Mod Parent Up.

Those of us who loved Affinity were devastated that Serif had sold out to Canva. The subscription-based Canva and Adobe models were exactly why we'd come to purchase perpetual licenses for Affinity.

Yes, Affinity 3 is being offered for "free", but how can one know how much "free" costs. Maybe your privacy? Maybe your designs? Maybe your beloved software provider? Maybe somebody else's job? Affinity 3 is positioned as a loss-leader. I doubt it can survive for long when the parent company is shedding so many jobs.

An open-source response seems the only way the world will get something decent, reliable, that won't be hollowed out by BigCorps trying to take every cent. With AI coding assistance, that might now be foreseeable (it certainly ain't GIMP et al). But the UI polish many vibe-coded apps show off hints at a competence or quality that most of those apps don't provide.

...is the new "you can use a home computer to balance your checkbook, and your wife can keep recipes on it!"

Ok, laundry is Sisyphean, but is folding your clothes so bad you'll pay Apple prices for a machine that handles some special case of the folding?

A dry cleaner that folds a few hundred just-shirts, yeah, i can clearly see that use case. But at my house? NFW.

Between my Macs and IoT/Arduino playthings, most of the wifi stuff I've seen that's bigger them a phone has an antenna connector and tiny coax. You can usually pop it off with a spudger.

That's how much power they're gathering, presumably dissipating and radiating as heat.

Hey, I'll start a fire department of my own if my house every catches fire!

So...

aren't adequate?

Interestingly (to me, anyway), Gen Z seem to have a really good AI detector that doesn't rely on things like 6-fingered hands.

My kid looked at a B&W birthday invitation template that looked to me like it could've come from any number of human-generated clip-art sites and said "That's AI. I hate it". When I pressed her for some evidence it was AI created, she could offer none.

I couldn't dismiss out of hand the possibility, even the likelihood it was an AI creation, but I spent about 15 minutes staring at the thing looking for a tell. I finally found one - a very subtle detail that was meant to be on a flag, but was outside of the flag. Then I found another "maybe" tell.

I don't think she found either of them, but instead had some recognition of the style or mix of styles used. But she got it instantly.

How did I smell my adopted home state before I read it?

Full of deer now that they've hacked down the biggest nearby stand of trees for a "town center". Gee, thanks, town.

Wonder if we could exchange some deer for some wolves with the Finns?

Drupal and others, reaching for feature parity.

"A remote root shell with a cool blogging feature!" ...recalls this WordPress user.

Meet at the ice-9 kiosk.

Old movie from the â60s.

Bland compared to 'leet haxor looks at Python code on a green-screen and breaks into the Pentagon while the timer on the bomb ticks down to 1'.

But required viewing, due to its prescience, and current applicability.

Ha!

BOOM!

"Molluscum Contagiosum!"