• 0 Posts
  • 83 Comments
Joined 15 days ago
Cake day: October 31st, 2026
  • Spite_By_Design_LLC@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Help me choose my daily browser (Android + Linux): hard privacy AND ethics constraints
    1·
    7 hours ago

    It uses Android System WebView, which gets independent updates.

    The browser UI may be five years old (I prefer it myself over today’s UIs), but the underlying rendering engine isn’t necessarily so. The cookie controls, fingerprinting protection, ad blocking and other privacy features all still work, AFAIK.

    Besides which, I forked the repo and lightly tweaked my version to suit my needs. That’s another option.

    Dunno what your threat posture is, but for mine, that’s enough. I’m not Snowden. I can only take so many (un)reasonable measures before I have to revert to flintlocks and bearskins.

  • Spite_By_Design_LLC@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoOpen Source@lemmy.ml•Average open source project nowadays
    2·
    9 hours ago

    No need to wonder. I ran the experiment myself. Despite forthright disclosure and an invitation to discuss code, project was dismissed as “slop” without reference to any specific technical defect.

    https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/29289619

    It’s all a little “Are you now, or have you ever been…” for my tastes and, as you say, risks encouraging obfuscation, siloing or performative compliance.

    Myself, I’d rather submit to the faceless masses on F-Droid (with appropriate disclosure) and let the software stand or fall on its own merits. I see little point in dancing on eggshells over the legitimacy of development tools for the privilege of sharing free software.

  • Spite_By_Design_LLC@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•Hosting matrix or something else for normal peopleEnglish
    6·
    1 day ago

    Sit down. Let me pour you a drink. Then let us lament the curse of the normie together.

    Beratna, tell me…is DeltaChat meeting their needs? Is it easier for you? I have one more migration in me, but i’m tired, beratna. I just walked in to find my youngest watching Netflix (gasp!) instead of the carefully curated media server.

    Like a lot of us, I solved an interesting technical problem without accounting for the messy end user problem.

    Fortunately, this one can be solved with a little uTorrent and some post-hoc market research and buy in (chocolate).

    You’re saying Deltachat gets you more of that then XMPP and Conversations, I’m willing to listen.

  • Spite_By_Design_LLC@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•Hosting matrix or something else for normal peopleEnglish
    3·
    1 day ago

    Same same but no VPS here. I use Tailscale to reach the self hosted XMPP instance, which is containerized. Clients can only reach the XMPP server (directly when on LAN, as white listed devices on Tailscale when not).

    It works. The bottleneck is Tailscale, weird issues with Android VPN automation switch over (something about my wife’s Samsung phone really does not like Tailscale. She’s also worried it increases battery drainage when left on) and the fact that using Tailscale instead of VPS is not the moral victory I had hoped for. There’s headscale I suppose, but then I have to deal with self signed certs and…then, and then and then…

    It never ends. Problems never end.

    I console myself with the fact I’ve made an E2E private family chat service that works without a public-facing server, yet remains accessible outside home with a click of a button. That’s a win.

    The problem is that I want it to work as smoothly as a commercial chat service on a shoe string budget, on a Raspberry pi sipping 2W. That and the fact that I’m bloody minded enough to work on it until it does, beyond the point of sanity.

  • Spite_By_Design_LLC@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoOpen Source@lemmy.ml•Ban AI Slop?
    2·
    1 day 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·
    2 days 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?
    2·
    2 days 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·
    2 days 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).