Vibing to Art - DTNS Weekend

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1:49Stephen Robles: From Unpacked.

2:01Stephen Robles: Welcome to the Daily Tech News Show Weekend Edition. Greatly provided to you and thanks for your support of this show. And this week, we are very excited to talk about ArtCraft. You may have heard about ArtCraft. It's both a company and kind of the term for a suite of applications meant to be used in the place of, say, all of Adobe's software. They have Photo Editor, Film Editor, all that kind of stuff. In fact, they're pretty much one for one with the major Adobe products. And joining me to talk about his use of them as an artist is Mr. Scott Johnson. Welcome back, Scott. Hey, man.

2:40Scott Johnson: Thanks. I know this town. I've been in this town before.

2:44Stephen Robles: You run this town.

2:45Scott Johnson: That's right. It's Barter Town, and I run it. No, I'm glad to be here. This is a subject that when this stuff started popping off, I went, oh, I bet Tom and I end up talking about this.

2:54Stephen Robles: Yeah. So I think some folks who may not, maybe some folks who only follow you peripherally may be surprised because I know you have very strong opinions about humans making art and not having art generated. To hear that Scott jumped in on the whole Vibe-coded software. what excited you to try these out? And how do you reconcile that kind of conflict that people might think you have?

3:21Scott Johnson: Well, here's the good news. The good news is, I don't know if it's good news. The good news is I finally found what I think to be a potential real-life competitor to the Adobe Suite, somebody who could actually compete with it in a way that would be meaningful and kind of alter the way maybe Adobe does business. the honest truth is I don't want to see Adobe go away, but I really don't like Adobe's business practices. I find them a little predatory when it comes to how they price things, how to quit their apps is a ridiculous amount of jumping through hoops, just trying to get canceled. And I don't like it.

3:55Scott Johnson: And I feel like it holds especially independent creators back who need options that aren't going to break the bank every month. So this came out and I went, ooh, interesting. And I did a little looking into how they all came about. We don't have to get into all that, but essentially, you're right. They, you know, very AI assisted kind of retconning or not reverse engineering purely that way, but in kind of a retcon of the Adobe apps. And in other words, saying everybody's used to these. These are the apps and the suites they've used. So we're going to make apps that look and behave and create output the same way that people are already used to.

4:31Scott Johnson: Same shortcuts, same, you know, mouse gestures, same sort of paneling. Everything about them should be familiar in that way. but we're going to give them in these really fast Rust-based applications, which I cannot overstate how fast all of this is. They're instantaneous in terms of, like, launching. You run Photocraft, which is the Photoshop equivalent, and Photocraft runs without a single full second passing. I should mention the hardware I'm running this on. I'm running it on a Mac M3 Studio Max. So it's fast. You know, it's good hardware. But everything else takes longer to load, including Photoshop.

5:09Scott Johnson: Affinity Photo, any of the other sort of competitors in this space, they've all got a lot of loading to do. For whatever reason, this Rust language is the basis for all of this is crazy speedy. And without knowing too many technical details about why, all I can tell you is it is wild how quick stuff has popped up on my screen.

5:28Stephen Robles: And it sounds like, I imagine some folks would have the question of like, why not use an open source competitor instead of this vibe-coded thing? It sounds like that's the answer is the speed.

5:39Scott Johnson: Yeah. Speed's a big part of it. The other part is open source and free.

5:44Stephen Robles: So these are also open source. Yeah. Yeah.

5:46Scott Johnson: I should mention that everything in this suite is 100%. You can go to GitHub, get yourself the latest load, do your own fork, do whatever you want. Mod it, do add-ons, make your own, whatever. Fully open source projects, each and every one of these in the suite. There are currently 13 apps. The ones I'm going to mostly speak to today are the ones I've used the most since you and I first talked, which is Photocraft, Vectocraft, which is like Illustrator. Filmcraft is like Premiere. And I've messed around a little bit with Lightroom, but mostly the rest of my time was spent with Soundcraft, which is like Pro Tools, like an audio suite, a DAC, really.

6:22Scott Johnson: And there are others. There's like a Word, basically it's a stripped down version of Word. Yeah, they've done some Office stuff too. Yeah, they're kind of going little nuts. They got a CAD piece of software in here. So these 13 apps, of which four or five are the ones I've focused on, they all feature this speed. It's very, very fast. And I don't just mean launching. I mean rendering things, how quickly it's taking input to the screen and applying filters and all the sorts of stuff just seem to be exponentially faster. I haven't done any actual benchmarks, so I can't give you numbers, but it is a clear speed increase in that regard.

6:59Stephen Robles: It doesn't take you as long to do things as it would if you were using Adobe. Yeah, and it doesn't mean they're perfect.

7:04Scott Johnson: There are some flaws. There are some bugs. These are all still in alpha phase. I want to say Photocraft is currently at version. Let's see. Where's the launcher? Photocraft is currently at version that's 0.16.0. We're not even at 1.0s on any of these. But that's partly why I'm so impressed with what I'm messing with here because out of the gate, they're very capable. with a few dips here and there, and it's usually bug stuff. Like, oh, they're setting it to constrain dimensions in Photograph when you're trying to create a 600-pixel image from something much larger. And you can set it in any other photo editing thing to say constrain these.

7:45Scott Johnson: So if I change the horizontal measurement to be whatever size pixels, I want the vertical to respond with the proportional pixels. You can turn that on or off. It's usually on by default. For some reason, this thing's all borked with that. It's little things like that. And they're annoying. There's nothing great about it. And you report bugs just like you do any other software. And they have a very active Discord and all this other stuff. But outside of that stuff, the core functionality is wildly there. And it's a little freaky how quick they spun all this up.

8:17Stephen Robles: Yeah. And I heard on launch day a couple weeks ago, maybe not even launch day, on everybody discovered it day when everybody started talking about this, that it was buggy. but they were pushing out patches constantly. And so the particular bug that bugged you might not stay around for very long. How have you perceived that? Have the bugs you found stuck or have you been like, oh no, there was this one bug and it went away fast?

8:44Scott Johnson: Some of them, I can't remember the specific one. I had one with color grading that fixed, oh, that was in Premiere or the Premiere equivalent film craft. That went away overnight after I experienced it and I didn't even report it. So it was clearly somebody else knew about the bug. And you're right, this launcher that is included with this suite of apps, which I didn't have to pay for, number one. Number two, didn't have to register anything. It doesn't care about who you are. You just download it and run it. And it's pulling all this stuff from GitHub. So these updates I get in the launcher, it'll say, Photocraft has an update, which is almost every day.

9:19Scott Johnson: It's pulling nightly pulls from the GitHub. Those show up and you can just update here, but they're just socketing straight to GitHub is how it's doing it. So there's a lot of open source, well-tread territory happening here. This is how a lot of things work. It's just that these are so notably in the Adobe sphere of like, whoa, wait a minute. We can do these without... We don't have to pretend like there's one golden statue to worship named Adobe. We can actually find these features, the creative tools someplace else. And it's been kind of nice. To answer your original question about how do I reconcile that, I don't...

9:55Scott Johnson: The nice thing about this suite, none of the AI features which you can integrate into them, just like with Adobe suite, you don't have to use any of them. None of them are forced. And if you want them, you got to tie it to an account anyway because you got to pay for tokens. The whole token system is a part of this. I haven't needed any of that, nor did I need it prior to this. So if you're going to use these tools like Adobe tools or anyone else's to make generative AI-based art, you can do that. But the features certainly are mandatory, and they don't even ask you for an account. So they don't even know I have their software, technically.

10:32Scott Johnson: I mean, they don't.

10:33Stephen Robles: So you don't mind that this was created with a coding agent versus someone hand coding?

10:42Scott Johnson: No. And people are going to say that sounds hypocritical. I get why they would say that. I'll cop to that because when you start to get into semantics, what's the difference between generative art and generative code? One was trained on many years of many coders and many languages. The other was trained on many years of many artists and many images. It's not that different with the exception of hardly anybody. I shouldn't say nobody, but nobody's sitting down one day and outputting a big image and going, or sorry, adding something to a piece of code and saying, oh yeah, I need to fix this bug and going.

11:23Scott Johnson: That is now my piece of code. It will forever be my piece of code and no one will ever take away my piece of code. Especially in the open source code world, now it's just part of the repository. Everybody gets it. In the art side of it, if I create a portrait of Tom, that's a Scott Johnson original. It's something Tom gets from me directly. Maybe it's printed and signed, whatever. That's more of a one guy did that. Don't take the one guy's thing away. whereas code feels like it's kind of everybody's already.

11:54Stephen Robles: Although a coder might say like, no, but I worked really hard on this particular code and it's mine. And I'm proud of that and didn't want it to be open source.

12:01Scott Johnson: Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. Every argument I've heard about this, I think has validity to it. And basically I'm making an exception because there's kind of a genie out of the bottle problem happening. I think there's still a way to salvage creative work. I'm not saying coding isn't creative. I know it is. But what I mean is like creative, let's say visual work. We'll keep it to the visual arts for now. Obviously, there's a lot of nuance in there. We don't have to get into it. But there's still a chance for us to figure out a way to preserve that individualism without it becoming part of MindHive where anybody can just use it and do it.

12:44Scott Johnson: There's something different about that versus coding languages, old and new. these it's we're done it's done like we're just there you know what i mean like somebody can still do something really creative with coding coding and and do it even with half of it being done with an agent and you checking on its code or you giving it ideas and it riffing on your ideas and you deciding that was a great idea and locking it in and putting it up to github or whatever those those things are going to continue to happen and i just think that's a runaway train because it's just too good at coding. Now, maybe there'll come a day where it's so good at realizing people's thoughts to create imagery that I'll have this same exact problem and I'll say, well, now that genie is fully out of the bottle.

13:28Scott Johnson: But I feel like the artist genie still has a toe stuck in the little tube at the end of the bottle.

13:32Stephen Robles: You know what I'm saying? I'm tempted to come at you with the, like, if I tell a generative model to make something in the style of Scott Johnson, how is that different from Artcraft saying, make this code in the style of Adobe, right? No, it's a fair point.

13:48Scott Johnson: It's a fair point.

13:49Stephen Robles: I think you just touched on something that is different. And I'll give you an analogy that may help illustrate what you're doing there. When photography came along, you didn't see people stop painting. Right. Right? In fact, you still have portraits. You still have people who will sit for a portrait because they want that style. Right. Yes, you could take a family photo portrait, but some people want paintings of them. It also changed painting. It freed painters to say, well, we don't always have to capture exactly what we're looking at because a photograph can do that. With code, object-oriented code came along and kind of ended assembly language coding.

14:35Stephen Robles: It became a very niche thing that people would learn mostly so they could say they knew how it worked. There are a few practical applications for it. But for the most part, nobody needs to learn assembly. And there isn't a whole lot of demand for assembly. You learn it because you want to know how it's done, right? Steve Gibson learned it because he wanted to know how it worked. And that helped him understand coding. Whereas I think with art, there's still a solid unified demand. People don't learn how to paint so they can become better photographers, right? Yeah, no, that's exactly right. Maybe that's the difference.

15:13Scott Johnson: I think you're right about that. and that's maybe what I'm trying to articulate. It's hard though, because I do see the pratfalls of my argument. But it's like coding is, again, not to diminish the skill of some coders, some people blow my mind, they're so good. It's just that it's so much math, logic and numbers that is so easily codified by computers and now AI to just automate and to make happen. It's just kind of there. We do it every day when we're processing everything. Everything's being processed in a way that is kind of programming, if you want to look at it in that way. And so I think that that maybe is the dividing line where creative work out of a human being that can't come out of a computer is always going to be valued at some level.

15:58Scott Johnson: And I hope that my work and other people's work will be valued in that way as well. But I realize as I say that, it makes it sound like I'm devaluing the work of voters. And it's a hard argument to get around.

16:08Stephen Robles: Yeah, it's tough to walk that line. the more developers i talk to who are enthusiastic about using these coding agents the more i hear from them because they take away the part that isn't being a developer right they're like yes all the stuff you just talked about the math and all of that the stuff that can be automated i think most developers i talk to are like yeah that's stuff you have to do it's not stuff you want to do that's not the development part the part where you figure out user flow and what features should be in there and how user interfaces should be arranged. In fact, user interface may be a good analog of like, that is something you can have the tool generate, but you still need a human to go like, no, that doesn't quite work.

16:50Stephen Robles: I need humans to try this and make it work. That is the artistic part of it. Whereas the numbers and underneath, if you can automate that, the developer can then get on with the actual work of development, which is designing how the whole thing should work, which to bring it back into the art craft conversation, they have done an excellent job. They weren't able to just say, make Adobe Premiere, and it pooped it out. They had to know what they were doing. They had to be experienced developers who understood how to describe the kind of computer program they wanted these coding tools to construct so that it ended up working well and being fast and all the things you were talking about.

17:32Scott Johnson: Yeah, and also they had to have a marketing brain a little bit to get the word out and also maintain it the way they are. The website is striking. You go there and you go, oh, these guys are, they actually seem like they're serious about this. I mean, these are all surface level things, but it shows me that it's more than just, hey, I made a thing. It's on GitHub. Go figure it out and assemble it yourself. And it's not one of those deals. And you could argue, by the way, GUI interfaces, Windows, Mac OS, Linux front ends, they're all to do this. they're to skip the resistance yes it's there's something cool about saying i'm a command line guy and i just do it all by the command line i need no mouse or no graphical interface or folders or any of this but we've all kind of decided as a as a as a as a people that we would rather have point and click and drag and drop and all of these kinds of things right like if photoshop in the first place introduced me to to layers all those years ago and that was a game changer it that was my math behind the scenes of let me get busy being creative because getting to have layers and having these virtual layers, being able to draw under other things and create these layers in dynamic ways without destroying your document, without having to start over, without having paint bleed into something you didn't mean to.

18:44Scott Johnson: These are all shortcuts to getting to the creative part. So I'm not going to use that as a full justification, but it's in that vein is all I'm saying.

18:53Stephen Robles: And honestly, the more people I talk to who use LLMs and agents, the more I find them saying, I less often ask it to create an artistic thing, and I more often tell it to use a piece of software to make a thing that I tell it what it should look like.

19:13Scott Johnson: Yeah.

19:14Stephen Robles: You know, so that some of them are like that way I can tell people who hate AI. Oh, I made it in blender, even though I had an agent make it in blender. But also it ends up being more of your artistic interpretation rather than like, make me a porcupine playing basketball. And then it puts out, you know, something that's vaguely porcupine like playing tennis. And you're like, no, that was not exactly what I wanted. Yeah.

19:36Scott Johnson: We're kind of having that moment where everybody's just we're doing what people call slop is really this experimental phase where people are shocked at how easy it is to make that raccoon doing something stupid. And it's really meaningless in terms of any real impact on anything. It's just to say, oh, look what it can do. We're a lot of look what it can do at the moment. And I think we're starting to transition into, well, look what I can do now that it is doing this so I can focus on that. Whatever the job is, whatever the project is, whatever it is, I've always been bullish on that. People think I just hate AI.

20:08Scott Johnson: Like going to pour a water bottle out anytime anyone mentions it or something like that.

20:12Stephen Robles: That isn't me. It should be hypocritical.

20:14Scott Johnson: No, it would be. It's not me at all. It's helped me in a bunch of ways. I don't use it to run my life and I probably never will because that sounds awful, but I do like it to do some of the crap I don't feel like doing so I can get to the business at hand. I'll give you an example. So this new version of Photoshop or this version called photocraft is interesting because not only is it launched very fast, but as soon as it opens, you go, oh yeah, all the shortcuts on my keyboard that I remember, H for panning around the screen and the B for brush, E for eraser, Z for the pointer, like all these keys you're used to in the Photoshop or Adobe ecosystem, they're all there immediately.

20:56Scott Johnson: Whether this was quote unquote vibe coded or not, that was a crucial thing to do. And for whatever reason, everybody else, GIMP, Affinity, everybody else decides, well, we'll have some of that. But we're going to make it kind of muscle memory difficult to remember some of the new stuff we do that they don't do. Another example of that is like DaVinci Resolve, fantastic video editor. But it's a completely different workflow. It's not completely different. It's still a timeline type editor. But yeah, different enough where you're like, I got to learn new shortcut keys or got to go reassign them or whatever.

21:26Scott Johnson: This takes all of that out of there and just says what's your muscle memory go for it and that made a big difference for me to get right into these things and to test them to see where maybe some of the flaws were instead of just being impressed that it pulled you know it pulled off this cloning of of what is photoshop but i can open psds directly i can open affinity photo files directly i have a feeling that by the end of this thing it'll just open gimp files and anybody's anybody's file format yeah it's save it's output to like archive and keep your multi-layered you know non-destructed file is literally a PSD.

22:00Scott Johnson: I don't know how that, I guess it's legal. PDFs are like this. I mean, it has a lot to do with these things getting invented, but I don't think the formats are.

22:07Stephen Robles: Once the patent expires on those things, anybody can do it.

22:11Scott Johnson: Yeah. And that's all really seamless. The brushes are super customizable, maybe more so than Photoshop. I found lots of robust plugin work happening from the community, although that'll probably just grow as it gets more insure. and like smart object equivalents that are basically vector objects you can use in a raster environment. This will mean more to, you know, the art nerds than those who are not. But so far, the only real cons I've seen are some memory leaks with really large PSDs that just kind of make things slow down a little bit.

22:40Stephen Robles: Yeah.

22:41Scott Johnson: I was mostly just throwing as much as I could to see what I could break or whatever. And it seemed like it would get a little slow with like hundreds of layers. It would get a little weird. But so does Photoshop. So it's maybe not a good example. And those couple of bugs I mentioned, which again, some of those just seem to be getting picked up as people notice them. And it feels like we're all testing a little. Like we're all part of this. We're part of what we are doing that. These are beta or alpha versions of the software and we are effectively testing them. Would I say that a company should feel comfortable tomorrow switching off Adobe and going straight to this and letting their accounting department yell at Adobe about how to cancel?

23:22Scott Johnson: Sorry, I have a bias in that regard. No, I probably wouldn't because they're not that ready. They're ready enough for me, but they're going to be some like mission critical, especially in corporate environments, workflows that are going to break with some of this because they're just not quite ready. For example, if I pull in a PSD file that I have fully applied a bunch of effects to, like I've added drop shadowing to something, a border on something else, some of these filters that you're used to seeing in Photoshop being used, some of those don't convert. Some of them show up and they just aren't there.

23:59Scott Johnson: And they're in the software. You just have to go redo them, reapply them. That's weird, and it shouldn't work that way. And I'm sure they'll have that worked out. And there was some of that with Affinity in the early days, too. So it's not that unusual. But beyond that, and this being the tentpole of the collection, because everything really, I mean, it's like Photoshop itself. Photoshop is the tentpole of the Adobe suite. Photocraft is the same here. It's going to be used the most. It's going to be the one people talk about the most. And I'm happy to say so far it is really solid. And I don't know what it is about Rust.

24:31Scott Johnson: I want to learn more because Rust is so fast. Everything I've tried Rust with, I've got a music player I've been dinking with, a couple of open source projects. And anytime people write stuff in rust, I don't know what's going on. It's like Lightning McQueen everywhere you go.

24:47Stephen Robles: Being a serious business owner takes hard work, patience, and a drive to keep moving forward. So it's important to find a serious business card that goes the extra mile. With the VentureX business card from Capital One, you earn unlimited double miles on every purchase. And with big purchasing power, you can spend more and earn more. This is your sign to take your business to the next level. The Capital One VentureX Business Card. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com for details. This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI.

25:22Stephen Robles: They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.

26:08Stephen Robles: APPS.com slash audio. One purchase equals one donated. Always. Apartheid. White supremacy. Are Israelis indigenous? Are Palestinians? These are the conversations most people are too afraid to have. I'm your Miyahu, and my new show Borderlines with That Semite walks straight through that minefield. Every episode, I hit the street to ask regular people what they really think, then sit down with an expert who often sees it completely differently than I do. No slogans, no point scoring, just two people trying to understand. Search borderlines with That Semi wherever you get your podcasts. From Unpacked.

26:45Scott Johnson: Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge, and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love.

27:02Stephen Robles: It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed.

27:09Scott Johnson: That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.

27:16Stephen Robles: Do you think Adobe should do this to themselves? Should they rewrite their own programs in Rust using quad code?

27:26Scott Johnson: That's funny because this sort of happened in games recently. Famously, but it was in the news. Tim Sweeney came out and said, hey, we just vibe-coded a replacement for the Epic Store. Yeah, and the Epic Store comes out and it's some percentage faster. And at the time, they claimed it was faster than Steam's. And Steam did it a day later and it beat the speed of the other thing. It's a little bit of Pepsi-Coke fighting going on, but it was this example of, oh, they are all doing, everyone's doing this. And it's not just to take something and build it from the ground up, like these guys have done where they've tried to recreate these things from nothing.

28:06Scott Johnson: You know, in the case of Steam or other applications floating around out there, they're going to their existing code base and going, it is time to lighten this up, clean this up, and do it quicker. Because that sort of project, it's not like people don't fix their software all the time, but sometimes it takes a year to really overhaul something. Old code, different language, we move to this, new protocols, whatever.

28:27Stephen Robles: Even with these tools, it can take a long time because, again, I think people don't understand. You don't just tell CloudCode, make Photoshop, and it puts out a fully formed clone of Photoshop. It puts out something that has a lot of bugs and things don't work exactly, and it misinterpreted this and that, and then you have to go, as a developer, figure out how to tweak that. Now that it's an open source project that everybody can contribute to, it's going to get better faster because it's popular and a lot of people are working on it and they're all using these tools. but that doesn't mean that everything happens overnight.

29:01Stephen Robles: It's definitely going to speed up development of things like that. But it doesn't – I think some people looked at this and said, oh, well, why do I even need ArtCraft? I could just do this myself. It's like, well, you can and you'll do it faster than you would have otherwise but the speed at which you do it will be very much dependent on how good a developer you are already.

29:19Scott Johnson: Yeah, we are entering a new phase of possibility where, you know, let's go back a little. Tom and I are old enough to remember the time in, say, the late 90s when the internet was a new, fresh thing and Amazon sold books and, you know, stuff like that.

29:35Stephen Robles: Netflix bailed discs.

29:37Scott Johnson: Exactly. And if you go back to that, nobody was making video at home. Nobody was putting together a piece of low def, let alone high def quality content pieced together, edited the way you want with the music and the stingers and the lighting and the whatnot. not nobody did that well why because the tools weren't in our hands to do it i feel like we're entering a phase now where the tools to make the software you need and forget about all the fighting online about what all this means and you know culturally or whatever financially all that stuff for just a second we push that aside not that it doesn't matter of course it does but take that discourse out for a second you're essentially saying you have an amazing web idea let's say, and you've just never been able to figure it out or have the money or the whatever it takes to get that site done, but you know, the idea is solid.

30:27Scott Johnson: Now you have zero excuse. You literally can go have Gemini do your HTML five and JavaScript and assemble the damn thing. And before you know it, you're, you're running this, this project that you've always dreamt of and it's running simply and well, and you know, it's a cloud flare and it's cheap and you know, all that stuff. Like the, the tools are just going into our hands.

30:48Stephen Robles: Yeah. Yeah.

30:48Scott Johnson: I sound pro AI here. It's a weird thing. I understand. I get it.

30:52Stephen Robles: No, I think what you're doing is giving the tools credit for what they're actually good for versus being angry for the snake oil salesman out there trying to sell you things that they're not good for. And then there's all the other fluff around it as well. Because I think you're right. The key is someone who would never be able to afford to take the time to learn HTML and learn how servers work, but has a sense of what a website should be, can make that website. It might still take them a month, but that's a month, not several years. And granted, when you and I in the 90s were coming up, it probably only took us a couple months to learn HTML and create sites and even faster in some cases, but things were much simpler then.

31:41Stephen Robles: And not everybody is into it, right? Now it's like, I don't have to be into learning HTML, I have to be learning into learning what makes a good website. And can I describe that? Well, can I plan it? Well, that makes you a web developer in the top sense, without having to know all the underneath. Now knowing the underneath is not valueless, that actually informs what makes a good web design and the best web designers are going to know how all that stuff works the same way that the best coders actually do have an understanding of assembly even if they're not doing it all the time but it's not a barrier anymore it's not a gatekeeping barrier the way

32:21Scott Johnson: it used to be yeah i feel a little bit like we haven't developed the language that we're gonna need yet yeah for these discussions because because what happens is you you have an argument even a good faith argument with somebody about pros and cons or effects or whatever. And, and you just, you don't exactly have the right ways to describe what you're trying to talk about to each other, let alone to an LL.

32:43Stephen Robles: There's a lot of, it's kind of like, and don't forget that I don't, I'm not trying to minimize this.

32:47Scott Johnson: Because as humans do, we, we have to look at the past and we look at potential and we say, well, I imagine a future and we do, that's what we do. And so it's just hard for us until we have that language to communicate kind of what we're trying to say. Yeah. Yeah.

33:00Stephen Robles: You could say powerful engine instead of, it's like a lot of horses.

33:04Scott Johnson: Right. No, that's exactly it. That is exactly it. And it will happen because it's here. We're dealing with it. It will evolve from that and we'll figure out a way to communicate about it better. But I'll give you something that is like plain in front of your face that blew my mind. One of the biggest beefs I've had with leaving Adobe, which I've done years ago, and I went and used other tools. I mentioned DaVinci for video. I mentioned Affinity Photo, which also has Affinity Designer, which is a vector program. Or maybe it's the other way around. Well, anyway, they have basically an illustrator and a page maker kind of equivalent in design.

33:42Scott Johnson: That's what it is. And they've been great. I've really enjoyed them. But they have a terrible raster to vector conversion. This is really a technical aspect of this that blew my mind. Nobody's got a good one. I don't know if Adobe's just as special. I've not looked into how many patents there are around it. But when you go in there and go trace this image or convert this image to vector, nobody's got anything better than Adobe anywhere that I'd seen for a very long time. I fired it up. First thing I wanted to try when I opened VectorCraft because I was like, that's the test of Illustrator. I barely use it to illustrate, but I use it to convert to vector all the time.

34:19Scott Johnson: And so I go in there and I do it and holy crap, it was really fast. It was really accurate. So if I said, I want this many colors, this resolution, print ready, whatever, all of those settings, I'm going to go ahead and just say it out loud. I think that engine's working a little better than the Adobe one. And that's a shock to me because I don't know how they achieved that. There are probably other aspects of that app that aren't as good. I know some of the advanced pathfinding operations between vectors and vertices, a lot of mumbo-jumbo. But basically, that stuff's not perfect. And you can have some weird overlap in places you didn't mean it to when you're creating and that sort of thing.

34:57Scott Johnson: So I know there's some bugs there. But that conversion thing, if that's all I got out of this suite, this was a huge find for me. Because I needed it. The one in Affinity Designer or whatever it's called is kind of crap. Sorry, Affinity. I love you guys, but woof. It's a bummer.

35:16Stephen Robles: Have you coded anything in Claude Code or Codex or anything?

35:20Scott Johnson: No, I haven't. So I did some front-end web stuff for my new comic strip that I run. What I wanted to do is create – this will be – if anyone out there has ever made web comics, you're going to know what I'm talking about. but there's been this long thing of like, well, if I have to, if I'm going to do a comic online, I have to have an archive and I have to have a next and previous and random and like all these abilities to do this stuff. And it used to mean, oh, PHP front end, let's get some MySQL on the back end. And you'd have to really make a thing to make it work. And it was kind of frustrating.

35:54Scott Johnson: I went into Gemini one afternoon, just the LLM, the basic light version. And I said, let's just make me a draft of like a front end for a comic. and it just needs to have, go back, go forward, give me random, have those correspond to some keys in case you're on desktop, have it be responsive for mobile. It's really it. That's all I did. I want to say, give me a light and dark option. So when people visit, they can have dark mode or light mode. And what it gave me was enough to then me go into the code, like raw, and tweak it around and fix some things I didn't like, mostly design decisions that it made.

36:26Scott Johnson: But the underlying code and the ability to make it happen statically in a bucket, basically, just running off. It's not AWS. It's Cloudflare. I essentially run that comic for free because Cloudflare costs nothing if you're doing a static site, really.

36:44Stephen Robles: Yeah, yeah.

36:45Scott Johnson: And all the dynamicness of it, the comics going forward and back and random and go to the newest, and all those things are all happening without a database, without anything special. And that would have taken me months just to do that. All I needed was that underpin, and I could go on top of that and be Mr. Creative and do whatever. So I think that maybe is where these things are starting to land. I mean, you'll always have the argument, oh, yeah, but wait until 10 years. Then you just will say make premiere and it'll make premiere. You know what I mean? It'll do it in five minutes.

37:20Stephen Robles: 10 years from now, you won't even need premiere for whatever reason. Right, exactly. 10 years is a long time.

37:24Scott Johnson: Exactly. So while they may be right or they're wrong, it doesn't even matter. What I'm seeing from the creative side of it, I'm seeing this middle ground start to show up where you see where your place might be. Where you go, oh, well, go ahead and do my heavy lifting JavaScript slash Jason file crap I have to do for these comics. Yeah, yeah. That's the least creative thing I could be doing with my time. And let me get to front ending it and then also getting these comics up and done. And let's do it really quick. Like that's an amazing thing to be able to do. And it helped me further my creativity.

38:01Scott Johnson: It didn't hinder it. It didn't replace it. It gave me more. Now somebody would say, yeah, but there's some guys out of a job who would have made that site for you.

38:10Stephen Robles: Maybe, maybe, maybe not. You may have never made it. Yeah.

38:13Scott Johnson: I probably would have never. I probably wouldn't have made it. That's the honest truth.

38:16Stephen Robles: I just say, well, that's like saying TV stations went out of business because we can stream video on the Internet. It's like sort of definitely hurt them. They're not out of business. and a lot of people are streaming that would have never streamed before. It's not that they threw people out of work. They created a whole industry of streaming video that just would never have been able to exist.

38:39Scott Johnson: Yeah, and for me, I've only dabbled on the website, really, like the mydrawings.com thing. That was all about telling it, hey, I went out and I found some JavaScript libraries and stuff that were drawing engine, like on...

38:52Stephen Robles: Ah, so you threw JavaScript workers out of work by using libraries.

38:56Scott Johnson: Basically, libraries somebody had already made that were open source.

38:59Stephen Robles: I mean, that's kind of the same thing, though. You're using code that you didn't write yourself.

39:05Scott Johnson: Yeah, a guy would have done that if I had hired this out, or I would have done it, whatever. And then it left me with room to just do the creative parts and let that stuff happen underneath. And now I've got a functioning drawing site that, again, is static. I'm not, in a way it's like, it's helped me go, oh, I don't need Instagram to be the place I show my comics. I still will. And that's still a place where people go. And that's not the problem. It's just that it's almost like going back to when the web could be yours a little bit. And it wasn't platforms. It was individuals. And I like that.

39:38Scott Johnson: Whether or not it's a profitable thing or not, I don't know. Or, you know, whether these, right now these comics aren't meant to be a profit center for me. They're a creative center for me. So I don't know what the end game is. It's not like I'm going, I'm not bro hustling about this at all, but I am hustling, but I'm hustling creatively. It's weird. It's, I realize there's dichotomies to this, that there's complications to it. I realize that it sounds like robbing Peter to pay Paul in some ways, but it's, um, I'm, I guess what I'm back to my original point, I'm starting to see where the middle ground is showing up and it's becoming more in focus where people are going to land, where the assisting will come from, where the actual work will happen, how much is really being done versus how much is being drafted, started, roughed, so that you can go, oh, that is what I meant to do.

40:26Scott Johnson: All right, I'm going to take that rough, and now it's all mine. See you later, LLM. I see that happening more with people I work with than ever. And they're all using it, whether they admit it or not.

40:35Stephen Robles: Yeah, it doesn't yet replace creativity. And like you said, maybe someday it will. so far what it is best at is aiding and speeding up and removing barriers from people who want to be creative there's a lot of promises of it doing things that it can't do well and i think that's where a lot of people do get angry uh and there's there's a lot of potentially dangerous things that it could do and we should minimize that and we should guard against that and have that conversation and we absolutely are. And that's good. But like you said, there's that middle ground and that's usually where technology ends up shining.

41:16Stephen Robles: We don't always stay in the middle ground. Sometimes you have to fight to stay in the middle ground, but the middle ground is usually where technology ends up benefiting the most people. An opposite example that occurred to me when we were talking about this is social media was welcomed as a wonderful thing when it first came along. Everyone loved it. And then the big platforms started to use it for their own purposes, bend it to their will. Some negative effects came and now everybody hates it, even though everybody continues to use it. I feel like we're going the opposite direction with these tools.

41:48Stephen Robles: Everybody's like, oh, it's another thing from the bad people. And it's like, well, yes, but there's good in him. I can feel it.

41:57Scott Johnson: Yeah, it's a little like the internet itself. And I know not every comparison is apples to apples here or anything. But when people say to me, man, the things people are doing with fake photos on AI, it's terrible. And I say, man, you should see what the internet had before. We already have some real dark corners of this thing. It's part of when you make a thing open, humanity says, most of us will be right here. but a little few of us are going to be way out on these fringes doing some dark dirt yeah and they always are whether you're aware or not it's always there whether you'd like it or not i mean there's other there's other fears about you know some of this stuff where they they're decompiling recompiling games and you know a bunch of like today there was news that broke that a bunch of um developers on steam during next fest which is the big demo fest they have every year on steam uh just floods with demos people are today pulling their demos down because nefarious actors are pulling down demos which are free uh decompiling them taking the best bits of what makes the movement great or art assets or whatever it is recompiling it in a slightly different way posting it and in some cases getting better placement on the store because more people clicked you know wish list or whatever and so people are there there are some you know big old obstacles stuff people are already stumbling across we're gonna have to deal with and figure out um but it i i guess i guess it's in that process that we'll get to what that middle ground is kind of have to go through this you know

43:29Stephen Robles: yeah uh i there's so many metaphors and examples of using technology for good or bad i feel like it's it's almost an insult to the audience uh to trot them out because everybody's heard them but but yeah it's you know it's a screwdriver it's like what people say you can fix something with it or you can stab.

43:47Scott Johnson: Yeah, you can stab a guy in the eye if you really wanted to. Yeah, I always think of driving. People use driving examples in all the wrong ways usually, but this one was kind of where it works. Today, you might look and say, oh, 33 ,000 people died today in car accidents in this country alone. Yeah. And those are real statistics and it's kind of a gnarly number. And you think, well, when did we not have that? Well, we didn't have that when we didn't have cars. There was nobody dying from car accidents when we had no cars. Well, there were a bunch people getting killed by oxes and weird horse accidents and that buggy fell down people dying

44:20Stephen Robles: of starvation because uh transportation wasn't good enough to get food to them uh which cars made possible to get food to places that you couldn't get to so it just strikes me complicated is my point not to wash it away and say so it's fine but to be like yeah there's also a lot of

44:38Scott Johnson: benefits that have come yeah basically i just i just think it's important to always remind ourselves that it's in the figuring it out that figures it out, not a binary decision at the beginning of it all. In the thick of this AI revolution, saying, I don't like it or I do like it is not enough. There's a, you got to work at where you think the value is or if you really think it's terrible for humanity, you got to do the work.

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45:43Stephen Robles: They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.

46:08Scott Johnson: and my my feeling is people end up kind of in the middle at the end of it and and i feel like

46:13Stephen Robles: it's important to remember that there's almost nothing in this world that doesn't have a downside and you can be for using things for the good and also be against using them for the bad it's and you don't have to pick one or the other it can't you you know if i say i think i can use this to do a good thing uh don't say oh so you support uh people stealing games then i'm like no i prefer they don't use it for that let's try and stop that yeah yeah because there are preservation

46:44Scott Johnson: in the gaming world there's preservation applications that are fan-freaking-tastic if we if we stewardship this right and that's always the question how how will the ships be sailed and and there's there is these tools oh this is the other thing a year ago i would have said to you, I wasn't sure, but now I'd say I'm sure of this. These models are getting more capable and smaller and they're running locally for a lot of things. And I can run on my Mac studio, a version of a 27 billion, whatever they call that. I forget models. Yeah. Parameter. That's what it is. That's like 98 % what the big boys are doing.

47:25Scott Johnson: Um, there's a little more maintenance. You got to, you know, there's new data. You got to, you know, there's all those kind of things. It's like everything else.

47:32Stephen Robles: You could, you can, you can use wordpress.com for your website, or you can run your own server, or you can have the server in your house. It's just different levels of work.

47:40Scott Johnson: And the good, and the good news is that I think that means more power to people. And it probably means that later down the road, like with social media, they figure out a way to pull that power away. And then the power exists on these platforms. And then everyone's sort of being dictated to by the platforms. Maybe that'll ebb and flow over time. It always does. Yeah. But at the moment, it's like giving people. Now, that doesn't mean I'm going to suddenly respect a guy that goes, draw me a polar bear eating a fish. Look at this fish I drew with this polar bear I made. That's garbage to me because you're not actually doing anything.

48:12Scott Johnson: It's just doing a trick. It's a parlor trick. Yeah. That this technology happens to support. But if you come to me and say, all right, well, using these things and those things and whatever, it's like a good film. I just saw Wildwood. It's amazing. The new Leica film. and it's stop motion animation, but there's integrated CGI and there's integrated photo work and there's integrated all these other things. The only thing they don't use is AI, they claim. And the net result is this beautiful coming together of all these filmic traditions and techniques and new and old, right? That's when you know creativity is happening.

48:47Scott Johnson: And so if somebody comes to me and says, I sketched this bear, but I didn't like how this turned out. So I used this tool to help me with this and that tool to help me with this. and now I'm going to hand animate it. But when I'm finally done color coding or color grading is going to happen automatically with this model I found. That's where we're at. Whether we want to admit it, we're all kind of there. Individuals, entrepreneurs, people with big companies, we're all kind of there. So it's just a matter of how much are we going to fight about it, honestly.

49:13Stephen Robles: I like what you were saying earlier about we're past the phase of being impressed, right? With every new technology, there's the like, oh my God, it made a cat that looks like a real cat. That's amazing. and then there's ah but that cat has 17 fingers i don't know if you noticed that doesn't look right we immediately start ripping down right there's a name for this hype cycle that i'm blanking on right now i'm sure someone in the comments has already said it's this tom um but there's that hype cycle of like we're overly impressed we're overly under impressed and we level back out and we're like oh it's actually really good for this but not so great for them yeah nobody marvels

49:52Scott Johnson: today that they can connect to a server in Germany and pull a file over in seconds. But I'll tell you what, dude, there was a time in 1996 where that floored me. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. It was unbelievably cool that I could do that and do it quickly. And it was there. Now it's here. We were basically teleporting stuff. Yeah. And nobody thinks that way now. We have telemetry happening in the air now. It's just all over the place and we don't even think about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're headed towards something like that with this. And it's because whenever these things come and they spike hard, it's like, oh my gosh, this came out of nowhere.

50:28Scott Johnson: Like in the last three years, really. Yeah.

50:31Stephen Robles: Just... Except it didn't. Everyone working in the industry has slow motion watched it. And all the people at OpenAI were like, really? ChatGPT is the thing you're excited about? We didn't think it was that great. And then, yeah, it just took off. And then it took off from there.

50:44Scott Johnson: And it's a little bit like the internet itself. when HTML happened in 94, it exploded. It became a thing of everybody's life, and you couldn't ignore it. But it had been going on since the 60s.

50:54Stephen Robles: I definitely remember in the 90s talking to people excitedly about the web, and they're like, I don't know. Sounds like work. What do I have to use to get it? I have to sit down at a computer? I think my son has one.

51:09Scott Johnson: We're in that cycle again. The question is, where does this one end? Who knows? But all I know is like projects like the Artcraft Project are interesting in the sense that they don't feel like they're sticking it to Adobe, but they don't feel like they're sticking it to people and creatives. It feels like it's saying, nope, these tools should be freely available at this point.

51:28Stephen Robles: That's one of the keys to their success is they went after somebody that no one likes. Yeah, everyone's mad at Adobe. They also haven't been sued by Adobe. So I think they probably did some careful prompting not to violate patents. so that obviously must have helped because there are all kinds of trade dress and things that they could have stepped on that would have gotten them in trouble and Adobe has not gone after them yet. We'll see. Maybe they still will. Maybe they're gathering their powder. But yeah, it's the Gartner hype cycle, by the way.

51:58Scott Johnson: There you go. Gartner. I'd heard that before. The Gartner hype cycle. Who was he? Someone came up with that?

52:02Stephen Robles: The Gartner group is an analytics group. They do like, you know, they used to be the ones who published like, this is the best-selling game console but then they started keeping that stuff behind the paywall it wasn't a guy that

52:12Scott Johnson: took care of your yard and your garden and you called him the gardener and he's and he one day

52:16Stephen Robles: just said he was like gardener tom gardener yeah and also here's that cycle and he's really smart

52:24Scott Johnson: but uh i should mention real fast uh that if you're like well i don't care about the creative suite what about like productivity stuff uh i would recommend checking out grid craft and check out uh wordcraft these are very very very i don't i'm not even that big of a word or excel user but for what i use those apps for this seem to do swimmingly okay so something to look at if even if you're not a creative you're just like i need a if you're a libre office person perhaps same deal because the libra stuff i believe that oh i didn't have any libra files to test this on but i think it's the same as pdfs it will open libra directly it will also open doc and doc x and all the docx is the big one right yeah that's the big one now and the docx files it will also save to those uh output to bdfs like all the stuff you needed to do it'll do now they're going to be some spreadsheet nerds out there that go oh man i tried it and gridcraft is not up to my pivot table did not probably yeah because i mean people do some crazy stuff with spreadsheets right no excel masters y 'all are wizards and yeah i do a lot of show notes and lists so it's not really the same But anyway, that was impressive.

53:31Stephen Robles: I do a lot of exports from other tools.

53:33Scott Johnson: Yeah, and maybe the biggest one is Filmcraft because a good premiere alternative for people who just want to make content and not worry about bottom line or justifying$80 a month, whatever. It seems like, at best I can tell, I had zero problems with that. I made a video, exported it, 4K, 1080p, multiple formats, tall stuff for socials, wide for regular shows. Just no problem. Just all worked. I'm sure there are bugs. I just didn't play with it enough to really report any. But overall, it's pretty impressive. And this is acting as a bit of a catalyst for me to start to see the possibilities.

54:14Stephen Robles: Yeah.

54:15Scott Johnson: Because some other things have happened. Remember, this is real quick, but do you remember the app? and you may still use it even because they did finally start updating it again, but it's called Levelator for audio. Fantastic little Mac tool. People have been using it for years. For a while, it was just gone and the developers seemed to have abandoned it and you had to run it with Rosetta and all this other stuff. It has been more updated lately, but there's this dude, he's a podcaster. I wish I remember his name, but I can at least mention the name of this software. He's got an app called Leveler that is, I think, built in Rust.

54:45Scott Johnson: It's so stinking fast, but it's the same thing, but you can take not just audio files and have them in there and do it. It will do multiple so you can cue them. And you can also throw an entire long form 12 gigabyte video file, an MP4 in there that you need to send to YouTube. But you're like, well, I don't want to take it into an editor and then edit the, you know, normalize the audio there and then re-export the video. That'll take, you know, these things all take time and they're resistant to your time. This thing will take the video without changing anything or saving a new file and just amp the audio to normalization in there.

55:22Scott Johnson: And this just came out of nowhere the other day. It's called Leveler. I've been using it. It's great. No complaints. It'll also take MP3s, not just waves and AFES. And I'm starting to see that happen with someone who have a little app, and it's very quick to put together because they didn't have to, again, it didn't take as long as it would to do it all from scratch. They had some help from an agent. They used Cloud Code, whatever. but they also had a very specific design in mind and they refined it to make it do a really cool thing and i i don't know how we not get excited about that that's just exciting to me i'm i can't wait for the feedback you're gonna get because there are gonna be some people who really take issue before i'm at with this but we'll see we'll see how it goes i found multiple app store apps called the leveler oh this one is just leveler uh let's see um where did i get i got it right from the site that he runs yeah uh and it didn't it had all the the apple um you know they're a picky about whether it'll run your app or not it needs to know it or whatever i forget that's signing yeah the signing stuff that all worked without me having to worry about it it's for mac yeah it's a mac thing is it let's see leveler know your game nope that's not it man there's a lot of things called leveler i'm gonna find this and get it to you in post but it is uh oh So, you know, maybe if I went to About Leveler, Stephen Robles is his name.

56:47Stephen Robles: Stephen Robles. Okay, good. That's one of the ones I was seeing, and I was starting to suspect that was the real one. So it's good to have that.

56:53Scott Johnson: He's also a podcaster. He does some YouTube stuff, but his beard.fm is the website. If you go to his apps link, there's a bunch. Oh, he's added some new ones. Anyway, there's a transcriber in there. It's really cool. Let you output to markup language. There's video editing stuff, all kinds of neat things. but the leveler one was like a godsend because I was like, okay, here we go. This is doing way more than I need to have an app like this. So there's just a lot of that going on. And he makes these, he's like, these are free. If you want to throw me a buck 99 or something, we'd love it, whatever.

57:26Scott Johnson: Just one of those kind of guys. I miss when the internet was like that a little bit more.

57:30Stephen Robles: Yeah. And like you said, it seems like this is allowing it to sneak back in, put some control back into more people's hands.

57:37Scott Johnson: A little bit. Yeah. Yeah.

57:38Stephen Robles: Well, Scott, thank you very much for hanging out. It's always easy and a pleasure to chat with you about this stuff. If there are, and I'm sure there's at least one person who doesn't already know where to find your stuff, where should they go?

57:52Scott Johnson: Well, they should go. Whether they will or not is really up to them, but they should go to frogpants.com. And the comic I mentioned is linked up top. It's called New Duck. There's a link to that My Drawings Project, which I'm still working on. It's kind of a work in progress. but you can see all the podcasts and everything else I have going on, um, all their frog pants.com. And I'd love it. If you wanted to reach out, there's contact stuff there. If you want to reach out and take issue with anything I said today or, or, uh, you know, share some cool examples of stuff you've seen. Let me know. I'd love to hear it.

58:21Stephen Robles: Fantastic. Thanks again, Scott. Thank you. It was great. Thank you everybody for watching or listening. Uh, this concludes free preview week. I hope everyone who is a free patron enjoyed getting all the episodes, all the bonus posts all week long. It also, October 31st is the end of Half-tober. Our 50 % off Patreon ends today. So if you are listening to this on Friday the 31st, hurry, get over there, get the Patreon for 50 % off. If it's November 1st, email me, feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com and use the code word DUX. And I'll get you your own discount, all right? but don't tell anybody else I did it.

59:06Stephen Robles: Thanks, everybody. Have a wonderful rest of your weekend. We have an author's tech roundtable coming your way and then back to the news on Monday. Talk to you then.

59:23Scott Johnson: This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this broker.

59:38Stephen Robles: With the Spark Cash Plus card from Capital One, you earn unlimited 2 % cash back on every purchase. And you get big purchasing power, so your business can spend more and earn more. Steven, Brandon, and Bruno, the business owners of SandCloud, reinvested their 2 % cash back to help build the company's retail presence. Capital One, what's in your wallet? Find out more at CapitalOne.com slash Spark Cash Plus. Terms apply. This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping.

1:00:16Stephen Robles: Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. Thank you.