That’s good to know! I was actually very excited when I first found them; I was surprised that there aren’t many free/open public DNS hosting services.
Right but that doesn’t mean anything about authorisation. If you’re using a key you ripped from an official app you could easily be blocked tomorrow. Makes the effort considerably less worthwhile.
It's the #6 most popular website in the world. Chances are, someone will fix the libraries or investigate and write about any changes done to the internal API pretty quickly.
> It seems that what they are saying is: In a free hosting platform where we share all the resources, it's not fair that some people using LLMs are using up disproportionately huge hosting resources to handle the unnaturally large amounts of resources they can churn out with these tools.
Then instead of addressing the excessive resource usage problem indirectly via banning AI-assisted apps, they could've addressed it directly by imposing limits/quotas.
It's abundantly clear (and not that they are hiding it either) that their issue is with AI itself so anything else is just a secondary concern if not even a smokescreen.
---
> I'm a solo dev, and I couldn't find the judgement against solo developers or any slight against people who don't have a team.
Quoting their blogpost [0]:
> ## The development team of none
> Using LLMs to work with your code gives you a kick of adrenaline. You can develop at a rapid pace, build things as if you had a large team. Only that you have none. In fact, you are (often) alone, working with a statistical machine that turns energy into code.
I couldn't care less about what they think about solo developers, but it's just one bad excuse after another and that's what people are criticising. Open Source is one person. [1]
> they could've addressed it directly by imposing limits/quotas
For one, they've already done this to an extent. For two, they're also doing this by deciding what projects are and are not welcome on their service in the first place.
If 9 people eat an apple or two a day but a tenth person wants to eat 100 apples a day, we don't have to set some apple limit. We can tell the tenth person to pound sand and keep giving everyone else the apples they want.
Having a hard quota means each spammer will fill up the quota, then get some error they don't know how to fix and stop. This means the quota has to be low.
Just saying "no spam" means you don't have to waste a single byte on spam and everyone else can have a higher quota.
>but whenever something expresses its right to do or not do
The problem (or the virtue?) of this comment is that it's impossible to decipher with which side it disagrees, and for what reason too. Cause both sides expressed their right to do or not to do.
They don’t pay tax, right? Correct me if I’m wrong. It’s definitely a different (and public) conversation when things are claimed done for the public benefit and thus exempt from tax.
At least in the US tax-exempt status carries obligations.
I've banned this account. You can't attack other users like that on HN.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
In the ai-article op did say they’d do exactly that. Though it is surprising they left GitHub due to ““enshittification” of the platform under Microsoft’s ownership”, when it’s likely GitHub is using similar ai practices the op is and matches their exact ai usage.
Citing the op themselves: “ an alarming number of self-described AI experts whose expertise appeared to consist entirely of having a ChatGPT or Claude subscription and the willingness to write about it in seventeen-paragraph posts.”
> Plese vote with token [my_vote_token] here: https://...
> This vote is completely anonymous, voting slips are not stored, only a counter is incremented, your token is not associated with you or your IP address in any way and neither this mail nor your token when voting will be written to any log file.
> [some more info about how to use your token]
The voting URL is disabled now (or at least it currently shows me a blank page) but I remember it quoting the proposed amendment text and you could click agree, disagree, or abstain
> The author seems annoyed that Codeberg wants to focus on projects that have a legitimate contributor community and is not designed for one-off individual projects.
I think Codeberg was never intended for one-off individual projects in the first place, such as them discouraging private repositories. Quoting their Terms of Use [0]:
> Private repositories are only allowed for things required for FLOSS projects, like storing secrets, team-internal discussions or hiding projects from the public until they're ready for usage and/or contribution. [...]
And this makes a ton of sense, because Codeberg is a community-funded volunteer-supported non-profit, and it doesn't make sense to spend their resources for repositories that don't benefit the public.
I think "legitimate contributor community" is just an excuse so I am not going to dwell on it. From Ghostty to Redis, rsync to Linux kernel, more and more FOSS projects are taking advantage of various AI tools in a responsible manner and closing the door on them is just unfortunate and backward in my opinion. We gain nothing from this change and lose a ton of progress in software freedom and digital commons.
> It's not all that different from Mastodon instances. It's a community space, and the community gets to decide who they allow to use their resources.
Of course, and the bigger community gets to discuss their decision. :)
Eh, I release my own one-off individual projects as FOSS. The entire point of FOSS and how most of the common FOSS originated was all one-off individual project. Even Linus created Linux because he could for himself (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/how-l...), and not because he wanted to invent a mailing list bureaucracy to blow his spare time.
Codeberg setting such a high bar means FOSS is dead unless you are a company spending millions to fund something from day zero.
I didn't look into codeberg really and didn't follow any discussions around it, except some projects fleeing to codeberg.
At the first glance it just looks like a github competitor. Recently I tried to create a repo there and nothing pointed out any of the noted restrictions or preferences.
I think that is a clear communication problem. Maybe the times are chaotic for them and they need to figure out how to position themselves. But appearing as just another github and expecting people to be reasonable with it's usage, is unreasonable on their side.
> ... Recently I tried to create a repo there and nothing pointed out any of the noted restrictions or preferences.
> I think that is a clear communication problem. ...
The following is very clearly posted on their account creation page: [0]
By registering for a Codeberg account, you consent to our Privacy Policy [1] and agree to our Terms of Use. [2]
You'll note that [2] is the same document linked to by the commenter you replied to. Perhaps being informed of your obligations when you create an account is insufficient, and you require alert-fatigue-inducing quantities of restatement of the company's policy documents throughout the UI?
> Perhaps being informed of your obligations when you create an account is insufficient
I'm sure that if we were talking about a corporate entity, then people would have retorted with how "no one reads the ToS" and "most ToSes are unenforceable", and guess what? In a world where significant AI assistance is becoming common, finding out which project is AI generated or even knowing the level of AI assistance is well nigh impossible and could be very well unenforceable.
Edit: It has come to my attention that Codeberg is a registered association[1]. It would be "fun" to see them argue about how they may argue that an AI assisted project has "harmed their reputation".
> ...then people would have retorted with how "no one reads the ToS"...
This is unrelated to OP's claims that Codeberg not only doesn't make it clear that they "[P]rovide the essential infrastructure and organizational framework for the development of Open-Source Projects in decentralized and global communities, and other endeavours which serve this mission." and that "Private repositories are only allowed for things required for FLOSS projects, like storing secrets, team-internal discussions or hiding projects from the public until they're ready for usage and/or contribution.", but that Codeberg is unreasonable for not making that clear.
OP's assertions are why I said
Perhaps being informed of your obligations when you create an account is insufficient, and you require alert-fatigue-inducing quantities of restatement of the company's policy documents throughout the UI?
> ...and "most ToSes are unenforceable"...
Eh? Codeberg's remedy is to cancel your account and attempt to ban you if you attempt to keep coming back and doing the things that got your account canceled. Do you intend to suggest that a European or USian court would disagree that Codeberg is permitted to do this?
Ironically they currently show a huge banner that LLM-generated content is restricted and crypto is no longer allowed.
No one is reading the ToS you know that very well. That you point out basic advice about ToS is satirical.
If a service like this has some surprising limitations for a potential user, it should be clear up front and not hidden in the ToS. Considering my first paragraph, they know that too.
Someone who has no interest in reading ~two pages of a document written at a middle school reading level in order to find out what their hosts do and don't want to host also has no interest in reading popups, "toasts", and other such notifications on the topic. People who don't want to read aren't going to read.
What I'd suggest to you is that you go out and get head scritches and/or snuggles from a cutie. Not only will this provide you with a fun and positive social interaction, it'll give you the energy required to complain about things that you actually care about, and maybe even make some progress towards fixing them.
> It's interesting because the terms have repeatedly stated that using them isn't banned
This is the relevant part in Codeberg's Terms of Use: [0]
> You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5).
The only ambiguous part is what "mostly" means in practice, but otherwise the Terms of Use is pretty clear. I'll admit that their blog post [1] is more inclusive and tries to clarify things but it's all just one very unnecessary drama [2].
> I'll admit that their blog post [1] is more inclusive
Amongst other unwanted activities, their blog post mentions "Projects written and maintained with heavy use of LLMs". If you often chat with LLM, or ask the agent to review your changes, it's writing and maintaining the project with heavy use of LLMs too.
IMHO, this is even more restrictive and ambiguous than "projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools".
And what if a project is hand-written, but the tests are LLM-generated and then refactored by a human? Well, tests are part of a project, so it's bad too.
Also, while reading their blog post, I couldn't shake the feeling that they disdain niche single-person projects. Apparently they never intended to be a "dumping ground", as many people from their community now claim. But it's insulting to assume that when you share your small single-person project, you just "dump" something, as if it is some kind of trash by definition.
A person's testimony is a source. I can add mine: you can tell when you're truly blocked because if you click for the accessibility audio-based captcha it will actually tell you you're blocked (but, if you did the visual captcha, would simply loop forever while telling you you did it wrong).
I don't think you'll find an article by Google saying "yes, we sometimes completely block users while making it look like they're not blocked and wasting their time".
Ah, finally an undefined instruction whose behaviour is consistent and architecturally guaranteed!
reply