Thanks for the really comprehensive reply. The feeling I’m kind of getting from these comments is that neither GIMP nor Krita is really capable of acting as a replacement for Photoshop yet. I know that GIMP is capable and fully featured, but when I last tired it, I could not bear how much it crashed or locked up, and like you implied, the default UI is absolutely fucking garbage. Being totally honest, I don’t think it’s defensible how bad it is - Photoshop lets you customise the UI way, way more than you probably think, it has easily half a dozen preset layouts for different tasks/workflows.

Krita looks quite nice, giving it a quick look, but like you said, it’s very obviously designed for painting and not design. Not all design can be done in vector format unfortunately!

Maybe I will get around to giving GIMP 3 a shot and trying to figure out how to use it. I want an open source replacement to the Adobe suite so, so badly. But I feel like I just can’t make the huge compromises required for that, yet.

So, real talk, be completely honest with me - how usable is GIMP these days? I’m not trying to pick a fight, I think it’s great that GIMP exists, but while I may not be a professional artist, I am a developer with an interest in graphical design and I would say that I am an advanced user of the Adobe Creative Suite tools - the main three that I use being Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.

I would be willing to learn to use GIMP to replace Photoshop, and Inkscape to replace Illustrator, for example, but only if they’re actually good enough to put to real, productive use.

I need my tools to get out of the way and let me work. If it crashes and loses my work EVER, then it is completely beyond consideration for me. If it’s good enough for light users but not really ready for professional use, then I don’t think I can really consider switching.

I do not use any of the 3D or AI features of any of those tools, if that helps.

I would really appreciate your opinions and advice. Please don’t be optimistic - I know it’s hard sometimes to be critical about open source software because of our ideological beliefs, but please try your best to be realistic.

Oh, and if you’re going to just tell me to try it, please try to contain that impulse. It would be a huge undertaking for me to relearn basically everything about how I work with these tools, so if I went through all that just to find that I couldn’t actually make use of them because they’re not ready yet, it would be a huge waste of time and energy, both of which I have in quite short supply these days.

Thank you so much for your time :)

Out of curiosity, have you actually spoken to blind people about how useful they find Braille?

There’s plenty of speculation that YouTube has never turned a profit. We have no way to know for sure, though.

TikTok is quite different since it’s shorts only. I can totally see that being a viable model, because you can more comfortably cram ads between pieces of content. That’s why YouTube is pushing shorts so heavily.

Nebula is propped up by private investment. I had a quick look and found SEC filings which indicate they have raised over $9 million dollars in private investment in the past 3 years.

Patreon has almost no video hosting compared to how much revenue they have.

I understand how you feel, and you’re not totally wrong - society is changing and shifting power away from men towards historically marginalised groups.

The hopelessness and pain that men is feeling is coming from capitalism, though. It’s corporations stealing your future.

The thing is that men held almost all of the power historically, and a small shift away from men doesn’t mean that women have extreme power now. Don’t let yourself be scammed by the rich and wealthy into fighting their battles for them.

You need to recognise your true enemy.

I mean any free video streaming platform, including YouTube.

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The same is true of every free video streaming service. They are not viable stand-alone businesses. They can only ever operate at a loss. Therefore their main use is as a propagandists tool, to control and shape narratives.

This doesn’t really make sense. Programmers are usually just paid a salary. My salary is the same regardless of how many subscribers there are. I don’t give a shit. If everyone started pirating everything it wouldn’t really impact my job. There’s plenty of dev work to do.

Free video sharing platforms are basically not viable as a business model. For a free and open internet to succeed, YouTube has to fail. At the moment, it only exists because Google subsidises it.

The ideal way for video sharing to work is for large content creators to set up their own federated video hosting websites (or pay for someone else to do it for them) and potentially offer some small amount of free capacity for those who want to upload small, not-for-profit videos

Fact checkers are all just self-important opinion columnists.

your foresight is much better than mine! I even deleted a bunch of my old stuff because, “I can just stream it whenever I want to watch it”… they took me for a fool, and they were right!

Hehe, I know, I’m just being silly - the /s on my message means it’s in a sarcastic tone :) but thanks for taking the time to share that video!

It kind of depends on your perspective, I wouldn’t say they profit from it monetarily - they definitely make a significant loss in raw $ from free users, but there is some amount of beneficial optics for the company, if people use it for fun/harmless activity.

I think we both want the same thing. I don’t want to tone police you or any of that shit, and I believe you’re totally justified in how you feel about AI, but I really do hope you have a read of my comments from the perspective of someone who agrees with you rather than someone who is trying to pick a fight with you.

First of all, most AI tools have some free tier. I doubt the other commenter paid a penny.

Also, just because they did it, it doesn’t mean they “required” it… I’ve laughed at cat videos before, that doesn’t mean that I require cat videos to be amused.

Fair enough, thank you for your time.

Clearly, their intent was to provide an example of a relatively harmless use of AI as a way of demonstrating to you that your position may have been a bit reductive.

Your reaction, of behaving like, lets be honest, a bit of an asshole, wasn’t really warranted.

Can you seriously not imagine how a corporation could benefit from generative AI, or are you just being obstinate and saying it’s useless because you think it’s unethical and you hope that by saying it’s useless that you can effectively manifest that?

Because there are plenty of use-cases for generative AI. None of them have to be good, or even products. Your phone machine example is a good one - it’s not a product, really, it’s taking the role of a human to fulfil some obligation, or to intentionally make it harder for people to add to the company’s support burden.

I think there are some useful applications for generative AI, but I do agree that the incarnations we have are unethical. And again, I really don’t think that simply telling people that they’re bad people for using it is going to win them over to your side.

Yeah, totally - I think it’s designed to be hard to understand, both tech stuff and financial stuff is often made intentionally confusing, in my opinion. It’s not dissimilar to the bitcoin mixers, but it’s still much stronger - the system is automated, you can’t mess it up as a user, you’re less reliant on a single-point-of-trust, and so on.

You might be on to something about quiet periods - I don’t really have the knowledge to say either way. There might be a bit of stuff that goes on in the background for wallets even if they’re not actively conducting “real” transactions. But, I don’t know, really.

The transaction data itself does need to be publicly readable, because otherwise the whole consensus mechanism that the blockchain relies on wouldn’t work.