Cloudflare will proxy DNS requests as well, by the way, so I’m not sure how you would get the IP address if all of their host names are proxied through Cloudflare

To be fair, it was probably some hardware issue. I had endless problems with my old Nvidia GTX 580 which I would have been using at the time. And yeah, it was quite a while ago :P

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 :)

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.

I think that you’re right, with the way that our society is structured, it is unethical. It’s essentially the world’s most advanced plagiarism tool.

However, being realistic, even if no private individual ever used it, it would still exist and would be used by corporations for profit maximising.

In my opinion, telling people that they’re bad people for using something which is made unethically isn’t really helpful. For example, smartphones aren’t made ethically, but the way to get that to change isn’t to change consumer habits - because we know that just doesn’t work - it’s to get organised, as a collective working class, and take action into our own hands.

Why would you even comment if you don’t want to participate in a discussion?

Internet search, e.g. Google, is now functionally almost completely useless. I use ChatGPT basically as a Google replacement.

I will still search for stuff - I use Kagi - but give up after half a dozen results if none of them are relevant and go to ChatGPT instead. Often, ChatGPT is more helpful. But sometimes it just makes a bunch of nonsense up.

ChatGPT is great for when you need to find something where you kind of know at least the vague shape of what you’re expecting and you have enough expertise to filter out any of the lies it makes up.