Rebuild it worse, but mine

I have a problem. When I run into software that works perfectly fine, my first instinct is to go home and rebuild it - usually worse, always mine.

I’ve built a chatbot. Yeah, a chatbot that’s usually used in companies to sell stuff to you. Or in recent years they market those as “digital assistants.” They are impressive toys, but what they don’t tell consumers is that they are made to harvest and sell consumer data to companies or government agencies. “No shit,” I hear you say. “Did I just expose them??? Wowww what an unknown fact, Emre!” OK OK CHILL THE FUCK OUT. I know it’s a known fact; I guess people don’t really care about their privacy. Because if they did, Google wouldn’t be worth over 4 trillion dollars.

But you can always host a local AI model to chat with, right? Pff, what’s the fun in that? It’s dumb. To ask serious questions to an LLM? I’d rather have a fictional character be real and say dumb stuff all the time instead of a generic company response.

That’s when I decided to make Goob.

Creating a dumb friend

Before you guys criticize me for the name choice, I don’t know if it means anything or if it’s a slang term for whatever, nor do I care. I named it Goob because it’s a slime. And yeah, it’s B.O.B. from Monsters vs. Aliens, but fuck you, its name is Goob.

Everything started to look good; Goob was alive, and he spoke like himself for a while. I also added a SQLite database for per-person memory and a general memory for it to use.

It even reacted to my messages and stuff.

But turns out Goob had morals:

Goob was a little suspicious, so when I caught him, he responded pretty weirdly:

And that proved my point - the moment he grew corporate morals was the tell he was never really mine, just someone else’s model wearing my name. My personal toy was a spy for the rich. That’s when I decided not to use any cloud api for any of my projects again; if you’re reading this, Goob fuck you.

Turns out Goob wasn’t the only corporate thing I’d end up ripping out of my life. My government did the next one for me.

Discord got banned where I live. I won’t get into why - partly because the reasons are dumb, mostly because I’d like to stay un-arrested.

So my friends and I decided to use Teamspeak 3 like the old days. It was surprisingly good: no shop, no bloat, no CPU overhead. Just a basic ui with good voice functionalities. There was only one thing I missed.

Screen sharing.

TeamSpeak 3 technically has screen sharing. I say “technically” because it’s a sketchy plugin and it sucks.

I could’ve used one of those “share your screen instantly!” websites. But we’ve been over how I feel about handing my stuff to someone else’s servers.

So I built my own.

Building a screen sharing webapp

I won’t get into the deep technical details, just how it generally works.

I wanted this web-app to be private - only me and my friends could use it. So I built a lobby system where the only way to create a session is to be an admin. You share a code with your friends, they join a Discord-call-like room, and everyone can share their screen and manage it in real time - focus one, go fullscreen, etc.

Under the hood it’s a LiveKit SFU for the media, Caddy in front, and a Node/TypeScript backend holding it together. Hosting this is basically free. 1080p60 streams don’t come close to my server’s 20TB limit.

Oh, and I gave it a pretty funny domain name. I’m not sharing it though - some of you security folks would crack the bandwidth, and I’d wake up to a $1000 bill.

It’s not finished. I’m adding OBS support so you can pipe in a proper stream instead of just a browser tab, and per-user key generation so everyone gets their own access instead of one shared code. Both are half-done and fighting me.

Not everything needs rebuilding, though. Sometimes someone already made the honest version - you just have to check they’re telling the truth.

I got a call from my friend the other day asking me to play Valheim. I answered with “Who plays Valheim in 2026?” but I had nothing better to do, so I accepted his invitation.

He asked me to download some mods first, and man, I’m not downloading Thunderstore Mod Manager with Overwolf bundled in it hell no. That’s when I found r2modman. An open-source alternative for Thunderstore.

I checked the source code and built it myself; I love software that does what it’s intended to do. No telemetry, no Overwolf, no account, no bullshit. Just code you can read and run. To be honest, it’s pretty sad that kind of software is rare these days.

“Aren’t you an EEE major? What about hardware, your actual field?”

I do, plenty of it. But nothing impressive enough to write up yet - everything’s either unfinished or almost there. Stay posted, though. I might show you my secret electronics projects one day.

Lately I’ve been writing my own game engines. Once you get used to reading every line before you trust it, the next step is just writing every line yourself. I don’t know where this ends. But it’s still in the walls.