Project Fucking Sucks

Author makes a lot of good points.

In recent years, I’ve seen some open source projects “sell” their “product” harder than most commercial companies. Extremely polished websites...

Can’t remember the last one that really creeped me out but “Foreman” is a decent example. Feels like they are trying to sell me a monthly membership, and yet they aren’t even asking for financial donations.

Frankly, it makes me even question their motives. The Cups website doesn’t even list its features and Samba is pretty mild in is description. A host of widely used tools are also this way.

In contrast “Ventoy”’s website is more organic (and yet its lack of a documented build process and irreproducible binaries has certainly fed other speculation).

I certainly miss the old-school websites where it felt like I was interacting with something produced as hobby.

There's two axes here: Quality-Slop, Human-AI.

Q1: Quality Content (No AI)

Q2: Quality Content (AI)

Q3: Slop (No AI)

Q4: Slop (AI)

More of a spectrum, really, since most posts will in the middle of the quality axis, and most code makes some use of AI now (without being slop).

I think the problem with Q2 is that when you do it right, it passes. You think you're looking at Q1.

It's like the requirement for good AI is to be indistinguishable from human work.

(As soon as I see a ChatGPT-ism, I recoil, even if the article was good!)

Not sure how relevant the Q3/Q4 distinction is, but obviously banning AI completely would eliminate most of the Slop end of the axis too.

I think we'll either see a polaization where some communities become explicitly pro-AI or anti-AI, or perhaps a "hide all AI" toggle and mandatory disclosure (basically unenforceable, except for egregious slop).

The article would have been fine with a theme/title closer to "things that annoy me". I agree with a lot of points raised, but not with gatekeeping. I'll die on the hill that gatekeeping is just wrong, anywhere, in any circumstance, and especially in a field that has open in its name. Open source means open first, source secondary.

So I strongly disagree with the "do. not. publish." point. Let the kids publish. Let them cringe 10-20 years from now when they see their first projects. We did with ours. My first geocities site had all the "slop" markers (triangle warning gifs, page under construction, etc), but I still laughed when I found some print-screens I had saved from that era, years later.

Writing slop and publishing slop is a rite of passage. When I see it, I don't have to like it, and I can avoid it. But I would never tell anyone "don't publish". Go ahead, there's plenty of bits on them github servers. Go nuts.

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It sounds like you're describing an opinion? Demanding consensus is strange/impossible.

We should write about our opinions. I appreciate this blog post, for example.