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Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai

blog.adafruit.com

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Re: Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai

#111

Post by PaulHoule »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #72
trollbridge wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI can’t really spell check without risking changing the meaning of sentences. Spell checking was a solved problem before this.

Spellchecking is absolutely not a solved problem. I immediately disable spellchecking on every avenue it tries to approach because managing a bunch of dictionaries on every browser/device/application that has its own spellchecker for some godforsaken reason to not have squigglies spammed over every piece of jargon, slang, and slightly atypical spelling is incredibly annoying. I don't know how effective LLMs are, but…

Human copy editors are less than perfect too. I hired one copy editor who I could not trust to be the last person who touched a document before it went out.

I had a friend who wrote an article for the New York Times: the article made a lot of sense before she submitted it, but it was edited for length and style and it definitely read like a New York Times piece but didn't completely make sense.

Re: Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai

#112

Post by mindslight »

TZubiri wrote: post #83
Ekaros wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They vibe coded their system and it showed Adafruit something? Or showed some information with trivial prodding? Sounds like your average cross-tenant leak. Maybe showing more than intended or some caching issue. Many options some not really not fault of Adafruit.

I don't know the details of the case, but what they worded there is a textbook unauthorized intrusion and a naïve teenager "the door was open" defense. Mind you there can be nuances, but that quote is like saying "I took their stuff, but it was poking out of their pocket."

No, it's more like "the door was open" in the context of a storefront. A public website carries an implicit invitation to visit, otherwise web browsing would be illegal.

Re: Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai

#114

Post by xoa »

wat10000 wrote: post #80
trollbridge wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI can’t really spell check without risking changing the meaning of sentences. Spell checking was a solved problem before this.

Only if the problem is declared to be whatever it is that spell checkers solve. As the classic joke goes, "Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken."

>Only if the problem is declared to be whatever it is that spell checkers solve.

The problem being misspelling, hence, "spell checker". Like, this seems pretty straightforward? Grammar checking if you cannot use the language properly is a pretty different problem space, and indeed has long existed and is exposed as a separate thing. And not just in fancy word processors either, if you go to something as simple as macOS TextEdit you'll see separate check boxes for "Check spelling as you type" vs "Check grammar with spelling". If someone wants to try out using LLMs for grammar no problem, but spell checking is purely about the mechanical and, importantly, deterministic aspect of typos or outright non-words.

>As the classic joke goes, "Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken."

There is a genuine touch of irony/meta in you using that here in this context. That sentence has no misspelled words, and importantly gets across the exact humorous meaning the human who wrote it intended. The joke literally only works because a human was able to make creative use of language. If you had an LLM agent posting for you to HN and it automatically changed that to:

>As the classic joke goes, "My spellchecker works great but could use some grammar checking."

Well, where would the joke be now!? This goes to the exact concern people have with powerful non-deterministic meaning-changing tools replacing deterministic meaning-preserving ones.

Re: Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai

#115

Post by pjc50 »

moron4hire wrote: post #76
Lerc wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be the right analogy except it is not clear that it is a house always wins situation. If you have a .6 chance of success on any particular outcome. Long term win or loss is down to your behaviour. If you double or nothing every time loss is guaranteed. The right strategy will win over the long term.

Gambling addicts make all kinds of post-hoc rationalizations for why they are actually up, if you think about it. "Well, if you consider my entertainment, I'm actually up." "Well, if you think of all the drinks I got comped, I'm actually up." Even worse are the ones who talk about runs, "I was up $10,000 at one point." Nevermind they gave it all back and another $20k chasing that first $10k. At the end of the day, if…

> If they can use the AI and get to a point that they can submit a PR that they themselves understand, then technically speaking, what do I care?

This is where my employer has ended up after extremely cautious AI adoption: _must_ be reviewed by a human, and the human whose name is on the gerrit review is responsible for the quality of the work.

For some reason the OpenAI dashboard shows me how much money the company as a whole has spent? It's still a very reasonable-looking amount of money and a tiny fraction of salaries.

Re: Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai

#116

Post by nathanielks »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #41
karmicthreat wrote: post #18

Adafruit probably did a review of AI PCB tools. I've used Flux.ai before; it was a pretty bad experience. After about 50-100$ in tokens a couple of times, I couldn't get more than a couple of simple components on the schematic. And not in sensible positions. The product just grinds tokens for little return, in my opinion. I had far better luck wiring together KiCad MCP, SKIDL. There are some AI-driven autorouters out…

> I could only get about 80% of what I wanted together with my hacky workflow. I literally did this yesterday with solid results using Codex CLI. I used xhigh thinking and gpt 5.5. I had it use KiCad directly via cli rather than via MCP, and I did make Claude Opus review it's work after every round. I got what I think will be a working revision A in about 10 hours of tinkering spread over a few days.

Is 10 hours a short amount of time for designing a PCB?

Re: Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai

#117

Post by PaulHoule »

pjc50 wrote: post #47
karmicthreat wrote: post #18

Adafruit probably did a review of AI PCB tools. I've used Flux.ai before; it was a pretty bad experience. After about 50-100$ in tokens a couple of times, I couldn't get more than a couple of simple components on the schematic. And not in sensible positions. The product just grinds tokens for little return, in my opinion. I had far better luck wiring together KiCad MCP, SKIDL. There are some AI-driven autorouters out…

> There are some AI-driven autorouters out there now. Placement is probably the big issue that needs to be solved now. Interesting that within an IC this is basically "solved", or at least properly automated with classical numeric techniques such as simulated annealing. I would have thought there's a big opportunity in a mixed-technique approach, where you use AI to extract unstructured data from datasheets and then…

Until a few years ago it was generally understood that useful "creativity" involves solving problems within constraints, e.g. something a lot like SAT or SMT in spirit even if not in the details.

Then we got LLMs which will make a good parody of anything and occasionally get it right.

Re: Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai

#118

Post by mindslight »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #102

> Adafruit accessed only information that Flux’s own systems made publicly available through a server misconfiguration Does anyone have some more context about what happened here? An uncharitable analogy might be that I misconfigured my front door by not locking it, which doesn't give someone the right to walk in and look around - but I have no idea what Adafruit is specifically being accused of doing.

It often does when your front door is otherwise a business storefront. Without knowing the specifics of what was accessed, analogies really aren't helpful. And there seems to be zero context here, so this strikes me as the most plausible scenario: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48368635

(I agree that Adafruit's statement itself is worded pretty terribly!)

Re: Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai

#119

Post by JackFr »

DrewADesign wrote: post #97
moron4hire wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gambling addicts make all kinds of post-hoc rationalizations for why they are actually up, if you think about it. "Well, if you consider my entertainment, I'm actually up." "Well, if you think of all the drinks I got comped, I'm actually up." Even worse are the ones who talk about runs, "I was up $10,000 at one point." Nevermind they gave it all back and another $20k chasing that first $10k. At the end of the day, if…

I am actually up all the drinks I got comped in Vegas. I sit down at the penny slots and bet one penny one row until I get offered a free drink. I tip the server $3, bet two more pennies for good measure, get up, and walk out with the drink in my hand. I just got like a $3.10 Manhattan for walking around the strip, including tip, courtesy of some business that was low-key trying to scam me and deserves to have less m…

I not sure what crap casino you're going to, but there are no penny slots in Vegas.

https://www.casino.org/news/vegas-myths-re-busted-the-end-of...

Re: Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai

#120

Post by Lerc »

moron4hire wrote: post #104
Lerc wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they cannot mention it how do you know that they have not taken up the offer? I agree that people will rationalise being in a losing situation as a winning situation. That does not change the fact that winning situations can exist.

They can't talk about it during the code review. Basically, "no excuses." We talk about what we're doing otherwise.

That's still gambling, you've just made yourself the house.

Developers have to gamble on whether they will be better with AI or without.

The no excuses criteria means if they choose AI and it performs well, you both win, if it performs poorly they lose.

If they don't choose AI but colleagues do and it performs well, they lose relative to their colleagues.

The sensible solution would be solidarity and all reject the offer. Don't play the house.

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