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.
> 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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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>".
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.
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.
Readit News
https://imgur.com/a/nFQN5tx
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.
The 'how society would look without x' has been a racist trope on 4chan since way before the cited examples.
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https://imgur.com/a/mqMEPUl
It is rather Novosibirsk.
> 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.
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.
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
https://vergesseneorte.com/die-expo2000-in-hannover/
Deleted Comment
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.
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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.
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...
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.
The UK is feeling left out and would like a word.
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.
Buran in storage: https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/baikonur-buran-soviet-...
Image link: https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/17103111131...
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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.
https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/u22v09/t...
The beauty of Kintsugi can also be difficult for people to understand. =3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9LMKGte0UU
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.
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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...
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.
Is there a better way? Asking for myself, also.
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.
> Looking for an architect who builds things that still look great even in November rain? Reach out to classical architect Jorian Egge.
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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.
If the demand continues after this blip I’ll try add ads or make real payments work.
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.
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.
Yes, UBI. Then you can create what you want and your livelihood doesn't depend on it going viral.
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.
Like, haven't got your 22nd cocksuckie virus booster? Get lost and die from hunger.
I still think it's a neat idea but I can't be bothered to build a real version
https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/FUTOmeter
That's not a practical answer but it's my two cents.
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.
The whole "subsidize for other visitors" concept is weaker than "pay <creator>".
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".
https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/FUTOmeter
"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.
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:(
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.