Captain Beyond

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.

That is if you believe “intellectual property” to be an ethical concept in the first place. Many in the free software movement do not. Many of us also do not believe copying, sharing, or remixing is “theft.” That is a propaganda term from the copyright cartel.

(Note that I think so-called generative AI has many problems but this is not one that concerns the free software movement imho)

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

IMO insisting that free software options be “no-AI” while accepting proprietary stuff is backwards. In the proprietary world it’s the norm that as the end-user you aren’t entitled to know how the software is built, because that’s considered a secret. Your favorite proprietary developers could be using “AI” and you’re not supposed to know about it. In the proprietary world as long as it looks good and does what you want it to do it doesn’t matter how it’s implemented.

If you’re insisting on being free of “AI” then as a consequence you have to insist on at least source-availability. As far as I know Obsidian isn’t even that.

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.

Unfortunately Obsidian is proprietary

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)

Grayjay is source-available proprietary software. https://isitreallyfoss.com/projects/grayjay/

Their replacement for gboard is another proprietary app. A real FOSS alternative that seems popular is Heliboard, but it requires a proprietary blob for swipe typing (although apparently they are working on replacing that with a free alternative). I’m fond of Unexpected Keyboard.

You are correct that simply saying “this is open source” without specifying a license is generally not enough to actually ensure the four freedoms, however in the case of TempleOS Terry Davis specifically wrote on his website that it is public domain (the link is to an archive, to demonstrate that it was not added after his death, but it’s still there).

Captain Beyond

The public domain is a concept in copyright law where a work has no copyright holder, either because the copyright expired or because (in TempleOS’s case) the copyright was voluntarily relinquished. However, note that it’s entirely jurisdiction-dependent (for example, it’s not always even possible to relinquish a copyright, and copyright expiration also varies by jurisdiction). As copyright is a state-granted monopoly on distribution rights, if no one has that monopoly, there are no restrictions on copying and hence the freedom to modify and distribute the source code is available to all. Note that copyright is automatic upon the creation of a work and does not need to be registered, so either an explicit declaration from the author or knowledge that the copyright term is expired is needed to know something is in the public domain.

In short, if something is in the public domain (as the preferred form for modification i.e. source code) it is free software and open source, but the idea that public domain is somehow incompatible with FOSS is a somewhat reoccurring talking point that came up very recently. I don’t know where this came from but I imagine it has something to do with the discourse on copyright on LLM generated work.

However, it’s usually best to use an explicit license so you can affirm your intent to release the software as free.

FSF recognizes public domain as a category of free software (although, in their pedantry, they are quick to point out that it is not a “license”):

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#PublicDomain

OSI says more or less the same thing although they also elaborate on the actual legal complications of the public domain, and recommend explicitly using a license if possible:

https://opensource.org/faq#public-domain

TBF he’s correct on that one, Linux actually is just the kernel and the OS normally built around it is the project he started ~7 years before Linux was ever a thing. Given his OS project had a political/ethical message that Linux completely disregards, it’s completely understandable he might be a tad irked that his work is lumped in under the kernel guy’s.

Even if it sounds silly to us “normal users” if you put yourself in his head it makes sense.

I like Unexpected Keyboard, it’s really intuitive once you get the hang of the swipe motions. I used to use Anysoft Keyboard but it became unusable with one of the more recent updates so I had to look for a new keyboard and found this one to my liking.

It’s not open source. The open source definition is about more than being able to see source code. The usual term for the latter is “source-available” which tells you nothing about what you’re actually able to do with it.

Another term I use is “proprietary source available software” (PSAS) as a mirror to “free, open source software” (FOSS). Note that the “free” in that term refers to free software (libre) not free-of-cost (gratis). The free software definition and open source definition generally overlap so most licenses that are one will also be the other. In other words, “open source but not FOSS” is not a thing (and is generally a misnomer for PSAS).

As an analogy, you wouldn’t say a store is “open” just because you can look in the windows and see things.