I feel the increasing need to take action on keeping LLMs out of my personal life. My work life is already tainted, and I know it may be difficult to keep these completely divided, but I see no benefit to outsourcing my thinking on projects that I actually enjoy.

This list of "Open Slopware", with some helpful suggestions on alternatives, has been an informative read. Projects can be flagged as Vibecoded, having a Permissive AI policy, or even just allowing AI code reviews. There's a thoroughness to this that I appreciate. I would strongly recommend a full read through this for anyone knowledgable about tech - there will certainly be a few items here you weren't before aware of.

Multiple items of software that I use have appeared on this list. I can't purge them all, but I can make significant progress, and hopefully make some incremental improvements along the way.

Static Site Generators

This site was initially built on Jekyll. I did not have a particularly fun time.

In terms of LLM usage, the sins committed by the Jekyll devs are on the light side - they seem to be using Copilot as a co-reviewer on pull requests. This usually wouldn't sway me, but that platform's reliance on Ruby bothers me. So I'm leaning towards jumping ship.

Its biggest rival, Hugo, has even worse AI policies (1, 2, 3 as at time of writing). There was an anti-AI fork called Hugo Unslopped, which has just changed its name to Golda, whose link to its own documentation doesn't work. Stunning. Being transfem won't win back my forgiveness for that, girlie.

With no other major competitors, I glanced at the smaller alternatives, but I do not want to bash my head against a wall, reinventing the wheel, on a platform that may or may not collapse at any given moment. So I am placing this in the "Monitor" category for now.

Image Manipulation

ImageMagick has been decent to me, but a "neutral" stance on LLMs, even after specifying some issues they've had, isn't good enough. Easy one to jump away from.

Libvips exists, and seems to tick all of the boxes. It has thousands of times more features than I actually need, but it's nice that it's there.

Unfortunately, running a brief compression test on a .png of a Magic the Gathering card resulted in no filesize reduction. Thankfully, ImageMagick also achieved nothing here. Will test further.

FFm(p)reg

Huge disappointment to see this lot here. Massive failures in allowing LLM usage in all aspects of the platform.

This is a titan in its class with no clear replacement, so sticking on old 4.4.x versions seems to be the only recommendation here at the moment.

Media Players

Another crushing loss, to see VLC throw so much away. Outright AI features, never mind AI code reviews, feel so antithetical to what the devs have fought for, for so long. I still respect them an enormous amount for their contributions before this, though.

On the other hand: Showtime exists, I'd heard of it before today, tells LLMs to go away, and it appears to be rather streamlined. Very enouraging stuff. I've put this on my laptop to trial before doing the same on my desktop. Also if the dev is reading this, hiiiiii~

Torrenting

I was saddened to see qBitTorrent feature on this list, due to LLMs being involved in code reviews and pull requests.

Unfortunately no clear anti-AI alternatives were specified. I really don't want qBitTorrent to fall, but I will jump ship whenever the opportunity presents itself.

File Transfering

rsync is vibecoded apparently?? Thank fuck I don't run remote servers any more.

Copyparty looks like the most viable alternative here. LocalShare never ever worked properly any time I tried it.

Web Browsers

Not even remotely surprised to see all of the big players here.

On mobile, Fennec has served me well. On desktop, it's going to be a struggle. Non-Chromium browsers get punished more and more every day. It's becoming unbearable.

The suggested alternatives for desktop simply can't handle the modern web in all its shittiness.

Note-Taking

Markor is what I've used on Android, and Kate on Linux. Both are solid but I don't need any fancy features here.

Markor has some LLM involvement, and Tuisku has an explicit anti-AI policy, so there's a significant improvement to be found here. The former uses Markdown, and the latter plaintext - slightly annoying, but I can put up with the switch. Thankfully I only really use this for shopping lists and present ideas.

Operating Systems

Anything but Windows is already an enormous, life-changing improvement. It's genuinely hard to find a single source that summarises all points I'd love to make here, though there's plenty of good arguments made here.

I'm currently using CachyOS, which doesn't appear anywhere on this list, which is a huge relief. There are some Linux distros to avoid based on this list, Ubuntu being the least surprising.

For recommendations, Arch and elementaryOS will appeal to the widest group of people. Also nice to see AsahiOS behaving well, as I'm very supportive of their efforts to bring Linux to Apple Silicon Macs.

The "Oh I Can't Be Bothered" Section

Some software that I use is specific enough that I could not muster up the energy to even consider migrating away. Several hours migration work minimum, into unknown alternatives, potentially poorer functionality, and for an at-best marginal improvement, is absolutely not in my best interests, principles be damned.

Therefore Actual Budget, Jellyfin, and Coreboot all live to see another day.