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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

#201

Post by mindslight »

SpaceNoodled wrote: post #199
mindslight wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> always starting with a reference design and tweaking from there. That's just basic design sensibilities.

There's a big difference between a human looking at a datasheet and manually copying the reference design (possibly leaving out things like pullups because they're simple/obvious/etc, or go to a different block of the circuit than what you're focusing on), and a mechanical copy with the pullup resistor only possibly being deleted after an explicit reasoning step focused on it.

In the given example, the human process obviously failed, right?

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

#202

Post by RHSeeger »

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…

> Nobody has taken me up on this offer, because I think they know that they aren't going to have the extreme discipline to do the hard thing of understanding "someone" else's code and sign their name to it.

That seems lazy to me. "I'm not willing to see if I can do a better job by using this tool, because I don't want to bother analyzing it's work".

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

#203

Post by nubinetwork »

peteforde wrote: post #191
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.

Hey man, speak for yourself. It's never occurred to me to even try getting an LLM to design or layout a circuit for me. Instead, I have dozens or hundreds of chats in my history where I debate the merits of different parts for different tasks and scenarios, the nuances of decoupling strategies (package size vs deregulation), work out resistor network ratios from the reels I have on hand. Then being able to feed an LL…

Design, no... but I've definitely thought about letting one route traces... while autorouters work, I was hoping Claude could do matched traces better. At the time, it didn't want to generate the kicad pcbnew file though. /shrug

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

#204

Post by serf »

mattkrause wrote: post #137
quuxplusone wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting idea I saw long ago in some book (I thought it was K&P's "Software Tools," or my second guess was K&R1, but neither of those panned out — a strong Mandela effect) was the clever idea of a whole-document spellchecker that works purely probabilistically, by histograms: you feed it a document, it tallies the trigraphs, and any trigraph that appears only rarely is flagged as a likely typo. This approach le…

That's uhh...a language model?

It's a modeling of language, it's not structurally anything like an LLM.

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

#205

Post by moron4hire »

Lerc wrote: post #120
moron4hire wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

I very much doubt they are thinking that deep. I think you're bending over backwards to give the AI an out based off of an incomplete picture. You can't have a complete picture because you haven't been here in this project.

Back two years ago, a lot of them were playing with AI code gen. They also have some explicit tasking for using agentic AI tooling to evaluate for use in an analytics product we're building, so it's not like they don't even have access or permission or time to try. We're just not religious converts who think AI would one day replace humanity and we should be working to help it.

Through the lens of "don't ask don't tell", throughout all of this, I've not seen any significant change in work output. The folks that have used AI for the specific research tasks they had did not produce solutions faster than without it. They spent huge amounts of time on things like getting the AI to produce results that have any meaning beyond what was trivially reportable in the data already, reliably reproduce the same results, even reliably operate over the full dataset. It's not been the go-fast button everyone has said it would be. I think folks are optimizing for reducing their cognitive workload: it's easier to understand, modify, and live with code you wrote yourself.

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

#206

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

doubled112 wrote: post #53
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…

> 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.

> augment already working solutions

That's exactly how I use it, but I'm just a geezer on his own, writing free software for people that can't pay for it.

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

#207

Post by mattkrause »

serf wrote: post #204
mattkrause wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's uhh...a language model?

It's a modeling of language, it's not structurally anything like an LLM.

It’s literally a trigram (character) language model. Check any NLP book from before 2015 or so.

LLMs have more stuff bolted onto them (embeddings, RLHF) but the autoregressive core is a direct descendent of that sort of language model.

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

#208

Post by murphyslaw »

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…

Shouldn't it be possible to simply state in the contract to use that tool only? I've had good success with that in my coding.

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

#209

Post by giancarlostoro »

> Adafruit accessed only information that Flux’s own systems made publicly available through a server misconfiguration.

Did they access it knowing that there was a server misconfiguration or was this only learned of after the fact? Because Computer Fraud and Abuse is pretty serious.

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

#210

Post by murphyslaw »

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…

You used to be able to add your own words to spellcheckers, somehow that went out the window. I rarely see the option for it on a red-lined word now in the context menu, and when it does adding the word seems to make no difference at all.
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