Repo seems to be gone? User action or GitHub action?
Regardless, for visibility as to maybe-why this happened, here are screenshots of the user editing comments to insult/make them say something they never did;
https://web.archive.org/web/20251130091635/https://github.co...
The tool itself claims "Zero AI" (https://www.zigbook.net/) yet is very obviously A-Lot-AI.
Had a conversation with the Zigbook maintainer. It’s either a young kid or somebody that has some serious growing up to do. Just generally weird behavior.
Indeed: @zigbook changed the title "Fix license violations" "Im mad because you wrote code similiar to mine >:(" 3 minutes ago (https://github.com/zigbook/zigbook/pull/43)
Wow. It's also an extremely reasonable pull request, here's the only commit: https://github.com/zigbook/zigbook/compare/main...SuperAugus...
I could sort of understand it if the PR used all sorts of judgemental/accusatory language or something. But it doesn't; it's straight-forward and factual. Outright bizarre behaviour.
I really loved this PR, very fair, appropriate, sensible, proportionated; masterpiece! Could easily be used as example in all git commit writing guides around (half-joking).
help us, it's gone
Original commit: https://github.com/SuperAuguste/zigbook/commit/8cc9edd35b3e3...
At one point they added a “R******D COMPLAINT” (censored for HN) ticket sticker to… idk, oppose AI-use accusations? Somebody seemingly talked them down from it though. Just bizarre. Like watching a midlife crisis through GitHub issues.
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By that token, is the harmed party here also immature? Also do you work at GitHub and did he hurt your feelings by... being dead accurate as to several engineering failures?
I mean, focus on whatever you want, but he hasn't done anything Linus Torvalds hasn't done (at least similar enough).
Was that not changed after feedback?
https://github.com/zigbook/zigbook/pull/45#issuecomment-3592... Would this be grounds to report zigbook to GitHub maybe? This is wild
Fear not I've mirrored it https://web.archive.org/web/20251130091635/https%3A%2F%2Fgit...
Sadly the important information, what was actually edited, isn't part of that mirror. (It's async fetched by the ui when clicking on the edit information on GitHub)
it's said something to paraphrase "I wonder what antisocial behaviour will be seen next instead of dealing with the feedback"
>Would this be grounds to report zigbook to GitHub maybe?
100%.
https://docs.github.com/en/communities/maintaining-your-safe...
Oh wow. Your original comment is pretty darn prophetic.
The whole thing looks very childish, I'm not sure I even fully understand the conversation of #43. Are they troll accounts?
Grifter or not, editing user comments to make it look like they're saying something they're not isn't okay.
Edit: It appears that the repo is gone? User removed it or GitHub?
I reported it to Github, supplied links to the edits and to this HN thread. The canned response was:
"Our review of the account(s) and/or content named in your report has concluded. We have determined that one or more violations of GitHub’s Terms of Service have occurred and have taken appropriate action in response."
It took 2h40m, genuinely impressed how quick the turnaround was :)
zigbook edited a 3rd party comment to say "I’m autistic and sperging out over stuff on the internet that doesn’t actually matter. Don’t mind me."
Just your run off the mill AI grifter.
EDIT: https://lobste.rs/s/pbn3zy/zigbook_learn_zig_programming_lan...
"Quick research - author's actual profile is https://github.com/zk-evm, and he's a potential scammer from crypto spaces, who also happens to be running fake GitHub Organisation of the Cursor editor, along with related BuyMeACoffee claiming it being official page of the "Cursor AI Editor"."
> Quick research - author's actual profile is https://github.com/zk-evm
The account is called zig-vm now.
And here's his real github account: https://github.com/gweidart
An old version of a related contact page: https://web.archive.org/web/20250320001430/https://gweidart....
lists as a donation link: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/Newcomer214
So, gweidart is probably this guy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandon-newcomer-7275aa228/
Yeah I came to that conclusion as well, though from zkevm.bio (which has a Venmo link) but was unsure about dropping his name publicly.
How did you connect this account back to the "real" account?
It is not. zk-evm refers to a type of blockchain. It's not a unique/singular link.
That's a pretty strong link, nice work!
zig-vm is now pilot-repl (user id 216412417)
That's mostly just odd. Either a young teen way in over their head or a weirdly non-functional adult.
your other PR made me laugh: https://github.com/zigbook/zigbook/pull/46 absolutely wild that they had the gall to report you, lol
Plagiarism is a moral wrong.
But copyright infringement is a legal wrong (a civil liability).
Is what they're doing infringing on a copyrighted work? Or does it fail to uphold license terms? Many open source licenses have some amount of attribution as a requirement, so that'd be something to consider.
It's addressed in the post. MIT license. Zigbook is not honoring the attribution requirement. A PR to change that was closed and obfuscated.
> Zigbook is not honoring the attribution requirement
It's crazy how many people treat MIT as if it were public domain.
I genuinely believe more people violate permissive licenses than copyleft license. I have no data to back this up, but just look at how much people focused on if LLMs were violating the GPL by reproducing code covered by the GPL without reproducing the license. If LLMs violate the GPL, they violate all licenses besides ones that are effectively public domain.
This probably depends on country, but AFAIK in most of europe, even in public domain, the „you can’t pass another’s work as your own” part of copyright is still active and doesn’t expire.
Something like, "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith" is probably sufficient.
not so much to AI companies :)
AI is actually beginning to encourage "restricted source", public-only-gets-binary debates to simply avoid such legal issues.
Write a snail-mail letter to get the real sources. Repositories are private with a small well-vetted list of contributors. Also avoid slop-PR headaches that away.
If you were licensing MIT, ostensibly it’s not the copying you care about, just the attribution. There is always the option to turn off prs, or even distribute code without using github.
GitHub has never allowed public repos to disable PRs in particular. There's no setting for that.
It's not directly possible, no, but with branch protection rules and this Github action it is trivial to set up: https://github.com/dessant/repo-lockdown
Sorry, this sounds like the absolutely worst idea ever. The way to kill open source as such. Sloppy PRs will end when the idiot HRs release there is no value in them. Plagiarism isn't really anything new and AI doesn't really change much there. But adding friction to examining source is a sure way to make no one care to contribute.
Honest question, what are "HR"s? I only know that acronym for "Human Resources" and I don't understand how that has anything to do with code contribution
> Human Resources > code contribution
Activity on github - must be a productive programmer. Have a thousand issues open - definitely a hire. I'm not talking about the Valley, but in India, as well as some some backwaters in the West that's how it seems to be. Talk about misaligned incentives.
I just can't get over how ridicioulus the "no ai" statement is.
I really love the part where llm.txt has the same notice, something humans will never read, or the fact that llm.txt exists considering that there is distaste for AI in every part of this llm generated book.
"Not generated by AI" is something that every programmer everywhere is going to say about their own work, even when it's obviously AI generated. I've started to publicly call people out when I see they've posted something on social media (LinkedIn, etc.) when I see they've made an AI-generated post. The fraud has to stop.
There's also the option of embracing it.
https://github.com/Lillecarl/lix/commit/9ac72bbd0c7802ca83a9...
I'm not ashamed to use AI if it improves my output, people draw the line of "acceptable use" differently just like drug addicts talk shit about each other's drugs to justify their own. I think honesty is more important than cleanliness.
Kind of hard unfortunately, now when one gets evaluated how much we're improving our daily work with AI, when the annual feedback meeting comes.
The no AI devs will get a "needs improvement" report.
I've talked to people who got fired for not embracing AI, so go out there and say how much more productive you are even if it's a lie.
I stopped using linkedin once the mediapipe epidemic started and everyone who could type pip install mediapipe could write a half baked hand and face gesture demo to show themselves as the "cool programmer".
The "no AI" statement reminds me of the Chinese idiom: "there are no 300 taels of silver here" (there is no money buried here). It's a clumsy way of denying something.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%AD%A4%E5%9C%B0%E7%84%A1%E...
> I just can't get over how ridicioulus the "no ai" statement is
You don't have to. I'm sure there are lots of other communities that welcome low-effort slop with no effort put into it.
@Zigtools:
Thank you for your educative post, letting the community know.
Don't let it to drag you down in any way. This is emotionally draining and takes away motivation, but keep going.
I remember reading the original zig book post and how weird it smelt. Even though it’s LLM written there’s more than a trivial amount of effort put into it. What could anyone possibly have to gain by doing this?
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I could see LLMs copying code as innocent mistake, but identical sha256sum on wasm files...jikes
The only stupid thing here is that the zigtools playground is mit licensed, so all zigbook had to do was acknowledging original copyright.
original submission dicussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45947810
Playground wise, is Zigs wasm compiler able to compile out simd wasm in the browser? I'm trying to find the best languages that can. So far it's just assemblyscript and c/c++ and their compilers are big.
I haven't dug deep but it seems Zig's Wasm target does support SIMD.
> WebAssembly portable SIMD intrinsics
https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/src/branch/master/lib/inclu...
The issue is I think that code is based on LLVM and and I am not sure the self-hosted Zig compiler that runs well in Wasm can do it.
I see, I don't know the internals of the compiler enough to find where that would be in the codebase. As an aside, their new home for the Git repo at Codeberg doesn't seem to have code search functionality. Probably simpler to clone the repo and grep through any way.
I decided to start learning Zig this past week, and typing in "zig book" to a search engine led me to that project. After a handful of pages, I had no clue what was going on and couldn't follow it (that said, I am new).
I quickly found https://ziglang.org/learn/, and the guide is great. For ziglings, make sure you're on the latest dev build (as it says in the README)! (Edit: or get the tagged release for the version you have!)
I went down the same path last week, and found Zigbook to be a very poor resource for learning. +1 for ziglings, that's been my favorite so far
Disappointing.
When zigbook first appeared here, I took a cursory scan, and it looked pretty solid and a useful resource. Seems it duped me and got me good. I was even defending the use of AI a little - although the claim needed to go.
Seems they just were just trying to do over a nascent community that I'm interested in seeing growing and wasn't a member of yet.
Good riddance, then.
This is just a vibe coder who tried spin his business onto a growing language. They don't care about their product (code) quality as long as it sells.
since zig is famously decentralized, i don't think there is a way to effectively combat bad actors like these? there is no "official zig org" that can disown them
Its the opposite in my understanding. Zig has a BDFL.
Trademarks are the usual cudgel of choice to enforce a bad actor claiming to be part of offcial Zig.
But he isn’t. He’s just writing an AI slop book about Zig. Surely there’s nothing legally wrong with that? He never said it’s an official book or backed by the Zig project.
The trademark cudgel is used on people who release an incompatible language that they insist on calling Zig, confusing people who want to try Zig. Or people who add malware to the Zig tool chain and try to distribute that.
Trademark can’t be used to control bad actors like zigbook.
> Surely there’s nothing legally wrong with that?
Incorrect. Not honoring the attribution requirement in the MIT license is a copyright infringement because it violates the terms of the license, which are legally enforceable conditions.
> I wouldn't be so quick with the "incorrect" if I were you. You haven't even taken the trouble to read two sentences.
I wouldn't be so quick with the dismissal if I were you. You haven't even taken the trouble to read the article.
Also, Quad erat demonstrandum - the infringing repo no longer exists.
Mm thats a good point. I'm not entirely clear on the limits of trademarks in this case. Its Zigbook rather then Zig.
I read a lot about this when Rust was considering adopting a trademark policy. The main use cases for enforcing the trademark were
- preventing someone who hardforked the project from creating an incompatible language while using the same name.
- preventing someone from distributing malware while still using the same name.
Because if you notice, neither of these clash with the MIT license that many languages use. You need to enforce your trademark to stop this kind of behaviour.
Zigbook can argue that they aren’t causing any confusion between themselves and the Zig language. The Zig foundation could argue that the name implies an endorsement by the project and they should call themselves The Unofficial Zig Book instead. I don’t know which way it goes.
In a decentralized but communicating community, this kind of post is raising awareness, and then the others in the community will make their own choices regarding the matter.
Our rules are so easy to follow but I'm not sad that the the consequences for breaking them are serious, in terms of your social reputation at least
I wonder what tools the Zig team has to deal with trolls like this.
Is the zig name or logo trademarked? What about the mascot he's using as his github picture?
They're violating the terms of the MIT license as mentioned in the article, so maybe Zigtools has legal standing.
As for lying about no AI, being an asshole isn't illegal, so no angle there.
Any other ideas I missed?
Lying potentially opens up fraud angles if they are soliciting or receiving something of value. Maybe false advertising even they are giving it away for free. A lot of this will depend on who has jurisdiction
I’m doing AoC on Zig this year. Zigtools will be my reference. Cheers!
There should be something of an OFAC Sanction List for SWE for people who blatantly transgress moral and ethical lines.
Ahh good idea; like the Brady list for bad police officers in US. Just have to figure out how to ensure it has teeth and doesn’t become a witch hunt
Wtf is happening in the zig world this week
And now it’s made private.
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Neither are the Zigtools folks. If you've ever run an open source project, you know that instead of running on money, they run on community goodwill. Having people take the project's creation, claim it as their own, and not comply with the license, are all damaging to people's motivation to contribute.
Misinformation and poor learning tools can do real damage to the experience of new zig users, which is incredibly meaningful.
Censorship is even worse
Requesting attribution (as the MIT license demands), hardly rises to the level of "censorship"
Or deleting all the comments there.
Whenever I hear anything about Zig it seems to be drama. Very bizarre, will avoid.
Ditto... I love Zig as a language but I worry the high-level community builders (including Andrew) are a little too antagonistic to foster a positive, tolerant, patient community in the long term. In saying that, my infrequent interactions in the reddit and discord are always pleasant.
I don’t think Andrew is a bad guy, but his tone seems to attract a certain kind of person. All the technical people I’ve interacted with in the Zig community have been awesome, but for whatever reason it also attracts a lot of people who are just there to shit on anything mainstream.
He has a pattern of taking any bit of criticism of his language on bad faith, and immediately goes all defensive accusing the criticizer of being a psyop working with a rival language.
This is all childish and unacceptable behavior.
Actual Zig community spaces like Ziggit is very pleasant as far as programming language forums go. I think Zig just occupies a unique space in the language ecosystem (a very performance oriented, production oriented language that is not afraid to rapidly try things and throw them out if it doesn't meet expectations in practice - not many languages sit in the middle of this venn diagram) and people see it as an opportunity to gain a social foothold in something potentially great.
It seems like it might be in the nature of a language with these goals and this development process to attract people like this, no matter how warm and welcoming the community leaders are.
This is the first drama I've heard related to Zig, and seems to have nothing to do with the project itself–this is someone writing an online book about Zig
Zig has previously been involved in all kinds of drama. Including involving money, battles among developers, attempts to split/fork the language, and self-pushed conflicts with other programming languages. This is just the latest, in the long series.
This isn’t anything to do with Zig though, it just happens to be the language that this crook chose.
They’ve could’ve picked Nim and done this whole spiel there (you’d want to pick a fledgling language that isn’t saturated with documentation, so the stalwarts aren’t usable).
Funny, because it's the exact opposite for me. You sure it's not just your news source preferences?
There's nothing inherently Zig about this - it's some random person who is not affiliated with the project in any way. They could have done the exact same BS copyright-infringing AI slop project in any language.
It's unbelievable to me that Github allows repo admins to edit other people's comments.
That's a useful feature for long-running issues to include updates in the opening post. Or to improve formatting when a bug reporter isn't familiar with markdown. And that it shows in the edit history should at least discourage abuse.
The vanishing small percentage of people that would actually check a comment’s history are the same people who would check a Wikipedia entries history.
At a bare minimum, the post should have in big bold lettering: Edited by <user_name>.
Allowing the maintainer to prepend a comment to the top seems more sensible to me to be honest. Would make API use harder potentially, but it would avoid weird abuse like this.
reporting abusive edits requires moderation/arbitration. the rules can instead be changed to sidestep the issue, while maintaining the value of the feature.
Report to whom? Github, who allows the behavior and therefore doesn’t see anything wrong with it, or the repo admins who have proven they they couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the very thing you’re reporting? The well is already poisoned, there is no reason to think that they’d suddenly change their stance and cooperate.
> designing it around adversarial use would be a loss for everyone
hmm... isn't this more of a 'personal viewpoint'? why are you stating this like a fact?
moreover, how would it "adding Edited by ~" constitute as a "loss for everyone" ?
I agree on adding "report abuse" button, but if no one notices that edit, how would anyone know what to report in the first place?
Yes, with an edit history I think it's a useful feature. I often use it to add pre formatting to errors or code examples people post, or to edit titles to be more helpful ("weird issue with X" → "clearer description of the bug" after triage). It used to be that it didn't have an edit history. I think it was added about five or six years ago? You could also delete comments with no indication there was ever a comment there.
I once had someone request a feature and they became quite aggressive after I declined it. I essentially told them to fuck off[1] and that was the end of it. A few months after this he strategically edited and deleted some comments to make it appear I was just insulting them for no reason and then started posting on HN and Lobsters what an asshole I was. Back then, there was no real indication of their manipulation.
[1]: In part because he was already a known troll. Well, maybe troll isn't the right word, but he does have a history of mass-reporting hundreds of feature requests across hundreds of repos, to the point where it's basically just spam. He's been banned from Github many times over this, but just keeps creating new accounts and it all starts over again.
It obviously does not discourage abuse
I get what you're saying, but I feel like they should highlight comments in some way if a repo admin completely replaces a comment with different text. I'm struggling to imagine a situation where that would really be appropriate. The "Edited by: username" seems too easy to overlook.
What would be a valid reason to allow this? That just seems mind-numbingly stupid.
I maintain the formatter for Dart, so a lot of my job involves maintaining the issue tracker for the formatter.
I use this feature all the time. Users get Markdown wrong, give titles to issues that don't make any sense, have typos, etc. Being able to edit issues helps me keep the issue tracker easier to understand and navigate for maintainers and users.
Every feature can be used. That doesn't mean every feature should not exist. The fact that the edit history is still visible means it's next to impossible to abuse the feature. It works fine.
Markdown is pretty tricky for new users to figure out, so quite often, users will just paste big snippets of code without formatting them, which is nearly unreadable. I'll usually edit these posts to add ```backticks``` around any code.
or they'll do what i assume is the jira style code blocks with just `multiple lines of code`
This is particularly useful when editing the top-level comment of a popular issue to specify the current status. Or when a peer opened a placeholder issue and you fill it up. Etc.
If you actually use GitHub as a social network of sorts, there are many reasons to do edit comments. All the edits are visible anyway. You're on Git-Hub, you can already edit everything you have write access to.
For GitHub specifically? This world. This is a useful feature
Censoring insults or illegal speech (depending on jurisdiction) would be the main reason I can think of.
It's not my feature, no reason to be angry.
in such case ability to delete comment would be enough
The responds and edits are simply unprofessional and immature. I don't hate AI and in fact I use it for many research based tasks, helping me narrowing a lot of tough topics, but it is the People with these kind of attitude turns me off.
AI use is fine, though pretending you haven't used it when you obviously did rubs me the wrong way.
I get why GitHub allows editing comments of other users though for public repos I guess it allows for this kind of abuse
Exactly, being dishonest is the real problem here.
Luckily, every edits are recorded in history, so they can't really hide their abusive behavior, for now. Even if they did, seem like there are often people faster in archiving their posts than they hiding their post.
I think the open abuse of people raising issues with the project is morally worse than the license issues or even lying about AI usage. Fraud is already bad, but someone can do that for reasons other than pure mean-spiritedness. To pull this nonsense, you have to actively take pleasure in making other people feel bad.
I don't mid the immature part, they are hate fueled. The ableism is disgusting.
Just knew what ableism is, but I don't think that is one but the more classic things bullies trying to downplay others by calling other idiots or autistic.
Either way, ableism or simply abusive behavior, both lacks respect, honestly and responsibility, which is a sign of immature behavior. Mature people can be playful, but they know when to act in the correct time, and definitely not in something that lead to a huge PR disaster.
Thus, being immature is the root cause of all these bad behaviors, including discrimination.
I find GitHub to be very prompt and responsive to abuse reports, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it was them if people reported the comments etc.
I notice again I haven't internalized how much https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SuspiciouslySpec... really happens.
Follow-up: seems they've been banned
The only public repo remaining under their github account is this VSCode-Copilot integration tool (https://github.com/zigbook/pilot).
It seems their whole account is gone now.
Did you make up A-Lot-AI? Can I suggest "A-Lott-a-AI"?
If you did, this is the greatest thing created in 3 ABC ("After Bullshit ChatGPTification"; ChatGPT launched in 2022.).
NB: Since ChatGPT is basically the new Messiah for many, I really think we should now be using dates like 3 ABC or 5 POS. POS stands for "Prior to Overlord Slop/Shit". I suggest we give up AD/BC.
But, please, I'm not the messiah! (hopefully you have watched Life of Brian!)
probably user reports to GitHub's moderation team