It's the same really. There have always been alternatives that can work with Adobe's various file formats. Even more aren't going to change much, at least for their enterprise key customers. This is not only the case for Adobe, but many others as well, e.g. MS office is still a thing these days, and so are things like 3Ds Max or Maya, albeit having many compatible cheaper or even free alternatives. It's not so much about features, pricing or even stability. It's about customer support. Do I want to ask an LLM and test my luck or write a GitHub issue and cross my fingers that someone will read it within the next weeks? No, I will pick up my phone or write a mail and get a response within hours if not minutes.
I ask my llm to write custom software and love the freedom to customize it to my needs. Today I do a presentation on Ubuntu with a new "Presenter" app that works offline, runs 100% in CUDA on GPU and streams videos, starts in 2 seconds, lets me demo live robotics policies in 3D simulations and Opus 5.5 wrote it yesterday. This may sound very unusual, but I think it will be common in the future: moats disappear one by one.
The big problem is Photoshop. I have no love for Adobe, I proudly moved my department off of all Adobe products a few years ago. I am a big fan of open source solutions and I am always impressed at what the GIMP team (and some others) have accomplished.
But…
Photoshop is king. Everything else is behind by a solid decade. If you’re a professional the $40 a month or whatever it is now means nothing to you as well. It has the professionals are all on it, and because the price isn’t astronomical, that’s what everyone else uses who needs to use that kind of program more than once in a blue moon.
Premier? Replaceable. Lightroom? Pretty replaceable though still somewhat ahead. Photoshop? There’s only one Photoshop. And as much as I’m loathe to give Adobe any credit, it’s the best by a mile. There are too many essential features in QoL things that other programs are missing.
Luckily my department doesn’t need it, but if we did, we would simply have to accept Photoshop.
> If you’re a professional the $40 a month or whatever it is now means nothing to you as well.
Exactly this, but also for an employer, paying $40/month/user is good value in order to ensure you have a room full of productive designers or image editors.
No employer is going to dump Photoshop and force the designers to re-learn everything they've learnt over years or decades. There would be such an enormous loss of productivity.
If you've ever watched a designer at work you would see that. They just breeze through Photoshop, hundreds of things in a few minutes. Super productive. All thanks to muscle memory, knowing all those shortcuts, knowing blindfolded where all the toolbar buttons are, knowing how the filters behave, knowing where everything is in the dialog boxes.
A similar comparison is all those "just write it in Rust" people. Well, sure. But if I've spent decades coding C or whatever, I'm not exactly going to be able to switch to Rust overnight am I .... realistically its going to take a timeframe measured in years to reach the same level of coding proficiency. And no, vibing with an LLM is not the same thing.
Also Photoshop has native integration with Adobe Indesign and Illustrator, so there's also the cross-tool aspect too.
I'm not sufficiently skilled with Photoshop to gauge how well this replaces it, but you may be interested in this supposed clean-room reimplementation of Photoshop: https://github.com/storytold/photocraft
Heard about this! Haven’t had a chance to check it out yet. I’m sure once I have an actual project that needs me to roll up my sleeves with Photoshop I’ll give it a shot. I probably should have mentioned it in my original comment as a possible option
Not a graphic designer, so, truly asking out of curiosity: what are the QoL things and essential features in Photoshop? I've been slumming it with GIMP for years now and not felt anything very obviously missing, but again I'm not a pro.
Compatibility issues, which can be a huge deal partially due to near-vendor lock in. If you historically been on Photoshop, bringing your working/former projects into another software is not easy, which matters because revisiting work is common.
Not all tools are non-destructive in GIMP. Things like raw support, smart objects, retouching, etc. all either are super thin compared to Photoshop or require workarounds/a lot of manual effort. There are just lots of tools you expect in Photoshop that either don’t exist or exist in an inferior form. I can’t elaborate too much because I don’t really touch Photoshop much these days, but I work with people who do and worked in production long enough to know the expectations. GIMP is great but Adobe is a massive company with deep pockets, it’s hard to keep up. Their user experience is miserable but the tool itself is just far more robust, and a client simply isn’t going to accept that you won’t do something that Photoshop could do quickly because your alternate program can’t do it or does it with a lot more effort. That’s the reason I ultimately dropped Final Cut!
I would say that Apple's Create Studio can move toward feature parity faster with Adobe. My point if you're not a platform provider it's going to be harder to make a profit.
The risk for Adobe isn’t that we replace their software with some AI generated alternative. It’s that we bypass that class of software altogether and have an AI do the work.
Surely not just prompting like this and it will one shot it. The usefulness of the flash authoring tool, was it was battle tested and polished.
But I did gave it a shot to took up developement again of abandoned www.wickeditor.com (a web reimplementation of flash). Good results, but limited time and energy for that right now.
Wait for people to learn about that you can listen in virtually anywhere through fiber-optic cables, as sound waves are enough to redirect the light in the cable to a measurable degree by "bending" the cable itself. Special devices to filter these variances out and transform them back to audio signals are a thing. It's only per line though, as any repeating device will just output a new cleaned up signal again.
Oh well, there have always been ways to snoop on someone like that. Back in the day it was CRTs emitting measurable waves through the neighborhood, with some papers even going as far as restoring the displayed image through a wall. Nowadays it's fiber and WiFi, and those seem to be much easier to work with even. Plus everyone carries a device that is tracked by their mobile provider's cell network. shrug
Theremin did invent the Thing (a.k.a. the Great Seal bug) that worked as a passive RF cavity. However, he later invented a completely different device called the buran eavesdropping system:
> Apparently happy with ‘the thing’, Beria called on Theremin’s services again and he was enlisted for further eavesdropping operations. In 1947 or earlier, when Theremin probably served in the Kuchino sharashka outside Moscow, he was called upon to create another device for wireless surveillance, but this time it should operate fully remotely without any device planted at the target site. The project received the code name buran (snowstorm). To solve this difficult task, Theremin paid attention to the resonators already present in a building, such as windows. A conversation in a room may cause window panes to vibrate slightly, and Theremin devised a method to detect these vibrations from a distance, using an infrared beam directed at the window pane, and then to interpret them and convert them to discernible speech (Glinsky, 2005, p.261).
>
> The buran was able to detect speech from as far away as 500 metres, making detection very difficult. Interception would have to disrupt the infrared beam and jamming would require optical overpowering. Both were unlikely. However, it could be used only when weather permitted and was not effective in rain, fog or smog (Glinsky, 2005, p.261). Buran is often considered a predecessor of the laser microphone, although it employed an infrared beam rather than laser.
The Thing uses a radio signal at 330 MHz (or perhaps a second or third harmonic). These radio waves have a wavelength of about a meter, which is about 6 orders of magnitude longer than an optical wavelength. It's a fundamentally different mechanism than laser Doppler vibrometry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_wave "Radio waves are a type of electromagnetic radiation with the lowest frequencies and the longest wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum, typically with frequencies below 300 GHz and wavelengths greater than 1 mm"
I see no problem with using the term 'optical wavelength' to distinguish between a wavelength of ~1 micrometer and 'radio waves' at ~1 meter.
> The study of optics extends to other forms of electromagnetic radiation, including radio waves, microwaves, and X-rays.
I have no problem with this usage if the distinction helps understanding, but we seem to be discussing terms with potentially conflicting definitions without defining them: laser, light, radio, optics. All of these can reasonably apply to MHz radiation!
And the next sentence is "The term optics is also applied to technology for manipulating beams of elementary charged particles."
No one disputes that 'optics' can refer to more than visible light. But, in the context of a discussion about lasers and 1950's radio devices operating at VHF, we can still use terms like 'optical wavelength', 'radio wave', 'light', etc to distinguish the phenomena.
Language is a two-way street. Words are imprecise tools for people who want to communicate together, even in engineering and physics. Being pedantic without a deeper point to make isn't a useful contribution.
The context is a plausible energy source for illuminating a passive modulating reflector (a window pane or a custom cavity resonator) in 1945 Moscow.
There are three approximate frequency bands being discussed. The bands are separated by a factor of about 1 million. The width of each band is a factor of 3-8.
Human voice audio - 500 Hz to 4 kHz (the modulating signal)
If you actually have any new information about the wavelengths Leon Theremin was using, please share it.
ClikeX originally claimed that the USSR had lasers in 1945 (untrue) and that Leon Theremin invented the detection of sound vibrations or audio reproduction of via light (also untrue).
The confusion here is between the two different eavesdropping systems developed by Theremin: The Buran eavesdropping system (which used likely-near infrared on windowpanes) and "The Thing" (which used VHF-UHF radio on a custom device).
Your repeated insistence on the unrelated point that "light" and "radio" are technically both electromagnetic waves isn't clarifying anything.
Mate, I'm really not trying to argue with you. I'm not suggesting anyone here is wrong!
> If you actually have any new information about the wavelengths Leon Theremin was using, please share it.
I'm quite confident it was an optical wavelength! ;)
> ClikeX originally claimed that the USSR had lasers in 1945 (untrue) and that Leon Theremin invented the detection of sound vibrations or audio reproduction of via light (also untrue).
> The confusion here is between the two different eavesdropping systems developed by Theremin: The Buran eavesdropping system (which used likely-near infrared on windowpanes) and "The Thing" (which used VHF-UHF radio on a custom device).
Great summary!
> Your repeated insistence on the unrelated point that "light" and "radio" are technically both electromagnetic waves isn't clarifying anything.
I hope this has helped clarify that, of the terms used here, only "radio" is clearly distinct, since "light" and "electromagnetic waves" are often used interchangeably.
The ancient Chinese invented WiFi. They used the light from signal fires to send messages between towers on the Great Wall. WiFi uses radio waves to send signals, which are also light. Therefore WiFi was invented 1800 years ago by the Chinese.
Funnily enough, first time I've seen it mentioned was in Ghost in the Shell manga from 1990s, where Major's side business illegally offers military grade optronic touch/etc senses in artificial skin for cyborgs, using measurements of bending fiber optic loops
Just toss a doppler laser interferometer on a window, mirror, etc. At least with fiber-optics you need physical access. Single mode (I think that's most of FTTH) is pretty insensitive to vibration and hard to localize so you'd really have to install something.
I don’t get your point. Yes, there’s a lot of eavesdropping techniques available to actors with nation state capabilities (or with a lot of time, money, and expertise). This is another one of them. It’s good to be aware of things like this because it helps you better understand threat modeling for applications that require serious hardening.
There may also be unusual applications of this, like the traffic counting mentioned by another commenter.
(For anyone who needs hardening against things like this, you need a SCIF.)
> Back in the day it was CRTs emitting measurable waves through the neighborhood, with some papers even going as far as restoring the displayed image through a wall.
Plot twist: They look for genuine exploit paths to fix as a cover up, while introducing and potentially selling genuine new backdoors that humans or other models are unlikely to find. Edit: Or maybe the AI does it just for its own interest.
That was exactly my thought when reading the headline, before even looking into the article. Sure it's still somewhat complex to get to a rocket launch, but without the biters where is the challenge, other than complexity? It's like a big excel sheet with conveyor belts, pipes and electricity poles at that point only.
The more interesting challenge is the one you eliminated, complexity, in getting efficient logistics and arrangements. Dyson Sphere Program (until late in its existence) and Satisfactory don't have waves of enemies attacking your bases but remain challenging and a satisfying puzzle. I remember I used a constraint solver to help me optimize some late game recipes for Satisfactory.
Patience, for one. I reach a point where I'm looking at a mess of coal-fed sorters that need a complete rip-and-replace with electric ones, and that's usually the point where I close the game and go back to something easier like Kenshi.
I know it's a pipe dream, but these kinds of games (Factorio, Satisfactory, etc) would all benefit from sort of brain-game interface where I could just think about what I wanted to do.
The tedium and repetition is really what kills the enjoyment for me. The problem solving, planning, forethought, etc are super fun but it's killed by the former.
Blueprints and construction bots, plus the well-thought-out and extensively battle-tested set of keyboard commands for them, are basically a brain-game interface for Factorio on the level that Vim is for text. For the grandparent’s “rip and replace coal burners” I am hitting mod-D and dragging a selection box over the offending area, then hover-Q on a nearby element I want to use and shift-click to plan it, once I have planned one instance of a subpattern its mod-C select, click hold and walk in a direction to tile it in one dimension, mod-C select, click hold walk to extend this over the other direction. It is now done, the bots will handle everything else - because Wube are an incredible bunch of UX engineers, I can place the new building before the old buildings are even removed, leave, and trust that everything will be done correctly. Highly recommend getting a “Starter Bots” mod that feels appropriately balanced.
> I am hitting mod-D and dragging a selection box over the offending area, then hover-Q on a nearby element I want to use and shift-click to plan it, once I have planned one instance of a subpattern its mod-C select, click hold and walk in a direction to tile it in one dimension, mod-C select, click hold walk to extend this over the other direction.
This just sounds exhausting.
I'd rather try to sneak into a hyper-religious xenophobic town and get captured and turned into servant labor at a mining camp. And I'm not even taking about visiting Texas!
It's basically just Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V in terms of complexity and ease of use. Factorio is very ergonomic and the only way I can interpret the abovementioned "tedium and repetition" is that they never played long enough to get to the bots stage.
Factorio rewards the players progression through the game by taking away points of pain. The helper bots being a key transition. Without that pain there would be no reward. The fact that refactoring is expensive in time and complexity is what makes it realistic - it makes the earlier decisions important and consequential.
You can always enter creative mode and make whatever changes you want in the game instantly, but in my experience that does make it less fun.
It's basically programming with really bad ergonomics. I'm a programmer by profession and I was immediately frustrated by Factorio because I realized I'd rather just write code and build a project because it would scratch the exact same itch while actually being useful.
I tried really hard to like Factorio, and I bounce off of it each time after playing a save for 4-8 hours for exactly this reason. I know a lot of programmers who love it, so I almost wish I could get into it.
Now I'm tempted to try again, because it feels like the kind of game I should really enjoy.
The biters are just a line item in the spreadsheet. Early players might build a wall with an ammo belt, for example. There's lots of options that don't involve responding in real-time.
Though these days I just manually clear the pollution cloud with a pocket full of turrets. The forward deployed engineer model, if you will.
> even compared to the synthetic materials we are now capable of creating
Aren't like almost all commercially used diamonds these days synthetic as well? As far as I can tell, other than just for the sake of them being "natural" or for having weird impurities that add color to them (read as: subjectively better to some people), no one wants/needs natural ones anymore.
We can recreate lots of things, but almost always appreciate the true version better. It’s why it’s cooler to see the Mona Lisa than to see a poster print of it.
Why? As far as I can tell, other than just for the sake of the view being “natural” or having some weird color issues due to time and radiation and oxidization, nobody wants/needs the actual painting anymore.
Reason: because even when it’s identical or even inferior, the touch of nature is just… nice.
A painting has a 3 dimensional texture to the paint, while a poster is inevitably flat. Different paint compositions will also reflect light differently, while a poster won't.
So, yeah, having the real painting has additional value.
I wouldn't pay much for a painting anyway. I have several paintings and posters up on the walls, and they're interesting for a time, and then I just don't see them anymore. They're just part of the wall.
To be clear, you acknowledge the natural version would be better, but the controversy and conflict surrounding it is what actually turns you off. This has no effect on my argument that people prefer real things.
Naturally, if you said “you can have the Mona Lisa but only if someone is murdered in the process”, reprints of it would be very popular.
>To be clear, you acknowledge the natural version would be better
No, not at all. I prefer the artificial ones. Any size you want at a much lower cost. No massive amounts of mining. The fact they don't cost some indigenous kids lives is a well earned bonus.
It is you with a strong attachment to the idea that natural is somehow better.
Unrelated, but does anyone else find the adjacent (4b) definition of 'synthetic' to be unusually unusual, in a way few definitions in a dictionary are?
Without anything redacted, definition 4b is "devised, arranged, or fabricated for special situations to imitate or replace usual realities"?
> Meanwhile the Chinese are going to undercut them every chance they get.
I wish they were, but I always wonder when people chime in with Chinese models what they are actually doing with those. I have an OpenRouter account and give various models a shot every other month, wishing for an alternative, but I always come back to Claude. Even more so since the switch from Opus 5.1 to 5.5. To me, personally, it's unmatched. Like a year ago it was very different, and I would use other models all the time. But honestly at the time they all felt kind of "meh" still. I just hope everyone is at a good baseline in a year from now on, so I actually have a choice. And then, as you stated, things will get interesting.
I use Opus 5.5 daily at work and a mix of GLM 5.3 (Flash or not), Deepseek v4 (flash or pro) at home and while Opus 5.5 is more capable, in my opinion it matters for less than 5% of the work i do.
These chinese models are simply good enough for the vast majority of tasks I run and when they're not I use Astra or Opus 5.5.
Yes, leaving Opus 5.5 on all the time is comfortable when you pay the 90€ plan but it's just not necessary.
I use Opus 5.5 at work and I use Sonnet 5.5 at home. Sonnet 5.5 medium according to AA cost per task is $0.48 per task, while GLM 5.3 (max) is $2.01 (opus 5.5 high is $1.82). GLM 5.3 flash is $0.28 per task and Deepseek 4.1 flash 1017 is $0.26.
So it seems like Sonnet 5.5 medium, GLM 5.3 flash and Deepseek V4.1 flash 1017 are all in a similar space in capacity and price, however the $20 anthropic sub will get you like $200-$300 in sonnet 5.5...
Another bonus is that sonnet uses a fraction of the overall tokens and finishes much faster than the average chinese model, so your work goes faster (Sonnet 5.5 medium in 2 minutes, Deepseek 1017 in 6.5 minutes, GLM 5.3 flash in 13 minutes...)
I still don't get why paying for chinese inference makes sense. I should try Haiku 5.5 high/max because it's posting higher numbers than Deepseek V4.1 flash for half the price
Yeah, I spent the last week with Deepseek Flash 4.1-1017, Kimi 3, and GLM 5.3 (and 5.3-flash). None of them were literally useless but also none of them were capable of making progress on the main project I am working on where Opus, Sol, and even Gemini Flash have all done very good work. Benchmarks might have you believe open models are only barely behind the big US labs in intelligence, but it feels much worse in practice.
I am running GLM 5.3 Flash locally at home for coding and from my point of view it is indistinguishable from the frontier models of 6 months ago. It can handle almost every task I throw at it.
I have 2 DGX Sparks, 256 GB unified RAM, so not a cheap set of hardware. Luckily I bought them before the recent price increase.
However even with a high tier gaming machine you can run one of the Qwen models and it will be good at coding... like having an intern with boundless energy that will sometimes make mistakes but in general save you a lot of time. And for automating tasks involving scanning documents or creating summaries it will be brilliant.
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. One of my coworkers who was constantly touting Chinese models a few months ago now only uses opus 5.5. It is a huge difference.
The one from Denmark (while not as cool looking, because ... you know, mountains and stuff) had much more appeal, though. Probably because it wasn't 1% blocks and 99% of Claudism rubbed against your face.
> B~ b~ but they would have used LLMs back then if they could, too.
"You're absolutely right."™ But they didn't/couldn't. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don't own any Garmin stuff, but it's just been yesterday that I overheard someone in the office ranting about them, and how they are making a custom firmware for it with Claude right now. Are they really this bad?
It's not bad on release, but it's very frustrating how quick they stop porting new features to one gen old models, basically instantly.
6 months after I bough mine (a 965 FR, top of the line, most recent model at the time), they released the new model 970 with new softwares features they won't port to mine...
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