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Call for Mbin contributors (fedia.io)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
20 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Crossposted from https://fedia.io/m/updates@kbin.melroy.org/t/4475005

As you all might know it, Mbin is a rather small project with a small team. In fact the current size of the team is 1.5 developers (0.5 for the ones which only have partially time). While our active devs do what they can in their free time, this leads to slow feature and security updates, sometimes slow support and increasing stress for the remaining devs.

That's why I ask everyone who likes this project, has time of their own to donate and knows how to program with PHP (or is willing to learn it) to consider helping this project move forward.
You can start with simpler features and submit them as PRs or even just help review existing PRs if full commitment to maintaining the codebase is currently too much. We are aware that parts of our codebase contains more spagett than some Italian restaurants, but we will help every newcomer to find their way through the sources.
Every bit of support helps, as it also shows that we have a passionate userbase which does not want Mbin to wither away.

Well ... as I'm not very good at writing motivational texts, just comment anything which comes to mind for this issue :D If you have ideas how to improve the chances that this post reach the right people, I would also love to hear it.

At the same time I want to bring up another topic, as transparency is important for any public project.

Some of our devs use AI assistants for generating code for PRs and also to assist with PR reviews. Simply because without it, they would not have time to continue contributing to Mbin (which would bring our devs down to 1, making it impossible to merge new PRs). On thing here is important to know: I will not call it slop nor vibe-coding, as they are a competent developer capable of understanding and managing the outputs of the agents. Still, I am very aware of the issues of AI and the general opinion on it in the Fediverse. That is why I would like to know your constructive opinions on this matter.
Also, I guarantee you that every PR is reviewed by at least one human pair of eyes.

all 20 comments

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[–] 1 point 2 hours ago

You lost me at AI, sorry. That's my issue though, not yours. Good luck to you.

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    [–] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

    Big oof on using LLM code for a fediverse project. That's not going to do any favors finding motivated devs to chip in, especially with all the social, ethical, and potential copyright issues they bring.

    such as these:

    1. Simply using an AI that's run on a corporate data centers encourages the construction of yet more data centers, with all of the environmental/climate negatives they bring, as well as local harms they induce on the people living near them, such as increased electricity rates.

    2. Using corporate AI directly helps the financial situations of those giant corporations (by boosting usage/user numbers, they are able to attract more investment capital), most of which are ran by right-wing CEOs who are more than willing to collaborate with and fund fascist governments to ensure that they are not regulated in search of both maximum profits. Some of these companies, such as Nvidia, Palantir and Oracle, genuinely appear to be seeking to use these tools for what would previously be considered crackpot conspiracy theory levels of public control and surveillance.

    3. I'm wary of the potential effects of AI usage resulting in declining or stagnating critical thinking based on some preliminary studies (example 1, example 2).

    4. All currently existing LLMs are unethically trained on copyrighted code that is incompatible with GPL licensed projects. LLMs have a 3 to 10% chance to unknowingly reproduce the copyrighted code perfectly, introducing legal plagiarism into an open-source project, which could easily open up the developers to being sued in the future if companies scanned open source repos for copyright violations.

    5. Many courts are ruling that LLM generated code cannot be copyrighted at all, meaning that it also cannot be legally made GPL, losing the protections from corporate exploration the GPL normally grants. https://fsfe.org/news/2026/news-20260825-01.html

    6. It is not clear if LLMs can be "just a tool".

    I personally think that the external costs of AI use far outweigh any potential benefit they can bring, but if soneone ultimately decides they are going to continue using them regatdless, I would hope they consider at least using a self-hosted LLM, or using something like AI horde instead, which has volunteers hosting AI, and avoids directly benefitting the fascist corporations such as openAI, anthropic, ect.

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    [–] 13 points 1 day ago (6 children)

    The git repo:

    https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago (5 children)

    It's written in PHP, vibe coded, and it's on Microsoft Github. A trifecta.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago

    written in PHP

    If I wouldn't have to work for some months I would love to rewrite it in Kotlin to be honest

    vibe coded

    No. Only a few recent PRs involved AI code, not the whole project is vibe coded. Also keep in mind that one dev uses AI, the others write and review by hand.

    it's on Microsoft Github

    Yes, and I agree that this is no good. Benti already mentioned that we had plans to migrate the repo to a Forgejo instance but didn't have time to actually do it.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    I really don't get why Mbin moved to Github. Should have stayed on Codeberg imo, like the project it was forked from.

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    • [–] 9 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    I was somewhat interested until I read the last part. I personally have no interest in contributing to projects that rely on AI and I feel like others feel the same way. It results in more code being shipped than necessary and thus requires a lot more time to understand and modify, I’d rather spend that time on projects that don’t rely on LLMs.

    (Relevant comment from the open source community)

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  • [–] 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    What do you mean it results in more code being shipped than necessary? If it's producing too many changes then it's up to the dev to refactor and PR reviewers to catch before it gets merged into master.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    In theory, yes. But that’s usually not what happens in practice. I don’t know if that’s the case for Mbin but I have no interest in finding out. Most people that do LLM driven development submit code that looks right, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is right. The same probably applies to reviewers when approving/merging changes, if they have way more code to review I wouldn’t be surprised if they get lazier with it, might even be subconsciously.

    There are a lot more reasons why using LLMs is generally speaking not a good idea, but to keep it short I’ll just share some relevant articles/posts that go more in depth and explain it better than me:

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    • [–] 5 points 1 day ago (5 children)

    AI is a tool. Garbage in, garbage out still applies.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 day ago (4 children)

    AI isn't a "tool" - it's a set of subroutines built on the stolen labor and property of others using exploitative amounts of energy and resources to confidently make up something that's wrong.

    That's a tool in the same way a hammer is a tool - if you stole it from your neighbor, it was coin-operated and gas-powered, and it often turned into a screwdriver or a halibut midswing and then obsequiously apologized.

    GIGO was true pre-GenAI, but is no longer. You can take good data, train a model on it with the greatest care, do a well-structured prompt, and still get garbage out. Honestly, a lot of boomers and older GenX embrace GenAI because they still think GIGO applies without realizing what a broken assumption that is.

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  • [–] 0 points 16 hours ago (3 children)

    It is a tool. Like I said, garbage in, garbage out. I wouldn't use it for something I don't know what the result should be.

    It's also good for gathering information, papers on subjects. Were is the stolen labour in that?

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  • [–] -1 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

    where do you think the data the models are trained on comes from? The Clanker Fairy?

    Also, LLMs are notoriously bad for gathering info. They make up info and sources constantly. Look at all the lawyers found to have used LLMs that made up legal citations and cases. Or scientific papers citing studies that don't exist.

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    • [–] 2 points 1 day ago

    I'm all for AI, personally. When using it as a programmer it's a huge force multiplier, just pay attention to what it's doing.

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