For Linux, there is https://github.com/pwr-Solaar/Solaar
But on another note, the genai content on the website is just so distracting and such a bummer. It sticks out like sore thumb.
But on another note, the genai content on the website is just so distracting and such a bummer. It sticks out like sore thumb.
That's harsh. Consider English might not be the author's first language (I see Chinese on the screenshots). Just opening the site I get all the info I need from the text (local first, no account, no telemetry, that's great), install instructions are immediately visible, there are screenshots, even the config file format is one scroll away. This is a great landing page for an open source tool.
As far as the page body content goes it seems like LLMs have taken a little bit too enthusiastically to an Apple style presentation of product features.
This is clearly LLM-written text, not something that the author asked an LLM to translate from a different language. Not sure how the author's first language is relevant.
They didn't, so the reason isn't that English isn't their first language, it's that they didn't want to spend time writing text. In which case I don't understand how this is different from a native English speaker doing the same thing.
> the genai content on the website is just so distracting and such a bummer. It sticks out like sore thumb.
The comment is fair and accurate. The vacuous marketing speak is tedious, unpleasant and risks undermining the technology it makes a flailing attempt to describe.
Your non-native English speaker excuse is neither fair nor accurate since an AI translation of a human-written Mandarin language text does not introduce the style of writing being criticised.
Not every open source project requires a grandiose marketing site littered with manipulative, cloying language. Let the project speak for itself.
I don’t agree at all. The text and illustrations are straight to the point. I just took the time to read the page fully and honestly every word is useful to me. I’m interested in this tool because Logi Options+ sucks, and it clears out every question I have for a replacement. I know what features it offers, what devices it’s compatible with, what it looks like, how to install it, even how it uses the network (update checker disabled by default is a nice touch)
I fail to see how this isn’t the perfect website for an open source productivity tool
I fail to see how me saying "that's harsh" makes us not able to disagree?
Writing/generating something with Rust doesn't make it devoid of bugs or problems.
This weird take of “an LLM made it, it must be slop and buggy” ignores the reality of how almost all software written by humans was also quite shit before LLM’s came along
However, also considering that LLMs can’t judge the code they have emitted, humans have the advantage here.
Lastly, why we downplay the bugs in the code emitted by AI? Why the lower standards?
- AI generated patch allows access (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49331423)
- Bug in AI scribe creates big problems (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49294441)
As an addenda, human written code is much more maintainable with respect to AI emitted blobs. At least a band of humans can forge that code to a much better shape.
I keep telling people use AI, but use your head more.
It's fairly obvious that an LLM has been used to design the site, but it does the job and the site isn't the focus of the product.
And that's what I see first thing on the repo. Lots of LLM-style writing in the README, which makes me think if this is a vibecoded app, which looks like it.
Happy have LLM code for me.
I won't let them speak for me though. I think people who let AI speak for them in places other humans read probably couldn't speak for themselves pre-LLM. It's sad.
I think the bigger personal challenge is to not outsource thinking, understanding and judgement as we leverage new tools, and to continue our personal learning journeys. After 20+ years as a software engineer, you can probably coast on past experience for a long time... but if you aren't learning and exercising (one way or another), your skills will stagnate. That would be sad.
They did bother to do the thing they loved doing - the thing of value - and didn’t bother doing the boring thing. Instead of finding it within yourself to offer some thanks or encouragement you find an unimportant “blemish” to pile on. If that ain’t virtue signalling I don’t know what is.
It’s also an emphatic reminder of the truism that you just can’t please some people.
If it were an overly elaborate human creation I'd agree that criticism was unnecessary and perhaps even insensitive.
It's so easy to spot LLM writing, especially poorly constructed ones like this.
> A local-first alternative to Logitech Options+, written in Rust. Remap buttons, drive DPI and SmartShift over HID++. No account, no telemetry.
?? I see nothing wrong in there, every word is immediately useful to me as a person interested in this software. You’re being ridiculous
For me, the "finally local" call is disturbing, hinting that there are no other alternatives, ever. For Linux GP noted that there's Solaar, which supports all the features of this tool. I also use Solaar without any problems on my Linux systems.
Also notably, fwupdmgr provides updates for Logitech hardware natively, so there's nothing "finally local" about it. It's a new, polished tool written in Rust for more platforms, and kudos to them. However this doesn't vindicate their use of LLM for the site text.
See, English is not my first language either, however one can sharpen it with by using it.
The Chinese version of the website through Google Translate shows the same LLMisms, so while I don't know which version was authored first but neither was human-authored regardless of language proficiency.
Between no website and shiny but crappy LLM website, I’ll take the latter, and I wouldn’t wish another 2 weeks of unpaid copy writing on any open source dev.
See the recent hack on CPU-Z: https://gist.github.com/N3mes1s/b5b0b96782b9f832819d2db7c668...
Now, I often find Claude's idea of idiomatic prose to be a bit load-bearingly seam-hitting as it lands not this point, but THAT one, but it is probably better than something hacked out by a person who confuses tenses, cases, pronouns and when they can enverb a noun. So I tend towards giving people the benefit of the doubt on this.
Lastly, if you think LLM-written software is full of security vulnerabilities and bugs, I have terrible news for you about the state of human-written code. The fact that what we do is often better than nothing at all, is no big recommendation.
What about people with fine English and terrible coding skills?
What about people with both terrible English and terrible coding skills?
> Now, I often find Claude's idea of idiomatic prose to be a bit load-bearingly seam-hitting as it lands not this point, but THAT one, but it is probably better than something hacked out by a person who confuses tenses, cases, pronouns and when they can enverb a noun. So I tend towards giving people the benefit of the doubt on this.
Personally, I find AI writing as insufferable as anyone else (though Anthropic's is particularly bad, maybe just due to my familiarity with it), but I wouldn't judge individuals for using it to make communication more readable, rephrase what they mean etc. If anything, any difficulty in reading my prose would support that.
> Lastly, if you think LLM-written software is full of security vulnerabilities and bugs, I have terrible news for you about the state of human-written code. The fact that what we do is often better than nothing at all, is no big recommendation.
I guess a lot depends on how you use the LLMs (I bet horrible coding skills coincide with horribly lazy and problematic usage of LLMs for development too), but I wonder how humans actually stack up to the slop-machine when it comes to how good or bad the code they produce is on average, since I'm sure that SOTA model code by now tends towards the upper end of that.
In other words, if a person wants to limit themselves to avoiding LLM code over fears of it being bad, they would also have to avoid any any all code written by people that essentially produced the problematic training dataset, as well as any programmers with the same capabilities (or lack thereof). You'd basically have to avoid using a lot/most of the software out there if that's your quality standard.
please provide some kind of statistics to back up this claim.
Depends on the project.
According to wordcounter.net, this landing page has 850 words. Most of that is just LLM fluff that could easily be removed, but even if you want to keep the original size, to spend two months on this you have to be writing less than 15 words a day.
What the h... I mean, it's an opensource software to make Logitech's users life less miserable, and you are comparing that to the effort of a student writing an essay, where their only or main job during those days is writing the essay?
Writing 850 words shouldn't take you two months even if you only have 10 minutes a day to spend on it. The discussion is about the short description on the product's website, not the product/code itself.
This is sales. And the right words means tens of thousands of more customers / users / contributors / stars / whatever over time. The wrong ones = dead and forgotten.
Irrelevance is the failure mode here.
I’ve thought “hey I’ll just throw together this 5 page website on Squarespace, it’ll take a week at most” and despite only having like 5000 words it can take over a month. When you see how slowly it’s coming together it really destroys your motivation as well.
The words depend on the layout. The layout depends on the words. It all depends on art, and call to action, and SEO, and mobile responsiveness, and…
You can spend like an hour tweaking one hero sentence. It’s a lot more complicated then what we did in school, ie “Atticus Finch defends Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused in a racist town, knowing he will lose.”
If you had to write those 18 words on a website it’d probably take half a day to decide how you wanted to write them, and where you wanted to put them.
The average person cannot write good documentation (or website copy). It's an actual skill to learn how to phrase things, ensure that the documentation delivers the right level of detail to the different reader types etc.
As English writers, software developers make great programmers, not authors.
> A background watcher reads the foreground app's identifier once per second; when it changes, the overlay you authored for that app is layered on top of the device's global bindings, with per-app entries winning and any unlisted button falling through to the global map.
as is in the documentation right now could have just read
> Your device will automatically use app-specific keybinds when a given app is in focus.
So much of the documentation copy especially is typical of the ways LLMs leak implementation instructions into their written copy.
Thank you Lordy for LLMs because I am going to hurt myself if I ever have to design and wire another contact form.
How so?
Given this is open-source, have you considered contributing a more expensive-feeling landing page? Or, donating to finance the project?
I'm not an AI advocate but in this case I honestly didn't see anything but a clean and informative website. I did have the thought that "this software is probably coded with AI agents" but that's just because there has been an explosion in new software lately.
But the website itself seemed perfectly normal to me, actually very clean and informative.
Humans usually don't write like that: we form sentences, not "punchy taglines for ads". Especially not with a negative form using "no" everywhere: you may see, say, on ads for a BMW: "400 bhp, pure driving pleasure" but you typically won't see "No automated gearbox, no assisted steering".
Then the typical "It's X, not Y": "Everything Options+ does, without the account."
Funnily enough it's totally trivial to un-LLMish this type of prose but we don't notice it when it's been unkarenified for we then simply don't detect it's been written by an AI.
Normally I'd say you have a point, but this was a poor choice of example.
FWIW I don't really care in this case, just explaining how people can see it's generated. I only care about it working properly and being less bloated than Logitech's stuff. Pretty good that something like this is possible now.
Nothing wrong with AI code either but it suggests the project may have been built in 2 weeks, has no community and low likelihood of ongoing maintenance.
So now overall instead of a flashy website I think the best signal of quality is a boring GitHub README and several months of commit activity, lots of merged PRs.
bellard.org style text-only, get-to-the-point-please content will the way forwards. "browsers" can then style and rewrite it till the cows come home - with fancy slideshows, LLMisms, carrousels, the works - or not and nobody will be worse off.
The way we structure content these days is insane. Separate content from presentation, please.
Still, I see that page and I think 'Logitech Corporate driver software'. Maybe that's the intention? But it makes me start slightly suspicious.
I came here looking for a reference to Solaar, which is what I currently use.
AFAICT there's no reason to switch to OpenLogi for Linux users.
> Quit Logi Options+ before launching: the two fight over HID++ access, and only one app can own a receiver at a time. On Linux, the same applies to Solaar.
While it does look extremely likely that AI is used for the copy writing, and probably for some of the code maintenance, I'm not convinced that this is being vibe coded.
Were houses crafted better before dimensional lumber and power tools? Maybe - they were also more expensive. So the same with programs and website via AI.