Technology

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.