Opinions here are my own.
- Completely the opposite experience.
- I understand why this is important. I’ll try my best to see what we can do :) Thank you for the great feedback.
- Thank you (long-time Affinity user and fan, and Canva employee here :)
Re. on-device AI features: these still have significant training costs; and Canva as a whole has paid hundreds of millions to date in royalties to creatives, including for AI training.
Affinity is free, forever; but not open source; if that makes sense.
- I know, I hear you. We want to prove to be the exception to the rule. If you think about this from a macro and game-theory perspective, I hope you can see why _genuinely_ “free, forever.” is in our best commercial interests, long-term.
On a personal level, I hope we don’t let cynicism prevent mission-driven companies trying to do good and customer-positive things from succeeding.
- I’m also a loyal Serif customer, love Affinity, and I work at Canva.
This is not the first step in that. It’s not anywhere close to our plan.
We want to make Affinity, and professional design, the default tool. And a huge part of that is free, forever.
AI features; like generative fill, have COGS and incremental inference costs. Hence that’s an _optional_ subscription.
I understand why you feel that way. Having being involved, the biggest factor to acquisition & joining forces was our shared mission and beliefs; not things like financial engineering.
I hope you can judge us by our actions. It’s you, who we try to build the product for <3
- Hi, Canva employee & Affinity user+lover for 10+ years (pre-acquisition) here.
That’s not true. We really do want to make all design, including professional design, as widely accessible as possible; including those who can’t afford it.
I understand this could be interpreted as ‘corporate PR’, but even from a game-theory sense, you’d want to maximize the top of your funnel, which is free users.
- It was good value! There’s few good value CPU’s sadly. I remember using my ryzen 3300x for years and years; it got me by on a budget.
- Yup. The limited decoders meant your pipeline just wasn’t flowing every cycle, because many of the stages were sitting idle.
- As a photographer with over 50,000 photos in my iCloud, getting new iPhones is a pain.
- Oil-plastics will increase in cost as it becomes more scarce.
Bioplastics are increasingly popular, research is making it better and easier to produce, etc.
I don’t fret over a plastic wrap. For one, if it’s bread in a supermarket, I want it wrapped, I don’t want someone’s sneeze on it.
Plastic for fruits and veggies that you rinse, that’s absurd.
- This is probably done by their recruitment division.
- That’s right, Tor doesn’t mean your traffic is completely hidden for the public web. It just attempts to break the link.
The list of exit nodes are public, it’s not a difficult exercise for Five Eye to intercept like >90% of its traffic through the ISP or backbone level.
- I run a Tor exit node (not just relay) in Australia from my residential home for about a decade now, and I’ve gotten contacted by multiple law enforcement officials now, although not frequently anymore.
Thankfully each and every one was resolved quickly when I explained I run a Tor exit node, to help people in dictatorships bypass their censorship. I’m surprised actually.
It’s probably on file somewhere which is why I haven’t been hassled for years now.
- Or perhaps the E-Core team continues their strides and the design side becomes competitive again. AMD used to be uncompetitive after all; tides can change, and I think people are dooming too much. Intel still has a chance.
Part of Intel’s problem is their ‘P Core’ team absolutely sucked for a decade.
- There’s a lot of market for ARM chips. I can totally see the likes of Mediatek giving Intel an explore if the costs are right.
- I’m not defending Intel here, but those Intel MacBooks never had appropriate thermal design or headroom for the processor’s operating specs.
- Well, they’re already funding so much ARM custom design, it’s not that incremental to tweak and scale for their laptops.
- Yup. Let’s see how they do with Arc. It takes multiple years and architecture revisions to catch up, and honestly they’ve been making very respectful improvements from Alchemist to Battlemage, and driver support and updates have been progressing very well.
I hope they don’t can it.
- Why do you say that’s most likely?
This is a common pattern for connecting to smart cards / hardware security devices. Probably a service or hardware that’s run on official CBP machines that should be disabled for prod, but forgot.
https://docs.unsloth.ai/get-started/fine-tuning-llms-guide