possibilistic

I'm modeling ourselves after Valve, which strongly emphasizes on-site. Valve gives its folks tons of latitude and freedom in exchange for working together in a tightly-knit culture.

I'm not a stickler for showing up to work on time, and I'm a late riser / night owl myself. But the energy of being in a room together physically is extremely hard to beat.

I'm not doing this to micro-manage. I don't have time for that. I'm doing this to be a better version of myself. I get energy from working close to others, and I voraciously learn from my peers. I want people teaching me and helping me be better every single day. That might be selfish, but I thrive in that environment.

What we're doing is weird and experimental and there's a metric ton of discovery in literally every path we take. A culture built around documenting and reading notes isn't going to be fast enough. I'm more hands on than someone who can write 6-pagers and read everyone else's - like Shia LaBeouf's "just do it" energy.

I understand that this isn't a great fit for everyone, and I'm sorry.

I'm not allergic to remote once we're bigger, but we have an enormous mandate, and I want us to tackle it like an RPG final boss in the trenches together. We have a lot to build and prove and learn. Doing it together in person reduces the network hop effects and leads to more serendipity and exchange.

In a years' time, I want us to have built open source alternatives to large portions of the most used software. I want us to create a considerable shake up. I want us to have built new infrastructure to make the web more distributed and more P2P.

I think we stand a better chance if we're in a room together, hacking and engineering together. That's what my gut tells me.

I make films too, and that's frankly something that could never be fully remote.

ArtCraft | Senior Engineers | SF (Onsite) / Atlanta (Onsite) | $150-$250k + Equity | https://getartcraft.com

Those fucking rent-seeking hyperscalers took the internet away from you, and we’re going to give it back to you and to everyone.

Web 1.0 was great - we had IRC, file sharing, third party chat clients. There were personal websites, forums. Flash was a format kids could use. Everything supported embedding and uploading. Websites actually had APIs and RSS. File sharing, FTP, MP3s, discs, owned media.

Broadband brought our parents and grandparents online, but the shift to the non-technical majority created an opportunity to grossly oversimplify everything. Everything dumbed down into a pre-packaged product. Startups began turning their offerings into walled gardens. Platforms took precedence over protocols. APIs and access and data export went away. And then the rent-seeking began. The era of ownership ended.

Corporate Memphis. Jesus Christ.

We’ve rallied a massive community to build MIT/Apache-licensed alternatives to Adobe, Microsoft Office, Google Workspace, Autodesk, SolidWorks, Slack, Discord, Unreal Engine, OpenRouter, RunPod, and more. The goal is full feature parity, with code anyone can own, inspect, modify, and build on.

We’re digesting second-class apps and platforms into first-class applications, libraries, and APIs with full MCP support. We’re distilling out the good parts, and we’re building the connective tissue that draws them together.

100% of the internet is going to be open source soon, and we’re going to force it open. Loudly.

We have eight figures in run rate revenue, over 20M app downloads and growing. Our community is the best part, and it’s energetic like a wildfire. Everyone resonates with our mission.

We’re missionaries, not mercenaries. We are going to slay the incumbents by being better. Our motto is Google’s old motto - “Don't be evil (tm)”.

We’re a tiny team looking for strong engineers to own major parts of the product: desktop apps, lots of completely open source backend infrastructure, agent workflows, agentic app factories. Stack: Rust, a sprinkle of TypeScript/React, egui, Tauri, MySQL/Postgres, Redis, Elasticsearch, Kubernetes. Lots and lots of Rust. We’re systems engineers by trade, but we like to vibe code Rust. Did I say Rust? Rust. Rust Rust Rust. Maybe that's a filter.

You have to be self-directed and independent. If you want to open source Salesforce with half your time, do it! If you want to work on Solidworks 3D printing applications, great! Writing music apps and DAWs? Go for it! Custom Discord/Slack clients for our custom, completely open source chat API and platform? Hell yeah. Our organization is flat, and we're going to go after everybody and everything.

Everything you build here will be open source. We have no private repos.

We can reclaim the internet. That’s our mission.

Want to know more about us? Look up “Adobe ArtCraft” on YouTube / TikTok / your platform of choice.

If this resonates with you, email [email protected] with your Github, a little about yourself and something you’ve built. Write the sentence, “don’t take my RAM, Sam!” so we know you’re one of the good guys.

These are "spy"marks, not watermarks:

https://brand.io/article/spymarks/

We need to inform everyone that this technology can encode database identifiers and enough entropy to uniquely identify you as an author (or downloader).

This extends to other forms of media as well.

It's a horrible idea. These companies can embed unique identifiers in content to forever track you and your content's diffusion across the web:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49794615

The comments here are orthogonal to what everyone should be talking about.

This is a spy tool.

It's not "watermarking", it's "spymarking": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49794615

> Peter runs multiple companies. Beyond Segment, he's raised $100m+ for Charm Industrial, and just recently closed a Series A for Revoy. He's incredibly organized and efficient with his time.

You can do this before an exit? Build and fundraise for multiple (3?) companies at the same time?

^ Zach is the founder of Uberduck, which was massively popular. He got into YC with it.

More story:

ElevenLabs launched a few years after FakeYou and Uberduck. ElevenLabs got a lot of attention for their remarkable zero shot model, but their pricing and enterprise focus created an enduring niche.

Companies like Musicfy.lol were what ultimately drew the ire of the music labels and created a lot of friction for consumer UGC audio tools. They ruffled feathers and that created headwinds.

I distinctly remember talking to their founder on a Monday at Founders, Inc. in SF. They were in talks with a16z to raise $10M or so after their first few weeks of wild success - viral marketing and clever positioning for the first RVC music models. By that same Friday the music labels had them shut down the majority of their offering and the funding offers fell apart.

A year or so later, Suno and Udio ultimately took that side of the market. They were more consumer-friendly than raw vocal models and appealed to a broader set of users. Both companies launched to great success despite the risk of lawsuits.

15.ai, FakeYou, UberDuck, and Weights.gg (a latecomer) all gradually wound down due to the founders being pulled in different directions. Weights.gg joined OpenAI, Fifteen.ai became anti-AI and built an art community website, I went into movies/film, and Zach (Uberduck) forged a new path too.

ElevenLabs kind of lost the plot with audio. They've been building a bigger, more comprehensive offering that has scaled their revenue well beyond just TTS and audio. But it also left something of a void to fill.

Last year, Fish Audio launched in our old segment (consumer / UGC TTS fine tunes and zero shot) and built a massive user base and revenue stream. The market was wide open for it. They raised a $40M seed round.

I found my way to where I want to be.

I'm working on https://getartcraft.com which is open source:

https://github.com/storytold/artcraft

We're in use by a few film studios and some pretty popular AI artists. There are a couple of theatrical releases coming out that use us, but I can't talk about it. (Under NDA for the individual projects.)

It's at $5M ARR and growing 65% month-on-month by word of mouth.

ArtCraftX (launching soon) is a new UX that lets you bring your own compute from every single platform and vibe code your own workflow UX. You can clone the repo and easily add/remove things you want. It's okay that people can bring competitor compute - we'll be generous and open.

https://artcraftx.ai/

Think of it as "ComfyUI, but comfortable" and geared to high-volume creators rather than hobbyists. It's written in Rust.

Critically, people should be able to not only own their apps, but be able to deeply customize them.

I've also built an open source FAL/OpenRouter which I eventually want to build RunPod/Featherless (fine tunes) features into. It's called "Foundation", and it's in private beta but launches GA soon. I think it could have good positioning vs. Stripe / OpenRouter since it's open source and is meant to be extensible. Fully BYOK, too.

I'm looking to hire someone to help me build a social layer for creators that ties all of this together. YesAnd got funding to pursue this, but I think they're taking the wrong approach. I think it should be open and hackable. More like Github, but still artist friendly.

A lot of platforms either target B2B enterprise (Runway, Krea) or UGC / "everyone can be a creator" (Higgsfield, OpenArt), but I think creators look more like the Github set. Intentional, and in need of tools they own.

I wasn't after them, I just changed my product's name. They had monumentally better distribution.

I launched as vo.codes (and two prior names) before 2020 and later rebranded to FakeYou.

https://thenextweb.com/news/celebrity-voices-deepfake-ai-app

Rebranding a domain with traction is a mistake, in retrospect. I think Magnific is learning this lesson now after undergoing a change from the popular FreePik.

I'm a filmmaker and I wanted to get into video models, and FakeYou felt more like a pivot to UGC video (vo.codes was too audio centric) that I could ultimately swing me into cinematic video. I was too slow and that was not a good choice.

But Higgsfield and Bytedance showed you can be late and still win a lionshare of the market.

My video product launched in February and is at $5M ARR / 67% MoM growth.

All of them copied 15.ai

ElevenLabs was a commercial version of 15.ai. It's crazy, because 15.ai could have had the venture-scale outcomes if he'd fundraised and turned it into a SaaS product. He was in the right place, right time, with tremendous attention, but missed the opportunity.

The other "labs" followed the trend. The {number}labs / {number}.ai domains all quickly got squatted.

I was in the same space and watched it happening. I launched FakeYou about the same time as 15.ai, but 15 had the backing of 4chan and a better model. I still made it to 7M MAU and a million in revenue despite that.

Just last year, Fish Audio picked up where 15.ai / FakeYou / UberDuck / Weights.gg left off and made it to $20M ARR, which is a lesson about abandoning under-served markets when you still have tremendous gravity.

2023: Google is doomed. They're not building AI. No wonder the "Attention" authors left. Google just sat on this. Their PMs are steering them into oblivion. OpenAI is winning while Google takes no risks. Innovator's dilemma. Google Search is doomed.

2024: Google is on fire. Sergey coming back helped. Gemini, Veo. They've caught up. OpenAI is doomed.

2025: Google is seriously winning now. Nano Banana!! Google was destined to be the true winner of AI.

2026 H1: Google is slow as hell. Where is Gemini? Google is not launching anything, meanwhile just look at everyone else. Anthropic! And open source. What the hell are they doing over there?

2026 H2: Everyone is leaving Google. Google is doomed. PMs are destroying the company. They don't take risks.

Meanwhile, Microsoft: "Copilot!"

Open source tools for controllable animation:

https://github.com/storytold/artcraft

https://getartcraft.com

$3M annualized run rate (looking for more Rust engineers to join me)

https://imgur.com/a/d9DyiIO

This IS AI.

Please unflag my comment.

This Wikipedia article has a review of several evolutionary aging theories:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_ageing

None of these has been proven or widely accepted, and the entire class of theories has many rebuttals. They are interesting to consider, though.

I don't think this is correct. I've never heard of any evidence for pro-aging genes, but I have read molecular biology rebuttals against this theory (Stephen Jay Gould or perhaps textbook sources, though unfortunately I can't recall well enough to cite them).

You don't need extra genes or information to prefer organisms that age out of reproductive fitness. If advanced age during reproduction confers lower fitness, then the offspring are automatically less fit. While you could argue that there would be a competition for resources amongst the young offspring, this isn't much different than other scenarios that produce less fit or disabled offspring.

Diamonds aren't worth much because they're actually not that rare. The only reason they command the price they do now is because of the De Beers cartel.

The "diamond alternative" meme is becoming increasingly popular with our generation, such that I predict that in a few generations nobody will care to buy "real" diamonds for engagement purposes. When this happens, the price of diamonds will fall dramatically (if it hasn't already by that point).

Diamonds are so overrated.

This feels like a straw man argument against static typing. No statically typed language I use suffers from this because they have great data structures and generics.

Languages such as Rust that lean on inference are an absolute joy to program in.

This is uncannily similar to my own personal experience with ADHD. Instead of words appearing scrambled, though, my focus during reading is drawn to random words within a text. I might skip to a new sentence or jump down a few paragraphs; it's entirely arbitrary. This process usually continues forward and back, resetting every few seconds. The longer I read something, the worse the effect becomes. It takes a lot of effort to get through things sometimes.

Whatever this effect is, it is somewhat lessened by adequate sleep, a low-sugar diet, and prescribed medication. It never completely goes away, though. I have good days and bad days; even at my best, though, working through long texts, papers, or technical literature will eventually cause my mind to wander. Whatever this is (I blame ADHD), it's prevented me from ever being able to enjoy reading literature or long-form journalism. It's a pity, too, because I enjoy the content. The task itself is just too mentally stressful. Reading is, sadly, a form of labor.

It's weird, because skimming comes easily. Visual forms of information are also incredibly easy to digest.

Do others with ADHD have a similar problem with this?

I'm singling out your post because of how "scripting language"-weighted it is. (Minus Swift.)

Ruby makes for a pretty slow server side language. It's appropriate when moving fast, but at scale it's rather icky. Your other languages seem to fill anything it can do.

Have you considered Go, Java, Scala, C#, etc.? None of these are "low level".

1. Rust - Low level systems programming. It has a ways to go, but it is so pleasant to write. In reality this has started to replace my usage of C++.

2. Javascript - Both a scripting language and the Web language. If it weren't the lingua franca of the browser I would much rather choose Python or Ruby instead.

3. Java - A typesafe, managed JVM language perfect for writing microservices, Android apps, etc. For anything bigger than would be appropriate for a scripting language or that must be maintained by several people. Java hits the sweet spot.

Do you happen to have this one to five pages of QM equations somewhere as reference? I would be very interested in reading that.

I do this rather frequently by mistake. I, like you, try to point out my error so the OP doesn't wonder why they are being downvoted.

Another problem is that I often upvote articles by scrolling on my phone. In addition to providing false signal, this has the unfortunate side effect of polluting my "saved stories".

I wish there was a mechanic to change votes after submission (even if the ability to change your vote was only momentary).

Do pg, et al. accept PRs?

ipilimumab, *-umab; hUman Monoclonal Ab (antibody)

These aren't cheap to mass produce.

Edit: Not the best source I could find, but this cites costs (not at scale) :

http://www.immunochemistry.com/services/antibody-development

How does this address the problem of not saving user-submitted data after informing them you've done precisely that? This seems _very_ bad.

I think we're debating the merits of different classes of update here. Some updates are not essential (UI preferences, etc.), but other requests by their very nature, are--billing, messaging, draft editing, etc.

Does anyone else wish tmux were modal like vim, ie. without a "leader" key? My conf file has a ton of custom key bindings for window / pane management, and I'd love for them to go away or become simplified by simply dropping into a "window management mode". Likewise, I'd like the command mode to stay open until I close it. I have some scripted hacks to do this, but it's nowhere near what I'd expect from true modality.

One of these days I guess I could get around to writing a patch. This single feature is probably my most wanted for any software at the moment.

I'm not a hypochondriac, I swear, but this really hits home. I have medically diagnosed ADHD; seemingly contrary to the disorder, I often find myself getting stuck daydreaming for hours. I honestly _enjoy_ it, and as a consequence of my incredibly realistic daydreams I never get bored. Seriously--I never get bored. It's like a dopamine rush I can turn on whenever I want. My stories are better than any movie because I'm actually _in_ them.

The walking in circles bit is just uncanny. My most creative thinking (or most vivid daydreams) happen when I'm doing exactly that. It's really weird (and I'm acutely conscious of how it must look), so I never let people catch me doing it. Something about walking in circles turns up the realism an order of magnitude.

I think this is highly related to my ADHD, and now I want to tell my doctor about it. I don't want to rid myself of this, but I do want to control it better.