As an artist, this isn't incredible. Arranging lights/darks to copy a photo is high-school tier. Money for food + shelter + materials and I could do this in a month, as with anyone who can copy a black and white photo.
I'm serious. The world is rife with things the "don't seem like a big deal" only in retrospect, when people downplay innovations as "no big deal/anyone can do that" when something comes on the scene that a lot of people connect with.
Heck, I feel like your response is the art equivalent of this top comment on the original Dropbox Show HN submission by Drew Houston:
> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
> Well then, why didn't you come up with it first?
This is never a good question. It doesn't take much imagination to substitute X in "Why didn't you come up with X first?" with something of no value. Obviously, if someone finds something to be of no value, then they would not have come up with it, would they. Or at least they would not have pursued it.
Rather, one must give reasons for believing something has value. (And I seriously doubt this is "new", though novelty is itself irrelevant. Valueless things can be "novel", too.)
IMO, this glass technique is maybe interesting, but it is also sort of gimmicky, at least as presented.
He's replying to a post that says it's "new, unexpected, and incredible" and he specifically only addresses whether it's incredible. I think, especially in the spirit of "assume the strongest interpretation", you can probably assume that an artist is well aware of the value of novelty and is quite specifically not disputing it.
Obligatory reminder that the Dropbox thread ends with "I only hope that I was able to give you a sneak preview of some of the potential criticisms you may receive. Best of luck to you!" The comment didn't dunk on Dropbox as an idea, but pointed out that they would need to highlight their moat wrt copycat competitors in order to convince sceptical investors.
The artist in question is presumably not raising VC money, so concerns about long-term viability of the niche if other artists start imitating the style probably don't apply. (Maybe it's even the reverse situation, where increased production of cracked-glass art raises the profile of the trailblazer and increases the demand for "originals.")
Calling observational realism high school tier while working in 3D (as per your profile) is hilarious given your medium automates the very thing you are belittling and is literally taught these days at elementary school!
Any serious artist would respect technical competency. I guess that says a lot about your credentials “as an artist”.
Any time you interact with the financial services industry in a meaningful way, they are doing almost exactly all of these checks on you. It is mandated by law, and they're overseen by FINTRAC in Canada and FinCEN in US.
When you applied for a bank account for your freelancing business (or startup idea), some people googled you, looked for PEPs (politically exposed persons) in your family, stored photos of your IDs and probably even printed them off, and sent everything in a nice package to some "risk" department. Who knows how that department is handling your data.
The only difference is that Persona is trying to put a front-end on it and selling the process as a SaaS. Look up "KYC/KYB saas" and you'll find hundreds of businesses doing this (including, of course, Persona).
edit: I want to emphasize that this isn't restricted to just business banking. Poor wording on my part. Lots of industries are legally mandated to conduct KYC/IDV. Notaries do it in home sales, your stock brokerage is doing it, employers in regulated industries do it to everyone on payroll. The list is very long. Unfortunately...
The government should take on responsibility for KYC imo, instead of letting 100 vendors come up with their own solutions. But that would probably have some nasty externalities.
Laszlo Polgar would disagree [1]. He contends that raising a genius is something you can actually target intentionally (whether or not you should). His proof being 3 daughters who became GMs and one that was a generational talent. As far as audibles go, that’s quite a flex. Yes, the daughters are not all equally talented and chess isn’t quite the same as math, but we’re talking about gradiation within an achievement only reached by much less than 1% of all active players. To me that’s genius level. Also, it’s not necessarily an accident that the youngest is the one to have attained the best result. Evidence is quite clear that older siblings can help their younger ones achieve more faster because the younger ones see it as a path to follow/if they can I can.
Even if you disregard the anecdote (n=1) thing, it's quite obvious that genius has a genetic component to it, and the father being a good chess player tilts the odds in his favor quite a bit.
Also, the idea that chess is a good proxy for genius is a bit out of date.
Laszlo was casual amateur at chess, and it's an n=3 sample at least. Though one sister 'only' made it to IM, but that was likely more due to social reasons. She decided to get married, have a family, etc rather than continue on with chess as actively as the other sisters.
> Also, the idea that chess is a good proxy for genius is a bit out of date.
He wrote that the reason he chose chess was because it was objectively measurable. You play the game, you either win or you lose; there is no way to dispute the outcome.
Imagine that you have dozen children, each of them genius at something different, and that you are surrounded by people who want to prove you wrong. Whatever the artistic genius does, the people who hate you can simply say "yeah, he did something technically impressive, but it's lacking the... nebulous artistic qualities that only we can judge... therefore, not a true genius". Now the chess genius comes and wins every tournament against the adults, there is no way to argue that "yeah, he won all the chess tournaments, but... for some reason we still don't consider him to be a chess grandmaster".
That's just utilizing potential already present there and nurturing it far, the father was an established chess player and university professor and their mother is probably in similar range. Sure, it works, why would anybody argue against or find this shocking or relevatory?
Try the same with babies who are already visibly not the brightest (say in kindergarden group), their parents are also average or worse regarding intelligence. There is a ceiling, it may be high or not but its there. If you haven't experienced it in your life you are one of lucky few (and certainly didn't push yourself hard enough to sense it).
Same goes with memory - you can train it far, use various techniques. Then comes somebody natural (yet still far from what we would call genius) who didn't bother with any of that and immediately surpasses whatever was achieved. We are not created equal and all have hard boundaries, be it health, cognition, body regeneration and so on.
Data point: my comment prompted different reasons for why Polgar was successful: it’s genetic, he had time to spend with his kids, he was a professor, his kids all happened to be gifted, if you go to a kindergarten class you’ll already see kids that aren’t bright. Clearly more comfortable for explaining away because it forces us to look at why maybe we aren’t geniuses or our kids aren’t.
> Same goes with memory - you can train it far, use various techniques. Then comes somebody natural (yet still far from what we would call genius) who didn't bother with any of that and immediately surpasses whatever was achieved.
It’s always hard to compare how much effort and for how long they’ve been applying it between people. Someone starting earlier can make them seem like a genius. Someone who spent time developing their memory through various games may feel like they spent no time on it and “it’s natural” while someone else had to explicitly work at it instead because they never were encouraged to play memory strengthening games.
> We are not created equal and all have hard boundaries, be it health, cognition, body regeneration and so on.
Thats true, but the same was said of height but height only became 90% genetic once we fixed nutrition. I see no indication that our systems of parenting and child rearing are robust enough to make intelligence and academic outcomes purely genetic. It’s far too chaotic and you need to apply consistent effort daily almost from birth before the intentional learning stuff even happens. Making sure the mother is in good physical shape before birth, taking all the supplements before and after birth, limiting exposure to toxic stuff, making sure the baby is getting a good mix of engaged play, time to be chill, and exercise, making sure both parents are able to keep the child engaged and studying and understanding of expectations, adjusting the environment appropriately as they develop so they’re constantly challenged and enjoy and seek out challenges, that’s it’s emotionally and psychologically safe for the child, riding the balance of a little bit of frustration and recovering from that vs no frustration or frustration without a break, etc etc etc. a bunch of that happens before you start academic play to teach verbal and math skills and each of these is an add on (eg we know physical education is important for brain development).
Data point: I was at a prenatal class and after the nurse said marijuana isn’t good for the baby, one of the parents was asking “but like what’s the actual limit before it’s harmful”. So don’t be too sure that “surely kindergarten is early enough that kids are still on equal footing”. Another data point is I know a parent that has a 4 yold that doesn’t know how to read nor write because “he’s stubborn” nor is he going to preschool. Yet every parent that I know of that’s applied effort has their child typically by 2 or 3 and writing by 4/5 which is when basic math should already be going.
Nowhere did I state that there aren’t natural limits. But I also think academic achievement isn’t 90% genetic - there’s plenty of “naturally gifted” people who go on to not achieve anywhere as near as much as those who just work - perseverance trumps almost everything and environment trumps that because that’s how you learn perseverance.
The closest to the truth for Polgar is he had time to spend with his kids, but mainly because he prioritized doing so in a way to help them grow. Also, he did so with help from his wife. He wasn’t a chess prodigy. He chose chess because there was a clear demonstratable progression that a) could be used to demonstrate his theories b) his kids had immediate feedback on success c) could repeat the game endlessly to try out various tactics d) they studied chess as a family.
I agree, not every child can become a genius. Most of the reason for that today is less because of a learning disability or “physical limits” and more because of the environment the children are raised in (and the need to teach them perseverance and to keep trying regardless of how others are achieving).
Yes, but that kind of aristocratic tutoring is not scalable to the bulk of the population. You need the equivalent of deep PhD expertise in every subject to accomplish that, and even AIs are nowhere close to that level.
This is irony. The study is stupid, society has reached a stupid stage of development. Kiki and bouba explain nothing and serve nothing. Culture is in shambles.
If you add a dialectic between Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.2 (not the Codex variant), your workflow - which I use as well, albeit slightly differently [1] - may work even better.
This dialectic also has the happy side-effect of being fairly token efficient.
IME, Claude Code employs much better CLI tooling+sandboxing when implementing while GPT 5.2 does excellent multifaceted critique even in complex situations.
[1]
- spec requirement / iterate spec until dialectic is exhausted, then markdown
- plan / iterate plan until dialectic is exhausted, then markdown
- implement / curl-test + manual test / code review until dialectic is exhausted
- update previous repo context checkpoint (plus README.md and AGENTS.md) in markdown
adding another external model/agent is exactly what I have been planning as the next step. in fact i already paste the implementation and test summaries into chatgpt, and it is extremely helpful in hardening requirements, making them more extensible, or picking up gaps between the implementations and the initial specs. it would be very useful to have this in the workflow itself, rather than the coding agent reviewing its own work - there is a sense that it is getting tunnel visioned.
i agree that CC seems like a better harness, but I think GPT is a better model. So I will keep it all inside the Codex VSCode plugin workflow.
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