Given that some are now reversing all closed software using LLMs, it should be now finally worth reversing the whole of Nvidia’s closed source software, drivers and blobs, including CUDA.
I think they're not reversing the way you may think(and they're doing a very bad job, if you try any of these apps they collapse very soon for basic workflow things) but rather copying the behaviour by looking at input and output. A clean-room design is called iirc
Virus Total:
Activity related to AMADEY - according to source Cluster25 - 6 months ago
This DOMAIN is used by AMADEY. Amadey is a botnet agent that appeared around October 2018 sold on Russian-speaking hacking forums. It periodically sends information about the system and installed AV software to its C2 server. It can also load other payloads to the victims' devices.
If you're talking about the artcraft stuff, it's strange. The codebase goes back to 2016 as a monorepo but not the full suite and was recently split out as separate apps and other parts of the Adobe suite added. The CLAUDE.md [1] are... interesting and left me puzzling about it.
I was mostly interested in the pdfcraft (have been appreciating https://www.nobloatpdf.com/)
> Clean-room.
> * Never read, disassemble or copy anything inside the Acrobat bundle (names and listings only). Never open Contents/Resources/JavaScripts/.
> * Behaviour comes from public docs, specs (ISO 32000-2, the Arlington model) and black-box observation (plan/acrobat/).
> * Never copy GPL/AGPL code. MuPDF, Ghostscript, Poppler, veraPDF and DSS run only as external oracle processes.
> * See plan/README.md §Clean-room and plan/adr/0001.
It really looks like they have AI running Adobe (and other apps) as sources of truth and have rules against disassembly or including source from GPL projects which left me pondering the ethics of it.
This is unfortunately exactly the kind of project I wouldn't want to trust my photo management workflow to...software is cheaper than ever, thoughtful maintenance and longevity is worth much more to me.
Fair. Your originals are never modified and edits are standard XMP sidecars that Lightroom and darktable can read, so if this project ever stops, nothing is locked in.
Darktable is GPL-3.0 licensed, meaning that I would have to attribute Darktable if it was used in the project. I chose C++ because it is extremely fast. I built this because I was frustrated that Darktable had such a high learning curve. No code was copied from Darktable with my knowledge. As for your comments about the workflow, I will look into that and make sure that this project gives credit where credit is due. Thanks for your feedback.
Note after a quick question to Claude: The workflow is inspired by Darktable, but none of its code was copied. This project aims at approachability versus darktable's many features.
The only surprising thing in your comment is that the day's latest vibe coded app actually got upvoted.
I mean really, you had to ask Claude whether the workflow was Darktable-inspired. The people in this thread who read Claude's README probably know more about how "your" software works than you do.
The scene-referred workflow is vastly superior because it makes all the adjustments before the full Raw data is converted to the display space.
You don't even need to know what that means for it to be useful. In practice, it just means less artifacts, less weird stuff that happens with color near clipping highlights, etc. You use the software in exactly the same way you'd use the display-referred workflow, except that under the hood, the modules are working with the linear Raw data.
It's got the kind of UI that I would love pre-2024 or so but these days it just screams "AI generic" unfortunately. Documentation is fairy concise and reasonably LLM-jargon free though.
There have been at least 10 (probably more) photo editing suites. It seems that now everyone who doesn't want to learn the existing suites just can make their own with AI.
I made my own with AI! It does the thing I need that no existing software does!
I do not however feel urge to upload it an ask strangers to look at what code tool assembled from bits and pieces of existing software by hallucinating into compiler.
It is objectively bad. Also very fun. Even useful. I do not understand the bit about publishing though.
AI means that anyone at all can pay tiny amounts of money for software that fits their exact needs.
This excites them and they share it under the assumption someone else has their exact needs but lacks the inclination to have AI make one of their own.
The real question is why does HN keep upvoting them?
>The real question is why does HN keep upvoting them?
Because a significantly large demographic of HN is aggressively pro-AI to the point of cultishness and the mere existence of such applications, to them, is a vindication of all of their beliefs and an expression of triumph over all of the critics and doubters.
Note that it doesn't actually matter how well they work, or whether they work at all. Many people will assume by default that they do, and that anyone claiming otherwise is just a deluded, bitter Luddite, and will praise and defend them regardless of quality. The rules and standards that apply to human written software don't apply to AI generated software.
I do however think sharing your own personal vibecoded software is a bit like saying "hey world! Check out how good the plot is on the latest page of my diary!"
I am anti LLM by many means, but I do believe it is possible (setting aside some moral quandaries just for the sake of argument) to accelerate the development of software in a meaningful way using them. But doing so requires a strictly defined process of incrementalism, incorporating human expertise and intervention, treating the LLM as a tool and not as magic and as much of a potential liability as a benefit. Anyone serious about developing a graphics editor or replicating Photoshop software who doesn't have professionals - both developers and from the industry - involved isn't serious. A project of that scale should still take months at least to do properly even with AI. Posting whatever Claude spits out over a weekend and declaring coding "solved" is clown shit.
The problem is many AI developers don't want to have to care about the code, or human expertise. They consider the process beneath them. They want to trust the LLM implicitly, believing in its superior intelligence. They want to already be living in the sci-fi post scarcity post singularity universe where they can just say "Computer make me a photoshop" and it just happens, perfectly and without error. And all else being equal... that attitude will never lead to quality software, it will only lead to vibecoded slop.
Look, most people really do not care about the code. The relationship most people (and most developers!) want to have with code is the relationship they have with photographs.
That is to say, maybe they'd put down for something professional for a special occasion, but the one they can make with the thing in their pocket is good enough 99% of the time.
The world where that's possible with photographs has been here for over a decade, but with software it has only arrived this past year. So it's novel. I guess I've answered my own question about why it gets upvoted. I still hate seeing it. I wonder if something similar happened when digital cameras first got cheap.
Most everyday Lightroom editing and library work is there. Missing: print, book, map and web modules, face recognition and tethering. There’s a full list in the README under “How it compares”.
Pro photographer here. And I've counted at least ten of these photo editing apps that have appeared in the last year, many of them in the last few months. All of them LLM-assisted or completely vibe coded.
They definitely work but...
Unlike Lightroom or Darktable (an open source Raw editor that took years to get to a sophisticated level), they are all rough around the edges. Maybe in the future they'll get better in terms of being really refined to handle advanced photography, but right now they're hobby applications.
To me this highlights the absurdity of AI, because enormous amounts of energy is wasted on duplicating stuff and making something new.
I won't try and argue that nothing nice can come out of it, but it seems absurd to me to waste so much energy as a species this way. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a hundred more of these apps in another year.
Is it a full clean-room implementation? I really want to see how the AI clean-room reverse engineering projects fare against legal challenges.
Supposedly clean-room implementations are legal. But they're so easy with AI - it seems like that will need to change. Or the world will come crashing down. Hard to say which is more likely right now.
I don't understand the fuss. Other image editors have always existed. Photoshop doesn't own selecting pixels and doing stuff to that selection. Nobody owns that.
The AI disruption means now, your product better be fucking good. Beacon status in a sea of slop. That's all, no pressure.
Interesting the community pushback on datacentres. I wonder if people are asking "do we need 7 trillion vibe-coded photocraft apps in our neighbourhood?"
By the way I don't think Adobe hangs around lamenting its status as original king of media editing tools, with its own word, who others like to imitate and aspire to. It's not the drag it sounds like!
I think the "fuss" lately is the ease with which people can clone existing proprietary programs and make them open-source using basically the same UI everyone is already familiar with.
A huge barrier to entry for getting people to switch platforms is that they're set in their ways and like their UIs exactly how they're used to seeing them.
The guy who made it said there's lots of work to do, a "long way to go" and that he needs help fixing the bugs. Doesn't sound easy.
I responded to someone who sounded like they were upset on Adobe's behalf "Oh no! Price-hiking subscription monster might feel the pressure!" So what? We all feel pressure, every day. Adobe has billions of dollars to help them threw uncertain times. They'll be fine.
Says you. Did you ask someone who works for Adobe? Maybe you could try.
Again, what you call "clone software" is an image editor. There's always been "clones" in that case. Maybe Photoshop "cloned" Photon Paint or Deluxe Paint.
There's a website called Photopea.com where you can open a PSD file and edit it. Big deal.
Big players supply long term support, innovative new features, and all the things people pay for and depend on. The little clones are cute. The Vibe-coded software is nice.
Maybe stop being terrified on behalf of big subscription enforcing companies? They will be fine. Let them adapt. Maybe Adobe will bring back a perpetual license option they never should have abandoned.
Fellow photographer here. Really interested in Rembrandt, couldn't give less of a shit about how you made it or any philosophical discussions about AI. Congrats on building something that looks genuinely useful.
Two things:
Will you add the ability to import Lightroom presets?
Will you add auto blemish removal? Adobe Cloud has it, Lightroom does not. My latest workflow includes putting photos in the Adobe Cloud, auto detecting and removing blemishes and then bringing those images into Lightroom. If you could figure out a way to auto detect and remove blemishes for portraits, that would be a true game changer. But that also includes being able to keep moles/beauty marks etc.
Automatic blemish detection is now included in the Remove menu. I don't think it is perfect yet, only tried it on a couple of photos, but, feel free to open an issue if the performance is not satisfactory, as with the import of Lightroom presets. It would be under Presets/Import Lightroom presets. Thank you!
Finally getting around to taking a look at Rembrandt. Doing a side by side comparison to how it works compared to Lightroom. First thing I noticed, not being able to take a selection of images from Photo Mechanic and not being able to click/drag to Rembrandt to get them to open in Rembrandt.
63 comments
[ 0.31 ms ] story [ 15.9 ms ] threadNo excuses this time.
macOS download url after downloading with librewolf and rightclicking "copy downoload url": https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/f1e08a34d17fd85cd8896ba86...
Edit: i dont get this when copying direct links from the readme.md. Its just when i click them and copy the url it used to download.
Edit2: i get this too when i download the x64 exe and copy the download link from the librewolf (firefox fork) download manager https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url-analysis/u-6a55e124c22f9b...
Edit3: maybe false alarm and the botnet used the github url https://release-assets.githubusercontent.com/ to spread malware?
Where that's good, I don't know..nobody seems to care telling.
> Clean-room.
> * Never read, disassemble or copy anything inside the Acrobat bundle (names and listings only). Never open Contents/Resources/JavaScripts/.
> * Behaviour comes from public docs, specs (ISO 32000-2, the Arlington model) and black-box observation (plan/acrobat/).
> * Never copy GPL/AGPL code. MuPDF, Ghostscript, Poppler, veraPDF and DSS run only as external oracle processes.
> * See plan/README.md §Clean-room and plan/adr/0001.
It really looks like they have AI running Adobe (and other apps) as sources of truth and have rules against disassembly or including source from GPL projects which left me pondering the ethics of it.
[0] https://getartcraft.com/
[1] https://github.com/storytold/pdfcraft/blob/main/CLAUDE.md
Not that Adobe's getting my money either.
Note after a quick question to Claude: The workflow is inspired by Darktable, but none of its code was copied. This project aims at approachability versus darktable's many features.
I mean really, you had to ask Claude whether the workflow was Darktable-inspired. The people in this thread who read Claude's README probably know more about how "your" software works than you do.
You don't even need to know what that means for it to be useful. In practice, it just means less artifacts, less weird stuff that happens with color near clipping highlights, etc. You use the software in exactly the same way you'd use the display-referred workflow, except that under the hood, the modules are working with the linear Raw data.
I do not however feel urge to upload it an ask strangers to look at what code tool assembled from bits and pieces of existing software by hallucinating into compiler.
It is objectively bad. Also very fun. Even useful. I do not understand the bit about publishing though.
This excites them and they share it under the assumption someone else has their exact needs but lacks the inclination to have AI make one of their own.
The real question is why does HN keep upvoting them?
Because a significantly large demographic of HN is aggressively pro-AI to the point of cultishness and the mere existence of such applications, to them, is a vindication of all of their beliefs and an expression of triumph over all of the critics and doubters.
Note that it doesn't actually matter how well they work, or whether they work at all. Many people will assume by default that they do, and that anyone claiming otherwise is just a deluded, bitter Luddite, and will praise and defend them regardless of quality. The rules and standards that apply to human written software don't apply to AI generated software.
I do however think sharing your own personal vibecoded software is a bit like saying "hey world! Check out how good the plot is on the latest page of my diary!"
The problem is many AI developers don't want to have to care about the code, or human expertise. They consider the process beneath them. They want to trust the LLM implicitly, believing in its superior intelligence. They want to already be living in the sci-fi post scarcity post singularity universe where they can just say "Computer make me a photoshop" and it just happens, perfectly and without error. And all else being equal... that attitude will never lead to quality software, it will only lead to vibecoded slop.
That is to say, maybe they'd put down for something professional for a special occasion, but the one they can make with the thing in their pocket is good enough 99% of the time.
The world where that's possible with photographs has been here for over a decade, but with software it has only arrived this past year. So it's novel. I guess I've answered my own question about why it gets upvoted. I still hate seeing it. I wonder if something similar happened when digital cameras first got cheap.
They definitely work but...
Unlike Lightroom or Darktable (an open source Raw editor that took years to get to a sophisticated level), they are all rough around the edges. Maybe in the future they'll get better in terms of being really refined to handle advanced photography, but right now they're hobby applications.
To me this highlights the absurdity of AI, because enormous amounts of energy is wasted on duplicating stuff and making something new.
I won't try and argue that nothing nice can come out of it, but it seems absurd to me to waste so much energy as a species this way. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a hundred more of these apps in another year.
Supposedly clean-room implementations are legal. But they're so easy with AI - it seems like that will need to change. Or the world will come crashing down. Hard to say which is more likely right now.
The AI disruption means now, your product better be fucking good. Beacon status in a sea of slop. That's all, no pressure.
Interesting the community pushback on datacentres. I wonder if people are asking "do we need 7 trillion vibe-coded photocraft apps in our neighbourhood?"
By the way I don't think Adobe hangs around lamenting its status as original king of media editing tools, with its own word, who others like to imitate and aspire to. It's not the drag it sounds like!
A huge barrier to entry for getting people to switch platforms is that they're set in their ways and like their UIs exactly how they're used to seeing them.
The guy who made it said there's lots of work to do, a "long way to go" and that he needs help fixing the bugs. Doesn't sound easy.
I responded to someone who sounded like they were upset on Adobe's behalf "Oh no! Price-hiking subscription monster might feel the pressure!" So what? We all feel pressure, every day. Adobe has billions of dollars to help them threw uncertain times. They'll be fine.
You could try asking someone who works for one.
I can't help you with that sorry.
> "terrified"
Says you. Did you ask someone who works for Adobe? Maybe you could try.
Again, what you call "clone software" is an image editor. There's always been "clones" in that case. Maybe Photoshop "cloned" Photon Paint or Deluxe Paint.
There's a website called Photopea.com where you can open a PSD file and edit it. Big deal.
Big players supply long term support, innovative new features, and all the things people pay for and depend on. The little clones are cute. The Vibe-coded software is nice.
Maybe stop being terrified on behalf of big subscription enforcing companies? They will be fine. Let them adapt. Maybe Adobe will bring back a perpetual license option they never should have abandoned.
Fellow photographer here. Really interested in Rembrandt, couldn't give less of a shit about how you made it or any philosophical discussions about AI. Congrats on building something that looks genuinely useful.
Two things:
Will you add the ability to import Lightroom presets?
Will you add auto blemish removal? Adobe Cloud has it, Lightroom does not. My latest workflow includes putting photos in the Adobe Cloud, auto detecting and removing blemishes and then bringing those images into Lightroom. If you could figure out a way to auto detect and remove blemishes for portraits, that would be a true game changer. But that also includes being able to keep moles/beauty marks etc.