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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Quick! Someone add it to Open Slopware!
Man this list is depressing. Good to have handy though. Sad to see SearXNG and a few others on here.
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 😭
Damn it!!! 😵
Wait Calibre is there??? Oh my god no.
Fortunately this exists
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.
I’d be easier to make a list of all software that doesn’t use any AI at this point
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.
@lambalicious @jasonweiser Not sure seafile should be listed as an alternative. We couldn’t include it on Debian due to copyright sketchiness/plagerism…
Geez… problems never end, do they.
I’m barely active in Codeberg. Unless someone beats me by, say, end-of-month, I might file an issue about it; that said, I’d like to be able to offer at least one (1) functional alternative rather than simply +1’ing to the complains that this or that is Never Good Enough.
@lambalicious Syncthing is what I replaced seafile with, fwiw. Works great!
Especially since it is actually listed as an alternative to calibre there
deleted by creator
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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately I don’t think caution is a virtue that is rewarding in most circumstances to most people. New tools need to be extensively and rigorously tested before being used.
I don’t even think it’s a individualism/capitalism thing unfortunately. I’ve been in cultures/societies that are not either and both still use these tools to further their goals. It’s just power at the end of the day.
It’s like the nuclear bomb. It doesn’t really matter what the underlying economic system of US or USSR were, they still used it to further their goals.
I think the insidiousness is in the power of the tool. For most people it’s just too powerful to not use. I can be an excellent photographer or artist and not make a dime if I don’t engage in social media.
For me that’s the sad thing. Self-hosted small models have been extremely useful to me to perform selective tasks that completely changed how things work. It’s allowed me to manage my research and information processing so much better. But I also know most people don’t put any limiters on it and use it for anything and everything.
I have played around with a bunch of tools at a self hosted level. The big thing I found puts inherent brakes on the process is the technical capability to actual use them, when I played around with ESRGAN to upscale images I was limited in application by time and equipment, I achieved better results than I could have on my own, markedly worse results than if I had the technical ability and equipment to just reshoot the images with better resolution.
I tried some photogrammetry, similar outcomes. I could have done better by being better with Blender. NERFs as well.
What we have is people yelling “Monorail! Monorail!” And using free credits or buying them.
The industry is already losing obscene amounts of money and the actual use cost is still entirely obscured from the general public. Once enough of the world is hooked on using LLMs for everything we are going to see the true costs emerge, then it will be another iteration of the haves and the have nots, society as a whole cannot afford to make LLM usage profitable, where does that get us?
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).
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 :)
Use it every day and it’s all I need.
Classic. Another one bites the dust…
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.
what happened with CWA? I was thinking of using it
I wonder if it’s just an out-of-line openclaw deleting the discord to silence the humans that don’t like its code.
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.
Booklore is actually good though.
Much more usable than those others
Seems the guy has calmed down too.
