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

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

#121

Post by applfanboysbgon »

xoa wrote: post #114
wat10000 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

I just fed this entire thread (excluding your comment pointing out the joke, and the text mentioning that it was a joke) to an LLM, and it did better than the dictionary spellchecker: corrected one real error, left my "squigglies" alone which was attacked by squigglies with the old-hat spellchecker, and specifically noted, without any prompting in that direction, that it left the joke spelling unchanged. It did not rewrite any sentences. I'm all for determinism where deterministic tools work, but the current implementations are so bad I can't blame people for turning to a non-deterministic program if it's still better on average.

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

#122

Post by sq_ »

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."

I think people have a heightened reaction to threats based on the CFAA for "the door was open" circumstances because that law is so widely known for being used in threats against folks who were trying to ethically report things and in overly-aggressive prosecutions.

Of course, we don't yet know the specifics of this particular case, but I'm willing to lean towards the people receiving legal letters threatening CFAA action until there's more information.

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

#123

Post by irthomasthomas »

ahartmetz wrote: post #58
doubled112 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> mixed-technique approach I think my biggest annoyance with the way we rolled out AI is that nobody seemed to want to use it to augment already working solutions. Just throw everything out and have an LLM do it instead.

Something something bitter lesson blah blah I think the bitter lesson is severely misapplied in the current situation: If progress from "just add more resources" is very slow, and a huge amount of money is at stake, continous work on hand-engineering can give a continuous and very valuable competitive advantage. The labs all seem to be going for AGI through bigger LLMs, and I am reasonably sure that it's not going to…

> The labs all seem to be going for AGI through bigger LLMs

I don't know if this is still the case. Labs like anthropic and openai are spending a huge amount of their time on custom model wrappers. Something which they used to leave to their customers.

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

#124

Post by Arodex »

CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #100
pjc50 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It is far from solved in IC, synthesis tools sometimes still do really stupid things and there's still quite a lot of hand-holding required to get to a working chip.

And LLM are even stupider and need even more hand-holding

The right use of AI would be to use it to create a better routing/synthesis tool, but that's not what is being worked on

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

#125

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

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…

Within an IC you don't have large obstructions for metal layers, distances are short, and buffers can be inserted at will to manage SI.

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

#126

Post by monuszero »

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…

That precise mixed technique approach has worked well for me. I’ve been using JITX (python based circuit design with a powerful auto router). Free for personal use, and has been discussed a few times here in HN.

Edit: it’s almost assumed at this point but for completeness Claude / Codex were the ones driving the OO python code and datasheet research and parsing.

https://www.jitx.com/

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

#127

Post by evntdrvn »

hamburglar wrote: post #95
neutronicus wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been frustrated with Copilot in this regard. I work on a large C++ codebase, with large files. Human developers jump around between files with the Visual Studio fuzzy search, set breakpoints to trace execution in the Debugger, use the IDE's refactoring tools. Microsoft's answer to this was to just ... expose none of this to their Agent Mode!? Replace the working semantic autocomplete with fucking lies!? Maybe it…

I work in Unity and I got frustrated with Claude constantly doing gross bash/grep/awk/sed/grep nested loops that took forever that I finally described (and had Claude implement and install) a tool that could, in a single pass, gather all this info from a Unity forest of scenes at once and answer all the questions Claude ever wanted to ask about a Unity project in a single pass that takes 50ms instead of 10 30 second…

if it helps, I've found that using context (Claude.md etc) is way less effective for this type of pattern compared to using PreToolHook to capture "bad patterns" and either transparently rewriting them to "do the right thing" if that is possible statically, or if not then rejecting the tool use with a message that tells the agent "how" to use the intended tooling itself.

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

#129

Post by otterley »

ptorrone wrote: post #30

hi everyone, phil and limor here, any questions for now, email press@adafruit.com limor and i are very much looking forward to telling our story.

Can we see the content of the demand letter? It should have been linked to your post. It's difficult for us to evaluate the merits of their allegations otherwise.

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

#130

Post by dylan604 »

PyWoody wrote: post #88
doubled112 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> mixed-technique approach I think my biggest annoyance with the way we rolled out AI is that nobody seemed to want to use it to augment already working solutions. Just throw everything out and have an LLM do it instead.

A few days ago someone on HN commented that a teammate uses Claude to search for text in files on their own computer. Buddy... There's Command-line Tools Can Be 235x Faster Than Your Hadoop Cluster and then there's Command-line Tools Can Be ∞ Faster Than Your AI .

As snark, I've been using the phrase "ask GPT about it" for things that clearly do not need an LLM to be involved. The other day, I was on a zoom call and said it, only to see the present actually doing it. I hope my unmuted laugh wasn't too distracting.
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