Charlie StrossBecause the Calibre ebook library software just acquired AI garbage (as of 8.16.2, this week), it has *already* been forked. For AI-free Calibre, seek out clbre:
Harry Meier@cstross
Funny name, but I'm not getting the strength of this backlash. The feature was just an interface that a user could choose to connect to a LLM if they wanted to put in the extra work. No forced AI, no enshitifying. Just a guy in Mumbai with a Patreon and a git repo who added a hook people are free to use or ignore. Calibre has a million other useless features like that. This one just hit a nerve
Funny name, but I'm not getting the strength of this backlash. The feature was just an interface that a user could choose to connect to a LLM if they wanted to put in the extra work. No forced AI, no enshitifying. Just a guy in Mumbai with a Patreon and a git repo who added a hook people are free to use or ignore. Calibre has a million other useless features like that. This one just hit a nerve
@cstross
It's more telling just how raw the AI nerve is among the book community and how toxic oss culture is. The "refusal to remove" was one comment in a forum saying people don't have to implement the feature (NOTE: It takes work to turn it on) As of yesterday it looked like no one even tried to talk to the guy beyond that. We just jump straight to forking the project. Who's going to support the new fork? Are they going to fix the bugs already in the queue? SMH
It's more telling just how raw the AI nerve is among the book community and how toxic oss culture is. The "refusal to remove" was one comment in a forum saying people don't have to implement the feature (NOTE: It takes work to turn it on) As of yesterday it looked like no one even tried to talk to the guy beyond that. We just jump straight to forking the project. Who's going to support the new fork? Are they going to fix the bugs already in the queue? SMH
@hjmiii I am an author. I am party to the Anthropic AI class action lawsuit (they stole my books for training their LLMs). I am not dispassionate on this issue!
BirdStealing books doesn't stop at Anthropic though, a lot of AI startups and big tech have been pirating books for training their next LLM (Hi Meta, this was only ~10 months ago)
@cstross
Believe me, I get that. As an author still trying to break into trad publishing, the whole industry is a hellscape because of these nitwits. All the more reason to focus the righteous anger at the source, not punish some random dude who helps people fight back the enshitifying of ebooks in general.
Believe me, I get that. As an author still trying to break into trad publishing, the whole industry is a hellscape because of these nitwits. All the more reason to focus the righteous anger at the source, not punish some random dude who helps people fight back the enshitifying of ebooks in general.
two first names