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Hoist with their own petard

Brandon Thomas is a proper software engineer who used his own skills + AI to reverse engineer the whole Adobe Suite in Rust. He was pissed off at what he called Adobe’s ‘scummy practices’ – like charging you a fee to cancel your subscription.

Me, I’m exercised at the subscription model to begin with. I know it suits Adobe, but it didn’t suit me. As a retired graphic artist, I couldn’t justify paying a monthly fee just to play Photoshop and do some light desktop publishing.

I’ve got the last standalone version of Photoshop on my main machine, frozen in aspic. This laptop uses Elements, which is 95% of the whole Photoshop. For desktop publishing, I use Affinity Publisher, which I bought a perpetual license for just before they made it free (frownyface.jpg).

Anyway, link to the free ArtCraft suite is here. I haven’t tried it yet. Absolutely nobody is crying for Adobe, which has made itself very unpopular over the years.

I asked the robot where “hoist with your own petard” comes from and it said Shakespeare’s Hamlet. A petard was a small explosive charge used to blow doors and such, but it’s from the French pétard, meaning fart. So, lifted by your own bomb (or fart). A second robot confirms. Funny, I’m sure I once read a very complicated explanation involving explosives on poles.

Posted: October 12th, 2026 under personal.
Comments: 2

Comments

Comment from Penelope Gutierrez
Time: October 12, 2026, 1:16 pm

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Comment from Ricky Sanford
Time: October 12, 2026, 1:50 pm

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