100% this is a jump-the-shark moment.

I sort of think what they’re releasing will stay free for a long time. That’s not my concern.

My concern is that since they’ve been acquired by Canva you can tell how Canva is thinking about Affinity; it’s a pure subscription driver towards Canva.

So given this is what Canva wants to do with Affinity, I have no doubt that Affinity will focus on shipping features that drive towards Canva subscriptions. That means other features will atrophy and that the future of affinity is one where you’re increasingly finding it diffficult to use, if you’re aiming to use it as an alternative to Adobe, without a subscription.

So this is subscription software by another name - it just creeping subscription, slowly boiling the frog in hope we won’t all jump out. Make no mistake, the fire has been lit and it won’t be long before the water gets warm.

Enshittification here we come.

Triggered much?

People make mistakes too.

Yes. Like people, if you want the nuggets of gold, you need to go dig them out of the turds.

And also if you’re opening a cafe in the morning, and you’re late, you are directly harming the place that employs you. Customers will be waiting yo!

This endless separation into “managers” and “not managers” is so unproductive. Everyone manages something. That’s why you’re employed.

This is actually worse. It’s copy/paste with an AI “correcting” any view that doesn’t conform to Elon’s view.

Vigilant team of right wing AI bots correcting any “libtard bias” as soon as it occurs.

This really solidifies the US’ splitting into two. Now there are two versions of “truth”. It breaks the heart.

I think people, and this paper, misses a few elements.

4K encoded content often has significantly higher bitrate (well, duh, there’s more content) and often higher than the simple increase in pixel density would suggest. So content with heavy moment (flocks of birds, water, crowds etc) still looks better than 1080p, not because of the increase in pixel density, but because of the decrease of compression artefacts.

Second, high dynamic range yo! On a still picture on my TV it’s hard to see difference between 1080p and 4K but it isn’t hard to see the difference between SDR and HDR.

So I still vastly prefer 4K content, but not because of the resolution.

This 1000%

We should be thrilled that menial, manual, backbreaking labour is no longer required. We should celebrate the removal of these jobs.

IF AND ONLY IF the benefits that Amazon accrued were taxed fairly and the spoils distributed into society.

I would love a world where people could choose their passion and follow it, safe in the knowledge that they would always have housing, warmth, health and food available to them.

“AI” and robotics could save us all and lead to a flourishing of creativity and human happiness.

But in the world where Amazon - and many other large corporations - can have an effective 0% tax rate and only the shareholders win out, this entire plan can go f*** itself.

And unfortunately it is neigh on impossible to imagine how the alternative could exist.

Like we’re dumb!

Not like we’re smart!

Of course. But that wasn’t the complaint/satire of the satirist whose article we’re discussing.

Some topics are just complicated. If I write you a tutorial in fast Fourier transforms I can’t start the tutorial at 1+1=2.

So maybe the tutorial the satirist was satirising just wasn’t quite aimed at the satirist.

Help me understand what the author is trying to say, please. It could be I’m missing something. It just reads to me like the author feels everybody else has a responsibility to somehow make complicated topics easy.

Oh do grow up, frankly.

When I taught myself to program, there was no internet. You went and bought an enormous, 800 page book (usually written by Charles Petzold) and you hoped to Darwin something, anything would be understandable and lead you to move forward just a little bit.

If it’s worthwhile doing it’s hard.

The CEO also looks underage, graduated last year after an internship with Microsoft. I can’t find any record of investment in the company or even any record of incorporation (to be fair I didn’t look very hard). The CEO and his whizz-kid AI coder may be the two smartest people on the planet - stranger things have happened - but statistically, and going by available data only, listening very much to a teenager (or thereabouts) hawking the skill of another teenager (confirmed) is a bit like watching two drunk kids in town thumping their chests.

For sure younger people will grow up to replace older people - such is the way of the world - and a salty coder is usually undertaken by fresh talent coming in with new skill sets (been on both sides of that), but right now, there’s nothing demanding attention here.

Once we were at zero warnings, we enabled warnings as errors, despite the protestation of the grognards on the team.

Depends on the age of the codebase, the age of the compiler and the culture of the team.

I’ve arrived into a team with 1000+ warnings, no const correctness (code had been ported from a C codebase) and nothing but C style casts. Within 6 months, we had it all cleaned up but my least favourite memory from that time was “I’ll just make this const correct; ah, right, and then this; and now I have to do this” etc etc. A right pain.

I’m all for figuring out the balance between creator compensation and AI training.

But this ain’t it.

This is an attempt to own the internet and should be treated as such. You think Cloudflare is doing this without taking a cut? They want in on the game, not change it.

If this succeeds we’ve opened up to non-neutral pipes. This is the end game of what non-neutral carrier ecosystem looks like.