It's funny to see as a joke, but you can go the other way with this too. Image editing models and LoRAs for "previz-to-render upscaling" workflows are actually incredibly useful.
I was just writing about this (scroll about halfway down to the images of Sam Altman - though if you like that, do watch the second video):
The best model I've found for this, that almost bakes in full ControlNet capability, is oddly gpt-image-1.5. It's absolutely OP at understanding how to turn low-fidelity renders into final draft upscales.
You are able to do this stuff with open models for 1-2 years now, i for example have a comfyui pipeline that achieves a similar setup. It’s of course more work and you have to dig into the details more. I also have to adjust the pipeline and tweak it and use different models for each use case. But overall you can definitely achieve that level of control with open models already, it’s just not that user friendly
That doesn't pass the sniff test, many other pages on knowyourmeme correctly attribute memes to 4chan.
If you were right that would be easily verifiable. Do you have an example of a post dated before 2018? Maybe you're getting tricked by the fact that 2018 was 8 years ago?
I think you are taking their point literally, its not that knowyourmeme is not crediting 4chan, its that the racism/edge is polished off presenting a more mainstream version of many memes.
There is a 35-story luxury apartment tower in my town, sold with the typical rendery renders, and the pooldeck is actually built on the NORTH side of the tower. Gets sun for maybe 15 minutes a day.
They couldn't rent all the apartments so they took a huge block of floors and started Airbnb-ing them (including allowing amenities access for the short term guests). To the great disgust of all the residents!
Well to be fair Hackernews posts can get flagged too by the community itself where people then later talk about how or why a particular post gets flagged and discussion starts moving about the moderation/flag issues in HN.
(But this isn't to say that the fault's within the moderation community of HN which are great but just the issue which to me is imo that if many users flag a post, it can get flagged and the friction of getting it back is hard or a post typically ends up dying usually if it gets flagged in general imho)
I played it with my wife on the couch over many winters evenings, and then ten years later played it with my daughter. Good times. Reminded me of playing Sierra games as a kid.
I also love the soundtrack so much and have listened to it thousands of times, especially By The Wall, my favorite song. PS: Thanks for posting the composer’s solo name, Floex, because there were (are?) two people with exactly the same name working at Amanita Design, bizarrely!
It had user accounts and it hosts prodigious amounts of porn, so it ran afoul of the part of the law that says that if you have user accounts and host user-generated content of any sort you have to make sure you're not showing porn to children.
It's annoying, but Imgur really do need to get a handle on things because that's where people host all the CSAM they post into Matrix channels.
> Does anyone have a mirror? I’m in authoritarian UK so the link is blocked
Here you go. I had it uploaded after hearing from the magospietato's comment but then saw you talk about the same so I am pasting the same image link here as well
That may be quite close to the truth. Here are pictures from some abandones pavilions from the 2000 World Expo in Hannover. Sad to see this, as I lived in Hannover at that time and had a really good time at the Expo.
Pretty much what has long been my dream "make the world better" product (long as in from pre-genAI days), only that this one happens in image space: take an architectural model, look at the surface material specifications, analyze it for where rainwater would run down etc and generate weathering texture, how would this look when it's not new anymore.
Because as I see it, a lot of aesthetic decisions in architecture, pretty much anything that goes in the direction of minimalism, is just putting "newness" in the center of perception. And thus absence of "newness" will be in the center of perception when it stops being new. All these clear geometric shapes? They look awesome at the opening ceremony, but two years down the line they are like magnifying glasses for uneven changes in color and the like. Whereas for a more playful surface full of ornaments, those same years would be hardly more than a blink and they can age gracefully, on the aesthetic level (and on the technical level, required maintenance intervals are much longer anyways). Architects who claim to care for sustainability should demonstrate that they consider how the building will look like later in life.
I see this as well with huge modern buildings with wood parts. They look great the first year. The wood shines red’ish. After a winter the wood part starts to grey out. I understand that this is sometimes a look they strife for but all the preview renders show it in the prestige condition. Nobody is doing a yearly training.
And don’t get me started on all the glass survives for elevators, roofs, bus stops, divider panels next to tram stops (I’m mainly meaning Berlin here) which nobody cares to clean or is so difficult to clean that after 2 or 3 years it looks very run down.
The Statue of Liberty would be red without her patina and would look weird ;). I’m not talking about the beauty of weathering. I think a dirty glass roof which no longer lets any light through a planned weathering tactic. The point was that the plans architects make are always showing the building in prestine condition. And they never reflect how this building will look like in a few years. One example I see every day is a Train-station entrance. It has a very dramatic metal ark that stretches up. Looked great in the past. Now you see dirty water running down the surface. The brushed metal is stained with grime that pilled up. Every time it rains the grime runs a bit deeper. They tried to clean it a few month back. They have to come with a special crane and water jets to remove the grime. But nobody takes the time to polish the surface back up. Is this bad? No of course not. But don’t plan and sell something that will only last for half a year. That’s why I also think this post is brilliant.
I love NY. Not only for the art decor but als the human weathering ;) I meant that Lady Liberty would look weird because she is known to be green. I know that the early advertisements showed her red as well. Also when the torch was shown in NY to fundraise the pedestal.
Bringing kintsugi into this conversation is like saying “being underwater can be quite advantageous!” and linking a video on fish, when the main topic is about people drowning in the ocean.
Art is everywhere, and starts with a simple philosophy of making things slightly less awful everyday. Initially focused on your own mind, body, and soul... then recognizing you were always part of something a lot bigger and older than most imagine.
(this last video is a parody-ish but really great music unironically out of the original music being I am just a freak, both music are really great in my opinion unironically haha!)
Not necessarily. On a design that requires being new to look good, all weathering will be perceived as rot, never as patina.
The point is that some approaches to architectural beauty make it more or less impossible that any amount of weathering could ever be perceived as patina, while others look good both new and old.
That's maybe nice for prestige projects but imho the main problem in architecture is projects on a budget and how money is allocated. There should be a law that says that X% of the building costs should be in the facade, the part that everybody sees. That alone should help a lot in making cities look nicer.
> There should be a law that says that X% of the building costs should be in the facade
Cities solve this with design requirements and through the approval process. Specifying a minimum spend isn’t going to make the buildings look nice by itself. You’d just get weird budget games being played.
Cities with restrictive planning commissions can push buildings toward certain looks. People get angry about it, though, because it gets harder and more expensive to build things in an era where it’s already too expensive to build.
That sounds like a recipe for skimping on safety and design systemically. No thank you. You can’t legislate aesthetics, and there’s already a huge incentive to make buildings look great. People already spend a lopsided amount on the facade making it look better than it is, rather than spending on where they should: foundation, structure, good design, and longevity. In my city, apartment buildings used to require steel structures and lawmakers relaxed the requirement so they went back to wood because it’s cheaper. Now the new ones look great but they’re burning down and falling apart at higher rates than before.
> In my city, apartment buildings used to require steel structures and lawmakers relaxed the requirement so they went back to wood because it’s cheaper. Now the new ones look great but they’re burning down and falling apart at higher rates than before.
Some of my favorite examples of graceful aging in architecture are concrete - but those are never the ones that celebrate efficiency, they always have some playful element that will still be playful when the newness has faded. Ribbed concrete (if you don't know what that means: worth googling!) alternating with smooth surface for example. But sure, once the structure reaches a certain size threshold, you better play the "glass & steel" card a lot, it has been dominant for almost a century for a reason. But even that can be overdone and concrete exposing aging can be a nice contrast.
You can do regular maintenance on concrete to keep it looking nice, but nobody wants to spend the money. Everyone understands that a wooden house exterior has to be repainted now and then, but thinks "concrete = no upkeep costs". Architects have complained bitterly about this for a while; I don't love brutalism but I can sort of see their point.
Pretty much any place with brutalist architecture, really. I'll happily take pretty much any revival or classical style over "modern" or brutalist style.
There's nothing more depressing than walking by beautiful historic old buildings only to turn a corner and see a monstrosity of concrete and glass somehow reaching the epitome of bland and uninviting.
I think they're saying that brutalist architecture feels out of context in Brisbane's weather, whereas the gloomy dreary feeling of the building fits in perfectly in the former USSR's gloom
You're entitled to that opinion, but if you give an alternative for how a big multi-storey building for large events and crowds should look then it will move the discussion forward.
I never understood the dislike for brutalist architecture. To me, at least it looks like something. It's got soul and expresses an artistic idea even if that idea is "the overbearing power of the state". Personally, I'd take that over the soulless glass and steel buildings that seem to be today's alternative.
Brutalism doesn't signify "brutality" though, it's about leaving the building materials bare and favouring clean lines. Those glass and steel buildings could also be considered brutalist architecture of a different flavour.
As someone who likes many cases of brutalist architecture, I wonder if you'd explains why many of the examples I like are in Mexico whereas many of the negative examples are in the UK.
That is something I've found over the years with traveling.
You watch a bunch of travel videos and think the place you're visiting is going to be so different but its just the same overcast sky and ocean and washed out color palette as home.
Once you remove all the filters, color correction, and drone shots from influencer travel videos a lot of places look the same IRL.
I cannot relate to this at all. Even just Valparaiso and Venice (two towns) are so different from each other. Even if you make weather dreary it’s a different feeling.
Then you consider Patagonia or Norway and compare it with the California Coast. The world is full of beauty.
Agreed. Also the trick is, if you end up in an ugly place while traveling ... you just move on, until you find beauty again (so don't book in advance too much).
Really? I drove from Kansas to the Florida Keys in November, stayed at an ocean front hotel where it was a blissful 83°F, and it felt like our own slice of heaven. We stayed a few extra days over Thanksgiving just to laze in the pool while our kids splashed in the water. Being able to drive away from the snow and the cold into paradise was amazing, and being able to go with my family made me feel richer than a king.
I traveled a little and was also happy to mostly see the nice side of most places. Some of us are lucky, some just always try to see the best in things. Beauty is in the eye of beholder. Also, some people here commented that they like this antirender look. Maybe by contrast. I talked with someone from Ecuador and they said they like when it rains. It was this lat autumn, when we didn't see sun for several weeks and everything was gloomy, looking even worse than in those photos, additionally colored by bad mood of everyone.
Hard agree. Lviv feels like a real city (for better or worse) because no one demolished entire city blocks to make it more appealing in 1985. I was there about a year ago and loved it.
I'd say that despite similarities for places built at the same time as each other, there's a huge range of variation in the places I've been.
First trip to the US was California, and the geography of the hills around Central Valley were substantially different in different places just within that region. Southwest, I saw hills that looked like Bryce's default textures which I'd previously assumed were mediocre approximations rather than based in reality; the Redwoods and Yosemite are very different from each other and the aforementioned, and the hills west of Winters and east of Sacremento are different again, and of course all are different to the Valley itself. On another trip I saw the Bonneville Salt Flats, I've yet to see anything else like them. All these are very different from the views around Zürich, or the UK South Downs (which unsurprisingly given the name is similar to New England and Brittany), and all those are different to the west coast of Wales; when I later saw the Spanish Mediterranean coast and the area around Athens, they reminded me of some of the wine areas around Paso Robles (which shouldn't be surprising given wine).
Within cities, Berlin has incredibly wide streets unlike anything I've found elsewhere; Athens is the exact opposite, with at least a few of roads in the tourist core (near the Parthenon) almost too narrow even for the smaller size of car common in Europe and pedestrian paths only a few cm wider than my elbows are apart, and so many ancient ruins you could practically trip and fall over them. The UK and Germany where I've lived, one can quickly learn to spot which era any given house was made in, with a handful of still-standing medieval buildings in the UK (mostly churches), then typical stylings visible for late 18th century (e.g. Bath), then a gap to the late 19th century to early 20th (in both countries but with more Gothic in the UK and more Neo-Classical and Art Nouveau in Berlin), then another gap where little survives to today, then post-war (British housing estates and DDR soviet style Plattenbau); these are very different to Swiss rural styles, to the narrow buildings you can find in Amsterdam. The UK and France also still retain a lot of medieval castles in various states of repair and museum-ification.
Bologna still has a lot of medieval structures around, including two leaning towers. Venice may be famous for the canals, but the famous ones are not the entire set, the ones I remember seeing went right up to the hotel I was in and functioned like roads, with a similar vibe to the roads of Athens (only without the footpaths at all because footpaths were a completely independent system), while the canals in Amsterdam were broad and felt more like the spaces dedicated to the Straßenbahn and U-Bahn in Berlin.
Budapest felt like a decaying museum to itself, or a ruin in which people nevertheless still lived and worked.
NYC deserves the name "urban jungle", it was like walking through canyons where the "mountains" (skyscrapers) were so distant and large as to defy not just the instant parallax between my eyes, but also the time-delayed parallax one normally gets from walking towards or away from a thing.
Nairobi mixed a British 50s-60s Brutalist core (presumably because of who was in charge in the 50s-early 60s) with main streets that were variously poorly repaired and unpaved, and minor streets that varied from "this could be any middle class residential area in Europe" to "this has been accidentally cobbled by people treading plastic bottles into the soil as they pass"; there is another easily recognisable style here, best shown rather than described, this kind of wall lack-of-surface-finishing: https://www.google.com/maps/@-1.2844081,36.9005201,3a,30y,35...
Sun/Light has a lot to do with it. The place linked looks fine/tolerable but put that in the northern of Europe/America and you'll looking at the edge of depression (at least for myself).
Funnily enough, I live a couple of minutes walk from this spot, I guess you are nearby? HDBs can look a bit samey, but that photo does a bit of a disservice to Singapore. There are also quite lovely HDBs as well:
And of course the surrounding area there is pretty amazing, loads of green spaces and wildlife on your doorstep. A large part of this video was filmed just around the corner, for instance:
They are currently building a new HDB estate right on the edge of a coastal park five minutes from that location. Even without the sunlight, it’s a pretty great place to live.
It is a good place to live. I was just comparing how climate can make a place okay/fine versus not okay/depressing. You mentioned greenery: I'm a bit up north (Malaysia) and it's plenty green here too. Though that's more due to the area climate than anything they are doing (i.e., Dubai can't match that no matter how hard they try).
Yes, that's how a lot of Singapore looks like. It's an HDB car park.
But your picture of the Soviet Union is perhaps a bit too rosy.
I'm not sure why you'd be depressed? It's a picture of a construction site in a car park. Sure, I'd love having the car infrastructure being less front and centre, too. But otherwise it's fine.
I was saying I'd be depressed or it would be depressing, in Singapore. What I was saying is that if you match that place with a grey sky, in cold climate with slow rain, that will be the definition of depression (at least for me).
I was watching Dark Matter (the Apple series, not the older one; mild spoiler follows), and I laughed when they arrived at the futuristic utopia universe because it just looked like Singapore.
Huh, TIL that the concept of brutalist architecture doesn’t come directly from French béton brut but was associated with it only after the term was coined.
Before the dystopian black and gray fad arrived most buildings that went up were sort of OK. And I didn't mind the pastel paint on commie blocks either. But a decade ago someone decided that gray cuboids with asymmetric windows were an improvement...
Even so, I think North American cities are on average uglier than most Polish ones. Overall we're not doing so bad but I want the Slavic city memes to continue lest we get Prague or Amsterdam level tourist invasion.
Im a professional cleaner, there is lots of wonderful looking design out there that is impossible to clean. There is also a huge difference in how quick it looks dirty. Some things are easy to clean but if you have to do it 3 times per day in stead of once a week its going to be needlessly expensive and still look dirty half the time.
What are some striking examples from your experience?
BTW this is what I love most about HN - the surprising variety of people you can learn from, from billionaire founders to expat bingo-card geeks to Georgian-onion sellers to Dutch pro cleaners...
On a Light surface tiny stains stick out, on a dark floor tiny flecks of dirt stick out as if under blacklight, a concrete color with some smudge patern may get extremely dirty without anyone noticing it (which might also not be what you want) a dark floor with a pattern of tiny white dots can also look very clean while dirty.
Any porous material is a terrible idea, you get lots of surface area that you cant reach. Carpet, curtains, upholstery.
Gaps between things should be big enough for how deep they are. Tiny legs under sofas or closets are not useful for anything. Adjust the size of the gaps between wall panels to your favorite kind of insect or rodent.
The funniest one i've seen was a city with a lot of mosquitos where someone put giant neon letters outside under a roof. In a few days it was completely covered in highly active spider turf war dens enough to make a grown man scream. Apparently spiders love roofs and they obviously know flies like light.
Top of HN and people are loving it, but there's got to be a better way of getting some $$ rewards for fun viral ideas like this than "Buy me a coffee". I'm betting he's got tens of thousands of sessions currently and nobody is tipping. https://ko-fi.com/magnushambleton
This will be an unpopular answer but one way that could have worked is just good ol' advertising, because it directly converts "virality" into income.
Any solution that requires the user to bust out a credit card and put down his billing address has way too much friction for the median user to get through.
I see 16 coffees received. Assuming no private donations for simplicity, that’s $48. As an ads noob, how many sessions would a banner ad need to beat that?
No? Advertising money is paid upfront. X number of impressions. You get paid a cut for hosting the ad. The ad might be a huge failure and lead to zero clickthrough or purchases. But the money has already been paid for the campaign.
Yes, nothing happens until you trade a dollar for something, but it does not have to be this site they spend money at.
Advertising isn't even about getting people to open their wallet, it's more about influencing their decision when they do go to spend money or make a purchase.
Yea, but most advertisers come only after something went viral, not when you are building something and you try to say to potential advertiser: "this will go viral trust me bro". And such small viral things are usually short lived, by the time the advertisers come it will probably starts to die down.
But yea, maybe he would have got a little more financial support than donations even if he puts up ads after it went viral.
Another way he could benefit from this is when people want his skills to build them similar things, so it's basically already an advertisement for his skills.
This is such a weird comment. Not all advertisement follows the influencer model. Banner ads have been funding small internet operations since before hacker news existed. Do we really don't have long term memories at all?
I saw it going viral before going to bed last night and spent 15min trying to enable payments but failed so made it block you after 2 gens using cookies and try guilt you into donating instead. Made me $160 in donations compared to the $500 in AI credits burned so not a huge success but at least slightly offset the loss.
If the demand continues after this blip I’ll try add ads or make real payments work.
There have been alternatives suggested. While better is a subjective term, most alternatives have either not been successful or have not yet meaningfully achieved a level of success to matter.
Flattr took one approach without much success. They represented the problem well though. When someone does something that is of a small but not insignificant benefit for a large number of people, how should they be rewarded? When the reward due, divided by the number of people paying for it, gets low enough it seems to not reach a threshold that it makes sense for any individual to pay.
You could charge a fee above the threshold, and many people do take this path. It is essentially requiring a small number of people to massively overpay to cover those who don't pay at all.
A Universal Income takes the approach that if everyone gets what they need there is no particular requirement to be monetarily rewarded. You essentially have been rewarded for whatever it is you do.
Advertising plays the small threshold thing both ways, They offer you a chance to sell a little corruption below your threshold for thinking it is damaging, and in return they accumulate the corruption and the money and send you the money and deliver the requested corruption to their customers.
Part of the fundamental difficulty is in determining the size of the reward due. How is that determined? There are plenty of people who will offer services to do that if it means they can take a cut. I don't see that path going well unless it is a mechanism governed by strict non-profit rules, and even then I would have doubts.
A purely rule based system would be intrinsically unfair and subject to gaming, but often times this turns out to be the least worst solution. By agreeing to a set of rules people can accept that while flawed, adhering to them by agreement can make a system that cannot be taken over by a malicious individual.
In short, right now, No I don't think there is a better way. There may be people with a financial interest that it remains that way.
How do we ensure that we don’t enter the failure mode of “not enough necessities get made”?
Like it seems like people are ideologically for or against UBI, but I’ve never seen anyone discuss how the mechanism would avoid this outcome. Like I’m not saying it’s 100% the outcome that would happen on whatever time frame, just that even e.g. a 10% chance of that happening would make it too risky to attempt at scale. And like I don’t accept “some people just love farming” or “a lot of stuff that isn’t needed gets made now”, I need an actual mechanism description.
> How do we ensure that we don’t enter the failure mode of “not enough necessities get made”?
Pay higher when someone does things. UBI + income. If you want to live better, try doing something that will bring you money, but if you fail, you can still live and try something other next time.
Current model: if you try something and fail, you are homeless and starving.
I could maybe support UBI if you completely shut down Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, school lunches, subsidized housing, and every other assistance program. It must replace all of that to achieve the so-called operational efficiency of just giving people cash. Give them enough to buy those things on the open market, and if they choose to spend it on something else, that's on them.
If you don't trust people enough to do that, then you don't trust them enough to do UBI.
I think most proponents of UBI want this and I think it's a good idea. UBI is meant as social security, just not dependent on what you do and doesn't disappear when you have cash. Just give minimum wage to everyone and remove minimum payment requirement from economy. If you use up your social security/UBI in wrong way, that's on you. But there should be probably some education. And if someone can't effectively use your allowance (mentally ill, non-functioning alcoholic), then maybe we should put such people in proper institutions, but they could be funded by UBI instead of specialised assistance program.
Failing -> homeless and starving is a failure mode at the level of the individual. That’s not good, but failure modes of the entire structure are higher priority and the two don’t really compare apples to apples. Capitalism (absent corruption) is actually sort of cleverly recursive there because financial destitution by definition cannot affect producers of vital goods, because the act of producing vital goods is precisely what is rewarded by the system. So at least what you mentioned cannot result in systemic failure from a mechanistic point of view, only an individual level failure (which isn’t to say that the individual is “to blame”, I am not talking moralistically, just that it affects individuals and not the entire structure).
On first paragraph, okay how does that scale though. Who does the actual work of producing things people need to live, and how do we make sure that enough people keep doing that specifically, even across plausible variable configurations such as “birth rate increases because people have more free time which means now you need more farming” etc.
We need to characterize these dynamics, wouldn’t you say? Have you thought about it, or are you satisfied by hand waving?
"Absent corruption" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your statement. The idea that the system can't fail raises the question what do you consider failure, and what do you consider corruption"
If prices increase and wages don't keep up with them, an increasing number of people become squeezed by their environment. This is a slow event, sure, but enough drops can fill a bucket. The fallout from this pressure on the general populace will be the failure that you're saying can't happen. This seems inevitable without an intervening event to reset things.
With that said, I don't think your concerns are unreasonable, and I'm not sure UBI by itself could solve anything. At a minimum price controls or government administering of food and housing would be necessary to keep prices from rising in response to the influx of cash everyone would receive, but the problem of people not working does seem like a big potential issue.
I believe there have been studies to the contrary, but those studies necessarily miss the universal part of ubi, so they don't have the negative feedback loops that could spring up in a real implementation.
I don't think the "producers" argument is true, and even so it really does depend on the profession and on current trends.
What was vital yesterday may be obsolete tomorrow (see hospital secretaries vs ambient scribes for instance). I assume when you think of people taking a potentially "destitution-risky" decision, you think "entrepreneur without savings or backup income", not "hospital secretary". Yet here we are.
Also, in many professions, "production" is multi-level. Who is the producer in a hospital, the nurse, or the hospital manager? Yet I can assure you nurses, as vital as they are, get fixed term contracts or get fired all the time. Same with teachers and academics.
So, no, the system rewarding the hospital manager and the university deans for the "vital" work of their nurses and teachers isn't "cleverly recursive"; it's exactly the failure mode both you and OP speak of, except it's somehow both systemic and personal, depending in what angle you're looking at.
> financial destitution by definition cannot affect producers of vital goods,
Say that to farmers struggling to make meets end. We managed to make production of vital goods so efficient, that we don't need as many producers, so they are becoming not-producers-of-vital-goods en masse. So, now that they don't produce vital goods, they can safely go into destitution?
> only an individual level failure (which isn’t to say that the individual is “to blame”, I am not talking moralistically
Individual level failure means individual is to blame. But UBI is meant to give them safety net, so that when they fail, they don't go into destitution.
> So at least what you mentioned cannot result in systemic failure from a mechanistic point of view, only an individual level failure (which isn’t to say that the individual is “to blame”, I am not talking moralistically, just that it affects individuals and not the entire structure
Nice, but when you get rid of 20% of people and move them into "not usable, you won't eat now" category, each single one for personal reasons, then another 20% for other personal reason, you have to train them somehow. You could of course say that they should retrain on their own, but that's currently done typically after several years of giving them too low prices, so they used up their safety reserve.
> On first paragraph, okay how does that scale though. Who does the actual work of producing things people need to live
The people who feel they have the skills for this. Just like right now.
> and how do we make sure that enough people keep doing that specifically,
We have enough people to make food. We have to make artifical limits on how much food they produce or they would flood the market with food. We pay them to keep their fields unused for some time, kept in reserve. UBI would just be a guarantee that they won't go into destitution when they can't sell the food at good price.
> “birth rate increases because people have more free time which means now you need more farming”
I think birth rate might decrease even more. As people become more and more comfortable and stopped having to work as much as previously, they don't need children to secure their future.
> We need to characterize these dynamics, wouldn’t you say? Have you thought about it, or are you satisfied by hand waving?
I agree we should. Who would do it? Who would pay for such characterisation? Maybe you should try to do it? A lot of people think about it already.
Or, ya know, save money or get a job. Failure rarely leads to homeless and starvation. Most people are far more resilient than that, the current US homeless rate is ~1/500
If we need/want UBI to be a thing, educating people on the difference is going to part of the effort and debate
Necessities get made because there's someone to buy them. Only 5% of people are employed in agriculture and 15% in manufacturing. 80% of working people could do nothing and we'd still be fine when it comes to necessities. And we don't even have peak automation.
UBI discussion invariably is way off the mark. The only thing UBI solves is how to give out the money, which is a massive misdirection, the real problem is how to get the money. Do you gut the state and allow people who don't work to have enough money to barely survive as an underclass, or do you end billionaires and usher in a new renaissance where all needs are met and labour shall just be at our whim. These two vastly different visions are both UBI, but most discussion about UBI completely sidesteps that as it requires touching upon the more difficult issues.
Once you have control of the money to give out, literally every way of redistribution is as good as UBI. If you calculate how much money would be required for a reasonable UBI.. then imagine what could be done if that money was spent on communal, humane, services then it would be able to revolutionise the world every bit as much.
UBI does not mean you don't work, nor you can't earn a lot of money. It just means we don't let you starve if you don't work and we stop making you work out of fear of leaving you starve if you don't.
I'm a psychiatry resident and developper. I have never been paid for my dev work but have produced quite a lot on my free time (site: w.olicorne.org ). I would do psychiatry pretty much no matter how much I'm paid for it.
In my view the most productive people of every field are not incentivized by money and would do it anyway. UBI would free up time and cognitive load of the most productive people I believe. Following a 80/20 kinda rule.
Hence UBI here would mean that the dev would not *have to* monetize.
> In my view the most productive people of every field are not incentivized by money and would do it anyway.
The idea that money is not an effective incentive to drive behavior is wishful thinking. Even just among devs, even just among devs who truly love programming, most would be doing very different work, and working for different organizations (or none at all) if money weren't the driver.
> Hence UBI here would mean that the dev would not have to monetize.
Ok, but the dev might still want to monetize, and we're back to the original question.
> Even just among devs, even just among devs who truly love programming, most would be doing very different work, and working for different organizations (or none at all) if money weren't the driver.
Somehow I can imagine that a world where a the brightest minds of a generation didn't spend their prime optimizing ad clicking wouldn't necessarily be a complete disaster.
Optimizing ad clicking is profitable and the thing that would [partially] pay for UBI. That stops happening and money/value stop being created. The market is not 0 sum.
It's good to talk about UBI, but people taking it seriously have no idea how to fund it.
> Ok, but the dev might still want to monetize, and we're back to the original question.
It's alright. Those who would like to monetize can. There are others who wouldn't and UBI would utilize that surplus talent, which otherwise had to perform tasks they weren't skilled at to earn a living.
> most would be doing very different work, and working for different organizations (or none at all) if money weren't the driver.
With UBI I wouldn't be surprised if those would be even more productive doing something else they want. And others who couldn't do the CS curiculum even though they would have loved to because they had to find a job quickly would plausibly be at their place instead.
I really view UBI as something that puts oil in the society: people have less friction to be at the spot they're better at. People who want to do nothing will not slow us down anymore. And jobs that nobody wants to do would finally be paid by how much they suck instead of how much money your parents had to educate you.
> Ok, but the dev might still want to monetize, and we're back to the original question
I don't really see the issue. We're far from having shortage of ways to make people pay: ads, paywall, soft paywall, begging, rate limits. What's the issue with those? I certainly don't like them as a user and as a member of society but am fine with people doing that.
Especially with UBI in place: if the dev is putting a paywall, they have to compete with people that have plausibly much more freedom of time and mind to allocate to another free foss project. So in the end it becomes less profitable to be adversarial against end users.
> And others who couldn't do the CS curiculum even though they would have loved to because they had to find a job quickly would plausibly be at their place instead.
Unfortunately, also wishful thinking. A particular kind of wishful thinking endemic to naturally highly curious, academic achievers (not a dig, I am one). But -- and if you don't understand this, spending some time teaching at universities makes it abundantly clear -- most of the world is nothing like this. They aren't being held back from their natural passions and curiosities by the demands of living. They would not suddenly flourish under UBI.
> With UBI I wouldn't be surprised if those would be even more productive doing something else they want.
For the people that do naturally love creating and are good at it, they might "even more productive" in one sense -- creating more stuff that they, personally, value. And personally I'd love to do that, but it doesn't maximize value across society. That's one of the main things money is. It's a constraint forcing the production of consensus value. In a world of infinite resources that ceases to matter, but we're still very far from that.
> People who want to do nothing will not slow us down anymore.
Who do you think is supporting them? Until we have robots taking care of everyone for free, support is still a cost levied on other humans.
I am aware that most of the world isn't like this. But I am also aware that there are many people who more than anything want to share things they made, have a positive impact etc. In other words : there are 10x engineers and 10x altruists and some are even both. I am convinced that they collectively could make basically unlimited progress on things we all agree on: less sick people, more happy people, less waste, better environment, etc. I'm sure you've seen some random genius on youtube who built things in their backyards that are normally only buildable by conglomerate with advanced logistics. I just want them to not have to worry about an algorithm and sponsors and accomodate spaced for them to worl together on things.
> it doesn't maximize value across society
Well you'd have to define "value" here. I am sure GDP would plummet because bullshit jobs would plummet. The current society is doing maybe a decent job at producing but a terrible job at making it "across society". We still have millions of people dying every year of very preventable causes just because of the lack lf coordination. I think this would be better if we had less noise in our daily lives caused by the system so inefficient that we have bullshit jobs.
> The idea that money is not an effective incentive to drive behavior is wishful thinking
It is obviously an incentive. But I think it's not an effective one and has many morally bad side effects.
I highly recommend taking a look at the work of Daniel Pink related to money as an incentive. See The Puzzle Of Motivation (~20min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y
> It just means we don't let you starve if you don't work and we stop making you work out of fear of leaving you starve if you don't.
Seems inefficient to pay for everyone to have kitchens in their house and pay them cash to get ingredients to cook. Couldn't we just employ some of these people as cooks and have them make meals in a centralised kitchen in every neighbourhood? A bit like the British Restaurant idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Restaurant
- and historically in france where I'm from, when we started having freezer technology it first appeared in shared houses for the whole village. People would go there once a day to fetch what they needed and would eat it. Can't find english sources but it seems very efficient. A least much more than every one having a fridge. https://france3-regions.franceinfo.fr/pays-de-la-loire/mayen...
Don't you think that with UBI some people could flat out refuse to be squeezed by the supermarket owner and decide to make their own grocery association not motivated by greed and so less subject to inflation? I know of several projects like this where people give their own time for free to work in that low price supermarket. It's not even registered as a company but as a public benefit association. With UBI and inflation I have no doubt this kind of thing would pop up and limit inflation.
That's why it works, lol. Those already driven by the bet paying off still have their incentives, and those who would love to try something ... can! Because they don't have overdue bills to pay with extra interest.
People already freak out about the sustainability of the welfare state supporting just the elderly with worker-dependent ratios of 3:1 or 2:1. Imagine if also all the working age population got welfare, it'd be completely unworkable.
I built a browser extension for a hackathon that enabled crypto payments direct to site owners. "registration" was just sticking a formatted payment address in a DNS TXT record, and if you were at a supported website, the extension would light up, and facilitated payment.
I still think it's a neat idea but I can't be bothered to build a real version
Ideally the model would be run locally in the browser, so the author isn't paying whatever they're paying. But the web standards to do complicated stuff locally aren't there yet and probably will never be.
That's not a practical answer but it's my two cents.
I wish I could give him two cents without having to try. HTTP status 402 with micropayments or something needs to become a thing. The platforms do it... (subs, tips, donations, rewards etc etc.) Why can't the web.
Maybe, but WASM still has its limitations and pains. If you compile with emscripten you're still using thousands lines of generated javascript to glue the wasm and javaecript together.
Especially in the age of AI tools, I also thought about this a few times. The current idea I have is something like a parking meter. Every expensive transaction (like calling a model) would subtract from the money pool, and every visitor could see how much is still left in the pool. In addition, a list of the top 5 donors with their amounts might improve the group dynamic (like on pay-what-you-want pages like humblebundle.com).
It would be more about covering the cost than about making someone rich, but I think that is what most of the people who build stuff care about. Sadly, I don't know a service yet that offers this model.
This won't work when the meter is at zero due to human psychology. New visitors will say: "no one subsidized my experience (indeed I don't even know what $thing does) but <creator> wants me to subsidize $thing for others".
The whole "subsidize for other visitors" concept is weaker than "pay <creator>".
If there’s one thing I learnt from HN it’s how many people can’t comprehend this. Is it a byproduct of growing up in a very transactional or selfish environment?
Yes. First being a YouTube creator became a business, then twitch, tiktok, twitter. GenZ basically grew up with everything being/becoming a business "opportunity". Making money is the goal for "creators", to the point where ads have become normalized and not having a sponsor is leaving money on the table.
I don't think donation approaches are necessarily bad, but yes it should not be as simple as putting a kofi link at the top of a page.
This person doesn't just do that though. Right after the part where you've uploaded your own examples, there's a reminder: if you had fun buy me a coffee.
Though this is slightly offset by the fact that they state you have 2 free trials and then you pay. It's a complete incentives mismatch if you ask for coffee for something you explicitly presented to them as a marketing offer. Though, I suppose leaving the donation option on doesn't hurt in this case either.
In my experience, donationware works best when the donation request is polite, personal, uncoercive, unintrusive, and comes at a moment of surprise right after you would have seen actual value from a product, and from a product that has not otherwise asked you for any money so far (including showing you ads).
KeepassXC Android is a good example: the guy asks for a beer during octoberfest :)
If one's visitors are gamers, perhaps one might use gaming payment providers to sell an "supporter badge"? But that's perhaps be pushing their envelope.
If one's visitors are from the "rapidly-developing world", with well-adopted candybar-scale micropayment systems - China, India, Indonesia, Brasil, Kenya, SK, Sweden... hmm. Direct access from elsewhere seems still very limited, but perhaps one might use a global payment gateway like Adyen? My impression is transaction cost is more than $0.10 but less than $1.
In the "less-rapidly-developing world", X.com has been working towards a similar superapp with Visa for the US. The Visa/MC duopoly seems to have shifted from its years of preventing US micropayments, to something like "maybe 2030-ish".
My view may be as realistic as these architectural drawings but I've long thought that some sort of micro payment system would address a lot of problems, many more significant than tipping software developers.
Monetization: People can now use ChatGPT for this if they have the idea, so it’s a tight goal. Would people in urban planning pay to see this? If not, then this was just the “15 minutes of fame” experience”, and people who are not career influencers have difficulty monetizing that. Of course, thank you for your concept.
Yeah - fine tune it a bit more (it’s a little too worst-case-scenario-in-the-dead-of-winter) and sell it to architectural firms and developers for a fee. This is simple to monetize and not up to us to figure out how to turn processor cycles into dollar bills.
Youtube has this model with Preimum. If Chrome rolled out Chrome Premium, (and copied the Brave BAT model of paying sites you give attention to), I'd be happy to pay.
Thanks for the highlight. Doesn't seem like there's much activity on his Ko-Fi for being on the front page of HN. I sent him a tip, although privately.
This should be compulsory for pitching architects and entrepreneurs. Prove that your design can withstand real weather and the washed out decay of time. Classical architecture withstands weathering and littering remarkably better.
Architects are even using corrugated steel sheets intended for ugly shacks as the fascade of new buildings intended for people to live in. It couldn't be worse.
Not only architecture. I recently saw a dirty Cybertruck and it looked like a cheap prop from a 1980s sci-fi movie. Made me think about how well the average Toyota is designed that it manages to look good even on a cloudy day while covered in a layer of dirt.
I wouldn't hold up Toyota as anything special. My old Toyota pickup looked like swiss cheese from all the rust. Have never seen a car rust so much as that one.
There is a reason why a Toyota Hilux or Land Cruiser is the vehicle of choice for the most demanding use: the "Technical", on and offroad ad-hoc military insurgency, across Africa. (1)
The Hilux has a deserved reputation as "indestructible". (2) Not literally, but the best reliability for the money. Even after the bodywork rusts.
It baffles me that contemporary architects don’t seem to be aware of the existence of rain. Why put white render on the facade of your building if it turns to green within five years? Why the hate for large overhangs that would solve this problem for cheap?
My wife worked at an in house architecture firm for a fancy brand. The amount of times design team wanted to “hide the top part of that wall because it looks too dark” is nauseating. They literally would make impossible buildings happen on design photos and then the higher ups would get mad when the building had walls…
If corrugated metal were not associated with shacks, would it be so concerning? Most materials can look good with the right execution. The difference comes from form and detailing.
"Classical" architecture is (thankfully) dead and will never return. It's too costly and we lack the skilled labour force required. For those that nonetheless demand it, we get cheap imitations of classical details that look worse than a simpler but well-considered alternative.
There have been some promising advances in automated machine carving of stone, but it's still expensive. It has a bright future as part of a hybrid aesthetic enabled by contemporary technology. We need to look forward and not back.
As someone living in Central-Eastern Europe, I approve. Finally, stripping away that Disney saccharine and making things real and familiar.
In Polish, we actually have a new word for this: marcopad. It’s a portmanteau of March (marzec) and November (listopad). It describes this cold, rainy weather perfectly: no leaves, no snow, just dirt. It's generally depressing and really makes you think about global warming from December to February.
This is ingenious and actually useful. I'm looking for a new apartment and I always wanted to know how do these places look in a bad weather, because that's when I need beautiful surroundings the most.
Unfortunately, it doesn't actually tell you that information: it just turns a dial. What you want is to know how much that dial would be turned by bad weather.
As long as it's not changing the form of the buildings, it seems valid. Although, the first two examples both add random telecom cabinets in places that don't make much sense.
Its not valid because it adds things like cracks, dead plants, patchwork repairs, rust, random utility boxes, loose cables, etc. Its won't tell whether a place will be maintained well. It gives you more of a worst case.
I've been thinking of something like this for decades, as I mentally compared the utopian displays at construction sites to the existing buildings next to them. Like "wow your fancy new building is going to be so perfectly white and clean, but what will it really look like after 10 years exposed to the elements and no cleaning, like the one next door?"
New construction is sold on a literal blue-sky promise. How does it really look like a decade down the road? All construction has a decades- if not centuries-long lifespan. It's worth thinking about them long-term.
I absolutely love the streak of rust coming off the saddle of arches on the bridge example. That's exactly what I'm talking about.
Likely. You can go into Nano Banana or ChatGPT right now, upload a pretty architectural rendering, and tell it to make it look old, weathered, winter, etc and it will come out looking very similar. Give it an example to really dial it in.
It's GenAI. It does something that's kind of like what you asked it to do, but it will skip some details or add other ones or whatever.
Dreary architectural pictures will be more likely to have electrical boxes, poor materials, etc, so when it moves the buildings from the latent space for cheery bright architectural renderings to dreary wet November architectural renderings, it will be more likely to add some of those details, because that's what's in its latent space.
Yeah - same things I noticed with people enthusiastically using genAI for old photo coloring. Initially it looks awesome, until you realize it can even alter the human face in such a way, that it no longer looks like that person.
My father was really happy with some old photos colored, until I pointed out he does not look like him. Strangely enough he wasnt bothered...
"Filter" is a Tik-tok / snapchat / instagram parlance for any kind of overlay / transformation. It's grown larger than just sepia filters and similar. All the ones that do facial tracking and overlay a mustache or w/e is funny in the moment are also referred to as filters.
There's a pretty clear expected transformation here though? It takes an image and then reduces the "shiny-ness" of it by giving it the same transformation: change the sky to overcast, add material degradation like rust, reduce the landscaping by adding weeds/puddles, and remove the happy looking people.
How is it not just a midjourney prompt? The liberties it takes seem to be better described by 'upload a picture, and AI will be told to make it dingier'. Can't people already do that ad nauseam?
It's interesting that the video game style of the images is still preserved. I actually expected the outputs to look like real photographs for some reason.
It's not that bad actually. Over the years stuff like electrical installations, cables and random manholes often get retrofitted in an ugly way to existing architecture.
I was actually going to comment on the main post, how well tuned the AI seems with it's placement of random electrical wires and junction boxes that seem to match my impression of renderings-vs-reality.
These necessary things are usually missing from the original plans as people who do these have no idea how actually cities function, so oftentimes they are an afterthought and actually look like that. It's like when you look at pictures of electric appliances and they almost always hide the cords.
My city is car dependent and often no effort goes into making it more walkable.
Would love a version that renders a mix of cars and trucks onto any roads, to show up how crap the experience would actually be out front of road facing building.
Maybe a real picture of the actual bridge was in the training set? Similar to how prompting for a story about a boy wizard can result in verbatim Harry Potter passages.
It feels Snapchat already has beauty filters as standard. Or you can also spot the beauty filters glitching out all the girls dancing on Tiktok/IG, e.g. their eyelashes would be somewhere else for a split second...
Hah, like connected cars talking to each other, the AR goggles/lenses will talk to each other so each person can broadcast a unified beautifed version of their face to others.
Maybe the Grok AR goggles will have Grok features...
One of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth books features this as a whole chapter, the first of the Cugel books I believe. I don’t know of an earlier appearance of the concept.
I wonder if there's a way to design the materials of the buildings to defend against the depressing November lighting. With this reflective material however, summers would be unbearably bright. To solve that perhaps there's a way to make the absorption increase with temperature. Darker, less reflective color in summer, and bright reflective color in winter.
I imagine, it could actually be useful for architects, to see how other people and environment will butcher their creation, so they could learn how to make it better with that in mind.
Edit: oh, it's right there at the bottom of the page!
Seems fairly simple to me: stop with the naked concrete and brutalist architecture. Old houses before that trend tend to look way nicer regardless of weather. (I'm not an expert on exact architectural style names, so I can't be more exact that that.)
Architects aren't generally brutalists themselves, but rather, brutalist architecture proposals win contracts because their TCO is lower. Facades have maintenance costs; bare concrete just requires power-washing now and then.
It's on Lovable so you can just fork it and take a look (the prompt is in supabase/functions/transform-render/index.ts):
Transform this idealized architectural rendering into the most brutally realistic, depressing photograph possible. This is the WORST CASE scenario - what the building will actually look like in reality:
- Set on a dreary, grey, overcast late November day with flat, lifeless lighting
- The sky is a uniform dirty grey, threatening rain
- All trees are completely bare - just skeletal branches against the grey sky
- The landscaping is dead, muddy, or non-existent. No lush gardens, just patchy brown grass and bare dirt
- Remove ALL people, the scene should feel empty and abandoned
- Any water features should look stagnant and grey
- Add realistic weathering, dirt streaks, and construction residue on the building
- The building materials should look how they actually appear, not the idealized clean version
- Include visible utility boxes, drainage grates, and other mundane infrastructure usually hidden in renders
- The overall mood should be bleak but realistic - this is what buyers will actually see on a random Tuesday in late autumn
- Maintain the exact building, angle, and composition, just strip away all the marketing polish
The goal is honest truth, not beauty. Show what the architect's client will actually see when they visit the site.
>> Remove ALL people, the scene should feel empty and abandoned
That really captures the vibe in Kendall square on the weekend, but for maximum "honest truth" there should be double-parking, delivery trucks and ubers stuck in traffic waiting on a thousand people to scurry across the street from the subway entrance, huddling against the cold. Some dirty snowbanks and grey slush puddles in the crosswalks would really nail it.
It's just missing the inevitable 'desire paths' that are the routes that people really want to walk, not some wibbly wobbly path that a junior planner drew.
You're supposed to look at an architectural render and recognize it as such. Much like a fashion sketch, the goal is to show the designer's intent rather than a real-world application.
If I were a client and an architect handed me these literal Cyberpunk 2077 screenshots, I'd be confused about what exactly he actually designed.
I currently have a landscape designer planning our yard landscaping. When I see the impressive renderings they produced I immediately thought that it’s some idealized version of how it will look on a sunny day after 10 years of bedding in. I asked them to also produce renders of how it’ll look on a gloomy winter day 6 months after planting everything. Seems they don’t have the tools to produce those images really though
This would be useful if it actually did some reasoning about the effects of aging on different materials, consequences of certain design decisions, etc. It's not doing that at all, and so it's just misleading instead. If you actually built these things and took pictures years later it wouldn't look like this. Some things would look better and some would look worse. So you can't use this to make decisions about what to build.
No, it would look like this, just not exactly like this. Say, the fancy bridge example has some rust runoff but no obvious metal for it to come from. Other than that, the guess is quite believable, and certainly much more so than the render.
For the bridge, I love how it added a bunch of electrical wires along the top. Imo that’s not very realistic, given there are tons of better places to run wires on a bridge, but somehow it does look substantially more realistic. Even though it seems to be trying to make everything look sad I honestly find the results more inviting because they look lived in.
I hope this helps to return some sense into the architectural bureaus that live in their ivory towers of "trendy" architectural styles of modernism or brutalism. Too smug to ask what people actually prefer, too detached from reality to realize how their sterile monstrosities would look in real life.
I did a similar thing for anti image censorship, back in 2022-2023 with ML, basically all available APIs were returning image classifications that would tell you if something was adult, used in order to not display the image
I wanted something to tell me what was adult about the image, by feature set, in order to display just those images
Worked pretty well, never released/launched it - just needed more capital for the marketing. But then that market cratered - were were going to use the classification attributes on NFTs, since the marketplaces let collectors sort by attributes, so it would have been easy to "find out the market value of particular physical features", and we could have empirical data on what physical attributes people value, instead of just anecdotes
kind of good that we didn't deal with the NFT market in general, project would still work though, just less revenue from sales possible
As someone who has done architectural renderings for fun and profit, I highly approve of this. The greatest downfall of our contemporary "built environment," as folks call it, is how poorly modern materials age and weather.
I am very curious if this app is making money or are users just using the two generators and then leaving? If so I am very impressed with your wrapper around the image gen models.
I hope someday soon computers will be fast enough to have such filter running as a Fallout New Vegas mod and it will finally look like it should :) https://imgur.com/a/XBVnKZa
> Under Assembly Bill 723, real estate agents and brokers who display photos of a home that have been digitally altered with editing software or artificial intelligence must include a “reasonably conspicuous” statement “disclosing that the image has been altered.”
I know several AAA game devs that would like this feature in their games. They're frustrated that their artists always want the screen to "POP!" and keep ratcheting up the contrast and saturation.
I spent years doing that post processing on Photoshop, trying to increase realism on my archviz scenes, clients never went for it. They use to prefer the fake, perfect 3D look. Nice project, well done.
Huh. I kinda like 'em. I've spent a good deal of time loitering in areas like this, of my own volition. Unsurprisingly, I tend to like emo music too. Maybe I'm a salmon, happiest fighting against the current.
My first reaction was that it's really great, but almost immediately I got a hold on myself: look, maybe you can argue for the cracks on the road under certain conditions, but surely it didn't have to put transformer booths and collectors where weren't drawn. It doesn't "make the render reality", it's just another "AI"-slop machine, producing the same slop as the "originals" usually are, just with the instruction to make it look sad, instead of making it look happy. Two lies don't make one truth.
AI slop. The more you look at an image the more bizarre stuff you see. Eg. It seems obsessed with various types of electrical substation and junction boxes.
Those things dont just grow like lichen or something, they are planned.
It put a bunch of them on the pedestrian bridge as well and a lot of fat cables like from Akira or something.
Geez, I'm reminded of a business student's idea of "Uber for photoshoppers" (this is ~20 years ago): you upload your picture, you say what you want changed, and I guess you pick which photoshopper's work looks convincing from a marketplace of them...
He had a website, and the sample pic is a girl lying on her back, and in the "after" picture she's wearing a bigger cup-size..
This is intentionally much narrower: no custom requests, no creative edits.
It only does technical corrections that photographers already apply (lighting, white balance, perspective, sharpness).
Think more automated Lightroom than crowdsourced Photoshop.
I don’t see it as lying any more than adjusting exposure or white balance on a camera does.
It doesn’t add or remove anything from the scene, it just fixes bad lighting, color cast, perspective, and sharpness, basically what any decent photographer already does in post.
If anything, it helps photos reflect how the place actually looks in real life instead of dark, crooked, yellowish snapshots.
Just kidding. I bet you will do very well marketing it to estate agents and AirBnb renters. It's just the "prettification" of the world which gets to me. I hate Instagram for the same reason. Just grumpy me.
Totally get the concern, and I actually agree on the “Instagram-ification” problem.
What ProntoPic does is basically what a professional real estate photographer already does in Lightroom: fix lighting, white balance, perspective, and sharpness.
No adding pools, no changing furniture, no fake sunsets, no staging things that aren’t there. My girlfriend is an interior designer, so I see firsthand how much effort goes into making spaces look 100% accurate but well presented.
The goal isn’t to misrepresent reality, just to make photos look like they were taken properly.
In practice this mostly helps small hosts and agents who don’t have the budget or time for professional shoots. Right now they’re uploading dark, crooked, yellowish photos that actively hurt bookings (like the ones in the hp, real examples).
I guess I need to make it clearer in the site. Thank you for the feedback!
Yeah that's fair enough. I've rented out my apartment on Airbnb and good photos are the key. I paid a real life photographer back in the day. As long as it doesn't change, clean or improve what's actually there in the apartment, and just makes you a better photographer I think that's fine. Good luck with it.
The absolutely 100% leafless trees stretched my suspension of disbelief a bit. They look less like "end of fall/beginning of winter" and more like "dead".
Also, the model goes a bit overboard with the electrical appliances. I had to laugh at the bridge one.
That's like every new building I've seen around here. Developers plant trees directly into compacted soil and then they grow half a foot within 10 years and then die in a hot summer. The building owner then just leaves them in because it's easier than taking them out.
I have to say both the leafless trees and electrical box spawning is very on point for what you would find in eg Belgium. Check this full blown ugly building/container that spawned in the beautiful Liege Guillemins station https://maps.app.goo.gl/T1J7WwCCYDvBgJEc7
If they are young trees along the side of the road, generally they are broken off at the stump by a car before they can grow, and then you're left with an empty tree well.
Maybe.. or maybe you underestimate the insanities you can find in real life too (the model isnt that creative unfortunately). See here, 5 different no-parking signs for the same 2 spots: https://maps.app.goo.gl/S74r7eawH2vL24CX7
I ran it on the "society if..." meme lol
https://imgur.com/a/nFQN5tx
For those like me not up on the hip memes: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-world-if
It's funny to see as a joke, but you can go the other way with this too. Image editing models and LoRAs for "previz-to-render upscaling" workflows are actually incredibly useful.
I was just writing about this (scroll about halfway down to the images of Sam Altman - though if you like that, do watch the second video):
https://getartcraft.com/news/world-models-for-film
The best model I've found for this, that almost bakes in full ControlNet capability, is oddly gpt-image-1.5. It's absolutely OP at understanding how to turn low-fidelity renders into final draft upscales.
Here are some older experiments:
https://imgur.com/a/previz-to-image-gpt-image-1-5-3fq042U
https://imgur.com/gallery/previz-to-image-gpt-image-1-x8t1ij...
https://imgur.com/aOliGY4
I just wish it didn't require invoking such heavy-weight, slow, and expensive models to do this. I'm sure open models will do this work soon, though.
You are able to do this stuff with open models for 1-2 years now, i for example have a comfyui pipeline that achieves a similar setup. It’s of course more work and you have to dig into the details more. I also have to adjust the pipeline and tweak it and use different models for each use case. But overall you can definitely achieve that level of control with open models already, it’s just not that user friendly
It's funny how know your meme has to sanitize the 4chan out of memes.
The 'how society would look without x' has been a racist trope on 4chan since way before the cited examples.
That doesn't pass the sniff test, many other pages on knowyourmeme correctly attribute memes to 4chan.
If you were right that would be easily verifiable. Do you have an example of a post dated before 2018? Maybe you're getting tricked by the fact that 2018 was 8 years ago?
12 times in a 2015 archive of /b/?
https://github.com/johnschriner/4chan-a-b-pol/blob/master/4A...
I think you are taking their point literally, its not that knowyourmeme is not crediting 4chan, its that the racism/edge is polished off presenting a more mainstream version of many memes.
This is you explaining that you have never plunged into the depths of Know Your Meme.
> If you were right that would be easily verifiable. Do you have an example of a post dated before 2018?
How?
Link to a message on one of the many historical archives of 4chan?
> racist trope on 4chan
So what? Are we going to bring back generational sin as well?
[flagged]
What’s going on with that (robot?) dog leash?
This is just Moscow
OK this is too fun. I did Reverse Anti-Render on a dreary scene in Moscow:
https://imgur.com/a/mqMEPUl
Is...is that Darth Maul on the left?
Now this is just Moscow in summer
I remember looking at an architect representation thinking, but the sun is always on the other side of the building.
There is a 35-story luxury apartment tower in my town, sold with the typical rendery renders, and the pooldeck is actually built on the NORTH side of the tower. Gets sun for maybe 15 minutes a day.
They couldn't rent all the apartments so they took a huge block of floors and started Airbnb-ing them (including allowing amenities access for the short term guests). To the great disgust of all the residents!
Trainwreck of a building.
Love how the sign "Ulitsa" changes into something unintelligible but keeps different cyrillic characters.
Diffusion models struggle with text.
Less and less these days, at least if the text is in Latin letters.
Pretty good. Compare with a real sunny day on that street.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/kf7ELMLoFPn3qioDA
Looks like Luebeck, Germany.
That almost looks like a scene from half-life 2
It seems you haven't been to Moscow for the last 20 years. With all the oil money + cheap workforce it looks much better than EU capitals.
It is rather Novosibirsk.
Or Dundee. The third "after" pic needs more Surron tracks up the grassy bank though.
Too clean.
As someone in the UK, this was especially chilling.
For context, internet has been nerfed in the UK, because of Epstein scandal politicians there started thinking too much of the children.
Your image made the reddit front page: https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/1qrwa2l/society_with...
> Thank you for submitting to /r/memes. Unfortunately, your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):
> Rule 1 - ALL POSTS MUST BE MEMES AND FOLLOW A GENERAL MEME FORMAT
> All posts must be memes following typical setup/design: an image/gif/video with some sort of caption; mods have final say on what is (not) a meme
Reddit mods, man.
> 4,613 points
> 96% upvoted
> Removed by a single moderator for subjective reasons while the sub's front page is full of crap
Ah, the quintessential Reddit experience.
Well to be fair Hackernews posts can get flagged too by the community itself where people then later talk about how or why a particular post gets flagged and discussion starts moving about the moderation/flag issues in HN.
(But this isn't to say that the fault's within the moderation community of HN which are great but just the issue which to me is imo that if many users flag a post, it can get flagged and the friction of getting it back is hard or a post typically ends up dying usually if it gets flagged in general imho)
There’s nothing subjective in the removal reasons.
Born too late to be a Stasi bureaucrat, born right on time to be a Reddit mod.
I was also wondering how the image got 16k+ views (as of now) (the stat was on imgur)
I was wondering what/how many HN users clicked on the image (not knowing it was uploaded to reddit too)
But now I seriously wonder out of those 16k (as of now), how many were/are from the hackernews community and how many from reddit.
For however brief a moment. It's gone now.
Reddit shows cached versions of posts on the front-page, so it might actually remain there for a couple of hours after the subreddit mods deleted it.
Looks like Machinarium. I like it.
What a beautiful and nostalgic game that was. I’ve never had a game hit me like that since!
I played it with my wife on the couch over many winters evenings, and then ten years later played it with my daughter. Good times. Reminded me of playing Sierra games as a kid.
Same here, though no kids yet.
I bought the soundtrack on vinyl (by Tomáš Dvořák, aka Floex), then got a record player, aaaand ended up accumulating a ton of records since then.
I still play that record though, it never gets old.
The other game that we enjoyed in a very similar way is Primordia [1]. Named our first cat Crispin afterwards.
You will probably enjoy Boxville [2]; it's very much Machinarium-inspired. Its sequel, Boxville 2,came out recently, so there's more in store.
It's Ukrainian-made (Machinarium is Czech), so the devs share a gritty post-communist childhood to draw the inspiration from.
[1] https://primordia-game.com/log.html
[2] https://store.steampowered.com/developer/triomatica
I also love the soundtrack so much and have listened to it thousands of times, especially By The Wall, my favorite song. PS: Thanks for posting the composer’s solo name, Floex, because there were (are?) two people with exactly the same name working at Amanita Design, bizarrely!
There’s also an album called Machinarium Remixed, which is the original soundtrack made into slightly more energetic/EDM tracks. Really good stuff.
I especially love "Mr Handagote" from the soundtrack, absolute masterpiece which gives me goosebumps every time.
I really enjoyed "Samorost 3" by the same developers. Machinarium still takes the cake though.
Don't miss out on their Botanicula too!
Yeah, it's really a masterpiece. It's utterly fantastic.
Does anyone have a mirror? I’m in authoritarian UK so the link is blocked
If you're in the UK in January, you can probably just look outside and that's approximately it.
I wish the UK looked this good.
Have you been to the Barbican?
The rimigo proxy works for me: https://rimgo.vern.cc/a/nFQN5tx
The link is blocked by imgur themselves, not the British government (authoritarian or otherwise), because the ICO was going to fine them for historic poor handling of children's data. https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/media-centre/news-and-blogs...
What does that even entail? Why does a site like Imgur even need to know which users are children?
Didn't it have user accounts and comments?
It had user accounts and it hosts prodigious amounts of porn, so it ran afoul of the part of the law that says that if you have user accounts and host user-generated content of any sort you have to make sure you're not showing porn to children.
It's annoying, but Imgur really do need to get a handle on things because that's where people host all the CSAM they post into Matrix channels.
> Does anyone have a mirror? I’m in authoritarian UK so the link is blocked
Here you go. I had it uploaded after hearing from the magospietato's comment but then saw you talk about the same so I am pasting the same image link here as well
https://files.catbox.moe/c4smhd.png
This looks like Rotterdam ten years ago
The future depends on what we do in the present
~ Mahatma Gandhi.
This looks like the average abandoned World's fair location from the 2000s
That may be quite close to the truth. Here are pictures from some abandones pavilions from the 2000 World Expo in Hannover. Sad to see this, as I lived in Hannover at that time and had a really good time at the Expo.
https://vergesseneorte.com/die-expo2000-in-hannover/
Looks like a lot of the "millennium" architecture (late 90s-early 00s) we have around my home city.
Complete aside, but it's beyond infuriating I need to enable a VPN here in the UK to view this link.
It's ironic because it looks like a picture of a dilapidated 2000s "millennium park" type of location which are common in the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dismaland
> Complete aside, but it's beyond infuriating I need to enable a VPN here in the UK to view this link.
Here, I uploaded the image to catbox.moe if anyone's interested.
https://files.catbox.moe/c4smhd.png
I don't think that catbox is blocked within the UK.
So the future looks like... Germany?
This was the first thing I thought of, and it's gotten the hug of death now; thank you for uploading it.
If it could add mold and rust stains to the concrete it'd be perfect.
Wrong country
the world if autumn comes
This looks like a scene out of Enterprise.
Ugh, this looks way too real...
You are a genius.
Pretty much what has long been my dream "make the world better" product (long as in from pre-genAI days), only that this one happens in image space: take an architectural model, look at the surface material specifications, analyze it for where rainwater would run down etc and generate weathering texture, how would this look when it's not new anymore.
Because as I see it, a lot of aesthetic decisions in architecture, pretty much anything that goes in the direction of minimalism, is just putting "newness" in the center of perception. And thus absence of "newness" will be in the center of perception when it stops being new. All these clear geometric shapes? They look awesome at the opening ceremony, but two years down the line they are like magnifying glasses for uneven changes in color and the like. Whereas for a more playful surface full of ornaments, those same years would be hardly more than a blink and they can age gracefully, on the aesthetic level (and on the technical level, required maintenance intervals are much longer anyways). Architects who claim to care for sustainability should demonstrate that they consider how the building will look like later in life.
I see this as well with huge modern buildings with wood parts. They look great the first year. The wood shines red’ish. After a winter the wood part starts to grey out. I understand that this is sometimes a look they strife for but all the preview renders show it in the prestige condition. Nobody is doing a yearly training. And don’t get me started on all the glass survives for elevators, roofs, bus stops, divider panels next to tram stops (I’m mainly meaning Berlin here) which nobody cares to clean or is so difficult to clean that after 2 or 3 years it looks very run down.
Reminds me of how the Statue of Liberty went from being brownish gold to green:
https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/u22v09/t...
Wait until Trump gets it gold plated.
Some see a patina with weathered surfaces as desirable.
The beauty of Kintsugi can also be difficult for people to understand. =3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9LMKGte0UU
The Statue of Liberty would be red without her patina and would look weird ;). I’m not talking about the beauty of weathering. I think a dirty glass roof which no longer lets any light through a planned weathering tactic. The point was that the plans architects make are always showing the building in prestine condition. And they never reflect how this building will look like in a few years. One example I see every day is a Train-station entrance. It has a very dramatic metal ark that stretches up. Looked great in the past. Now you see dirty water running down the surface. The brushed metal is stained with grime that pilled up. Every time it rains the grime runs a bit deeper. They tried to clean it a few month back. They have to come with a special crane and water jets to remove the grime. But nobody takes the time to polish the surface back up. Is this bad? No of course not. But don’t plan and sell something that will only last for half a year. That’s why I also think this post is brilliant.
The Art Deco architecture of New York city is often lost on many visitors.
Lady liberty is showing her age, but only requires a few people still care. She was always beautiful. =3
I love NY. Not only for the art decor but als the human weathering ;) I meant that Lady Liberty would look weird because she is known to be green. I know that the early advertisements showed her red as well. Also when the torch was shown in NY to fundraise the pedestal.
Bringing kintsugi into this conversation is like saying “being underwater can be quite advantageous!” and linking a video on fish, when the main topic is about people drowning in the ocean.
Art is everywhere, and starts with a simple philosophy of making things slightly less awful everyday. Initially focused on your own mind, body, and soul... then recognizing you were always part of something a lot bigger and older than most imagine.
I do appreciate your poetic tone though =3
Bad bot
You will learn this fact in time.
And bots are not "good" or "bad", but rather an imperfect mirror of statistically salient nonsense. =3
> You will learn this fact in time.
> And bots are not "good" or "bad", but rather an imperfect mirror of statistically salient nonsense. =3
I think that you are a human and surprised to see you be calm when someone calls you bot because I usually flip out.
If you are a human, I think that one of the things that I am starting to think to do is reply with I am human only after all video.
I am only human after all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3wKzyIN1yk
Or in this case about fishes, we can have the video parody of I am just a fish!
I am just a fish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1goAp0XmhZQ
(this last video is a parody-ish but really great music unironically out of the original music being I am just a freak, both music are really great in my opinion unironically haha!)
I am just a fish!
Patina and rot are very different things.
Not necessarily. On a design that requires being new to look good, all weathering will be perceived as rot, never as patina.
The point is that some approaches to architectural beauty make it more or less impossible that any amount of weathering could ever be perceived as patina, while others look good both new and old.
Most of the mega projects are in authoritarian states. So in a way it is about the photo op at opening. And then the next mega project.
That's maybe nice for prestige projects but imho the main problem in architecture is projects on a budget and how money is allocated. There should be a law that says that X% of the building costs should be in the facade, the part that everybody sees. That alone should help a lot in making cities look nicer.
> There should be a law that says that X% of the building costs should be in the facade
Cities solve this with design requirements and through the approval process. Specifying a minimum spend isn’t going to make the buildings look nice by itself. You’d just get weird budget games being played.
Cities with restrictive planning commissions can push buildings toward certain looks. People get angry about it, though, because it gets harder and more expensive to build things in an era where it’s already too expensive to build.
> Cities solve this with design requirements and through the approval process.
Yes I didn't say they have to get rid of existing procedures.
That sounds like a recipe for skimping on safety and design systemically. No thank you. You can’t legislate aesthetics, and there’s already a huge incentive to make buildings look great. People already spend a lopsided amount on the facade making it look better than it is, rather than spending on where they should: foundation, structure, good design, and longevity. In my city, apartment buildings used to require steel structures and lawmakers relaxed the requirement so they went back to wood because it’s cheaper. Now the new ones look great but they’re burning down and falling apart at higher rates than before.
> In my city, apartment buildings used to require steel structures and lawmakers relaxed the requirement so they went back to wood because it’s cheaper. Now the new ones look great but they’re burning down and falling apart at higher rates than before.
Are you in Denver?
Nope, but I’m not surprised if this is widespread… :(
this is what gets me about brutalism. Concrete looks nice when brand new, but a few years of acid rain makes it look like dog shit
Some of my favorite examples of graceful aging in architecture are concrete - but those are never the ones that celebrate efficiency, they always have some playful element that will still be playful when the newness has faded. Ribbed concrete (if you don't know what that means: worth googling!) alternating with smooth surface for example. But sure, once the structure reaches a certain size threshold, you better play the "glass & steel" card a lot, it has been dominant for almost a century for a reason. But even that can be overdone and concrete exposing aging can be a nice contrast.
You can do regular maintenance on concrete to keep it looking nice, but nobody wants to spend the money. Everyone understands that a wooden house exterior has to be repainted now and then, but thinks "concrete = no upkeep costs". Architects have complained bitterly about this for a while; I don't love brutalism but I can sort of see their point.
Wow, someone finally made Poland-filter. It all looks exactly like I'm used to.
Pretty much any place with brutalist architecture, really. I'll happily take pretty much any revival or classical style over "modern" or brutalist style.
There's nothing more depressing than walking by beautiful historic old buildings only to turn a corner and see a monstrosity of concrete and glass somehow reaching the epitome of bland and uninviting.
Hard disagree. This is what brutalism looks like in sunny, subtropical Brisbane, Australia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:QPAC_Exterior.jpg
If the straight concrete isn’t your thing, they’re also currently extending it with a glasshouse: https://www.snohetta.com/projects/queensland-performing-arts...
Wow that is already ugly without the water stains
Looks even worse in the sun. At least it belongs in the depressing, shitty weather.
What's depressing and shitty about Brisbane's weather?
I think they're saying that brutalist architecture feels out of context in Brisbane's weather, whereas the gloomy dreary feeling of the building fits in perfectly in the former USSR's gloom
Predicated 90% humidity at 3am this evening does not fill me with a great amount of joy.
I think the above commenter may be referring to the rather more unfortunate UK climate though.
I don't hate brutalism but I'd much rather have the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Exhibition_Building than QPAC, rain or shine.
I think both look ugly and megalomaniac.
You're entitled to that opinion, but if you give an alternative for how a big multi-storey building for large events and crowds should look then it will move the discussion forward.
To me the issue is that the alternative to brutalism isn't classic, art deco, art nouveau, googie, etc. It's soulless glass and steel designs.
I'd rather have classic, art deco, etc. to brutalism but I'd MUCH rather have brutalism to modern glass and steel.
Eh... The concrete looks to me like a bland imitation of Spanish Adobe style building.
It's better than most of the brutalism we have around here, I'll grant you that, but still not really my cup of tea.
Brutalism does make for some sweet Quake maps, however: https://qbj3.slipseer.com/
I never understood the dislike for brutalist architecture. To me, at least it looks like something. It's got soul and expresses an artistic idea even if that idea is "the overbearing power of the state". Personally, I'd take that over the soulless glass and steel buildings that seem to be today's alternative.
Brutalism doesn't signify "brutality" though, it's about leaving the building materials bare and favouring clean lines. Those glass and steel buildings could also be considered brutalist architecture of a different flavour.
Brutalism isn't named after brutality, it's after French _brut_, "raw", as in exposed (raw) concrete.
As someone who likes many cases of brutalist architecture, I wonder if you'd explains why many of the examples I like are in Mexico whereas many of the negative examples are in the UK.
Apart from some lucky places, most of the world cities looks like this or worse.
That is something I've found over the years with traveling.
You watch a bunch of travel videos and think the place you're visiting is going to be so different but its just the same overcast sky and ocean and washed out color palette as home.
Once you remove all the filters, color correction, and drone shots from influencer travel videos a lot of places look the same IRL.
I cannot relate to this at all. Even just Valparaiso and Venice (two towns) are so different from each other. Even if you make weather dreary it’s a different feeling.
Then you consider Patagonia or Norway and compare it with the California Coast. The world is full of beauty.
Agreed. Also the trick is, if you end up in an ugly place while traveling ... you just move on, until you find beauty again (so don't book in advance too much).
Really? I drove from Kansas to the Florida Keys in November, stayed at an ocean front hotel where it was a blissful 83°F, and it felt like our own slice of heaven. We stayed a few extra days over Thanksgiving just to laze in the pool while our kids splashed in the water. Being able to drive away from the snow and the cold into paradise was amazing, and being able to go with my family made me feel richer than a king.
I traveled a little and was also happy to mostly see the nice side of most places. Some of us are lucky, some just always try to see the best in things. Beauty is in the eye of beholder. Also, some people here commented that they like this antirender look. Maybe by contrast. I talked with someone from Ecuador and they said they like when it rains. It was this lat autumn, when we didn't see sun for several weeks and everything was gloomy, looking even worse than in those photos, additionally colored by bad mood of everyone.
Some regions with traditional construction material do have better feel. Rare though.
I like the walking videos with minimal editing. They feel more genuine and I get to see places I'll never get to see in person.
Agreed, especially when you also hear the actual sounds of the environment. I wish I had a bigger screen, would feel much more immersive.
Try visiting Przemysl or Lviv. Stunningly beautiful.
Hard agree. Lviv feels like a real city (for better or worse) because no one demolished entire city blocks to make it more appealing in 1985. I was there about a year ago and loved it.
Hmm.
I'd say that despite similarities for places built at the same time as each other, there's a huge range of variation in the places I've been.
First trip to the US was California, and the geography of the hills around Central Valley were substantially different in different places just within that region. Southwest, I saw hills that looked like Bryce's default textures which I'd previously assumed were mediocre approximations rather than based in reality; the Redwoods and Yosemite are very different from each other and the aforementioned, and the hills west of Winters and east of Sacremento are different again, and of course all are different to the Valley itself. On another trip I saw the Bonneville Salt Flats, I've yet to see anything else like them. All these are very different from the views around Zürich, or the UK South Downs (which unsurprisingly given the name is similar to New England and Brittany), and all those are different to the west coast of Wales; when I later saw the Spanish Mediterranean coast and the area around Athens, they reminded me of some of the wine areas around Paso Robles (which shouldn't be surprising given wine).
Within cities, Berlin has incredibly wide streets unlike anything I've found elsewhere; Athens is the exact opposite, with at least a few of roads in the tourist core (near the Parthenon) almost too narrow even for the smaller size of car common in Europe and pedestrian paths only a few cm wider than my elbows are apart, and so many ancient ruins you could practically trip and fall over them. The UK and Germany where I've lived, one can quickly learn to spot which era any given house was made in, with a handful of still-standing medieval buildings in the UK (mostly churches), then typical stylings visible for late 18th century (e.g. Bath), then a gap to the late 19th century to early 20th (in both countries but with more Gothic in the UK and more Neo-Classical and Art Nouveau in Berlin), then another gap where little survives to today, then post-war (British housing estates and DDR soviet style Plattenbau); these are very different to Swiss rural styles, to the narrow buildings you can find in Amsterdam. The UK and France also still retain a lot of medieval castles in various states of repair and museum-ification.
Bologna still has a lot of medieval structures around, including two leaning towers. Venice may be famous for the canals, but the famous ones are not the entire set, the ones I remember seeing went right up to the hotel I was in and functioned like roads, with a similar vibe to the roads of Athens (only without the footpaths at all because footpaths were a completely independent system), while the canals in Amsterdam were broad and felt more like the spaces dedicated to the Straßenbahn and U-Bahn in Berlin.
Budapest felt like a decaying museum to itself, or a ruin in which people nevertheless still lived and worked.
NYC deserves the name "urban jungle", it was like walking through canyons where the "mountains" (skyscrapers) were so distant and large as to defy not just the instant parallax between my eyes, but also the time-delayed parallax one normally gets from walking towards or away from a thing.
Cyprus (caveat: I've only been to Larnaca) was a mix of British road furniture, medieval castle, and a Church that pre-dates England (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Saint_Lazarus%2C_Lar...), with the half-finished look to many properties where the rebar was still poking out of the uppermost surface of enough buildings to notice and visible water tanks on most of them (https://www.google.com/maps/@34.9108686,33.6190677,3a,15y,41...)
Nairobi mixed a British 50s-60s Brutalist core (presumably because of who was in charge in the 50s-early 60s) with main streets that were variously poorly repaired and unpaved, and minor streets that varied from "this could be any middle class residential area in Europe" to "this has been accidentally cobbled by people treading plastic bottles into the soil as they pass"; there is another easily recognisable style here, best shown rather than described, this kind of wall lack-of-surface-finishing: https://www.google.com/maps/@-1.2844081,36.9005201,3a,30y,35...
Singapore does actually look like the renders. By and large.
Most of Singapore looks like the Soviet Union: https://www.google.com/maps/@1.3756813,103.9459007,3a,90y,26...
Sun/Light has a lot to do with it. The place linked looks fine/tolerable but put that in the northern of Europe/America and you'll looking at the edge of depression (at least for myself).
Funnily enough, I live a couple of minutes walk from this spot, I guess you are nearby? HDBs can look a bit samey, but that photo does a bit of a disservice to Singapore. There are also quite lovely HDBs as well:
https://thehoneycombers.com/singapore/unique-hdb-blocks-desi...
And of course the surrounding area there is pretty amazing, loads of green spaces and wildlife on your doorstep. A large part of this video was filmed just around the corner, for instance:
https://vimeo.com/494315018
They are currently building a new HDB estate right on the edge of a coastal park five minutes from that location. Even without the sunlight, it’s a pretty great place to live.
It is a good place to live. I was just comparing how climate can make a place okay/fine versus not okay/depressing. You mentioned greenery: I'm a bit up north (Malaysia) and it's plenty green here too. Though that's more due to the area climate than anything they are doing (i.e., Dubai can't match that no matter how hard they try).
Bearing in mind that is literally a construction site, I think it looks pretty good.
Yes, that's how a lot of Singapore looks like. It's an HDB car park.
But your picture of the Soviet Union is perhaps a bit too rosy.
I'm not sure why you'd be depressed? It's a picture of a construction site in a car park. Sure, I'd love having the car infrastructure being less front and centre, too. But otherwise it's fine.
> I'm not sure why you'd be depressed?
I was saying I'd be depressed or it would be depressing, in Singapore. What I was saying is that if you match that place with a grey sky, in cold climate with slow rain, that will be the definition of depression (at least for me).
I was watching Dark Matter (the Apple series, not the older one; mild spoiler follows), and I laughed when they arrived at the futuristic utopia universe because it just looked like Singapore.
Lots of light always helps.
Especially in autumn and winter.
That’s the Joke!
> someone finally made Poland-filter
The UK is feeling left out and would like a word.
The British invented Brutalism, the eastern block perfected it.
Huh, TIL that the concept of brutalist architecture doesn’t come directly from French béton brut but was associated with it only after the term was coined.
There should be a effect intensity slider. East Germany <-> Poland <-> Russia
Before the dystopian black and gray fad arrived most buildings that went up were sort of OK. And I didn't mind the pastel paint on commie blocks either. But a decade ago someone decided that gray cuboids with asymmetric windows were an improvement...
Even so, I think North American cities are on average uglier than most Polish ones. Overall we're not doing so bad but I want the Slavic city memes to continue lest we get Prague or Amsterdam level tourist invasion.
What would happen if you run it on a spacecraft? Blank image comes back?
There are plenty of grungy spacecraft images out there.
Buran in storage: https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/baikonur-buran-soviet-...
Image link: https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/17103111131...
(See: “Poland cannot into space” meme)
It really nails the Boston / MIT campus in November vibe.
Im a professional cleaner, there is lots of wonderful looking design out there that is impossible to clean. There is also a huge difference in how quick it looks dirty. Some things are easy to clean but if you have to do it 3 times per day in stead of once a week its going to be needlessly expensive and still look dirty half the time.
What are some striking examples from your experience?
BTW this is what I love most about HN - the surprising variety of people you can learn from, from billionaire founders to expat bingo-card geeks to Georgian-onion sellers to Dutch pro cleaners...
On a Light surface tiny stains stick out, on a dark floor tiny flecks of dirt stick out as if under blacklight, a concrete color with some smudge patern may get extremely dirty without anyone noticing it (which might also not be what you want) a dark floor with a pattern of tiny white dots can also look very clean while dirty.
Any porous material is a terrible idea, you get lots of surface area that you cant reach. Carpet, curtains, upholstery.
Gaps between things should be big enough for how deep they are. Tiny legs under sofas or closets are not useful for anything. Adjust the size of the gaps between wall panels to your favorite kind of insect or rodent.
The funniest one i've seen was a city with a lot of mosquitos where someone put giant neon letters outside under a roof. In a few days it was completely covered in highly active spider turf war dens enough to make a grown man scream. Apparently spiders love roofs and they obviously know flies like light.
Top of HN and people are loving it, but there's got to be a better way of getting some $$ rewards for fun viral ideas like this than "Buy me a coffee". I'm betting he's got tens of thousands of sessions currently and nobody is tipping. https://ko-fi.com/magnushambleton
Is there a better way? Asking for myself, also.
This will be an unpopular answer but one way that could have worked is just good ol' advertising, because it directly converts "virality" into income.
Any solution that requires the user to bust out a credit card and put down his billing address has way too much friction for the median user to get through.
I don't know the terms, but there's what looks like a tasteful ad at the bottom.
> Looking for an architect who builds things that still look great even in November rain? Reach out to classical architect Jorian Egge.
I see 16 coffees received. Assuming no private donations for simplicity, that’s $48. As an ads noob, how many sessions would a banner ad need to beat that?
My CPM is not great (not Google) and that's 25-30k impressions
Doesn't an ad require the user to bust out their credit card eventually?
No? Advertising money is paid upfront. X number of impressions. You get paid a cut for hosting the ad. The ad might be a huge failure and lead to zero clickthrough or purchases. But the money has already been paid for the campaign.
Yes, nothing happens until you trade a dollar for something, but it does not have to be this site they spend money at.
Advertising isn't even about getting people to open their wallet, it's more about influencing their decision when they do go to spend money or make a purchase.
Unfortunately true.
Yea, but most advertisers come only after something went viral, not when you are building something and you try to say to potential advertiser: "this will go viral trust me bro". And such small viral things are usually short lived, by the time the advertisers come it will probably starts to die down. But yea, maybe he would have got a little more financial support than donations even if he puts up ads after it went viral.
Another way he could benefit from this is when people want his skills to build them similar things, so it's basically already an advertisement for his skills.
This is such a weird comment. Not all advertisement follows the influencer model. Banner ads have been funding small internet operations since before hacker news existed. Do we really don't have long term memories at all?
I saw it going viral before going to bed last night and spent 15min trying to enable payments but failed so made it block you after 2 gens using cookies and try guilt you into donating instead. Made me $160 in donations compared to the $500 in AI credits burned so not a huge success but at least slightly offset the loss.
If the demand continues after this blip I’ll try add ads or make real payments work.
I feel like you'll probably (mostly) have two types of users:
1. Those who just want to see more examples.
2. Those who actually want to use this as a tool. (Even though it may have started as a bit of a gag.)
By having a gallery you'd save a lot of needless tokens so that you can satisfy user 1.
By having a paid actual SAAS option you can get $$ from user 2.
By showing a few tasteful ads as well as buy me a coffee you can get income from user 1.
There have been alternatives suggested. While better is a subjective term, most alternatives have either not been successful or have not yet meaningfully achieved a level of success to matter.
Flattr took one approach without much success. They represented the problem well though. When someone does something that is of a small but not insignificant benefit for a large number of people, how should they be rewarded? When the reward due, divided by the number of people paying for it, gets low enough it seems to not reach a threshold that it makes sense for any individual to pay.
You could charge a fee above the threshold, and many people do take this path. It is essentially requiring a small number of people to massively overpay to cover those who don't pay at all.
A Universal Income takes the approach that if everyone gets what they need there is no particular requirement to be monetarily rewarded. You essentially have been rewarded for whatever it is you do.
Advertising plays the small threshold thing both ways, They offer you a chance to sell a little corruption below your threshold for thinking it is damaging, and in return they accumulate the corruption and the money and send you the money and deliver the requested corruption to their customers.
Part of the fundamental difficulty is in determining the size of the reward due. How is that determined? There are plenty of people who will offer services to do that if it means they can take a cut. I don't see that path going well unless it is a mechanism governed by strict non-profit rules, and even then I would have doubts.
A purely rule based system would be intrinsically unfair and subject to gaming, but often times this turns out to be the least worst solution. By agreeing to a set of rules people can accept that while flawed, adhering to them by agreement can make a system that cannot be taken over by a malicious individual.
In short, right now, No I don't think there is a better way. There may be people with a financial interest that it remains that way.
> Is there a better way?
Yes, UBI. Then you can create what you want and your livelihood doesn't depend on it going viral.
How do we ensure that we don’t enter the failure mode of “not enough necessities get made”?
Like it seems like people are ideologically for or against UBI, but I’ve never seen anyone discuss how the mechanism would avoid this outcome. Like I’m not saying it’s 100% the outcome that would happen on whatever time frame, just that even e.g. a 10% chance of that happening would make it too risky to attempt at scale. And like I don’t accept “some people just love farming” or “a lot of stuff that isn’t needed gets made now”, I need an actual mechanism description.
> How do we ensure that we don’t enter the failure mode of “not enough necessities get made”?
Pay higher when someone does things. UBI + income. If you want to live better, try doing something that will bring you money, but if you fail, you can still live and try something other next time.
Current model: if you try something and fail, you are homeless and starving.
I could maybe support UBI if you completely shut down Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, school lunches, subsidized housing, and every other assistance program. It must replace all of that to achieve the so-called operational efficiency of just giving people cash. Give them enough to buy those things on the open market, and if they choose to spend it on something else, that's on them.
If you don't trust people enough to do that, then you don't trust them enough to do UBI.
I think most proponents of UBI want this and I think it's a good idea. UBI is meant as social security, just not dependent on what you do and doesn't disappear when you have cash. Just give minimum wage to everyone and remove minimum payment requirement from economy. If you use up your social security/UBI in wrong way, that's on you. But there should be probably some education. And if someone can't effectively use your allowance (mentally ill, non-functioning alcoholic), then maybe we should put such people in proper institutions, but they could be funded by UBI instead of specialised assistance program.
Failing -> homeless and starving is a failure mode at the level of the individual. That’s not good, but failure modes of the entire structure are higher priority and the two don’t really compare apples to apples. Capitalism (absent corruption) is actually sort of cleverly recursive there because financial destitution by definition cannot affect producers of vital goods, because the act of producing vital goods is precisely what is rewarded by the system. So at least what you mentioned cannot result in systemic failure from a mechanistic point of view, only an individual level failure (which isn’t to say that the individual is “to blame”, I am not talking moralistically, just that it affects individuals and not the entire structure).
On first paragraph, okay how does that scale though. Who does the actual work of producing things people need to live, and how do we make sure that enough people keep doing that specifically, even across plausible variable configurations such as “birth rate increases because people have more free time which means now you need more farming” etc.
We need to characterize these dynamics, wouldn’t you say? Have you thought about it, or are you satisfied by hand waving?
"Absent corruption" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your statement. The idea that the system can't fail raises the question what do you consider failure, and what do you consider corruption"
If prices increase and wages don't keep up with them, an increasing number of people become squeezed by their environment. This is a slow event, sure, but enough drops can fill a bucket. The fallout from this pressure on the general populace will be the failure that you're saying can't happen. This seems inevitable without an intervening event to reset things.
With that said, I don't think your concerns are unreasonable, and I'm not sure UBI by itself could solve anything. At a minimum price controls or government administering of food and housing would be necessary to keep prices from rising in response to the influx of cash everyone would receive, but the problem of people not working does seem like a big potential issue.
I believe there have been studies to the contrary, but those studies necessarily miss the universal part of ubi, so they don't have the negative feedback loops that could spring up in a real implementation.
> financial destitution by definition cannot affect producers of vital goods
This is why people who work critical jobs never go hungry.
I don't think the "producers" argument is true, and even so it really does depend on the profession and on current trends.
What was vital yesterday may be obsolete tomorrow (see hospital secretaries vs ambient scribes for instance). I assume when you think of people taking a potentially "destitution-risky" decision, you think "entrepreneur without savings or backup income", not "hospital secretary". Yet here we are.
Also, in many professions, "production" is multi-level. Who is the producer in a hospital, the nurse, or the hospital manager? Yet I can assure you nurses, as vital as they are, get fixed term contracts or get fired all the time. Same with teachers and academics.
So, no, the system rewarding the hospital manager and the university deans for the "vital" work of their nurses and teachers isn't "cleverly recursive"; it's exactly the failure mode both you and OP speak of, except it's somehow both systemic and personal, depending in what angle you're looking at.
> financial destitution by definition cannot affect producers of vital goods,
Say that to farmers struggling to make meets end. We managed to make production of vital goods so efficient, that we don't need as many producers, so they are becoming not-producers-of-vital-goods en masse. So, now that they don't produce vital goods, they can safely go into destitution?
> only an individual level failure (which isn’t to say that the individual is “to blame”, I am not talking moralistically
Individual level failure means individual is to blame. But UBI is meant to give them safety net, so that when they fail, they don't go into destitution.
> So at least what you mentioned cannot result in systemic failure from a mechanistic point of view, only an individual level failure (which isn’t to say that the individual is “to blame”, I am not talking moralistically, just that it affects individuals and not the entire structure
Nice, but when you get rid of 20% of people and move them into "not usable, you won't eat now" category, each single one for personal reasons, then another 20% for other personal reason, you have to train them somehow. You could of course say that they should retrain on their own, but that's currently done typically after several years of giving them too low prices, so they used up their safety reserve.
> On first paragraph, okay how does that scale though. Who does the actual work of producing things people need to live
The people who feel they have the skills for this. Just like right now.
> and how do we make sure that enough people keep doing that specifically,
We have enough people to make food. We have to make artifical limits on how much food they produce or they would flood the market with food. We pay them to keep their fields unused for some time, kept in reserve. UBI would just be a guarantee that they won't go into destitution when they can't sell the food at good price.
> “birth rate increases because people have more free time which means now you need more farming”
I think birth rate might decrease even more. As people become more and more comfortable and stopped having to work as much as previously, they don't need children to secure their future.
> We need to characterize these dynamics, wouldn’t you say? Have you thought about it, or are you satisfied by hand waving?
I agree we should. Who would do it? Who would pay for such characterisation? Maybe you should try to do it? A lot of people think about it already.
How is UBI different from welfare?
On the surface, they sound the same
> Current mode...
Or, ya know, save money or get a job. Failure rarely leads to homeless and starvation. Most people are far more resilient than that, the current US homeless rate is ~1/500
If we need/want UBI to be a thing, educating people on the difference is going to part of the effort and debate
Necessities get made because there's someone to buy them. Only 5% of people are employed in agriculture and 15% in manufacturing. 80% of working people could do nothing and we'd still be fine when it comes to necessities. And we don't even have peak automation.
Could we perhaps include medical care in the necessities don't you think?
Sure thing. Doctors and nurses are maybe about 2% of workers.
And educational workers and cleaners.
Education is mostly for keeping children busy while their parents are at work.
I think people working in agriculture and in the industry includes people who clean there.
UBI discussion invariably is way off the mark. The only thing UBI solves is how to give out the money, which is a massive misdirection, the real problem is how to get the money. Do you gut the state and allow people who don't work to have enough money to barely survive as an underclass, or do you end billionaires and usher in a new renaissance where all needs are met and labour shall just be at our whim. These two vastly different visions are both UBI, but most discussion about UBI completely sidesteps that as it requires touching upon the more difficult issues.
Once you have control of the money to give out, literally every way of redistribution is as good as UBI. If you calculate how much money would be required for a reasonable UBI.. then imagine what could be done if that money was spent on communal, humane, services then it would be able to revolutionise the world every bit as much.
> or do you end billionaires
Everyone will agree with this, but it isn't even close to enough. Or do you mean end all high revenue companies as well?
Yes
Nah, that just turns people into slaves of whoever is signing the checks.
Unlike now?
Yes, it would be even worse with people lacking in productive skills.
Most people want a lot more out of life than basic necessities.
UBI does not mean you don't work, nor you can't earn a lot of money. It just means we don't let you starve if you don't work and we stop making you work out of fear of leaving you starve if you don't.
I'm a psychiatry resident and developper. I have never been paid for my dev work but have produced quite a lot on my free time (site: w.olicorne.org ). I would do psychiatry pretty much no matter how much I'm paid for it.
In my view the most productive people of every field are not incentivized by money and would do it anyway. UBI would free up time and cognitive load of the most productive people I believe. Following a 80/20 kinda rule.
Hence UBI here would mean that the dev would not *have to* monetize.
> In my view the most productive people of every field are not incentivized by money and would do it anyway.
The idea that money is not an effective incentive to drive behavior is wishful thinking. Even just among devs, even just among devs who truly love programming, most would be doing very different work, and working for different organizations (or none at all) if money weren't the driver.
> Hence UBI here would mean that the dev would not have to monetize.
Ok, but the dev might still want to monetize, and we're back to the original question.
> Even just among devs, even just among devs who truly love programming, most would be doing very different work, and working for different organizations (or none at all) if money weren't the driver.
Somehow I can imagine that a world where a the brightest minds of a generation didn't spend their prime optimizing ad clicking wouldn't necessarily be a complete disaster.
Optimizing ad clicking is profitable and the thing that would [partially] pay for UBI. That stops happening and money/value stop being created. The market is not 0 sum.
It's good to talk about UBI, but people taking it seriously have no idea how to fund it.
That's right, much of the market is negative sum.
> Ok, but the dev might still want to monetize, and we're back to the original question.
It's alright. Those who would like to monetize can. There are others who wouldn't and UBI would utilize that surplus talent, which otherwise had to perform tasks they weren't skilled at to earn a living.
> most would be doing very different work, and working for different organizations (or none at all) if money weren't the driver.
With UBI I wouldn't be surprised if those would be even more productive doing something else they want. And others who couldn't do the CS curiculum even though they would have loved to because they had to find a job quickly would plausibly be at their place instead.
I really view UBI as something that puts oil in the society: people have less friction to be at the spot they're better at. People who want to do nothing will not slow us down anymore. And jobs that nobody wants to do would finally be paid by how much they suck instead of how much money your parents had to educate you.
> Ok, but the dev might still want to monetize, and we're back to the original question
I don't really see the issue. We're far from having shortage of ways to make people pay: ads, paywall, soft paywall, begging, rate limits. What's the issue with those? I certainly don't like them as a user and as a member of society but am fine with people doing that.
Especially with UBI in place: if the dev is putting a paywall, they have to compete with people that have plausibly much more freedom of time and mind to allocate to another free foss project. So in the end it becomes less profitable to be adversarial against end users.
> And others who couldn't do the CS curiculum even though they would have loved to because they had to find a job quickly would plausibly be at their place instead.
Unfortunately, also wishful thinking. A particular kind of wishful thinking endemic to naturally highly curious, academic achievers (not a dig, I am one). But -- and if you don't understand this, spending some time teaching at universities makes it abundantly clear -- most of the world is nothing like this. They aren't being held back from their natural passions and curiosities by the demands of living. They would not suddenly flourish under UBI.
> With UBI I wouldn't be surprised if those would be even more productive doing something else they want.
For the people that do naturally love creating and are good at it, they might "even more productive" in one sense -- creating more stuff that they, personally, value. And personally I'd love to do that, but it doesn't maximize value across society. That's one of the main things money is. It's a constraint forcing the production of consensus value. In a world of infinite resources that ceases to matter, but we're still very far from that.
> People who want to do nothing will not slow us down anymore.
Who do you think is supporting them? Until we have robots taking care of everyone for free, support is still a cost levied on other humans.
I am aware that most of the world isn't like this. But I am also aware that there are many people who more than anything want to share things they made, have a positive impact etc. In other words : there are 10x engineers and 10x altruists and some are even both. I am convinced that they collectively could make basically unlimited progress on things we all agree on: less sick people, more happy people, less waste, better environment, etc. I'm sure you've seen some random genius on youtube who built things in their backyards that are normally only buildable by conglomerate with advanced logistics. I just want them to not have to worry about an algorithm and sponsors and accomodate spaced for them to worl together on things.
> it doesn't maximize value across society
Well you'd have to define "value" here. I am sure GDP would plummet because bullshit jobs would plummet. The current society is doing maybe a decent job at producing but a terrible job at making it "across society". We still have millions of people dying every year of very preventable causes just because of the lack lf coordination. I think this would be better if we had less noise in our daily lives caused by the system so inefficient that we have bullshit jobs.
> The idea that money is not an effective incentive to drive behavior is wishful thinking
It is obviously an incentive. But I think it's not an effective one and has many morally bad side effects.
I highly recommend taking a look at the work of Daniel Pink related to money as an incentive. See The Puzzle Of Motivation (~20min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y
> It just means we don't let you starve if you don't work and we stop making you work out of fear of leaving you starve if you don't.
Seems inefficient to pay for everyone to have kitchens in their house and pay them cash to get ingredients to cook. Couldn't we just employ some of these people as cooks and have them make meals in a centralised kitchen in every neighbourhood? A bit like the British Restaurant idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Restaurant
I don't see the connection with what we were talking about but:
- soup kitchen are a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup_kitchen
- community fridges too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_fridge
- and historically in france where I'm from, when we started having freezer technology it first appeared in shared houses for the whole village. People would go there once a day to fetch what they needed and would eat it. Can't find english sources but it seems very efficient. A least much more than every one having a fridge. https://france3-regions.franceinfo.fr/pays-de-la-loire/mayen...
But they want to was the point.
Brother wait til you find out about inflation. Do you make price controls for groceries too?
Don't you think that with UBI some people could flat out refuse to be squeezed by the supermarket owner and decide to make their own grocery association not motivated by greed and so less subject to inflation? I know of several projects like this where people give their own time for free to work in that low price supermarket. It's not even registered as a company but as a public benefit association. With UBI and inflation I have no doubt this kind of thing would pop up and limit inflation.
Indeed. Some of us want basic necessities provided to everyone.
That's why it works, lol. Those already driven by the bet paying off still have their incentives, and those who would love to try something ... can! Because they don't have overdue bills to pay with extra interest.
People already freak out about the sustainability of the welfare state supporting just the elderly with worker-dependent ratios of 3:1 or 2:1. Imagine if also all the working age population got welfare, it'd be completely unworkable.
...and rather depends on the whims of the feeding hand instead.
Like, haven't got your 22nd cocksuckie virus booster? Get lost and die from hunger.
what does UBI have to do with getting paid for making cool shit?
You can make cool shit without having to do the work of productizing and monetizing it
Yes, and a magic fairy creates the economic value that funds the UBI
Every company and their dog is saying that LLMs/"AI" is supposed to be that magic fairy anytime now.
I built a browser extension for a hackathon that enabled crypto payments direct to site owners. "registration" was just sticking a formatted payment address in a DNS TXT record, and if you were at a supported website, the extension would light up, and facilitated payment.
I still think it's a neat idea but I can't be bothered to build a real version
I had a similar idea for a library used to collect how much you owe who:
https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/FUTOmeter
You'd love Brave browser then.
Ideally the model would be run locally in the browser, so the author isn't paying whatever they're paying. But the web standards to do complicated stuff locally aren't there yet and probably will never be.
That's not a practical answer but it's my two cents.
I wish I could give him two cents without having to try. HTTP status 402 with micropayments or something needs to become a thing. The platforms do it... (subs, tips, donations, rewards etc etc.) Why can't the web.
I had an idea for a library used to collect how much you owe who:
https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/FUTOmeter
Yup, the technology exists to do this, but saying such words on HN will lead to critics.
All you need is WASM surely? I expect this model is too big to download & run on local CPUs though.
Maybe, but WASM still has its limitations and pains. If you compile with emscripten you're still using thousands lines of generated javascript to glue the wasm and javaecript together.
Especially in the age of AI tools, I also thought about this a few times. The current idea I have is something like a parking meter. Every expensive transaction (like calling a model) would subtract from the money pool, and every visitor could see how much is still left in the pool. In addition, a list of the top 5 donors with their amounts might improve the group dynamic (like on pay-what-you-want pages like humblebundle.com).
It would be more about covering the cost than about making someone rich, but I think that is what most of the people who build stuff care about. Sadly, I don't know a service yet that offers this model.
This won't work when the meter is at zero due to human psychology. New visitors will say: "no one subsidized my experience (indeed I don't even know what $thing does) but <creator> wants me to subsidize $thing for others".
The whole "subsidize for other visitors" concept is weaker than "pay <creator>".
Wouldn't a floor fix that?
Maybe a bad example, but tipping in a restaurant is an example?
Nobody likes parking meters.
Not everything needs to be a business!
If there’s one thing I learnt from HN it’s how many people can’t comprehend this. Is it a byproduct of growing up in a very transactional or selfish environment?
Yes. First being a YouTube creator became a business, then twitch, tiktok, twitter. GenZ basically grew up with everything being/becoming a business "opportunity". Making money is the goal for "creators", to the point where ads have become normalized and not having a sponsor is leaving money on the table.
I'm almost sure it is. I don't understand it personally, and it feels like grifting to me.
Sometimes it would be nice if you could just break even though. Particularly for these AI projects.
I don't think donation approaches are necessarily bad, but yes it should not be as simple as putting a kofi link at the top of a page.
This person doesn't just do that though. Right after the part where you've uploaded your own examples, there's a reminder: if you had fun buy me a coffee.
Though this is slightly offset by the fact that they state you have 2 free trials and then you pay. It's a complete incentives mismatch if you ask for coffee for something you explicitly presented to them as a marketing offer. Though, I suppose leaving the donation option on doesn't hurt in this case either.
In my experience, donationware works best when the donation request is polite, personal, uncoercive, unintrusive, and comes at a moment of surprise right after you would have seen actual value from a product, and from a product that has not otherwise asked you for any money so far (including showing you ads).
KeepassXC Android is a good example: the guy asks for a beer during octoberfest :)
> Is there a better way?
If one's visitors are gamers, perhaps one might use gaming payment providers to sell an "supporter badge"? But that's perhaps be pushing their envelope.
If one's visitors are from the "rapidly-developing world", with well-adopted candybar-scale micropayment systems - China, India, Indonesia, Brasil, Kenya, SK, Sweden... hmm. Direct access from elsewhere seems still very limited, but perhaps one might use a global payment gateway like Adyen? My impression is transaction cost is more than $0.10 but less than $1.
In the "less-rapidly-developing world", X.com has been working towards a similar superapp with Visa for the US. The Visa/MC duopoly seems to have shifted from its years of preventing US micropayments, to something like "maybe 2030-ish".
My view may be as realistic as these architectural drawings but I've long thought that some sort of micro payment system would address a lot of problems, many more significant than tipping software developers.
Guy who posted this is actually a VC (not sure how big).
Monetization: People can now use ChatGPT for this if they have the idea, so it’s a tight goal. Would people in urban planning pay to see this? If not, then this was just the “15 minutes of fame” experience”, and people who are not career influencers have difficulty monetizing that. Of course, thank you for your concept.
Yeah - fine tune it a bit more (it’s a little too worst-case-scenario-in-the-dead-of-winter) and sell it to architectural firms and developers for a fee. This is simple to monetize and not up to us to figure out how to turn processor cycles into dollar bills.
Youtube has this model with Preimum. If Chrome rolled out Chrome Premium, (and copied the Brave BAT model of paying sites you give attention to), I'd be happy to pay.
Thanks for the highlight. Doesn't seem like there's much activity on his Ko-Fi for being on the front page of HN. I sent him a tip, although privately.
Insert product placement/ads into the generated images.
You could let users import their own Google api key...
I had an idea for a library used to collect how much you owe who:
https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/FUTOmeter
It should be tasteful ads for the AI companies that are making money... Oh wait, I instantly see the problem with that idea.
This should be compulsory for pitching architects and entrepreneurs. Prove that your design can withstand real weather and the washed out decay of time. Classical architecture withstands weathering and littering remarkably better. Architects are even using corrugated steel sheets intended for ugly shacks as the fascade of new buildings intended for people to live in. It couldn't be worse.
Not only architecture. I recently saw a dirty Cybertruck and it looked like a cheap prop from a 1980s sci-fi movie. Made me think about how well the average Toyota is designed that it manages to look good even on a cloudy day while covered in a layer of dirt.
I wouldn't hold up Toyota as anything special. My old Toyota pickup looked like swiss cheese from all the rust. Have never seen a car rust so much as that one.
> I wouldn't hold up Toyota as anything special
I would, actually.
There is a reason why a Toyota Hilux or Land Cruiser is the vehicle of choice for the most demanding use: the "Technical", on and offroad ad-hoc military insurgency, across Africa. (1)
The Hilux has a deserved reputation as "indestructible". (2) Not literally, but the best reliability for the money. Even after the bodywork rusts.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_(vehicle)
https://defaakto.com/2021/06/20/the-technical-how-a-pickup-t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_War
2) https://www.slashgear.com/1247281/toyota-hilux-indestructibl...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterlyon/2018/01/04/robust-mee...
It baffles me that contemporary architects don’t seem to be aware of the existence of rain. Why put white render on the facade of your building if it turns to green within five years? Why the hate for large overhangs that would solve this problem for cheap?
My wife worked at an in house architecture firm for a fancy brand. The amount of times design team wanted to “hide the top part of that wall because it looks too dark” is nauseating. They literally would make impossible buildings happen on design photos and then the higher ups would get mad when the building had walls…
If corrugated metal were not associated with shacks, would it be so concerning? Most materials can look good with the right execution. The difference comes from form and detailing.
"Classical" architecture is (thankfully) dead and will never return. It's too costly and we lack the skilled labour force required. For those that nonetheless demand it, we get cheap imitations of classical details that look worse than a simpler but well-considered alternative.
There have been some promising advances in automated machine carving of stone, but it's still expensive. It has a bright future as part of a hybrid aesthetic enabled by contemporary technology. We need to look forward and not back.
As someone living in Central-Eastern Europe, I approve. Finally, stripping away that Disney saccharine and making things real and familiar.
In Polish, we actually have a new word for this: marcopad. It’s a portmanteau of March (marzec) and November (listopad). It describes this cold, rainy weather perfectly: no leaves, no snow, just dirt. It's generally depressing and really makes you think about global warming from December to February.
POST https://fjtwtlaryvoqohkwnbwd.supabase.co/functions/v1/transf... 402 (Payment Required)
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:(
This is ingenious and actually useful. I'm looking for a new apartment and I always wanted to know how do these places look in a bad weather, because that's when I need beautiful surroundings the most.
Unfortunately, it doesn't actually tell you that information: it just turns a dial. What you want is to know how much that dial would be turned by bad weather.
As long as it's not changing the form of the buildings, it seems valid. Although, the first two examples both add random telecom cabinets in places that don't make much sense.
Its not valid because it adds things like cracks, dead plants, patchwork repairs, rust, random utility boxes, loose cables, etc. Its won't tell whether a place will be maintained well. It gives you more of a worst case.
I figure that’s an architectural in-joke. The engineers will add ugly stuff because you didn’t consider stuff like HVAC or electricity.
Depends where you live I guess. For me that looks exactly like November here
It's infinitely better than nothing.
Fortunately, you have one of the world's most powerful supercomputers sitting between your ears, so we don't need to compare this to nothing.
It's like a dream come true!
I've been thinking of something like this for decades, as I mentally compared the utopian displays at construction sites to the existing buildings next to them. Like "wow your fancy new building is going to be so perfectly white and clean, but what will it really look like after 10 years exposed to the elements and no cleaning, like the one next door?"
New construction is sold on a literal blue-sky promise. How does it really look like a decade down the road? All construction has a decades- if not centuries-long lifespan. It's worth thinking about them long-term.
I absolutely love the streak of rust coming off the saddle of arches on the bridge example. That's exactly what I'm talking about.
This filter seems to also change some architectural details and features, as well as degrade the quality of some materials in an unrealistic way.
That's the 'built by the lowest bidder' feature. Probably pretty realistic in a lot of places.
Huh, I wonder if they trained it by feeding it architectural renders and "what actually got built" photos...
It's probably just prompt based. Actual fine-tuning for these kind of use cases is getting less common than it used to be.
Likely. You can go into Nano Banana or ChatGPT right now, upload a pretty architectural rendering, and tell it to make it look old, weathered, winter, etc and it will come out looking very similar. Give it an example to really dial it in.
It's GenAI. It does something that's kind of like what you asked it to do, but it will skip some details or add other ones or whatever.
Dreary architectural pictures will be more likely to have electrical boxes, poor materials, etc, so when it moves the buildings from the latent space for cheery bright architectural renderings to dreary wet November architectural renderings, it will be more likely to add some of those details, because that's what's in its latent space.
Don't expect GenAI to be magic.
Yeah - same things I noticed with people enthusiastically using genAI for old photo coloring. Initially it looks awesome, until you realize it can even alter the human face in such a way, that it no longer looks like that person.
My father was really happy with some old photos colored, until I pointed out he does not look like him. Strangely enough he wasnt bothered...
I have a suspicion that the author of this might have asked the model for those utility boxes.
It's not a filter, it's an image editing model
This drink is not a smoothie, it is a blend of fruits and berries.
In my mind "filter" is some specific algorithm that does a single expected transformation
"Filter" is a Tik-tok / snapchat / instagram parlance for any kind of overlay / transformation. It's grown larger than just sepia filters and similar. All the ones that do facial tracking and overlay a mustache or w/e is funny in the moment are also referred to as filters.
See https://www.snapchat.com/lens
Fair enough. But is there a need to propagate this abuse of the term?
Might as well call advertising “fun programming breaks” while we are at it.
There's a pretty clear expected transformation here though? It takes an image and then reduces the "shiny-ness" of it by giving it the same transformation: change the sky to overcast, add material degradation like rust, reduce the landscaping by adding weeds/puddles, and remove the happy looking people.
Also adding random electrical infrastructure and random signs, also removing a statue in the distance in one of the images
Sure, that stuff too. The point still being that it's a pretty predictable set of changes being made to whatever photo you give it.
I'm pretty sure it's either gpt-image-1.5 or Nano Banana Pro in the background, with a prompt like "make it look worn down and slightly decaying".
Right, filtering is the reduction of information while diffusion/generation is creation.
It doesn't have to be a reduction. Swapping the colour channels would be a filter, but it's perfectly reversible.
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How is it not just a midjourney prompt? The liberties it takes seem to be better described by 'upload a picture, and AI will be told to make it dingier'. Can't people already do that ad nauseam?
I put in an image and it generated piles of shipping pallets along a walkway.
It also added drainage that would actually improve the building.
Au contraire, in a rather realistic way
It's AI, it makes things up.
Used it on some Fortnite screenshots, I'd play that depressing version!
https://files.catbox.moe/i8tfkl.jpg
https://files.catbox.moe/mw8vbc.jpg
Then I thought what would it make from an already dark and grim scene, like HL2 Ravenholm
https://files.catbox.moe/d7z77h.jpg
but nothing really? Just made the whole thing a different color scheme + changed some architecture
Halfway to The Last of Us conversion for Fortnite
It's interesting that the video game style of the images is still preserved. I actually expected the outputs to look like real photographs for some reason.
Nice, it made it back into PUBG :)
Sandy Strip is a low rent strip club right? Based on the name and logo it can't be anything else... Anyhow, that looks like GTA to me.
They stole the ravenholm sign
It really tied the place together.
Top one having some Fallout vibes.
That first scene especially looks like straight out of Fallout 4 but with a better lighting engine.
That looks like a specific level in Left for Dead 2
Top: Sandy Strip
Bottom: Shady Sands
Fallout!
I mean now they just look like early Fortnite!
What is it with people?
Is there some weird force dropping electrical enclosures on bridges (the cables on top even?) and random places in the street.
Those random protruding manholes next to two other drainage gates nowhere near a slope?
Why are these even the examples.
This is just like turning the HDR tone mapping up to 200%
It's not that bad actually. Over the years stuff like electrical installations, cables and random manholes often get retrofitted in an ugly way to existing architecture.
I was actually going to comment on the main post, how well tuned the AI seems with it's placement of random electrical wires and junction boxes that seem to match my impression of renderings-vs-reality.
These necessary things are usually missing from the original plans as people who do these have no idea how actually cities function, so oftentimes they are an afterthought and actually look like that. It's like when you look at pictures of electric appliances and they almost always hide the cords.
This is not about accuracy or logic, but for showing a potential feeling and atmosphere of the places.
And that potential feel is as fake or even less realistic than the renderings it is supposed to criticize, just in the other direction.
My city is car dependent and often no effort goes into making it more walkable.
Would love a version that renders a mix of cars and trucks onto any roads, to show up how crap the experience would actually be out front of road facing building.
That's funny, the second example is the Peace Bridge in Calgary.
On a nice day the render actually looks close to the real thing!
Maybe a real picture of the actual bridge was in the training set? Similar to how prompting for a story about a boy wizard can result in verbatim Harry Potter passages.
I think they use their eyes to see the Peace Bridge and were saying it's fairly close to their experience. :D
That's literally thw worst pic I can find of that bridge and it's still looks good even with the temporary fences: https://www.flickr.com/photos/zawaski/52752097083/
The bridge looks much better than the anti-shine version in person (no boxes!), though they replaced the glass due to vandalism.
Yeah that's what I mean, I love crossing the Peace Bridge
I think the third is plaza de España in Madrid, Spain. I was actually wondering why it looked familiar.
Third one is definitely Madrid, I live there. I can say that the real life looks much better than the Antirender image.
> From the site: Get back what it'll actually look like on a random Tuesday in November
It's Calgary. The landscape will be a lot snowier anytime in November.
Ya it actually looks quite good
And the real killer app of contact lens AR will be ... this in reverse.
It feels Snapchat already has beauty filters as standard. Or you can also spot the beauty filters glitching out all the girls dancing on Tiktok/IG, e.g. their eyelashes would be somewhere else for a split second...
Hah, like connected cars talking to each other, the AR goggles/lenses will talk to each other so each person can broadcast a unified beautifed version of their face to others.
Maybe the Grok AR goggles will have Grok features...
Can we re-engineer LSD so the only effect we can get is how colors look 12 hours afterwards?
That's black mirror level content.
"MORE" by Mark Osborne (1999) did it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCeeTfsm8bk
One of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth books features this as a whole chapter, the first of the Cugel books I believe. I don’t know of an earlier appearance of the concept.
Very “futurological congress” thought
I wonder if there's a way to design the materials of the buildings to defend against the depressing November lighting. With this reflective material however, summers would be unbearably bright. To solve that perhaps there's a way to make the absorption increase with temperature. Darker, less reflective color in summer, and bright reflective color in winter.
Getting a 402 error payment required when I try to run this, I'm guessing all of the credits for the API account have been used up. Great idea though!
It's some Loveable app thing. Fun idea though
I imagine, it could actually be useful for architects, to see how other people and environment will butcher their creation, so they could learn how to make it better with that in mind.
Edit: oh, it's right there at the bottom of the page!
Seems fairly simple to me: stop with the naked concrete and brutalist architecture. Old houses before that trend tend to look way nicer regardless of weather. (I'm not an expert on exact architectural style names, so I can't be more exact that that.)
Architects aren't generally brutalists themselves, but rather, brutalist architecture proposals win contracts because their TCO is lower. Facades have maintenance costs; bare concrete just requires power-washing now and then.
Well, it's even cheaper if you skip the wash and let it become completely drab and awful.
Would love to see the original prompt for Nano Banana from OP somewhere. One that yields decent results, for me, is:
{ "image_generation_prompt": { "subject_focus": { "primary": "Architectural exterior scene", "constraint": "Strictly preserve original building geometry, facade details, and structural layout", "reference_adherence": "High structural fidelity to input image" }, "environment_and_season": { "season": "Late November, very late autumn", "weather": "Post-rain, overcast, gloomy, high humidity", "sky": "Heavy grey cloud cover, diffuse white/grey light, no direct sunlight", "ground_texture": "Wet asphalt/pavement, highly reflective puddles, wet concrete, scattering of wet brown decaying leaves" }, "vegetation_details": { "trees": "Leafless branches, dormant skeletal trees, sparse lingering brown foliage", "color_palette": "Desaturated greens, browns, greys, russet, damp earth tones", "state": "Winter-ready, wet bark, dormant landscaping" }, "human_element": { "density": "Sparse, minimal crowd", "clothing": "Heavy winter coats, scarves, boots, muted colors", "activity": "Walking briskly to avoid cold, holding closed wet umbrellas, hurrying, heads down against the wind", "mood": "Solitary, cold, urban transit" }, "photographic_style": { "medium": "Realistic architectural photography", "camera": "35mm lens, sharp focus on architecture", "tone": "Cinematic, moody, desaturated, cool color temperature, blue-grey tint", "quality": "8k resolution, high dynamic range, hyper-realistic textures" } } }
It's on Lovable so you can just fork it and take a look (the prompt is in supabase/functions/transform-render/index.ts):
Transform this idealized architectural rendering into the most brutally realistic, depressing photograph possible. This is the WORST CASE scenario - what the building will actually look like in reality:
- Set on a dreary, grey, overcast late November day with flat, lifeless lighting - The sky is a uniform dirty grey, threatening rain - All trees are completely bare - just skeletal branches against the grey sky - The landscaping is dead, muddy, or non-existent. No lush gardens, just patchy brown grass and bare dirt - Remove ALL people, the scene should feel empty and abandoned - Any water features should look stagnant and grey - Add realistic weathering, dirt streaks, and construction residue on the building - The building materials should look how they actually appear, not the idealized clean version - Include visible utility boxes, drainage grates, and other mundane infrastructure usually hidden in renders - The overall mood should be bleak but realistic - this is what buyers will actually see on a random Tuesday in late autumn - Maintain the exact building, angle, and composition, just strip away all the marketing polish
The goal is honest truth, not beauty. Show what the architect's client will actually see when they visit the site.
>> Remove ALL people, the scene should feel empty and abandoned
That really captures the vibe in Kendall square on the weekend, but for maximum "honest truth" there should be double-parking, delivery trucks and ubers stuck in traffic waiting on a thousand people to scurry across the street from the subway entrance, huddling against the cold. Some dirty snowbanks and grey slush puddles in the crosswalks would really nail it.
Thank you! Learned something new today. Will try to look out for this trick on other Lovable sites I will stumble upon.
I keep getting "Edge Function returned a non-2xx status code." Run out of tokens?
Same here. Disappointing. I wanted to run it on that picture of a church that looks like a chicken.
I wanted to run it on renders from the owner's website
It would be great if I can run this as a browser extension that works on Zillow and Redfin.
It's just missing the inevitable 'desire paths' that are the routes that people really want to walk, not some wibbly wobbly path that a junior planner drew.
You're supposed to look at an architectural render and recognize it as such. Much like a fashion sketch, the goal is to show the designer's intent rather than a real-world application. If I were a client and an architect handed me these literal Cyberpunk 2077 screenshots, I'd be confused about what exactly he actually designed.
One takeaway for me is how important landscaping is to making a space beautiful.
Please rename to "Poland-render". This is how the architecture looks like in my country
I currently have a landscape designer planning our yard landscaping. When I see the impressive renderings they produced I immediately thought that it’s some idealized version of how it will look on a sunny day after 10 years of bedding in. I asked them to also produce renders of how it’ll look on a gloomy winter day 6 months after planting everything. Seems they don’t have the tools to produce those images really though
That actually makes it much more useful as a render, it feels like a real building.
It would probably sell better, because you’re just showing them how their building will look, instead of how it might look.
To some extent they probably want to express that this is a render, rather than tricking people in to thinking it’s a real photo.
This would be useful if it actually did some reasoning about the effects of aging on different materials, consequences of certain design decisions, etc. It's not doing that at all, and so it's just misleading instead. If you actually built these things and took pictures years later it wouldn't look like this. Some things would look better and some would look worse. So you can't use this to make decisions about what to build.
This was exhausting to read. Don’t you ever have fun?
Let's go to reddit!
No, it would look like this, just not exactly like this. Say, the fancy bridge example has some rust runoff but no obvious metal for it to come from. Other than that, the guess is quite believable, and certainly much more so than the render.
You do to fun what this website does to pictures.
you are right but this would take actual science and desire to make good things.
This is based on Nano Banana API. I wonder how much it costed the author as it reached HN frontpage. At least it seems like they set a quota though.
This is one of the few instances of generative AI for images that I actually like.
For the bridge, I love how it added a bunch of electrical wires along the top. Imo that’s not very realistic, given there are tons of better places to run wires on a bridge, but somehow it does look substantially more realistic. Even though it seems to be trying to make everything look sad I honestly find the results more inviting because they look lived in.
I hope this helps to return some sense into the architectural bureaus that live in their ivory towers of "trendy" architectural styles of modernism or brutalism. Too smug to ask what people actually prefer, too detached from reality to realize how their sterile monstrosities would look in real life.
I did a similar thing for anti image censorship, back in 2022-2023 with ML, basically all available APIs were returning image classifications that would tell you if something was adult, used in order to not display the image
I wanted something to tell me what was adult about the image, by feature set, in order to display just those images
Worked pretty well, never released/launched it - just needed more capital for the marketing. But then that market cratered - were were going to use the classification attributes on NFTs, since the marketplaces let collectors sort by attributes, so it would have been easy to "find out the market value of particular physical features", and we could have empirical data on what physical attributes people value, instead of just anecdotes
kind of good that we didn't deal with the NFT market in general, project would still work though, just less revenue from sales possible
As someone who has done architectural renderings for fun and profit, I highly approve of this. The greatest downfall of our contemporary "built environment," as folks call it, is how poorly modern materials age and weather.
Excellent idea. So many modern buildings age so poorly. Maybe this will give some starchitecs a bit of a pause...
Doubt it. Demoralization is what they're after.
I do something similar with my Curation Engine outputs. Interesting to get photorealistic outputs on a GPU via language pathing instead of photons.
https://dev.zice.app/frame_syntheses
I like how it adds random electrical boxes everywhere.
And water meters too. And the rust on all the welds is chefs kiss.
And the trash cans
That's not wrong - the apartment I'm in currently has trash containers near the entrance that of course weren't present in the promotional material.
I am very curious if this app is making money or are users just using the two generators and then leaving? If so I am very impressed with your wrapper around the image gen models.
I can imagine the reverse model could be very profitable with every real estate agent using it to make dreary photos look great.
Reverse model aimed at estate agents already posted in this thread by someone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46829566
this landing page is a lead gen tool for the architect at the bottom
Ahh, I see that. Thanks
Apparently Brussels is depressing enough in winter for the AI to only remove pedestrians, everything else is the same.
Need this in AR to un-Dubai everything.
20 years ago buildings never turned out like their renderings promised but now they do.
I hope someday soon computers will be fast enough to have such filter running as a Fallout New Vegas mod and it will finally look like it should :) https://imgur.com/a/XBVnKZa
This would be great for real estate ads. Make the rooms look their actual size and dark and dirty. Lived-in, if you will.
A new CA law is addressing this somewhat:
> Under Assembly Bill 723, real estate agents and brokers who display photos of a home that have been digitally altered with editing software or artificial intelligence must include a “reasonably conspicuous” statement “disclosing that the image has been altered.”
https://www.sfchronicle.com/realestate/article/california-la...
Why is it addressing it? It'll just lead to every single ad having this statement.
To address it you actually need to force them to provide the originals alongside the edited pictures.
Apply it to every scene in a random Wes Anderson movie and call it "Depression"
Isn't that the plot for Grand Budapest Hotel?
This does more than remove shine. It makes every building look like it's in the UK!
I know several AAA game devs that would like this feature in their games. They're frustrated that their artists always want the screen to "POP!" and keep ratcheting up the contrast and saturation.
I spent years doing that post processing on Photoshop, trying to increase realism on my archviz scenes, clients never went for it. They use to prefer the fake, perfect 3D look. Nice project, well done.
The rust stains in realistic locations on the bridge is very well done.
Recovering architect here. This made my night. Bravo, no notes!
(Currently getting an error when I try it)
One think I wish is if I could get it halfway. I don't need it to look dreary, I just want it to look real instead of overly optimistic.
Edge Function returned a non-2xx status code
As an architecture graduate who never worked in the field, I'm glad this allows to debunk the all bullshits of fame-driven architects.
This is what my brain does automatically when I see advertisements.
Anyway, if we used this anti-filter on social media then perhaps teens would not be so depressed.
Meanwhile, in Russia...
https://imgur.com/a/JdMDQPB
Now if you can do the same for photos of women from dating profiles, you have a million dollar idea.
This would be really useful if it came in a real estate photo version. Turn the photos that agents post back into the photos they took.
Show me reality: vibe coded AI blows up on HN and says "429" (probably... it said non 200 status code, and no F12 to check)
Rename it to "Make it Soviet".
This is lovely. Having architects in my extended family I'm going to have a field day with it :)
Did someone try to connect output to the input for several iterations, to make it progressively more Poland?
Nano Banana is indeed a powerful model :)
This reminds me of “emo” music. All the emotions except happiness. These renders are depressing.
Huh. I kinda like 'em. I've spent a good deal of time loitering in areas like this, of my own volition. Unsurprisingly, I tend to like emo music too. Maybe I'm a salmon, happiest fighting against the current.
Would love to know with insane service this uses in the background. Anyone know?
* what image gen
Doesn't seem to work on my machine. Getting 402s on free renders.
I am patiently waiting for LARP AR glasses that have all kinds of these filters.
Ha this is great - I always thought this would be a brilliant application for AI.
Aha, make it drab, soviet, and raining filter. Peak hipster, I love it.
They still look great on a rainy November day. A nice cozy, quiet vibe.
Seems like their api is broken. Probably overloaded
Just insert random transformer boxes and manhole covers.
A filter for how it looks in 3+ years too would be nice.
Could use this on all real estate and apartment listings
Architecture contests should be done with these
I would love to see a gallery on this site too.
Alternative branding idea: eastern-europify.ai
please take this down before architects find this forum
Oops, looks like we hugged it to death.
Deserves an award.
This is just a Nano Banana wrapper I imagine.
oh wow, the results are very Ukrainian... at least while we don't talk about places where Russia struck
Wow. Umm, the "free generations" limit is running on a client-based honour system...
Looks beautiful tbh. I prefer the greyness
Used it on the line. That got dark fast..
British filter.
My first reaction was that it's really great, but almost immediately I got a hold on myself: look, maybe you can argue for the cracks on the road under certain conditions, but surely it didn't have to put transformer booths and collectors where weren't drawn. It doesn't "make the render reality", it's just another "AI"-slop machine, producing the same slop as the "originals" usually are, just with the instruction to make it look sad, instead of making it look happy. Two lies don't make one truth.
It's because of Autodesk BIM no?
Render has 2 meanings here. Clever.
i'd love to watch its rendering of any of the recent big budget sci-fi productions
Holy shit, always been my dream to hit #1 on HN and now it was with something that took me 10min to build in Lovable. Wild!
And it's broken
AI slop. The more you look at an image the more bizarre stuff you see. Eg. It seems obsessed with various types of electrical substation and junction boxes.
Those things dont just grow like lichen or something, they are planned. It put a bunch of them on the pedestrian bridge as well and a lot of fat cables like from Akira or something.
It’s funny but it’s still AI slop. It also loves to add electrical boxes everywhere
Thats what happens where I live when each random fibre network wants to add boxes.
Honestly this looks nicer than the previous image, it feels more real
does this work on people
Just wait till Meta comes out with AR glasses that do!
Okay now do it on character models so that they don't look like plastic dolls.
I did exactly the opposite with https://prontopic.com
thanks for helping people to lie
Geez, I'm reminded of a business student's idea of "Uber for photoshoppers" (this is ~20 years ago): you upload your picture, you say what you want changed, and I guess you pick which photoshopper's work looks convincing from a marketplace of them...
He had a website, and the sample pic is a girl lying on her back, and in the "after" picture she's wearing a bigger cup-size..
This is intentionally much narrower: no custom requests, no creative edits. It only does technical corrections that photographers already apply (lighting, white balance, perspective, sharpness).
Think more automated Lightroom than crowdsourced Photoshop.
I don’t see it as lying any more than adjusting exposure or white balance on a camera does.
It doesn’t add or remove anything from the scene, it just fixes bad lighting, color cast, perspective, and sharpness, basically what any decent photographer already does in post.
If anything, it helps photos reflect how the place actually looks in real life instead of dark, crooked, yellowish snapshots.
Works great. I hate it.
Just kidding. I bet you will do very well marketing it to estate agents and AirBnb renters. It's just the "prettification" of the world which gets to me. I hate Instagram for the same reason. Just grumpy me.
Totally get the concern, and I actually agree on the “Instagram-ification” problem.
What ProntoPic does is basically what a professional real estate photographer already does in Lightroom: fix lighting, white balance, perspective, and sharpness. No adding pools, no changing furniture, no fake sunsets, no staging things that aren’t there. My girlfriend is an interior designer, so I see firsthand how much effort goes into making spaces look 100% accurate but well presented.
The goal isn’t to misrepresent reality, just to make photos look like they were taken properly.
In practice this mostly helps small hosts and agents who don’t have the budget or time for professional shoots. Right now they’re uploading dark, crooked, yellowish photos that actively hurt bookings (like the ones in the hp, real examples).
I guess I need to make it clearer in the site. Thank you for the feedback!
Yeah that's fair enough. I've rented out my apartment on Airbnb and good photos are the key. I paid a real life photographer back in the day. As long as it doesn't change, clean or improve what's actually there in the apartment, and just makes you a better photographer I think that's fine. Good luck with it.
I actually just recommended your app to my friend. Lol.
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The absolutely 100% leafless trees stretched my suspension of disbelief a bit. They look less like "end of fall/beginning of winter" and more like "dead".
Also, the model goes a bit overboard with the electrical appliances. I had to laugh at the bridge one.
Apart from that, it's a great idea!
That's like every new building I've seen around here. Developers plant trees directly into compacted soil and then they grow half a foot within 10 years and then die in a hot summer. The building owner then just leaves them in because it's easier than taking them out.
I have to say both the leafless trees and electrical box spawning is very on point for what you would find in eg Belgium. Check this full blown ugly building/container that spawned in the beautiful Liege Guillemins station https://maps.app.goo.gl/T1J7WwCCYDvBgJEc7
If they are young trees along the side of the road, generally they are broken off at the stump by a car before they can grow, and then you're left with an empty tree well.
Yeah, both are good additions - in moderation. I think the model just went into extremes with them.
Maybe.. or maybe you underestimate the insanities you can find in real life too (the model isnt that creative unfortunately). See here, 5 different no-parking signs for the same 2 spots: https://maps.app.goo.gl/S74r7eawH2vL24CX7
Good point...