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.

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

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

Opencloud is a nextcloud analog rewritten in golang.

Really lightweight and nice!

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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".

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.

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

I'd challenge that. Have you looked at the specifications of any reasonably current compression standards? The AVC one is some 900 pages, I think.

Entire communities exist around discussing the strengths and shortcomings of different codec implementations.

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.

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.

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

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'.

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.

The answer to every question about how to use/write it is the counter question: well, which software or player do you want it to work with? Here are your 8 mutually incompatible options.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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!"

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.

> 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?

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.

> 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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

That would be a good feature here.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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

That is exactly what he said, yes.

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

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