How to tell a formerly respectable brand has jumped the shark (after selling out to Qualcomm, who are their own special species of shitbaggery):
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The fossil fuel money funding AI initiatives are looking for something that wastes energy like cryptocurrency wastes it.
By design, repeated queries are required because the answers are unpredictable & with a high error rate.
It's genius level fraud created by an industry bent on keeping its addicts.
Like any drug dealer, the fossil fuel industry is manufacturing a pool of addicts (captive consumers) with a dependency to something only they can supply.
The Dark Side of AI Companions: The Quiet Rise of Emotional Dependency in a Digital Age
How Digital Companions Quietly Redefine Intimacy—and Blur the Line Between Comfort and Dependency
Futurism (vocal.media)
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@ben Ah, I confused adafruit with arduino. (Adjacent customer space.)
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@cstross@wandering.shop
Electricians: "look at this wiring.. thing.. gen AI showed me it's got so many things wrong if you even look at it you will die guaranteed."
Adafruit: "good news we used gen AI to design a piece of electronics you can buy from us and play with!"@driusan See also:
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@cstross
They don't even explain how it's better or different than their other hardware. The entire sales pitch for it is literally just that they got an LLM to generate the design and it miraculously works.Even *if* I didn't care that they involved a dehumanizing, planet-boiling technology, they've still left me absolutely no reason to care that they made this.
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@cstross @adafruit For context, at least the symbol shown on screen does not look like something I’d accept quality wise for a library symbol. It has inconsistent pin spacing, the power pins should be on the top/bottom edges, for this kind of part the EP and GND pins should be stacked, the GND pin should be on grid, and the I2C pins should be on the left side of the symbol to preserve reading direction.
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@cstross
This makes me sad. It's not the only thing that does, but it is one. -
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@cstross posts something wrong, does not edit or correct, gets a ton of people to pile on for showing what a new tool can and can't do... adafruit did not "sell out to Qualcomm" either. we are vc-free, loan-free, NYC, usa manufacturer, open-source... Charles why is wrong for a woman to experiment & use a tool to make her job easier? My company is Adafruit, not Arduino btw - Limor
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@cstross posts something wrong, does not edit or correct, gets a ton of people to pile on for showing what a new tool can and can't do... adafruit did not "sell out to Qualcomm" either. we are vc-free, loan-free, NYC, usa manufacturer, open-source... Charles why is wrong for a woman to experiment & use a tool to make her job easier? My company is Adafruit, not Arduino btw - Limor
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@cazabon @cstross too late, he did it about 8 hours ago and kept going, any way - he caused a giant pile-on, we updated our post ... in the "UPDATE – Men on Mastodon" section ... https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/02/14/heres-our-first-gemini-deep-think-llm-assisted-hardware-design/
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@cstross posts something wrong, does not edit or correct, gets a ton of people to pile on for showing what a new tool can and can't do... adafruit did not "sell out to Qualcomm" either. we are vc-free, loan-free, NYC, usa manufacturer, open-source... Charles why is wrong for a woman to experiment & use a tool to make her job easier? My company is Adafruit, not Arduino btw - Limor
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@cazabon @cstross too late, he did it about 8 hours ago and kept going, any way - he caused a giant pile-on, we updated our post ... in the "UPDATE – Men on Mastodon" section ... https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/02/14/heres-our-first-gemini-deep-think-llm-assisted-hardware-design/
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@Sablebadger Guys like @cstross do this to women online all the time, more so to ones that do open-source or electronics (like Limor), even after being told he targeted a different company, person, etc, he let it ride and went for the shares and stars... one his most popular ones already. Check out the pile on, it's... piling.
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@cazabon @cstross too late, he did it about 8 hours ago and kept going, any way - he caused a giant pile-on, we updated our post ... in the "UPDATE – Men on Mastodon" section ... https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/02/14/heres-our-first-gemini-deep-think-llm-assisted-hardware-design/
@adafruit @cstross I saw the adafruit post, and the people telling you to get out because of using llm's before the bad post from cstross. In his thread someone pointed out he confused Arduino & Adafruit, and he confirmed but hasn't updated the main post. Using an llm and getting push-back on it was all you though. #noai
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@Sablebadger @adafruit @cstross
It's not "sabotage", it's a simple mistake/confusion that literally anyone could make. "Small electronics company popular with hobbyists that starts with 'A' which sold out to Qualcomm and started bragging about ``AI''" is pretty easy to mix up with "*Other* small electronics company popular with hobbyists that starts with 'A' which started bragging about ``AI''" . Hell, I could have made that mistake myself.
So ya, he confused one company's actions with another similarly-named, same-industry company's actions. He didn't torpedo your zeppelin.
And if Adafruit wants to start using "AI" (LLM), then that's fine. But a lot of us electronics hobbyists will want to have absolutely nothing to do with you from that point on.
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@Sablebadger Guys like @cstross do this to women online all the time, more so to ones that do open-source or electronics (like Limor), even after being told he targeted a different company, person, etc, he let it ride and went for the shares and stars... one his most popular ones already. Check out the pile on, it's... piling.
@ptorrone @Sablebadger @cstross @adafruit
If you think Charles Stross is anti-women or otherwise misogynist, boy have you clocked him wrong. Try reading his stuff.
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@cstross posts something wrong, does not edit or correct, gets a ton of people to pile on for showing what a new tool can and can't do... adafruit did not "sell out to Qualcomm" either. we are vc-free, loan-free, NYC, usa manufacturer, open-source... Charles why is wrong for a woman to experiment & use a tool to make her job easier? My company is Adafruit, not Arduino btw - Limor
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@ptorrone @Sablebadger @cstross @adafruit
If you think Charles Stross is anti-women or otherwise misogynist, boy have you clocked him wrong. Try reading his stuff.
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@Sablebadger @adafruit @cstross
It's not "sabotage", it's a simple mistake/confusion that literally anyone could make. "Small electronics company popular with hobbyists that starts with 'A' which sold out to Qualcomm and started bragging about ``AI''" is pretty easy to mix up with "*Other* small electronics company popular with hobbyists that starts with 'A' which started bragging about ``AI''" . Hell, I could have made that mistake myself.
So ya, he confused one company's actions with another similarly-named, same-industry company's actions. He didn't torpedo your zeppelin.
And if Adafruit wants to start using "AI" (LLM), then that's fine. But a lot of us electronics hobbyists will want to have absolutely nothing to do with you from that point on.
