Submitted 3 weeks ago by jasonweiser@sh.itjust.works to selfhosted@lemmy.world
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.
accusing people forking their code of theft
Too fucking bad, pussy.
Hey, pussies are great, don’t compare them to that idiot.
Fair point.
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’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 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
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.
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?
It’s a powerful tool that people are using without restraint. I think this to be expected in the first few years after any new powerful tool is found. Humans will find a way to mess it up.
See radium cosmetics and ideas to dig the Panama canal using hydrogen bombs. Social media is probably as much or even more dangerous than LLMs.
But they aren’t distinct things, they are both heads of the same capitalism hydra. How much of the training data for these LLMs has been harvested directly from Social Media? I sure as shit don’t know and I would argue nor do many other people.
Radium is probably a good analogy actually. Thank you. It’s toxic in almost every application we can imagine, it’s got a legacy that extends out to the current day, it formed a massive economic block, and it turns out it should only ever have been used under the strictest controls. We should never have had “entrepreneurs” being the driving force behind it.
It should have ALWAYS been a controlled substance that required people who understood and respected how fucking dangerous it is. Instead we are intent on jamming LLMs into every aspect of life regardless of how badly we suspect and/or know it will fuck everything up.
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.
Wow, I was thinking about switching from calibre-web soon too… Thanks for the headsup!
I self-host audiobookshelf, and it’s working pretty well for me. It doesn’t have tons of features, and the android app is a bit janky, but it does what I need and I’m happy with it.
I use it daily and I love it :)
Reading this whole thread I’m now glad I have Audiobookshelf already. I already use it every day for audiobooks and podcasts, but hadn’t considered it for ebooks.
Just transferred my ebook collection from Booklore to ABS. I’ll miss the Kobo Sync which seems to work in Booklore, but I certainly won’t miss the AI and vibe coding!
Use it every day and it’s all I need.
Classic. Another one bites the dust…
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.
I wonder if it’s just an out-of-line openclaw deleting the discord to silence the humans that don’t like its code.
Don’t know that software, but that was fun to read lol
Booklore is actually good though.
Much more usable than those others
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.
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.
Good thing I decided against switching to it, even though my main reason is that my weird book organisation scheme isn’t feasible with anything but calibre or manual organisation currently as far as I know
lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 3 weeks ago
Quick! Someone add it to Open Slopware!
nfreak@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Man this list is depressing. Good to have handy though. Sad to see SearXNG and a few others on here.
northernlights@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
Seriously… kitty, rawtherapee, keepassxc, python, the freaking linux kernel!
Atropos@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Searxng? Fuck, guess I’m just not pulling a new container.
Jolteon@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
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.
Evotech@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I’d be easier to make a list of all software that doesn’t use any AI at this point
lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 3 weeks ago
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.
meathappening@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Booklore is listed as an alternative to Calibre 😭
lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 3 weeks ago
Damn it!!! 😵
traxex@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Wait Calibre is there??? Oh my god no.
Sunny@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
Holy shit I almost whish I didn’t read through that list…So sad to see so many projects go down this path…
pie_enjoyer@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
“No, anti AI people aren’t technophobic”
Meanwhile anti AI people:
antrosapien@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
That list is depressing
uzay@infosec.pub 3 weeks ago
Especially since it is actually listed as an alternative to calibre there