Post by @zzt@mas.to
- buy a cheap IP camera because you hear there’s open source firmware
- the only open source firmware is thingino, which is slop
- well shit, if it’s my only choice I guess that’s it
- reach for it months later for a specific important thing
- it doesn’t connect to wifi even though nothing has changed about the network
- the reset procedure doesn’t work at all
- all of the new docs are extremely LLM slop instructing you to do things that don’t work
- all of the old docs are from 2024 and also don’t work
- the docs for doing remote access on the camera, an extraordinarily common thing if you don’t have a host that can act as a stream collector, are just the text “placeholder” and a blurb elsewhere about how I may or may not have to recompile from source to do this
- fucking hell where’d I put the flashing cable, I’m going back to stock firmware
one might call this a systemic failure if one’s goals were anything other than getting breathless mentions in hackaday from whichever LLM they use to slop out articles
your alleged open source project is spam, congrats
please come in here and tell me I’m holding it wrong and the firmware being horrid in every way is somehow my problem
“this is just my charmingly janky open source passion project” what passion
it’s fucking amazing how fast the charm wears off the jank when I have lots and lots of proof that your project is cynical horseshit
@zzt This is how open source and "boutique electronics" (open hardware, retro gaming, IoT that doesn't come from big tech, etc.) die simultaneously in the RAMageddon days.
And somehow there isn't enough foresight in Open Source development to see this coming for some reason.
it’s now too late to incorrect me on thingino, I blew it away and reverted to my backup of the stock firmware, which worked instantly
“but zzt the stock firmware is probably slop too!” yeah, in spite of the words some dickheads wrote about me and mine, I don’t really give a shit about purity. one of these works, one of these doesn’t, both are horrible in their own ways. I’ve got a specific important task and a time limit. if there’s no good option I’ll take the least broken slop available.
fuck both of them for being broken slop all the same.
it’s real anxiety-inducing that for an important task, my choices are visibly broken horrid slop and proprietary most-likely slop that seems to work
the former broke instantly all at once, the latter’s likely to break later. the latter also predates LLMs by a fair bit, so I’m pretty much relying on the remaining bits of it that aren’t garbage
this isn’t an unfamiliar feeling at all if you’re actually anti-AI and not an imaginary person some dickhead invented to paint AI critics as unreasonable
I slow walk updates for most of the software I rely on now, either because it’s already slop or because it has no viable anti-AI policy and might become slop without notice
I’m at the end of the line for new mobile devices because the platform I planned to switch to after iOS is now proudly doing slop too
it’s cute to pretend I have the option of pretending to do purity. and again, I realize the accusation is there to make us look unhinged and incompetent. but I’m fully aware of how much of the infrastructure I rely on is slop, and I’m fully aware what can go wrong if and when any of this infrastructure breaks.
I’m not sure any of the “I’m anti-AI but anti-AI has gone too far” people have that level of awareness. I haven’t seen any evidence that we share the same anxieties.
@zzt I'm afraid we reached (or will soon reach) the point when "I'm anti-AI and therefore I refuse to use anything touched by AI" is about as sustainable as "I'm anti-capitalist and therefore I refuse to use anything touched by capitalism".
@zzt I only realized after buying a pet feeder to install Localkit on and being unable to properly install it that the whole project was fucking slop.
Ended up ripping the guts out of the feeders and replacing them with ESP32s running ESPHome. The days of being able to trust open source projects are over.
@zzt@mas.to I don't think developers see it, but those of us who do a little IT support have seen a surprising rise in "software not working properly even though it previously did" in the last few years. All of which can be traced back to slop.
