this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2025
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The line between helpful tech and quiet surveillance is blurring — and our devices no longer feel fully under our control.

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[–] IonTempted@lemmynsfw.com 22 points 14 hours ago (3 children)

I mean tech innovation has been stale for a long time, even with hardware remember how the CPU market was before Ryzen? Completely dead, Intel was sitting on it's morals doing nothing because they were owning the market 10 to 1, but even now that I've got my i7-10700 I don't see any point in upgrading.

Software side? It's a mess companies will always be greedy, just today I wanted to upscale something with the cloud because my PC is great for 90% of the things I want to do, Upscaling is not one of those but guess what Topaz asks for credits in order to use their servers, yes CREDITS, so I said bye bye. I've also said bye bye to Adobe and moved on with Davinci Resolve.

[–] Joelk111@lemmy.world 3 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

bye bye to Adobe and moved on with DaVinci Resolve.

This is the way. I skipped Adobe entirely due to how they conduct business. I really wish Resolve had better Linux support though. Like, it works and I use it, but having to use a third party tool (make resolve deb) is ridiculous.

Additionally, Gimp is just not on the level of Photoshop, at least from what I understand, I've never used photoshop. I mostly long for smart select tools where I can, for example, just circle a person and have them selected. Also, content aware fill would be incredibly nice to have. Of course neither of those things are worth shoveling money out of my wallet into Adobe's.

[–] IonTempted@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Affinity Photo 3 is also free and it's kind of like Photoshop, I haven't tried it yet but I've heard good things

[–] ch00f@lemmy.world 29 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

sitting on it’s morals

Assuming that's not a typo, the phrase is "sitting on its laurels".

[–] lemmy_get_my_coat@lemmy.world 10 points 13 hours ago

And they definitely have no morals

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 4 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

For upscaling, check out chaiNNer: https://github.com/chaiNNer-org/chaiNNer

And openmodeldb: https://openmodeldb.info/

It’s quite possible your PC can do it with Vulkan just fine, and if not, you can rent something online pretty cheap.


Also, for video processing, if you know any Python check out vapoursynth.


This highlights the problem: the primary obstacle to a lot of software enshittification is accessibility, and discoverability.

Once something like Topaz or Premiere gets SEO, it starves all the other cool efforts out there as they get buried under spam.

What people want often exists. They just don’t know it, or it’s too technically demanding to set up and no one is “in the middle” packaging enthusiast experiments to be accessible.


I don’t know how to solve this either. The open internet is getting worse, niches are moving to Discord, and it feels like people are losing patience to really dig for cool stuff. Heck, I see some open source efforts spin up, with thousands of man hours dumped in, without even a cursory check to see what they want already exists and is looking for contributors.

[–] IonTempted@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Honestly this is more complicated as I'm looking for something that just works, maybe I'll set it up later and yeah I've got an AMD GPU so upscaling is much much slower.

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago

See: https://openmodeldb.info/docs/faq

The GUIs are basically just as plug-and-play as Topaz.