Hi all, been a while since I posted the degoog beta, been head down working on all my apps.

Some of you may know me for Jotty and Cronmaster on top of degoog, hi friends!

Degoog is a search aggregator meant to be plug and play, the app itself is extremely light (about 50mb to 70mb ram usage whilst idle, biggest spike I’ve seen recently has been about 100mb in usage), and then there’s a very comprehensive extension system where you can create engines, plugins and transports (transports are the way I’ve named systems to fetch data, headless browsers, curl alternatives and so on).

The app has been in beta for a while and today I’ve released the first stable beta, so I’d love to re-announce it here and get at bit more feedback. Next post I’ll make will be once it’s out of beta and fully stable, trying to not spam this too much.

Little quick history for anyone who hasn’t seen the first post, this was born from my PERSONAL gripes with searxng (no shades, the internet is beautiful because it’s vary), can’t say my project is better, it’s too new to say that, but it works more for my personal preferences and hopefully it resonates with some of you too.

Let’s talk about AI usage like adults please

This is NOT vibecoded, it’s not AI driven and it’s NOT some slop put together in 5 minutes. Some people here know me, they know I maintain my projects, I code myself and I have been a software engineer for many many years.

I actually have rejected pull requests that were very obviously vibecoded (p.s. fucking hilarious if you check the CLAUDE.md file in the repo, the PRs were riddled with these comments I force in there).

That said I obviously make some use of AI, it’s 2026, dunno what you all expect, open source however is my way to escaping how my day job REQUIRES me to use AI, so it’s only used for stuff I can’t be bothered to do (e.g. repetitive boring tasks, documentations, tests and heavy debugging). If you have issues with this please go tell a carpenter to use a manual screwdriver and not a power drill and see if they say yes or throw it at you, thank you <3

  • fccview@lemmy.worldOP
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    1 day ago

    Do you pay a 200 subscription for AI? Because I certainly do not lmfao

    Btw whilst your view is not incorrect is VERY narrow. Also the fact that corporations are greedy is not news, you can’t blame the technology tho, especially if said technology has been around for over 70 years >.>

    • mavu@discuss.tchncs.de
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      23 hours ago

      I did not blame any technology, i just pointed out that your carpenter<->Power Drill comparison is flawed.

      • fccview@lemmy.worldOP
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        23 hours ago

        It isn’t, subscriptions are no different than renting power tools for work (many do, especially for heavy machinery), and the power drill factory doing evil stuff is not the carpenter’s fault, nor the power drill. The carpenter’s job is STILL easier that way, he’d still likely choose it for convenience, maybe trying to do his part to avoid exceeding usage and being mindful on HOW it’s used.

        You are nitpicking on an analogy for the sake of nitpicking.

        • mavu@discuss.tchncs.de
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          23 hours ago

          no, i’m “nitpicking” because you used an (in my view) flawed comparison to wave away criticism on gen-AI use.

          If the company that sells/rents tools to me is in fact “doing evil” then I (or anyone) am complicit in that evil if i just keep giving them money.

          You might not agree to that, but smarter people than me have written books on morals and ethics and this is a pretty basic example.

          Also: you are being fooled by the gen-AI companies and subsidizing their product. Anthropic for example has just made a new investment deal that will keep the company afloat for about 18 months (best guess, no one can predict long term energy prices currently) that amounts to a burn rate (including profit they make) of about 5 billion $ per month.
          This is not a sustainable product / business.

          Not to mention the fact that many large Datacenters have started to rent gas turbines generators they park outside to supply additional power.

          The point of all this anti gen-AI talk is to make people aware of the impact these companies are having and to do the only thing we can do to resist this development, and that is to not use it, not pay it and point out to others the problems with them.

          • fccview@lemmy.worldOP
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            22 hours ago

            Oh I see, I have a feeling the comparison’s reason may have been misunderstood. I am not waving away criticism on gen-ai use, I welcome it actually. I want the technology and I want it done right, what’s currently happening sucks, that doesn’t mean I should blanket hate on something.

            I’m waving away criticism on the whole “if you use AI you can’t program and your applications must be shit” narrative and mentality that I always get any time I mention that I do make use of AI to speed up development :)

            Btw, nobody here is getting fooled by gen-ai companies or at least definitely not me. I keep telling my company we must NOT stop hiring junior developers just because this pretend-magic box can fill holes. And my latest presentation especially touches this specific topic and how unsustainable this is gonna get when asked to review our AI using strategy.

            • mavu@discuss.tchncs.de
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              22 hours ago

              It’s so easy to missunderstand and get missunderstood when communication in text with people who don’t know you :)

              This could easily have devolved into a shouting match, but it seems this time we managed to “get the corner” (as in “not fly off the road in a corner”) as we say in germany.

              That slide is pretty good, i hope they listen to you, but if not, you’ll be able to show it to them in a year and have a very satisfying “i told you so” monent :D

              • fccview@lemmy.worldOP
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                22 hours ago

                Hahahah I tend to reason with people more than shouting at them, discussions are very good for the brain <3

                Thank you, I already had a FANTASTIC “I told you so” moment when both Microsoft and Anthropic switched to a “you pay what you use” model few days ago, this slide is actually a month old, call me Nostradamus lmfao