alt.hn

8/23/2026 at 4:54:10 PM

A website for debloated open source alternatives

 https://debloat.dev/

by ryanvogel

8/23/2026 at 7:41:37 PM

I've been a big fan of https://alternativeto.net/ and using their "open source" and "self-hosted" filters. Even looking through the non-FOSS alternatives for a particular application/site can be helpful; sometimes a for-profit company will take a different approach to solving a problem and it will give me other ideas to consider.

by maples37

8/23/2026 at 9:12:24 PM

Some of the information on there is useful, but I'd say that alternativeto.net is an almost perfect example of a bloaty & hostile website. OP's website is much more pleasant.

by RadiozRadioz

8/23/2026 at 9:29:57 PM

Seems it's always the same trade-off: either a commercial site with an opaque business model, or a weekend passion project which might go away when the hobbyist in question finds they have other (or more lucrative) things to do.

by bluebarbet

8/23/2026 at 10:46:17 PM

Alternativeto was a site I used to frequent, but after their redesign, it’s been pretty painful to use and a lot less valuable.

by al_borland

8/24/2026 at 5:55:02 AM

SaaSHub founder here. Have you tried https://www.saashub.com? It has both "open-source alternatives" and "EU Alternatives".

by stanislavb

8/24/2026 at 3:37:27 PM

In most cases I’m looking for alternatives to local apps, rather than a SaaS offering.

by al_borland

8/24/2026 at 3:24:10 PM

More pleasant, but also only with a small fraction of the information alternativeto has.

by Semaphor

8/23/2026 at 9:37:12 PM

i've found this site easier to use and have better results than alternativeto. https://openalternative.co/

by bdlowery

8/23/2026 at 8:32:40 PM

FWIW, this site is fast, works perfectly with a text-only browser, e.g., links (1.4MB static binary), elinks, or without a (bloated?) browser, e.g., retrieve all the pages, catenate and read as a single HTML file or convert it to, e.g., SQL, CSV or a plain text file

All the /p/ URLs are in the sitemap, all the site's pages can be retrieved over a single TCP connection

https://debloat.dev/sitemap.xml

This, i.e., retrieving all 200 /p/ URLs over a single TCP connection (using HTTP/1.1 pipelining), results in a 1.9MB HTML file comprising all the /p/ pages, including response headers. NB. This isn't "crawling". All URLs (cf. a set of "seed" URLs) are known before the connection is made

No cookies, no Javascript

Other than CSS, no bloat

NB. A 1.9MB sitemap would not be large. For example, here is a 2.9MB sitemap from AP

https://apnews.com/ap-sitemap-202607.xml

by 1vuio0pswjnm7

8/24/2026 at 1:00:46 AM

Also, the website seems to be largely ‘vibe coded’, at least given by the written copy and the style. If you ask Claude to use 1990s/2000s web design and HTML it’ll do something like this.

by varun_ch

8/24/2026 at 1:43:38 PM

The sitemap "standard" was not introduced until 2005

Would a "1990's style" website offer a sitemap.xml file

Also, this site, like most today, uses "slugs" for its URLs. In the 1990's this was less common; URLs were often "uncool":

https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html

NB. I'm not commenting on the website's content or how it was generated/sourced

by 1vuio0pswjnm7

8/23/2026 at 9:02:08 PM

I about to splutter that 1.9MB is a huge sitemap, but it's 12kB.

Do you mean crawling the entire sitemap and concatenating the results is 1.9MB?

by eterm

8/24/2026 at 7:49:42 AM

> retrieving all 200 /p/ URLs over a single TCP connection […] results in a 1.9MB HTML file

That is exactly what he said, yes.

by Hendrikto

8/24/2026 at 12:17:54 PM

But then he compared it to a sitemap that is 2.9MB by itself.

by inigyou

8/23/2026 at 6:40:29 PM

Not able to access the site on Firefox "Error Code: SSL_ERROR_INTERNAL_ERROR_ALERT"

by hiitsmyaccount

8/23/2026 at 7:56:15 PM

Seems to be overloaded.

I wonder if the site needs a bit more bloat to handle the load, or a bit less.

by cortesoft

8/23/2026 at 11:17:53 PM

It’ll work tomorrow. It’s fine.

by heyoni

8/23/2026 at 6:55:28 PM

Same, it's not just you. I'm wondering if this is an exotic symptom of the site running out of capacity.

by JoshTriplett

8/24/2026 at 1:10:27 AM

That's exotic to you?

by hackernud3s

8/24/2026 at 5:37:36 AM

Yes? That SSL error is not remotely common when a site is hugged to death?

by KennyBlanken

8/24/2026 at 7:32:33 AM

Why does it have almost 400 upvotes, while it's serving an up to date cert signed by Certificate Authority expired in 2024 ? Do people really ignore such issue and click through warnings so easily?

It would be better to have a pure http site, instead.

by szszrk

8/24/2026 at 11:59:17 AM

I'm getting a Let's Encrypt cert, generated two days ago.

by shakna

8/24/2026 at 8:05:28 AM

It loaded for me

by subarctic

8/24/2026 at 11:36:14 AM

Bitdefender blocked it for being malware apparently

by voidUpdate

8/24/2026 at 5:03:29 PM

Same. I hate HSTS. Not everything needs to be encrypted.

by MetroWind

8/23/2026 at 9:03:54 PM

Same, works on Chromium but not Firefox.

by EvilGoose

8/24/2026 at 3:03:25 AM

I tried to access this at work but was blocked by FortiGate.

by steve_taylor

8/23/2026 at 7:51:12 PM

Same here, but it works on chromium, eww and lynx.

by kmstout

8/23/2026 at 7:54:59 PM

Failing on chrome for me. I dont think it is a browser issue, but is a load issue

by cortesoft

8/23/2026 at 6:52:24 PM

Same on Chromium-based browsers.

by theandrewbailey

8/23/2026 at 7:12:43 PM

Same, bitdefender blocked me

by sudo_cowsay

8/23/2026 at 5:48:26 PM

Sign in with Google or Github only? No, thank you.

by reconnecting

8/23/2026 at 7:09:15 PM

The irony is strong with this one

by water-drummer

8/24/2026 at 8:23:59 AM

Which ones would be cool to use?

by jordiburgos

8/24/2026 at 12:18:44 PM

Site-local username and password

by inigyou

8/24/2026 at 10:08:28 AM

Email.

by reconnecting

8/23/2026 at 7:49:19 PM

Cool site, though browsing through “most popular” I absolutely wouldn’t call Nextcloud “debloated.”

by Grombobulous

8/24/2026 at 6:47:35 AM

While I kind of agree, is there a more debloated replacement?

by a96

8/24/2026 at 12:21:57 PM

It’s hard to pinpoint one single replacement because nextcloud is a huge suite of cloud apps. So it depends which apps in the stack you’re looking to replace.

by Grombobulous

8/24/2026 at 10:45:13 AM

openssh?

by GoblinSlayer

8/23/2026 at 5:19:35 PM

In the TV and Media section (https://debloat.dev/c/tv-media) there are 11 recommendations and 4 of them are XBMC.

There used to be so many options for media centres. What happened?

by hnlmorg

8/23/2026 at 5:27:23 PM

I think it's just a pretty consolidated space? Kind of like ebook management, which was dominated by Calibre for so many years (this changed recently).

But unlike ebooks, media centre management is a fair bit more complex since it involves supporting many different media formats and many forms of acceleration or transcoding.

So the big projects - Kodi for local media and Jellyfin for streaming - have a lot of inertia because they tend to support whatever you throw at them.

by piaste

8/23/2026 at 5:51:09 PM

What did the ebook space change into?

by intelkishan

8/24/2026 at 8:11:55 AM

Until a year ago, it was either Calibre/CalibreWeb, Audiobookshelf, or a few alternative readers heavily focused on comics.

Late last year, a vibe-coded app called BookLore appeared and basically brought over everything Calibre did but with much better UX and e-reader integration. The original dev crashed out[0], but the community picked up the project and started reigning in the worst of the slop and maintaining it as Grimmory [1]. It's pretty damn good.

There is also a book fetcher called Shelfmark [2] that integrates with Calibre, ABS, or Grimmory.

[0] and he _might_ be currently trying to push another even more vibe-coded competitor, but that's unconfirmed drama

[1] https://github.com/grimmory-tools/grimmory

[2] https://github.com/calibrain/shelfmark

by piaste

8/23/2026 at 5:53:58 PM

It’s not that difficult to be honest. VLC / ffmpeg can do most of the heavy lifting. And there’s no shortage of libraries for rendering in a UI.

There used to be dozens of options to choose from. Multiple different XBMC forks. Multiples different Subsonic forks. Multiple different DNLA servers. Multitudes of web-based servers. CLI MP3 servers. Independent media centres for a variety of different consoles.

Maybe that’s still available and just not indexed on that site. But I noticed the choices had shrank significantly last year when I was looking for Plex alternatives compared with when I last built a media centre approximately 15 years ago.

Maybe smart TVs have reduced people’s desire here?

by hnlmorg

8/23/2026 at 7:26:54 PM

> It’s not that difficult to be honest.

Sounds easy if all you have to do is write a short comment about it. People who actually did it, like the recently retired lead of the Jellyfin project, didn't make it sound like it's "not that difficult" [1].

If you want ot vibe code a project for yourself it's probably reasonable amount of effort. But if you want to build a product, something with polish, something not held together by spit and scotch tape, something reliable, it won't be easy.

[1] https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-project-leadership-changes

by buran77

8/23/2026 at 7:36:36 PM

I did write a media centre around 15 years ago. What that link you shared describes is the very real toll that maintaining an open source project demands. Not the specific complexities of transcoding multimedia.

From personal experience, the transcoding was the easy part. Building a UX that was intuitive and a backend that catalogued the media accurately required far more attention.

by hnlmorg

8/24/2026 at 12:12:32 AM

This is such a weird comment chain. Of course transcoding media is the easy part, ffmpeg exists. Even if it didn't, it would still be the easy part because you're just building computer algorithms that are like specified and defined and testable.

Making something that actually interacts with "the human world" is 100s of times harder than writing any kind of algorithm.

by wredcoll

8/23/2026 at 6:59:45 PM

I would love to see an Open Source media center that supports streaming services. I wouldn't care if the services say "we only support 1080p for browsers / open source, anything more needs a locked-down device". (Perhaps the project could have some add-on you can buy that's a physical hardware dongle for doing 4k HDR and emitting HDCPed HDMI.) I already live with that for watching on my laptop. Just having watchable basic-resolution streaming would make it a one-stop-shop.

by JoshTriplett

8/23/2026 at 7:12:31 PM

If streaming through a browser/open source / not the locked down app supported 1080p I would be a lot happier. My understanding from the last time i looked is that it actually only supports 720p

by MostlyStable

8/23/2026 at 7:30:20 PM

Would still live with that, to have a single system that's no worse than my laptop.

by JoshTriplett

8/23/2026 at 8:38:16 PM

You can coax Netflix into giving you 1080p in ordinary Firefox by setting the right user-agent. That's good enough for me, and if it stops working I'll be motivated to stop paying those assholes anyway.

by gspr

8/23/2026 at 9:07:59 PM

The issue is many streaming services require DRM in the browser.

I can’t recall if Chromium supports that, I have a feeling Google only include that DRM in Chrome. But if it is available in Chromium then you might be able to build an Electron app.

by hnlmorg

8/23/2026 at 6:13:24 PM

I think I understand how to use about 20 of the command line options for ffmpeg and the companion utilities like ffprobe. Which is to say; I understand about 0.5% of the total options they provide and am likely a world leading expert in it. I'm mostly joking -- as in, overstating how many of them I understand.

Understanding ffmpeg borders on a specialization in itself. No big surprise that so many of the alternatives have fallen away over the years as people realize the absolute scope of that piece of software.

by metek

8/23/2026 at 6:28:35 PM

You don’t need to understand much of ffmpeg to build a media centre. Your requirements here are extremely simplified and there are hundreds of guides online on how to use it for very simple transcoding.

But if you don’t want to use ffmpeg directly then use one of the many ffmpeg wrappers. Or a different lib entirely like gstreamer or VLC.

Around 15 years ago I built a media centre for my car and the media playback part turned out to be the easiest part of the project.

by hnlmorg

8/23/2026 at 6:41:56 PM

Do you still maintain it?

by rpdillon

8/23/2026 at 6:54:51 PM

No. It was built before Android / Apple integrations existed and was built around tactile controls and voice interactions. But I think Apple Car play is a far far more useful product these days than anything I built 15 years ago. Even if their touch controls are an ergonomic step backwards.

by hnlmorg

8/23/2026 at 7:01:26 PM

i had media center powered by a few perl script that would transcode all videos into formats that ps3 supported in 2007-ish. Yes ffmpeg had a lot of options, 99% of them does not matter, there really only 3 ways to stream to client: as is, repack streams into something client support (i.e. your source is mkv) or transcode into something client support (clients know which formats they support).

People that run these services don't want "dynamic stream quality selection".

by 0x457

8/24/2026 at 8:01:19 AM

> Multiple different XBMC forks. Multiples different Subsonic forks. Multiple different DNLA servers. Multitudes of web-based servers. CLI MP3 servers.

Big difference between _audio_ streaming and _video_ streaming servers. Video streaming is much more complex and pretty consolidated, as I mentioned.

Audio streaming is much more manageable: no issues with transcoding, acceleration or subtitling, and a radically simpler UI. Also ID3 tags aren't great but they're a pretty universal standard with lots of databases, you don't need to desperately scrape IMDB/TMBD for info.

As a result there are quite a few music servers, often exposing Subsonic compatible APIs, ranging from the minimalistic to the 'I'm trying to do everything Spotify does'.

by piaste

8/24/2026 at 10:29:13 AM

There’s literally no difference in difficulty between audio and video.

They all suffer from the same problems of indexing content. They all have multiple different encoding formats available. And they all need a frontend widget in your client for playback.

I’ve worked with both the audio and video streaming platforms and what you’re describing is grossly inaccurate. The fact that your container format isn’t including video frames doesn’t magically solve any of these issues.

Plus ID3 can be a source of new problems by itself given the way it was implemented…twice.

by hnlmorg

8/23/2026 at 5:36:33 PM

It's logical, but the low variety is disappointing nonetheless and makes it more likely than none of the available options are well-suited to one's needs/desires.

In the case of media management, ffmpeg is easily usable with just about every programming language in existence and its usage is extremely well-trodden at this point, which makes the vacuum of newer alternatives to the XBMC lineage all the more puzzling.

by cosmic_cheese

8/23/2026 at 6:14:11 PM

You know that recent social media trend where you name 100 women? Try naming 100 ffmpeg command line options.

by metek

8/23/2026 at 7:46:36 PM

ffmpeg is a beast, not gonna argue that. As another commenter noted however, only a small fraction of those options are necessary to cover a media center project, especially if you're not beholden to supporting esoteric/archaic formats, aren’t bothered with trying to make broken/corrupted files play, etc. Being willing to specialize can also help reduce scope.

by cosmic_cheese

8/24/2026 at 12:14:56 AM

> the vacuum of newer alternatives to the XBMC lineage all the more puzzling.

What is there to be puzzled about? Doing media transcoding is the easy part, dealing with humans is the hard part so.. programmers aren't rushing out to do it.

by wredcoll

8/24/2026 at 9:55:15 AM

[flagged]

by pitop64

8/23/2026 at 8:13:48 PM

I think in general maintainers would be better served by declaring Performance is a Feature earlier in their projects and rejecting contributions that add surface area to the API at the expense of throughput on the existing surface area.

Wrapping modules to expose additional functionality for a niche in a problem domain is tricky. You will end up with some code duplication and some predictability issues with your timelines, but the end result will be better for it.

Long ago someone convinced me that 'Strangling a Service' could also be applied to APIs. The base module should be as simple as possible but no simpler, and more esoteric features should be shunted off to another module. And then in the case when features are antagonistic to each other, they can live in parallel in separate wrappers.

The tricky part there is writing unit tests in the base to defend the negative space that these features fit into. This feature depends on an invariant in the base API that will break everything if merged.

by hinkley

8/23/2026 at 5:32:18 PM

How is “bloat” measured here? Or is this simply a list of open source alternatives to commercial products?

by WalterGR

8/23/2026 at 5:55:28 PM

The inclusion of Tailscale here was a little surprising to me. I'm betting on the latter.

by joshuat

8/23/2026 at 6:15:11 PM

I like Tailscale, but it's difficult to argue with a straight face that it's not seriously suffered from product creep.

This is the inherent problem with tech start-ups. Once they solve the problem they were founded to solve, then what? It's feature complete, but investors insist that the line must go up. Can you imagine if `sed` or `vim` was brought to market by a venture-backed company?

IMHO, capitalism and FOSS are fundamentally incompatible.

by ad_fontes

8/23/2026 at 7:51:10 PM

To be fair to tailscale, I think all the feature creep is stuff that enterprises actually need to have solved. Without it it’s a product that 99% of users would just use free tier and never pay a dime for.

Perhaps it would have been better to split the product into a simple consumer thing and then a separate enterprise product suite.

by Grombobulous

8/23/2026 at 8:16:34 PM

> IMHO, capitalism and FOSS are fundamentally incompatible.

A bold statement to make given the world we live in today contains plenty of both, working together, in harmony.

by arcfour

8/24/2026 at 9:49:53 AM

[flagged]

by pitop64

8/23/2026 at 7:57:05 PM

Someone should add Kanboard for project management tools (like Trello): https://kanboard.org/

Really lightweight and nice!

by KronisLV

8/24/2026 at 7:32:04 PM

Taking the opportunity to plug my own recent project: canireplaceit.com

You can see some collection, and I'm building some advanced research capabilities to it.

For now, you can see if you can fully replace an app with a sub, with oss alternatives, or free alternatives.

Heavily vibe coded but all the apps out there didn't have what I needed, a list of features, what exactly is missing, if there is an sso tax or not, licenses, cheaper alternatives, if there are some tjat genuinely can't be replaced and why.

Lemme know what you think about it and what I should add to it

by hadestructhor

8/23/2026 at 6:47:52 PM

I want a debloated (electric) car.

by flaburgan

8/23/2026 at 8:02:07 PM

There are a lot of electric cars that are relatively normal, usually from more traditional auto manufacturers.

Toyota bZ/bZ Woodland, the entire Hyundai/Kia lineup, Honda Prologue, Jaguar i-pace, original Audi e-tron

I haven’t seen the newer Nissan infotainment system, not sure about that one.

Are these without tech? No, not at all, but they do have fast and simple interfaces that are designed to dump you into CarPlay/Android Auto with ease, and a good amount of them retain separated climate controls that live outside the screen.

Obviously if you want something like a 2008 Accord that’s not really going to be a thing, but almost everyone who isn’t Tesla or Rivian is surprisingly conventional. If you haven’t done much EV shopping and your impression of EVs is “they’re all like Tesla where everything is in the screen” that isn’t true at all. For example, Kia/Hyundai EV models have absolutely zero difference between the gas models and EVs in terms of control design. Toyota’s latest infotainment system is as basic and straightforward as it gets.

by Grombobulous

8/23/2026 at 8:49:59 PM

The only electric car that I drove was a Peugeot 208e. I liked it a lot, but just the fact that the car has a SIM card with 4G connection is already weird for me. Why would my car connect to the internet? I also have doubts about the GPS... And I absolutely do not want Android Auto. Anything related to Google or any GAFAM is a big no for me.

by flaburgan

8/23/2026 at 11:14:50 PM

Android Auto (and, similarly, Apple CarPlay) isn’t by itself any form of draconian Google data collection, you can really think of it as a second screen mirroring car-oriented user interface for Android OS.

It is almost 100% equivalent to connecting a second monitor to a laptop, but with a car UI.

You can use Android Auto without any sort of internet connection with offline maps, perhaps an app utilizing OpenStreetMaps. There is no prerequisite to sign your life away to Google or have them collect tons of data from you to use it.

As far as cars having cellular modems, yeah, I guess I’m not a fan of not having the choice to buy new cars without them, but usually they are there for pretty logical reasons. The car manufacturer infotainment system usually has its own software with online-enabled maps and apps, which some people prefer, I guess.

Believe it or not, Rivian has a complete global off switch for data collection, although it disables features like adaptive cruise control. Still, you’d probably be the type to not mind losing that as a trade-off.

There definitely needs to be more privacy legislation surrounding automotive technology, for sure. However, our original topic here was “bloat,” which in the context of automotive technology I take to mean “overbearing software and a lack of intuitive controls for automotive functions.”

For me, if a car has separate climate controls, turn signal stalks, non-haptic steering wheel buttons, and a volume knob, and the screen isn’t wildly laggy, I’m good.

by Grombobulous

8/23/2026 at 7:23:24 PM

Slate? Or just remove the cellular modem from a Tesla and you have a more or less "dumb" car.

by drnick1

8/24/2026 at 3:44:49 AM

Volkswagen Polo I. It even does have some lights.

by cocodill

8/23/2026 at 9:23:32 PM

https://www.slate.auto/en/blank-slate

by angeldimitrov94

8/23/2026 at 10:43:12 PM

Interesting, thanks. But that still looks like a massive car.

by flaburgan

8/24/2026 at 6:20:58 PM

If you're in France, perhaps. Definitely very far from massive for USA.

by angeldimitrov94

8/24/2026 at 4:22:47 PM

It’s small for a truck.

by mixmastamyk

8/23/2026 at 8:09:43 PM

I find my Mii Electric qualifies.

by brnt

8/23/2026 at 10:49:19 PM

Indeed, it looks great, but not sold for years anymore. What would be the equivalent nowadays?

by flaburgan

8/24/2026 at 8:18:51 PM

Category selection should be checkboxes, not a text box.

by gigabyte9592

8/24/2026 at 7:18:57 AM

It's surprising how pleasant to browse this project is.

by stanislavb

8/23/2026 at 7:42:55 PM

Website doesnt connect for me.

by newsomix9xl

8/23/2026 at 7:55:40 PM

Nice collection. I've been using some of these for a while, G-Helper is a lifesaver if you own an Asus laptop and Immich is probably the best Google Photos replacement out there right now.

by jamesforestwest

8/24/2026 at 12:16:40 AM

Have you tried photoprism? I'm currently running it and trying to decide if it's worth swapping.

by wredcoll

8/23/2026 at 5:54:18 PM

I like the retro ebay style page design.

by ranger_danger

8/24/2026 at 9:46:58 AM

Is this site opensource? It's beautiful I kind've want one

by HugoTea

8/23/2026 at 5:36:53 PM

suckless.org?

by sam_lowry_

8/23/2026 at 6:32:44 PM

Actually think the suckless people would hate this. Google login and nothing there looks light weight in the suckless spirit.

by tokai

8/23/2026 at 8:06:25 PM

I mean, if the suckless crowd were actually serious they'd offer their website only in gopher or something like that instead of bloated HTML (/s)

by Gualdrapo

8/24/2026 at 10:26:11 AM

Heh, HTTP itself is pretty nice and flexible protocol. Its not their fault its get bloated by all shit added to it. Gopher is such inferior protocol compared to HTTP.

http://borg.uu3.net/~borg/ <- impossbile to replicate using gopher. Is it bloated? Hell no...

by Borg3

8/23/2026 at 5:50:09 PM

"Use /* */ for comments, not //."

I find stuff like this hilarious. No software project has ever failed, or even slow down one iota, because of the comment style. This is just someone's personal "ick" masquerading as "coding standards."

EDIT: I think it has actually been becoming a dad of two boys that has absolutely killed my patience for this kind of thing. A lot of it is so similar to how my children argue with each other over absolutely trivial things. Add in the way they say "I don't like that" as "that's not fair" (my children) or "that's not consistent" (the bike shedding nerds) and it just makes me want to scream, "stop whining!"

by moron4hire

8/23/2026 at 6:00:58 PM

Whilst I do agree with you on that specific example, it’s worth noting that code standards as a whole are a somewhat blurry line that can be extremely subjective at times.

by hnlmorg

8/23/2026 at 6:39:16 PM

I actually don't think it's worth noting. I think, if a particular code standard issue is really of value, it will be obvious. You will propose it and nobody will argue. I think the fact that code standards are contentious is proof they are extremely low value. Subtle effects are indistinguishable from superstition.

by moron4hire

8/23/2026 at 6:44:31 PM

I think the particular choice of coding standards is low value, but I think the consistency they bring has a lot of value, at least potentially.

As a father of two boys myself, I know exactly where you're coming from. Like some adults, they'll argue over pointless details and miss the entire thrust of the discussion.

by rpdillon

8/23/2026 at 6:59:45 PM

No, to repeat what I said, I think "consistency" to a programmer is like "fairness" to a child: it's not what you think it is and it probably doesn't apply to whatever situation it's being invoked.

by moron4hire

8/23/2026 at 7:09:09 PM

Oh, interesting.

> No, to repeat what I said, I think "consistency" to a programmer is like "fairness" to a child

I tend to pride myself on my ability to read and comprehend things, and I feel like I never saw you say this. I see now it was an edit to an earlier comment that I didn't catch the meaning of. It seems to say that you think consistency is childish, maybe because it's a naive ideal of some kind? I value it highly, so your perspective is interesting (in the vein of "Symmetry is a complexity-reducing concept. Seek it everywhere.")

That aside, you're advocating for projects that have wildly different coding styles from file to file and function to function?

I guess I've never really worked on a project like that. I can imagine it would feel very messy and would make manual refactors difficult but might not be such a problem for AI?

by rpdillon

8/23/2026 at 8:17:14 PM

"you're advocating for projects that have wildly different coding styles from file to file and function to function?"

I'm advocating for giving up in style as a thing you delude yourself into thinking matters. The opposite of "enforcing consistent style" is not "bedlam and mayhem." I'm saying just let people work on their things and focus on real metrics like testing and algorithmic analysis.

This idea that code should be "consistent" is a gigantic question begging practice. Consistent with what? As according to whom? For what purpose? I will go out on a very short, very thick limb and say that nobody has ever demonstrated a good definition of "consistency," say nothing of the value of adhering to that definition.

It is the way of no way. It does not imply doing things in a stupid way. It implies the narrow minded focus demonstrated by others is an impediment to excellence.

I'm getting rate limited do to an ancient slow-ban I picked up years ago and probably redemonstrate the need for on a regular basis, but I think tacking this text intended as a reply to another person into the end of this comment makes sense.

I suspect if Bruce Lee had ever tried to work as a martial arts instructor in a school as his primary form of living, he'd have found that he couldn't communicate with the other instructors in his school, that they would be insistent that the rigid forms were the only way to achieve true mastery. The value in Bruce Lee being an actor was that he never had to really have that argument with a cadre of fellow instructors. He was able to build his own cult of personality and start his own school. Which, of course now, the art of Jeet Kun Do was ossified into a series of predefined patterns for how to operate, completely missing the point.

by moron4hire

8/24/2026 at 12:22:21 AM

I'm not sure if I disagree with you or not, but this argument isn't very convincing.

> Consistent with what? As according to whom? For what purpose?

Consistent with.. itself! According to.. the people working on it! For the purpose of making it easier to read/write/understand!

Like, I'm willing to entertain arguments that it doesn't actually accomplish this, but these are questions with pretty obvious answers.

A lot of this conversation depends on the definition of "Style" we're using though.

I assumed it meant things like tabs/spaces/bracket placement/semicolon usage and so forth.

If you meant something much higher level, like, dunno, object orientation or what not, then that's an entirely different conversation.

As a side note, as long as we depend on extremely literal character by character diffing algorithms in order to display changes, code formatting is going to have some definite implications.

by wredcoll

8/23/2026 at 7:07:16 PM

Oh, interesting. So you're advocating for projects that have wildly different styles encoding from file to file?

I guess I've never really worked on a project like that. I can imagine it would feel very messy and would make manual refactors difficult but might not be such a problem for AI?

by rpdillon

8/23/2026 at 6:44:31 PM

I think you’re underestimating how opinionated developers are.

The fact that we are disagreeing on this point is great evidence that there isn’t an easy to define, proverbial line in the sand.

by hnlmorg

8/23/2026 at 6:56:54 PM

I know very well how opinionated other developers are. I'm explicitly saying it's a waste of energy to be that picky about code style.

There is an easy to define line: there is no line. It's not a boundary where "over here is good code" and "over there, not" we just don't have a good idea of where the line is. No. There is absolutely no line.

by moron4hire

8/23/2026 at 7:15:29 PM

> I know very well how opinionated other developers are. I'm explicitly saying it's a waste of energy to be that picky about code style.

To be honest, I completely agree with you.

The point I make is that not everyone would. And that disagreement alone results in a blurry line as to what some would consider important and what others would not.

But personally, I honestly do wish more people had the same opinion as you.

by hnlmorg

8/24/2026 at 12:24:44 AM

I'm not going to argue about what style is best like whether or not tabs are superior to spaces or if you should cuddle your elses (other than for my own amusement of course), I just want there to be a style, singular, that the whole project uses. It's nicer that way.

Like, I certainly could finish a book where they changed which font/size they were using every chapter or whatever, but why would I want this?

by wredcoll

8/24/2026 at 1:12:56 AM

I've worked with C compilers that refused the // style before.

by Dwedit

8/24/2026 at 12:42:54 AM

Combined with “do not mix declarations and code”, this could be a strict C89 compatibility thing (not that I think that these standards are a good idea either, even with that less arbitrary justification).

by minitech

8/23/2026 at 6:46:00 PM

[dead]

by thoow02319

8/24/2026 at 5:36:56 AM

tinyapps.org is worth a mention too, if anyone does not know about it :)

by butz

8/23/2026 at 6:52:00 PM

I first thought I’m on old eBay webpage lol

by tech_army

8/23/2026 at 8:46:00 PM

Same here. I’m guessing that’s not accidental.

by josteink

8/23/2026 at 9:15:22 PM

site is down. debloated too much

by ltbarcly3

8/23/2026 at 7:35:21 PM

Something seems not right with that website, even aside from the SSL problem.

by shevy-java

8/23/2026 at 7:08:49 PM

this website is so old school

by tonyhart7

8/23/2026 at 5:42:26 PM

Is there a marker to know if any of these tools are AI generated slop here?

That would be a good feature here.

by yannoninator

8/23/2026 at 6:09:25 PM

How do you define "AI generated slop"?

There's also an implicit judgment in your question. Is well-designed, well-tested AI-generated code worse than poorly written, but hand-typed code?

by ad_fontes

8/23/2026 at 6:47:49 PM

Here we go: as soon as you ask for any kind of definition or rigor around AI development, people will work hard to shut you up.

You're asking an extremely reasonable question, IMHO, especially given these are projects with limited resources going up against generally larger, better-resourced projects. AI is an obvious point of leverage in such a situation, and so there is a lot of potential to reverse engineer using AI and get good results.

What all of these requests fundamentally come down to is "How are you filtering for quality?", which is an extremely difficult question given the state of, for example, the app stores.

by rpdillon

8/23/2026 at 7:15:46 PM

> Here we go: as soon as you ask for any kind of definition or rigor around AI development, people will work hard to shut you up.

Heh. I was essentially run out of lobsters for repeatedly asking that question. Not even kidding. At some point I became the second most flagged user in the entire forum. The site itself invited me to delete my account.

After a while I simply asked Claude to define "slop" and posted the answer. To this day it's still the only coherent definition of "slop" in the entire site.

by matheusmoreira

8/24/2026 at 12:27:40 AM

Software was never that different but everyone is definitely now realizing that, like all the other creative type things humans produce, the trick isn't finding one, it's finding a good one.

AI involvement is a possible heuristic but I seriously doubt it's all that useful for software (probably works a lot better for books)

by wredcoll