This was precisely my first thought upon reading. "Ah, yes - the attack that was PoC'ed against commissaries operated by the US armed forces a bit over a month ago."
There are a few of us around who still make them. I do film photography and have my own darkroom already for that purpose. Adding holography on top of that is a relatively minor lift, and every once in a while the urge strikes and I'll get the equipment out.
The main challenge is that there are, to my knowledge, only two remaining manufacturers of the plates - in France, and in Russia.
While I love this idea generally, the scope of the use of generative AI for artwork is too vague for my comfort.
The README.md mentions that "no art is AI-generated, though some has been retouched with AI." Superficially, that sounds mild. Some of the other closely-related projects, however, use different verbiage, or none at all.
For those of us with ethical concerns around generative AI application to artwork, much more detail may be needed before we could decide if this was appropriate for us.
Nothing at runtime uses AI either, at least in the sense of LLMs or diffusion. The collage is Pillow and numpy, and detection is BirdNET, which is a classifier, not a generative model.
However I have used LLMs for code-related work, and for writing scripts for programatically editing the images, like cutting, contrast and colour corrections.
Wait, are you telling me that macOS has gotten so ensh---ified that many of its users feel the need to purchase a bespoke file manager, arguably one of the most fundamental functions of an operating system?
Surely this is a very specific product for a very specific class of users? This can't be a widespread need, right? RIGHT?
(Context: I haven't used modern macOS in roughly a decade and have no idea what it's like these days)
I had a gap of 5-6 years of not using macOS, now I'm kind of forced as I want my cross-platform native applications to also be available on macOS.
The file manager definitely got a lot worse than it used to be. It doesn't even seem like you can properly move up/down the directory hierarchy anymore with just the keyboard, I think the sequence of holding down "CMD" then spamming "up arrow" no longer takes you to the root, as just one example of workflows they've broken since then.
In comparison though, Windows' file browser is a completely dumpster-fire that sometimes takes 10-20 seconds to load for me, in a relatively barebones Windows 11 installation with 0 network drives. The only stuff that keeps being the same or slightly improving, is the various file managers on Unix/Linux systems, although Gnome's latest iteration took some time before it was as good as the previous versions, for whatever reason.
Finder has always been crap. When Windows Vista came out, using Finder was like playing with a toy. IYKYK.[1]
Sadly, it has received effectively zero updates since. The only amazing things about the Finder are column view and QuickLook, both of which we've had forever
For reference, both Windows Vista and QuckLook came out nearly 20 years ago. TWENTY.
[1]: One example: you could customize it to show fields from your MP3 files, including the artwork, and *edit* the files inline. Some goes for EXIF. macOS, today, won't even show you something as basic the image dimensions (not file size)
In the Menu Bar of the Finder go to View -> Show Preview Options, then you get a dialog where you can select which info should be shown in the preview.
I think it's more people would rather built their own opinionated file manager than explore or understand how much Finder can really do. This app does a tiny fraction of what Finder can do and has been able to do for decades.
It's not a widespread issue but it's hardly new. DiskTop was an add-in that's almost as old as the Mac itself, and PathFinder has had a business model for most of the life of OSX.
Alternative file managers are arguably a healthy property; the alternative is the phone where you cannot compete meaningfully with the Files app. And Finder works for most basic needs, something which is not true of its mobile counterpart.
I suppose it's similar to how people used to buy things like Directory Opus. The point isn't so much that the default one doesn't work. A bunch of functions like those listed here, e.g. batch rename and easy image conversion, would be a great help to power users, and should be better than having to install a separate program for each one.
I doubt it's aimed at everybody, but it shouldn't need to be. Software tailored to a specific group's needs is likely to be better for them than something too generic.
I think most of us software engineering (or related) people don't use the gui interface for file management. I've been using macOS for the last 20 years and I only used the gui for files like 10 or 20 times maybe. Not sure who the target audience is but at $19.99 I would pay a lot of money to have a list of the people who bought the app.
Apple makes good hardware but their software is really sucky nowadays. Finder was always crap but today even Windows Explorer is crap so all the default OS file managers stand in the same shit pool.
During the days of my Powerbook G4 and 1st gen Intel Mac days, I used to use Path Finder [^1] over the native Finder, as it provided a richer and more comprehensive toolset. The base Finder wasn't bad, but Path Finder did more. Totally understand in today's era why you might jump to enshittification as the reason for this. Sometimes though, someone see the functionality a tool does, and goes "I wish it did this, but a little bit more".
This seems to me like a stab in the right direction.
Obviously their actions are going to be fiscally motivated at the root, but sussing out how they intend the precise dynamics to play out is more nuanced.
Thinking of this as an effort to woo the defense hawks cuts a very clear path.
While I love the sentiment, I feel like the odds of this actually ever reaching a trial are low, given the international positioning of the parties, and the... um... complex relationships involved.
Anthropic's actions seem performative. Others have already speculated on the likely audience(s).
> While I love the sentiment, I feel like the odds of this actually ever reaching a trial are low ...
As cited in a peer comment here[0]:
In June 2025, Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District
Court for the Northern District of California ruled on
summary judgment that using books without permission to
train AI was fair use if they were acquired legally, but he
denied Anthropic’s request for summary judgment related to
piracy—finding that the piracy was not fair use.[1]
Of note in the judge's finding; "the piracy was not fair use".
It seems to be nearly forgotten that Once Upon a Time, business and scientific computing were more or less different universes.
The two paradigms eventually merged, but there was a problem: it wasn't really a merger. It was more that scientific computing became the implied default, and simply absorbed new and emerging business use cases over time, and actual business computing languished in senescent obscurity.
Scientific computing precepts are dreadful at business use cases (and the reverse is true as well). For an example, one need look no further than the horrors of IEEE 754 in financial calculations, which even Microsoft has admitted are a problem(1).
Now here we are. Every "general purpose" computing architecture and platform out there - from Windows on x86-64 to macOS on aarch64 to Linux on RV64 - is derived from the scientific computing lineage and paradigms.
Small wonder that modernizing and porting decades-old business software is a nightmare.
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