limor & i posted a statement last night (below). as you have seen, anyone can tag/email the founder of flux ai, the board member (8vc), and the board member/vc and ask them to reach out to limor if they want to go on a pod' or resolve this openly together to set a good example on a dispute. if the most powerful people in the world with all the resources and advice (fenwick) cannot talk, and solve this, who can?
On Responsible Security Disclosures and Free Speech
Adafruit has worked with our longtime employment firm and team to make sure there is indemnification for all employees and contractors reporting responsible security disclosures at Adafruit. This is not any different… it only makes it more clear that the bad actors and companies that try to use responsible disclosure as a way to chill free speech will not stop us from publishing facts, or even the answers to an interview with a startup that makes lots of questionable claims.
Before issuing any public response, and before involving the press - Limor wrote directly to Flux’s founder, Matthias Wagner. Not through lawyers. Founder to founder.
She proposed: a podcast of his choosing, open questions and answers, with the community watching and taking part. She offered to keep Phil off the podcast.
Her words:
“Before we both spend lots of time and money embroiled in a legal dispute, I would like to explore with you a way to reconcile things and perhaps turn this into a positive… adults with good intentions can work together and solve them… Cooler heads can prevail and we could set a good example for the community, building a future together where everyone can make and share electronics.”
She followed up the next day, again.
That offer stands. We would still rather build than litigate, and we would still rather talk in the open. We think that is how this should work - between two companies who both believe anyone with a browser should be able to make electronics, we can set a good example together.
We will update the community, and will still look forward to sharing our story.
It might be being suggested in that statement, but to me that reads that there's a potential opportunity there for a delayed AMA on this?
That if people were to email press@adafruit.com with a subject line (for example) of 'FLUX - AMA for later', these questions could be rounded up and the responses could then go onto a Adafruit blog page later, when and if applicable?
new "altaccount2026" only posting twice, today, about this. we are very much looking forward to sharing our story, very very soon.
if you "altaccount2026 " really want a twitter archive of my photos of my kids, puppets, links to my articles, posts, and more, it may be available on some archiver.
we are very much looking forward to sharing our story.
This is just another instance of Adafruit's "drama-journalism" functioning as advertising. Adafruit turns its director/ex-director (current status unknown) Phillip Torrone's compulsive personal feuds into principled-sounding "advocacy" and harvests the resulting outrage as free marketing. Adafruit publicising a dispute while not publishing the underlying letter/breach is the smoking gun for this.
People are afraid to speak out on this because engaging @ptorrone or critiquing Adafruit carries significant risks.
There is a pattern of aggressive public confrontation before private resolution along with disproportionate responses & difficulty disengaging with critics.
Even mild criticism or jokes has resulted in abusive messages from PT, with Phil Torrone contacting their managers, employers, ex-employers (as called out by sparkfun) and even a critic’s partner’s workplace.
PT will continue the escalation even after being blocked/suspended on platforms resulting in @ptorrone being temporarily banned from Bluesky last year. Some people were even harassed via their Etsy stores.
My take is I've never heard of Flux but I've repeatedly heard of Adafruit getting into drama, so the bayesian in me is definitely not prepared to jump on whoever Flux is. Better to wait for the facts, than give Adafruit the benifit of the doubt.
I have, and the article does not in any way address my question. You also seem to be a brand new user, so in case you're not aware, HN guidelines say to refrain from mentioning whether or not someone has read the link.
As a long time reader I keep wondering how it is more conductive to the discourse to comment without reading than to point that the answers might be in the article someone ignored.
Just reply with a quote from the article. They will understand they did not read carefully, and you can avoid the low-value 'read the article' snark (that might be false since often it is not actually in the article when somebody does that).
My question wasn't "how to handle that better". I hope it's okay to point it out :)
I would also argue it's not "often" the case someone asking the obvious question seemingly answered in the article had actually read it. It happens, surely, but it's not a rule of thumb.
That's too meta for a thread here anyways, I think.
It's an in-actionable "question" / comment. The rule does not claim one thing is better than the other. One is easily enforceable, the other is indemonstrable. If the point of this exchange is to better understand and use HN, the reason is because it is not hard to be constructive instead of throwing out non sequiturs.
And I didn't say it's '"often" the case someone asking the obvious question seemingly answered in the article had actually read it'. I said the person pointing it out while refusing to provide receipts or cordially engage is often wrong about what they think is obviously in the article. It's worthless noise regardless.
I'd rather read "it's in the article you didn't read" than pretty much anything else.
The ideal case of course is that there are only legit questions and discussion from people who actually read what they are talking about. If they miss something that's fine as long as it's the honest exception. But this is not a thing that exists or can exist, so it doesn't count. It's not actually available to be a "What I'd like the most."
The next-most ideal case is when someone talks about something they didn't read, that no one else responds at all. The noise is the minimum possible noise from the original source and it just gets ignored. This aslo is not a real thing, and so not up for consideration.
What's left is some flavore of "noise". This is not avoidable. it will exist and the only choices are what form and flavor it takes.
I think it is most conductive for everyone, the poster, the bystanders, everyone, including people who don't like "noise", is the obvious and natural response. That it's the obvious and natural response for a reason.
Low value and snark may be true but it's irrelevant. It's still the best most productive reaction. (Within reason, 500 of the same response to one comment isn't very interesting reading, but multiple of the same agreeing response does serve a purpose which serves us all.)
That's what I mean by "I'd rather read that than almost anything else."
There are are no better options that actually exist.
As for the hall monitor aspect, telling people they shouldn't say the obvious most applicable thing is also hall monitor.
All in all, I just find the argument sorta valid but weak.
Can we see the content of the demand letter? It should have been linked to your post. It's difficult for us to evaluate the merits of their allegations otherwise.
"one dude's little devboard company" ... that "one dude" is limor fried, who's been shipping open hardware since 2005, and before that from her MIT dorm room...
webserial in firefox happened because a bunch of people and companies, adafruit included, shipped code, fixed bugs, made open hardware, and did the standards grind.
clicking the name/link of the comment (kotaKat) ... defending right-to-repair, foss, anti-drm, anti-walled-garden.
someone ships open source hardware and software that work together... and you shit on it.
join in and tinker, share code and projects ... or stay addicted to being miserable. if you cannot see this as a positive, nothing will ever be.
(posting this in both comments about this) i am the author of the article.
the adafruit blog is not trying to block you my dude(s). we are under constant automated scraping and ddos, largely from ai crawlers, and we use cloudflare to keep the site online at all. the nature of of these things will cause false positives depending on browser, extensions, network, or referrer.
the site respects do not track, privacy badger, and similar tools. the site will probably never pass the purity tests for everyone, the goal is to stay independent, publishing, without selling readers or folding into a mega-platform. we're open source and vc free, chill out about us, ok?
if you still can’t get an article and want it in html, markdown, text, or pdf, email me and i’ll send it directly, i will read it on the phone to you, i am not kidding.
we’re trying, and we’ll keep trying. you gotta meet somewhere.
Cloudflare is ridiculous. I can't even open it using Cromite (privacy enhanced, but not over the top, android browser).
I get:
blog.adafruit.com
Verifying you are human. This may take a few seconds.
blog.adafruit.com needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding.
And this hangs forever. What difference does it make if I access this site using a browser (blocked anyway) or I asked my LLM to fetch the content? I bet my LLM coukd get it anyway as I'm using basic local scraping with firecrawl for backup. So my LLM if it fails to retrieve using my basic local crawl4ai will use my paid firecrawl api and those guys can scrape EVERYTHING.
I do not understand why do you (as a site owner) care? Are these bots generating so much traffic? Can you set it up to serve text only version to them then?
this isn’t an adafruit-specific stance, it’s a web-wide problem. automated scraping and bot traffic is enough to take independent sites offline, and cloudflare is a tool we use to keep the site available at all. we publish full-text rss with no blockers here: https://blog.adafruit.com/rss
. if cloudflare trips on your browser and you want an article, email me and i’ll send it in whatever format you want, we're always working to make it easier, it's hard, would rather have help than snarks and dunks.
My office uses ZScalar and lots of sites automatically block that because the company running the product make the product seem like an "open anonymous proxy".
When companies that earn their money by selling things deliberately make their website hard to access (especially for scrapers -- of any sort), then they're making a choice to abandon their customers.
It seems ruthlessly disappointing to consider, but maybe Adafruit isn't cut out for this whole Internet thing.
Can you elaborate on the logic that makes preventing scrapers (note, you didn't mention actually hindering accessibility technologies) customer antagonistic?
When a product doesn't show up at all using the [potential] customer's chosen tools (whether a search engine like Google, or an LLM like ChatGPT), then that product is invisible.
An invisible product is one that may as well not exist. When a person can't find it, then they also can't purchase it.
(posting this in both comments about this) i am the author of the article.
the adafruit blog is not trying to block you my dude(s). we are under constant automated scraping and ddos, largely from ai crawlers, and we use cloudflare to keep the site online at all. the nature of of these things will cause false positives depending on browser, extensions, network, or referrer.
the site respects do not track, privacy badger, and similar tools. the site will probably never pass the purity tests for everyone, the goal is to stay independent, publishing, without selling readers or folding into a mega-platform. we're open source and vc free, chill out about us, ok?
if you still can’t get an article and want it in html, markdown, text, or pdf, email me and i’ll send it directly, i will read it on the phone to you, i am not kidding.
we’re trying, and we’ll keep trying. you gotta meet somewhere.
the adafruit blog is not trying to block you my dude(s). we are under constant automated scraping and ddos, largely from ai crawlers, and we use cloudflare to keep the site online at all. the nature of of these things will cause false positives depending on browser, extensions, network, or referrer.
the site respects do not track, privacy badger, and similar tools. the site will probably never pass the purity tests for everyone, the goal is to stay independent, publishing, without selling readers or folding into a mega-platform. we're open source and vc free, chill out about us, ok?
if you still can’t get an article and want it in html, markdown, text, or pdf, email me and i’ll send it directly, i will read it on the phone to you, i am not kidding.
we’re trying, and we’ll keep trying. you gotta meet somewhere.
> Sorry, you have been blocked. You are unable to access adafruit.com
> Why have I been blocked?
> This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.
there is not some conspiracy to stop you personally from visiting adafruit.com, if you are still having problems, email me, i am the author, i can send you just about any form of text in almost any way? ... that message is probably some cloudflare message if the site is getting hammered... like it is now, i can look into it...
not everyone who works at adafruit works in our industry city, brooklyn factory. we've been doing remote before it was a thing, you can check out our shows or ask before assuming the worst, but whatevers, you made up your mind and want us to move to florida.
I would love to use Adafruit boards in my production, but I have to resort to custom Chinese PCB stuff to be competitive. I don't want anything, but taxes and CoL is basic business logic.
SparkFun is in Colorado, which isn't a low tax state but their cost of living is still lower. So all else equals, they are going to earn maybe 5-10% more profit on the sale of a commodity item like a Teensy. You have better products than they do, all else equals you could earn 25%+ more than them, by simply moving to greener pastures, whether that be NC, TN, NV, or FL.
>simply moving to greener pastures, whether that be NC, TN, NV, or FL
Yeah, but then they’d be in NC, TN, NV, or FL which, frankly, sounds absolutely miserable. They made the right choice by being in NYC.
Adafruit seems to be doing very well where they are. Why would they want to suffer in such junk states like those with worthless governments when they could continue to be where they are and are happy? They’d also be scraping the bottom of the barrel in those places for talent for the necessary in-person positions. The stars up mentioned sure are cheaper, and they still cost more than they are worth.
As a long time internet user and consumer of products from both Adafruit and Sparkfun, I don't think your participation in this thread is doing you any favors. Like others here, I advise de-engaging with this debacle for now.
your writing style in particular fits with a lot of autistic people I've seen, FWIW. but I don't support using "autistic" as an insult (it's honestly the opposite, IMO)
They know. Most of these green troll accounts are alts of older, established accounts that don't want to risk their karma and a ban on their main account.
Don't bother interacting with them. Just flag them and move on.
i asked if the person was going to "dox" me if i purchased a sticker that was in my cart already. there are multiple people making accounts using my handle, so i'm now on a server where there is some due process before fake reports or others pretending to be me.
> i asked if the person was going to "dox" me if i purchased a sticker that was in my cart already.
That implies you asked this of some random Etsy seller you happened to be interested in purchasing a sticker from, due to general privacy concerns. However, as I understand it, you instead tracked down the Etsy store of someone who had criticized and blocked you on social media, specifically to send them further unwanted messages related to your previous conversation about "doxxing" another user. Is this correct?
> there are multiple people making accounts using my handle, so i'm now on a server where there is some due process before fake reports or others pretending to be me.
Nick cited [1] specific since-suspended fediverse accounts linked to you: @ptorrone@fosstodon.org, @ptorrone@toot.community, @ptorrone@cyberplace.social, @ptorrone.bsky.social, @ptorrone@mastodon.nu. Are you denying involvement with those specific alt accounts, or just vaguely suggesting there might be other impersonators out there?
> However, as I understand it, you instead tracked down the Etsy store of someone who had criticized and blocked you on social media, specifically to send them further unwanted messages related to your previous conversation about "doxxing" another user.
I have zero knowledge of the drama beyond reading the posts here, but if this is true then that clearly falls into the harassment arena.
wow, I recommend people read the linked thread, it basically completely exonerates the "employee who made a hate site" with receipts. I came into this thinking adafruit was in the right, but wow
On Responsible Security Disclosures and Free Speech
Adafruit has worked with our longtime employment firm and team to make sure there is indemnification for all employees and contractors reporting responsible security disclosures at Adafruit. This is not any different… it only makes it more clear that the bad actors and companies that try to use responsible disclosure as a way to chill free speech will not stop us from publishing facts, or even the answers to an interview with a startup that makes lots of questionable claims.
–Ladyada, pt – Adafruit, June 9, 2026
https://adafruit.com/flux