possibilistic

It's a horrible idea. These companies can embed unique identifiers in content to forever track you and your content's diffusion across the web:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49794615

The comments here are orthogonal to what everyone should be talking about.

This is a spy tool.

It's not "watermarking", it's "spymarking": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49794615

> Peter runs multiple companies. Beyond Segment, he's raised $100m+ for Charm Industrial, and just recently closed a Series A for Revoy. He's incredibly organized and efficient with his time.

You can do this before an exit? Build and fundraise for multiple (3?) companies at the same time?

^ Zach is the founder of Uberduck, which was massively popular. He got into YC with it.

More story:

ElevenLabs launched a few years after FakeYou and Uberduck. ElevenLabs got a lot of attention for their remarkable zero shot model, but their pricing and enterprise focus created an enduring niche.

Companies like Musicfy.lol were what ultimately drew the ire of the music labels and created a lot of friction for consumer UGC audio tools. They ruffled feathers and that created headwinds.

I distinctly remember talking to their founder on a Monday at Founders, Inc. in SF. They were in talks with a16z to raise $10M or so after their first few weeks of wild success - viral marketing and clever positioning for the first RVC music models. By that same Friday the music labels had them shut down the majority of their offering and the funding offers fell apart.

A year or so later, Suno and Udio ultimately took that side of the market. They were more consumer-friendly than raw vocal models and appealed to a broader set of users. Both companies launched to great success despite the risk of lawsuits.

15.ai, FakeYou, UberDuck, and Weights.gg (a latecomer) all gradually wound down due to the founders being pulled in different directions. Weights.gg joined OpenAI, Fifteen.ai became anti-AI and built an art community website, I went into movies/film, and Zach (Uberduck) forged a new path too.

ElevenLabs kind of lost the plot with audio. They've been building a bigger, more comprehensive offering that has scaled their revenue well beyond just TTS and audio. But it also left something of a void to fill.

Last year, Fish Audio launched in our old segment (consumer / UGC TTS fine tunes and zero shot) and built a massive user base and revenue stream. The market was wide open for it. They raised a $40M seed round.

I found my way to where I want to be.

I'm working on https://getartcraft.com which is open source:

https://github.com/storytold/artcraft

We're in use by a few film studios and some pretty popular AI artists. There are a couple of theatrical releases coming out that use us, but I can't talk about it. (Under NDA for the individual projects.)

It's at $5M ARR and growing 65% month-on-month by word of mouth.

ArtCraftX (launching soon) is a new UX that lets you bring your own compute from every single platform and vibe code your own workflow UX. You can clone the repo and easily add/remove things you want. It's okay that people can bring competitor compute - we'll be generous and open.

https://artcraftx.ai/

Think of it as "ComfyUI, but comfortable" and geared to high-volume creators rather than hobbyists. It's written in Rust.

Critically, people should be able to not only own their apps, but be able to deeply customize them.

I've also built an open source FAL/OpenRouter which I eventually want to build RunPod/Featherless (fine tunes) features into. It's called "Foundation", and it's in private beta but launches GA soon. I think it could have good positioning vs. Stripe / OpenRouter since it's open source and is meant to be extensible. Fully BYOK, too.

I'm looking to hire someone to help me build a social layer for creators that ties all of this together. YesAnd got funding to pursue this, but I think they're taking the wrong approach. I think it should be open and hackable. More like Github, but still artist friendly.

A lot of platforms either target B2B enterprise (Runway, Krea) or UGC / "everyone can be a creator" (Higgsfield, OpenArt), but I think creators look more like the Github set. Intentional, and in need of tools they own.

I wasn't after them, I just changed my product's name. They had monumentally better distribution.

I launched as vo.codes (and two prior names) before 2020 and later rebranded to FakeYou.

https://thenextweb.com/news/celebrity-voices-deepfake-ai-app

Rebranding a domain with traction is a mistake, in retrospect. I think Magnific is learning this lesson now after undergoing a change from the popular FreePik.

I'm a filmmaker and I wanted to get into video models, and FakeYou felt more like a pivot to UGC video (vo.codes was too audio centric) that I could ultimately swing me into cinematic video. I was too slow and that was not a good choice.

But Higgsfield and Bytedance showed you can be late and still win a lionshare of the market.

My video product launched in February and is at $5M ARR / 67% MoM growth.

All of them copied 15.ai

ElevenLabs was a commercial version of 15.ai. It's crazy, because 15.ai could have had the venture-scale outcomes if he'd fundraised and turned it into a SaaS product. He was in the right place, right time, with tremendous attention, but missed the opportunity.

The other "labs" followed the trend. The {number}labs / {number}.ai domains all quickly got squatted.

I was in the same space and watched it happening. I launched FakeYou about the same time as 15.ai, but 15 had the backing of 4chan and a better model. I still made it to 7M MAU and a million in revenue despite that.

Just last year, Fish Audio picked up where 15.ai / FakeYou / UberDuck / Weights.gg left off and made it to $20M ARR, which is a lesson about abandoning under-served markets when you still have tremendous gravity.

2023: Google is doomed. They're not building AI. No wonder the "Attention" authors left. Google just sat on this. Their PMs are steering them into oblivion. OpenAI is winning while Google takes no risks. Innovator's dilemma. Google Search is doomed.

2024: Google is on fire. Sergey coming back helped. Gemini, Veo. They've caught up. OpenAI is doomed.

2025: Google is seriously winning now. Nano Banana!! Google was destined to be the true winner of AI.

2026 H1: Google is slow as hell. Where is Gemini? Google is not launching anything, meanwhile just look at everyone else. Anthropic! And open source. What the hell are they doing over there?

2026 H2: Everyone is leaving Google. Google is doomed. PMs are destroying the company. They don't take risks.

Meanwhile, Microsoft: "Copilot!"

Open source tools for controllable animation:

https://github.com/storytold/artcraft

https://getartcraft.com

$3M annualized run rate (looking for more Rust engineers to join me)

https://imgur.com/a/d9DyiIO

This IS AI.

What's with the comment flagging?

This Wikipedia article has a review of several evolutionary aging theories:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_ageing

None of these has been proven or widely accepted, and the entire class of theories has many rebuttals. They are interesting to consider, though.

I don't think this is correct. I've never heard of any evidence for pro-aging genes, but I have read molecular biology rebuttals against this theory (Stephen Jay Gould or perhaps textbook sources, though unfortunately I can't recall well enough to cite them).

You don't need extra genes or information to prefer organisms that age out of reproductive fitness. If advanced age during reproduction confers lower fitness, then the offspring are automatically less fit. While you could argue that there would be a competition for resources amongst the young offspring, this isn't much different than other scenarios that produce less fit or disabled offspring.

Diamonds aren't worth much because they're actually not that rare. The only reason they command the price they do now is because of the De Beers cartel.

The "diamond alternative" meme is becoming increasingly popular with our generation, such that I predict that in a few generations nobody will care to buy "real" diamonds for engagement purposes. When this happens, the price of diamonds will fall dramatically (if it hasn't already by that point).

Diamonds are so overrated.

This feels like a straw man argument against static typing. No statically typed language I use suffers from this because they have great data structures and generics.

Languages such as Rust that lean on inference are an absolute joy to program in.

This is uncannily similar to my own personal experience with ADHD. Instead of words appearing scrambled, though, my focus during reading is drawn to random words within a text. I might skip to a new sentence or jump down a few paragraphs; it's entirely arbitrary. This process usually continues forward and back, resetting every few seconds. The longer I read something, the worse the effect becomes. It takes a lot of effort to get through things sometimes.

Whatever this effect is, it is somewhat lessened by adequate sleep, a low-sugar diet, and prescribed medication. It never completely goes away, though. I have good days and bad days; even at my best, though, working through long texts, papers, or technical literature will eventually cause my mind to wander. Whatever this is (I blame ADHD), it's prevented me from ever being able to enjoy reading literature or long-form journalism. It's a pity, too, because I enjoy the content. The task itself is just too mentally stressful. Reading is, sadly, a form of labor.

It's weird, because skimming comes easily. Visual forms of information are also incredibly easy to digest.

Do others with ADHD have a similar problem with this?

I'm singling out your post because of how "scripting language"-weighted it is. (Minus Swift.)

Ruby makes for a pretty slow server side language. It's appropriate when moving fast, but at scale it's rather icky. Your other languages seem to fill anything it can do.

Have you considered Go, Java, Scala, C#, etc.? None of these are "low level".

1. Rust - Low level systems programming. It has a ways to go, but it is so pleasant to write. In reality this has started to replace my usage of C++.

2. Javascript - Both a scripting language and the Web language. If it weren't the lingua franca of the browser I would much rather choose Python or Ruby instead.

3. Java - A typesafe, managed JVM language perfect for writing microservices, Android apps, etc. For anything bigger than would be appropriate for a scripting language or that must be maintained by several people. Java hits the sweet spot.

Do you happen to have this one to five pages of QM equations somewhere as reference? I would be very interested in reading that.

I do this rather frequently by mistake. I, like you, try to point out my error so the OP doesn't wonder why they are being downvoted.

Another problem is that I often upvote articles by scrolling on my phone. In addition to providing false signal, this has the unfortunate side effect of polluting my "saved stories".

I wish there was a mechanic to change votes after submission (even if the ability to change your vote was only momentary).

Do pg, et al. accept PRs?

ipilimumab, *-umab; hUman Monoclonal Ab (antibody)

These aren't cheap to mass produce.

Edit: Not the best source I could find, but this cites costs (not at scale) :

http://www.immunochemistry.com/services/antibody-development

How does this address the problem of not saving user-submitted data after informing them you've done precisely that? This seems _very_ bad.

I think we're debating the merits of different classes of update here. Some updates are not essential (UI preferences, etc.), but other requests by their very nature, are--billing, messaging, draft editing, etc.

Does anyone else wish tmux were modal like vim, ie. without a "leader" key? My conf file has a ton of custom key bindings for window / pane management, and I'd love for them to go away or become simplified by simply dropping into a "window management mode". Likewise, I'd like the command mode to stay open until I close it. I have some scripted hacks to do this, but it's nowhere near what I'd expect from true modality.

One of these days I guess I could get around to writing a patch. This single feature is probably my most wanted for any software at the moment.

I'm not a hypochondriac, I swear, but this really hits home. I have medically diagnosed ADHD; seemingly contrary to the disorder, I often find myself getting stuck daydreaming for hours. I honestly _enjoy_ it, and as a consequence of my incredibly realistic daydreams I never get bored. Seriously--I never get bored. It's like a dopamine rush I can turn on whenever I want. My stories are better than any movie because I'm actually _in_ them.

The walking in circles bit is just uncanny. My most creative thinking (or most vivid daydreams) happen when I'm doing exactly that. It's really weird (and I'm acutely conscious of how it must look), so I never let people catch me doing it. Something about walking in circles turns up the realism an order of magnitude.

I think this is highly related to my ADHD, and now I want to tell my doctor about it. I don't want to rid myself of this, but I do want to control it better.

I have never used Yahoo pipes, but I found IFTTT to be quite limited when I tried it earlier this year. There are no booleans, pipeline control, arguments, scheduling, reuse, etc. I know this tool wasn't written for me, but these are things that I would derive real value from.

I want visual tools at a level just above a scripting language, hosted on a managed platform I can largely ignore. An API for webhooks and oauth, 3rd party API support, triggers that can run custom javascript or python... I'd pay all the money for that.

I find this style wholly garish. Thank you for giving me the vocabulary to describe it.

Mid-century modernism is whimsical, busy, distracting. More than anything, it belongs to our grandparent's generation; it's an admission that we didn't reach the sought after future of robots and space travel.

I would take sleek lines and monochromatic shades over this any day. This is just my personal opinion, of course. I'm very cognizant of the fact that many people appreciate this style and find my own to be bland and drab.

I wasn't born in that era, yet I am immediately conscious of the style being described. I think this is owed to both the cultural preservation afforded by film and photography as well as the nostalgia of the previous generation (there are undoubtably a disproportionate number of films set during this period).

No. I described at a high level just one of the mechanisms of adaptive immunity--one of the most incredible biological systems in my opinion. (Runtime metaheuristics search!) These are complex pathways that involve many genes.

If the system isn't working you probably won't live very long. And while there may be certain functional alleles that may increase odds of an initial false positive stimulation, by in large the entire class of failure known as "allergic reactions" is simply a result of how the system itself works. You don't really need to invoke genetic differences to see how it fails. This is why the hygiene hypothesis is so strong.

There are actually four major categories of hypersensitivity that involve different cell populations and signalling pathways (eg. why poison ivy allergy is different from pine allergy).

If you're interested, the Wikipedia articles aren't a bad read. I also recommend Janeway's Immunobiology as a great intro to the entire subject.

This is not how Type I hypersensitivity works. Epitope recognition is powered by a biological RNG (somatic hypermutation) and evolves at runtime via the process of somatic / V(D)J chain recombination. Your body learns to be allergic, perhaps due to a bad ashy vent (you got sick that one spring), under-stimulation (play outside!), or just plain bad luck. Unfortunately for all of us, the immune system has no concept of the innocuous nature of harmless antigens. It will continue to pick up bad habits until the day we die. But thankfully it also keeps the trillions of cells, leaky programming, our own broken and errant self, and other uninvited guests that would just as soon eat us at bay (bacteria, viruses, cancer, fungi, nematodes, ...).

Wow, so many memories you've just unearthed. I haven't played a nomic-based game since I was a teenager.

My online friends and I had a series of mostly text-based nomic instances where we would creatively write and world build, but there was this one crazy performance art piece where we hacked a phpBB instance to grant every user admin privileges. The experiment was in relative harmony for a few days before the first rounds of deletes and IP bans. After one or two attempts to regain equilibrium, there were rampant impersonations, terrible javascript popup spam and redirect loops, and disappearing server files (the joys of using PHP prior to formal CS education and any form of engineering discipline...). Finally we acknowledged that the experiment had been a great success when all HTTP requests returned 500s--testament, at least in our minds, of the ultimate fate of mankind if ever given absolute and unlimited power.

Then there was that time we piped say yes to each other's terminals, somehow creating a pospositive feedback loop. Or those dotfiles that brought down the whole server... none of that stuff was very nomic related, but ah... teenage years.

The hosting company certainly loved us. :') I hope every one of them got a raise for having to deal with our endless support tickets as a result of our own foolish and stupid games.

Anyhow, very astute parallel to draw.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic

I appreciate the memories / feels.

A little bit far, but at least I can say I know of another HN user in Georgia. :)

Send me an email if you're ever out this way, and I'll do likewise.