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

blog.adafruit.com

181–190 of 300 posts

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

#181

hi everyone, its me 'ladyada. we're very much looking forward to telling our story, i have reached out to the founder of flux.ai (Matthias Wagner - Founder & CEO at Flux), in hopes we can resolve this together and set a good example for the community. looking forward to maybe seeing this resolved on a podcast together, or something

(somewhat) unrelated to this kerfuffle, but I can say I've ordered thousands of dollars of stuff from Adafruit, and the quality of the electronics, the speed of shipping, the prices, and the customer service have been consistently outstanding. Hope common sense prevails and Adafruit can go back to doing what it does best instead of dealing with this (IMO) distraction.

Adafruit's documentation and software maintenance is also top notch. I just built a new project using an ancient, no-longer-sold Adafruit PiTFT Plus which I had in my parts bin. Their software installer worked great on latest PiOS, and their data sheets had all the dimensions I needed. Outstanding.

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

#183
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Spelling" refers specifically to the order of letters forming a given word Right. And "the given word" in that particular example means "well" and is spelled G R E A T. G R A T E is a misspelling of that word. Your position doesn't make any sense when you boil it down. I write some word as some sequence of letters. Whether it's correctly spelled depends not only on how that word is spelled, but how all other words…

> And "the given word" in that particular example means "well" and is spelled G R E A T. G R A T E is a misspelling of that word. "Grate" is a real word, and it is correctly spelled. In fact, within the purpose of the joke, it's even correctly used! But even if someone were to write that sentence out with no joke meaning, because perhaps they had learned English as a second language purely phonetically and were just…

I have more to say, but repeatedly calling me a snowflake is pretty fucking infuriating, so I'll leave it.

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

#184
post #27

Never heard of Flux.ai before. It seems to be a 3D circuit designer with 'AI'. Not sure what the issue between them and Adafruit is. However, people over on Reddit¹ claim that Flux.ai is a little bit scummy. They push users into a beginner trial ($5/month) and then silently charge for usage per token - up to $100 per month. Oh, they also claim that they have "the world's largest community-driven public library of Ada…

Flux.ai is abusing Adafruit's trademark while harassing Adafruit with a lawsuit. Wow!

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

#185
post #51
post #19

As an electrical engineer who has tried to use it multiple times, I think Flux is an absolutely awful product. No surprise at all that they want to sweep details about their “intellectual property, commercial traction and user base” under the rug.

Yeah this stuff isn't even realistic as well. A number of years ago I was working on something professionally and there was a problem. Only about 1 in 5 boards assembled wouldn't crash the CPU. After much debugging it turned out one of the ICs had an open collector output and it wasn't loaded correctly with a pull up resistor. This caused a cascading failure, held the bus up when initialising the hardware which hit t…

I'm with you on the complexity of debugging hardware, as I've been there too. But I will say, automatically adding pullups to floating pins is something that an automated process could succeed at. Not first gen of blindly throwing an LLM at circuits and hoping, but perhaps a later improvement that uses metadata about parts. Perhaps curated metadata about parts, or always starting with a reference design and tweaking from there.

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

#186
post #7

Note that this is not related to Black Forest Labs Flux, the image synthesis models builders, and is instead related to a PCB AI authoring product called Flux.ai.

Don't forget about the (awesome) cluster scheduler, Flux.

https://hpc-tutorials.llnl.gov/flux/

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

#187

> 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 certainly doesn't look like they've publicly released anything. My guess is they found a problem and have been following reasonable responsible disclosure guidelines. However, the 90 days (or whatever time limit was given) is likely expiring and to head off publication, flux.ai is getting lawyers involved.

This is all 100% speculation, just based on checking the archive sites and search sites historical data and finding nothing.

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

#188
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs don't seem to be doing a very good job of clarifying your basic thinking however, in this post or your earlier one. To reply to both: > 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 s…

> But this is a logic fail is it not? It is not. The LLM approach is not dependent on system configurations. You can expect that it probably works the same from any device or application, because it can surmise slang/jargon from training and context rather than needing to be fed every little individual case as a per-user configuration. There are advantages to making a program more sophisticated than a literal == chec…

>The LLM approach is not dependent on system configurations

How is it not dependent? Like, help me out here: I'm writing something up in vim on my FreeBSD system using the built-in dictionary capability, maybe I've got grammar too with LanguageTool via the ALE plugin. I've added various words to my good words list over time. I save it to a network drive and want to keep working on it and do some graphical formatting as well for output to a different audience with a different tool on an iPad for a flight. How does "the LLM approach" uniquely slot into vim and the iPad app. "Uniquely" as-in a way that you couldn't slot in a shared sync'd dictionary file or whatever else. What if one of the developers doesn't want to and I don't have time or (if it's closed source) can't? How does it help all the other different software I use that are still using their own thing?

If by "LLM approach" you specifically mean "I copy/paste into this whole other software, and that software is what I use from different platforms" well, that's nice but it's not an "LLM approach" it's a "copy/paste into different software" approach which again could be done with whatever.

I explicitly noted that non-determinism doesn't need to be flawless, only better than the deterministic solution on average.

But how do you know what the "average" is? You can't get that from a single shot. And what's the upside vs downside of false positives or false negatives or meaning changes/hallucinations? That's also a point of contention, particularly when it comes to any problem space (coding of course, but also law, medicine etc) where precision in language is important even 1% of the time. And you clearly have an intense personal issue here around grammar/spelling that is not universally shared. Which is fine, but the tradeoffs you're willing to make are also going to be personal. It's also going to vary, just as with using LLMs for coding, based on the user. Some people are sufficiently capable with language to realistically be able to expect to double check an LLM and mostly do fine. It's a lot riskier though for someone with a weak grasp to depend on.

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

#189
post #29

From what I can tell, the message is When you discover an exploit, only communicate with source (and pray they respond) or get sued. Seems like the position is customers and stakeholders shouldn't be allowed access to this information.

That's actually very common even with respected bug bounty programs. Communicating exploits to anyone else (let alone the general public) will at the very least make you ineligible for rewards.

IMO if you're participating in a BB program, you should abide by he rules set forth by the program.

If you're not, then you don't have to.

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

#190

hi everyone, its me 'ladyada. we're very much looking forward to telling our story, i have reached out to the founder of flux.ai (Matthias Wagner - Founder & CEO at Flux), in hopes we can resolve this together and set a good example for the community. looking forward to maybe seeing this resolved on a podcast together, or something

(somewhat) unrelated to this kerfuffle, but I can say I've ordered thousands of dollars of stuff from Adafruit, and the quality of the electronics, the speed of shipping, the prices, and the customer service have been consistently outstanding. Hope common sense prevails and Adafruit can go back to doing what it does best instead of dealing with this (IMO) distraction.

Ditto- it played an important role in my entry to the world of electronics. Some of their breakout boards are my favorite (very nice layout, highly functional, well-documented).
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