MangoCats

Well, aren’t you quaint. Next thing you’ll be asking for is seed corn that you can replant year after year from the corn it grows, heated seats in your cars without a subscription payment, replaceable batteries in your battery powered electronics.

easily looked up via a search engine,

Search engines have been evolving toward chatbots for 20+ years. Ever since they started fighting back against SEO, search engines became more and more opinionated about what they were going to serve and what they were going to ignore. Of course, along the way, most of the advertising supported ones slowly (and not so slowly) succumbed to the financial pressure of a little quid-pro-quo or we take our money elsewhere…

LLMs are going to go the same way, probably much faster. Some, like Grok, didn’t need any pressure put on them at all. npr.org/…/grok-elon-musk-antisemitic-racist-conte…

Everybody, everywhere has paid all sorts of services to “polish their online reputation” for decades.

I worked in a building where the entire floor beneath us was full of “reputation repair specialists” who did nothing all day but make people look better online, for money. It’s not surprising that they are being replaced by bots.

what you’re trying to say with arbitrary numbers pulled out of the air about the amount of “coders” and potential users

No matter how wonderful and loved a project (aka business) is, it has expenses. A project like Codeberg’s expenses scale with the number of users and how they use the system.

This policy allows them to get rid of the worst offenders and point to the policy as their reason.

Agreed. However, at the scale they are operating at, I wouldn’t be surprised if they end up using a LLM assisted AI implementation to give them short lists of projects to review as potential “worst offenders”.

It’s like pornography - they’ll know it when they see it.

I think they’re great for what they’re doing, but, truthfully, any “free use” system which has non-zero operating costs for bandwidth and storage is going to have potential problems that can’t be waived away with simple policy statements. 8 billion people on this planet, maybe only 80 million coders, maybe only 8 million active in creation of projects that would end up on Codeberg, but AI probably tripled that number to at least 24 million people, and those people (including myself) are making 3-300x larger projects with AI, not only because they can now, but because AI needs that extra documentation to successfully implement larger projects… just like teams of human programmers do, but AI makes it faster with less humans in the loop.

On the “people count” Github cites 180 million “individual users” but, how many of those are work/home/alt/other accounts of the same person?

Humans with brains will decide on a per-project basis.

This is a good way to clear the “worst of the problems” - but a hopeless whack-a-mole task to get rid of problems altogether.

I’ve got a blockchain based project - hosted on Codeberg no less - that has nothing like an ICO or other get rich quick scheme attached, it’s about as sincere of an open transaction processing platform as you can get.

But a quick read will come away with “this is a Cryptocurrency project” - so… am I banned? Even worse, although I started it 8 years ago, I made a quick pass with Claude code recently to clean things up and implement some of the lagging parts… now I’m double-banned from Codeberg, right?

I’m glad they have principles, but one-word labels are really inadequate to separate “good” from “bad” - it’s almost always more complicated than that.

I just don’t see how an open resource like Codeberg could possibly economically make even the smallest of dents in their slop problems without using some automated methods themselves. Even if it’s entirely human driven decisions, they’ll be making mistakes. Will they be like Google and render themselves deaf to appeals?

I can see them having problems / frustration with terabytes of junk showing up 10x faster than it used to because people have the new text generation tools and are just spewing massive “projects” of no value with them, and I would assume when they find an account that’s full of this junk they want to trim it out of their running expenses (consider that they’re also going to be crawled by stealth trainers who read everything they have publicly available)… but, then… no matter how they go about identifying “junk” there will be false positives.

I have some projects I initially wrote over 20 years ago that I like to look back at and tweak around a little every now and then… even if nobody has looked at a project for years, that doesn’t really mean nobody cares about it - so algorithms for activity are going to hit stuff like that.

Billy the graphic designer that never coded “makes” an app using Claude, he is vibe coding

See, I don’t know Billy, and I don’t know what his app looks like. If Billy is a logically thinking, good graphic designer who communicates well with his clients, understands what they want, and can express all that in logically coherent statements, Billy’s first app using LLMs might be great. Probably not, but it stands a chance. Everybody starts somewhere.

If Billy just says "hey, like, I want an app that runs on Android and iPhone and desktops too, and I want it to do this list of random stuff, some of which is internally conflicting, and while I’m at it I’m going to spec that I want it in Scala, because reptiles are cool (like cold blooded, get it?) Yeah, Billy’s first app is only likely to be awesome for Billy.

Now, when I fire up Claude Fable and ask it to make me a webserver in Python, how does Codeberg determine if my app is “Vibe coded” or not?

As someone who can code, has coded for 40 years for a living, I’ll say: LLMs can be heavily abused to write a lot of garbage. I’ll also say: give a human enough time, and they can write almost as much garbage but they usually get discouraged by all the errors and crashes and have the good sense to give up - but these humans armed with LLMs can at least make stuff that runs.

I’ll also say: LLMs can be used as very effective tools, if you exercise the kind of care and planning that has always been required to write “good” (whatever your definition of “good” may be) software. They do speed up development - some development ends up in a good place, some… not so much. It was always like this even long before LLMs, but LLMs help get to those endpoints much faster.

And: false positives? How much fun is it to go to clone your repo and find it locked because something (probably an AI algorithm) decided your project was “vibe coded”?

Pop up fines - impediment to free travel - arbitrary tax collection. I mean, if you want to go back to Roman times where any government officials you happen to meet can just grab you by the shoulder and “collect taxes for the emperor” because you happen to be within reach - you can call that “not evil” if you like. I call it regression of civilization.

If it’s clearly posted, that’s fine - and appropriate in certain mountain pass situations.

If it’s a surprise when the fine arrives in the mail, that’s pure unadulterated evil.

Norway does a lot of sensible things that seem impossible in the USA.

The problem with these, and all, automated systems that detect EVERYTHING is that current code enforcement hardly detects 0.1% of existing violations, by design. That’s how they roll. They only kick into action when somebody complains.

Think of speeding tickets - how easy would it be for our roadside ALPR systems to time your transit from point A to point B, calculate your minimum average speed to make the trip in that time, and mail you a citation when you’re over the posted speed limit? Not hard at all, but that’s not how speeding tickets roll in this country (and most others, too.) If they really wanted total enforcement, your car already knows when you’re speeding, it can already wirelessly tattle on you to roadside monitors, they could effect 100% citation coverage if they wanted to, but whoever tries that is comitting political suicide.

One of the reasons HOAs are such groaners is that the types of people who run for HOA president occasionally (not always) go in for this “100% enforcement” mentality and due to the utter apathy of HOA residents who can’t be bothered to depose their despot, they can persist in that mode for years. Last HOA I lived in had fearless leaders who “lived in the back” and hired an outside company to write upkeep violations, but only on houses in the front of the neighborhood.

When I lived in a big city with a code enforcement department instead of an HOA system, things went along for decades without much flap, the occasional citation on the really persistently bad violators - as things are expected to work, but then some new neighbors moved in and attended the city-neighborhood meeting and started chanting “just enforce the law, JUST ENFORCE THE LAW” and, so, code inspectors were sent to walk the neighborhood by foot and write every violation they could see from the street. Our 400 houses got more violations written up in one day than the entire city of 40,000 homes received in the prior year.

So, these systems that “observe 13,000 violations in a single week” need to chill out, turn the filters way way up and figure out what the 13 most important violations in the city are each MONTH and work with those property owners to get them fixed. Use the photo-scans to pre-screen citizen complaints, ensure that there’s even a problem worth sending an inspector for when the neighbor says “there’s been a junky car here up on blocks for the past 2 years and somebody needs to do something about it” the records can show whether that’s true, or a gross exaggeration before prioritizing which citizen calls get seen this week and which need to chill out and “wait their turn.”