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Zigbook Is Plagiarizing the Zigtools Playground

329 points10 hourszigtools.org
nusl4 hours ago

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://imgur.com/a/LsvBXY1

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.

jonathrg1 hour ago

It's unbelievable to me that Github allows repo admins to edit other people's comments.

the84721 hour ago

[delayed]

NeckBeardPrince1 hour ago

What would be a valid reason to allow this? That just seems mind-numbingly stupid.

halapro1 hour ago

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.

projektfu1 hour ago

Censoring insults or illegal speech (depending on jurisdiction) would be the main reason I can think of.

NoteyComplexity3 hours ago

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.

nusl2 hours ago

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

NoteyComplexity2 hours ago

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.

xrd1 hour ago

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!)

mcintyre19944 hours ago

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.

Meneth4 hours ago

The only public repo remaining under their github account is this VSCode-Copilot integration tool (https://github.com/zigbook/pilot).

arccy2 hours ago

probably user reports to GitHub's moderation team

lillecarl5 hours ago

https://github.com/zigbook/zigbook/pull/45#issuecomment-3592... Would this be grounds to report zigbook to GitHub maybe? This is wild

SSLy4 hours ago
ffsm84 hours ago

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)

SSLy4 hours ago

it's said something to paraphrase "I wonder what antisocial behaviour will be seen next instead of dealing with the feedback"

keyle2 hours ago

The whole thing looks very childish, I'm not sure I even fully understand the conversation of #43. Are they troll accounts?

slacktivism1235 hours ago

>Would this be grounds to report zigbook to GitHub maybe?

100%.

https://docs.github.com/en/communities/maintaining-your-safe...

Crestwave5 hours ago

Oh wow. Your original comment is pretty darn prophetic.

nusl4 hours ago

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?

SSLy5 hours ago

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"."

KomoD4 hours ago

> 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

jamesbelchamber4 hours ago

How did you connect this account back to the "real" account?

+1
speedgoose4 hours ago
+1
CGamesPlay4 hours ago
RestartKernel3 hours ago

That's mostly just odd. Either a young teen way in over their head or a weirdly non-functional adult.

p1nkpineapple4 hours ago

your other PR made me laugh: https://github.com/zigbook/zigbook/pull/46 absolutely wild that they had the gall to report you, lol

gnarlouse8 hours ago

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.

ayhanfuat7 hours ago

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)

vintagedave6 hours ago

Wow. It's also an extremely reasonable pull request, here's the only commit: https://github.com/zigbook/zigbook/compare/main...SuperAugus...

arp2425 hours ago

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.

ikari_pl4 hours ago

help us, it's gone

temptemptemp1116 hours ago

[dead]

littlestymaar6 hours ago

It turns out a language whose leader calls github's people “Monkeys” ended up attracting immature people, who would have thought, really?

jamesbelchamber6 hours ago

Was that not changed after feedback?

wyldfire8 hours ago

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.

bjt8 hours ago

It's addressed in the post. MIT license. Zigbook is not honoring the attribution requirement. A PR to change that was closed and obfuscated.

anonnon6 hours ago

> Zigbook is not honoring the attribution requirement

It's crazy how many people treat MIT as if it were public domain.

adrian174 hours ago

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.

+1
poly2it1 hour ago
lenkite5 hours ago

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.

femiagbabiaka2 hours ago

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.

mtndew4brkfst1 hour ago

GitHub has never allowed public repos to disable PRs in particular. There's no setting for that.

vanous7 hours ago

@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.

kachapopopow8 hours ago

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.

booleandilemma6 hours ago

"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.

lillecarl6 hours ago

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.

pjmlp5 hours ago

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.

nurettin6 hours ago

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".

otabdeveloper45 hours ago

> 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.

nmilo7 hours ago

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?

temptemptemp1117 hours ago

[dead]

Havoc2 hours ago

I could see LLMs copying code as innocent mistake, but identical sha256sum on wasm files...jikes

b800h1 hour ago

Whenever I hear anything about Zig it seems to be drama. Very bizarre, will avoid.

dangoodmanUT2 hours ago

Wtf is happening in the zig world this week

koolala7 hours ago

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.

wavemode9 hours ago

original submission dicussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45947810

znpy2 hours ago

The only stupid thing here is that the zigtools playground is mit licensed, so all zigbook had to do was acknowledging original copyright.

darshanime9 hours ago

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

pa7ch9 hours ago

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.

testdelacc16 hours ago

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.

lenkite5 hours ago

> 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.

testdelacc12 hours ago

We are specifically talking about what the Zig project/foundation headed by Andy Kelley can do to such bad actors using the Zig trademark - which is exactly nothing.

I wouldn't be so quick with the "incorrect" if I were you. You haven't even taken the trouble to read two sentences.

IncreasePosts9 hours ago

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.

kklisura3 hours ago

There should be something of an OFAC Sanction List for SWE for people who blatantly transgress moral and ethical lines.

blks4 hours ago

And now it’s made private.

do_not_redeem9 hours ago

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?

bragr7 hours ago

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

koakuma-chan8 hours ago

[flagged]

bjt8 hours ago

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.

jesseb34r8 hours ago

Misinformation and poor learning tools can do real damage to the experience of new zig users, which is incredibly meaningful.

vasco7 hours ago

Censorship is even worse

swiftcoder6 hours ago

Requesting attribution (as the MIT license demands), hardly rises to the level of "censorship"

+1
ayhanfuat6 hours ago