(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
sparkfun will continue to use limor’s open source code, libraries, and designs. that is how open source works, and we are fine with that, and that is awesome!
what is not speculation is - paul (teensy creator) told us directly that sparkfun’s decision to block us from purchasing teensy was final. that was not a heat of the moment thing, and it was not handled through normal purchasing channels. i do not even purchase. our purchasing team does. the same is true of the royalty payments sparkfun has made to adafruit for over a decade under standing agreements. there is essentially no day to day interaction. i asked if they are going to keep paying those, no reply yet.
the termination letter was addressed broadly to “adafruit leadership,” not to any specific operational contact. that alone tells you this was not a routine business dispute.
no current sparkfun employee did anything wrong here. one former employee did, and nate’s behavior toward limor has been an issue for years. i am done with that and him, so that part will sort itself out now.
> the termination letter was addressed broadly to “adafruit leadership,” not to any specific operational contact. that alone tells you this was not a routine business dispute
That really doesn’t tell me anything. I would like to humbly suggest you’re very close to this issue, in an already stressful personal situation, and you’re reading things between the lines kind of aggressively and overreacting.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, and I’m not saying whatever others did is ok, but I am saying that you aren’t improving anything by being here trying to litigate your case. I don’t think anyone who puts any thought into this can legitimately accuse you of anything except getting a little too worked up about it.
it seems like if i do not reply, it's worse? i totally get what you are saying, however i think we're part of this hackernews community too, and not here to litigate past issues, and i will probably always get a little too worked up when it comes to what i believe is a long history of a "competitor" doing things outside of "it's just business, get thicker skin" ...
Try this as a reply; "hello everyone. This seems to have all gotten out of hand. We want to continue selling teensy units, We've made a lot of sales working together and I want to salvage this working relationship and ensure we continue to do business together and sell as many Teensy units as possible. Why don't I, sparkfun and Paul Stoffregen get together for a zoom meeting next Monday and discuss this. At the end of the day I'm sure Paul S would prefer his product to be as widely available as possible and we want to help with that. Best regards - ptorrone".
That would be the mature and professional response which ensures continued sales for you, sparkfun and PJRC.
And for Christ's sake stop arguing business issues on social media and messaging boards. What are you doing, man?! :)
Having read the whole thing in great detail, I’m going to try to give you an honest perspective. Your competitor has done nothing to you. Someone loosely connected to your competitor (used to work there) did something extremely mild to you, and you have been overreacting to it so egregiously that it splashed over into your relationship with another company, through no fault of theirs. It is now to the point that you have made a complete ass of yourself. If you had simply let it drop like an adult, Nick never would have dropped that incredibly damning (to you) email chain. You blew it.
That's not necessarily correct. If you leave something standing without gainsaying it there is a substantial fraction of the viewers of the interaction who will come away with the impression that that party that did not speak up against the last comment lost the discussion because they ran out of arguments. This is so widespread that there are multiple names for the phenomenon and lots of good interaction has been ruined by it.
Obviously I don’t claim to speak for everyone else when I say it only seems that way to him. I’m being tongue in cheek. But I do think it’s the wrong instinct and the fact that some people agree isn’t reason to give into it.
You've already stopped replying, but I think an anecdotal stories might do you some good:
When I was 18, I had a situationship with a girl with abusive parents. One night she texted me to go get her because they were being awful (Mostly to each other) and she wanted to get away from it. When I took her back, even though they had told her she could go in the first place, they were angry with her for being out. The dad, angry with me, yelled at ~10PM and pointed a gun at me in my car.
Latter, the police came by my place and tried to give me a Disturbing the Peace citation. I felt wronged: My only involvement had been to remove a younger person from an already un-peaceful situation! The girl's dad had pointed a gun at ME. I wanted to defend myself.
My mom is a lawyer. She went with me to the station when the police wanted to question me, and she told me to just shut up. Don't answer any questions. Even if it was defending myself. Just. Shut. Up.
She was right, but it was still hard. At one point she kicked me pretty hard under the table to tell me to not talk as the office kept trying to get me to. By doing so, they didn't have enough evidence to do anything. They couldn't press charges, so nothing happened. I would've been innocent either way, and would've won any case, but it was sure a lot easier and avoid a waste of everyone's time for me to not defend myself, because by not defending myself then, I didn't have to waste time in court.
Years later, the incident itself is irrelevant. I doubt anyone else by my mom and I remember it - the notable bit was that the entire situation ended that night because I didn't let my strong desire to show my innocence and wrongful persecution win over the advice of my lawyer-mom telling to STFU.
Now, this isn't to say there aren't time where being very, very vocal is the right call. I could rant and rave to you about the time I really pissed in the cheerios of https://www.scanoss.com/ (With some of it happening here on HN, and me actually "Doxxing" one of their employees after he posted on the HN thread claiming to not be affiliated and accusing me of "falsifying information, impersonation, and even extortion" which was comical levels of bullshit.) but I had public opinion firmly on my side, getting constant pings in discord and slack servers as people wanted to know the latest juicy details and how I was sticking it to them.
But optics matter: It was a David and Goliath situation, where the entire incident happened in a short time frame, and as an individual I wasn't representing anybody other than myself. Those are the factors that change your situation.
You're involving Adafruit in drama and posting quickly, not as formal, adult response.
You're a golliath too, with Adafruit being a pretty big name that everyone in this community knows.
You're involving years old drama, where details are murky and intent and other relationships aren't easy to understand from the outside.
All of that combined makes you look bad, regardless of you're the "good guy" or "bad guy" here. Optics matter.
Sparkfun, by being vague and making an at least surface-level professional page here controlled the optics pretty well. It's only on the surface - as others point out, there's definitely some smells to it too - but rash, fast posting from an individual is what's making the optics bad for you - just like how the CTO of ScanOSS directly responding in my situation made him get over 100 thumbs downs on the GitHub thread in that story.
I think, honestly, that everyone involved - you, the person that's saying you dox'd them, Limor, etc. are great people doing great things that got a little too riled up and let things explode into public drama when really even just being the bigger person and making your FOSS Teensy pin-compatible board would've been retaliation enough in a way that nobody would've seen you as anything but the good guys for.
Honestly, if I were you, even if you believe you did nothing wrong, I'd apologize. Say you're sorry for using their real name. Say making extra accounts to contact them when they didn't want to be wasn't cool. Say you felt hurt, and have been stressed, but didn't realize how what you did would affect them. I honestly don't think you meant to dox anyone, because I don't think you saw it as doxxing. So say that, and say you're sorry. Probably in private first, if you mean it.
i’m catching up here. we have two kids. i dropped one off at pre-k this morning.
i replied to an email from a person whose full name was already in the email and is publicly listed on all of their sites. i said we should talk together about the pile-on. at the time, they believed we had done nfts. we never did.
i can and will apologize. i am not a double-downer. i like changing my mind. if this is the worst thing that happened to this person in their life, and a sincere apology would help, i am fully on board with that. i would mean it. why let something like this linger and turn into prolonged suffering.
there are no other examples anyone has pointed to of doxxing or misgendering. i believe i said “he.” that’s it. i am available, and they know how to reach me.
at the same time, there are people creating alt accounts, including ones using my handle. i see that pattern clearly. still, i understand what you are saying: that i should always take the higher road and be the bigger person, regardless.
my email is pt at braincraft d0t com, open to talk
And he apologized to you and handed the domain over to you.
And now you've decided, 8 years later, to blow up your relationship with a number of other folks in the industry, over a shitpost and some mild criticism?
Please, for the love of god, just drop this whole thing. Dredging this up from years ago has lost you a supplier of a popular product already, and a number of customers. I know a bunch of people who used to want to buy from the cool woman owned hacker manufacturer, and now won't touch it with a 10 foot pole after everything you've done.
And please, for the love of god, stop hiding behind Limor when people are criticizing you. You have repeatedly claimed that people are harassing Limor, when every single piece of criticism I've seen here has been directed at you or the Adafruit social accounts that you post through. And stop using your child as a shield as well.
You are a public figure, and sometimes people are going to disagree with you. They might find your use of GenAI image models to be problematic. They may find your over-hyping of drama happening in the open source hardware community to be a bit much. But you know what? That's OK. People can disagree with you, and make jokes about that disagreement.
But claiming that you are being harassed because people occasionally make a joke at your expense, blowing up relationships with your suppliers, driving away customers because you expose emails and deadnames (or legal names, in cases where people go by pseudonyms online), and doing it all while using your wife and child as a shield is not very professional behavior.
Step back, take a deep breath, pick your battles, own up to your mistakes, apologize for the places where you've gone wrong, and stop using your wife and child as a shield, and maybe you can repair some of this reputational damage. But you really need to get some distance from this.
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 publishs full-text rss feeds with no blockers here, no ads: https://blog.adafruit.com/rss
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.
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