Academic Aesthetic

Last month AI started making the news in a new, horrible way: Some guy is vibe-coding copies of popular commercial software and releasing it as “open source.” PetaPixel has more information about this train wreck, if you’re interested.

Said person also seems to really dislike the stuff that’s out there in the open source community already, according to Tech Radar. I can understand why, since reputable open source projects like LibreOffice tout a lack of AI code as a feature. If the best you can do is have an AI plagiarize code for you while telling you you’re brilliant, you’re going to get snippy at the people who want you to actually understand the “work” you’re trying to say you did.

You may have guessed, but I don’t like anything about this. Sure, I’ve no love for Adobe or Microsoft, but slopified copies are not inherently better and they seem to be getting tons of publicity right now.

This isn’t one of those cases where I invoke the “let them fight” meme from Godzilla, because I don’t want either of them to win and ONE of them seems to be winning just by existing in the present news cycle.

OK, calming down, now. Mostly.

Instead of continuing to rant, how about I share some tools I’ve been using, in some cases for literal decades, as alternatives to the “big tech” things that have been getting progressively worse. This won’t be an exhaustive list, just a few of the ones I use most often.

And yes, I use all of these on Linux, but most/all of what’s mentioned here has versions that also run on Windows and Mac.

Inkscape instead of Adobe Illustrator

If I could have only one digital visual art tool on my computer, this would be it. It’s my go-to for anything involving vector graphics. I keep getting told that my students NEED to know Adobe Illustrator by people who think being the “industry standard” means you have to work for them to keep them the industry standard. I teach my students to use Inkscape because those people are wrong.

Kdenlive instead of Adobe Premiere

For a long while my goto video editor was Openshot, but I’ve been using Kdenlive for a few years now and I don’t see any reason to go back. It does everything I need out of a video editor, including captions, chroma key, key frames, color correction, and so much more. If it had a “Truncate Silence” tool like Tenacity has I’d use it as my default audio editor as well.

LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office

The software so despised by the affore-not-mentioned vibe coder that he called it out by name, I’ve been using LibreOffice and, before that, its predecessor, OpenOffice, since I was a MacOS user in the early days of this website.

My employer is mostly a Google Docs shop at this point, but every now and then a legacy MS Office file is needed for one reason or another. None of my coworkers know I’m using LibreOffice instead of Google Docs or MS Office unless I tell them, which is important when you’re aiming for compatibility between software suites.

Tenacity instead of Adobe Audition

This is my go-to audio editor. I used to use Audacity, but that open source project was bought by a for-profit company and I jumped ship early on. Tenacity is a fork of Audacity that keeps things as they were – usable, with no AI. They had a bit of a rough start at first, but that was years ago and it’s been a blast to use ever since.

Their absolute best feature is the “Truncate Silence” effect, which I use to automate removing long pauses from a recorded conversation. Some of my podcasts are over 2 hours long before editing, and running that once can cut out a half hour or more in tiny little chunks spread throughout. It’s not done with AI! The tool was inherited from the Audacity code and predates AI slop by a decade or more. I used to have to do that by hand back when I used Garageband.

Waterfox instead of Chrome or Firefox

Google makes the primary browser for accessing the internet, especially when you realize most of the alternatives are built using Chrome and therefore have a lot of the same problems.

A lot of us switched to Firefox, but the people in charge of it seem dead set on adding AI “features” that we don’t want and have to jump through hoops to disable.

That’s where Waterfox comes in. It’s based on Firefox, not Chrome, but the people behind it have torn out/disabled the AI nonsense and added more privacy tools. There’s even a built-in adblocker, though all the Firefox plugins like uBlock Origin still work.

Alysa Gavilan has an article on DIY Photography asking what happens when you stop buying new cameras. As is my way, I’m not summarizing that here. I’m just using that article as a jumping off point for my own thoughts, and pointing out where the inspiration is from as a way of saying thanks.

Considering that my DSLR of choice is a Nikon D5100 (a camera that was first announced in 2011), I can tell you: You learn to use the equipment you have and get to keep your money.

Well, mostly. There’s footnotes to both sides of that conjunction.

The Money

It’s been said that every hobby’s a bottomless pit that one tries to fill with money. Even if you pick something low cost, like, say, local nature walks, you end up getting more comfortable shoes, hiking poles, maybe a nice camera to photograph what you find along the way…

Oh, yeah, cameras. We were talking about cameras.

Point is, if you have something in your hobby where you say “I don’t need to toss money here,” you’re likely to find something else that looks like it has lots of room for cash. I bought my refurbished DSLR in 2022, and since then I’ve replaced the camera bag twice, snagged a half-decent telephoto lens, and let’s not talk about tripods right now.

Still, I have the money to do that because I’m not buying $600+ cameras every time there’s a new innovation.

And yeah, $600 is an entry level price, at best. The review sites I follow keep talking about new cameras that cost thousands as if they’re good deals. for some people, they are, but we’re talking here about how Olympic athletes will have custom outfits designed to best reduce wind resistance. I am so far removed from that level of innovation.

I just want more control over how I can take pretty pictures, and I have that with my 15 year old camera.

The Learning

If I upgraded to a new DSLR or one of the mirrorless models people really like these days, I’d have a new interface, new button placement, and likely new options to confuse me and get in the way of taking a good photo. For how I use my 5100, I know where all the buttons are that I want to use.

OK, adjusting the ISO’s a bit of a pain, but I learned photography back when you had to grab a new roll of film to change your ISO, so it’s still an upgrade.

But this doesn’t mean I know how to do everything with the camera. I know the features I use most often, but because photography is a hobby first I haven’t sat down to integrate every knob, dial, and menu setting into my mental image of my image saver. I likely never will, because given the option I’d rather keep taking the kinds of photos I enjoy taking, and I know how to do that.

Final Thoughts

Far be it from me to tell you to avoid upgrading a camera if you can afford a newer one and really, REALLY want one. (I still think you should buy used, but I’ve written enough about that for now.)

As for me, I don’t just have a camera that does what I need. I have one that has room to upgrade (lenses, mic, etc.) and more buttons to learn.

I still listen to the PetaPixel podcast when they review new cameras, but never with the idea that I should seriously consider whatever they’re really fond of that week.* It’s oddly freeing to keep an eye on a market when you know you don’t have to be part of it.

*(OK, I did buy some Camp Snap stuff after they talked about it, but it was in spite of their reviews, not because of it.)

There are few things that make me more upset these days than a company encouraging artists to betray other artists in favor of AI slop. Adobe famously did that, as reported by PetaPixel. (They later tried to clarify what they meant, but in my opinion it did a better push to get photographers off of Adobe products than any ad campaign run by a competitor. Photographers weren’t their target audience, though.)

Well, I’ve found something that’s close. Apparently Ricoh and DJI are fans of using slop in their ads, which is strange as you’d think camera companies should have a photographer or two on the payroll, right?

I’m going to assume that neither company has enough faith in the quality of their hardware to consistently show us images made with their cameras, even cherry-picked ones.

I’d love to end this post on a happier note than this. I want to shout from the rooftops that open source exists, and it does, but open source hardware isn’t so much a thing.

Of course there’s used hardware. Aim for that and not a single penny goes to the manufacturer. That’s getting harder to do, as prices for used equipment continue to increase.

So how about this.

How about we just make art. Let’s celebrate what we can do. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It doesn’t even need to be good. It just needs to be ours.

We don’t need to think about Ricoh, DJI, or even Adobe when we do this. We can use whatever tools we have, perhaps borrowing or loaning things where needs and surpluses exist.

I don’t think that’ll solve the problems here. I don’t know how to do that.

But I know sometimes it’s worthwhile to find one’s joy anyway. I find a lot of mine in art, so I’m going to go make some.

Find your joy.