For those like me not up on the hip memes: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-world-if

This is just Moscow

As someone in the UK, this was especially chilling.

Looks like Machinarium. I like it.

If it could add mold and rust stains to the concrete it'd be perfect.

This was the first thing I thought of, and it's gotten the hug of death now; thank you for uploading it.

the world if autumn comes

Does anyone have a mirror? I’m in authoritarian UK so the link is blocked

Ugh, this looks way too real...

You are a genius.

What would happen if you run it on a spacecraft? Blank image comes back?

Pretty much any place with brutalist architecture, really. I'll happily take pretty much any revival or classical style over "modern" or brutalist style.

There's nothing more depressing than walking by beautiful historic old buildings only to turn a corner and see a monstrosity of concrete and glass somehow reaching the epitome of bland and uninviting.

Apart from some lucky places, most of the world cities looks like this or worse.

> someone finally made Poland-filter

The UK is feeling left out and would like a word.

Before the dystopian black and gray fad arrived most buildings that went up were sort of OK. And I didn't mind the pastel paint on commie blocks either. But a decade ago someone decided that gray cuboids with asymmetric windows were an improvement...

Even so, I think North American cities are on average uglier than most Polish ones. Overall we're not doing so bad but I want the Slavic city memes to continue lest we get Prague or Amsterdam level tourist invasion.

This will be an unpopular answer but one way that could have worked is just good ol' advertising, because it directly converts "virality" into income.

Any solution that requires the user to bust out a credit card and put down his billing address has way too much friction for the median user to get through.

> Is there a better way?

Yes, UBI. Then you can create what you want and your livelihood doesn't depend on it going viral.

There have been alternatives suggested. While better is a subjective term, most alternatives have either not been successful or have not yet meaningfully achieved a level of success to matter.

Flattr took one approach without much success. They represented the problem well though. When someone does something that is of a small but not insignificant benefit for a large number of people, how should they be rewarded? When the reward due, divided by the number of people paying for it, gets low enough it seems to not reach a threshold that it makes sense for any individual to pay.

You could charge a fee above the threshold, and many people do take this path. It is essentially requiring a small number of people to massively overpay to cover those who don't pay at all.

A Universal Income takes the approach that if everyone gets what they need there is no particular requirement to be monetarily rewarded. You essentially have been rewarded for whatever it is you do.

Advertising plays the small threshold thing both ways, They offer you a chance to sell a little corruption below your threshold for thinking it is damaging, and in return they accumulate the corruption and the money and send you the money and deliver the requested corruption to their customers.

Part of the fundamental difficulty is in determining the size of the reward due. How is that determined? There are plenty of people who will offer services to do that if it means they can take a cut. I don't see that path going well unless it is a mechanism governed by strict non-profit rules, and even then I would have doubts.

A purely rule based system would be intrinsically unfair and subject to gaming, but often times this turns out to be the least worst solution. By agreeing to a set of rules people can accept that while flawed, adhering to them by agreement can make a system that cannot be taken over by a malicious individual.

In short, right now, No I don't think there is a better way. There may be people with a financial interest that it remains that way.

> Is there a better way?

If one's visitors are gamers, perhaps one might use gaming payment providers to sell an "supporter badge"? But that's perhaps be pushing their envelope.

If one's visitors are from the "rapidly-developing world", with well-adopted candybar-scale micropayment systems - China, India, Indonesia, Brasil, Kenya, SK, Sweden... hmm. Direct access from elsewhere seems still very limited, but perhaps one might use a global payment gateway like Adyen? My impression is transaction cost is more than $0.10 but less than $1.

In the "less-rapidly-developing world", X.com has been working towards a similar superapp with Visa for the US. The Visa/MC duopoly seems to have shifted from its years of preventing US micropayments, to something like "maybe 2030-ish".

I built a browser extension for a hackathon that enabled crypto payments direct to site owners. "registration" was just sticking a formatted payment address in a DNS TXT record, and if you were at a supported website, the extension would light up, and facilitated payment.

I still think it's a neat idea but I can't be bothered to build a real version

Ideally the model would be run locally in the browser, so the author isn't paying whatever they're paying. But the web standards to do complicated stuff locally aren't there yet and probably will never be.

That's not a practical answer but it's my two cents.

My view may be as realistic as these architectural drawings but I've long thought that some sort of micro payment system would address a lot of problems, many more significant than tipping software developers.

Youtube has this model with Preimum. If Chrome rolled out Chrome Premium, (and copied the Brave BAT model of paying sites you give attention to), I'd be happy to pay.

I had an idea for a library used to collect how much you owe who:

https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/FUTOmeter

Guy who posted this is actually a VC (not sure how big).

Thanks for the highlight. Doesn't seem like there's much activity on his Ko-Fi for being on the front page of HN. I sent him a tip, although privately.

It should be tasteful ads for the AI companies that are making money... Oh wait, I instantly see the problem with that idea.

Unfortunately, it doesn't actually tell you that information: it just turns a dial. What you want is to know how much that dial would be turned by bad weather.

That's the 'built by the lowest bidder' feature. Probably pretty realistic in a lot of places.

It's GenAI. It does something that's kind of like what you asked it to do, but it will skip some details or add other ones or whatever.

Dreary architectural pictures will be more likely to have electrical boxes, poor materials, etc, so when it moves the buildings from the latent space for cheery bright architectural renderings to dreary wet November architectural renderings, it will be more likely to add some of those details, because that's what's in its latent space.

Don't expect GenAI to be magic.

It's not a filter, it's an image editing model

Au contraire, in a rather realistic way

It's not that bad actually. Over the years stuff like electrical installations, cables and random manholes often get retrofitted in an ugly way to existing architecture.

I was actually going to comment on the main post, how well tuned the AI seems with it's placement of random electrical wires and junction boxes that seem to match my impression of renderings-vs-reality.

Halfway to The Last of Us conversion for Fortnite

It's interesting that the video game style of the images is still preserved. I actually expected the outputs to look like real photographs for some reason.

They stole the ravenholm sign

Top one having some Fallout vibes.

That first scene especially looks like straight out of Fallout 4 but with a better lighting engine.

Sandy Strip is a low rent strip club right? Based on the name and logo it can't be anything else... Anyhow, that looks like GTA to me.

Nice, it made it back into PUBG :)

That looks like a specific level in Left for Dead 2

Fallout!

Top: Sandy Strip

Bottom: Shady Sands

I mean now they just look like early Fortnite!

It's some Loveable app thing. Fun idea though

Maybe a real picture of the actual bridge was in the training set? Similar to how prompting for a story about a boy wizard can result in verbatim Harry Potter passages.

I think the third is plaza de España in Madrid, Spain. I was actually wondering why it looked familiar.

The bridge looks much better than the anti-shine version in person (no boxes!), though they replaced the glass due to vandalism.

To some extent they probably want to express that this is a render, rather than tricking people in to thinking it’s a real photo.

Seems fairly simple to me: stop with the naked concrete and brutalist architecture. Old houses before that trend tend to look way nicer regardless of weather. (I'm not an expert on exact architectural style names, so I can't be more exact that that.)

It feels Snapchat already has beauty filters as standard. Or you can also spot the beauty filters glitching out all the girls dancing on Tiktok/IG, e.g. their eyelashes would be somewhere else for a split second...

Hah, like connected cars talking to each other, the AR goggles/lenses will talk to each other so each person can broadcast a unified beautifed version of their face to others.

Maybe the Grok AR goggles will have Grok features...

That's black mirror level content.

Can we re-engineer LSD so the only effect we can get is how colors look 12 hours afterwards?

Very “futurological congress” thought

Same here. Disappointing. I wanted to run it on that picture of a church that looks like a chicken.

This was exhausting to read. Don’t you ever have fun?

No, it would look like this, just not exactly like this. Say, the fancy bridge example has some rust runoff but no obvious metal for it to come from. Other than that, the guess is quite believable, and certainly much more so than the render.

You do to fun what this website does to pictures.

A new CA law is addressing this somewhat:

> Under Assembly Bill 723, real estate agents and brokers who display photos of a home that have been digitally altered with editing software or artificial intelligence must include a “reasonably conspicuous” statement “disclosing that the image has been altered.”

https://www.sfchronicle.com/realestate/article/california-la...

I can imagine the reverse model could be very profitable with every real estate agent using it to make dreary photos look great.

this landing page is a lead gen tool for the architect at the bottom

And water meters too. And the rust on all the welds is chefs kiss.

Huh. I kinda like 'em. I've spent a good deal of time loitering in areas like this, of my own volition. Unsurprisingly, I tend to like emo music too. Maybe I'm a salmon, happiest fighting against the current.

Doubt it. Demoralization is what they're after.

Just wait till Meta comes out with AR glasses that do!

thanks for helping people to lie

Works great. I hate it.

That's like every new building I've seen around here. Developers plant trees directly into compacted soil and then they grow half a foot within 10 years and then die in a hot summer. The building owner then just leaves them in because it's easier than taking them out.

I have to say both the leafless trees and electrical box spawning is very on point for what you would find in eg Belgium. Check this full blown ugly building/container that spawned in the beautiful Liege Guillemins station https://maps.app.goo.gl/T1J7WwCCYDvBgJEc7