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.
You must log in or register to comment.
Wow, I was thinking about switching from calibre-web soon too… Thanks for the headsup!
Don’t know that software, but that was fun to read lol
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 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.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.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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
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.
That’s not a reason to consider CWA unsafe
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.
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.
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!!! 😵
That list is depressing
@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!
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.
I wonder if it’s just an out-of-line openclaw deleting the discord to silence the humans that don’t like its code.
accusing people forking their code of theft
AGPL 3.0 license
Too fucking bad, pussy.
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).
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.
