NotAwfulTech

Dear god. Why are note-taking projects such a magnet for slop bros?

I'm on a bit of a quest to build up some self-hosted services for me and friends & family, partially because Ad- & AI-infested big tech slop was making me sick and also to become a better sysadmin. General requirement was notes available anywhere and decent editing on mobile.

I was about to rip my hair out, when every session digging into options for weeks ended into frustration. Every project with somewhat decent features had some meh aspects and became worse the longer I looked. And there are so many of them. You can drown your self in "Best FOSS Note-taking App in ${current_year}" listicles. Here's a list of over a hundred projects.

I suspect it's a bit of the shopping list problem. It's such a basic idea, that every ambitious clueless dev has it once while picking a hobby project. But note-taking also definitely has a place in toxix self-optimization / hustle culture. Some of the more developed project strike me as that.

I won't mention every basic note-talking project with a CLAUDE.md that I stumbled on, but here's some of the more disappointing lowlights:

• Joplin main developer was one-shot. Added agent instructions to the repo this year and some provisions from his personal Vibecoding rig to .gitignore. Also it's not a bug if the AI chat button is visible of AI features are disabled. People have to be informed about the AI features!
• Notesnook seems okay-ish, but they're part of the mall ninja club. Business partnership with Kagi & Tuta.
• Standard Notes was the least suspect to me. Later found out they Copilot-Review all of their PRs. (same as Notesnook btw)
• I even considered going with a self-hosted binary of Obsidian. They don't get instant-disqualified by promoting themselves as AI-anything. And if you don't have a project you can trust, you might as well through yourself at the most established option and pray.

I was running out of places to look for alternatives, when I remembered Open Slopware. You can guess how surprised I was, when note-software made up on of the biggest sublists in there. Through the shortlist of recommendations I ended up looking at Flatnotes. That project might just be enough notes for me.

I know copyright isn’t the way to address what’s wrong with tech, but this here is a great way to poison the well for medium-to-large enterprise companies leeching off open source: if your software requires the work to function, it’s entire source code needs to be published.

Considering using this for my more polished stuff just to irk the companies that would otherwise be happy to use it.

Building on the completed decompilation of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and the Gamecube/Wii compatibility later Aurora, another unofficial port's come to the PC.

(announcement post - release trailer)

Hi folks, I'm making another tech-stack recommendation. Previously, on Awful, I noted that below 87.5% availability, whether a service is up is effectively random chance. We've reached that point for GitHub's Platform, which includes components like Actions, Copilot, Pages, and the core API of issues and PRs. I do not have confidence in GitHub's owners or operators to remedy this situation, so I cannot recommend it professionally nor to neighbors. As a bit of nuance, note that Pages seems to have relatively decent availability and is often up even when the rest of GitHub is down, so static content hosted on Pages can be deprioritized for migration.

The thread is open on Lemmy. I'm interested in your thoughts, particularly around alternative forges, alternative paradigms for forges, community-driven plans for migration, strategies for migrating, and tools that ease the burden of maintaining many git repositories.

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/49511045

Generative AI, namely LLMs, image and video diffusion models and especially the companies that make them plague the tech industry.

We got tired, so we decided to take things into our own hands and curate a list of projects that aren't complicit in the devaluing of labor by these companies.

Unlike projects that came before us, we want to highlight software that values the labor that goes into creating and not call out projects that use LLMs or Image/Video Diffusion models.

I'm not gonna dig up the links since I'm sure y'all're already tired of talking about quantum computing. I am going to insist that, while I professionally disagree with Filippo about plenty of things, I do not see any mistakes in their analysis here. Please start thinking about post-quantum cryptographic tooling today.

Welcome to the carnival! We've got fun and games. I asked vibecoders to complete three tasks. When folks complained about that, I offered up five more tasks. I did half of these and got average scores. How well did the community do? Scroll to the end to find out!

Was looking for a terminal that can render LazyVim. It's looking like Alacritty (definitely not ghostty).

Too early to see if it's viable. I'm doing my part in the GitHub trenches.

EDIT: They pinned my no-AI policy issue. I think they're pure of heart, lads.

Okay, previously, on Awful, we established that vibecoding can't produce working compilers. Let's try some other side projects of mine. I have important stuff to work on and a deadline, so I'm not matching these projects with my own submissions. Instead, I've laid out a psuedo-objective rubric and I'm going to say that par is 10/10 points.

Fun fact: there's a dedicated game engine for Nintendo 64 homebrew now. This is only its first release, but its looking pretty promising.

The engine's available on GitHub, if you wanna tinker with it.

GitHub's having another major departure - Linux distro Gentoo is starting its migration to Codeberg, with code theft from Microsoft's Copilot as a major reason why.

(This essay is based off of Iris Meredith’s "Becoming an AI-proof software engineer" - recommend reading that first.)

I’m tired of hearing about vibecoding on Lobsters, so I’ve written up three of my side tasks for coding agents. Talk is cheap; show us the code.

The original's been taken down thanks to the creator being harassed into silence by promptfondlers, but a fork was thankfully made, and taking contributions.

Currently in its very early stages, but it'll be a useful resource to identify slopified garbage and get it out of your life.

Credit to Kat Marchin for starting this.

Happy Holiday and merry winter solstice! I'm sharing a Nix flake that I've been slowly growing in my homelab for the past few months. It incorporates this systemd feature, switches from CppNix to Lix, and disables a handful of packages. That PR inspired me, and I'm releasing this in turn to inspire you. Paying it forward and all that.

Should you use this? As-is, probably not. It will rebuild systemd at a minimum and you probably don't have enough RAM for that; building from this flake crashed my development laptop and I had to build it on a workstation instead. Also, if you have good taste in packages then this will be a no-op aside from systemd and Lix, and you can do both of those on your own.

Isn't this merely virtue-signalling? I think that the original systemd PR was definitely signalling, since it's unlikely to ever get deployed on the systems of our friends. However, I really do sleep better at night knowing that it's unlikely that jart or suckless have any code running on my machines.

Why not make a proper repository and organization? Mostly the possibility that GitHub might actually take down a repository named nixpkgs-antifa. If there's any interest then I could set up a Codeberg repo. However, up to this point, I've only used it internally and my homelab has its own internal git service.

Mods: You've indicated that you don't like it when people write code to approach our social problems. That's fine; I'm not publishing an application or service and certainly not starting a social movement, just sharing some of my internal code.

Once I asked a friend of mine, "What was the best meal you ever had?"

He thought about it a moment and then replied, "A stick of pepperoni dipped in peanut butter... after a day hiking the AT." (He'd actually hiked the whole Appalachian Trail, as I recall.)

Years before that, a different friend asked me the same question. The one item that came to mind above all others was the dessert course at a resort my family visited when I was a child, on a snorkeling trip to the Caribbean. I don't think I've had a sopapilla that good since. And sure, childhood taste buds and all, but that's kind of the point: the best subjective impression is the best subjective impression.

One of the best things I've ever made myself was early in the first COVID season. I was throwing together a soup of whatnot, and I made a broth of soy sauce, mirin, gochujang, garlic and probably a few other things. When I had a taste, it was knee-bucklingly good. I haven't hit the proportions just right again, or something; everything I've tried in that genre has been nice, but not that nice.

Dad was the sort who'd try a new thing at a restaurant and then try and figure out how to make it at home. He was good at it, too. I picked up that habit, a bit. My white whale is the suanla chaoshou/suan la chow show/swans from Mary Chung's in Cambridge, MA. For that, I have to go by memory, since the restaurant closed years ago, and I have to adapt it to my current diet, since I went mostly-vegan vegetarian. There's a dumpling-sauce recipe from 1993 that is perfectly serviceable, but I tried it with three different chili pastes and it just wasn't the same. I think it was adapted for home cooks of the early '90s and left out doubanjiang, which a Sichuan restaurant would have had on hand. A couple heaping teaspoons of that brought the flavor a lot closer....

Anywhoo. Do you folks have food memories that stand out? Best ever pizza? Cookies that you'd like to find again?

Stumbled across this proposal whilst reading about one of the AI-free calibre forks cropping up - pretty interesting idea all around.

Cassandra Granade writes:

Things are moving really fast, so I went on and created a Codeberg organization for coordinating a post-Calibre path forward for uniting readers and writers in the goal of archiving, organizing, and reading books.

https://codeberg.org/rereading

DNS is still propagating, but https://rereading.space/ should be up soon as well.

After ten years on GitHub, general-purpose programming language/toolchain Zig has jumped ship, citing severe CI headaches caused by crumbling infrastructure as the major reason why.

The Zig Software Foundation hopes to see less violations of their strict "no slop" policy from this move as well.

tl;dr: nsf requested that python software foundation affirms that they “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws”.

the psf has withdrawn the proposal instead.

The (imo) best splinter group of the former Disco Elysium game studio ZA/UM announced their first product. Hard to imagine they will actually deliver on all the hype they are building but the vibes are so so good right now. Also the website design is quite fresh.

If you haven't seen them before maybe start with the manifesto and the blog.