Wow! This is amazing. I recently did a search of all of the background removers ever mentioned on HN and this one will be the one I recommend. I have a few images I have as tests for hard cases and this tool has done great and you've thought through some helpful other tools to add to it while keeping them out of the way if you just need to remove the background. Well done and thank you!

What happened to students who were in schools that closed was terrible. But it wasn't anything close to homeschooling.

The positives you experienced are very possible for a homeschooled student as well, and this seems to be a common boogieman. Other factors seem to play a much larger factor in the things you are (rightfully!) concerned about. As long as the parents have "the will to have nice things" (to refer to Patrick McKenzie's concept), then these are very surmountable problems.

Respectfully, A grateful dad who was homeschooled and who will homeschool.

P.S. Of course I will do some things differently than my parents, but it was an amazing gift and I had an extremely vibrant and stimulating time, including with peers (and adults!) outside of my parents' network who pushed me, challenged me, thought very differently than me, etc.

I posted this in another thread,but I think it better belongs here:

"So Gemini 3 Pro dropped today, which happens to be the day I proofread a historical timeline I'm assisting a PhD with. I do one pass and then realize I should try Gemini 3 Pro on it. I give the same exact prompt to 3 Pro as Claude 4.5 Sonnet. 3 pro finds 25 real errors, no hallucinations. Claude finds 7 errors, but only 2 of those are unique to Claude. (Claude was better at "wait, that reference doesn't match the content! It should be $corrected_citation!). But Gemini's visual understanding was top notch. It's biggest flaw was that it saw words that wrapped as having extra spaces. But it also correctly caught a typo where a wrapped word was misspelled, so something about it seemed to fixate on those line breaks, I think. A better test would have been 2.5 Pro vs. 3.0"

After continuing to use it, I genuinely think "It's a good model sir" and plan to add it to my rotation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736202

"Krita plugin Smart Segments lets you easily select objects using Meta’s Segment Anything Model (SAM v2). Just run the tool, and it automatically finds everything on the current layer. You can click or shift-click to choose one or more segments, and it converts them into a selection."