6 ms·
Zigbook Is Plagiarizing the Zigtools Playground
- wavemode 11mo agooriginal submission dicussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45947810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45947810
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- darshanime 11mo agosince 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
- IncreasePosts 11mo agoIn 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.
- pa7ch 11mo agoIts 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.
- testdelacc1 11mo agoBut 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.
- lenkite 11mo 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.
- testdelacc1 11mo agoWe 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.
- lenkite 11mo ago> 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.
- pa7ch 11mo agoMm thats a good point. I'm not entirely clear on the limits of trademarks in this case. Its Zigbook rather then Zig.
- testdelacc1 11mo agoI 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.
- do_not_redeem 11mo agoI 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?
- bragr 11mo agoLying 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-chan 11mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- jesseb34r 11mo agoMisinformation and poor learning tools can do real damage to the experience of new zig users, which is incredibly meaningful.
- vasco 11mo agoCensorship is even worse
- swiftcoder 11mo agoRequesting attribution (as the MIT license demands), hardly rises to the level of "censorship"
- bjt 11mo agoNeither 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.
- wyldfire 11mo agoPlagiarism 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.
- bjt 11mo agoIt's addressed in the post. MIT license. Zigbook is not honoring the attribution requirement. A PR to change that was closed and obfuscated.
- _zagj 11mo ago> Zigbook is not honoring the attribution requirement It's crazy how many people treat MIT as if it were public domain.
- adrian17 11mo agoThis 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.
- poly2it 11mo agoThis piques my interest, what is the legally required recognition of a derivative's parent work? Must I be able to list dependencies, or should I be able to verify whether a parent work is included in mine? What if my work is a second derivative of a work which I am unaware of, because the work in between improperly didn't recognise its parent? Am I legally responsible to investigate such cases?
- projektfu 11mo agoSomething like, "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith" is probably sufficient.
- kachapopopow 11mo agoI 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.
- booleandilemma 11mo 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.
- lillecarl 11mo agoThere's also the option of embracing it. https://github.com/Lillecarl/lix/commit/9ac72bbd0c7802ca83a907d1fec135f31aab6d24#diff-0310e4ce73c9d1e6384568c35fcdd36fdb4c08829b85847febaf7ae0ce69eb5aR395 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.
- nurettin 11mo agoI 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".
- pjmlp 11mo agoKind 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.
- kachapopopow 11mo ago
- gnarlouse 11mo agoHad 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.
- ayhanfuat 11mo agoIndeed: @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 https://github.com/zigbook/zigbook/pull/43)
- temptemptemp111 11mo ago[dead]
- vintagedave 11mo agoWow. It's also an extremely reasonable pull request, here's the only commit: https://github.com/zigbook/zigbook/compare/main...SuperAuguste:zigbook:fix-license-violations https://github.com/zigbook/zigbook/compare/main...SuperAugus...
- arp242 11mo agoI 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_pl 11mo agohelp us, it's gone
- ajifurai 11mo agoOriginal commit: https://github.com/SuperAuguste/zigbook/commit/8cc9edd35b3e3aeee1e15b938e1a8f1a98a341f6 https://github.com/SuperAuguste/zigbook/commit/8cc9edd35b3e3...
- koolala 11mo agoPlayground 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.
- lioeters 11mo agoI 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/include/wasm_simd128.h https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/src/branch/master/lib/inclu...
- koolala 11mo agoThe 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.
- lioeters 11mo agoI 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.
- nmilo 11mo agoI 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?
- temptemptemp111 11mo ago[dead]
- vanous 11mo 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.
- lillecarl 11mo agohttps://github.com/zigbook/zigbook/pull/45#issuecomment-3592358539 https://github.com/zigbook/zigbook/pull/45#issuecomment-3592... Would this be grounds to report zigbook to GitHub maybe? This is wild
- SSLy 11mo agozigbook 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_language#c_epxt2r https://lobste.rs/s/pbn3zy/zigbook_learn_zig_programming_lan... "Quick research - author's actual profile is https://github.com/zk-evm 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"."
- KomoD 11mo ago> Quick research - author's actual profile is https://github.com/zk-evm https://github.com/zk-evm The account is called zig-vm now. And here's his real github account: https://github.com/gweidart https://github.com/gweidart
- jamesbelchamber 11mo agoHow did you connect this account back to the "real" account?
- CGamesPlay 11mo agoWell, the name of the "real" account is "zkevm.dev", and the previous account was zk-evm. Those are just letters to me, but it does seem like a clear link. Couldn't say that either is "real", though.
- csomar 11mo ago
- blks 11mo agoAnd now it’s made private.
- nusl 11mo agoRepo 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://imgur.com/a/LsvBXY1 https://web.archive.org/web/20251130091635/https://github.com/zigbook/zigbook/pull/45 https://web.archive.org/web/20251130091635/https://github.co... The tool itself claims "Zero AI" (https://www.zigbook.net/ https://www.zigbook.net/) yet is very obviously A-Lot-AI.
- mcintyre1994 11mo agoI 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.
- Meneth 11mo agoThe only public repo remaining under their github account is this VSCode-Copilot integration tool (https://github.com/zigbook/pilot https://github.com/zigbook/pilot).
- Zambyte 11mo agoIt seems their whole account is gone now.
- NoteyComplexity 11mo agoThe 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.
- nusl 11mo agoAI 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
- kklisura 11mo agoThere should be something of an OFAC Sanction List for SWE for people who blatantly transgress moral and ethical lines.
- kyleee 11mo agoAhh 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
- kshri24 11mo agoGets worse: https://github.com/EclipseFdn/open-vsx.org/issues/6395 https://github.com/EclipseFdn/open-vsx.org/issues/6395
- andrewflnr 11mo agoAlready gone. https://web.archive.org/web/20251130101438/https://github.com/EclipseFdn/open-vsx.org/issues/6395 https://web.archive.org/web/20251130101438/https://github.co...
- Havoc 11mo agoI could see LLMs copying code as innocent mistake, but identical sha256sum on wasm files...jikes
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- dangoodmanUT 11mo agoWtf is happening in the zig world this week
- znpy 11mo agoThe only stupid thing here is that the zigtools playground is mit licensed, so all zigbook had to do was acknowledging original copyright.
- b800h 11mo agoWhenever I hear anything about Zig it seems to be drama. Very bizarre, will avoid.
- jamiejquinn 11mo agoDitto... 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.
- Zambyte 11mo agoActual 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.
- yoyohello13 11mo agoI 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.
- flykespice 11mo agoHe 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.
- 11mo ago
- PaulRobinson 11mo agoDisappointing. 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.
- gnarlouse 11mo agoI’m doing AoC on Zig this year. Zigtools will be my reference. Cheers!
- conartist6 11mo agoOur 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
- robertwpearce 11mo agoI 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/ 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!)
- poetril 11mo agoI 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
- flykespice 11mo agoThis 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.