29 results for “analog_cafe”
Hey #believeinfilm friends,
If you print at home, you may be familiar with f-stop timing, but devices that make it actually convenient can be expensive.
Darkplug is a $25 f-stop timer app for iPhone that uses a smart home gadget you may already own: https://www.analog.cafe/comments/odu9
Hey #believeinfilm friends,
I spent nearly all of October rewriting the internals of film Q (a web app for inverting film negatives online).
The new version features significant image quality improvements:
- Eliminated highlight/shadow clipping,
- More accurate colours,
- And a new colour correction algorithm.
Plus, fun new UI elements with faster processing speeds.
I explain how and why those upgrades work in today's article: https://www.analog.cafe/r/scanning-film-just-got-easier-mxge
Near the end, I also outline what could take it to the next level and ask for your feedback on future developments.
Thank you all for your support. This would not be possible without you!
"PT has lived in the city for about a decade, and when he wanted to promote his own business, he searched online for a list of bulletin boards where he could post his flyers. Finding no such resource, he decided to assemble one himself. He hopped on his bike and began searching and cataloging what he calls “community work[s] of art.”
Many of them reside in laundromats and cafes across the city. They typically sport homemade ads for cleaning services and music teachers, but these boards represent more than just free marketing. One librarian he spoke to described community bulletin boards as “the First Amendment in action.”
“It’s just so messy, and everyone’s talking over each other. You can put up whatever you want,” PT said.
Described this way, bulletin boards sound a lot like an earlier, more optimistic version of the internet. Now, social media ostensibly fills the same role, but, as in music and literature, PT says people still feel a pull toward the analog version.
“I’ve had more than a few people say it’s almost a ritual where they’ll grab a coffee from the neighborhood coffee shop, walk up, and just sit and look at [the board] instead of doom scrolling,” he said."
https://epicentersf.substack.com/p/where-have-all-the-bulletin-boards
The analog side of my music studio in action! Haha :D
News: Dual Analog makes declaration of identity and ambition with first music video from forthcoming album
City Views on Tour #1407 Analog Berlin Wideangle 77
#photography #cityviews #berlin #kreuzberg #landwehrkanal #cityphotography #streetphotography #analogphotography #filmphotography #minolta #fomapan200
https://foto.bibra-medien.de/2026/10/25/city-views-on-tour-1407-analog-berlin-wideangle-77/
City Views on Tour #1405 Analog Berlin Wideangle 75
#photography #cityviews #berlin #kreuzberg #landwehrkanal #cityphotography #streetphotography #analogphotography #filmphotography #minolta #fomapan200
https://foto.bibra-medien.de/2026/10/23/city-views-on-tour-1405-analog-berlin-wideangle-75/
AnalogMimic (0.1.0) by tkgktyk
➡️ https://github.com/tkgktyk/analog-mimic-arduino
Controls the Analog Mimic programmable analog module over I2C.
Vintage Tones on a Budget: Why We Love Kodak ColorPlus 200 https://petapixel.com/2026/10/23/vintage-tones-on-a-budget-why-we-love-kodak-colorplus-200/ #Reviews #Analog
#ITByte: Great Sky’s #Superconducting #Neuromorphic #AI chip is an analog brain-inspired #Processor designed to analyze high-speed data from nuclear fusion reactors and large-scale AI infrastructure.
https://knowledgezone.co.in/posts/Superconducting-Neuromorphic-AI-Chip-6adb124c62f261c3f18a60c0
https://www.europesays.com/ie/749590/ New disclosure rules expose big gap between Analog Devices’ Irish tax charge and sum paid – The Irish Times #Accenture #AnalogDevices #Apple #Business #CorporationTax #Éire #EU #IE #Ireland #Microsoft #tax
Immidiate Synthwave by Glitchedtones 🎹
24 synthwave kits (12 keys), 72 MIDI files, 96 WAV loops, 24 Cthulhu presets. 756MB.
🎁 FREE (reg. $20) until Nov 6, 2026
🔗 Link in bio!
PS4Bluepad32 (1.0.1) for esp32 by Pham Thanh Tuyen
➡️ https://github.com/phm-tuyenn/ps4-esp32-lib
Read DualShock 4 buttons and analog inputs using Bluepad32.
Was gonna get fancy for Mom with a set of noise canceling Bose headphones and a Bluetooth audio sender for the Roku TV…
But that’s one more thing to charge, one pairing that can fail, one gadget to plugin…
Did ya know a 35 foot analog audio cable is $17?!?!
Simple tech for the win!
Finally got my Casio G-SHOCK (GA-2100) hands adjusted properly. Hold "ADJUST" for 5 seconds until "SUB" flashes, adjust the day-of-week pointer to point to SUnday, then adjust the analog hands to 12:00, and exit. The analog machinery then steps to the correct time of day and day of week!
Jetzt fix: 2027 kostet die Jahreskarte für die Wiener Linien 483,10 Euro
Der städtische Verkehrsbetrieb hebt die Preise aufgrund der Inflation ab 1. Jänner 2027 an. Ob man Jahreskarten digital oder analog bezieht, macht preislich keinen Unterschied mehr
#PHTV73: This isn't another glorification and/or lamentation post of the oldest TV network. I've heard like that years already.
And now they have 30 days of analog transmission.
https://timowsturf.wordpress.com/2026/10/23/phtv73-counting-down-going-down/
Tilecrawling in Pocket Starforged.
Inspired by the beautiful illustrations by u/FrankReady on r/RPG_Illustrated (e.g. https://redd.it/1www9g3 ), I learned about @capacle 's #tilecrawling idea, and wanted to try drawing some tiles based on my own #IronswornStarforged sessions. I also recently learned about the awesome #artist_trading_card format, and this was a perfect match for both. And it worked way better than I imagined and than I thought I could be able to, which has me really quite proud and excited! ☺️ In the pic you can also see my Pocket Starforged set that I used to play the actual sessions.
#ttrpg #solorpg #illustration #sciencefiction #rpgart #sketch #traditionalart #handmade #humanart #scifi #mastoart #fediart #theWorkshop #analog #blackandwhite #blackandwhitedrawing #pendrawing #drawing #drawtober
New Signal Check is live: Episode 205 - October 23, 2026. This episode covers critical PHP vulnerabilities already being exploited in the wild, a zero-day in Arista's SD-WAN platform, and the unsettling rise of fully autonomous AI agents scanning and breaching websites without human oversight. Adrian also touches on the NYC Marathon as a grounding analog counterpoint to the digital chaos—because sometimes the best security is just putting one… Listen: https://share.transistor.fm/s/e080cb3f
`Argument using analogy is just a tool bro`
---
Amazing that #TNG established the analogy between the warp/subspace crisis and the #anthropocene decades ago and still neither timeframe has done jack shit.
Yesterday, I watched the Mexican film Flies (Moscas), which deals with cancer. I found it particularly sad and moving, perhaps because I watched it just one day before the Brazilian presidential election.
I couldn't help seeing an analogy between cancer and the erosion of democracy.
Cancer can develop in different parts of the body. Our bodies are made up of trillions of cells, and some can become cancerous, spreading and eventually threatening the entire organism.
I kept thinking about how something similar can happen to democracy. Undemocratic forces can emerge in different parts of society and its institutions, gradually weakening the very system that allows them to exist.
Watching a film about such a devastating disease, while fearing for the future of democracy in my country, was an unexpectedly emotional experience.
#Moscas #Cinema #Mexico #Brazil #Democracy #FarRight #Eleicoes2026
The Joe Tidy controversy is exactly why I don’t advertise myself as a ‘cyber expert’, rather a ‘cyber regulation/policy person’.
Because I don’t want to convey the impression that ‘I am a go-to voice on cyber’, versus ‘I have deeply studied cyber regulation as a PhD’.
Defence analogy:
Imagine claiming to be a fires expert/fires-focused journalist but not having heard of nitrocellulose.
Yes, this is a hill I will die on (and die mad about, because there's nothing that's gonna change it now)...
Internet != internet.
There's a generational breakpoint where the only meaning of "internet" is "wifi access", and in fact "wifi" means access to the Internet. Whereas the geeks and the older folks think of "wifi" as the last-feet layer-two transport / auth / etc only.
Put another way, analogy from electricity:
"internet" = "is the power on in my home"
"Internet" = "is the overall electrical grid OK"
... and The Youts make no distinction between the two.
So when 404 Media's headline says "is the internet cooked?", they really should say the Internet, not the internet.
Docker can look intimidating at first.
Images, containers, volumes, networks, registries, Dockerfiles...
The basic idea is actually simple:
Package an application together with the environment it needs to run.
The "Works on My Machine" Problem
Imagine your application requires:
Node.js 22
MongoDB
Specific npm dependencies
Environment variables
A teammate might have:
Node.js 20
Different MongoDB version
Different operating system
Problems appear.
Docker helps standardize the environment.
Dockerfile
A basic Node.js Dockerfile might look like:
FROM node:22
WORKDIR /app
COPY package*.json ./
RUN npm install
COPY . .
EXPOSE 3000
CMD ["npm", "start"]
This describes how the application environment should be created.
Image vs Container
An image is the packaged blueprint.
A container is a running instance of that image.
Think:
Image = Class
Container = Object
It's not a perfect analogy, but it's useful for beginners.
Docker Compose
Multiple services can be defined together:
services:
api:
build: .
ports:
- "3000:3000"
database:
image: mongo
Now your development environment can include both the API and database.
Why Developers Should Learn Docker
Even if you don't become a DevOps engineer, Docker helps with:
Final Thoughts
You don't need to memorize every Docker command.
Start by understanding:
Dockerfile
Image
Container
Volume
Network
Compose
Those concepts will take you surprisingly far.#docker #devops #containers #development #software #coding #engineering #inclusive #community
Docker for Developers Who Don't Want to Become DevOps Engineers
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🛠️ Tool: PacketSmith v5 Integrates Yara-X into Network Traffic Analysis
===================
PacketSmith from Netomize shipped version 5, codenamed Pinus strobus, and the headline feature is an integrated Yara-X engine. The vendor describes the release as the result of extended R&D for network detection engineers, SOC analysts, and malware and vulnerability researchers, adding "unique, unparalleled" capabilities. Marketing aside, the integration itself looks substantive: Yara-X is not only pointed at payloads, it is wired into a structure of protocol attributes that the compiler can reference.
Key features
• Scoping across data categories: raw frames, individual TCP/UDP packets, reassembled TCP/UDP streams, and ICMP (v4/v6) payloads.
• Deep protocol attributes provided as custom Pattern Identifiers (PaIDs), nested identifiers that let rules target network metadata instead of raw bytes only.
• Cross-layer correlation: a single YARA condition can reference link-layer, network-layer, and transport-layer dissected data simultaneously.
• Results as high-detail console output, JSON, or XML Workbook, with the option of logging matched content.
Technical implementation
The dns case study is the most concrete part of the announcement. It targets the Denis backdoor, publicly documented by Kaspersky on Securelist under "Use of DNS tunneling for C&C communications".
Sample indicators:
MD5: 1a4d58e281103fea2a4ccbfab93f74d2
SHA-1: 1a2cd9b94a70440a962d9ad78e5e46d7d22070d0
SHA-256: f5872f49943c39b73026fc3982b85330953a138cc27c23487a28103337bfdbb5
Win32 EXE, Microsoft Visual C++, 179,202 bytes
Detected behavior: the malware sends check-in DNS requests to Google's public resolver 8.8.8.8 on port 53, base64-encoded with the custom alphabet [A-Za-z0-9_-], and the initial check-in consists of one tunneling label at a fixed 32-byte length. The vendor ships a reference capture (denis_bkdr_dns, 2,292 bytes) together with a sample rule combining ip4 and dns PaIDs. The rule condition shown:
dns.is_set and not dns.over_tcp and not dns.flag.response
and dns.flag.opcode == 0
// optional check:
ip4.is_set and ip.dst.addr == "8.8.8.8"
Use cases
1. Detection engineering against known malware captures, where rules are validated directly on pcaps.
2. Tunneling signatures built on protocol structure, which holds when payload content is encrypted, since the pattern lives in field shape, resolver choice, and flag combinations.
3. Offline pcap triage. The vendor's own analogy: PacketSmith plus Yara-X is to a pcap what an IDS/IPS is to live traffic.
Limitations and open questions
• The claim that no other tool on the market has this capability is vendor-provided and unverified.
• The post demonstrates only the ip4 and dns PaIDs. The announced protocol list at other layers is larger, but per-protocol identifiers require the official documentation.
• The sample rule is tailored to this sample's fixed 32-byte label, so expect tuning for other tunneling families and false-positive pressure from legitimate long DNS labels.
• The release material is framed around pcap analysis; nothing in the post describes high-volume live traffic handling.
References
• PacketSmith official documentation, with technical specifications and advanced use cases for identifying malware C&C traffic and network exploitation attempts.
• Kaspersky Securelist: Use of DNS tunneling for C&C communications.
🔹 tool #PacketSmith #YaraX #NetworkDetection #DNSTunneling
🔗 Source: https://packetsmith.ca/yara-x-packetsmith-detection-module/
Write or be written off
I’ve written before about why I write and why it’s important for personal and work reasons. I often use it to sense make and it inspires me. I’ve not been as purposeful of late and a lot of it has probably to do with AI. As you can imagine, AI makes it a lot easier to choose it to write for you, rather than do it yourself. It makes you lazy. This is my recommitment post, to my own writing.
I’ve started reading On Writing Well by William Zinsser, this fired me up. He said, “the act of writing generates some cluster of thoughts or memories that you didn’t anticipate. Don’t fight such a current if it feels right. Trust your material if it’s taking you into terrain you didn’t intend to enter but where the vibrations are good. Adjust your style accordingly and proceed to whatever destination you reach. Don’t become the prisoner of a preconceived plan. Writing is no respecter of blueprints.”
I share that not in support of the title of this post, I’ll get to that. What he wrote is more about the act of writing well and how to go with the flow if it is to work. It reminded me why I love writing for the pleasure of it. When it creates a state of flow and the effort becomes effortless, you enjoy it and the writing is better for it. You’re better for it too – there’s nothing more satisfying than punching out some powerful prose or getting an intended reaction from someone.
But there is also the connection to living for which writing is a wonderful analogy. And especially William’s point about what the act of writing instils in you.
There’s something about getting your words down on a page or screen that is life affirming. I like to believe that “I write, therefore I am”, to paraphrase. It’s not so much an affirmation of existence as it is simply a way of actualising lived experience. When you write what you know based on what you’ve done, it adds a certain concreteness to life.
In the same breath, Michael Pollan said, “don’t write if you know the answer”. Writing is one of the best ways to improve your critical thinking. This is needed for the right learning. Writing is subsequently an excellent way to solidify what you have learned. It reinforces learning because it forces your brain to slow down, organize thoughts, and process information deeply.
I’m making a lot of these points in the context of AI use and how, if we’re not careful, we’ll lose the ability to write and thereby lose all of the benefits it brings.
Reading is a closely related cousin and is in a similar predicament for other reasons. Reading levels have gone down drastically in recent years with social media doom scrolling replacing it.
The casualties in all of this is us. Whatever the causes, we cannot stop doing the things that make us human. The ability to read what others have written and reflect and learn from this and vice versa. And to think rationally and critically as a result, with a deep connection to others so that it grounds our actions. This is not something we should easily give up to algorithms and AI.
#inspiration #writing #reading
Artcraft, Mindscaper, et al: Can we really just vibecode creative software?
Over the past couple days, massive hype has built up around Artcraft, a collection of literal clones of Adobe’s CC, Microsoft Office and other apps, entirely vibecoded and open source. Artists and creative folks battered by subscriptions costing hundreds and thousands of dollars a year finally smell relief that’s not the poorly designed open source jank of yesteryear, and the project receives dozens of similarly vibecoded pull requests each hour. At the same time, I’ve been building Mindscaper, practically with the same goal, but without the hype. As such, I have some thoughts and bias on this subject. And probably typos, this is 100% human-written.
Background
Artcraft is developed by Learning Machines LLC, which appears to be a one-man company by Brandon Thomas. Thomas previously developed the deepfake services “vo.codes” and “fakeyou.com” under this company, and developed VTubing tech. Judging by the blurb on “the.storyteller.company”, he appears to believe in “controllable AI” trivializing (“democratizing”) art creation, but with Artcraft opted to primarily clone existing professional software, putting AI on the backburner (although an AI subscription service is available).
By a lucky coincidence, I founded my company Koytek Wattenberg Media at a similar point in time, with similarly limited success. One of my biggest clients became Audacity, at which I worked on “democratizing” audio creation, and wouldn’t you know I’m also into VTubers. I started my hooray into vibecoding about half a year after Artcraft, focusing on Audacity-shaped audio and video editors, Soundscaper and Framescaper.
On technical matters
I have nothing new to say here that hasn’t been already said a billion times. Modern coding robots (I used Opus 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol mostly) are perfectly capable of making something that Just Works. They just happen to be lying, lazy bastards that will happily claim something exists when it doesn’t. Test-driven development principles keep them reasonably honest, though they occasionally do manage to find a way to write tests so unspecific that a pixel-by-pixel spectrogram in the Roseus color scheme and a spectrogram with much coarser buckets using a blue-to-yellow color scheme pass the same test.
I am under no illusion that the code they’ve produced isn’t ugly and suboptimal. But then, the Audacity codebase is 25 years old and also extremely ugly and suboptimal. The Audacity team – all extremely talented software engineers and beautiful people – have been unable to make Audacity 4 feature-equivalent to Audacity 3 in over a year, despite that “only” being a UI migration with some UX changes attached. With Soundscaper, I managed to get an app going featuring all of Audacity 3’s and 4’s features within 3 months, plus a plethora of additional DAW features and video editor on top of it. Similarly, Artcraft managed to get a Photoshop (and general Adobe CC) clone going in half a year.
On practical matters
While the robots are perhaps good enough to get functionality implemented, they suck at figuring out the finer details – and pretty much all of the design.
Robots suck at progressive disclosure
Progressive disclosure is the part of UX where, instead of showing everything at once, you show things as they’re needed. A trivial example for this would be a menu; the “Format” menu is reduced to that single word on your screen until you, the user, decide that now is the time to format something and click on it, revealing a dozen or so options.
Robots suck at this. If you tell them to add a feature, they’ll generally attempt to place it on screen with a dedicated button. This is fine for an app with 6 controls in total, but less so for a complex creation app with 500. Forcing them to chuck everything into menus and dialogs helps, but then we’re straight back into design paradigms from the 80s.
This is where Artcraft and Mindscaper both have an advantage over a pure vibecoded approach: Artcraft already knows where everything goes because they’re busy copying existing design. I know where my stuff goes because I am the designer, and thus have a very strong idea on what these features are, how they should work, where they should go and when they should show up.
Robots suck at information density
In a similar vein to the thing above, robots love to implement stuff as “Control title – control – explanation sentence”. Again, this is fine for a small dialog with 2 controls in it, but for any sufficiently complex effect it just either overwhelms people with too many words and/or requires things to be spaced so far apart to fit all this extra text that the dialog becomes massive.
And again, cloning existing dialogs works here, as does being the original designer to make relevant decisions. Purely vibecoding this from scratch is going to be much more difficult though.
Robots suck at asking the right questions
The biggest difference between working with humans and working with robots is what questions I’m being asked. With the Audacity team, I’d get asked about user edge cases as they popped up, I’d get asked about clarifications on my designs, I’d get asked about things by users. With the robots, there are a lot fewer of these kinds of questions; the only time the robot asks questions at all seems to be in plan mode. However, in plan mode, the questions that are being asked almost always are implementation-centric, ie the stuff I don’t really care about. So what ends up happening is that the robot will go ahead and do something, proudly proclaim it’s finished and then it’s up to me to QA whether it actually did the right stuff. And more often than not, it misses some design edge case.
On philosophical matters
In this section I’d want to talk about the should and shouldn’ts of vibecoding a creative software suite.
Copyright
Artcraft is copying various proprietary programs wholesale using AI. On Artcraft’s side, this has all the usual copyright questions attached (who is the author? is the code copyrightable?), though on Adobe’s side this becomes more interesting: From Tetris v. Xio, we know that the look and feel of a program (in that case, Tetris) can be copyrightable. Note that this is different from copyright on the code itself (which I don’t think Artcraft can even infringe given that their thing is in Rust, which Adobe’s stuff probably isn’t), and also is different from attempting to claim copyright on the app’s structure or underlying ideas (that’s patent stuff, not copyright).
Artcraft thus may be in for a rude awakening should Adobe feel threatened by them. Adobe may or may not win this case, but they also probably don’t need to in order to hobble Artcraft’s development for years to come. Funnily enough, the actual code being open source may be a saving grace here, as it likely can trivially be forked, copied and modified to avoid Adobe’s gaze, to a better degree than pirates ever could. Another point in favor of Artcraft is AI itself; any rulings in favor of copyright holders over AI developers is also a ruling against Adobe’s own products. It thus may be that Adobe opts to do… nothing, in order to avoid the backblast. I don’t think they’ll necessarily care about the possibility of a Streisand; lawsuits like this generally are boring enough for the wider press to not care beyond perhaps a single story in the margins.
Mindscaper meanwhile doesn’t have that problem, as Soundscaper is building upon an open source app and crediting it, and Framescaper is original.
Patents
Software patents unfortunately arguably exist, some of them on UI (eg the Ribbon pattern found in MS Office). Adobe, unsurprisingly, has a tens of thousands of patents.
Software patents are one level more devious than mere copyright: It doesn’t matter that you had the idea all on your own, or that the idea may be obvious now, all that matters is that someone else also had the idea before you. And if they have registered it, you now are in trouble. It’s because of software patents that loading screens don’t have minigames, it’s because of software patents that Audacity makes you jump through hoops to download FFmpeg, as there are still over 3000 patents in the AAC patent pool alone. And if just a singular patent survives litigation, which given the sheer number of patents involved is gonna take forever anyway, you’re on the hook for yet more damages.
Software patents are the ideal tool for corporations to shut down people you don’t like, hence why some corporations (including Adobe and Microsoft, the companies most likely to be upset by what Artcraft is doing here) engage in non-aggression pacts with each other, like the Allied Security Trust or Open Innovation Network – this prevents these companies being at each other’s throats for patent reasons all the time.
However, these defensive alliances generally don’t apply to people outside the alliance, and neither Artcraft nor Mindscaper are in one. Thus, whenever one of the incumbents ends up being upset or feel threatened by what’s happening, they can pull the litigation lever.
I don’t know which patents could be relevant here, and frankly, I also don’t wanna know – in the end it doesn’t really matter. Patents are a risk factor for any software, and typically best left ignored as patent holders tend to be more busy with actual business than going after one-man companies. However, when you sufficiently piss off a company – and I’d argue that wholesale cloning of a software might constitute that – you have a lot stacked against you.
Freeing users
Subscription services for software create incentives for the builder of the software to put as little work as possible into the software while charging as much as possible. This allows the Autodesks and Adobes of the world to charge ridiculous amounts, while providing software so bad that it regularly attracts user petitions, begging them to fix longstanding bugs degrading the experience.
Simply providing free software alternatives here may work (eg in the case of blender and musescore), or may not work, as free software does (or at least: used to) suffer from small development teams and quite frequently UX so weird that it wasn’t possible for some folks to figure out how to use the program in question. A famous example for this is the “make a circle in GIMP”. The solution is to make an elliptical selection, intuit that you can convert that to a path, and then use a panel to draw the path – as opposed to Photoshop, where you just use the circle tool.
Providing free software versions of a program would indeed free people of subscription software to use something else, depending on the copyright situation more or less easy compared to pirating, and this is what Artcraft does provide.
Freeing new users
However, I’ve found that the entire creative software field suffers from underdeveloped design. A lot of professional-grade software is modeled after pre-digital hardware and uses design metaphors that simply don’t make sense if you haven’t experienced said hardware. I remember when Lightworks, an Oscar-winning video editor, became a free download in 2010, I couldn’t for the life of me figure it out, not even typically simple things like rendering the video. This is despite me having had some experience in Sony Movie Maker (the cheap version of Vegas) and Powerdirector.
This is understandable somewhat: To attract professional users in the 80s and 90s, you’d need to replicate their workflows from their pre-digital tools. And once you have these users and they’ve learned how to use the program, they’d hate to have to adapt to a new design. However, this also leads to new users having to jump through enormous quantities of hoops trying to learn the program. If you want to “democratize” art creation, making things free and open source is one thing, but the barrier to entry of learning the tool remains the same.
This is where my work on Audacity (and now Soundscaper) becomes relevant: It takes quite a bit of design work, but it in principle should be possible to design a complex creation app in such a way to make it easy to use. Notably, not everything has to be equally easy – setting up a simple recording should be a one-button operation, while setting up a more complex multi-track recording may be a bit more involved, as we can expect the user to have a more clear task in mind on which input goes to which track.
Our vision for Audacity (and Musescore for that matter) was to completely starve the current incumbents of new users by just having a much more modern design and having an app that’s easier to get into. I still think this is the way things will shake out eventually; we’ve already seen Finale starve to death from this pressure.
Artists
Of course, AI bros would go further here and envision a future where skill is completely replaced by AI. And while for things that already were sloppy and primarily utilitarian to begin with (shitposts, local business signage, anything using Wordart/clipart in the past), AI certainly is going to replace more dedicated tools, I don’t see it doing so for artists. To draw a chess analogy, computers have been better than humans in chess for a long time, yet humans still play chess, for one simple reason: It’s fun. Similarly, artists don’t really care if a robot can do a hyperrealistic godzilla in mere seconds, as the fun part of making art is actually creating it, not just admiring the result (that would be mere consumption).
As an artist, you of course get to pick your battles. You can decide that shading or coloring is too annoying, and stick to strict black and white, or that mixing and mastering is too annoying and stick to making melodies and chords. From there you can hire someone to do the shading and coloring and additional work for you, or indeed use AI instead. In either case, your initial creative vision gets diluted by the other work; the more people are involved and the heavier the AI use, the more diluted your vision gets. This can be acceptable to you, especially in a world where art is traded as a commercial good, but if we assume that art as a good is going to lose worth, this tradeoff may become less worthwhile, perhaps making it so that you only wants tools strictly designed for you to express yourself.
For-profit open source
Having both worked at and seen for-profit open source, I’m perhaps a bit jaded:
There might be a way to make a for-profit company be a good steward of an open source project, but the incentives always point in a different direction – and even if the current leadership can resist these incentives, the next one can flip towards enshittification so fast. I haven’t seen Thomas’ Artcraft project enough yet to know whether he’ll stay true to open source, though given he already has a subscription service (for cloud AI compute, of course) and a launcher ready, I gotta say that I’m worried.
It’s for this reason that I spun out Soundscaper from my company kw.media into Mindscaper, a non-profit association. It is now immune to me, or anyone else for that matter, deciding I would like it to make me tons of money, as long as its members (so, ideally, the users) don’t want to be milked. As an association (as opposed to a foundation), it also is way more democratic, giving users a real voice in what should happen to Soundscaper.
Resources & Sustainability
It’s impossible to discuss AI without touching upon the massive resource use it causes. Throughout my time developing Soundscaper, I have burnt through Codex’ and Claude’s 20x subscription quota almost every single reset cycle, including OpenAI’s ridiculous practice of vibing when a reset occurs and having a dude announce it on twitter. This has cost me hundreds of dollars, would have cost me tens of thousands of dollars in API cost, and has cost OpenAI and Anthropic likely thousands of dollars as well.
It is clear to me that the current pricing isn’t sustainable, and that slowly but surely, costs will go up. It is for this reason that Soundscaper uses local inference whenever useful and won’t be integrating with any cloud AI services. As far as I’m concerned, the entire point of open source is to fuck around with stuff on the machines you have access to and have it not tied to some service which decides what is and isn’t allowed.
It also is clear to me that there are real environmental impacts vibecoding this hard has; especially when comparing how long and hard my local setup has to work to achieve much simpler tasks (I let gemma and aya-expanse handle translation work locally, for example). Thus, I try to limit my vibecoding to the areas I really care about. I have a media background, so I shall vibecode media tools I’ll personally use – as opposed to token-maxxing just because I can.
Conclusion
So, can we vibecode creative software? On a technical level, yes. On a design level, yes, if we are a designer or follow someone else’s design. But should we? Depending on how adventurous we are with copyright and patent laws, especially if we are just re-implementing someone else’s design – maybe not.
We absolutely should open source and reverse engineer the things we care about, but we shouldn’t take a robot’s “one-shot” in an area we know nothing about as proof that it’s good now. It’s enormously easy to slop a whole software suite into existence but it actually takes some real work to get the software suite to actually be usable by real people – and surely, the benefit to real people has to be the goal.
If you’re interested in contributing to a non-profit making creative software, consider joining Mindscaper.
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