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I would take one step back and ask myself WHY do I want to release upon the public a piece of software. For me, at various times and various programs, the answer was some combination of the following:
A. I think it is solving an important problem (hunger, world peace, etc.  ) and world should hear about this (direct greater good case). In this case, even if there are perceived negative consequences, I will release it for the greater good (damn the torpedoes!).
B. Other people could learn interesting things from what I've done (indirect greater good case). Than, if there are some problematic parts of the software, I would take them out and leave only the general framework.
C. It just tickles my ego and I want to show how smart I am (sadly, most frequent case). Well, if I honestly see some negative consequences, I will refrain from releasing it. My ego will be a bit bruised but I've got used to that.
Mircea
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It relies on some cool tech I made that I'd like to share with the board.
I've shared a piece of it, but the whole thing is greater than the sum of its parts and can be adapted to easily bind json data to a page on the server side.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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I would give some counter-examples:
A steak knife may be used to cut one's steak, or to cut a person. Should we therefore ban (or control) the production of steak knives?
Jackhammers may be used to make holes in roads or to make holes in bank vaults. Should we therefore ban (or control) the production of jackhammers?
Lastly, software may be used for a legal & moral purpose (cataloguing DVDs owned by the cataloguer) or for an immoral (and possibly illegal) purpose (cataloguing pirated videos). Should we therefore ban (or control) the release of the software?
Note further that in many countries, making a copy of a DVD that you own is perfectly legal. The illegality may come in when one either (a) copies it from a Torrent, (b) broadcasts the DVD or makes it available for copying, or (c) plays it for a public audience (i.e. outside of home consumption). The US, with its DMCA, is very much on the strictest side of this issue.
To summarise, there may be some legal issues with releasing your cataloguing software, but I don't see any moral issues with it. Your call!
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Yeah, where I think my software is different than a steak knife, is the worry that piracy will become the *primary use* of my "steak knife", outstripping legitimate uses for it.
That's what gave me pause.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Your tool isn't providing the content.
Your tool isn't providing a link to any content.
You're not instructing people how to get the content.
Seems pretty clear-cut to me.
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Don't worry, such tools exist already, Plex and Jellyfin to name two popular ones and Plex even comes with a paid version to unlock more features!
Is it ethically dubious? To me honestly not much, it's not like people commit less of a crime by downloading pirated videos and watching them using say a smb share and vlc on their TV
Would people use it to watch pirated content? If it has better features than the current alternatives I'm sure someone would
But I don't think is your responsibility to cripple it or keep it private as to not enable piracy, you are not the one committing a crime by using it to view pirated movies and people will do it anyway
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I'm thinking that if you cripple it, bad actors will find a way around that anyway.
Release it. I want to see it!
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honey the codewitch wrote: The problem is, you could use it in tandem with a torrent client, and filebot to basically give you a much nicer way to pirate and organize what you downloaded
The potentially illegal part here should be the torrent client, not the organizational software.
If the organization could be considered to be the illegal part, every maker of file systems would be in trouble.
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This was never a question of legality.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Perhaps not, but the same principle should apply in this case I'd say.
Any tool could be used in an illegal or immoral way. But in this case this obviously isn't the purpose.
For a torrent client the case looks quite different.
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It's funny because I actually have a legitimate purpose for torrenting but I'm afraid to do it without a VPN in case my ISP thinks I'm up to funny business.
It is the most reliable way to upload gigs of data to a server.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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I always found good old fashioned FTP (FTPS nowadays) to be the best.
It was invented in a time when 3600 baud modems were considered hot.
(Not SFTP mind you)
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Title says it all
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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I don't understand the question.
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Then you must be a computer 
Hogan
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Tired? for darn sure. Pissed? not so much.
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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To be honest...
I use meanwhile frequently the help of ChatGPT.
It does not give me the ultimative result at first.
But with an iterative process, I usually (70%) find a solution with ChatGPT.
Therefore no, I'm not pissed off hearing about AI. For me it really helpfull.
Only my two AI cents 
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This.
The incessant talk about it can get annoying, but "pissed off"? No, over the decades I've learned not to let annoying things get under my skin. It's useful.
Typically, I might try to get it to give me a short sample showing how to use some obscure API. More often than not I still have to tweak the results (I'm not expecting anyone, or an AI, to do all my work for me), but asking it in plain English what you're trying to do is often far better than trying to come up with the exact right keywords to have a search engine bring back a relevant page.
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I hadn't heard/read anything about it all day...until now. Thanks for that! 
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
"Hope is contagious"
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I'm more p---ed off about people (read: members of the media) who have no idea how generative AI works claiming it will solve the world's problems and/or bring an end to civilization as we know it. 
Transformer ANNs in particular are very useful when trained on a vetted and well bounded corpus of text (e.g. user's manuals for software, service manuals for machinery, the works of Shakespeare, the IRS tax code, etc.) Persons who rely on the publicly available version of ChatGPT to do their homework or answer questions of any significance are only fooling themselves.
/ravi
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Quote: Persons who rely on the publicly available version of ChatGPT to do their homework or answer questions of any significance are only fooling themselves.
My latest expirience with the ' publicly available version of ChatGPT' was to solve a math problem.
It helped me a lot, it helped me to solve it in between two hours to get a solution with Octave (the matlab alternative).
I don't see the point where 'are only fooling themselves'.
I don't know matlab/octave syntax, but by the help of ChatGPT I was able to solve in short.
Without ChatGPT: I would have to first learn matlab/octave 
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I'm glad ChatGPT was able to help you solve your issue. I've also used it with great success to quickly figure out how to do something specific in Android (with which I'm only somewhat familiar). Before ChatGPT I would have Googled the problem and probably waded through several answers at SO before eventually reading the Android docs and hoping to find a solution.
I should have been clearer. What I meant was ChatGPT works by predicting an answer (actually predicting just the next word in a sentence) to a question, based on the LLM it's trained on. It doesn't "understand" a word of what we ask it. What I meant by "questions of significance" was a question that requires analytical thought and whose answer can't be found in an existing corpus of text.
For example, asking ChatGPT to suggest a course of therapy for a specific psychological patient won't get us anywhere, since ChatGPT doesn't understand psychiatry or how to treat patients suffering from psychosis. It simply searches for the next likely word (and consequently a phrase and sentence) based on our input. This is why it excels at tasks like summarization and perusing content in well defined and well bounded bodies of text (e.g. user guides, collections of legal and tax rules and in our case Octave and Android how-to articles).
/ravi
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As mentioned, I was on a math/programatically thing with ChatGPT.
Especally the suggestions from ChatGPT (usually an iteration when ChatGPT delivered not the expected solution *1) ) on a question leads me to the conclusion, that it is not simply an answer based on statistics what the next word will be.
*1) But yes, sometimes ChatGPT starts to repeat itself if one claims a mistake in the answer. And that, confirms then your statement, that statistics for the next word comes into acount.... 
Anyway: Still confused some times when using ChatGPT, but also surprised how good it helps for easy code fragments
Sorry for my English. Most probably hard to understand
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Your English is fine! 
Requests to ChatGPT include a property (oddly enough called "temperature") that controls how much it will vary successive answers. This property simply injects a degree of randomness in its output. So it's not surprising that its answers can sometimes be completely incorrect, and not just slightly wrong.
A couple of examples:
- I asked ChatGPT what would happen if I deleted a file in a folder that was synced to OneDrive when I didn't have an internet connection. It responded by saying the file would be restored to my local storage the next time I connected to OneDrive. When I asked it the same question again, it said the file would be deleted from OneDrive when a sync was established. Two completely opposite answers in quick succession!
- I asked ChatGPT to tell me a little bit about the app TakeStock (which happens to be written by me). It responded with a very accurate description, and included the fact that it was written by me. I then asked it what other apps Ravi Bhavnani had written and it responded with a list of apps that were completely unrelated to TakeStock and that I haven't written. I've written several other popular apps, but none of those appeared in the list. In fact the apps in the list weren't even remotely similar to any of my other freeware apps.
At work we use (a paid version of) ChatGPT that has been trained on our user's manuals. Our product is pretty complex (highly configurable) and its documentation set is quite large and includes several detailed troubleshooting guides. ChatGPT has been remarkably useful by allowing end users to ask questions in plain English (and soon other languages) and do away with the need to speak with a human (although that option is always available).
/ravi
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This exactly. Every piece of software with more than one "if/else" is now an "intelligence". I've yet to see how ChatGPT is so "intelligent" that it can raise my kids.
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