This raises another question I've been kicking around in my head for a while - at what point does a slop project stop being slop? Say I one shot a slop app and then continue to iterate on it with human-written commits. Or I find a vibe coded app I think has potential, fork it and then iterate on it. At what point does this become non-slop, or does it ever?
You raise a good point. "Build" in software engineering has a very specific meaning: typically binary artifacts are "built" from source code. Source code I think is typically "written" but of course if you're using a generative program you can't say you wrote it...
I've seen an LLM-user claim that "AI is the compiler of natural language" so I suppose if the prompt is source code then the generated code could be considered a build artifact. But, yeah, I don't think people generally say they "build" code.
Proprietary is a deal breaker (and SaaSS is a subset of that), so if the only option is slop then I guess I have to use slop.
But, realistically, neither. I haven't found a situation so far in which the only viable option is vibe coded.
Rewriting stuff in rust was kind of a meme long before LLM's. Rust also is famously a powerful language with a steep learning curve, the latter being irrelevant if you don't actually have to bother to learn it.
My tinfoil conspiracy theory is that artcraft is actually a 5d chess move from the "anti-ai" camp to draw bigtech attention and get them to turn against LLMs on principle, or at least get them to implement some sort of anti-app-cloning thing like anthropic recently did for games.
Not really but that'd be funny i suppose.
I wonder how the rustaceans feel about their language being associated with slop.
Remember if it lives on "the cloud" (someone else's computer) then they control it... not you.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html
The biggest problem with patched apps is that they are not free software. The patches themselves might be under a free license but applying a free patch to a proprietary program doesn't cause the entire program to become free.
However, these patched youtube apps are usually promoted as competition to actual free options such as NewPipe, in free software and open source communities. So they serve as attempts to pull FOSS users back into the proprietary world. On that basis I am generally against them and promote real FOSS where possible. NewPipe and its forks (not sure about other FOSS youtube options) also have the benefit of serving as PeerTube clients, so they can be helpful in moving off the youtube platform itself.
AI is the compiler of natural language.
That's a very worrisome position. If "AI is the compiler" that means the source code is your prompts/chats and the stuff in the repo is just build artifacts.
Raspberry pi also started including DRM in their (non-free) firmware that restricts RAM upgrades. If you upgrade the RAM the firmware will either refuse to use the additional RAM or simply refuse to boot at all.
Fortunately it also has a fairly sensible non-free software policy
The only non-free software permitted in AlpineBSD is the netbsd-firmware package, which contains binary blobs for NetBSD drivers.
(Although part of me feels like reverse-engineering binary blobs might in fact be a valid use case for LLM's)
I've never been active in r/opensource and don't want to make assumptions of bad faith on this moderator. It's my opinion that these rules, while perhaps well-intentioned, are a bit too stringent, and they will most likely walk some of them back in time. Personally I would give the benefit of the doubt to established projects but I think newer projects should merit more scrutiny, not an outright ban. That said I have spoken in favor of a ban on vibe coded and mostly-generated projects (although tend to give the benefit of the doubt to established projects experimenting with generative tools).
IMO I'd keep the one-year maintained rule (maybe walk it back to six months) and the "capstone project" rule (more scrutiny if it's something we have a dozen of already). "Must have 3+ contributors" is just too far. The account age rule is also probably a good idea if it keeps spammers away.
That said it is my experience that many "anti-AI holy warriors" are not "pro-FOSS" or very knowledgeable about the free software movement in general. Not saying that's true about this moderator in specific but many would have no issue at all sacrificing the FOSS community if it helped fight back against slop. I'm not saying being pro-FOSS means being "pro-AI" but I think most "anti-AI" are motivated by silly mickey mouse reasons like "stolen intellectual property" when there are imo actual reasons to be skeptical of "AI" especially the proprietary SaaSS models.