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digitalmars.D.announce - D Language Foundation July 2025 Quarterly Meeting Summary

reply Mike Parker <aldacron gmail.com> writes:
The D Language Foundation’s quarterly meeting for July 2025 took 
place on Friday the 4th at 15:00 UTC. It lasted a little under 30 
minutes.

Our quarterly meetings are where representatives from businesses 
big and small can bring us their most pressing D issues, status 
reports on their use of D, and so on.



The following people attended the meeting:

* Walter Bright (DLF)
* Dennis Korpel (DLF/SARC)
* Mario Kröplin (Funkwerk)
* Razvan Nitu (DLF)
* Mike Parker (DLF)
* Carsten Rasmussen (Decard)
* Bastiaan Veelo (SARC)





Carsten said things were going well at Decard. It was very 
exciting on the business side because they were going into 
logistics and security. The problems they were having to solve 
had nothing to do with the language, just normal development 
stuff. They were comfortable with what they had in the system and 
were happy.



Mario said he’d emailed Mathis Beer about the meeting three days 
ago, but suspected he'd forgotten about it. Mathis was 
programming in D, but Mario was currently the Java programmer, so 
he had nothing to bring to us this time.



Walter said he’d previously complained about the lack of D 
articles on Hacker News, but one had shown up recently and turned 
out to be a significant success for us. He wanted more of that 
kind of visibility.

He then went into a little rant about people who said "I used D 
for years, but it had this one flaw, so I dropped it," and then 
presented that flaw as the reason D couldn't succeed. The example 
he’d seen lately was, "I can’t use D because the exception 
handler uses the garbage collector."

Carsten said they shouldn't use exceptions if that was a concern. 
Walter said using exceptions with the GC wasn’t going to break 
your program. He got frustrated with people turning a single 
technical detail into a deal-breaker.

I brought up a comment I’d seen on Dennis’s DConf talk from last 
year: "The single biggest mistake Bright made when designing D 
was the GC. That is the sole reason D hasn't replaced C++ by now. 
It's the biggest crutch to D adoption. Really, who wants to deal 
with this kind of nonsense?"

Carsten said, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no."

Walter said if it wasn't the GC, it would be something else. 
Throughout his career, he'd had people telling him, "If only your 
compiler had this feature, our company would switch." He'd add 
that feature and they'd say, "That's nice, but what we really 
need is this other feature." Then you ended up on a 
merry-go-round. They had no intention of ever using it.

Carsten added that the GC was one of the reasons he had switched 
from C++ to D. He'd gotten tired of hunting wild pointers and was 
too old to do that anymore. Walter said that the GC had ended up 
being a surprising asset for CTFE.

I asked Walter if that was all. He said he was done ranting for 
the moment, but was sure he'd think of something else to rant 
about.



Bastiaan had two work issues he wanted to bring up. He'd spoken a 
little bit about them with Dennis.

__alloca and 64-bit DMD__

Bastiaan reminded us he’d started using `alloca` as a solution to 
one of the thread contention problems he'd had. It worked fine 
with DMD in 32-bit and fine with LDC in 64-bit, but when 
compiling for 64-bit with DMD, he got an error saying `alloca` 
didn't work with exception handling. He was wondering why and 
whether it was really working on 32-bit and 64-bit LDC.

Walter recalled giving up on trying to get `alloca` working on 
Windows 64-bit. It was ugly to implement, though he couldn't 
remember what the actual problem had been. He’d never been able 
to figure out Win64 exception handling. DMD’s exception handling 
on Windows differed from MSVC’s. He suggested that Bastiaan's 
problem was probably related to that.

Dennis posted [a link to the relevant code in DMD's 
`eh.d`](https://github.com/dlang/dmd/blob/9f573c494acc38855027462bde162fabea9cf33f/compiler/src/d
d/backend/eh.d#L50) along with a comment that he thought Walter had probably
written:

```
// BUG: alloca() changes the stack size, which is not reflected
// in the fixed eh tables.
```

Walter said we were kind of stuck with that. He suggested using a 
RAII malloc/free scheme, which would accomplish the same thing as 
`alloca`. Bastiaan pointed out that `malloc` required the global 
lock. One of the reasons they were using `alloca` was to avoid 
that.

As an alternative, Walter suggested that if they knew the maximum 
size of the allocation, they could use a struct of that size. 
That would then be the allocated storage. Bastiaan didn't think 
they could get rid of `alloca`. It wasn’t a deal-breaker because 
they could just use LDC, but it was a minor inconvenience that 
they couldn’t fall back on DMD.

Bastiaan recalled an initiative for nonallocating exceptions and 
wondered what the story was. Walter said there was a compiler 
switch that enabled them and it did work, but there were some 
issues with it he never fully understood. I said Razvan could 
probably explain it, and that I recalled it had to do with stack 
trace generation. Walter said that sounded like that was probably 
the issue.

__Link errors in LDC__

Bastiaan's second issue was an LDC linking problem after 
upgrading the front end. He didn’t expect a full answer on the 
call and would need to work on a reduction. He asked if Dennis 
had any thoughts on it.

Dennis thought it was a mix of compiler flags and preview 
switches causing a difference in symbol generation. He hadn't yet 
reproduced it.

Walter suggested it could also be a DRuntime/Phobos mismatch and 
stressed that DRuntime, Phobos, and user code all needed to be 
built with the same compiler version. Bastiaan believed they were 
doing that. He said the error mentioned "conflicting weak 
external definition". He'd only seen it a few times and had 
forgotten the context.

__Floating point issue__

Bastiaan said that aside from those issues, things were generally 
fine. The only other issue he could think of was that 64-bit 
floating point answers sometimes deviated from 32-bit. One reason 
was that he'd been relying on undefined behavior for some code 
using `bitmanip`. He was glad they'd disovered that. It was in 
order now.

The other was because 32-bit DMD used 80-bit floating point in 
intermediate results. This was code using floats, not doubles. 
LDC, even in 64-bit, was using 32-bit intermediates. He figured 
that was introducing a lot of rounding errors in the intermediate 
results.

Walter explained that if the target machine supported XMM 
floating point registers, the compiler would use them, otherwise 
it would use the 80-bit floating point coprocessor, which did 
everything in 80 bits. He said 32-bit LDC on the platform 
Bastiaan was working on wasn't using the XMM registers. He 
suggested looking at the LDC switches to see if there was one to 
enable it. That should clear up the problem. Bastiaan said that 
was a good point and he would look into it.



After Bastiaan finished, I asked Dennis if he had anything 
work-related to add beyond what had come up in Bastiaan’s issues. 
Dennis did not. Neither he nor Razvan had anything DLF-related.



I said I would be be announcing the Symmetry Autumn of Code in 
the next few days. We had funding from Symmetry for three slots. 
I noted Emmanuel Nyarko had already told me he planned to apply. 
I asked all present to let me know if they had any open source 
libraries they were using that needed some work. That sort of 
thing could make potential project ideas.

I asked Carsten if he could send me an updated headcount of 
Decard's DConf attendees within the next week. We needed to send 
the caterers an approximation of our final numbers. Then I asked 
if anyone had anything else to add. Dennis asked if there was 
going to be a monthly meeting the following week. There was.



As we were about to close, Walter told us he’d tried very hard to 
get an AI to draw a D-man. He'd failed miserably no matter how he 
crafted the prompt. He kept getting something that looked like 
Superman with a D on his chest.

Carsten offered to ask someone at his company who was "super good 
at that" to see if they could come up with a prompt that worked. 
I mentioned that some of the services let you upload a reference 
image. Walter said he’d tried that, too. He'd tried everything. 
All these people were saying AI was going to take over 
everything, and he hadn't been successful with getting it to do 
what he wanted.

I said it had been very useful for me with research and 
translation. Carsten agreed. He thought it was great for 
extracting information and translation. When it came to writing 
code you wanted to maintain, he thought it was just crap on crap, 
but maybe he was too old for that.

I noted that I'd gotten GPT to generate a Lua script as a plugin 
for Pandoc, because I knew nothing about Pandoc plugins. It had 
mistakes that I'd had to correct, but it got me further than I 
would have gotten on my own in a shorter amount of time. Carsten 
thought it was great for that sort of thing, scripts for specific 
tasks. But for something that you wanted to develop and maintain, 
he didn't think we'd be losing our jobs any time soon.

Walter said he’d been invited to give a short presentation about 
D that highlighted concurrent programming. He didn't know much of 
anything about concurrency, so he'd asked Grok for a sample 
program and it worked. Then he thought he should send the prompt 
to Bruce, who was an expert on concurrent programming. Bruce sent 
back a marvelously written piece of concurrent code that did the 
same thing. Walter scrapped the one from the AI and went with 
Bruce's. There was nothing like talking to an expert to get 
something we could be proud of. That had been fun.

Mario joked that it was good Mathis wasn’t there, otherwise the 
meeting would run for another hour. Mathis did nothing without 
AI. He put the code in a loop with the compiler and the AI was 
fixing his bugs. He was very deep into AI. Carsten said you could 
probably use it as a tool if you knew what you were doing. Mario 
agreed and mentioned a saying that it made good people better and 
bad people worse.

Walter said when he asked AI to write a piece of code, he knew 
how to specify what he wanted. It was really helpful in getting 
the results he wanted on that front. He was just annoyed that he 
couldn't get it to generate a D-man.

He said we had a shortage of D-man cartoons. He had a directory 
with a collection of all the ones he'd seen. For him to draw one 
was a long, complicated process because he had no talent for it. 
He would have to spend a lot of time with the image editor to 
make it look presentable. Being able to automate it would be 
wonderful. Something silly like D-man jumping rope or something. 
If anyone could figure out how to do it, he asked that they send 
him the prompt.



Our July monthly meeting took place the following Friday, July 
11th. Our next quarterly happened on Friday, October 3rd, 2025.

If you are running or working for a business using D, large or 
small, and would like to join our quarterly meetings periodically 
or regularly to share your problems or experiences, please let me 
know.
Jan 11
next sibling parent reply Kapendev <alexandroskapretsos gmail.com> writes:
On Sunday, 11 January 2026 at 14:56:07 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:

 The D Language Foundation’s quarterly meeting for July 2025
 As we were about to close, Walter told us he’d tried very hard 
 to get an AI to draw a D-man.


My favorite part.
Jan 11
parent Sergey <kornburn yandex.ru> writes:
On Sunday, 11 January 2026 at 16:10:29 UTC, Kapendev wrote:

 My favorite part.


This one is most important:

 Mathis was programming in D, but Mario was currently the Java 
 programmer


D was overtaken by Java
Jan 11
prev sibling next sibling parent reply monkyyy <crazymonkyyy gmail.com> writes:
On Sunday, 11 January 2026 at 14:56:07 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:

 AI interlude


I think theres allot of bad takes here and I think d will do 
poorly in the ai transition as it is missing tools

This is entirely vibe coded by me in a programming language I 
dont know: https://crazymonkyyy.github.io/nullboard/ find the 
bugs (theres one one minor graphical one)

Ai will a be separate compute class, like gpu programming, some 
languages will be left behind and it will be a different skill 
set. You really should ask for takes from whoever is getting 
results and have a position on that future.
Jan 11
parent reply Sergey <kornburn yandex.ru> writes:
On Sunday, 11 January 2026 at 17:12:00 UTC, monkyyy wrote:

 On Sunday, 11 January 2026 at 14:56:07 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:

 AI interlude


 I think theres allot of bad takes here and I think d will do 
 poorly in the ai transition as it is missing tools

 This is entirely vibe coded by me in a programming language I 
 dont know: https://crazymonkyyy.github.io/nullboard/ find the 
 bugs (theres one one minor graphical one)

 Ai will a be separate compute class, like gpu programming, some 
 languages will be left behind and it will be a different skill 
 set. You really should ask for takes from whoever is getting 
 results and have a position on that future.


lol
if AI is so good - create a tooling for D in another language
Jan 11
parent reply Kapendev <alexandroskapretsos gmail.com> writes:
On Sunday, 11 January 2026 at 20:54:26 UTC, Sergey wrote:

 On Sunday, 11 January 2026 at 17:12:00 UTC, monkyyy wrote:

 On Sunday, 11 January 2026 at 14:56:07 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:

 AI interlude


 I think theres allot of bad takes here and I think d will do 
 poorly in the ai transition as it is missing tools

 This is entirely vibe coded by me in a programming language I 
 dont know: https://crazymonkyyy.github.io/nullboard/ find the 
 bugs (theres one one minor graphical one)

 Ai will a be separate compute class, like gpu programming, 
 some languages will be left behind and it will be a different 
 skill set. You really should ask for takes from whoever is 
 getting results and have a position on that future.


 lol
 if AI is so good - create a tooling for D in another language


No! How about we don't make any tool like that and make the world 
a better place?!?!! The world needs more D and Zig in it. Too 
many Odin and C3 zoomers yapping all day on Discord.
Jan 11
parent Sergey <kornburn yandex.ru> writes:
On Sunday, 11 January 2026 at 21:17:39 UTC, Kapendev wrote:

 world a better place?!?!! The world needs more D and Zig in it. 
 Too many Odin and C3 zoomers yapping all day on Discord.


Who is writing C3/Odin these days??
its 2026!

Everyone moved to Mojo and Jai
Odin is officially obsolete
Jan 11
prev sibling next sibling parent reply bauss <jacobbauss gmail.com> writes:
On Sunday, 11 January 2026 at 14:56:07 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:



 Walter said he’d previously complained about the lack of D 
 articles on Hacker News, but one had shown up recently and 
 turned out to be a significant success for us. He wanted more 
 of that kind of visibility.

 He then went into a little rant about people who said "I used D 
 for years, but it had this one flaw, so I dropped it," and then 
 presented that flaw as the reason D couldn't succeed. The 
 example he’d seen lately was, "I can’t use D because the 
 exception handler uses the garbage collector."


GC is the reason I __use__ D.
Jan 11
parent Kapendev <alexandroskapretsos gmail.com> writes:
On Sunday, 11 January 2026 at 18:14:40 UTC, bauss wrote:

 On Sunday, 11 January 2026 at 14:56:07 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:



 Walter said he’d previously complained about the lack of D 
 articles on Hacker News, but one had shown up recently and 
 turned out to be a significant success for us. He wanted more 
 of that kind of visibility.

 He then went into a little rant about people who said "I used 
 D for years, but it had this one flaw, so I dropped it," and 
 then presented that flaw as the reason D couldn't succeed. The 
 example he’d seen lately was, "I can’t use D because the 
 exception handler uses the garbage collector."


 GC is the reason I __use__ D.


Some people just have GC phobia
Jan 11
prev sibling next sibling parent reply "Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole" <richard cattermole.co.nz> writes:
On 12/01/2026 3:56 AM, Mike Parker wrote:

 Bastiaan recalled an initiative for nonallocating exceptions and 
 wondered what the story was. Walter said there was a compiler switch 
 that enabled them and it did work, but there were some issues with it he 
 never fully understood. I said Razvan could probably explain it, and 
 that I recalled it had to do with stack trace generation. Walter said 
 that sounded like that was probably the issue.


Non-allocating would not be DIP1008, it would've been my value typed 
exceptions. DIP1008 allocated with malloc and then RC'd.

Sadly they wouldn't have worked, due to the architecture of the compiler 
wrt. inferred attributes.

You would've had to manually annotate them and it would be too frequent 
to be usable.

As far as I know, the design was still good, but... still DOA currently.

So I'm in the process of trying to find a new solution to exceptions.
Without the need for platform/target specific stack unwinding code.
Jan 11
parent Bastiaan Veelo <Bastiaan Veelo.net> writes:
On Monday, 12 January 2026 at 01:58:41 UTC, Richard (Rikki) 
Andrew Cattermole wrote:


 So I'm in the process of trying to find a new solution to 
 exceptions.
 Without the need for platform/target specific stack unwinding 
 code.


Interesting.

-- Bastiaan.
Jan 11
prev sibling next sibling parent Bastiaan Veelo <Bastiaan Veelo.net> writes:
On Sunday, 11 January 2026 at 14:56:07 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:

 __Link errors in LDC__

 Bastiaan's second issue was an LDC linking problem after 
 upgrading the front end. He didn’t expect a full answer on the 
 call and would need to work on a reduction.


[...]

 He said the error mentioned "conflicting weak external 
 definition". He'd only seen it a few times and had forgotten 
 the context.


What turned out to be the issue was that I was using the "include 
imports" flag (`-i`) wrong. We have a lot of library code in a 
grab bag that various programs include from, and the -i flag 
relieves us from having to otherwise manage or define 
dependencies. None of these modules were in a D package though, 
and thus the -i flag was effective on *all* imports, also those 
imported from Dub packages and their dependencies. Dub already 
takes care of linking in Dub packages, so those modules would be 
linked twice. This would occasionally cause link errors but not 
always, and the errors would appear and disappear with different 
compilers and compiler versions. Understanding only half of the 
problem, I was using exclusions (`-i=-dub_package`) to patch over 
these errors, which doesn't scale, is flaky and is obviously not 
how you are meant to use this.

The solution was to move our library modules into a D package, 
and use only one flag with the package name (`-i=d_package`).

-- Bastiaan.
Jan 12
prev sibling next sibling parent reply "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh qfbox.info> writes:
On Sun, Jan 11, 2026 at 02:56:07PM +0000, Mike Parker via
Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
[...]


 
 As we were about to close, Walter told us he’d tried very hard to get an AI
 to draw a D-man. He'd failed miserably no matter how he crafted the prompt.
 He kept getting something that looked like Superman with a D on his chest.


Somebody on Reddit appeared to have succeeded, a while back:

	https://www.reddit.com/r/d_language/comments/1n9evn0/i_dont_have_a_twitterx_account_but_since_walter/
	https://www.reddit.com/r/d_language/comments/1n9jb19/heres_another_geminigenerated_image_of_d_running/

That account sadly seems to have been deleted since, so no way to ask
how the prompt was crafted.


T

-- 
The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating system and
Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the world. -- Anonymous
Jan 12
parent reply apz28 <apz28 help.com> writes:
On Monday, 12 January 2026 at 18:32:59 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:

 On Sun, Jan 11, 2026 at 02:56:07PM +0000, Mike Parker via 
 Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: [...]


 
 As we were about to close, Walter told us he’d tried very hard 
 to get an AI to draw a D-man. He'd failed miserably no matter 
 how he crafted the prompt. He kept getting something that 
 looked like Superman with a D on his chest.


 Somebody on Reddit appeared to have succeeded, a while back:

 	https://www.reddit.com/r/d_language/comments/1n9evn0/i_dont_have_a_twitterx_account_but_since_walter/
 	https://www.reddit.com/r/d_language/comments/1n9jb19/heres_another_geminigenerated_image_of_d_running/

 That account sadly seems to have been deleted since, so no way 
 to ask how the prompt was crafted.


 T


Here is from CoPilot
Create a floating D man; D is for D computer language and man is 
cartoon figure; cheerful but not as super man; just use D 
character and not human figure

https://copilot.microsoft.com/th/id/BCO.6dd1abca-f0ee-406b-9f59-cdb78b81e875.png
Jan 12
parent reply "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh qfbox.info> writes:
On Mon, Jan 12, 2026 at 08:25:43PM +0000, apz28 via Digitalmars-d-announce
wrote:

 On Monday, 12 January 2026 at 18:32:59 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:

 On Sun, Jan 11, 2026 at 02:56:07PM +0000, Mike Parker via
 Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: [...]


 
 As we were about to close, Walter told us he’d tried very hard to
 get an AI to draw a D-man. He'd failed miserably no matter how he
 crafted the prompt. He kept getting something that looked like
 Superman with a D on his chest.


 
 Somebody on Reddit appeared to have succeeded, a while back:
 
 	https://www.reddit.com/r/d_language/comments/1n9evn0/i_dont_have_a_twitterx_account_but_since_walter/
 	https://www.reddit.com/r/d_language/comments/1n9jb19/heres_another_geminigenerated_image_of_d_running/
 
 That account sadly seems to have been deleted since, so no way to
 ask how the prompt was crafted.




[...]

 Here is from CoPilot
 Create a floating D man; D is for D computer language and man is cartoon
 figure; cheerful but not as super man; just use D character and not human
 figure
 
 https://copilot.microsoft.com/th/id/BCO.6dd1abca-f0ee-406b-9f59-cdb78b81e875.png


Nice!  Here's my own attempt with Google Gemini:

	https://gemini.google.com/share/5840e3ab4e7c

None too shabby, IMO.  Didn't quite capture the "happy" part, but meh,
I've seen worse from AI.


T

-- 
People tell me that I'm skeptical, but I don't believe them.
Jan 12
parent reply monkyyy <crazymonkyyy gmail.com> writes:
On Tuesday, 13 January 2026 at 00:25:52 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:

 On Mon, Jan 12, 2026 at 08:25:43PM +0000, apz28 via 
 Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:

 On Monday, 12 January 2026 at 18:32:59 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:

 [...]




 [...]

 Here is from CoPilot
 Create a floating D man; D is for D computer language and man 
 is cartoon
 figure; cheerful but not as super man; just use D character 
 and not human
 figure
 
 https://copilot.microsoft.com/th/id/BCO.6dd1abca-f0ee-406b-9f59-cdb78b81e875.png


 Nice!  Here's my own attempt with Google Gemini:

 	https://gemini.google.com/share/5840e3ab4e7c

 None too shabby, IMO.  Didn't quite capture the "happy" part, 
 but meh, I've seen worse from AI.


 T


https://gemini.google.com/share/fac6a3d3b1cd

control on gemini still leaves allot to be desired; is this 
section of the market not being covered?
Jan 12
parent reply Serg Gini <kornburn yandex.ru> writes:
On Tuesday, 13 January 2026 at 04:18:07 UTC, monkyyy wrote:

 control on gemini still leaves allot to be desired; is this 
 section of the market not being covered?


wrong instrument. there are specific models for images
Jan 12
parent reply monkyyy <crazymonkyyy gmail.com> writes:
On Tuesday, 13 January 2026 at 07:59:38 UTC, Serg Gini wrote:

 On Tuesday, 13 January 2026 at 04:18:07 UTC, monkyyy wrote:

 control on gemini still leaves allot to be desired; is this 
 section of the market not being covered?


 wrong instrument. there are specific models for images


gemini is a "router chat" it uses "the state of the art" and I 
couldnt find something that lets me manually inject intervention 
data

I think the art tools are just bad rn
Jan 13
parent reply "Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole" <richard cattermole.co.nz> writes:
On 14/01/2026 6:42 AM, monkyyy wrote:

 On Tuesday, 13 January 2026 at 07:59:38 UTC, Serg Gini wrote:

 On Tuesday, 13 January 2026 at 04:18:07 UTC, monkyyy wrote:

 control on gemini still leaves allot to be desired; is this section 
 of the market not being covered?


 wrong instrument. there are specific models for images


 
 gemini is a "router chat" it uses "the state of the art" and I couldnt 
 find something that lets me manually inject intervention data
 
 I think the art tools are just bad rn


Are you explicitly turning on the image tool, which uses Nano Banana LLM?

https://gemini.google.com/share/4da7e6055b5f
Jan 13
next sibling parent reply "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh qfbox.info> writes:
On Wed, Jan 14, 2026 at 06:55:41AM +1300, Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole via
Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:

 On 14/01/2026 6:42 AM, monkyyy wrote:

 On Tuesday, 13 January 2026 at 07:59:38 UTC, Serg Gini wrote:

 On Tuesday, 13 January 2026 at 04:18:07 UTC, monkyyy wrote:

 control on gemini still leaves allot to be desired; is this
 section of the market not being covered?


 
 wrong instrument. there are specific models for images


 
 gemini is a "router chat" it uses "the state of the art" and I couldnt
 find something that lets me manually inject intervention data
 
 I think the art tools are just bad rn


 
 Are you explicitly turning on the image tool, which uses Nano Banana LLM?
 
 https://gemini.google.com/share/4da7e6055b5f


My current settings causes it to use Nano Banana LLM. It's not perfect,
but after tweaking and playing around with various prompts I got another
decent one:

	https://gemini.google.com/share/5338eb4c37d1

D-man at your service, ready to fix your bugs for you! ;-)


T

-- 
He who laughs last thinks slowest.
Jan 13
parent Kapendev <alexandroskapretsos gmail.com> writes:
On Tuesday, 13 January 2026 at 18:15:01 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:

 D-man at your service, ready to fix your bugs for you! ;-)


Perfection.
Jan 13
prev sibling parent reply monkyyy <crazymonkyyy gmail.com> writes:
On Tuesday, 13 January 2026 at 17:55:41 UTC, Richard (Rikki) 
Andrew Cattermole wrote:

 On 14/01/2026 6:42 AM, monkyyy wrote:

 On Tuesday, 13 January 2026 at 07:59:38 UTC, Serg Gini wrote:

 On Tuesday, 13 January 2026 at 04:18:07 UTC, monkyyy wrote:

 control on gemini still leaves allot to be desired; is this 
 section of the market not being covered?


 wrong instrument. there are specific models for images


 
 gemini is a "router chat" it uses "the state of the art" and I 
 couldnt find something that lets me manually inject 
 intervention data
 
 I think the art tools are just bad rn


 Are you explicitly turning on the image tool, which uses Nano 
 Banana LLM?

 https://gemini.google.com/share/4da7e6055b5f


You dont have to, it turns on by itself given an image prompt

What im saying is that you cant edit the data in any sensable way

https://magiceraser.org/ this is the only "local section" type of 
tool I found, and they are all, deletions

If I write out a header a code ai will ussally try its best to 
write the function and if its in a tdd+agile hallucination, may 
write a unit test.

I just want to draw the changes; if I cant the tools are shit for 
images. and would be like a ai code editor that didnt actually 
obey my function headers.
Jan 13
parent reply "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh qfbox.info> writes:
On Tue, Jan 13, 2026 at 07:38:10PM +0000, monkyyy via Digitalmars-d-announce
wrote:
[...]

 What im saying is that you cant edit the data in any sensable way


[...]

Yeah, current image AI is one big black box, you give it a prompt and it
spits out something resembling the prompt, but nobody understands how it
got there or why. Good luck trying to correct minor mistakes in the
output. Changing a single word in the original prompt can give you a
completely different image with completely new and different mistakes.
Trying to fix 'em all is a game of whack'a'mole.

IMNSHO it's a waste of time. Better just take the time to draw it myself
(or program a scriptable paint program to do it for me the traditional
way).  Yes, AI output is flashier, but it's like playing a slot machine,
you never know what you'll get, have only an illusion of control over
the results, and always end up spending far more time than you ought to
trying to get the desired results.


T

-- 
Talk is cheap, because the supply is always greater than the demand.
Jan 13
parent monkyyy <crazymonkyyy gmail.com> writes:
On Tuesday, 13 January 2026 at 22:52:39 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:

 but nobody understands how it got there or why.


But we do know, and I think I understand why anime girl 
"masterpiece" images are this never before seen art style is 
suddenly everywhere.

"style transfer" is a tool we have; its very well defined and I 
can quick edits to image data, recreating ms paint isnt hard.

https://gemini.google.com/share/a1fac7ba5258

Its not rocket surgrey, theres options here. They are going 
delusional full automation  rather then having a mental model of 
what ai is good at and when and where we inject human 
intervention in the pipeline.
Jan 13
prev sibling parent reply Mindy (0xEAB) <desisma heidel.beer> writes:
On Sunday, 11 January 2026 at 14:56:07 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:



 As we were about to close, Walter told us he’d tried very hard 
 to get an AI to draw a D-man. He'd failed miserably no matter 
 how he crafted the prompt. He kept getting something that 
 looked like Superman with a D on his chest.

 Carsten offered to ask someone at his company who was "super 
 good at that" to see if they could come up with a prompt that 
 worked. I mentioned that some of the services let you upload a 
 reference image. Walter said he’d tried that, too. He'd tried 
 everything. All these people were saying AI was going to take 
 over everything, and he hadn't been successful with getting it 
 to do what he wanted.

 […]

 Walter said
 […] He was just annoyed that he couldn't get it to generate a 
 D-man.

 He said we had a shortage of D-man cartoons. He had a directory 
 with a collection of all the ones he'd seen. For him to draw 
 one was a long, complicated process because he had no talent 
 for it. He would have to spend a lot of time with the image 
 editor to make it look presentable. Being able to automate it 
 would be wonderful. Something silly like D-man jumping rope or 
 something. If anyone could figure out how to do it, he asked 
 that they send him the prompt.


I suppose one has to approach generative AI from a different 
perspective to make sense of it:
It's not a tool to be used by an artist but instead it's a 
(soulless) drawing robot commissioned by patron (= the user).

So, here me out. I have two ideas going forward here:

Why not open thread for collecting comic ideas that artists (or 
patrons with better prompting voodoo) can turn into art?

If composing comics from templates is doable, we could also 
create a collection of D-Man template resources and such to be 
used in comics and similar.

(While I wouldn't advocate for it, generative AI should prolly do 
a good job rendering background scenery or single sprites for 
such comics.)
Jan 22
parent monkyyy <crazymonkyyy gmail.com> writes:
On Thursday, 22 January 2026 at 13:54:59 UTC, Mindy (0xEAB) wrote:

 It's not a tool to be used by an artist but instead it's a 
 (soulless) drawing robot commissioned by patron (= the user).


bad tools doesn't make the tech more capable. It *will* be 
babysitable by an end user before its capable of replacing all 
artists.
Jan 22