Just a PSA.

See this thread

Sorry to link to Reddit, but not only is the dev sloppily using using Claude to do something like 20k line PRs, but they are completely crashing out, banning people from the Discord (actually I think they wiped everything from Discord now), and accusing people forking their code of theft.

It’s a bummer because the app was pretty good… thankfully Calibre-web and Kavita still exist.

  • queasy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    2 hours ago

    Wow, I was thinking about switching from calibre-web soon too… Thanks for the headsup!

  • James R Kirk@startrek.websiteEnglish
    23·
    7 hours ago

    Damn 99% of the time someone says not to use an open source product it’s because of some obscure drama unrelated to the actual program.

    But in this case the dev appears to not just be using AI code (not great but debatable) but using mostly AI code and using AI to reply to bug reports. Not something the average person wants to be running in a live environment.

    I haven’t used Booklore but the excitement around it was nudging me there. I think I’ll stick with CWAs slower rollout.

  • Strawberry@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    4·
    6 hours ago

    Thanks, that might explain the jank I got when spinning it up yesterday…I’ll be back on calibre web or trying another option over the weekend.

  • philpo@feddit.orgEnglish
    11·
    3 hours ago

    Tbh, at the moment the maintainer seems to be have gotten the message - or at least tries to make it seem so. I would give him the benefit of doubt at this stage, at least for a while now.

  • Auster@thebrainbin.org
    16·
    10 hours ago

    Can’t check now, but if there aren’t forks named like BookTale and BookStory, I’ll riot.

    Jokes aside, if the license he used allows forking, dude’s tripping, and could even get sued depending on the country for false accusation of crime.

    And ah, Discord, great for nuking inconvenient chats. Imagine if it had happened over at a public forum so people’s reactions could be backed up.

    And dunno where I’d draw the line, but 20k lines imo is a bit past reasonable. How would anyone audit that many in a timely manner? But with the “dev” doing that daily, that’d be hard to even pretend.

    • rtxn@lemmy.worldEnglish
      101·
      9 hours ago

      The treekie in me wants BookData.

      (edit) This made me remember The Measure Of A Man and now I’m fucking depressed. They had such high hopes for the future.

      • Stern@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        9 hours ago

        The trekkie in me wants BookData.

        The extra bit about Lore being the one who could make shit up and say what folks wanted to hear while Data was based on facts and logic isn’t lost on me either

          • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
            3·
            9 hours ago

            Truly an actor of all time. Sometimes I think Oscars and Emmys and all that shit should be able to be granted retroactively (hellooooo, “you broke your little ships” scene).

  • nfreak@lemmy.mlEnglish
    142·
    9 hours ago

    I literally just got this all set up and was about to hook up my wife’s kobo to it, good timing for this to come out so I don’t waste any more of our time with this slop. What a shitshow.

    I just spun up Komga instead last night (I was going to set up CWA but I’ve heard sketchy things about their lead dev that don’t leave me optimistic). Very easy to get up and running, pretty basic but it seems to work well and does exactly what it needs to do. I was a bit hesitant since it seemed geared toward comics, but it’s handling regular ebooks just fine.

      • nfreak@lemmy.mlEnglish
        4·
        8 hours ago

        I don’t have the full details, but I saw some mentions in that Booklore reddit thread about CWA’s dev ignoring major issues in favor of new features and such, something like that. I admittedly didn’t really do much research into that nor the tool itself, but Komga’s Kobo support seems better, so I just went with it.

  • shads@lemy.lolEnglish
    94·
    7 hours ago

    And every time the use of LLMs for open source development comes up we get the same tired spiel from people about how it’s just a tool and implications that anyone who doesn’t embrace it with jpy in their heart is just a Luddite.

    It seems to me that it’s less a tool and more like intentionally infecting your project with cancer. Sure it shows all the signs of rapid growth, but metastasization isn’t sustainable or desirable. Plus I am yet to encounter a strong advocate for LLMs who isn’t a cunt.

    • Vendetta9076@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      16 minutes ago

      I find an LLM is a great way to shortcut the googling itd take for me to parse random error message #506 when I’m learning a new language but that’s about it. I’m also in no way writing software meant for mass consumption.

  • civAEnglish
    11·
    9 hours ago

    I self-host audiobookshelf, and it’s working pretty well for me. It doesn’t have tons of features, and the android app is a bit janky, but it does what I need and I’m happy with it.