babes it has been a rough time lately to be a computer toucher. llm brainrot seems to be infecting everything and it's getting kinda hard to avoid! if you've seen me post about this kinda thing on the fedi you'll know that i am hardly someone to advocate for unorgainsed, individualised boycotts. i don't try to remove llm-tainted software from my devices because i want my hands to be clean, but rather because as a tech-literate person i feel like i owe it to normal people to figure out what it would take to actually extract yourself from this hellscape. and i'll tell you what it's not fucking easy! (also i just don't wanna put up with the instability and bugs inherent to running code straight from the probabilistic plagiarism generator).
in terms of low-hanging fruit there's been vim, keepassxc and rsync that recently ensploppified. vim and rsync are not pieces of software that normal people would use but nonetheless i've found replacements. for vim there's vim-classic, a fork of vim 8.2 which rejects the llm-tainted code changes but also avoids vimscript 9. i'm gonna be real with you i have no fucking idea what vimscript is besides what the name implies, but if you wanna keep using the old version of the scripting language then i guess vim-classic is for you! regarding rsync i've started using cpdup from DragonFlyBSD. it has a couple of limitations: by design it doesn't cross filesystem boundaries which i can see being a handy safeguard, but also got in my way because i use a lot of zfs filesystems and need to transfer each one separately. also it has very poor network performance for pushes, it's much better to pull from your target, which sucks because i don't want to run an ssh server on my laptop just to back it up. also it has per-directory ignore files rather than just matching an ignore pattern like tar or rsync. this is very flexible but does require a bunch of futzing around to get set up. all very acceptable trade-offs compared to getting your data hosed, which has been reported by rsync users. lol. lmao. however, tragically the DragonFlyBSD project itself has started pushing llm-tainted code to its repos. this blows so hard, HAMMER2 was supposed to save us! it's a matter of time before cpdup gets hit, luckily FreeBSD maintains a fork, which may prove to be the best place to get this software, providing FreeBSD doesn't end up blindly following upstream's poor decisions.
in terms of availability both of the above are mainly source-only. if you don't know how to handle a makefile etc then you're shit out of luck for vim-classic for the time-being (unless you run OpenBSD lol). it's still prerelease after all. it's a tiny programme if you don't need language bindings and gui support etc, so that's not hard for the average sweaty vim-user. i am currently working (slowly) on a port for FreeBSD. cpdup is available in the FreeBSD ports collection, and OpenBSD has a very old version of it in their ports tree also. curiously it's not in pkgsrc at the moment. again it's a tiny programme, very easy to compile, so that's what i do on my linux box. updating the OpenBSD port or bringing it (back?) into the pkgsrc tree would be great first contributions for anyone looking to get involved in packaging for BSD/illumos.
but that's weirdo nerd shit for BSD users, normal people do not care about this nonsense. i have however, got normal people to use keepassxc, and that's a much more urgent situation. getting people to use a password manager is fucking important! and keepassxc jumping on the llm bandwagon is kind of worst-case scenario, we're talking about security software here, people's internet banking, people's government logins, real shit! keepassxc in particular is important software because it's offline, browser-based password safes are fucking scary and normal people deserve to have a good quality alternative to random javascript plugins!!
in december last year i started working on a fork, it was going to be called keepassZX, in reference to mega man zx (2006, nintendo ds). the z stands for zero, the heroic reploid who fought in the maverick wars and the elf wars, and also how much llm-code would be included. also how much windows support would be included, i intended to push BDS into this and explicitly deny windows users access to this software. (the original keepass software is written for windows and actively maintained, windows users can use that). the x stood for x, the final creation of dr thomas light. i also planned to move everything to qt6. well turns out i was too slow and the chipass project beat me to the punch. i've contributed one patch to fix the build on FreeBSD which keepassxc never agreed to import, and had one patch enabling NetBSD and illumos support which has been ignored, but probably because i made an ass of myself demonstrating how bad i am at using git lmao. chipass does everything i would have tried to implement in keepassZX, except for the megaman references and boycotting microsoft. instead this seems to be a kingdom hearts reference, which is problematic because disney is also a BDS target, but on the other hand the people running the project are much more competent than me.
so: i heartily recommend chipass to anyone who can compile their own software!
unfortunately i can't recommend chipass to normal people though, it's prerelease and i feel bad about asking even computer touchers to use cmake. which is a real shame, because in the meantime it's either a choice of running an unsupported version of your password manager or trusting all of your login details to a vibe-coded codebase. i have a FreeBSD port in my private tree, but i'm not going to submit it because i'm not currently running FreeBSD on any graphical systems that warrant password access. and that doesn't help normal people anyway, recommending FreeBSD on the desktop is an even worse faux-pas than telling someone to use cmake.
one of the barriers to release seems to be kind of non-technical: the project needs new branding. some of this is updating the translations which requires knowledge of more than a handful of different languages! if you can read/write a non-english language then this might be a great way to contribute! also the project needs a new logo! currently it has none and it looks like shit on my desktop. so if you have graphic design chops consider getting in touch with the team! normal people's bank details rely on it!!
that's the low hanging fruit though. switching programmes is very achievable. unfortunately operating systems themeselves are incresingly pushing this shit! what's a girl to do? stay tuned, it's the year of linux on the desktop and we are slaying the leviathan known as "systemd"