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:marseycoin: Photopea: The Free Photoshop Alternative Making Millions :marseydrawing1:

Photopea has been a godsend for me personally since I use a Chromebook (:marseylaughpoundfist:) which means that I don't have to RDP into one of my machines running Windows to use Photoshop 99% of the time :!marseycodecellove:

Dude's very talented IMO, I use his UPNG encoder to compress my png files too. Faster load speeds = More $$ :marseyjewoftheorient: RIOT's probably better by a little bit but it requires Windows :marseyantiwork2:

Orange Site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33334521

Adobe Photoshop is the most popular image editing tool in the world. It's used by over 29 million people and has become a household name.

But it has a few problems. It takes up a ton of computing power and battery, which makes it difficult to use on old/slow computers. And the biggest thing, cost.

You can't just buy Photoshop with a one-time fee, instead, users spend $20/mo for a subscription to use the product.

Ivan Kutskir saw these shortcomings as an opportunity and created Photopea a free, web-based image-editing tool. And its doing crazy well. Here are some numbers:

  • 10 million MAU and $2 million ARR

  • Completely owned by Ivan

  • $60/mo business expense with zero paid marketing

How it all started

You might be thinking, "how did one person build this?". Well, Ivan had a lot of time.

When Photopea started in 2012, Ivan was a full-time student. Photopea's initial version was a simple PDS viewer, and Ivan treated this as a hobby.

If there was a video game that was more fun, he would play that instead of working on Photopea. But Ivan would incrementally build out advanced features while studying. Including his own PDF parser, content-aware fill feature, and even supporting GIFs.

After completing his master's degree in 2017, Ivan solved 400 bugs/feature requests from users, produced several open-source libraries, and turned Photopea from a hobby into a powerful image editor and his full-time job.

But monetizing and growing Photopea wasn't easy!

https://i.rdrama.net/images/1684135119753061.webp

From 2012 - 2016, Photopea had no monetization plans built in. And after graduation, Ivan only produced $29k in the first year and a half of monetizing.

Despite this, Photopea had positive user responses and the user base was growing quickly (~300%) through organic means.

Then, it all clicked.

YouTubers began sharing video tutorials on how to use Photopea, and many of these got hundreds of thousands of views!

And in October 2018, Photopea hit an all-time high of 1.5 million visits, setting it up for one of its biggest marketing campaigns: AMAs

In Nov 2018, Ivan hosted his first Reddit AMA. It went viral. 50k upvotes, 2.2k comments.

9 months later, his traffic doubled to 3 million visits, and he did another one.

Viral again, and he kept repeating. In 2021, he decided to host one on Hacker News. And just like Reddit, it made the front page and went viral again!

As it turns out, this was the ultimate marketing campaign. Creating a free version of a complex product like Photoshop attracts people because it saves them money (hundreds a year).

But sharing how you built this and garnered millions of users and revenue makes ultra-viral content. And Ivan utilized this to the fullest.

It's the exact type of thing that makes people want to share with people like Pieter Levels tweeting about it, random people hunting it on Product Hunt, etc.

Heck, even I'm writing about it!

Photopea only costs $60/mo to maintain

You probably don't believe it only costs $500 a year for a business that makes millions.

But it's true. Photopea is web-based, but it also is completely built using Javascript with no backend. This means it works offline with no internet connection and doesn't require huge computing power.

Instead, Ivan's main costs are just hosting a simple webpage, which makes this super easy to maintain (no server work) and incredibly cheap to support.

Additionally, Photopea has been primarily worked on and maintained by Ivan. He grew his team by adding two of his previous college mates in the last few months. But Ivan still says he does about 80% of the work.

Conclusion

Photopea is an advanced image editing tool that rivals Adobe Photoshop and is built by one person, Ivan Kutskir. But these features weren't built in a day, Ivan spent the better part of 10 years slowly building out Photopea! He's solved over 4,000 feature requests and issues on GitHub alone!

With no paid marketing, Photopea found success through AMAs and old-fashioned, word-of-mouth sharing.

As Ivan says, "if you make a free analogy to an expensive product, users will (eventually) use your product. There is simply no other way."

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Good riddance to the Lightning cable

:marseysnoo:

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ydovb9/apple_confirms_the_iphone_is_getting_usbc_but/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/technews/comments/ydq7x0/apple_confirms_the_iphone_is_getting_usbc_but/?sort=controversial

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Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33330410

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If it's not reddit where else could it be? Not many companies IPO'ing in this economy, especially in silicon valley.

EDIT: Could be Groomercord!!

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Someone answer this chud why

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Imagine if it doesn't detect your peepee pic :marseydicklet:

Orange site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33324651

At Bumble, safety has always been at the heart of our mission. Since 2018, we've worked to help pass legislation in both the U.S. and U.K. to combat the sending of unsolicited nudes online, known as cyberflashing. In 2019, we harnessed technology to better shield our community from unwanted lewd images, launching our Private Detector™ A.I. feature in the Bumble app.

Private Detector™ works by automatically blurring a potential nude image shared within a chat on Bumble. You'll be notified, and it's up to you to decide whether to view or block the image. (You can also easily report it to Bumble. We don't tolerate any bad behavior at all on our app.)

Now, Bumble's Data Science team has written a white paper explaining the technology of Private Detector™ and has made an open-source version of it available on GitHub. It's our hope that the feature will be adopted by the wider tech community as we work in tandem to make the internet a safer place.

*For more on Bumble's legislative work, see *here.


At Bumble Inc., the parent company of Bumble, Badoo, and Fruitz, safety has been a central part of our mission and a core value that informs the company's product innovations and roadmap. We've leveraged the latest advancement in technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help provide our community of users with the tools and resources they need to have a safe experience on our platforms. In 2019 we launched Private Detector™ across Bumble and Badoo app, an AI-powered feature that detects and blurs lewd images and a warning is sent to users about the photo before they open it.

As just one of many players in the world of dating apps and social media at large, we also recognize that there's a need to address this issue beyond Bumble's product ecosystem and engage in a larger conversation about how to address the issue of unsolicited lewd photos -- also known as cyberflashing -- to make the internet a safer and kinder place for everyone.

In an effort to help address this larger issue of cyberflashing, Bumble teamed up with legislators from across the aisle in 2019 in Texas to pass a bill that effectively made sending unsolicited lewd photos a punishable offense. Since the passing of HB 2789 in Texas in 2019, Bumble has continued to successfully advocate for similar laws across the United States and globally.

In 2022, Bumble reached another milestone in public policy by helping to pass SB 493 in Virginia and most recently SB 53 in California, adding another layer of online safety in one of the most populous states in the United States.

These new laws are the first step to creating accountability and consequences for this everyday form of harassment that causes victims---predominantly women---to feel distressed, violated, and vulnerable online.

As Bumble continues to help curb cyberflashing through legislative efforts and provide safety tools such as Private Detector™ to help keep our community safe from unsolicited nudes within our apps, we hope to make a ripple effect of change across the internet and social media at large. This is why today we are extremely proud to release a version of the Private Detector™ to the wider tech community with the hope of democratizing access to our technology and to help scientists and engineers experiencing the same challenges around the world to improve their approach to online safety.

How does it work?

Since the early days of Badoo, we have always been pioneers in leveraging technology and advanced procedures to improve both our match-making experience and our integrity and safety capabilities. Behind the scenes, we started designing and implementing machine learning solutions for lewd image detection for almost a decade, trying to leverage both our best-in-class knowledge in the tech space and the insights collected by our apps, thanks to our dominant position in the dating industry.

Machine learning (ML) is a field devoted to understanding and building methods that learn (or better, mimic) how to reach human-level performances on specific tasks, leveraging data to improve their accuracy. The development cycle requires you to carefully design and develop a neural network's architecture and to provide it iteratively with a curated set of samples (dataset) from the problem -- in our case, detecting if a picture contains lewd content or not.

Even though the number of users sending lewd images on our apps is luckily a negligible minority -- just 0.1% -- our scale allows us to collect a best-in-the-industry dataset of both lewd and non-lewd images, tailored to achieve the best possible performances on the task. Our Private Detector™ is trained using very high volume data sets, with the negative samples (the ones not containing any lewd content) carefully selected in order to better reflect edge cases and other parts of the human body (eg. legs, arms) in order not to flag them as abusive. Iteratively adding samples to the training dataset to reflect actual users' behavior or test misclassification, proved to be a successful exercise that we applied during the years in all our machine learning endeavors. Even if the downstream task is framed as a binary classification problem (as in our case!) nothing prevents data scientists from possibly defining more concepts (or labels), to possibly merge them back right before the actual training epochs.

https://i.rdrama.net/images/1684135063404212.webp

Traversing the trade-offs between state-of-the-art performance and the ability to serve our user base at scale, we implemented (in its latest iteration) an EfficientNetv2-based binary classifier: a convolutional network that has faster training speed and overall better parameters efficiency. It uses a combination of better designed architecture and scaling, with layers like MBConv (that utilizes 1×1 convolutions to wide up the space and depth-wise convolutions for reducing the number of overall parameters) and FusedMBConv (that merges some steps of the vanilla MBConv above for faster execution), to jointly optimize training speed and parameter efficiency. The model has been trained leveraging our GPU powered data centers in a continuous exercise of dataset, network and hyperparameters (the settings used to speed up or improve the training performance) optimization.

When analyzing its performance in different conditions (both offline and online) we are proud to state that it achieves world class performance (>98% accuracy, both in upsampled and production-like settings, with no clear tradeoffs between precision and recall).

What are we releasing today?

Concomitantly with this White Paper, we are releasing on https://github.com/bumble-tech/private-detector the source code we used to train the machine learning engine powering the Private Detector™, together with a ready-to-use SavedModel to deploy the model as it is (using TensorFlow Serving) and a checkpoint for possibly finetune it with additional images, improving its performance on samples that are important for specific use cases. In both scenarios, the repository comes with extensive documentation and a guide on how to perform those actions, in order to make the experience as smooth as possible for all the scientists, engineers or product folks around the world.

This version of the Private Detector™ is released under the Apache License, so that it is available for everyone to implement it as the standard for blurring lewd images as it is, or after fine tuning it with additional training samples. Improvements to the architecture or to the overall code quality and structure are welcome.\

Check out bumble-tech for any other exciting projects happening at Bumble.

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Staff, Elon Musk, and Board of Directors:

We, the undersigned Twitter workers, believe the public conversation is in jeopardy.

Elon Musk’s plan to lay off 75% of Twitter workers will hurt Twitter’s ability to serve the public conversation. A threat of this magnitude is reckless, undermines our users’ and customers’ trust in our platform, and is a transparent act of worker intimidation.

Twitter has significant effects on societies and communities across the globe. As we speak, Twitter is helping to uplift independent journ*lism in Ukraine and Iran, as well as powering social movements around the world.

A threat to workers at Twitter is a threat to Twitter’s future. These threats have an impact on us as workers and demonstrate a fundamental disconnect with the realities of operating Twitter. They threaten our livelihoods, access to essential healthcare, and the ability for visa holders to stay in the country they work in. We cannot do our work in an environment of constant harassment and threats. Without our work, there is no Twitter.

We, the workers at Twitter, will not be intimidated. We recommit to supporting the communities, organizations, and businesses who rely on Twitter. We will not stop serving the public conversation.

We call on Twitter management and Elon Musk to cease these negligent layoff threats. As workers, we deserve concrete commitments so we can continue to preserve the integrity of our platform.

We demand of current and future leadership:

Respect: We demand leadership to respect the platform and the workers who maintain it by committing to preserving the current headcount.

Safety: We demand that leadership does not discriminate against workers on the basis of their race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, or political beliefs. We also demand safety for workers on visas, who will be forced to leave the country they work in if they are laid off.

Protection: We demand Elon Musk explicitly commit to preserve our benefits, those both listed in the merger agreement and not (e.g. remote work). We demand leadership to establish and ensure fair severance policies for all workers before and after any change in ownership.

Dignity: We demand transparent, prompt and thoughtful communication around our working conditions. We demand to be treated with dignity, and to not be treated as mere pawns in a game played by billionaires.

Sincerely,

Twitter workers

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Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33321475

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:marseyjam::marseyjam::marseyjam: It's neurodivergent New Year! :marseyjam::marseyjam::marseyjam:

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:marseysnoo:

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ycglby/company_that_makes_rentsetting_software_for/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/sandiego/comments/ycdhfz/real_page_suit_filed_in_san_diego_for_price/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/ycfjst/renters_filed_a_lawsuit_this_week_alleging_that_a/?sort=controversial

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33317414


Company that makes rent-setting software for landlords sued for collusion

The lawsuit was filed days after ProPublica published an investigation raising concerns that the software, sold by Texas-based RealPage, is potentially pushing rent prices above competitive levels, facilitating price-fixing, or both.

The proposed class-action lawsuit was filed in US District Court in San Diego.

She declined to comment further, saying the company does not comment on pending litigation.

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44
cheapest registrar for every tld
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:marseysnoo:

https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/yciegl/two_alleged_chinese_spies_charged_with_trying_to/?sort=controversial

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Spoiler Alert: it affects mental health badly.

#BanTikTokNow

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About time Crapple! :chadstevejobs:

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#BanTikTokNow

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:#marseyyikes:

#BanTikTokNow

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Reported by:

Serious part: since Reddit hates NFTs so much, these are equal in value to the seethe they produce.

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Reported by:
  • snus : great reset NWO george soros klaus schwab WEF live in pod own nothing be happy
  • TheOverSeether : You don't understand, snus!! We should have never upgraded past XP. Win 7 maybe, but OH SHI---

From the same people who brought you "You Will Eat the Bugs and live in the pod!" and "You will Own Nothing and Be Happy!".

:#marseyobey:

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:marseyoctopus2:

:marseysnoo:

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ybdbc6/yes_zuckerbergberg_is_right_whatsapp_is_more/?sort=controversial

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Reported by:
  • sighup : legacy hole sings and I hate it

:#marseysoypoint2:

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If the next version of the Linux kernel emerges a little slower than usual, blame a dodgy DIMM in Linus Torvalds's AMD Threadripper-powered PC and the vagaries of the memory market.

In a post responding to a kernel developer inquiring if he had missed a Git Pull, Torvalds on Sunday revealed the request was still in his queue as "I'm doing merges (very slowly) on my laptop, while waiting for new ECC memory DIMMs to arrive."

Torvalds needs the DIMMs because over the last few days he experienced what he described as "some instability on my main desktop the … with random memory corruption in user space resulting in my allmodconfig builds randomly failing with internal compiler errors etc."

The Linux boss's first thought was that a new kernel bug had caused the problem – which isn't good but sometimes happens.

His instinct was wrong.

"It was literally a DIMM going bad in my machine randomly after 2.5 years of it being perfectly stable," he wrote. "Go figure. Verified first by booting an old kernel, and then with memtest86+ overnight."

Torvalds appears to have been tracking delivery of the new DIMMs as he reported replacement memory was "out for delivery" and predicted it should arrive later on Sunday evening.

"I'll probably leave memtest86+ for another overnight with the new DIMMs just because this wasn't the greatest experience ever. A fair amount of wasted time blaming all the wrong things, because obviously it wasn't my hardware suddenly going bad," he added.

Torvalds's post is interesting for two other reasons. One is that the laptop he mentions could be the recent MacBook – complete with Arm64 Apple silicon – that he used to push the final cut of Linux 5.19. If that's the same laptop he used on Sunday, said silicon may not be quite up to one of the more high-profile workloads in the world – or perhaps Linus just misses the comforts of a big screen.

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When Windows 95 debuted all those years ago, it was revolutionary. It introduced many of the features we still use today, including a desktop, taskbar and Start button.

Consumers lapped it up, and it sold some seven million copies in the first five weeks, buoyed by the multimillion-dollar hype. Microsoft spent an estimated $300 million promoting the OS, which included some $12 million for the rights to use the opening chords of the Rolling Stones song "Start Me Up" as its theme tune.

We’ve looked at how the operating system might look on Mobile and Desktop if it was released today, but if you want to actually try out the original again (or for the first time if you came into Windows more recently) you can do so by installing a new app that runs on Windows, macOS, or Linux.

Created by Slack developer Felix Rieseberg, it’s available in the form of an electron app. Most things work exactly as you’d expect them to, including WordPad, FreeCell, Calculator and Media Player, although you can’t currently browse the web with Internet Explorer sadly. It opens but pages don't load.

You can lock or unlock your mouse inside the virtual OS by tapping Esc.

Despite being a fully functioning operating system running in a window, it doesn’t require too much in the way of system resources.

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