Photopea creator weighs in on Photosuite project | Hacker News Reader

Photopea creator weighs in on Photosuite project

github.com

60 pointsmontag29 comments

If your answer to "here is an example of 1:1 copying of my code and I can do the same for every line in your app" (Github comment 7, from the Photopea author) is to copy/paste a justification from an LLM (comment 8, from the Photosuite author), you've lost the argument.

The hard reality though is any site written in JavaScript is now part of an LLM's training set and can (and will be) be trivially rewritten into something new. Interesting times.

>“He who hath grown wise concerning old origins, lo, he will at last seek after the fountains of the future and new origins. […] For the earthquake—it choketh up many wells, it causeth much languishing: but it bringeth also to light inner powers and secrets. The earthquake discloseth new fountains.”

— Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

> those defaults have earned their place here even though the format doesn't require them

> the reader emits the model's shape rather than the file's

Oh hello Claude

I had the same exact thought from the paragraph above that when reading:

> the writer derives its field count from Object.keys().length while skipping the sentinel

All I know for sure is that the author of Photopea is not AI and I remember when he first released it. No one was calling it a photoshop ripoff. People were calling it an actual open source alternative that functioned and didn't cost the heap of cash Adobe wanted. I recall the response to the announcement being quite positive.

I wonder if the issue is being responded to by an agent. A lot of the responses sound like stuff Claude writes.

It definitely sounds like Claude.

Nah, I'm real

That doesn't preclude their point from being true.

I find it hardest to sympathize with the guy who inserted himself with 'Adapt or Die'..

I mean, it seems a pretty open-and-shut case. The author literally admits he copied the code. From one of the comments he makes:

> @kuckir, to be clear about the lineage: PhotoSuite started from the Photopea build mirrored at https://github.com/ruanjiyang/Photopea-Offline, and the README credits Photopea as the primary inspiration and prior art. Over the past year it's been rewritten and rearchitected module by module, retargeted for desktop, restructured into ~330 source files, with a lot of features Photopea doesn't have. It's a rewrite of that lineage.

That Photopea-Offline is an unofficial rip of the actual app. Pretty sure using a pirated version doesn't suddenly grant you license rights to use & extend the code into another competing product...

I was about to say this. Even if the offline version was an authorized thing, there was no license attached to the project, meaning full copyright.

Such a basic mistake treating any repo as free use. That one’s clearly a rip of copyrighted code.

And the comment where he's "explaining" the code is clearly LLM written. Very nice.

Absolutely. There’s a lot of this going around on twitter too with all the game reverse engineering with all the AI grifters claiming games are all open source now etc. Yeah right, I don’t think they understand the concept of open source or copyright!

Also, he started by lying. He/she went from

> That's a bold accusation. Would you care proving which bits of the code are "stolen"?

https://github.com/eolix/photosuite/issues/77#issuecomment-5...

to banning photopea, to when photopea responds with a 2nd account re: some duplicate code which is very hard to explain w/o being, well, duplicated to what you pasted above.

I banned the user photopea because they started spamming issues instead of following the thread

They posted one new issue with proof that you copied their code, which you deleted and closed. I’d hardly call that spamming.

I find that very hard to believe.

seeing what has been happening in the game modding communitiy, with people reverse engineering full rust rewrites of games like modern warfare 2 [1][2], or reverse engineering mashups with cod, minecraft, and skate 3 [3][4][5], the only defence against reverse-engineering literally all software will be to serve it from the cloud, and even that will not be enough. these people aren't even programmers, claude code just downloads ghidra and builds this stuff.

the future of software is oss. unless governments lock down access to these tools to prevent this kind of reverse engineering. which is a horrible future to envision.

[1] https://github.com/vladtrc/iw4L

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UbADrcEW5w

[3] https://github.com/chasmlol/2010-rust-rewrite-mashup

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/bevy/comments/1wuu7bx/are_you_seein...

[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/bevy/comments/1wuag9d/skate_3_was_r...

I saw someone say that we're going to go back to a situation like the 70s where software is technically copyrightable but there's no reason to bother. Maybe Stallman's dream will finally come true.

that would be the absolute dream imo. true ownership of the code running on your system.

I think GTA6 will be the real test for how capable these agents are. Some of these mods use well-known emulation methods, and some of these binaries have probably been ingested by the LLM numerous times.

I don't mean to discredit LLM capabilities, it's just that these examples are heavily favored by what's already documented online.

Wine-style PS5 emulation has advanced far enough that I would bet money on there being a pirated GTA6 PC release based on the PS5 version available within six months.

I'm currently working on OpenBFME[0] and I can assure you, enough LLM power guessing at the code in the binaries is enough to get the code for anything

[0] https://github.com/Open-BFME/

yeah for sure, and more modern games will probably be more difficult as well. but even so, games feel like one of the harder things to reverse engineer compared to most business software. yes there is the backend component, but that's mostly just crud.

I just find it surprising that the author is complaining about "stolen code" while having been piggybacking (and earning money) from unattributed OSS code for years... https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues/9042

Half of these are extremely permissive license attribution issues. Seems rather tame, no?

Since that audit is just some hours old and clearly completely AI written - may I ask if you have looked into it yourself to make such claims?

Or rather created it and eolix is your other alias?

From 5h ago, and suddenly you found that immediately, this is very juvenile.

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