Just a PSA.
Sorry to link to Reddit, but not only is the dev sloppily using using Claude to do something like 20k line PRs, but they are completely crashing out, banning people from the Discord (actually I think they wiped everything from Discord now), and accusing people forking their code of theft.
It’s a bummer because the app was pretty good… thankfully Calibre-web and Kavita still exist.
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accusing people forking their code of theft
AGPL 3.0 license
Too fucking bad, pussy.
Hey, pussies are great, don’t compare them to that idiot.
Quick! Someone add it to Open Slopware!
It seems like the criteria for making it on there is fairly lax. Nextcloud makes a list by simply having an AI assistant as an optional (user-facing) feature, while none of the actual code appears to be AI-generated.
Even if the “has an optional AI assistant” was not a thing, the repo includes an AGENTS.md file, which is also listed in the criteria, and more than qualifies it as slopware.
I’d be easier to make a list of all software that doesn’t use any AI at this point
That list is depressing
Especially since it is actually listed as an alternative to calibre there
Man this list is depressing. Good to have handy though. Sad to see SearXNG and a few others on here.
Seriously… kitty, rawtherapee, keepassxc, python, the freaking linux kernel!
Did you read about kernel they are experimenting with using it for reviews. They have some prompts for LLM to catch issues before it gets to maintainers so it frees up time. Don’t see an issue if that is all it is.
It might be, but for some people that might, understandably, be already bad enough, a line in the sand if you will.
I’m reminded of this statement about LLMs and the kind of people who use them in the first place. It’s an early indicator that quality (and sovereignty) of the software is going to go the incline down.
Searxng? Fuck, guess I’m just not pulling a new container.
There is this that popped up the other day, but I haven’t looked into it at all to see if it’s vibecoded or not: https://github.com/fccview/degoog
Thanks, will dig into this!
Booklore is listed as an alternative to Calibre 😭
Wait Calibre is there??? Oh my god no.
Fortunately this exists
Damn it!!! 😵
“No, anti AI people aren’t technophobic”
Meanwhile anti AI people:
Damn 99% of the time someone says not to use an open source product it’s because of some obscure drama unrelated to the actual program.
But in this case the dev appears to not just be using AI code (not great but debatable) but using mostly AI code and using AI to reply to bug reports. Not something the average person wants to be running in a live environment.
I haven’t used Booklore but the excitement around it was nudging me there. I think I’ll stick with CWAs slower rollout.
Wow, I was thinking about switching from calibre-web soon too… Thanks for the headsup!
Can’t check now, but if there aren’t forks named like BookTale and BookStory, I’ll riot.
Jokes aside, if the license he used allows forking, dude’s tripping, and could even get sued depending on the country for false accusation of crime.
And ah, Discord, great for nuking inconvenient chats. Imagine if it had happened over at a public forum so people’s reactions could be backed up.
And dunno where I’d draw the line, but 20k lines imo is a bit past reasonable. How would anyone audit that many in a timely manner? But with the “dev” doing that daily, that’d be hard to even pretend.
The treekie in me wants BookData.
(edit) This made me remember The Measure Of A Man and now I’m fucking depressed. They had such high hopes for the future.
The trekkie in me wants BookData.
The extra bit about Lore being the one who could make shit up and say what folks wanted to hear while Data was based on facts and logic isn’t lost on me either
“You want to seek out new life and new civilizations? Well THERE. IT. SITS!”
Truly an actor of all time. Sometimes I think Oscars and Emmys and all that shit should be able to be granted retroactively (hellooooo, “you broke your little ships” scene).
And every time the use of LLMs for open source development comes up we get the same tired spiel from people about how it’s just a tool and implications that anyone who doesn’t embrace it with jpy in their heart is just a Luddite.
It seems to me that it’s less a tool and more like intentionally infecting your project with cancer. Sure it shows all the signs of rapid growth, but metastasization isn’t sustainable or desirable. Plus I am yet to encounter a strong advocate for LLMs who isn’t a cunt.
I think it kinda depends on the context. If someone is just making a tool for themselves and they slap on MIT or GPL3 just because who cares someone else can have it, then sure. Who cares if it’s trash if the stakes are so low that they’re scraping the ground and the user base is expected to be single digits.
But when you care about the reputation of your project, or if your project requires people trust it, then yeah for sure it’s not appropriate to vibe/slop it.
I have ethical concerns about the realities of how this tech is used, mainly in what it’s doing to the economic and power dynamics in society. But I don’t have a problem with the tech itself. That said, I have to admit that it may not be realistic to separate the tech from its inevitable impact. Now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds, and all that.
How do people gain the ability to make these major projects if not for cutting their teeth on the small ones though. We cut the apprentice and journeyman stages of mastering an art out, replace it with slop, and then ten years from now we wonder why kids these days are so incapable of actually creating anything.
I have talked to kids who have told me that the assignments they got at school were so trivial they just ran them through ChatGPT rather than waste their time. When I pointed out that the reason the assignments were “trivial” was to give them the skills and confidence to do the big projects when the time came I got, at best, blank looks.
I said it somewhere else, if you are using an LLM to generate unit tests I find it hard to be terribly mad at that. If it’s scaffolding documentation, meh whatever. If it’s generating the main body of your project, I have concerns. Plus I circle back to how can you open source code that may have been stolen from a copyrighted work?
I did a better job explaining my position in another comment, the problem is one of culture. We live in a culture that pressures people to use AI in this bad way, and pressures the creators of AI to court bad people as customers, and throw away their ethics. If we weren’t in a rat race, I feel like a lot of the problems would go away.
But we live in the culture that we live in, and at some point you simply cannot practically view the technology in isolation.
The problems are human nature, capitalism and greed. Doesn’t mean we have to give in, and frankly all the appeasers out there that keep saying “You have to use it or you will be left behind.” are effectively the drug pusher in the locker room telling the insecure young man “Oh yeah everyone else is juicing, you don’t do it you won’t be able to compete.”
Nobody believes the drug dealers are handing out drugs because they are humanitarians, they have a financial interest in destroying that kids life while he tries to justify it to himself.
We know LLMs are harmful on SO many different levels, but the US economy would literally collapse if people acknowledged that and stopped supporting them. So we race headlong towards societal collapse to keep the plates spinning. Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, Elon Musk, and so many others should all be tried for genocide and crimes against humanity once the collapse occurs. The sooner our societies start stringing these monsters up rather than celebrating them the more hope we have as a species.
I’ll argue that it is a tool, and object to automatic zealous hostility towards anyone using it, but that doesn’t mean criticisms of how that tool is being used aren’t valid. It seems like that is what people are focusing on here, and they definitely aren’t Luddites for doing so.
I think I can provide you a great equivalent. Firearms, they have utility, but there are people who make them a lifestyle choice, and there are people who make them their whole personality. There are also a lot of people just desperate for an excuse to use one. I grew up with a couple of farmers in the extended family, I would never argue guns should be entirely banned, but I am so glad I live somewhere with sane laws around gun ownership. It would be so nice if we had similar consideration around regulating LLMs.
The danger to open source as I see it is that LLMs degrade the quality and ability of developers while increasing their throughput, and I have never once heard someone complain that open source lacks quantity, but I hear a lot of people complaining about the quality.
I think that the problem, in both cases, is culture.
It’s not that either of those are bad, or bad for people; it’s bad for people of this culture or people of this society. It’s how the two intersect that is the problem.
It could be a tool that lifts up the worker or creative, but instead it’s a tool to devalue the creative and extract power and wealth.
It highlights that people with power get a different set of rules and laws than the rest of us, and they’re using that to further entrench and enrich themselves.And it’s so noisy. We are already losing bug bounties, it’s swamping open source projects in poor quality or even counter productive “work” on github to get recognition, its drowning out the work of creatives, its invading so many aspects of life (education, communication, research, public policy) and its fundamentally a bad tool for so many of those areas.
I recently applied for a job and got some advice from a friend who works HR in a different industry. His advice, see if you can find out which LLM they use and run your application through it. A lot of positions are getting huge numbers of applicants so they are using LLMs to generate the short list for interview, you could have the absolute perfect application but because the LLM doesn’t like the way you wrote it you are thrown out of the pool without a human being ever seeing you. It’s so insidious, by being “helpful” it reinforces its necessity.
I will complain about quantity, many areas where open source projects are competing with closed source commercial products they have not achieved feature parity or a comparable level of polish, quantity matters. So does, as someone else touched on, quality of life improvements to the process of writing code like ease of acquiring and synthesizing information. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a worthwhile tradeoff, but how much is really being sacrificed depends on what exactly is being done with a LLM. To me one part of what’s described here that’s clearly going too far is using it to automate communication with other people contributing to the project, there’s no way that is worth it.
As for the gun thing, I will support entirely banning LLM powered weapons intended to kill people, that’s an easy choice.
I still don’t think quantity is lacking, and when quality is there it’s amazing how often Open Source becomes a defacto standard. How many video tools are just a shim over FFMPEG for example?
Yet again the problem I see is that LLMs are a seductive form of software cancer, it starts as a little help and before you know it we have booklore like projects. If open source can’t be better it will be subsumed in slop.
Not disagreeing about LLMs as a weapon. In a functional society the person who pulls the trigger on any weapon is responsible for the consequences of that action. I wonder how eager the CEOs of these “AI” companies would be to weaponise their creations if they were held personally accountable for every injury caused by their product. By a jury. Preferably with explicit laws stating they could not indemnify or gain immunity.
One example of a place where quantity is lacking is web browsers. Another might be mobile operating systems. I am glad projects like Firefox and GrapheneOS exist, but it’s obvious that the volume of work needed to achieve broad compatibility and competitiveness for these types of software is a limiting factor. As for the idea that any LLM use is a slippery slope, the way to avoid the slippery slope fallacy would be to have compelling evidence or rationale that any use really does lead naturally to problematic use; without that the argument could apply to basically any programming thing that gets to be associated with things done badly (ie. Java), but I think it isn’t usually the case that a popular tool has genuinely no good or safe ways to use it and I don’t think that’s true for AI.
How many browsers would you like me to list, yes a lot of them are spins on some of the big incumbents, but there is a much wider variety than you might credit. Rendering engines on the other hand, yeah there’s not much variety there.
Mobile operating systems are something of a special case I’m afraid, the Telcos and incumbents have got way too heavy a thumb on the scale, and if any new comer looks like breaking the duopoly it will be treated as an existential threat. It will be associated with paedophilic terrorists faster than you can blink.
Both incidentally categories where I will never be happy with slopcode. But hey if anyone wants to use a slop-coded browser I just heavily suggest you never enter any passwords or personal information while using it.
We are actively building a history of cases where LLM usage correlates heavily with that slope you mentioned, but hey that’s OK, we aren’t allowed to call things out before they happen, judgement may only be passed once the damage is done right?
Out of curiosity, we know that LLM usage increases cognitive deficit and in some cases leads to psychosis. How many fatalities would you say is an acceptable number before governments act? How degraded do we let our societies get before we reign it in?
At some point the bubble is going to burst and we will see a number of countries bankrupted in the name of “AI” I’m really curious to see if we learn our lessons at that point. Should be interesting.
I find an LLM is a great way to shortcut the googling itd take for me to parse random error message #506 when I’m learning a new language but that’s about it. I’m also in no way writing software meant for mass consumption.
Ergo its a tool, a search engine replacement, that we wouldn’t need if search hadn’t gone to shit due to neglect and active internal sabotage.
Oh 100%.
I literally just got this all set up and was about to hook up my wife’s kobo to it, good timing for this to come out so I don’t waste any more of our time with this slop. What a shitshow.
I just spun up Komga instead last night (I was going to set up CWA but I’ve heard sketchy things about their lead dev that don’t leave me optimistic). Very easy to get up and running, pretty basic but it seems to work well and does exactly what it needs to do. I was a bit hesitant since it seemed geared toward comics, but it’s handling regular ebooks just fine.
Wait, I use CWA… What do I need to be outraged about this time?
I don’t have the full details, but I saw some mentions in that Booklore reddit thread about CWA’s dev ignoring major issues in favor of new features and such, something like that. I admittedly didn’t really do much research into that nor the tool itself, but Komga’s Kobo support seems better, so I just went with it.
Hmmm… Calibre web’s kobo integration is good enough, but Komga seems to be able to sync progress as well?
I might have to try Kkmga after all.
That’s not a reason to consider CWA unsafe
what happened with CWA? I was thinking of using it
Booklore is actually good though.
Much more usable than those others
Seems the guy has calmed down too.
he only said I was a dumb bitch and hit me because I told him I didn’t vote for Trump. he’s not like this all the time.
when people tell you who they are, listen.
Thanks, that might explain the jank I got when spinning it up yesterday…I’ll be back on calibre web or trying another option over the weekend.
Don’t know that software, but that was fun to read lol
Tbh, at the moment the maintainer seems to be have gotten the message - or at least tries to make it seem so. I would give him the benefit of doubt at this stage, at least for a while now.
so if someone had a meltdown and started slapping people, you’re willing to give them a pass?
I mean they seem like they’re sorry. /s
dude isn’t regretful of his actions. he regrets the reactions from the community.
being a FOSS dev is like being a merchant, trust is the only commodity you should be dealing in. if you, or your code, can’t be trusted there’s nothing for the community to rally around.
