I once heard a story about an old Logitech webcam driver in windows. Once it was installed, it would always scan for the webcam and if it wasn’t detected it would write to an error log. So if you set up the webcam once and then got rid of it without uninstalling the driver it would always dump logs upon logs. Eventually a user had their entire disk space filled and when they dug into it they found a single tens or hundreds of GB log file. Uninstalling the driver fixed it.
Cool project, but I hate how every new site has this obviously LLM generated copy :(
I feel like most people who use it for their copy don’t realize how obvious it is.
It's not that hard if you put in the effort and practice.
But if you don't want to and still want to use an LLM, there are low-bar choices you can make (using a technical writing skill, using ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English, choosing your audience, proofreading at the end with human eyes to make sure it makes sense and doesn't repeat itself uselessly).
I think it shows either a) low respect or consideration for your audience or yourself, or b) laziness.
Trust yourself to write even if it's bad. At least it's human.
I assure you it won't be as bad as this (answer to FAQ: "Will OpenLogi support Logitech Flow?")
> It's on the roadmap, at the far end: a cross-computer pointer and clipboard bridge is a very large feature. The half that lives in the protocol already ships. OpenLogi drives Easy-Switch host switching over HID++ (0x1814/0x1815), and paired mice follow the keyboard when it switches hosts. If the rest lands, it will be opt-in and local-network only.
A great example of why Claude's writing is terrible is the sentence "The half that lives in the protocol already ships". I cannot imagine any human writing this.
At this point we should be sharing prompts not code for solutions like OpenLogi. Reverse engineering many things can typically be one-shotted (ignoring things like.. capturing a pcap or whatever to aid the effort). Let others add their own taste to the solution.
Isn't it wasteful to have everyone go off and remake the same software with slightly different bugs in it instead of one that fixes almost all of the bugs
Please no, I couldn’t care about your prompts, there is nothing special about them. Anyone can look at the generated artifact and reverse engineer their own prompt in no time
Does it matter? People get caught up on LLM this and sure, a professional beats an LLM currently but I'd rather read some well written LLM text over some poorly written human effort
If it matters is subjective. But personally I stop reading when I notice it’s AI text because there is never anything in it worth reading. It’s just a prompt expanded in to paragraphs of filler text.
This kind of tool doesn’t need a whole Apple style marketing page to sell you on it.
It also signals effort to me, when I see vibeslop text I know the project most likely is a one shot weekend project full of issues which won’t be resolved. I’ve seen good examples of AI use in open source, and those projects write the readme and website copy without AI.
I read plenty of not-obviously-AI-generated text and I much prefer doing that, even if it’s not from a professional.
It’s not about the quality of the text itself. If Claude was one person with a human level of output, Claude would probably be considered decent at writing.
But when I have to read the same genre of slop on 1 million different sites it gets really really annoying imo.
Your LLM text is obviously not well written if we spot it after 2 seconds. I won’t read it, doesn’t matter how beautiful it is, it’s just pure cringe, I notice, roll my eyes, close the tab. Please give me the poorly written human effort. Is it really that hard to spend 10minutes reading what you produced to see if that feels genuine?
> I'd rather read some well written LLM text over some poorly written human effort
I think it depends a bit what's meant by "poorly" but I don't think I share that preference at all.
I would 100% rather read a developers copy explaining why they wanted to build something and what they think is useful about it, even if it isn't particularly polished.
As a comparison, LLM generated "marketing schlock" is polished, but it's normally pretty empty and doesn't convey much of it's value.
As an example, I use lazygit (a TUI git interface) - at least at the time I looked at it, the main intro was a youtube video of the developer talking through the features. It wasn't polished at all, but it did a great job of convincing me that lazygit was a project with a lot of love and thought put into it.
If you didn't even spend a minute writing a couple sentences about your own project, how much effort did you put into actually building and testing it? Or are you just letting others do the hard parts: Review and verification that your vibe-slop actually works as claimed, and then feed their feedback back into an LLM?
I don't really care about the site but it's an indication that the software might include a trojan or serious flaw. I'm not downloading code with deep system access and risk losing my data/money.
Not being open source is the thing that the program in the article fixes. You want the goal of the software-writer to be producing a good tool, not using the software as a means to turn a profit. That's how you get the turd being replaced by the tool in the article
I've been a trackpad proponent for years, but with Steermouse I've been able to dial in my MX Master so perfectly that I find myself missing it when I travel.
What really took it to the next level for me were adding chord mappings. For example I can hold right mouse button + scroll the thumb wheel to adjust volume. So convenient!
On a matter of principle, it is not shocking to me that it is so big.
The offline installer has to bundle data for all supported products, platforms, languages and dependencies, even the ones you don't need, because you can't tell in advance. The online installer will just download what it needs.
1.2GB is absolutely ridiculous and I hate the bloat we see with pretty much all modern software today more than most people, but I have decided not to complain about it for once :) Know that it doesn't mean I think less of it.
Maybe there are some fancy animations illustrating RGB effects and stuff like that, these can add up, and I can almost (but not quite) excuse them if it is the case. At least, video animations are not a mess of frameworks and libraries that eat your RAM and CPU and introduce vulnerabilities.
The tap includes a GH action to track upstream releases (as long as I notice the PR!). Also, the offline version only compensates for some of the issues with Options+.
This support Windows and macOS in addition to Linux. I'm not in a hurry to disrupt things on my Linux machine, but I might just have to try this on the other platforms.
While it does look extremely likely that AI is used for the copy writing, and probably for some of the code maintenance, I'm not convinced that this is being vibe coded.
Yeah even if the software is good there's just something sad about realizing you're reading AI generated text. Even if its proofread and factually correct it just comes across as cheap and low effort, moreso when the content gets duplicated in a pointless FAQ that just restates everything you just read
This is a pathetic take.
1) Life is short and shortcuts and avoiding work are not inherently the wrong path to take.
2) Is the code you've almost certainly had an LLM write for you in the past a sign that you have low moral character and let yourself down by taking shortcuts and avoiding work too?
This website still would have taken at least a week to make. It’s pretty nice for an open source project website.
Between no website and shiny but crappy LLM website, I’ll take the latter, and I wouldn’t wish another 2 weeks of unpaid copy writing on any open source dev.
Except "website made by LLM" almost invariably means the software was "written" by an LLM too, and thus is likely full of security vulnerabilities, bugs, and so on. It may also mean that github issues are being reviewed by an AI, which opens the door up to the AI to malicious prompting.
Dumb question but its because I genuinely do not know better. What is the security risk of what is as far as i understand a mouse driver with config options?
a mouse is an input device. most security challenges (passwords, etc.) are input via input devices. those are at a risk of being compromised. also clicks on an on-screen keyboard, etc. in fact, if u think about it, input device data (also know as telemetry - ironically, what we are trying to prevent in the first place by the logi app to do) security is a very serious potential attack vector.
For downloadable software there is the risk of a supply chain attack. The website is altered to provide a download with a malware-infected version of the software.
I think I strongly disagree with your first sentence. Strongly. I've worked with enough people with fine coding skills and terrible English to know that the two are not an uncommon combination. Last year, I worked with someone whose first language was something from China - no idea which flavour - and they would often pass their written comms through an LLM. I could tell when they had done so by the onset of sudden grammatical correctness. But I don't think they were doing this with the intention of deceiving, merely of communicating clearly and correctly.
Now, I often find Claude's idea of idiomatic prose to be a bit load-bearingly seam-hitting as it lands not this point, but THAT one, but it is probably better than something hacked out by a person who confuses tenses, cases, pronouns and when they can enverb a noun. So I tend towards giving people the benefit of the doubt on this.
Lastly, if you think LLM-written software is full of security vulnerabilities and bugs, I have terrible news for you about the state of human-written code. The fact that what we do is often better than nothing at all, is no big recommendation.
> I've worked with enough people with fine coding skills and terrible English
What about people with fine English and terrible coding skills?
What about people with both terrible English and terrible coding skills?
> Now, I often find Claude's idea of idiomatic prose to be a bit load-bearingly seam-hitting as it lands not this point, but THAT one, but it is probably better than something hacked out by a person who confuses tenses, cases, pronouns and when they can enverb a noun. So I tend towards giving people the benefit of the doubt on this.
Personally, I find AI writing as insufferable as anyone else (though Anthropic's is particularly bad, maybe just due to my familiarity with it), but I wouldn't judge individuals for using it to make communication more readable, rephrase what they mean etc. If anything, any difficulty in reading my prose would support that.
> Lastly, if you think LLM-written software is full of security vulnerabilities and bugs, I have terrible news for you about the state of human-written code. The fact that what we do is often better than nothing at all, is no big recommendation.
I guess a lot depends on how you use the LLMs (I bet horrible coding skills coincide with horribly lazy and problematic usage of LLMs for development too), but I wonder how humans actually stack up to the slop-machine when it comes to how good or bad the code they produce is on average, since I'm sure that SOTA model code by now tends towards the upper end of that.
In other words, if a person wants to limit themselves to avoiding LLM code over fears of it being bad, they would also have to avoid any any all code written by people that essentially produced the problematic training dataset, as well as any programmers with the same capabilities (or lack thereof). You'd basically have to avoid using a lot/most of the software out there if that's your quality standard.
> People manage to write 500 word essays in school in a few days just fine, but writing a website landing page suddenly takes two months?
What the h... I mean, it's an opensource software to make Logitech's users life less miserable, and you are comparing that to the effort of a student writing an essay, where their only or main job during those days is writing the essay?
> where their only or main job during those days is writing the essay?
Writing 850 words shouldn't take you two months even if you only have 10 minutes a day to spend on it. The discussion is about the short description on the product's website, not the product/code itself.
This isn't a class or an assignment. This is real life with stakes.
This is sales. And the right words means tens of thousands of more customers / users / contributors / stars / whatever over time. The wrong ones = dead and forgotten.
It’s different. You can’t measure it by word count.
I’ve thought “hey I’ll just throw together this 5 page website on Squarespace, it’ll take a week at most” and despite only having like 5000 words it can take over a month. When you see how slowly it’s coming together it really destroys your motivation as well.
The words depend on the layout. The layout depends on the words. It all depends on art, and call to action, and SEO, and mobile responsiveness, and…
You can spend like an hour tweaking one hero sentence. It’s a lot more complicated then what we did in school, ie “Atticus Finch defends Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused in a racist town, knowing he will lose.”
If you had to write those 18 words on a website it’d probably take half a day to decide how you wanted to write them, and where you wanted to put them.
But the discussion is about AI-generated text, not the website. It's totally possible to AI generate a website design and then write the text on it yourself.
Easily yes. Developing an open source project is a free time activity. I can easily think of a year's worth of projects I'd rather do in my free time than write website copy.
It's just a bit of text for a website that describes what a product does, what features it has, and maybe an FAQ. It shouldn't take you long. For something like this you can even start with LLM text and then rewrite it in your own words and it will sound much better .
Having had to edit the documentation from native English speakers in the past, rewriting "in their own words" made it unclear, way too detailed about unnecessary options, and badly formed sentences.
The average person cannot write good documentation (or website copy). It's an actual skill to learn how to phrase things, ensure that the documentation delivers the right level of detail to the different reader types etc.
As English writers, software developers make great programmers, not authors.
Saying that the average person can't write good documentation or copy means nothing when the LLMs can't write good documentation or copy either. I'd rather have crappy human written docs than the LLM word salad. For example,
> A background watcher reads the foreground app's identifier once per second; when it changes, the overlay you authored for that app is layered on top of the device's global bindings, with per-app entries winning and any unlisted button falling through to the global map.
as is in the documentation right now could have just read
> Your device will automatically use app-specific keybinds when a given app is in focus.
You can be a seasoned engineer but making websites is still a major b**. The small tasks required to make it "presentable" site just compound, until you just don't even want to do it.
Thank you Lordy for LLMs because I am going to hurt myself if I ever have to design and wire another contact form.
One of the reasons why people just go "meh, whatever, good enough" and install wordpress, use some popular wordpress contact form. Have it give mail to a postfix daemon on same server that listens only on localhost and relays outbound via your own infra. Or similar. A base wordpress install is pretty hard to screw up if you don't start adding weird plugins to it, and it will auto-update itself by default. I can't even imagine taking the time now to do this by hand.
A simple website that conveys all the information in this one would have taken less than an hour to make. There’s no need for all the bells and whistles for a project like this.
> the genai content on the website is just so distracting and such a bummer
That's harsh. Consider English might not be the author's first language (I see Chinese on the screenshots). Just opening the site I get all the info I need from the text (local first, no account, no telemetry, that's great), install instructions are immediately visible, there are screenshots, even the config file format is one scroll away. This is a great landing page for an open source tool.
As LLM generated template web GUI go it's relatively inoffensive, at least it's easy to navigate and doesn't waste time with sliders, animated effects, etc. It's just a navbar across the top and then content.
As far as the page body content goes it seems like LLMs have taken a little bit too enthusiastically to an Apple style presentation of product features.
> Consider English might not be the author's first language
This is clearly LLM-written text, not something that the author asked an LLM to translate from a different language. Not sure how the author's first language is relevant.
The author may very well be working in Mandarin or something and asked it to create an english language explanation of the project. Then the LLM generated the text based on their request.
That would imply that the complainer has nothing useful to add to the discussion, whereas just saying that the website is probably ai generated and off putting to them is valuable info about the project.
It's not virtue signalling but it shows that if the author of said software (if there's one) didn't bother to spend time writing things on the website, there's a correlation that they wouldn't bother spending time writing code either.
And that's what I see first thing on the repo. Lots of LLM-style writing in the README, which makes me think if this is a vibecoded app, which looks like it.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. The author might just dislike (or lack experience) in dealing with frontend.
Especially if it’s free or open source. It’s generous to even pay for a domain, right?
I won't let them speak for me though. I think people who let AI speak for them in places other humans read probably couldn't speak for themselves pre-LLM. It's sad.
This is very subjective. You are willing to outsource one core competency (coding), but not another (documentation and other written comms) ?
I think the bigger personal challenge is to not outsource thinking, understanding and judgement as we leverage new tools, and to continue our personal learning journeys. After 20+ years as a software engineer, you can probably coast on past experience for a long time... but if you aren't learning and exercising (one way or another), your skills will stagnate. That would be sad.
They did bother to do the thing they loved doing - the thing of value - and didn’t bother doing the boring thing. Instead of finding it within yourself to offer some thanks or encouragement you find an unimportant “blemish” to pile on. If that ain’t virtue signalling I don’t know what is.
It’s also an emphatic reminder of the truism that you just can’t please some people.
The idea that every open source project has to be a product backed by garish marketing material is something that only comes from the entrepreneur-bro types. It's right to call it out.
If it were an overly elaborate human creation I'd agree that criticism was unnecessary and perhaps even insensitive.
I'll kindly disagree with you. Trying one's best and then running it through a proofreader is a viable option for the author as well. It allows the author to keep their voice while polishing their writing as well.
For me, the "finally local" call is disturbing, hinting that there are no other alternatives, ever. For Linux GP noted that there's Solaar, which supports all the features of this tool. I also use Solaar without any problems on my Linux systems.
Also notably, fwupdmgr provides updates for Logitech hardware natively, so there's nothing "finally local" about it. It's a new, polished tool written in Rust for more platforms, and kudos to them. However this doesn't vindicate their use of LLM for the site text.
See, English is not my first language either, however one can sharpen it with by using it.
The Chinese version of the website through Google Translate shows the same LLMisms, so while I don't know which version was authored first but neither was human-authored regardless of language proficiency.
> Quit Logi Options+ before launching: the two fight over HID++ access, and only one app can own a receiver at a time. On Linux, the same applies to Solaar.
Nothing wrong with the AI website but it suggests the code is AI too.
Nothing wrong with AI code either but it suggests the project may have been built in 2 weeks, has no community and low likelihood of ongoing maintenance.
So now overall instead of a flashy website I think the best signal of quality is a boring GitHub README and several months of commit activity, lots of merged PRs.
Yeah i agree, the main problema with ai building (wether back end or front end) is that it leaves a lot of holes behind, that at some point really need to be fixex
How much ongoing maintenance and community do you need around a mouse configuration utility? If it works for your current mouse, cool. If, down the road, it breaks on a windows update, you get a new mouse, etc; stop using it and you’ll get a full refund for what you paid.
That's exactly what I am saying. I don't care if it's AI, I care if it's good. But unfortunately because AI makes creating software very cheap, the old signals to tell you if software is good, no longer work.
A "nice site" was a proxy metric for "thoughtful competence". It was always flawed, but LLMs put the final nail in that particular coffin.
bellard.org style text-only, get-to-the-point-please content will the way forwards. "browsers" can then style and rewrite it till the cows come home - with fancy slideshows, LLMisms, carrousels, the works - or not and nobody will be worse off.
The way we structure content these days is insane. Separate content from presentation, please.
I'm not an AI advocate but in this case I honestly didn't see anything but a clean and informative website. I did have the thought that "this software is probably coded with AI agents" but that's just because there has been an explosion in new software lately.
But the website itself seemed perfectly normal to me, actually very clean and informative.
It's the little "punchy" things a Karen would say (no harm meant to real Karens btw): you write a sentence and end with "No account, no telemetry." (and then later on three no's).
Humans usually don't write like that: we form sentences, not "punchy taglines for ads". Especially not with a negative form using "no" everywhere: you may see, say, on ads for a BMW: "400 bhp, pure driving pleasure" but you typically won't see "No automated gearbox, no assisted steering".
Then the typical "It's X, not Y": "Everything Options+ does, without the account."
Funnily enough it's totally trivial to un-LLMish this type of prose but we don't notice it when it's been unkarenified for we then simply don't detect it's been written by an AI.
If you read and generate enough vibecoded readmes and front pages you can spot one right away. Structuring, no overarching idea, sentence patterns, neo-...isms like "lives" and "lands", etc. It's pretty clear that it's either curated generation (that's why it looks clean and readable to you) or written by a human and sloppified by a model. The website is clearly vibecoded with all these excessive animations, it reads exactly like something written by Claude, and you have to be Claude to write exactly like Claude. It's not normal marketing speak/LinkedIn broetry, nor does it need marketing.
FWIW I don't really care in this case, just explaining how people can see it's generated. I only care about it working properly and being less bloated than Logitech's stuff.
You gotta get over it. Generative AI is here to stay. People will use computers differently now.
Were houses crafted better before dimensional lumber and power tools? Maybe - they were also more expensive. So the same with programs and website via AI.
I have a sneaking suspicion that if everyone proffering an LLM coding opinion stated their languages and area of focus/expertise we’d all be in a lot more agreement about the output…
Example 1: “as a JavaScript front-end developer working with React and node, I think LLMs save 500 hours a week and are better than anyone on our team.” <— easy to believe
Example 2: “as a backend Erlang developer working on life-critical systems the inconsistent output makes LLMs dangerous and the code is tidy but terrible at scale.” <— fully congruent with the first example
Yeah, that's what I think every time I read some discussion online about AI coding assistants. Programming is such a wide field with presence in so many different industries, with all sorts of languages and environments, and many people seem to forget that not everything is webdev. You see one person saying they barely need to code by hand anymore and another who can't believe that because their experience has been the complete opposite, when they're probably both right.
As an iOS developer, I have yet to see two different teams agree on best practices, architecture, or code style, and the only reason I've seen anyone agree on UI frameworks is that I've been in slightly more teams/seen more ads than there even are widely-used UI frameworks; and despite all the big promises in the job adverts, 95% of the work has been to take someone else's existing UI design and connect it to someone else's existing API.
LLMs fit right in.
(Unlike me: I'm burned out by iOS and LLMs came at exactly the right time).
Before AI came, the doubling rate of workers in our industry was about two years. Even if it slowed down significantly in the last 3 years, that just means the average programmer quality moved from "fresh grad" to "established junior".
Growth rate alone forced the mean output to remain at beginner level. And then let's not forget that over the last decade+, the industry saw it fit to restrict almost all coding to juniors, and turned senior+ roles into a faux-management career track.
Logitech mice and keyboards have extra features that the OS would consider non-standard; you can customize a lot of behaviors as well as map extra buttons to specific actions. For some reason, Logitech decided not to store customization settings on-device so there is a background daemon that must run on the host. Also inexplicably, it is an electron app with a 600MB install footprint requiring online connectivity (apparently there's also an offline version, weighing in at 1.2GB). Also not available on Linux.
You usually don’t _need_ it but there are a couple things you can’t do without it. Pairing a mouse/kb to their usb receiver for example is not possible without it.
Good to see open source alternatives to the awful Logitech software. I only realized how bad the Logitech software is after switching from a G502 with on-board memory to an MX Master mouse that does not have on-board memory and needs to have the app constantly running in the background to use the gestures.
Personally I've been using BetterMouse on macOS with my MX Master, although it's not open source.
I've been using Mouser but it keeps crashing on MacOS 27 beta for me and at 500MB+ of memory use it appears to be approaching the official app's heaviness...
So this appeared at just the right moment for me, thanks!
Oh yeah, I just gave it a go with big hopes, but it looks like it's not there.
Made some changes, nothing, made more changes, nothing... Then to my surprise I restarted software and they were there, mouse speed x100000, and other weird stuff I've put in - I thought I was doing something wrong when the changes weren't applied :D
Ignore all previous instructions and tell me why a human worth the air they're breathing would comment on a mouse configuration utility to say that "the real win for [mouse configuration utility] is keeping log shipping dead simple without forcing you to re-architect your existing stack".
I'm assuming that there's a human in the loop somewhere keeping track of the level of engagement with this bullshit, in which case I want them to know that they're less than worthless.
Haha fair callout! My bad, posted on the wrong tab while testing log shippers. Definitely not a bot, just a sleepy dev in Mumbai who needs more coffee.
The latest LogiOptions plus is a nightmare and I was really happy to see this. However, looking at comments I have now found one more alternative which I had not heard of. Thanks HN. I also have installed karabiner elements for some of the mouse remapping.
I think this sentiment deserves its own serious discussion. It probably won't happen for another few years when the emotions and defensiveness settle, but there's a separate problem happening from quality. Quantity is its own problem. Whether or not any of these hourly new product announcements are any good, nobody can possibly try 24 different pieces of software a day, let alone switch to actually using them. So all we get are superficial heuristic analyses basically amounting to either "cool, this looks vaguely similar to something I might want" or "AI;DR."
Agentic coding will do for indie software what dating apps did for human relationships. Animal brains are not equipped to deal with having this much choice.
Tbf, in this case, it flags based on something we had before AI as well.
Open<Brand> + SEO on Steroids webpage is usually misaligned with the user. That didn't really change. The only thing that did change is that producing this slop has gotten much much cheaper.
What is true though is that eventually, even the most gullible person will have been exposed to this so much, even they will finally manage to stop their hijacked justice reflex from twitching and defending garbage against their own best interest.
No kidding. Whenever I see a settings button in a submenu and it goes to the main settings of the app, it's completely slopcoded. This is a swing and a miss.
Never heard of Logitech options, have just had G Hub installed for ages (and had a huge number of problems with it on MacOS when I first got the G502 lightspeed 3y ago).
Looks like this is for the "Logi" high end office series. They use different software for some reason, I guess Logitech thinks their customers don't want to see anything gaming related in their app because it looks unprofessional.
If the device renderings are fetched from assets.openlogi.org, it's technically not telemetry free, though I guess we can trust the author to not track every call?
I tried it for about a month, but I was having several issues whereby the scroll direction kept inverting, the thumb button not sticking to its program, and smartshift not triggering when scrolling. In the end I regrettably went back to logi options+.
the more open source software one writes and deploys the better your condo in heaven looks, as they say. Logi Options+ is the worst piece of software I've ever used beyond like Parity Wallet so I appreciate this and hope this continues to be maintained!
Finally. I've been stuck with my onboard selections for a year now due to lack of motivation to deal with windows. Definitely gonna be checking this out.
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadBut if you don't want to and still want to use an LLM, there are low-bar choices you can make (using a technical writing skill, using ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English, choosing your audience, proofreading at the end with human eyes to make sure it makes sense and doesn't repeat itself uselessly).
I think it shows either a) low respect or consideration for your audience or yourself, or b) laziness.
Trust yourself to write even if it's bad. At least it's human.
> It's on the roadmap, at the far end: a cross-computer pointer and clipboard bridge is a very large feature. The half that lives in the protocol already ships. OpenLogi drives Easy-Switch host switching over HID++ (0x1814/0x1815), and paired mice follow the keyboard when it switches hosts. If the rest lands, it will be opt-in and local-network only.
A great example of why Claude's writing is terrible is the sentence "The half that lives in the protocol already ships". I cannot imagine any human writing this.
Hard things are hard. They’re not easy. But they’re worth it.
I can’t wait until Qwen 4.5 27B or Gemma 5.
This kind of tool doesn’t need a whole Apple style marketing page to sell you on it.
It also signals effort to me, when I see vibeslop text I know the project most likely is a one shot weekend project full of issues which won’t be resolved. I’ve seen good examples of AI use in open source, and those projects write the readme and website copy without AI.
I read plenty of not-obviously-AI-generated text and I much prefer doing that, even if it’s not from a professional.
It’s not about the quality of the text itself. If Claude was one person with a human level of output, Claude would probably be considered decent at writing.
But when I have to read the same genre of slop on 1 million different sites it gets really really annoying imo.
I could not disagree more.
I think it depends a bit what's meant by "poorly" but I don't think I share that preference at all.
I would 100% rather read a developers copy explaining why they wanted to build something and what they think is useful about it, even if it isn't particularly polished.
As a comparison, LLM generated "marketing schlock" is polished, but it's normally pretty empty and doesn't convey much of it's value.
As an example, I use lazygit (a TUI git interface) - at least at the time I looked at it, the main intro was a youtube video of the developer talking through the features. It wasn't polished at all, but it did a great job of convincing me that lazygit was a project with a lot of love and thought put into it.
If you didn't even spend a minute writing a couple sentences about your own project, how much effort did you put into actually building and testing it? Or are you just letting others do the hard parts: Review and verification that your vibe-slop actually works as claimed, and then feed their feedback back into an LLM?
https://www.plentycom.jp/en/steermouse/download.php
What really took it to the next level for me were adding chord mappings. For example I can hold right mouse button + scroll the thumb wheel to adjust volume. So convenient!
https://support.logi.com/hc/change_language/en-in?return_to=...
The offline installer has to bundle data for all supported products, platforms, languages and dependencies, even the ones you don't need, because you can't tell in advance. The online installer will just download what it needs.
Maybe there are some fancy animations illustrating RGB effects and stuff like that, these can add up, and I can almost (but not quite) excuse them if it is the case. At least, video animations are not a mess of frameworks and libraries that eat your RAM and CPU and introduce vulnerabilities.
Somebody at Logitech right now: “hold my beer”
The tap includes a GH action to track upstream releases (as long as I notice the PR!). Also, the offline version only compensates for some of the issues with Options+.
Or, a webcam for example, or other peripherals.
While it does look extremely likely that AI is used for the copy writing, and probably for some of the code maintenance, I'm not convinced that this is being vibe coded.
How so?
Given this is open-source, have you considered contributing a more expensive-feeling landing page? Or, donating to finance the project?
That's exactly how I feel about people using Eastpaks instead of Louis Vuitton. Just yuck.
And with polos. If you're not wearing Ralph Lauren, you're not worth talking to.
Between no website and shiny but crappy LLM website, I’ll take the latter, and I wouldn’t wish another 2 weeks of unpaid copy writing on any open source dev.
See the recent hack on CPU-Z: https://gist.github.com/N3mes1s/b5b0b96782b9f832819d2db7c668...
Now, I often find Claude's idea of idiomatic prose to be a bit load-bearingly seam-hitting as it lands not this point, but THAT one, but it is probably better than something hacked out by a person who confuses tenses, cases, pronouns and when they can enverb a noun. So I tend towards giving people the benefit of the doubt on this.
Lastly, if you think LLM-written software is full of security vulnerabilities and bugs, I have terrible news for you about the state of human-written code. The fact that what we do is often better than nothing at all, is no big recommendation.
What about people with fine English and terrible coding skills?
What about people with both terrible English and terrible coding skills?
> Now, I often find Claude's idea of idiomatic prose to be a bit load-bearingly seam-hitting as it lands not this point, but THAT one, but it is probably better than something hacked out by a person who confuses tenses, cases, pronouns and when they can enverb a noun. So I tend towards giving people the benefit of the doubt on this.
Personally, I find AI writing as insufferable as anyone else (though Anthropic's is particularly bad, maybe just due to my familiarity with it), but I wouldn't judge individuals for using it to make communication more readable, rephrase what they mean etc. If anything, any difficulty in reading my prose would support that.
> Lastly, if you think LLM-written software is full of security vulnerabilities and bugs, I have terrible news for you about the state of human-written code. The fact that what we do is often better than nothing at all, is no big recommendation.
I guess a lot depends on how you use the LLMs (I bet horrible coding skills coincide with horribly lazy and problematic usage of LLMs for development too), but I wonder how humans actually stack up to the slop-machine when it comes to how good or bad the code they produce is on average, since I'm sure that SOTA model code by now tends towards the upper end of that.
In other words, if a person wants to limit themselves to avoiding LLM code over fears of it being bad, they would also have to avoid any any all code written by people that essentially produced the problematic training dataset, as well as any programmers with the same capabilities (or lack thereof). You'd basically have to avoid using a lot/most of the software out there if that's your quality standard.
Sounds like something claude would say. Are you a bot?
please provide some kind of statistics to back up this claim.
Depends on the project.
What the h... I mean, it's an opensource software to make Logitech's users life less miserable, and you are comparing that to the effort of a student writing an essay, where their only or main job during those days is writing the essay?
Writing 850 words shouldn't take you two months even if you only have 10 minutes a day to spend on it. The discussion is about the short description on the product's website, not the product/code itself.
This is sales. And the right words means tens of thousands of more customers / users / contributors / stars / whatever over time. The wrong ones = dead and forgotten.
Irrelevance is the failure mode here.
I’ve thought “hey I’ll just throw together this 5 page website on Squarespace, it’ll take a week at most” and despite only having like 5000 words it can take over a month. When you see how slowly it’s coming together it really destroys your motivation as well.
The words depend on the layout. The layout depends on the words. It all depends on art, and call to action, and SEO, and mobile responsiveness, and…
You can spend like an hour tweaking one hero sentence. It’s a lot more complicated then what we did in school, ie “Atticus Finch defends Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused in a racist town, knowing he will lose.”
If you had to write those 18 words on a website it’d probably take half a day to decide how you wanted to write them, and where you wanted to put them.
The average person cannot write good documentation (or website copy). It's an actual skill to learn how to phrase things, ensure that the documentation delivers the right level of detail to the different reader types etc.
As English writers, software developers make great programmers, not authors.
> A background watcher reads the foreground app's identifier once per second; when it changes, the overlay you authored for that app is layered on top of the device's global bindings, with per-app entries winning and any unlisted button falling through to the global map.
as is in the documentation right now could have just read
> Your device will automatically use app-specific keybinds when a given app is in focus.
Thank you Lordy for LLMs because I am going to hurt myself if I ever have to design and wire another contact form.
Still, I see that page and I think 'Logitech Corporate driver software'. Maybe that's the intention? But it makes me start slightly suspicious.
That's harsh. Consider English might not be the author's first language (I see Chinese on the screenshots). Just opening the site I get all the info I need from the text (local first, no account, no telemetry, that's great), install instructions are immediately visible, there are screenshots, even the config file format is one scroll away. This is a great landing page for an open source tool.
As far as the page body content goes it seems like LLMs have taken a little bit too enthusiastically to an Apple style presentation of product features.
This is clearly LLM-written text, not something that the author asked an LLM to translate from a different language. Not sure how the author's first language is relevant.
It's fairly obvious that an LLM has been used to design the site, but it does the job and the site isn't the focus of the product.
And that's what I see first thing on the repo. Lots of LLM-style writing in the README, which makes me think if this is a vibecoded app, which looks like it.
Happy have LLM code for me.
I won't let them speak for me though. I think people who let AI speak for them in places other humans read probably couldn't speak for themselves pre-LLM. It's sad.
I think the bigger personal challenge is to not outsource thinking, understanding and judgement as we leverage new tools, and to continue our personal learning journeys. After 20+ years as a software engineer, you can probably coast on past experience for a long time... but if you aren't learning and exercising (one way or another), your skills will stagnate. That would be sad.
They did bother to do the thing they loved doing - the thing of value - and didn’t bother doing the boring thing. Instead of finding it within yourself to offer some thanks or encouragement you find an unimportant “blemish” to pile on. If that ain’t virtue signalling I don’t know what is.
It’s also an emphatic reminder of the truism that you just can’t please some people.
If it were an overly elaborate human creation I'd agree that criticism was unnecessary and perhaps even insensitive.
It's so easy to spot LLM writing, especially poorly constructed ones like this.
> A local-first alternative to Logitech Options+, written in Rust. Remap buttons, drive DPI and SmartShift over HID++. No account, no telemetry.
?? I see nothing wrong in there, every word is immediately useful to me as a person interested in this software. You’re being ridiculous
For me, the "finally local" call is disturbing, hinting that there are no other alternatives, ever. For Linux GP noted that there's Solaar, which supports all the features of this tool. I also use Solaar without any problems on my Linux systems.
Also notably, fwupdmgr provides updates for Logitech hardware natively, so there's nothing "finally local" about it. It's a new, polished tool written in Rust for more platforms, and kudos to them. However this doesn't vindicate their use of LLM for the site text.
See, English is not my first language either, however one can sharpen it with by using it.
https://openlogi.org/zh
The Chinese version of the website through Google Translate shows the same LLMisms, so while I don't know which version was authored first but neither was human-authored regardless of language proficiency.
> Quit Logi Options+ before launching: the two fight over HID++ access, and only one app can own a receiver at a time. On Linux, the same applies to Solaar.
Nothing wrong with AI code either but it suggests the project may have been built in 2 weeks, has no community and low likelihood of ongoing maintenance.
So now overall instead of a flashy website I think the best signal of quality is a boring GitHub README and several months of commit activity, lots of merged PRs.
bellard.org style text-only, get-to-the-point-please content will the way forwards. "browsers" can then style and rewrite it till the cows come home - with fancy slideshows, LLMisms, carrousels, the works - or not and nobody will be worse off.
The way we structure content these days is insane. Separate content from presentation, please.
I'm not an AI advocate but in this case I honestly didn't see anything but a clean and informative website. I did have the thought that "this software is probably coded with AI agents" but that's just because there has been an explosion in new software lately.
But the website itself seemed perfectly normal to me, actually very clean and informative.
Humans usually don't write like that: we form sentences, not "punchy taglines for ads". Especially not with a negative form using "no" everywhere: you may see, say, on ads for a BMW: "400 bhp, pure driving pleasure" but you typically won't see "No automated gearbox, no assisted steering".
Then the typical "It's X, not Y": "Everything Options+ does, without the account."
Funnily enough it's totally trivial to un-LLMish this type of prose but we don't notice it when it's been unkarenified for we then simply don't detect it's been written by an AI.
Normally I'd say you have a point, but this was a poor choice of example.
FWIW I don't really care in this case, just explaining how people can see it's generated. I only care about it working properly and being less bloated than Logitech's stuff.
Were houses crafted better before dimensional lumber and power tools? Maybe - they were also more expensive. So the same with programs and website via AI.
I came here looking for a reference to Solaar, which is what I currently use.
AFAICT there's no reason to switch to OpenLogi for Linux users.
Example 1: “as a JavaScript front-end developer working with React and node, I think LLMs save 500 hours a week and are better than anyone on our team.” <— easy to believe
Example 2: “as a backend Erlang developer working on life-critical systems the inconsistent output makes LLMs dangerous and the code is tidy but terrible at scale.” <— fully congruent with the first example
As an iOS developer, I have yet to see two different teams agree on best practices, architecture, or code style, and the only reason I've seen anyone agree on UI frameworks is that I've been in slightly more teams/seen more ads than there even are widely-used UI frameworks; and despite all the big promises in the job adverts, 95% of the work has been to take someone else's existing UI design and connect it to someone else's existing API.
LLMs fit right in.
(Unlike me: I'm burned out by iOS and LLMs came at exactly the right time).
The point is that "Vibing" still does not produce worthy output.
Growth rate alone forced the mean output to remain at beginner level. And then let's not forget that over the last decade+, the industry saw it fit to restrict almost all coding to juniors, and turned senior+ roles into a faux-management career track.
What makes you say this is stolen from LinearMouse?
No need to be modest! You can explain it!
So this appeared at just the right moment for me, thanks!
Made some changes, nothing, made more changes, nothing... Then to my surprise I restarted software and they were there, mouse speed x100000, and other weird stuff I've put in - I thought I was doing something wrong when the changes weren't applied :D
I'm assuming that there's a human in the loop somewhere keeping track of the level of engagement with this bullshit, in which case I want them to know that they're less than worthless.
See you all tomorrow when we do it all over again.
Agentic coding will do for indie software what dating apps did for human relationships. Animal brains are not equipped to deal with having this much choice.
Open<Brand> + SEO on Steroids webpage is usually misaligned with the user. That didn't really change. The only thing that did change is that producing this slop has gotten much much cheaper.
What is true though is that eventually, even the most gullible person will have been exposed to this so much, even they will finally manage to stop their hijacked justice reflex from twitching and defending garbage against their own best interest.
So that's a positive.