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.

Your image made the reddit front page: https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/1qrwa2l/society_with...

Looks like Machinarium. I like it.

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

This looks like the average abandoned World's fair location from the 2000s

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

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

So the future looks like... Germany?

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

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

the world if autumn comes

This looks like a scene out of Enterprise.

Ugh, this looks way too real...

You are a genius.

I see this as well with huge modern buildings with wood parts. They look great the first year. The wood shines red’ish. After a winter the wood part starts to grey out. I understand that this is sometimes a look they strife for but all the preview renders show it in the prestige condition. Nobody is doing a yearly training. And don’t get me started on all the glass survives for elevators, roofs, bus stops, divider panels next to tram stops (I’m mainly meaning Berlin here) which nobody cares to clean or is so difficult to clean that after 2 or 3 years it looks very run down.

Most of the mega projects are in authoritarian states. So in a way it is about the photo op at opening. And then the next mega project.

That's maybe nice for prestige projects but imho the main problem in architecture is projects on a budget and how money is allocated. There should be a law that says that X% of the building costs should be in the facade, the part that everybody sees. That alone should help a lot in making cities look nicer.

this is what gets me about brutalism. Concrete looks nice when brand new, but a few years of acid rain makes it look like dog shit

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.

There should be a effect intensity slider. East Germany <-> Poland <-> Russia

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.

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

It really nails the Boston / MIT campus in November vibe.

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...

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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't know a service yet that offers this model.

Not everything needs to be a business!

I don'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't just do that though. Right after the part where you've uploaded your own examples, there'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'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'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 :)

> 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".

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Insert product placement/ads into the generated images.

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

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

https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/FUTOmeter

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

Not only architecture. I recently saw a dirty Cybertruck and it looked like a cheap prop from a 1980s sci-fi movie. Made me think about how well the average Toyota is designed that it manages to look good even on a cloudy day while covered in a layer of dirt.

It baffles me that contemporary architects don’t seem to be aware of the existence of rain. Why put white render on the facade of your building if it turns to green within five years? Why the hate for large overhangs that would solve this problem for cheap?

If corrugated metal were not associated with shacks, would it be so concerning? Most materials can look good with the right execution. The difference comes from form and detailing.

"Classical" architecture is (thankfully) dead and will never return. It's too costly and we lack the skilled labour force required. For those that nonetheless demand it, we get cheap imitations of classical details that look worse than a simpler but well-considered alternative.

There have been some promising advances in automated machine carving of stone, but it's still expensive. It has a bright future as part of a hybrid aesthetic enabled by contemporary technology. We need to look forward and not back.

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

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.

Au contraire, in a rather realistic way

It's AI, it makes things up.

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.

Nice, it made it back into PUBG :)

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.

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.

That looks like a specific level in Left for Dead 2

Top: Sandy Strip

Bottom: Shady Sands

Fallout!

I mean now they just look like early Fortnite!

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.

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's like when you look at pictures of electric appliances and they almost always hide the cords.

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

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.

That's literally thw worst pic I can find of that bridge and it's still looks good even with the temporary fences: https://www.flickr.com/photos/zawaski/52752097083/

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

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

> From the site: Get back what it'll actually look like on a random Tuesday in November

It's Calgary. The landscape will be a lot snowier anytime in November.

Ya it actually looks quite good

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...

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

That's black mirror level content.

Very “futurological congress” thought

It's some Loveable app thing. Fun idea though

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's on Lovable so you can just fork it and take a look (the prompt is in supabase/functions/transform-render/index.ts):

Transform this idealized architectural rendering into the most brutally realistic, depressing photograph possible. This is the WORST CASE scenario - what the building will actually look like in reality:

- Set on a dreary, grey, overcast late November day with flat, lifeless lighting - The sky is a uniform dirty grey, threatening rain - All trees are completely bare - just skeletal branches against the grey sky - The landscaping is dead, muddy, or non-existent. No lush gardens, just patchy brown grass and bare dirt - Remove ALL people, the scene should feel empty and abandoned - Any water features should look stagnant and grey - Add realistic weathering, dirt streaks, and construction residue on the building - The building materials should look how they actually appear, not the idealized clean version - Include visible utility boxes, drainage grates, and other mundane infrastructure usually hidden in renders - The overall mood should be bleak but realistic - this is what buyers will actually see on a random Tuesday in late autumn - Maintain the exact building, angle, and composition, just strip away all the marketing polish

The goal is honest truth, not beauty. Show what the architect's client will actually see when they visit the site.

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

You're supposed to look at an architectural render and recognize it as such. Much like a fashion sketch, the goal is to show the designer's intent rather than a real-world application. If I were a client and an architect handed me these literal Cyberpunk 2077 screenshots, I'd be confused about what exactly he actually designed.

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.

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.

Doubt it. Demoralization is what they're after.

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

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

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...

Isn't that the plot for Grand Budapest Hotel?

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.

* what image gen

Thats what happens where I live when each random fibre network wants to add boxes.

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