• 2 Posts
  • 97 Comments
Joined 14 days ago
Cake day: October 31st, 2026
  • Spite_By_Design_LLC@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoOpen Source@lemmy.ml•Ban AI Slop?
    1·
    2 hours ago

    The current 32.71 snapshot includes both source code and APKs compiled there from. I take your point that I should make that correspondence clearer, along with which future interim releases might have no public source.

    At present, under the definitions you’ve provided, the current release meets all four FOSS criteria.

    As for “sanitising”, I mean removing private configuration, credentials and development files, not stripping out functional source code. That’s literally all I meant.

    As I’ve said, development happens in my private Forgejo repository, so preparing a public snapshot involves a little housekeeping. I prefer to keep the public release clean, and .gitignore only does part of that job.

    I appreciate you being civil. The other points I raised are worth serious community consideration (especially what constitutes “slop”, AI disclosure, and the unintended consequences of penalising transparency rather than judging projects on their merits), but I have said my piece.

  • Spite_By_Design_LLC@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoOpen Source@lemmy.ml•Android launcher actually worth switching to?
    1·
    17 hours ago

    Hard to improve upon perfection then :)

    Sometimes, code just gets to a place where it works and you can leave it alone for a while. I’m sure the dev is across unLauncher - it’s been specifically mentioned in places like r/dumbphones and the like and is somewhat popular in digital detox circles.

    It’s a nice, stable launcher, that uses minimal resources and works on very low end hardware. Hell, I’ve used it on Android based flip phones.

    I’m unabashedly a fan.

  • Spite_By_Design_LLC@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoOpen Source@lemmy.ml•Ban AI Slop?
    1·
    14 hours ago

    Yes, after a brief assessment i concluded (correctly, i see now after taking another look at it) that your project is exactly the kind of new, single-developer, vibe-coded slop which i think we should not accept the promotion of here

    A brief assessment indeed. Dare I say, a perfunctory one.

    You claim to have assessed the project, then taken another look, but provide no technical findings. Tell me then, specifically, what defects, security problems, unreliable features or examples of poor code did you find?

    Or did you just decide “fresh-looking repo, one dev, disclosed AI, therefore slop”?

    In your earlier remarks, you argued that no firm definition of “slop” was necessary. Yet you remain remarkably vibes-based about what constitutes it. Surely, during your extensive twice-over assessment, you would have noticed that SmartTube LOCAL is a fork of an established project, not something generated wholesale from a prompt?

    My additions include about 5,000 lines in new source files, plus minor modifications to existing code, across 6-8 months of development. The overwhelming majority of the codebase remains upstream SmartTube and its dependencies.

    The new functionality includes local profiles, local subscriptions, playlist imports and offline playback from SMB shares. I’ve tested actual builds on multiple TVs, including offline operation without internet access.

    I reviewed the code by hand, tested it myself, rewrote parts of it and iterated upon the results.

    None of this proves the code is perfect. It does, however, suggest something rather more substantial to assess than the age of a GitHub repository.

    So, it isn’t even an open source project going forward: the released source code is “frozen” and future versions will be binary-only?

    The public repository contains source code, build files and an MIT licence that preserves the original SmartTube copyright notice.

    The published 32.71 source code is open source. Anyone can inspect, modify, redistribute or fork it. In fact, I specifically encourage people to do so in the README.

    The MIT licence also permits binary-only distribution of MIT-licensed code, subject to its notice requirements. That doesn’t make a future binary-only build open source, but neither does it invalidate the existing release.

    I won’t push every intermediate source revision to GitHub. The project is maintained privately on self hosted Forgejo, and preparing a clean public release means sanitising code, separating unfinished features and removing private configuration and internal CI/CD tooling.

    That adds to my workload without much benefit to the people I support.

    I’m perfectly happy to publish updated source code with the next major revision, which I’m working on slowly.

    So, while you might reasonably argue that my README was poorly worded, there’s rather a large difference between not publishing every intermediate source revision and permanently withholding source code for all future releases.

    To be frank, you appear to be set on pre-punishing a solo developer for sharing a family-and-friends project based on a rather cursory examination. Doesn’t that run somewhat contrary to the spirit of FOSS?

    i am personally not completely opposed to AI-assisted coding; i am also doing some of it myself.

    Great. And yet you readily throw around “slop” as an invective and propose that new, heavily AI-assisted solo projects be relegated to [email protected], regardless of their actual quality.

    I’m sure you see the disconnect.

    You also suggest that most new solo AI-assisted projects are low quality and likely to be abandoned.

    That’s a generalisation, not an assessment of the project I posted.

    I’ve publicly discussed SmartTube LOCAL’s progress on the upstream SmartTube Show and Tell forum since September, with further updates in October.

    The repository is new because I repopulated it from my private development tree. Its creation date does not reflect the age of the project.

    Time in development alone doesn’t prove that SmartTube LOCAL is high quality. Equally, one developer and a new public repository don’t prove that it is poor quality.

    Which takes us full circle to your proposed secondary metrics. Project age and developer count might indicate maturity or maintenance risk, but neither establishes code quality. A young project can be well engineered, and an old one can be dreadful.

    This is exactly what the new community is meant to address: to have a place for people to share their AI-created softwares without getting a flood of hate for it being made with AI.

    There’s a certain irony here I’d like to comment on.

    You’ve now publicly called my project “slop” twice, without identifying a single technical defect, while advocating a separate community to protect AI-assisted developers from precisely that sort of hostility.

    I’m not opposed to !aials existing. It might become a genuinely useful community for people who use AI in software development.

    But presenting it as a refuge from hostility while dismissing projects as “slop” without demonstrating what’s wrong with them or what “slop” is rather undermines the sentiment.

    As I said, I’m not asking you to reinstate my post. Your community, your rules.

    But if you’re going to dismiss someone’s work as “slop” after two looks at the project, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask you to explain what, specifically, is wrong with it.

    Otherwise, this is precisely the “guilty until proven innocent” approach I mentioned earlier.

  • Spite_By_Design_LLC@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoOpen Source@lemmy.ml•Ban AI Slop?
    1·
    1 day ago

    … but I don’t think we actually need a very firm definition of “slop” to be able to say some things clearly are slop and some AI-involved things clearly aren’t. When in doubt about if something is of sufficient quality that we should keep it here, the age of the project and the number of developers involved are useful secondary metrics…this is not a place to promote new single-developer heavily-AI-assisted projects. Another community exists for sharing AI-Assisted Libre Software: [email protected] note that the word “slop” is intentionally absent from my proposed rule (and from name and description of the community)

    Curious. Woke up to find my post removed at almost exactly the same time you posted this, complete with an accusation of “slop”.

    The post had 31 upvotes, a 98% positive vote ratio and genuine discussion, for a project with a 6 month history behind it and a freshly repopulated repo. That doesn’t read like an unwelcome contribution.

    To be clear, I’m not asking nor am interested in reinstatement of it.

    Speaking plainly, !aials appears to be a tar pit for projects the mods deem guilty until proved innocent. Cool - your room, your rules.

    But I suspect this approach will lead you exactly here:

    https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/78050871/29108982

    IMESHO, there may be some merit in approaching things the way !selfhosted does, vis-a-vis [AIP], [CBH] tags.

    • Hint - AI suggested solution, human does the task.
    • Assisted - AI acts on part of a task, but a human handled the bulk.
    • Pair - About a 50/50 split of human made and generated.
    • Generated - Human prompted, AI generated

    There’s a significant difference between those categories and a catch all rule that assumes the worst. The latter leads to things like this. The proxy signals you’re proposing would have tar-pitted something like the venerable cURL if it had come out today and been accused of “slopware” (whatever that means).

  • Spite_By_Design_LLC@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPtoOpen Source@lemmy.ml•SmartTube LOCAL: piss off Youtube with a local account, subs and offline playback
    3·
    1 day ago

    Better :)

    The issue with stuff like TubeArchivist, pinchflat etc is that they have great curation and downloading (spoilers: its mostly ytdlp under the hood) but really bad at getting the content onto your TV.

    Plex, Jellyfin etc can be press ganged into it, but it’s clunky.

    Smarttube was designed for big screen, remote control navigation etc.

    What I did was make SmartTube play YouTube videos you download (I like MeTube because I’m not a sadist) alongside live sources.

    Use MeTube, Pinchflat or whatever to download your videos. Use SmartTube LOCAL to then play them offline thereafter. It’s android native, so it should work on Chromecast, android TVs, AOSP, Firesticks (maybe?) etc.

    Crunching the numbers, using a mix of 720 and 480p, I can store somewhere around 5000, 20-25 minute videos in 500gb. Stick that on a hard drive, plug it into your compatible travel router and you have offline YouTube on a boat, in an offgrid cabin, camping etc - anywhere you can install the app. You don’t need a server per se once the catalogue has been generated.

    We did something similar with NovaPlayer when we went to Tokyo last year (I brought the Google cast with USB pass thru and stuck a 128gb thumb drive to it. Plugged that straight into HDMI and off to the races). I’ll likely graft that onto SmartTube LOCAL also.

    Anyway, right now it’s configured for TVs but I’m sure I can figure out a way to have it display on android tablets or phones. That’s probably the final buy in step for the kids.

  • Spite_By_Design_LLC@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•Self-hosting messaging infrastructureEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    XMPP hosted via Raspberry Pi.

    The setup is:

    • Prosody provides the XMPP server.
    • Converse.js provides web client / PWA.
    • Conversations for Android clients
    • Coturn provides TURN services for calls and NAT traversal.
    • Tailscale provides remote access without exposing the XMPP server directly to the public internet.

    (nb: also configured Message Archive Management (MAM) for chat history, private multi-user chat rooms (MUC), HTTP File Upload for media, and Jingle signalling for audio/video calls).

    The server is designed to be accessible over our LAN. When away from home, family members connect through Tailscale (I really should just use Android actions and geofencing to auto launch Tailscale, but on my kids devices, I just leave Tailscale enabled. I don’t think it hits the battery too hard). Tailscale can only connect to XMPP and we keep our XMPP to family only, with me manually adding devices to Tailscale as I need to.

    As for why? Because I get joy from hosting my own shit, having control over it, having it work when other stuff falls over. My stuff falls over too, but I know WHY and HOW to fix it, and that’s how I prefer it. I want to get to the point that if the internet dies tomorrow, I shrug my shoulder and barely notice.

    My goal is to replace all cloud based services we use and I’m about 85% of the way there. I have a much larger goal too…but that’s a story for a different time.

    PS: I’m mildly irritated about Tailscale use, so I’m looking at getting off that teat as well eventually for a self hosted solution. There are some issues with Headscale and I don’t want to punch holes in firewall if I can avoid it. Still thinking on it.

    PPS: Meshtastic, Reticulum etc all seem super cool…but until there’s interoperability simple enough for normies…good luck getting buy in. I struggle to convince the fam to use XMPP (weird issues with android clients, Tailscale drop outs etc).

  • Spite_By_Design_LLC@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoOpen Source@lemmy.ml•Average open source project nowadays
    21·
    6 days ago

    “Guide” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. There’s an infinity of difference between asking an AI to make something and using an AI to do the scutt work, looking over the code it made, running IRL tests, asking “why X? Why not Y?”, swearing at it like a junior dev, asking it to fix a,b,c then finally getting acceptable code.

    And even with all that - when you set it up correctly - it’s still faster than doing it yourself (in certain circumstances).

    It feels more like doing project management / “software engineering” than clacking the keys. It’s amazing how different LLMs approach the same task though; I find Codex to be much more by the book than Claude, for example. The Qwen’s are like Labradors - eager to please, clumsy, crash into things a lot. GLM and Kimi are different again. Etc.

    You can’t let anything just “make me X, make no mistakes”. By the time you type in a ticket (with GO/NO GO gates, acceptance criteria etc) you might be looking at 500-1000 lines of text (which is why a re-usable template and procedures are important). You need repeatable procedures, acceptance tests - the lot.

    And so it goes.