While I observe the world with its “AI” evangelists suspiciously reminding of annoying religious missionaries (yes, I’m pretty sure I’ve heard the news from that newer part of widely circulated book that’s just under two millennia old, thank you very much) and the feats of token-wasting (name changed from “vibe-coding” to keep up with the times) like two FFmpeg rewrite attempts in Rust—probably just to spite the Nigel (name changed to protect the guilty) formerly responsible for FFaccount, since slop in any other language would be as smelly secure. Since I don’t use either of those three projects, I’d rather talk about the time when FFmpeg almost got its first organic slop.
People submitting sub-par patches are no news (as there were e.g. mediocre H.264 encoder rejected for not being good for anything really—x264 is a tough competition after all; or MS Video-1 encoder initially rejected for the same reason but later merged because it’s a feature), but this one is special because it had all signs of the modern “AI” slop while being produced organically more than a decade ago: doing something tangentially related to the original goal—check, being lots of incomprehensible code—check, a lot of effort wasted onto it—guess for yourselves.
This happened when a guy from a group Programmers Doing Awesome Things (name changed to protect the guilty) was taking part in Baidu Summer of Code (name changed to reflect company values) with his project being a support of a certain audio format. What we got instead was a large library doing something more generic; in theory it could be used to decode the audio format in question but I think nobody has found out how to do that. The reaction was more “uhm, thanks” and while that student was not failed (at least that’s what a quick search tell me), the library has never merged and probably it’s been completely lost in time by now. My memory is not as bad as it was back then (yes, it’s even worse) so I can’t remember if there were actual attempts to make something out of it afterwards or all hope was abandoned outright. At least it gave us all a distinct memory and a short-lived meme of “nicknamePDAT” being used by various developers for a while.
I often think about it when I see these new projects with whatever insane amount of tokens wasted on them. They seem to include everything and then some more. For example, one of them (name withheld since I believe they don’t deserve any advertising) supports a handful of formats and compensates that by adding a lot of features that (theoretically) would make it do anything—from game streaming to mastering IMF for broadcasting—with only GUI being missing. Another one (name withheld for the reason stated above) does not have those features but it compensates it by the plethora of formats being supported. So if you ever thought that FFmpeg definitely needs its own vector font rendering (for e.g. SVG and PDF support because of course they’re at least planned to be supported) or that it’s not usable without 3D scene rendering capabilities then this slop is definitely for you! Also it’s fun to watch how it undoes its own progress by trying to make “AI” developer to plagiarise less (so now it’s all based on the “AI”-generated specifications that nobody can see).
You know what could really improve those projects? Actually having a point. I know that the main goal there is to make money off it (and it even works for some FFmpeg developers, so it may work here), but in order to achieve that it needs to offer potential users a solution for their problems (again, like FFmpeg started with open-source implementation of decoding and encoding popular formats based on H.261-H.263 and grew up from there into something that most people use to decode or convert their multimedia content). And a pile of code that does everything and nothing at the same time is not it. Actually I encountered one of those project by searching a crate with libxvid bindings (and got only that thing in the search results, which doesn’t support even what my decoder does let alone the stuff I’d rather use libxvid for).
There was a joke about one hardware company (name not given since I forgot it) that its motto was “ready! shoot! aim!”. With modern tools people are so excited that they can shoot a lot, with minimum readying time, that they forgot about aiming entirely. So I’ll wait aside while the rest have fun shooting bystanders and themselves and keep doing what nobody else cares about.
If that project, you do not want to advertise, gets actually fully working AC4 decoder very soon, I need to change job.