I don’t really want to become the judge of what is “heavily-AI-assisted”.

imo it doesn’t really take much in the way of judgement; usually it is pretty obvious when there is one developer and the README is written in LLM voice and the project is a few weeks or days old.

I think if I were to write a rule I would focus more on self-promotion in general than trying to decide how AI assisted it was

I think that would also be a good rule, but wouldn’t stop people from promoting others’ slop or from promoting their own while pretending it isn’t.

I would generally rather rely on user votes to decide if it is “worth it” or not

unfortunately there are sometimes cases (such as the post i deleted here yesterday) where a post will have mostly upvotes despite being not-even-open-source. there are also things which are freely licensed, but get many upvotes despite being absurdly bad vibe-coded ideas - eg, this centralized IPFS web directory making contradictory privacy claims 🫠 (imo that should be deleted; what do you think?)

Curious. Woke up to find my post removed at almost exactly the same time you posted this, complete with an accusation of “slop”.

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… and yes, seeing and deleting your post was what reminded me that i’ve been meaning to post something in this thread.

however, after i deleted it for being slop, i also noticed another reason it is not suitable for this community: as @thingsiplay@lemmy.ml helpfully pointed out in the comments, your README says this:

To that end, I’m publishing the current 32.71 source code and final release, with the source code frozen at this version.

Download the APKs from the SmartTube LOCAL GitHub Releases page.

I’ll continue to publish updated APKs as I hatch them.

So, it isn’t even an open source project going forward: the released source code is “frozen” and future versions will be binary-only? so, in this case you actually shouldn’t post this in the !aials@lemmy.ml community either 🤦

fwiw i am personally not completely opposed to AI-assisted coding; i am also doing some of it myself. however i think everyone should be skeptical of new single-developer vibe-coded projects - most are very low quality and will be abandoned in the near future.

The latter leads to things like this.

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.

imo this community should have a rule against posts promoting new primarily-written-with-an-LLM software projects. as an admin, i’ve deleted a few myself when there are reports of them and the mods aren’t resolving them.

banning all AI-assisted software is obviously no longer reasonable now that many large and old projects are using it (with varying levels of care…) 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.

@gary_host_laptop@lemmy.ml created a new community which I think should be linked in the sidebar here as an alternate place for sharing these things. How about this for a rule (in the !opensource@lemmy.ml sidebar)?

This is not a place to promote new single-developer heavily-AI-assisted projects. Another community exists for sharing AI-Assisted Libre Software: !aials@lemmy.ml

note that the word “slop” is intentionally absent from my proposed rule (and from name and description of the community) - the point is that this is a place for people to share their AI-created software, regardless of if it is 100% vibe coded or is actually high-quality “agentic engineering” - only time, review, and users will ultimately tell which category many of these new things fall into. But enough of it is slop that we shouldn’t have this community flooded with it, imo.

cc @CrypticCoffee@lemmy.ml @Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml @kevincox@lemmy.ml

In the spirit of open-source OP asked if people want to contribute their time. You wouldn’t flame any other foss project this hard for simply being unfinished.

asking strangers to review your LLM outputs without informing them that some (or in this case, most) of it has never been reviewed by any human before, is not at all in the “spirit of open-source”. This website continues to be very misleading: it says “Learn math and science by doing. Bite-sized, hands-on lessons. Drag, predict, and solve your way to real understanding. Free for everyone.” and has a “Start learning” button. The disclaimer which OP added on the About page absolutely needs to be moved to the front page, where everybody will see it before they see a pitch implying that this is ready to go.

@kiarash@lemmy.world when i undeleted your post before, after you added the “less than a third” disclosure on the About page, I told you in a PM that that was insufficient and I see now you have still not fixed it so I am sorry but I am going to delete this post again. Send me a PM if/when you make the disclosure of what this actually is far more prominent. I suggest showing your agent my comments and asking it if this is reasonable and if your disclosures are sufficiently prominent.

https://www.spacejam.com/2021/ is not much different tho

I was really expecting your last paragraph to say the opposite of what it says 😂

I don’t have this device but, on behalf of everybody who does and will be able to run mainline linux on it in the future due to your work: thank you!

I agree. I’ll make the modifications later. Thank you.

Thanks, glad to hear it.

How much later, though? If it’s not soon, I think I will delete this post for now (i’m an admin on the home instance of this community). You can still edit it while the post is deleted but only you and mods and admins will be able to see it; send me a message after your edits are made and I’ll undelete it.

To be clear what I am asking for is an early/prominent/clear disclosure, both on the website and in the body of this lemmy post, of the percentage of the lessons which you estimate have not yet been carefully read by you (or presumably anyone else).

Thank you, and I hope this isn’t too discouraging!

Are you sure? […] I think the server itself may actually be GitHub somehow?

Yes, as i said:

When you use it on the web, there is a server serving it (the static files) to you.

And that server is github pages - one of microsoft’s free static web hosting services.

This is might seem inconsistent with what OP said:

It’s a static site with no servers or accounts, so it costs almost nothing to run

… but it isn’t really imo. You always need some kind of server to put something on the web for the world (using a normal web browser without installing something else) to be able to access it; what they mean by “no servers” here is that (1) there is no logic on the server, the server just serves a static web page, and (2) you can easily get the static files yourself and serve them yourself (or browse them from your filesystem without even serving them).

They mean you can git clone it and use it locally, offline on your computer or on your own server for others to use over the internet (or over some non-internet offline network).

When you use it on the web, there is a server serving it (the static files) to you.

It doesn’t look like you’re a moderator, according to the sidebar. How would you be able to remove it if you wanted to do that?

i’m an admin on the instance this community is on.

That’s why community contribution will be really important here.

requiring a github account to contribute is a major friction point; i highly recommend that you build something to allow people to give you feedback without requiring them to make an account with microsoft or anything else.

also, the website says:

AI tools helped us build this many lessons quickly. What turns a good lesson into a great one is human insight: the moment a step confused you, a clearer example, a mistake only a careful reader spots. OpenAha is open source, and every suggestion is read.

but you go much further in this lemmy comment and acknowledge:

I’ve already read through at least 30% of all the pages myself.

I think you really need to clearly disclose early - not only in this lemmy post but also on the website itself - that most (or any at all, if/when you’ve read most) of the lessons have not yet been read by any human at all.

Asking teachers to try this with their students without disclosing this crucial fact is not really OK.

I’ve already read through at least 30% of all the pages myself

wait, you posted this here when you’ve looked at less than 100% of it yourself? really?

this is incredibly disrespectful of other people’s time. please update the body of the post to disclose that fact 🤦

Regarding my background, my full name is publicly visible on github. You can search that up to see some of my background, education and activities. I have talked to some teachers about this and used their feedbacks, but there’s still a long way to go. I can’t foresee the future, but I’m serious about exploring this projects potential.

I’m sorry to be so negative here; from what i can tell what you’ve built seems quite impressive for a solo project in such a short time. Maybe I’m wrong and this is the next Khan Academy, but I am sadly not optimistic about this evolving into something which is useful for many people.

… but speaking of Khan Academy, why not try to build things with them instead of starting a new thing from scratch? (i don’t actually know much about them besides that they’ve been around a long time and have a good reputation from what i can tell)

I tried your first example, the planar graphs one. It made some sense until the “How many lines fit?” challenge which asks “What is the largest number of edges a planar graph with 10 vertices can have?” - the earlier steps do not remotely explain how to figure out the answer to this question, nor does the hint given when an incorrect answer is entered.

And it’s the same with the next challenge after it: “A football is stitched from pentagons and hexagons, with three patches meeting at every corner. Engineers design geodesic domes and virus shells the same way, some with hundreds of hexagons. However many hexagons there are, how many pentagons must such a closed ball have?” - there is nothing earlier to prepare someone to answer this question (except for the fact that this challenge is titled “Always twelve” and the answer is in fact 12 😂).

I’m curious about your background and plans for this project. Are you an educator? And/or do you have connections with educators who plan to use this with students? Is this a solo project so far? What is the likelihood that you’ll get bored and abandon this project in a week or a month from now? It is difficult for me to imagine many strangers on the internet volunteering their time to help you develop this when your website doesn’t preemptively provide answers to these and other questions.

tbh I am very tempted to remove this post from !opensource@lemmy.ml 🤔

Do you read pirated books?

yes, and you should too - limiting yourself to the books which you can afford to buy (and which are even available for you to buy) doesn’t make any sense.

This is also a reason to have functional LoraWan mesh network

fyi LoRa is a useful building block for building offline (non-internet) mesh networks but LoRaWAN is not: LoRaWAN is for IP-over-LoRa and it requires one of the nodes to have internet access to talk to a centralized server which mediates everything. (tldr: forget about LoRaWAN.)

Sorry I don’t have time to braindump on other things in this space, but I will say https://columba.network/ looks interesting - it is a reticulum client for android which can use LoRa (if you have a LoRa radio) and also BLE (100m range) and WiFi (both locally to other nodes and to the internet to talk to distant nodes). I have not actually tried Columba myself, but i think it looks promising.

edit: looking closer i think the one big missing feature in Columba for this type of application is group chat. Unfortunately Reticulum doesn’t have a decentralized group chat yet; its 1:1 chat protocol (LXMF) is completely decentralized (two people can keep talking if they’re in range of each other even when they can’t see anyone else in the mesh) but the group chat protocol it has now (called RRC, similar to IRC) requires a centralized relay server. You can run an RRC relay yourself, including on a non-internet-connected network, but it only works for people who are able to reach that relay (and it doesn’t keep history so you miss what was said while you couldn’t reach it). I see that the Columba author has actually implemented RRC for Android, but it’s currently in a separate app called eridanus. I don’t know if anyone is trying to build a decentralized group chat protocol on top of reticulum yet but probably someone is. It’s a very complicated problem to solve well, though.

And we’ll see if Adobe goes after them on the basis that it’s warez or not. I think it’s entirely likely that they might even if there’s no legitimate ground to do that. Companies are well known for bullying open source projects that are viewed as a threat to their profits.

Yes, I agree it’s possible that Adobe goes after them for something even if they didn’t decompile photoshop - and also even if it isn’t really a threat to their profits.

I do not care what level of feature parity it has with Photoshop or GIMP. My only interest is that it works for my use case, and that’s what I tested. It solves a problem for me as an individual by providing me with a tool that has the UX I like and the functionality that I need.

Cool, if it works for you then I wouldn’t tell you not to use it! I’m just skeptical that it actually will; I assume you haven’t used it enough to really find out how well it works in practice yet.

It’s not like I’m forced to look at any of these projects, or use them.

I guess we’re not forced to look at them but to avoid looking at them we’d need to stop reading the internet. I only looked at this one because I was conflicted about if i should delete this post from /c/opensource here - the discussion has been informative so I certainly won’t now, but i’m still conflicted about the fact that by leaving this post here we’re potentially helping this genAI huckster get more paying customers for his token-reselling business which this project is obviously a loss-leader for.

Btw I found the video I mentioned earlier, here is a link to the part comparing PhotoCraft’s Levels adjustment to Photoshop’s: https://youtu.be/Oc51Ty9h-68?t=216 (and later he compares other basic features).

And whether it’s copyright infringement or not is of little interest to me since I view copyrights as being inherently harmful.

But from that perspective it would be much easier and more effective to simply use an LLM to make a crack for pirating the original software than to try to reimplement the whole thing. Or, to actually decompile and recompile it to get something (pirate-)source-available with actual feature parity. (People are also doing both of those things with various proprietary software, of course.)

However, since the implementation is using a different language, that does make the implementation itself a clean room one.

That isn’t what “clean room” means in this context. It is widely accepted legal doctrine that direct ports of software from one language to another constitute derivative works under copyright law.

This project’s claim to be “open source” would be false if it is actually an automated port of the output of a decompiler of proprietary programs; that would make it warez.

And it still takes time to add features using LLMs. It’s not magic, and I’m more amazed how much they managed to add already rather than it not having parity yet.

Indeed. But if they haven’t gotten around to adding more than the most basic features in the Levels adjustment window (probably one of the most commonly used features of Photoshop) I assume they’re missing a lot of other stuff too.

It does appear to work with PSDs fairly well, but again I don’t have really complex ones because I use the tool in an amateur way to begin with. […] So, the feature parity isn’t really the stumbling point for me, it’s the UX.

OK, I’m taking that to mean that you haven’t actually identified any specific features (or PSD compatibilities) that PhotoCraft has over GIMP besides the UX? It seems to me like using an LLM to improve the UX of GIMP, on top of all of its existing (presumably far greater) set of features, would make a lot more sense.

But this is something that’ll sort itself naturally over the coming months. If the developer stays active and continues working on it, then it’ll keep getting better. If they abandon it and move on then it’ll either die or somebody else picks it up. But it is in a fairly usable state as is from my experience, and I’d argue a lot of the hard work has already been done. So, we’ll have to just wait and see what happens with it.

I concur, in six months or a year I can either eat my words or say “I told you so” :)

And if we get to the point where all this stuff can be done using local models, then we really could see Stallman’s vision for GNU become a reality. Regular people, who aren’t developers, could use fully open source stacks, and they could modify software to work exactly the way they want. If we’re lucky this might kill closed source software entirely in the long run.

I wouldn’t hold your breath, but perhaps with a lot more advances and if/when local models can perform coding tasks at reasonable speeds on affordable hardware… maybe? Meanwhile right now we’re drowning in new 1M LOC slop projects overpromising and underdelivering.

people are literally just reverse engineering these applications by having the LLM decompile it and observe what it does

Have you seen the creators of this particular project claim anywhere that they decompiled anything? I’ve seen several commenters claiming that but I think they’re incorrectly assuming that that’s what they did.

For one thing, decompiling and recompiling Adobe or Microsoft code would surely be viewed as copyright infringement if there isn’t a clearly-documented “cleanrooming” process in the middle (having an LLM write a spec (in English) from the decompiled code, and having another session without access to the copyrighted code write new code from that spec - a fun LARP many people are doing lately).

But also, if they were actually doing that then I’d expect more feature parity than I’ve seen in the few youtube videos I’ve skimmed through showing these apps. I’m too lazy to find the link now but I watched one comparing PhotoCraft to Photoshop, and one example was that PhotoCraft’s Levels diagram is very primitive in comparison to Adobe’s (or to GIMP’s for that matter).

I did something similar recently where I had an LLM figure out the proprietary format for the way my Nikon camera stores RAW files. There’s currently no open source implementation for it, and now I can read them using my own library. So, something that used to be a herculean effort before, is something you can now do in a few days using an LLM.

Congratulations, that’s awesome (and I don’t doubt it). But implementing a RAW format is a lot easier than re-implementing all of the Photoshop features which are required to be able to say (honestly, a least) “this has .PSD file format compatibility” without a long list of caveats.

I am using his PhotoCraft and LightCraft, and they work fine for what I need. I can process my photos using completely open source tools now that have a UX I’m used to.

I am curious how much you’ve actually used it. Eg, can you confirm what I saw on youtube showing the Levels adjustment dialog lacking most of the features found in Photoshop’s and GIMP’s? (Is that still the case in the current version?)

And have you noticed it having compatibility with (or at least some support for) any modern PSD file format features which GIMP lacks?

You’re saying this as if NPM ecosystem didn’t exist before LLMs.

yes there was a lot of crap before 😭 but don’t you agree it’s 1000x worse now?

You look at the number of stars a project has, how long it’s been developed, how many users it has, and so on. This gives you an idea of whether it has legs or not.

This project has a lot of stars but only because it just got a ton of clickbait press grossly exaggerating its completeness. I assume the vast majority of the stars are from people who have not tried running it. How long it’s been developed is… two weeks, as of today. How many users? It’s far too soon to say.

I’ll certainly trade having to rely on proprietary software for the problem of having too many open source options.

I agree with you here! But I’m assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that this particular one is not likely to ever become a particularly good option.

I don’t think any decompiling was involved here; if it was, Adobe and Microsoft would have DMCA’d it off of github already.