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Comment by cowlevel | Hacker News Reader

People are literally doing it right now since about a month ago, and the industries are losing their minds. Most notably some guy just decompiled all the Adobe products, made them free to use and without bullshit, and published them under the name ArtCraft. There've also been successful "port this Mario game to a Skyrim mod", "port this PS5 game to run on PC", and so on.

In the upcoming lawsuit, Adobe is either about to destroy the AI industry by collecting massive damages, or Anthropic is about to destroy the software industry by effectively making software non-copyrightable. There's no other outcome.

And making your software SaaS won't help because the AI tools can infer a server-side implementation based on enough examples of behaviour.

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From what I've gathered, and I'm still feeling like I'm missing something, most people don't seem to be doing that. They seem to pass the binary in, say to decompile it, and out the other side is something that looks similar but not exact. https://youtu.be/qFEuYUfauNY .

On the recent WAN show LTT said they tried the recent Photoshop clones and they were buggy, feature missing messes. If they were truly reverse engineer decompiles (minus needing a subscription) they would work just as well. But they don't so they're not.

the adobe suite clones are vibe coded clean room implementations, decompiles on the other hand should compile 1:1 to the existing software, and we have ways to verify that's the case. recompiles from my understanding of the term are somewhere inbetween.

AFAIK ArtCraft is not a decompilation and more like some kind of dodgy re-implementation that barely works.

That's the view you hear from doomers - the view you hear from boosters is that it's basically Adobe quality. I haven't tried it so I don't know which is actually true.

I also heard a lot of people rave about Affinity and all kinds of Lightroom alternatives, but so far I found it all terribly disappointing and am back to CS5 and Lightroom 4 (because I own those on disc)… There is a lot of useless hype around.

No chance the AI industry gets destroyed. China wouldn't care if Adobe somehow sued and won (so really it would just be America destroying its economy), and this point nvidia could buy Adobe and shut it down mid lawsuit just to make it go away.

> There's no other outcome.

Wow, what an interesting binary when 80% of all cases end in settlement.

Meh I don't think Adobe has anything there. AI is just a tool. Are they going to sue Microsoft and Dell just because those two were involved in the laptop used to instruct the agent to do the thing?

Are they gonna sue the user's power company because they supplied power for a nefarious activity without making the human agree to use it for innocent purposes only?

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