Jesus Christ finally. I'm not joking when I say that the old text tool wasn't simply bad, it was THE WORST text tool I ever used. If you had a dark theme and made the text black, you literally couldn't see the text you were editing!
I believe the last feature Krita needs to become a decent design tool would be fixing the layer styles so you can add the same style multiple times to the same layer (and if possible better bevel and 3D text tools). An immense number of designs are not much more than multiple strokes or "slightly" 3D text. Multiple strokes can be done in Krita in a very complicated and impractical way (you can do it by adding the layer style to a group, but with too many strokes the rounding errors make the outer strokes "flat," so the "correct" way would be to add the largest stroke first and then use clones to add the inner strokes). Photopea (a free online editor) supports both of these.
My opinion is that Krita has a tremendous amount of potential to serve a free and open source application for several niche use cases, but it's routinely held back by lacking "that one feature the user will need." Probably because everyone still thinks it's just an application for illustration and can't be used for image editing or design.
Animation is probably the most obvious one. Krita has an entire curves-based timeline editor, but the integration is so poor that it can only be used to animate opacity and the simplest type of transforms (translate, rotate, scale). That's an incredible waste considering it has cage transform, perspective transform, etc. All the non-destructive filters already have the code to serialize their settings to XML and back, but somehow those settings can't be animated? The liquefy transform, by far the most powerful, can't be animated. If transform masks had opacity and you could animate that, even that could be extremely useful, but they don't so they can't be animated in general.
Layer styles are another integration problem. Many users don't know they exist because they're hidden in the context menu. Krita already has filter masks. It doesn't even need a separate UI for layer styles, the styles could just be filters instead, then they would be able to get drag-n-dropped around and you could add multiple of the same to a single layer. Apparently this is because they want compatibility with Photoshop, but you could just convert Krita filter masks into Photoshop styles in the save step, so I don't really understand the problem. Naturally if the filter settings ever became animatable, that would mean layer styles would NOT be animatable in virtue of them not being filters, which would suck a lot.
By the way, I haven't tested the new version yet but Krita ALREADY has a color overlay layer style. So it looks like they simply... duplicated a feature they already had? Also the UI looks very similar to Clip Studio Paint, but a key difference in CSP is that single-color layers use 8 bit pixels instead of full 32 bit RGBA. I'm afraid this UI I'm seeing in the video is going to mislead some users into creating dozens of 32 bit layers with color overlay for easy color management and then end up with much worse performance than they would have in similar software. It also seems the color overlay "mask" behaves in a way that is completely different from literally every other mask in the software. I guess I'll have to download it to know for sure.
Edit: by "3d text" I sincerely don't mean more than WordArt level stuff. A lot of text for mobile games is very basic "curved text + vanishing point 3D + multiple strokes." Krita also lacks a "long shadow" style (i.e. infinite shadow instead of a drop shadow), which is common in a lot of designs and that GIMP has.
Most of the transfors you describe are still unfortunately destructive (ie the only way to go back is to undo). I'm not an expert on this, but I think the only way this could be key framed would be to take snapshots of the pixels and insert the modified raster data as keyframes? I'm not sure there's a good/correct/obviously way to interpolate betweens say a before and after liquefy operation the way it currently works. Maybe some of them coul store brush+inputs (pressure, cursor movement, etc) but that seems difficult to work with as an artist. Again, not done much animation (as a dev or artist) so maybe I'm just out of the loop completely
But yeah I agree with you in principle though, it would be nice if these were non-destructive and could be keyframed.
They are all non-destructive in Krita. Just use a transform mask and go to tool options, select liquefy and after you liquefy however you want you can just hide the transform mask and it stops liquefying the layer.
Yes, Krita has had this feature for years. Non-destructive filters (adjustment layers), too.
GIMP still doesn't have it. Only in 3.0 it got adjustment layers for filters.
Oh, this is news to me! I've used Krita to pain (recreational noob, not on a professional level) and I never realised this. I'll play with this tomorrow
I've just moved to a new town, and my social life is kicking.
Found a local computer club, crew of lads tinkering and using open source software. Really nice, smart bunch. I'm learning loads and appreciating their company.
OP found this lacking, because it's not working fast enough and he's not getting enough time with people.
I totally agree putting in time with old friends is always worth it (maybe not through surprise calls) but on a local level, I'd encourage patience.
Things take time, friendship isn't something you can just switch on. It takes years, and that's the point. It's a journey, not a destination.
Last time I checked, only the US and Israel. Europeans don't want anything to do with this war, and the USA's East Asian allies also like it not even a little bit.
As a Brit, I'm disgusted that Starmer is allowing UK bases to be used by the US for launching attacks. I can see it being just a matter of time before Starmer drags us into another war of lies. (Last time it was Tony Blair, also a Labour leader and he still hasn't been tried for his war crimes).
That attack looks like a false flag operation to me. Also, as already stated, Iran is not the aggressor - that would be Trump with his Fifa Peace Prize.
Fallacious comparison, two entirely different situations. For a start, whatever the Iranian response, the aggressor at the root of this particular episode is the other side: the U.S.
Yes, I'm sure Iran is completely honest and knows what it's doing at all times. It's not like there's no central command and someone surely knows what everyone else, including proxies are doing, right?
It never ceases to amaze me that demonstrating such a weapon on civilian targets somehow made it past the entire chain of command. One of those things that I just can't wrap my head around no matter how many times I come back to it.
They weren't exclusively civilian targets, they were considered "mixed" targets. Hirohito's home wasn't considered strategically-important enough and therefore didn't make the cut.
The sites in question were also specifically selected because they hadn't previously faced conventional attack, enabling a more accurate damage assessment.
> they hadn't previously faced conventional attack
Which, by the way, illustrates a related point: Hiroshima and Nagasaki had stiff competition. WWII was devastating, to cities and civilians all over the map. More people died in the conventional bombing of Tokyo than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. I think the atomic bombs represented some 2 weeks worth of casualties in a war that lasted 300.
No sir that's not a school we're proposing to bomb, it's a complex containing both a school and a vehicle maintenance facility. So it's mixed, meaning there's valid logistical reasons to attack it. Yes, hundreds of children will perish in the attack, but the action will also provide us with legitimate benefits. Just try not to think about the former and focus on the latter. I'm sure no one in the future will judge us too harshly for the decision.
Is that what the Japanese were doing? (Bit of a pointless diversion though because this is a nuclear bomb we're talking about here. Not exactly a surgical strike.)
Yes and no. They were doing that, but AFAIK they did so because it was deemed more efficient, not to use people as human shields. Also, at the time, there was no such thing as a surgical strike.
I personally think that the lifetime of the author is a bit odd, since it reduces the rewards towards those who are old or infirm. I agree the length is way too long though.
Remember that Disney was a major factor in lobbying for the longer copyright terms, and their 1959 film Sleeping Beauty was made 80 years after Tchaikovsky's ballet (a major source for the Film's soundtrack).
If we thus take 79 years as our measuring stick (And I still think that's a bit too long) 18 more books from the list would be in the public domain.
Maybe if we take 25 as a typical beginning of career and 80 as a typical date of death for someone who lives to 25 we could settle on 55 years? That would leave only 13 items on the list as still under copyright, and I believe that includes all works by living authors too.
I just went there as German and it actually went really smooth. They just asked me why I'm visiting and I said to visit a friend/tourism, took less than 2 minutes. So I think this is FUD
That's usually how it goes with the US as well but every now and then they decide to search someone's electronic devices.
Of course AFAIK this can happen pretty much everywhere at this point so your only hope is being a citizen of a country that doesn't allow it for locals (such as the US) and then not traveling. Or wipe your devices prior to traveling.
I think that's adequately addressed in the article:
> "The other way to look at this is like there's no free lunch here," said Smiley. "We know what the limitations of the model are. It's hard to teach them new facts. It's hard to reliably retrieve facts. The forward pass through the neural nets is non-deterministic, especially when you have reasoning models that engage an internal monologue to increase the efficiency of next token prediction, meaning you're going to get a different answer every time, right? That monologue is going to be different.
> "And they have no inductive reasoning capabilities. A model cannot check its own work. It doesn't know if the answer it gave you is right. Those are foundational problems no one has solved in LLM technology. And you want to tell me that's not going to manifest in code quality problems? Of course it's going to manifest."
You can argue with specifics in there, but they made their case.
Because either only Amazon sells the books I want to buy or the alternatives are other non-local shops that are usually far more expensive.
I live in Poland. I want to read books in the original English version. The main competitor to Amazon for ordering books in the original version would be libristo.eu, which is not Amazon, but it’s also not local and it’s far more expensive. On top of that, there are “local” online shops which engage in ordering things from Amazon to then only repackage them, as if they were bought locally. The books I’ve bought recently, all of them hardcover:
2. Alan V. Oppenheim, Alan S. Willsky, Signals and Systems. Second Edition. Available from local Empik.com, but only in paperback version, and it’s a different edition. libristo.eu: 298.19EUR, Amazon: 237.81EUR.
3. Avinash C. Kak, Malcolm Slaney, Principles of Computerized Tomographic Imaging. Not available anywhere else than Amazon (to be fair, on Amazon I’ve also bought a used version, because there were none new).
4. David J. Griffiths, Introduction to Electrodynamics. libristo.eu: 67.11EUR, Amazon: 48.72EUR.
5. Thomas M. Cover, Joy A. Thomas, Elements of Information Theory. libristo.eu: 122.85EUR, Amazon: 83.38EUR.
As long as you buy hardcover versions, their quality tends to be a lot higher.
And I would not be able to find these books in any physical shop by just walking in. Even if some book was theoretically available, it would need to be imported.
(I’ll also preempt one possible criticism: it is not true that this state of affairs is caused by Amazon pushing out great local shops from the market. There used to be no easy options of getting technical books in original versions before Amazon, just translations, and only of a small number books in the most generic topics appealing to the lowest common denominator. You could maybe get Charles Dickens or Shakespeare in original version from Empik.com, maybe a Bruce Eckel book if you were lucky, but forget about getting a book like Elements of Information Theory. English proficiency in Poland is generally high, compared to Western Europe, but our local shops refuse to cater to it.)
My friend, I lived in Gruzja for many a year. My local shops in Tbilisi were pretty limited in terms of English-language content, I feel your pain.
For expensive, hard to find stuff, then of course one has to go on price. If you're seeing 50-100 EUR difference then no judgement here.
The original article, however, does not contain that sort of material. In fact, the piece is about low-quality print-on-demand books, which presumably mainly exist for very mainstream titles.
Using examples from TFA, I have no idea why anyone would buy paperbacks of Jack London or Bertrand Russel from Amazon. That's my beef, not your technical hardback collection.
For books in English, Amazon is considerably less expensive than anything local, and can also be significantly faster, instead of being a “special order”.
There is a hidden cost to Amazon, and it's the death of our high streets and independent retailers.
As per my comment to the other commenter in the thread, there will of course be times when Amazon makes sense, for more expensive or difficult to source books.
Sometimes, a book may be desperately, urgently needed tomorrow.
Most of the time, the price difference isn't substantial and time isn't of the essence.
I'd rather keep my money in my local economy, rather than subsidising Bezos' next jaunt into space.
And honestly, given America's current behaviour, I'm currently of a mind to avoid sending a cent a across the Atlantic.
I hate opening my phone/laptop to put music on, inadvertently opening HN/lichess, and watching the next few hours vanish in silence.
Also deeper engagement, and a big second hand and artist-driven markets keeping my money out of the hands of NastyCorp.
Vinyl is just the nicest.
reply