It's an iOS app that applies various generative art effects to your photos, letting you turn your photos into creative animated works of art. It's fully offline, no AI, no subscriptions, no ads, etc.

I'm really proud of it and if you've been in the generative art space for a while you'll instantly recognise many of the techniques I use (circle packing, line walkers, mosaic grid patterns, marching squares, voronoi tessellation, glitch art, string art, perlin flow fields, etc.) pretty much directly inspired by various Coding Train videos.

Direct download link on the App Store is https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photogenesis-photo-art/id67597... if you want to try it out.

* Coming to Android soon too.

I started out in all the usual ways - inspired by Daniel Shiffman making generative art first using Processing, then p5.js, and now mostly I create art by writing shaders. Recently after being laid off from my job, I actually took my obsession further and released my very first mobile app - https://www.photogenesis.app - as a homage to generative art.

It's an app that applies various generative effects/techniques to your photos, letting you turn your photos into art (not using AI). I'm really proud of it and if you've been in the generative art space for a while you'll instantly recognise many of the techniques I use (circle packing, line walkers, mosaic grid patterns, marching squares, voronoi tessellation, etc.) pretty much directly inspired by various Coding Train videos.

I love the generative art space and plan to spend a lot more time coming up doing things in this area (as long as I can afford it) :-)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47332019

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

eg. See [1] which finds: "The report shows a rapid change over just five years. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of incoming students whose math skills were below high school level rose nearly thirtyfold and 70% of those students fell below middle school levels. This roughly translates to about one in twelve members of the freshman class."

and

"high school math grades are only very weakly linked to students’ actual math preparation."

There is simply no way you can dangle an automatic homework and assignment solver in front of kids and not absolutely destroy their motivation, desire, and ability to learn.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/annaesakismith/2025/12/11/uc-sa...

I'm honestly shocked by the latest results we're seeing with Gemini 3 Deep Think, Opus 4.6, and Codex 5.3 in math, coding, abstract reasoning, etc. Deep Think just scored 84.6% on ARC-AGI-2 (https://deepmind.google/models/gemini/)! And these benchmarks are supported by my own experimentation and testing with these models ~ specifically most recently with Opus 4.6 doing things I would have never thought possible in codebases I'm working in.

These models are demonstrating an incredible capacity for logical abstract reasoning of a level far greater than 99.9% of the world's population.

And then combine that with the latest video output we're seeing from Seedance 2.0, etc showing an incredible level of image/video understanding and generation capability.

I was previously deeply skeptical that the architecture we have would be sufficient to get us to AGI. But my belief in that has been strongly rattled lately. Honestly I think the greatest gap now is simply one of orchestration, data presentation, and work around in-context memory representations - that is, converting work done into real world into formats/representations, etc. amenable for AI to run on (text conversion, etc.) and keeping new trained/taught information in context to support continual learning.

My fundamental argument: The way the average person is using AI today is as "Thinking as a Service" and this is going to have absolutely devastating long term consequences, training an entire generation not to think for themselves.

I actually disagree with Andrej here re: "Generation (writing code) and discrimination (reading code) are different capabilities in the brain." and I would argue that the only reason he can read code fluently, find issues, etc. is because he has spent year in a non-AI assisted world writing code. As time goes on, he will become substantially worse.

This also bodes incredibly poorly for the next generation, who will mostly in their formative years now avoid writing code and thus fail to even develop a idea of what good code is, how it works/why it works, why you make certain decisions, and not others, etc. and ultimately you will see them become utterly dependent on AI, unable to make progress without it.

IMO outsourcing thinking is going to have incredibly negative consequences for the world at large.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46776034

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46494527

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

For one, many of these companies are now used to their tech teams being remote. The tools, culture, infra, etc. over the last ~5 years has all become remote which lessens the shock of going fully offshore.

Two, many tech teams in the western world are already partially offshored and have been for some time now. I know where I worked, a reasonable % of the team was already offshore in low COL countries (India, etc.). What's happening now is just the expansion of that cost saving after initial testing of the waters was successful.

Three, the quality gap between offshore teams and their western counterparts is now much smaller, and AI will be used to lessen the gap even further (along with just throwing more bodies at each problem which you can do when your salaries are 1/3rd of what they are here).

Four, many products/services now have captured markets with strong network effects, which means they can weather a heavy degradation of services with little to no loss of customers. It's called enshittification, and businesses are doing it now because they absolutely know they can, and get away with it.

And this isn't about AI (well, not primarily anyway). It's offshoring, offshoring, offshoring.

IMO, what's taking place now is absolutely transformative and the world economy is in the process of being reshaped. It's not just tech jobs that are being offshored - we're just one of the first/early movers. Many other professional/white-collar jobs (accounting, etc.) are also getting offshored at an accelerating rate. And it's happening all over the western world - it's happening in the US, it's happening in Australia, Canada, the UK, etc.

And unlike previous periods of mass offshoring, I don't think the jobs are ever coming back.

We're so in search of novelty, we ignore the bus steadily making its way straight towards us as we stand in the middle of the road, doing absolutely nothing - and with no hint that anything or anyone will come to save us - and instead we keep reading tea leaves and imagining more fascinating and wonderful dangers that have a near zero chance of manifesting before the bus hits us.

To some extent, the bus ending is just too boring it seems for anyone to really become engaged by it - narratively speaking.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40165941

Points: 9

# Comments: 1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39773499

Points: 30

# Comments: 19

We're in the middle of the sixth mass extinction right now (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction), we're in unparalleled territory with ocean warming: (https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/) and as a society we are utterly incapable of reducing CO2 emissions (https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/).

If you're scared of AGI, instead step away from your monitor, put down the techno-goggles and sci-fi books, and go educate yourself a bit about the profound ways we are changing the natural world for the worse _right now_

I can recommend a couple of books if you'd like to learn more:

Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency (https://www.amazon.com/Our-Final-Warning-Degrees-Emergency-e...)

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (https://www.amazon.com/Uninhabitable-Earth-Life-After-Warmin...)

Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant's Guide (https://www.amazon.com/Hothouse-Earth-Inhabitants-Bill-McGui...)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39197960

Points: 25

# Comments: 13

One area I've studied pretty extensively is the history of cancer treatment. In the long story of the history of cancer treatment, it is absolutely scandalous how often the scientific consensus was wrong and persisted for years in spite of the evidence. For example, the radical mastectomy for the treatment of breast cancer continued to be used for many years, leaving many women disfigured, in spite of wide evidence that it did not produce better outcomes vs more restrained breast tissue removal.

In the history of science, many of these kinds of bad ideas have persisted simply due to deference/seniority - the incentives are all stacked towards paying your dues and not challenging the status quo and absolutely not towards being right/following the actual scientific method. There is a reason the saying "Science advances one funeral at a time" exists - as Max Planck noted: "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

I don't think many people outside of academia truly understand how much scientific research has degraded over the years.

There are an extremely small number of fields in which the overall quality is still quite high (mathematics, etc.) but overwhelmingly the social sciences, medical science, etc. are wastelands of p-hacked, low-N, biased, poorly designed studies that can't be replicated (not to mention the outright frauds and absolutely rampant plagiarism).

Every intelligent person should be deeply, deeply skeptical of papers published in particular fields over the last ~20 years.