[HN Gopher] Some Words on WigglyPaint
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Some Words on WigglyPaint
Author : RebelPotato
Score : 98 points
Date : 2026-03-07 01:21 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (beyondloom.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (beyondloom.com)
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| A well written piece on a sad state of affairs.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Just a reminder for those who may be interested. WigglyPaint is
| implemented in Decker, an homage to Hypercard that runs on modern
| operating systems (both by John Earnest).
| rogual wrote:
| Good article, and I feel your pain. Sometimes it feels like
| there's no point creating anything anymore, because shitty people
| will just steal it.
|
| In case you're interested, though, I just wanted to point out
| that there are things you can do.
|
| In my experience, Google does respond to requests to scrub
| infringing sites from their results if you submit their Copyright
| Claim form. They even give you a dashboard with the status of
| your claims. Probably worth trying your luck if you can be
| bothered.
|
| Also, many of the theives have X and Bluesky accounts, and I
| don't believe either of these services let users censor replies
| to them.
|
| There's also the payment platforms that are collecting money for
| your stolen work on behalf of these guys. They might be
| interested to hear about what's going on.
|
| Then there's the hosting companies themselves, of course, hosting
| the infringing websites.
|
| It's a pain, and it would be better if you could just create
| stuff and people weren't shitty, but we live in a fallen world
| and sometimes you gotta defend yourself. Up to you, of course,
| and I totally get it if you don't have the energy, but I've been
| through the same thing and you do have some power.
| Upvoter33 wrote:
| Yes I've had to do this but it does work. Unfortunately it's a
| constant cost to have to look for stuff like this and then do
| the work.
| drdrek wrote:
| There is a reason games and software have moved to the client
| server architecture even when it doesn't really makes sense.
| Its the only way to maintain copyright.
|
| You can hate it, but for the creative types your options are:
| Assume it fails and no one knows about it / Assume it succeeds
| get stolen / build it on the server side
| dylan604 wrote:
| It also means everyone is on updated versions of software, or
| easier for devs to A/B different aspects. Anti-piracy is not
| the only reason
| cl0ckt0wer wrote:
| With the amount of piracy that went on with the early 2000's
| videogames (doom!) I'm surprised anyone made money.
| imaginationra wrote:
| I love wiggly paint(got it from your itch.io so I know its the
| real one) Keep up the great work and thank you.
| NeutralForest wrote:
| Full support to the author, I hope they'll be able to keep making
| things that are interesting and outside the box like Decker and
| WigglyPaint. I hope they'll find solace in keeping at creative
| things.
|
| I also wish LLM copies were not crowding out actual artists.
| hananova wrote:
| This is why I've recently modified my git forge to return subtly
| and maliciously buggy code if it detects it is being accessed by
| an LLM.
|
| I won't link it, and I won't do a write up to retain
| effectiveness, but I have already found at least 3 vibe coded
| slop projects on GitHub that include my deliberately buggy code
| verbatim, and it makes me very happy.
| spacebuffer wrote:
| this sounds very effective. I obviously understand you wouldn't
| want to explain how LLM detection works, but would it be
| possible to know which forge your using?
| furyofantares wrote:
| I have no doubt LLMs are involved in this these days and make the
| problem worse, but this problem extends back in time too. During
| the Wordle craze there were tons of people making variations on
| Wordle. Anyone who's game got at all popular would find search
| results covered in sites that either just iframe embed their
| game, or copied the game and took out the credits.
|
| I always register a TLD for my games and I think that might be
| why my games have always managed to stay at the top of the
| results, but they are followed by loads of people embedding the
| game, look at the search results for xordle for example. Many
| other authors would share their game on github pages or replit or
| whatever and were not so lucky.
| cl0ckt0wer wrote:
| Yeah, I have a few domains that I keep around for these type of
| projects. If it doesn't go anywhere I just reuse it.
| cl0ckt0wer wrote:
| (it's never gone anywhere )
| socalgal2 wrote:
| I'm confused. The post rants about LLMs but says the project is
| open source and most of the copies are v1.3. What does LLMs have
| to do with this?
|
| Further, if your idea is simple to copy it will be copied. See
| Threes vs 2048. Sure, yours might be best for some defintion of
| "best". Maybe? A recent example is the Suika Game. It's a game,
| once you know the idea, you could write, without an LLM, in a few
| hours. And so there are 100s of clones. The original has some
| deliberate design choices that some of the clones might have
| missed. On the other hand, it's got some bad choices that I'm
| guessing some of the clones didn't bother to copy. Further, it's
| a simple idea so it's easy to make and then add stuff.
|
| As for wigglypaint, it's not a new idea. Dr. Katz was made in
| Autodesk Animator in the mid 90.s
| https://youtu.be/XxhS0U9-Z84?t=154
|
| Neither is the "draw under the lines" a new idea. Two I know of,
| the Paper App (iOS) and MyPaint (Amiga, 1991). I'm sure there are
| others.
| thot_experiment wrote:
| You should consider reading the article as everything you talk
| about is addressed almost directly by the author.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| Maybe you should go read the HN comment guidelines
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article.
| "Did you even read the article?
|
| I get that it's frustrating - that's what open source allows
| though. I used to run a blog. I ran a few websites, open
| sourced, that were similar in a general way (users can make
| stuff on the site and share it others). I found the site
| duplicated. In fact it's still duplicated to this day. Oh
| well.
| 1313ed01 wrote:
| The video description only links to some clone and not to the
| now (since 2011 or so) also open sourced original Animator:
|
| https://github.com/AnimatorPro
| redmattred wrote:
| It seems like the most popular of these clones is
| https://jigglypaint.com which looks to openly acknowledge it was
| inspired by WigglyPaint.
|
| I'm curious if this article is directed towards them or the
| clones that are impersonating the WigglyPaint brand.
| bitwize wrote:
| Na na na na, na na na na na na...
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y0BerpDmVSE
|
| (sorry, that effect gives me 90s flashbacks)
| badsectoracula wrote:
| Interestingly enough, i had a kind of similar "problem" (not that
| i see it as a problem, just a bit unfortunate).
|
| About ~16 years ago i wrote a scripting language i called LIL[0]
| (which, like the author, i also hooked up in a HyperCard-like
| program[1][2]), meaning Little Interpreted Language, but whenever
| i search for it on Google or DDG, my site never shows up -
| instead, both show a GitHub repository[3] that someone made and
| hasn't been updated in 15 years (and has outdated links) and
| sometimes the Tcl wiki page about it[4] (which at least points to
| the correct homepage) or even Rosetta code[5] since sometime
| added LIL to it some time ago.
|
| Amusingly DDG's AI summary does describe my LIL but it links to
| the outdated GitHub repo and the Tcl wiki page. Then if you click
| the "More" button it describes Beyond Loom's Lil. The "Explore
| more" links however do a mix of both (one even mixes both
| languages in the same response :-P).
|
| [0] http://runtimeterror.com/tech/lil/
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8CYosAIIJw
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rshZHDDruAE
|
| [3] https://github.com/wsxiaoys/lil
|
| [4] https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/lil
|
| [5] https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:LIL
| cousin_it wrote:
| There's an "AI alignment" angle here. An actually aligned AI
| would choose its actions based on human flourishing, so it would
| refuse requests to write scam emails or fill the internet with
| slop. This explains why commercial companies will never release
| any AI that's anywhere close to aligned. They'll release AI which
| is good for their bottom line and for the bottom line of the
| client. Basically, commercial incentives say AI should happily
| screw over anyone who isn't an AI company or its client.
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