Apparently the author got a surprising amount of backlash on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rickbrew.bsky.social/post/3muiv4phe...
Thanks Rick Brewster! I love PDN. It isn't as capable as Photoshop, but it isn't a rental, and it does 99% of what I need it to do. I've even bought it on the Microsoft Store just to support it.
I still think the argument holds though that people who have maybe used PDN but haven't contributed time, code, money, or even bug reports have no business raging at its author because he used AI to make it run on WINE/Linux. Literal ingrates.
But I like it a lot... My personal fitness level is just enough to bring me to my car, though... ^^ And I know that's bad... Keep cycling! ;)
What I noticed in this is that literally every single poster has a cartoon avatar. I assume they farm their karma in threads related to a game, movie, show, etc.
Paint.net is just one of those freeware apps that became a sorta figment of retro identity for some people, akin to winamp. Even if they havent touched it in over a decade, they feel entitled to become vengeful for their nostalgia being "tainted".
Outside of tech communities like HN, I see anti-AI rhetoric everywhere. A very large number of humans see AI as a purely evil and parasitic thing, no matter how it’s used. It’s an especially common view among artists and young people.
Whether or not you agree about AI, when you’re communicating to a wider audience, you have to read the room.
There is plenty of skepticism (with any new technology) sure. People often change their attitude to technology when they can see utility in it.
> Whether or not you agree about AI, when you’re communicating to a wider audience, you have to read the room.
People quite frankly were being arseholes. The AI-haters are as bad as the AI-cultists.
Without even getting into the AI part of this claim, how can you have any confidence about a claim like this when there are always going to be several orders of magnitude more people who are online than people you interact with offline? You could replace "AI haters" with "people who live in <continent I don't live in>" and end up with something that's pretty much entirely true in your subjective experience but quite obviously false objectively. How do you tell what's your bubble and what's actually what most people think?
I am also not in any "bubble" group and I am one of those people that are very suspicious of cliques.
I spent as much time talking to people that are neutral, positive and negative on AI.
Most of the AI haters IME of interacting with them irrational and are full of very poor arguments for their position. Almost all of it is emotional and/or out of ignorance. I've seen the exact same arguments made on US and UK based websites.
A lot of AI-skepticism I've encountered IRL/more-normie space comes from fears of what their children will do for work and the large data centre projects being approved by government without enough consultation of local residents. I think these are both valid concerns.
Moreover, I personally find this sort of discussion point / tactic to be very frustrating. It essentially stops any form of discussion, doesn't provide me or anyone else new information and doesn't really point anything out that is incorrect with my rationale than it isn't statistically sound when I wasn't pretending it was. I've factored that into my thought process and I am open to changing my mind.
My rationale is relatively simple:
- It is known that the most vocal/extreme people (on any side of any issues) are a minority, there is nothing controversial with this statement.
- It is also known that there is a technological adoption curve (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle) which is basically a bell curve. This model is well known and I don't think there is much that is controversial with the basic premise of it.
- When anything that is pushed too much and AI has been hyped massively, there will be a reaction and people will push back.
I can then use this knowledge and then apply it to what I am seeing online and IRL and then form my opinion, which I have already stated.
Now I understand that some people can get drawn into cliques and "bubbles" where they only see information that confirms their own confirmation bias. That is why I bothered listening to people that hold opposite opinions to my own.
I've found many of the arguments to simply be poor including people that many people laud like Ed Zitron (you may have seen there was a blog post by Danluu saying he has been consistently wrong that was on this site a few days ago). I also think that they are essentially in their own bubble.
So this idea that I (or anyone else) cannot be cautiously skeptical and attempt a level headed assessment of sentiment based on what I am seeing online and IRL because it isn't rigorously statistically sound is a nonsense and just derails any discussions into where I having to defend what is a relatively normal (albeit informal) decision making process.
I do think it is worth questioning why an entire thread is filled specifically and exclusively with cartoon character avatars. Pick a thread, pretty much any thread on bsky with 20+ replies and I believe you'll have trouble reproducing these results. I have had trouble finding one.
Feel free to locate some and point them out to me. Let me know how many threads it took you to find one. I am genuinely curious.
If you look at the quality of their avatars it becomes clear why they aren’t making money as artists.
But I get there is backlash. Not everyone lives in the bubble HN does. Not even everyone here is accepting of AI. I don't even know where I stand many times. But something feels off about this response. It's certainly looking brigaded.
On my home feed was another AI announcement. Few comments. Zero hate. And I definitely expected more there.
A basic AM/FM radio does receive radio, but you wouldn’t lump it in with a Yaesu or even a Baofeng.
I’m just surprised to see so many strong opinions from people who probably don’t even use the software (although they pretend they do).
The distinction is important because no one asked them to leave.
Entirely different than twitter, in that respect.
Bluesky has this nice feature where you can mute lists, so someone made a MAGA list (https://bsky.app/profile/skywatch.blue/lists/3l53cjwlt4o2s), and yet I was still seeing MAGA stuff on my feed because all the Twitter refugees were screenshotting Twitter nonsense and laundering it into my feed. Utterly ridiculous.
Its not exclusive to bluesky by any margin, but it does become especially concerning as a double standard to filter lists.
And many pro-AI communities sweep the issue under the rug, consider it invalid in some way, or just over-discussed and boring. They have to, because it's uncomfortable and it has no solution. There is no generative AI without scraped datasets. But the consequence of ignoring the issue is that you might be surprised when you encounter a large group who are still very (justifiably) angry about it. Bluesky has a large community of people who post art for free on the internet.
You can't expect them to be civil either, when so many countries are in a cost of living crisis. No one faces losing their home or health insurance and thinks "I'd better be polite to the people doing it," and a high profile developer posting publicly about implementing a long-asked-for feature with AI is exactly what the AI marketing machine needs. A lot of devs are wondering whether AI-generated code is good or slop, and it's the opinion of other respected devs that sways them.
Also, let's not forget that PDN isn't FOSS. Linux platform knowledge was scraped from FOSS Linux software, trained into AI, and is being used to port a closed source program to Linux where it will displace FOSS alternatives. And the dev expects a pat on the back from the community? Why?
Tell me you aren't on literally any other social media site without telling me.
Even HN has it's fair share of anti-ai criticism.
The only place that might not be like that also doubles as a child porn factory. I'll take anti-AI bias over visiting a pedo paradise any day of the week.
The source got deleted, what is the backlash even about? People don't like .net software running on Linux?
> Like I said, the code is experimental. A proof of concept showing that PDN-on-WINE is possible. It's not finished. I can literally just delete it. It won't be part of the next build.
This almost sounds like sarcasm and a reference to the whole "The Bun-rewritten-in-Rust branch is just a prototype and probably means nothing" Tweet that initially made the frontpage when it. But I think it's in earnest, just very similar to how I remember that Tweet I suppose.
It's Bluesky, they hate AI so the mob bullied him to delete the posts
https://web.archive.org/web/20260901203707/https://bsky.app/...
>Paint .NET-on-WINE has never been possible because of Direct2D, which WINE has really struggled with (for good reasons).
>So like ... why not reimplement Direct2D-in-Paint .NET? Remove the dependency on WINE completely. Clean room reverse engineering ...
>Thanks to Claude Code, it's now a reality. More story in the link above.
>It's buggy and slow, but real progress is being made.
>And I have no idea when/if this will be "production ready" or "supported" or even "good enough." Maybe next year, maybe next month, maybe 2035.
>Claude made more progress on this in 3 weeks than we've seen in the 12 years since PDN started using Direct2D in 2014.
>This isn't to talk down to the WINE folks, btw. Direct2D has a really complicated effects system, and probably only PDN really uses it, so the ROI was very low.
>AI doesn't care. And it doesn't get tired. And this is the perfect task for it: it already has the design (D2D's docs and API), and it already has a known-good implementation of it and an app to test against and bang its head against.
>So that's what it did: it banged its head against d2d1.dll and paintdotnet.exe for about 3 weeks until it was able to boot up PDN. In WINE. For real.
>Here's PDN on .NET 10 win-x64, in WINE 11.14-dev, on Ubuntu, in WSL2, on Windows 11. And yes it works on real Linux too.
That's not true. The Bluesky team are themselves pretty pro-AI and open about how LLMs are used to build Bluesky and are necessary for moderation.
Lots of SWEs on Bluesky (e.g. me) use LLMs a lot and follow other people who do too.
On the other hand, artists and writers on there generally hate AI and will gladly take time out of their day to loudly gang up on anyone they see as betraying them.
Why not just ignore them? Most of them are probably not Paint.net users anyway. Why listening to some randos most of who wouldn't be using your software anyway.
There is a very vocal section of the userbase who are vehemently anti-AI. Blocklists help avoid them (using them or being on them). However there is also a really good AI community on there. It's generally a lot less commercially-focused than on Twitter, for better and worse. It helps that atproto itself is really good for agents. They know how to use it, and the data is all open and accessible. Lots of people have been experimenting with agents that "live" on Bluesky, some of which are really interesting.
Unless I'm not following the right people which can totally be the case. I've stopped using the platform regularly because of how present this mob mentality toxicity is on the site.
Clearly there's hyperbole on both sides
>Verbal abuse (also known as [...] verbal violence [...]) is a type of psychological abuse that involves the use of oral or written language directed to a victim. Verbal abuse can include the act of harassing, labeling, insulting, scolding, rebuking, or excessive yelling towards an individual.
I'm sorry for this verbal abuse you'll now receive, as I'm disagreeing with you, but it's really hard to see "rebuking" as verbal abuse, I think that page might need a pass or two to make it a bit more objective.