Singapore does actually look like the renders.  By and large.

That is something I&#x27;ve found over the years with traveling.You watch a bunch of travel videos and think the place you&#x27;re visiting is going to be so different but its just the same overcast sky and ocean and washed out color palette as home.Once you remove all the filters, color correction, and drone shots from influencer travel videos a lot of places look the same IRL.

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

Before the dystopian black and gray fad arrived most buildings that went up were sort of OK. And I didn&#x27;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&#x27;re not doing so bad but I want the Slavic city memes to continue lest we get Prague or Amsterdam level tourist invasion.

Brutalism does make for some sweet Quake maps, however: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qbj3.slipseer.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qbj3.slipseer.com&#x2F;</a>

Hard disagree. This is what brutalism looks like in sunny, subtropical Brisbane, Australia: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;commons.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;File:QPAC_Exterior.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;commons.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;File:QPAC_Exterior.jpg</a>If the straight concrete isn’t your thing, they’re also currently extending it with a glasshouse: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.snohetta.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;queensland-performing-arts-centre" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.snohetta.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;queensland-performing-arts...</a>

I never understood the dislike for brutalist architecture. To me, at least it looks like something. It&#x27;s got soul and expresses an artistic idea even if that idea is &quot;the overbearing power of the state&quot;. Personally, I&#x27;d take that over the soulless glass and steel buildings that seem to be today&#x27;s alternative.

As someone who likes many cases of brutalist architecture, I wonder if you&#x27;d explains why many of the examples I like are in Mexico whereas many of the negative examples are in the UK.

Pretty much any place with brutalist architecture, really. I&#x27;ll happily take pretty much any revival or classical style over &quot;modern&quot; or brutalist style.There&#x27;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.

The British invented Brutalism, the eastern block perfected it.

&gt; someone finally made Poland-filterThe UK is feeling left out and would like a word.

There are plenty of grungy spacecraft images out there.Buran in storage: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;edition.cnn.com&#x2F;style&#x2F;article&#x2F;baikonur-buran-soviet-space-shuttle" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;edition.cnn.com&#x2F;style&#x2F;article&#x2F;baikonur-buran-soviet-...</a>Image link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;media.cnn.com&#x2F;api&#x2F;v1&#x2F;images&#x2F;stellar&#x2F;prod&#x2F;171031111319-baikonur-rueda7.jpg?q=w_1110,c_fill" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;media.cnn.com&#x2F;api&#x2F;v1&#x2F;images&#x2F;stellar&#x2F;prod&#x2F;17103111131...</a>

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

There should be a effect intensity slider. East Germany &lt;-&gt; Poland &lt;-&gt; Russia

It really nails the Boston &#x2F; MIT campus in November vibe.

Wow, someone finally made Poland-filter. It all looks exactly like I&#x27;m used to.

Looks beautiful tbh. I prefer the greyness

I think they use their eyes to see the Peace Bridge and were saying it&#x27;s fairly close to their experience. :D

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.

Third one is definitely Madrid, I live there. I can say that the real life looks much better than the Antirender image.

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

Yeah that&#x27;s what I mean, I love crossing the Peace Bridge

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

&gt; From the site: Get back what it&#x27;ll actually look like on a random Tuesday in NovemberIt&#x27;s Calgary. The landscape will be a lot snowier anytime in November.

That&#x27;s literally thw worst pic I can find of that bridge and it&#x27;s still looks good even with the temporary fences:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flickr.com&#x2F;photos&#x2F;zawaski&#x2F;52752097083&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flickr.com&#x2F;photos&#x2F;zawaski&#x2F;52752097083&#x2F;</a>

That&#x27;s funny, the second example is the Peace Bridge in Calgary.On a nice day the render actually looks close to the real thing!

What a beautiful and nostalgic game that was. I’ve never had a game hit me like that since!

OK this is too fun. I did Reverse Anti-Render on a dreary scene in Moscow:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;mqMEPUl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;mqMEPUl</a>

Or Dundee. The third &quot;after&quot; pic needs more Surron tracks up the grassy bank though.

It seems you haven&#x27;t been to Moscow for the last 20 years. With all the oil money + cheap workforce it looks much better than EU capitals.It is rather Novosibirsk.

It&#x27;s funny to see as a joke, but you can go the other way with this too. Image editing models and LoRAs for &quot;previz-to-render upscaling&quot; workflows are actually incredibly useful.I was just writing about this (scroll about halfway down to the images of Sam Altman - though if you like that, do watch the second video):<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getartcraft.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;world-models-for-film" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getartcraft.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;world-models-for-film</a>The best model I&#x27;ve found for this, that almost bakes in full ControlNet capability, is oddly gpt-image-1.5. It&#x27;s absolutely OP at understanding how to turn low-fidelity renders into final draft upscales.Here are some older experiments:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;previz-to-image-gpt-image-1-5-3fq042U" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;previz-to-image-gpt-image-1-5-3fq042U</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;gallery&#x2F;previz-to-image-gpt-image-1-x8t1ijX" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;gallery&#x2F;previz-to-image-gpt-image-1-x8t1ij...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;aOliGY4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;aOliGY4</a>I just wish it didn&#x27;t require invoking such heavy-weight, slow, and expensive models to do this. I&#x27;m sure open models will do this work soon, though.

It&#x27;s funny how know your meme has to sanitize the 4chan out of memes.The &#x27;how society would look without x&#x27; has been a racist trope on 4chan since way before the cited examples.

What’s going on with that (robot?) dog leash?

For those like me not up on the hip memes: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;knowyourmeme.com&#x2F;memes&#x2F;the-world-if" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;knowyourmeme.com&#x2F;memes&#x2F;the-world-if</a>

If you&#x27;re in the UK in January, you can probably just look outside and that&#x27;s approximately it.

The rimigo proxy works for me: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rimgo.vern.cc&#x2F;a&#x2F;nFQN5tx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rimgo.vern.cc&#x2F;a&#x2F;nFQN5tx</a>

The link is blocked by imgur themselves, not the British government (authoritarian or otherwise), because the ICO was going to fine them for historic poor handling of children&#x27;s data. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ico.org.uk&#x2F;about-the-ico&#x2F;media-centre&#x2F;news-and-blogs&#x2F;2025&#x2F;09&#x2F;statement-update-on-imgur-investigation&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ico.org.uk&#x2F;about-the-ico&#x2F;media-centre&#x2F;news-and-blogs...</a>

&gt; Does anyone have a mirror? I’m in authoritarian UK so the link is blockedHere you go. I had it uploaded after hearing from the magospietato&#x27;s comment but then saw you talk about the same so I am pasting the same image link here as well<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.catbox.moe&#x2F;c4smhd.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.catbox.moe&#x2F;c4smhd.png</a>

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

For context, internet has been nerfed in the UK, because of Epstein scandal politicians there started thinking too much of the children.

As someone in the UK, this was especially chilling.

This was the first thing I thought of, and it&#x27;s gotten the hug of death now; thank you for uploading it.

If it could add mold and rust stains to the concrete it&#x27;d be perfect.

It&#x27;s ironic because it looks like a picture of a dilapidated 2000s &quot;millennium park&quot; type of location which are common in the UK.

&gt; Complete aside, but it&#x27;s beyond infuriating I need to enable a VPN here in the UK to view this link.Here, I uploaded the image to catbox.moe if anyone&#x27;s interested.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.catbox.moe&#x2F;c4smhd.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.catbox.moe&#x2F;c4smhd.png</a>I don&#x27;t think that catbox is blocked within the UK.

Complete aside, but it&#x27;s beyond infuriating I need to enable a VPN here in the UK to view this link.

That may be quite close to the truth. Here are pictures from some abandones pavilions from the 2000 World Expo in Hannover. Sad to see this, as I lived in Hannover at that time and had a really good time at the Expo.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vergesseneorte.com&#x2F;die-expo2000-in-hannover&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vergesseneorte.com&#x2F;die-expo2000-in-hannover&#x2F;</a>

This looks like the average abandoned World&#x27;s fair location from the 2000s

Looks like a lot of the &quot;millennium&quot; architecture (late 90s-early 00s) we have around my home city.

For however brief a moment. It&#x27;s gone now.

&gt; Thank you for submitting to &#x2F;r&#x2F;memes. Unfortunately, your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):&gt; Rule 1 - ALL POSTS MUST BE MEMES AND FOLLOW A GENERAL MEME FORMAT&gt; All posts must be memes following typical setup&#x2F;design: an image&#x2F;gif&#x2F;video with some sort of caption; mods have final say on what is (not) a memeReddit mods, man.

I was also wondering how the image got 16k+ views (as of now) (the stat was on imgur)I was wondering what&#x2F;how many HN users clicked on the image (not knowing it was uploaded to reddit too)But now I seriously wonder out of those 16k (as of now), how many were&#x2F;are from the hackernews community and how many from reddit.

Your image made the reddit front page: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;memes&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1qrwa2l&#x2F;society_without_the_shine&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;memes&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1qrwa2l&#x2F;society_with...</a>

This looks like a scene out of Enterprise.

I ran it on the &quot;society if...&quot; meme lol<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;nFQN5tx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;nFQN5tx</a>

It&#x27;s infinitely better than nothing.

As long as it&#x27;s not changing the form of the buildings, it seems valid. Although, the first two examples both add random telecom cabinets in places that don&#x27;t make much sense.

Depends where you live I guess. For me that looks exactly like November here

Unfortunately, it doesn&#x27;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.

This is ingenious and actually useful. I&#x27;m looking for a new apartment and I always wanted to know how do these places look in a bad weather, because that&#x27;s when I need beautiful surroundings the most.

They still look great on a rainy November day. A nice cozy, quiet vibe.

This drink is not a smoothie, it is a blend of fruits and berries.

How is it not just a midjourney prompt? The liberties it takes seem to be better described by &#x27;upload a picture, and AI will be told to make it dingier&#x27;. Can&#x27;t people already do that ad nauseam?

It&#x27;s not a filter, it&#x27;s an image editing model

Huh, I wonder if they trained it by feeding it architectural renders and &quot;what actually got built&quot; photos...

That&#x27;s the &#x27;built by the lowest bidder&#x27; feature. Probably pretty realistic in a lot of places.

I have a suspicion that the author of this might have asked the model for those utility boxes.

Yeah - same things I noticed with people enthusiastically using genAI for old photo coloring. Initially it looks awesome, until you realize it can even alter the human face in such a way, that it no longer looks like that person.My father was really happy with some old photos colored, until I pointed out he does not look like him. Strangely enough he wasnt bothered...

It&#x27;s GenAI. It does something that&#x27;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&#x27;s what&#x27;s in its latent space.Don&#x27;t expect GenAI to be magic.

I put in an image and it generated piles of shipping pallets along a walkway.It also added drainage that would actually improve the building.

This filter seems to also change some architectural details and features, as well as degrade the quality of some materials in an unrealistic way.

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

Reverse model aimed at estate agents already posted in this thread by someone: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46829566">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46829566</a>

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

I am very curious if this app is making money or are users just using the two generators and then leaving? If so I am very impressed with your wrapper around the image gen models.

Nano Banana is indeed a powerful model :)

Halfway to The Last of Us conversion for Fortnite

That looks like a specific level in Left for Dead 2

Sandy Strip is a low rent strip club right? Based on the name and logo it can&#x27;t be anything else...  Anyhow, that looks like GTA to me.

I mean now they just look like early Fortnite!

It&#x27;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.

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

Used it on some Fortnite screenshots, I&#x27;d play that depressing version!<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.catbox.moe&#x2F;i8tfkl.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.catbox.moe&#x2F;i8tfkl.jpg</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.catbox.moe&#x2F;mw8vbc.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.catbox.moe&#x2F;mw8vbc.jpg</a>Then I thought what would it make from an already dark and grim scene, like HL2 Ravenholm<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.catbox.moe&#x2F;d7z77h.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.catbox.moe&#x2F;d7z77h.jpg</a>but nothing really? Just made the whole thing a different color scheme + changed some architecture

One of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth books features this as a whole chapter, the first of the Cugel books I believe. I don’t know of an earlier appearance of the concept.

&quot;MORE&quot; by Mark Osborne (1999) did it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=cCeeTfsm8bk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=cCeeTfsm8bk</a>

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&#x2F;IG, e.g. their eyelashes would be somewhere else for a split second...Hah, like connected cars talking to each other, the AR goggles&#x2F;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...

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

Very “futurological congress” thought

And the real killer app of contact lens AR will be ... this in reverse.

Ha this is great - I always thought this would be a brilliant application for AI.

Wow. Umm, the &quot;free generations&quot; limit is running on a client-based honour system...

It would be great if I can run this as a browser extension that works on Zillow and Redfin.

Geez, I&#x27;m reminded of a business student&#x27;s idea of &quot;Uber for photoshoppers&quot; (this is ~20 years ago): you upload your picture, you say what you want changed, and I guess you pick which photoshopper&#x27;s work looks convincing from a marketplace of them...He had a website, and the sample pic is a girl lying on her back, and in the &quot;after&quot; picture she&#x27;s wearing a bigger cup-size..

I don’t see it as lying any more than adjusting exposure or white balance on a camera does.It doesn’t add or remove anything from the scene, it just fixes bad lighting, color cast, perspective, and sharpness, basically what any decent photographer already does in post.If anything, it helps photos reflect how the place actually looks in real life instead of dark, crooked, yellowish snapshots.

Just kidding. I bet you will do very well marketing it to estate agents and AirBnb renters. It&#x27;s just the &quot;prettification&quot; of the world which gets to me. I hate Instagram for the same reason. Just grumpy me.

I did exactly the opposite with <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;prontopic.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;prontopic.com</a>

Used it on the line. That got dark fast..

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

It&#x27;s some Loveable app thing.  Fun idea though

Getting a 402 error payment required when I try to run this, I&#x27;m guessing all of the credits for the API account have been used up. Great idea though!

I wanted to run it on renders from the owner&#x27;s website

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

I keep getting &quot;Edge Function returned a non-2xx status code.&quot; Run out of tokens?

It&#x27;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&#x27;s placement of random electrical wires and junction boxes that seem to match my impression of renderings-vs-reality.

And that potential feel is as fake or even less realistic than the renderings it is supposed to criticize, just in the other direction.

This is not about accuracy or logic, but for showing a potential feeling and atmosphere of the places.

These necessary things are usually missing from the original plans as people who do these have no idea how actually cities function, so oftentimes they are an afterthought and actually look like that. It&#x27;s like when you look at pictures of electric appliances and they almost always hide the cords.

What is it with people?Is there some weird force dropping electrical enclosures on bridges (the cables on top even?) and random places in the street.Those random protruding manholes next to two other drainage gates nowhere near a slope?Why are these even the examples.This is just like turning the HDR tone mapping up to 200%

Yeah, both are good additions - in moderation. I think the model just went into extremes with them.

If they are young trees along the side of the road, generally they are broken off at the stump by a car before they can grow, and then you&#x27;re left with an empty tree well.

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&#x2F;container that spawned in the beautiful Liege Guillemins station <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;maps.app.goo.gl&#x2F;T1J7WwCCYDvBgJEc7" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;maps.app.goo.gl&#x2F;T1J7WwCCYDvBgJEc7</a>

That&#x27;s like every new building I&#x27;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&#x27;s easier than taking them out.

The absolutely 100% leafless trees stretched my suspension of disbelief a bit. They look less like &quot;end of fall&#x2F;beginning of winter&quot; and more like &quot;dead&quot;.Also, the model goes a bit overboard with the electrical appliances. I had to laugh at the bridge one.Apart from that, it&#x27;s a great idea!

This does more than remove shine. It makes every building look like it&#x27;s in the UK!

The rust stains in realistic locations on the bridge is very well done.

This is just a Nano Banana wrapper I imagine.

I am patiently waiting for LARP AR glasses that have all kinds of these filters.

Doubt it. Demoralization is what they&#x27;re after.

Excellent idea. So many modern buildings age so poorly. Maybe this will give some starchitecs a bit of a pause...

Aha, make it drab, soviet, and raining filter. Peak hipster, I love it.

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

I like how it adds random electrical boxes everywhere.

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.

you are right but this would take actual science and desire to make good things.

This would be useful if it actually did some reasoning about the effects of aging on different materials, consequences of certain design decisions, etc. It&#x27;s not doing that at all, and so it&#x27;s just misleading instead. If you actually built these things and took pictures years later it wouldn&#x27;t look like this. Some things would look better and some would look worse. So you can&#x27;t use this to make decisions about what to build.

This would be really useful if it came in a real estate photo version.  Turn the photos that agents post back into the photos they took.

POST <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fjtwtlaryvoqohkwnbwd.supabase.co&#x2F;functions&#x2F;v1&#x2F;transform-render" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fjtwtlaryvoqohkwnbwd.supabase.co&#x2F;functions&#x2F;v1&#x2F;transf...</a> 402 (Payment Required)Function error: FunctionsHttpError: Edge Function returned a non-2xx status code:(

please take this down before architects find this forum

It&#x27;s like a dream come true!I&#x27;ve been thinking of something like this for decades, as I mentally compared the utopian displays at construction sites to the existing buildings next to them. Like &quot;wow your fancy new building is going to be so perfectly white and clean, but what will it really look like after 10 years exposed to the elements and no cleaning, like the one next door?&quot;New construction is sold on a literal blue-sky promise. How does it really look like a decade down the road? All construction has a decades- if not centuries-long lifespan. It&#x27;s worth thinking about them long-term.I absolutely love the streak of rust coming off the saddle of arches on the bridge example. That&#x27;s exactly what I&#x27;m talking about.

My view may be as realistic as these architectural drawings but I&#x27;ve long thought that some sort of micro payment system would address a lot of problems, many more significant than tipping software developers.

Thanks for the highlight. Doesn&#x27;t seem like there&#x27;s much activity on his Ko-Fi for being on the front page of HN. I sent him a tip, although privately.

All you need is WASM surely? I expect this model is too big to download &amp; run on local CPUs though.

I wish I could give him two cents without having to try. HTTP status 402 with micropayments or something needs to become a thing. The platforms do it... (subs, tips, donations, rewards etc etc.) Why can&#x27;t the web.

Ideally the model would be run locally in the browser, so the author isn&#x27;t paying whatever they&#x27;re paying. But the web standards to do complicated stuff locally aren&#x27;t there yet and probably will never be.That&#x27;s not a practical answer but it&#x27;s my two cents.

I see 16 coffees received. Assuming no private donations for simplicity, that’s $48. As an ads noob, how many sessions would a banner ad need to beat that?

Doesn&#x27;t an ad require the user to bust out their credit card eventually?

Yea, but most advertisers come only after something went viral, not when you are building something and you try to say to potential advertiser: &quot;this will go viral trust me bro&quot;. And such small viral things are usually short lived, by the time the advertisers come it will probably starts to die down. 
But yea, maybe he would have got a little more financial support than donations even if he puts up ads after it went viral.Another way he could benefit from this is when people want his skills to build them similar things, so it&#x27;s basically already an advertisement for his skills.

I don&#x27;t know the terms, but there&#x27;s what looks like a tasteful ad at the bottom.&gt; Looking for an architect who builds things that still look great even in November rain? Reach out to classical architect Jorian Egge.

This will be an unpopular answer but one way that could have worked is just good ol&#x27; advertising, because it directly converts &quot;virality&quot; 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.

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

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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t think there is a better way. There may be people with a financial interest that it remains that way.

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

I had a similar idea for a library used to collect how much you owe who:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;thiswillbeyourgithub&#x2F;FUTOmeter" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;thiswillbeyourgithub&#x2F;FUTOmeter</a>

I built a browser extension for a hackathon that enabled crypto payments direct to site owners. &quot;registration&quot; 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&#x27;s a neat idea but I can&#x27;t be bothered to build a real version

Most people want a lot more out of life than basic necessities.

what does UBI have to do with getting paid for making cool shit?

Nah, that just turns people into slaves of whoever is signing the checks.

How do we ensure that we don’t enter the failure mode of “not enough necessities get made”?Like it seems like people are ideologically for or against UBI, but I’ve never seen anyone discuss how the mechanism would avoid this outcome. Like I’m not saying it’s 100% the outcome that would happen on whatever time frame, just that even e.g. a 10% chance of that happening would make it too risky to attempt at scale. And like I don’t accept “some people just love farming” or “a lot of stuff that isn’t needed gets made now”, I need an actual mechanism description.

...and rather depends on the whims of the feeding hand instead.Like, haven&#x27;t got your 22nd cocksuckie virus booster? Get lost and die from hunger.

People already freak out about the sustainability of the welfare state supporting just the elderly with worker-dependent ratios of 3:1 or 2:1. Imagine if also all the working age population got welfare, it&#x27;d be completely unworkable.

&gt; Is there a better way?Yes, UBI. Then you can create what you want and your livelihood doesn&#x27;t depend on it going viral.

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&#x27;d be happy to pay.

I had an idea for a library used to collect how much you owe who:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;thiswillbeyourgithub&#x2F;FUTOmeter" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;thiswillbeyourgithub&#x2F;FUTOmeter</a>

&gt; Is there a better way?If one&#x27;s visitors are gamers, perhaps one might use gaming payment providers to sell an &quot;supporter badge&quot;? But that&#x27;s perhaps be pushing their envelope.If one&#x27;s visitors are from the &quot;rapidly-developing world&quot;, 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 &quot;less-rapidly-developing world&quot;, X.com has been working towards a similar superapp with Visa for the US. The Visa&#x2F;MC duopoly seems to have shifted from its years of preventing US micropayments, to something like &quot;maybe 2030-ish&quot;.

This won&#x27;t work when the meter is at zero due to human psychology. New visitors will say: &quot;no one subsidized my experience (indeed I don&#x27;t even know what $thing does) but &lt;creator&gt; wants me to subsidize $thing for others&quot;.The whole &quot;subsidize for other visitors&quot; concept is weaker than &quot;pay &lt;creator&gt;&quot;.

Especially in the age of AI tools, I also thought about this a few times. The current idea I have is something like a parking meter. Every expensive transaction (like calling a model) would subtract from the money pool, and every visitor could see how much is still left in the pool. In addition, a list of the top 5 donors with their amounts might improve the group dynamic (like on pay-what-you-want pages like humblebundle.com).It would be more about covering the cost than about making someone rich, but I think that is what most of the people who build stuff care about. Sadly, I don&#x27;t know a service yet that offers this model.

If there’s one thing I learnt from HN it’s how many people can’t comprehend this. Is it a byproduct of growing up in a very transactional or selfish environment?

Sometimes it would be nice if you could just break even though. Particularly for these AI projects.

Monetization: People can now use ChatGPT for this if they have the idea, so it’s a tight goal. Would people in urban planning pay to see this? If not, then this was just the “15 minutes of fame” experience”, and people who are not career influencers have difficulty monetizing that. Of course, thank you for your concept.

You could let users import their own Google api key...

I don&#x27;t think donation approaches are necessarily bad, but yes it should not be as simple as putting a kofi link at the top of a page.This person doesn&#x27;t just do that though. Right after the part where you&#x27;ve uploaded your own examples, there&#x27;s a reminder: if you had fun buy me a coffee.Though this is slightly offset by the fact that they state you have 2 free trials and then you pay. It&#x27;s a complete incentives mismatch if you ask for coffee for something you explicitly presented to them as a marketing offer. Though, I suppose leaving the donation option on doesn&#x27;t hurt in this case either.In my experience, donationware works best when the donation request is polite, personal, uncoercive, unintrusive, and comes at a moment of surprise right after you would have seen actual value from a product, and from a product that has not otherwise asked you for any money so far (including showing you ads).KeepassXC Android is a good example: the guy asks for a beer during octoberfest :)

Yeah - fine tune it a bit more (it’s a little too worst-case-scenario-in-the-dead-of-winter) and sell it to architectural firms and developers for a fee. This is simple to monetize and not up to us to figure out how to turn processor cycles into dollar bills.

I feel like you&#x27;ll probably (mostly) have two types of users:1. Those who just want to see more examples.2. Those who actually want to use this as a tool. (Even though it may have started as a bit of a gag.)By having a gallery you&#x27;d save a lot of needless tokens so that you can satisfy user 1.By having a paid actual SAAS option you can get $$ from user 2.By showing a few tasteful ads as well as buy me a coffee you can get income from user 1.

I saw it going viral before going to bed last night and spent 15min trying to enable payments but failed so made it block you after 2 gens using cookies and try guilt you into donating instead. Made me $160 in donations compared to the $500 in AI credits burned so not a huge success but at least slightly offset the loss.If the demand continues after this blip I’ll try add ads or make real payments work.

Insert product placement&#x2F;ads into the generated images.

Top of HN and people are loving it, but there&#x27;s got to be a better way of getting some $$ rewards for fun viral ideas like this than &quot;Buy me a coffee&quot;. I&#x27;m betting he&#x27;s got tens of thousands of sessions currently and nobody is tipping. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ko-fi.com&#x2F;magnushambleton" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ko-fi.com&#x2F;magnushambleton</a>Is there a better way? Asking for myself, also.

Okay now do it on character models so that they don&#x27;t look like plastic dolls.

Architects aren&#x27;t generally brutalists themselves, but rather, brutalist architecture proposals win contracts because their TCO is lower. Facades have maintenance costs; bare concrete just requires power-washing now and then.

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&#x27;m not an expert on exact architectural style names, so I can&#x27;t be more exact that that.)

I imagine, it could actually be useful for architects, to see how other people and environment will butcher their creation, so they could learn how to make it better with that in mind.Edit: oh, it&#x27;s right there at the bottom of the page!

I do something similar with my Curation Engine outputs. Interesting to get photorealistic outputs on a GPU via language pathing instead of photons.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dev.zice.app&#x2F;frame_syntheses" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dev.zice.app&#x2F;frame_syntheses</a>

(Currently getting an error when I try it)One think I wish is if I could get it halfway. I don&#x27;t need it to look dreary, I just want it to look real instead of overly optimistic.

Why is it addressing it? It&#x27;ll just lead to every single ad having this statement.To address it you actually need to force them to provide the originals alongside the edited pictures.

A new CA law is addressing this somewhat:&gt; 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.”<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sfchronicle.com&#x2F;realestate&#x2F;article&#x2F;california-law-home-listing-photos-21308040.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sfchronicle.com&#x2F;realestate&#x2F;article&#x2F;california-la...</a>

This would be great for real estate ads. Make the rooms look their actual size and dark and dirty. Lived-in, if you will.

One takeaway for me is how important landscaping is to making a space beautiful.

On a Light surface tiny stains stick out, on a dark floor tiny flecks of dirt stick out as if under blacklight, a concrete color with some smudge patern may get extremely dirty without anyone noticing it (which might also not be what you want) a dark floor with a pattern of tiny white dots can also look very clean while dirty.Any porous material is a terrible idea, you get lots of surface area that you cant reach. Carpet, curtains, upholstery.Gaps between things should be big enough for how deep they are. Tiny legs under sofas or closets are not useful for anything. Adjust the size of the gaps between wall panels to your favorite kind of insect or rodent.The funniest one i&#x27;ve seen was a city with a lot of mosquitos where someone put giant neon letters outside under a roof. In a few days it was completely covered in highly active spider turf war dens enough to make a grown man scream. Apparently spiders love roofs and they obviously know flies like light.

What are some striking examples from your experience?BTW this is what I love most about HN - the surprising variety of people you can learn from, from billionaire founders to expat bingo-card geeks to Georgian-onion sellers to Dutch pro cleaners...

Im a professional cleaner, there is lots of wonderful looking design out there that is impossible to clean. There is also a huge difference in how quick it looks dirty. Some things are easy to clean but if you have to do it 3 times per day in stead of once a week its going to be needlessly expensive and still look dirty half the time.

I spent years doing that post processing on Photoshop, trying to increase realism on my archviz scenes, clients never went for it. They use to prefer the fake, perfect 3D look. Nice project, well done.

Show me reality: vibe coded AI blows up on HN and says &quot;429&quot; (probably... it said non 200 status code, and no F12 to check)

My city is car dependent and often no effort goes into making it more walkable.Would love a version that renders a mix of cars and trucks onto any roads, to show up how crap the experience would actually be out front of road facing building.

I did a similar thing for anti image censorship, back in 2022-2023 with ML, basically all available APIs were returning image classifications that would tell you if something was adult, used in order to not display the imageI wanted something to tell me what was adult about the image, by feature set, in order to display just those imagesWorked pretty well, never released&#x2F;launched it - just needed more capital for the marketing. But then that market cratered - were were going to use the classification attributes on NFTs, since the marketplaces let collectors sort by attributes, so it would have been easy to &quot;find out the market value of particular physical features&quot;, and we could have empirical data on what physical attributes people value, instead of just anecdoteskind of good that we didn&#x27;t deal with the NFT market in general, project would still work though, just less revenue from sales possible

Could use this on all real estate and apartment listings

Recovering architect here. This made my night. Bravo, no notes!

This is one of the few instances of generative AI for images that I actually like.

For the bridge, I love how it added a bunch of electrical wires along the top. Imo that’s not very realistic, given there are tons of better places to run wires on a bridge, but somehow it does look substantially more realistic. Even though it seems to be trying to make everything look sad I honestly find the results more inviting because they look lived in.

Did someone try to connect output to the input for several iterations, to make it progressively more Poland?

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.

That actually makes it much more useful as a render, it feels like a real building.It would probably sell better, because you’re just showing them how their building will look, instead of how it might look.

Huh. I kinda like &#x27;em. I&#x27;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&#x27;m a salmon, happiest fighting against the current.

This reminds me of “emo” music. All the emotions except happiness. These renders are depressing.

Honestly this looks nicer than the previous image, it feels more real

oh wow, the results are very Ukrainian... at least while we don&#x27;t talk about places where Russia struck

This is what my brain does automatically when I see advertisements.Anyway, if we used this anti-filter on social media then perhaps teens would not be so depressed.

This is based on Nano Banana API. I wonder how much it costed the author as it reached HN frontpage. At least it seems like they set a quota though.

i&#x27;d love to watch its rendering of any of the recent big budget sci-fi productions

My first reaction was that it&#x27;s really great, but almost immediately I got a hold on myself: look, maybe you can argue for the cracks on the road under certain conditions, but surely it didn&#x27;t have to put transformer booths and collectors where weren&#x27;t drawn. It doesn&#x27;t &quot;make the render reality&quot;, it&#x27;s just another &quot;AI&quot;-slop machine, producing the same slop as the &quot;originals&quot; usually are, just with the instruction to make it look sad, instead of making it look happy. Two lies don&#x27;t make one truth.

Antirender: remove the glossy shine on architectural renderings