ivan be okay with Adobe using a third party he relies on to nuke Photopea due to IP infringement?


Copying isn’t stealing. We settled this in the 90s.


I saw someone who claims to have re-implemented Photoshop in Rust using clean room specs. I haven't checked into it yet, but it seems to have a lot of interest.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bard/comments/1wxmqpt/ive_created_o...


this “author” has been spamming his project all over social media lately. do the apps even work? everything about this screams vaporware.


Now that’s interesting, thanks for bringing it up.


Yeah, this bodes well for my meditation app frontend I'm going to release on GitHub. It should be fair use ish but it does seem GitHub is fairly friendly anyway.


Headspace without being tracked and having data brokers cross reference "anonymized" (sic! word wasn't in keyb. dict) info on when I meditate, using which program etc.?

Headspace updated it's privacy policy info recently, which got me to have it checked with an LLM. And it turns out that what you're doing on $100 per year meditation app is still being sold to anyone willing to pay. Using headspace lost it's charm. I wonder if Andy ever agreed to this.


Yes. It streams the content from the Healthy Minds Program but without a login or any of their tracking.

Here's a very rough draft of a comparison of the privacy of different meditation apps: https://litter.catbox.moe/crq4n62bf1prei8j.html

Balance is crazy! They're essentially a data broker themselves.


The word “stealing” isn’t limited to physical objects.


I would agree, should you `rm` the copy on the server after having copied it.


Thats what the copyright lobby wants you to think, but honestly, if i copy your digital item, im not stealing it as the original still exists in your possession. That you might infringe on content made by someone else because you copied them, sure but its not stealing.


What do you do for a living?


AI did this to every developer in the world and nobody cares. This just confirms to me that software engineers are the biggest cucks that exist right now.


Best cost for a good result on our MacBook Pro SVG benchmark.

https://playcode.io/blog/macbook-svg-benchmark#model-claude-...

Btw, we have added Opus 5.5 as default model to playcode.ai


https://playcode.io/blog/macbook-svg-benchmark

MacBook Pro 3D in SVG for me the most helpful one.


What worries me most are questions like this: these autonomous AI employees or automations - it doesn't change the essence - consume a lot of LLM tokens. Please tell me, how do you pay for this? Do you use, for example, the Anthropic or OpenAI API directly, or do you connect, for example, a Codex subscription?


Our control panel is on a server but individual agents actually are run on anyone’s machine. This allows us to use the native harnesses including subscriptions. Yes it uses a lot more tokens, but i have have Claude $200, OpenAI $200, and SuperGrok Heavy $300 (or whatever it is called) that includes Cursor Ultra. My machine runs most of them, but some other team members have agents running on their machines using 1-2 $200/mo subs.

I would say this setup probably costs us about $1,000/month total. (I’m excluding traditional engineering use of LLMs from this number. This is the cost of all the “AI employees”.

One reason we did it this way was to use subs.


Do I understand correctly that by using your machine and Claude Code or something like it you are avoiding API pricing?


I do the same thing with my subscriptions. Haven't checked the math lately but it seemed more cost effective in the past.


How do you orchestrate the various machines? Sounds like a great idea.


I've been spending all my time recently thinking about LLM costs. From that, I am currently of the mind that the most interesting question is if they can get it to work in the first place. After that, like with "performance" in the past, I believe there are ways to optimize things. We see the code harnesses doing this out of necessity, for example.

Some of the tools we use: https://www.induction.ai/docs/context-management


If you use a bajillion tokens your economical approach is to self host.


There is a point where those two lines do cross but with them effectively subsidising token cost by burning debt, it's further away than it will be at some point.

That said I use local only models purely because I don't want to use remote models, never having to think about token costs is worth it and no one is training anything on my data either.


Check out my MacBook SVG benchmark. From my experience, it demonstrates the Real model’s behavior. However, I notice the errors it makes, which are similar to the mistakes made by the mistake model in code.

https://playcode.io/blog/macbook-svg-benchmark


Great idea! Would be interesting to see the raw SVG sources too, not only the renderings.


I still believe my bench is superior to Pelican or Karpathy’s.

Everyone knows how a MacBook looks. Any missing or incorrect detail will be obvious. However, Pelican or this world can be anything.

https://playcode.io/blog/macbook-svg-benchmark


Anyway, only Opus 5 Max and Fable 5 XHigh + Max make a good-looking Mac.


Congratulations, Chris! I’ve always been competing with you, and many users came to Playcode from Codepen. In fact, I even offered to buy playcode.io about 9-10 years ago, but you didn’t respond and 1-2 months later you released a copy product named Codepen Projects.


Fun fact: we also built our cloud platform based on Fly.io’s ideas, but we supercharged it with a custom Rust filesystem.

This platform powers full-stack applications for business users, including Playcode.ai.

For more information about our cloud platform, visit: https://playcode.io/cloud


[flagged]

That's rude. It's a shameless plug and I'm happy I have discovered that project thanks to that shameless plug


[flagged]

What does it mean?


lovecraftian horrors while you chase obscure bugs. and no, llms won't help because there was not enough lovecraftian stuff to train them on.


I've heard stories like this before, how one or a few people miraculously coded up an alternative to Node.js. But can you name even one that actually works properly in production? Not a single one.

Take Bun, for example. Nobody is actually running it in production as a runtime. Why? Memory leaks and a whole bunch of other issues. I've personally tried it multiple times, and something always breaks. Come on, it's just not that simple.

Sure, you can build something that has similar interfaces and even works to some degree. But making a production-ready solution is a completely different level of complexity. There's that well-known chart where the first 90% of implementation happens almost instantly, and the remaining 10% takes forever to polish out all the rough edges.

On one hand, I really like the idea, and I've always wondered why TypeScript doesn't compile to native code. On the other hand, I'm quite skeptical that Vercel can actually pull this off. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I have very little faith in it.

Either way, good luck to them, but honestly, even if they succeed, I probably won't use it. Knowing their track record with vendor lock-in and Next.js, where they do everything possible to push you onto Vercel Cloud — no thanks.


Sometimes you are forced to use it - e.g. Bun in Claude Code. I like Opus models, but can't run them outside of Claude Code/Bun in subscription models.


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