Sometimes it's easier to let an AI agent write a small solution than add whole dependency. These libraries really need to rethink their strategy. Their audience is now AI not a programmer writing code.
I maintain 4 awesome lists and I agree: it takes a lot of time and some are more catalogs than curated lists. Curation takes time and is like gardening especially given the half-life of content on the web. My solution was to encode my editorial process in the form of contribution guidelines: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-iam/blob/main/.github/c...
I used to be the editor of a newspaper. Eventually, actually reviewing all the articles in the newspaper took too long time, so instead of shutting down the newspaper, I just started accepting every single article, eventually everyone stopped reading it.
I used to reach for an awesome list the first thing as i ventured in something new. Nowadays, i almost kinda forgot about them. Still I hold a fond memory of it, they usually contained some real gems (especially when they were relatively new).
The real tragedy here is the asymmetric warfare AI enables.It costs zero effort for a spammer to script 100 PRs linking to their AI-generated wrappers,but it takes genuine human energy for maintaners to vet and reject It's a fast-track to maintainer burnout.
I found a few lists that I found genuinely useful, like self-hosted. But I also think the problem with them is they were gamed for some reason, maybe because of Github stars and the fact that Github attention is useful for other things. I think it would have been much more useful to have them almost on a different platform. IMBD lists for example seem to work better because there's not much reward in making them except a love of movies.
Also I think another problem is that they were given high recognition on Github, and thus became a formulaic pattern rather that some individual who is really passionate about trying the stuff on the list, which also made most of the later ones generic and much less interesting...
Curation is also really hard to go as a group activity, there are so many different views on value and rules just don't work for taste in any way that works.
> Curation is also really hard to go as a group activity
It really isn't. You establish a process, a review system and the guidelines, then make people write and share notes. It'll be a bit varied initially, but it solidifies and converges a lot quicker than you think.
There are hundreds of examples out in the world of all of these things working properly, everything from galleries to second-hand stores have things like this "implemented" already, take inspiration from them :)
The problem is digital things don't decay in the same way as physical objects. AI can shit out a webpage for an institute that doesn't really exist and make it sound awesome until you realize there's nothing there. A webpage with a vibrant community behind it that is actively maintained looks, at first glance, the same as a page that's been put out to the pasture. A physical store that's out of business will accumulate cruft, broken windows, vines everywhere. There's not really an equivalent for bitrot. Sure, my website from 1996 looks dated because I used frames and we don't do that no more, but eBay and Yahoo and Myspace are still around. Link rot does set in though. Links to pages that no longer exist because the person running it has passed. Archive.org has such a good purpose.
Thing is though, for software, sometimes things can just be done. If a perfectly good piece of software hasn't been updated in years because it hasn't needed to be updated, then let it sit, ensconced in stone. The problem is it's hard to tell the difference between that, and something that needs maintaining but hasn't been.
The problem is, how do you know what does not need maintaing? how do you know what's going to bite you in the future? And migrating might be a huge effort. So, the instict becomes to not pick something that is already giving you an negative signal.
I'm not saying that I fully agree with that logic, but I think it's a pretty understandable behaviour.
well when it comes to github a great window into an non-updated repository is just looking at the github issues. That will signal to you if theres maintenance to be done being ignored or if the software is of quality and maintenance isn't needed yet.
Depends on what it is, for anything that uses a web interface or runs as a native app I'd question many years without updates just because the deployment targets shift so much. Most of the apps I really enjoy on the Mac, for example, at least get yearly updates to whatever new MacOS API changes occurred in the major release.
A video game emulator getting an update every decade though? Some low level tool that's never changed since the beginning of time? Yeah, they're done, what's the problem.
The ground shifts under software. OSs change, dependencies get updates, engines change, compilers are improved occasionally in ways that aren't backwardly compatible. If the maintainer isn't at least checking it's not broken, and updating a changelog to say that it's still working, then you can't safely assume it's fine. "Not updated for years" is shorthand for "It could be broken, but I don't want to be the person who goes through the effort of checking."
If you want people to run your code against a set of pinned dependencies from the last time it was updated then that's one thing, but if you people to run it with an up-to-date set of dependencies on a new OS and on the latest compiler or runtime, then you can't just say it's 'done', because things can change outside of your code that means it won't work any more.
If the repository has an issue tracker, that helps. Then you can at least see if people are posting issues and whether they are being resolved.
I’ve seen projects that haven’t had a release in years, but the maintainer is still answering questions. I would say that counts as actively maintained, since there’s still someone around to handle bug reports.
> The problem is digital things don't decay in the same way as physical objects.
I'm not so sure of that. Ask anyone who's ever used VBScript, ActiveX, Flash, <blink>, <marquee>, or (soon) XSLT.
The web likes to portray itself as championing backwards-compatibility, but for better or worse, it is quick to drop technologies perceived as harmful or merely wasteful. If you're unfortunate enough to jump on the wrong bandwagon, you can easily be left behind, and any older pages left untouched can quickly become non-functional.
Every 'awesome' repo I can remember has seemingly been made by someone who hasn't used the things included and only read a project's readme. This dates back years before the LLM craze.
I would rather hear from users of software and their opinions, otherwise I can't take seriously something ostensibly curated for quality. In my experience such lists serve better as a way to discover new projects using eg. some framework you're interested in, if they're maintained (which is still valuable).
Completely disagree. When AI was new I found so many great tools through awesome-* repositories. There was some of that going on for sure, but most lists were a curation of good tools.
Depending on what "generation of developers" you belong to, this could differ by decades :) Are you talking about LLMs probably? At that point, "awesome" lists were already mostly used for spam and marketing, none of the original "curated list" concept remained at this point.
I think I noticed awesome-lists changing from "Here is a curated list of AWESOME software" to "Here is a list of every software ever built, related in any way" somewhere around 2015 (thanks IM logs!), which must have been pretty shortly after the concept was introduced even, but can't remember when that was.
I recently came across some notes from a lecture I went to at Los Alamos in 2013 where the lecturer (Steven Brumby) said "it's out of fashion to call it AI now so I guess this is machine learning" .
yup, remember seeing the same around that time. It used to be incredibly curated and limited, every list since then is just like the top 400 "related" repos
Very variable quality, I agree. But even an astroturfer has to throw in some actually useful tools in there to give cover for the payload they're promoting.
I'm pretty sure the astroturfer would just google for the most visible tools and put them in and then add their own.
i added a PR once to add a package of mine which I thought was useful and he told me it didnt qualify as "awesome" lol. the reaction led me to dig around and I realized "oh, this is just content marketing"
I disagree with the blanket statement. Lists like awesome-scalability [1] are actually pretty useful and full of great references. They dont recommend any specific tool, and it is a very good resource to learn unknown unknowns.
AI suffers the same problem Search Engines had: you cannot ask about something you dont know. Thats why monthly magazines were great: they pushed" knowledge to us so that we learned things we didnt know existed.
awesome-selfhosted was very nice in a way that most other awesome repos are not. I think this was because it covered a pretty broad topic that didn't require a lot of skill to get started in.
Many awesome repos target such a narrow topic that the projects on the list would be early in search results anyway.
It's kind of inevitable that they stale because of the growth. Let's say it is about programming language - if it's good language then there're more good materials about it, that means more content to maintain in an "awesome repo", and then again and again, with or without AI it would go fully stale or unmaintainable.
I guess there's no solution, these things should go to history and we need to find a better way to find "best of the best" individually while avoiding SEO-hacked resources with some bs.
I actually think there's future in individual learning, so everybody will have their own learning plan, their own learning materials and all that adapted to the way they think and consume information.
In the long run we need to find viable alternatives to github.
I don't mean gitlab either. I think we kind of need repositories
for everyone, as a human right - sounds strange but IMO we kind
of need to build a new web with a lasting impact on the world.
We should not need web-archive; things should be documentable.
(Github is not responsible for disappearing web-pages as such,
mind you; I just mean that we need to look at the whole problem
here, not just on github only as gatekeeper.)
I don't like Google, but google-docs is great. LibreOffice should
have something like that too. Every state as well. I really think
this all needs to become a human right. Why is a US company offering
this and just about everyone else is not, including governments? I
don't understand it. And that is also just one example of many more
things. We need to change the web to a better variant. In many ways
the 1990s was better than what we have today. Everyone built websites.
Today this is a bit ... well. Gone. People may at best put their
"website" on facebook. That's a walled garden. It's not the same as
having separate websites. I don't want the world wide web to become
a walled garden gatekept by a few companies. But I don't see alternatives
emerging - and nobody has time anymore, which is another problem.
“Socialism, like the old politics from which it emanates, confuses Government and Society. This is why every time we do not want a thing to be done by the Government, it concludes that we do not want that thing to be done at all. We reject instruction by the State; therefore we do not want instruction. We reject a State religion; therefore we do not want religion. We reject equalization by the State; therefore we do not want equality, etc., etc. It is as if they accused us of not wanting men to eat because we reject the cultivation of wheat by the State.”
https://sourcelibrary.org/book/the-law-bastiat/page/6992c4c0...
But that’s why it’s so important that each of us are driven to make things. We can all make the world a little better by making the things that we want to exist in the world. Thou art that. It’s up to us! Shape the world, make it closer to what you want—
Their recent embarrassing vulnerability [1] notwithstanding, Radicle [2] seems promising to me, being p2p/decentralized. If not Radicle itself, then some other project like it.
There is a lot of value in good curation but its also extremely time consuming to curate well. Its very difficult to do it as a group activity especially a highly disconnected one via git/opensource and where a lot of these lists started out good the collective effort has ruined their value.
I think we need curation more than ever on the internet on a range of topics where social media of various forms don't work very well. I also think there is a real place for index's as well because search often does adjacency quite poorly since its not really optimised for that. Short curated lists are great for beginning, long ones not so much to anyone.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 22.5 ms ] threadAI is nice but never gives the same answer, will tunnel you if you have zero idea on the topic, and can be outright wrong or refuse to answer.
Also I think another problem is that they were given high recognition on Github, and thus became a formulaic pattern rather that some individual who is really passionate about trying the stuff on the list, which also made most of the later ones generic and much less interesting...
It really isn't. You establish a process, a review system and the guidelines, then make people write and share notes. It'll be a bit varied initially, but it solidifies and converges a lot quicker than you think.
There are hundreds of examples out in the world of all of these things working properly, everything from galleries to second-hand stores have things like this "implemented" already, take inspiration from them :)
Thing is though, for software, sometimes things can just be done. If a perfectly good piece of software hasn't been updated in years because it hasn't needed to be updated, then let it sit, ensconced in stone. The problem is it's hard to tell the difference between that, and something that needs maintaining but hasn't been.
This. When people say "I wouldn't use this because it hasn't been updated for years", maybe it's because it doesn't need updating?
I'm not saying that I fully agree with that logic, but I think it's a pretty understandable behaviour.
A video game emulator getting an update every decade though? Some low level tool that's never changed since the beginning of time? Yeah, they're done, what's the problem.
The ground shifts under software. OSs change, dependencies get updates, engines change, compilers are improved occasionally in ways that aren't backwardly compatible. If the maintainer isn't at least checking it's not broken, and updating a changelog to say that it's still working, then you can't safely assume it's fine. "Not updated for years" is shorthand for "It could be broken, but I don't want to be the person who goes through the effort of checking."
If you want people to run your code against a set of pinned dependencies from the last time it was updated then that's one thing, but if you people to run it with an up-to-date set of dependencies on a new OS and on the latest compiler or runtime, then you can't just say it's 'done', because things can change outside of your code that means it won't work any more.
I’ve seen projects that haven’t had a release in years, but the maintainer is still answering questions. I would say that counts as actively maintained, since there’s still someone around to handle bug reports.
I'm not so sure of that. Ask anyone who's ever used VBScript, ActiveX, Flash, <blink>, <marquee>, or (soon) XSLT.
The web likes to portray itself as championing backwards-compatibility, but for better or worse, it is quick to drop technologies perceived as harmful or merely wasteful. If you're unfortunate enough to jump on the wrong bandwagon, you can easily be left behind, and any older pages left untouched can quickly become non-functional.
I would rather hear from users of software and their opinions, otherwise I can't take seriously something ostensibly curated for quality. In my experience such lists serve better as a way to discover new projects using eg. some framework you're interested in, if they're maintained (which is still valuable).
Depending on what "generation of developers" you belong to, this could differ by decades :) Are you talking about LLMs probably? At that point, "awesome" lists were already mostly used for spam and marketing, none of the original "curated list" concept remained at this point.
I think I noticed awesome-lists changing from "Here is a curated list of AWESOME software" to "Here is a list of every software ever built, related in any way" somewhere around 2015 (thanks IM logs!), which must have been pretty shortly after the concept was introduced even, but can't remember when that was.
i added a PR once to add a package of mine which I thought was useful and he told me it didnt qualify as "awesome" lol. the reaction led me to dig around and I realized "oh, this is just content marketing"
AI suffers the same problem Search Engines had: you cannot ask about something you dont know. Thats why monthly magazines were great: they pushed" knowledge to us so that we learned things we didnt know existed.
[1] https://github.com/binhnguyennus/awesome-scalability
awesome-selfhosted was very nice in a way that most other awesome repos are not. I think this was because it covered a pretty broad topic that didn't require a lot of skill to get started in.
Many awesome repos target such a narrow topic that the projects on the list would be early in search results anyway.
I guess there's no solution, these things should go to history and we need to find a better way to find "best of the best" individually while avoiding SEO-hacked resources with some bs. I actually think there's future in individual learning, so everybody will have their own learning plan, their own learning materials and all that adapted to the way they think and consume information.
I don't mean gitlab either. I think we kind of need repositories for everyone, as a human right - sounds strange but IMO we kind of need to build a new web with a lasting impact on the world. We should not need web-archive; things should be documentable. (Github is not responsible for disappearing web-pages as such, mind you; I just mean that we need to look at the whole problem here, not just on github only as gatekeeper.)
I don't like Google, but google-docs is great. LibreOffice should have something like that too. Every state as well. I really think this all needs to become a human right. Why is a US company offering this and just about everyone else is not, including governments? I don't understand it. And that is also just one example of many more things. We need to change the web to a better variant. In many ways the 1990s was better than what we have today. Everyone built websites. Today this is a bit ... well. Gone. People may at best put their "website" on facebook. That's a walled garden. It's not the same as having separate websites. I don't want the world wide web to become a walled garden gatekept by a few companies. But I don't see alternatives emerging - and nobody has time anymore, which is another problem.
But that’s why it’s so important that each of us are driven to make things. We can all make the world a little better by making the things that we want to exist in the world. Thou art that. It’s up to us! Shape the world, make it closer to what you want—
Make that GitHub alternative! You can do it!
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49817524
[2]: https://radicle.dev/
No, almost never curated.
I'm broadly pro AI, I like datacentres etc, but its clear we cannot let our entire culture be penetrated by it.
At work we'll use AI aggressively, at home we'll socially punish anyone who blurs this line.
I think we need curation more than ever on the internet on a range of topics where social media of various forms don't work very well. I also think there is a real place for index's as well because search often does adjacency quite poorly since its not really optimised for that. Short curated lists are great for beginning, long ones not so much to anyone.