About two weeks ago I released a free open source app for the Commodore 64 Ultimate and I promoted it on Reddit. In the thread a user reached out trying to get it to work with a non-Ultimate device, which wouldn’t work because they don’t have the data streams.
Later, the user messaged me on Reddit to ask about this.
So I put a card in my kanban system to look into cutting a 2.1 build sometime when I had time.
Today, the user reached back out to me, and it just felt to me like he was rushing me, saying that maybe I haven’t put out an update because I don’t understand my AI generated code, so I let him know I didn’t appreciate it.
When I came back later I was surprised to see he was very upset.
He’d also sent me an email.
Seemed like a misunderstanding to me at first.
So at this point I thought him calling me a “fucked up idiot” was just a misunderstanding because he thought I blocked him, and I thought he was trying to have a genuine conversation with me at this point, even if he doesn’t like AI. (I thought that “I hate this app, sry,” was him suggesting he hated the reddit app for making it look like I blocked him, but in retrospect maybe he meant that he now hates my app?)
Now I think he’s back to being friendly, but there’s not a lot of meat for me to respond to here, so I read the article and get back to him.
Okay, now he’s back to calling me a bot for some reason. I think, in retrospect, he’s saying that I am a bot because I was able to read the article quickly. But it’s a very short article. If 15 minutes was a short amount of time to read that article, I don’t know how slow this guy reads.
I’m still treating this like a customer service situation because he was originally contacting me to talk about my app, so I want to keep trying to defuse the situation.
I offer to show him I’m not a bot by holding a message up for him on my webcam, but he claims a “link doesn’t work” which doesn’t make sense as my webcam is not a link, just an image on the page, and he definitely used my site earlier to email me. He also claims my portfolio site is ‘vibe code hell’ when the code is pretty simple nested divs.
Either way, I’m still in “this is basically customer service” mode so I want to be nice, and then it seems like we’re getting along again, talking about our computer history.
Yes, he didn’t like my initial comment about AI, obviously. That “1 reply” I can’t see now, but it was just “This is so wrong but also so true,” something like that.
However we were very quickly back to him accusing me of being a bot and swearing at me.
At this point I realize this guy just wants to abuse me for some reason, so I try to break down what is happening here.
He really didn’t like that. Apparently typing quickly is proof that I am a bot?
After this I realized I should just wrap it up. This is clearly an anti-AI kook and I’ve wasted my breath too much already.
After this, he went onto my last reddit post on the r/c64 subreddit to publicly accuse me of being a bot and calling my app “vibe coded bullshit”.
Now, I don’t know exactly why Sven Trümper decided that today was his day to harass me on the internet for giving away free software, but I really didn’t appreciate it. I’ve been building and giving away free software on the internet for over a decade, before modern AI existed, there is no reason to attack me just because you’re upset about AI. I hope that on future interactions with people on the internet, he chooses to be nicer.
P.S. I reported his “vibe coded bullshit” comment to the r/c64 mods because it clearly breaks their #1 sidebar rule to “Be nice, be friendly”, and the mods told me “Their first comment is not “targeted harassment”. They are expressing an opinion about your product and your promotion of it. We don’t enforce ‘positive comments only’ on products, projects, etc. If you’re not willing to accept critical takes, don’t post here.” So, yeah, that’s interesting.