On the previous HN posts I got this impression:
The developer's astrology app containing tarot reading features was rejected from Apple's App Store that prohibits astrology apps.
He then replaced the app's content with a clone of, if not the identical open source astronomy app "Dark Hours", copying even the name. The original is here: https://darkhours.app
The developer was then in contact with John Gruber, who wrote an article claiming Apple's reviewers confuse a nice, scientific astronomy app with astrology. The developer reviewed the article before publication.
It then turned out that the developer forgot to mention that originally he did upload an astrology app for review. Gruber felt duped, and noted that it's unclear whether an updated build containing the new astronomy app was ever submitted to Apple for review: https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...
Now the developer seems to claim that he merely accidentally cloned that open source app when working with Claude.
I am not buying it.
> I am not buying it.
Coincidentally:
Just in the last few weeks, D'addario, one of largest guitar string manufacturers, posted on Instagram what is clearly an AI-song to advertise its new line of guitar strings.
After being called out on it being AI, they posted a mobile-recording of the song recreated in a DAW, but it didn't even match the timing or the notes played.
After being called on it AGAIN, they blamed it on LANDR and Apple Mastering "changing the notes", but those only do "AI knob tweaking", they're not generative-ai audio synthesis. LANDR itself replied.
After being called on it AGAIN, they finally caved and said one of their workers used Suno without their knowledge.
After someone contacted the worker, he said he was pretty clear in his communication with D'addario that he had used Suno.
EDIT: The worker claimed it was "his first time using AI" and "he didn't know", but after someone did some digging in his Instagram profile, there's a few Suno songs and a lot of AI posters and avatars.
This sort of ass-covering is getting crazy with AI...
Reminds me of politicians and public figures saying they got "hacked" after doing/posting something stupid and getting backlash for it. I guess "AI did it" is the new iteration on that.
Sir Norman Fry Compilation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REpNTi-9oRQ
And kids. I recently happened to see a pic on a kid's phone of him holding 5 vapes and a tin of snus, when challenged on it he said it was an AI-generated fake.
same for guns, they say it’s airsoft
At this rate politicians will be able to say “AI hacked me” soon
I think of it as a new version of "my brain made me do it"
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/my-brain-made-me-...
Appears to have replaced "fake news" as the go-to response
"The dog ate my homework"
Just blame the next thing down the chain that can't defend itself, so you don't have to take responsibility.
Crazy but my dog once ate half my homework.
My mother was a teacher, and she once had to go to school and tell her students our dog ate their homework.
Did you submit the other half? Which definitely would prove "dog ate my homework"
"If you put even half as much effort into homework, as you put into faking dog bite marks, ..."
So true. “AI slop” is the new “Fake news”
But there is copious amounts of AI slip on YouTube
freudian slop?
slip, slop, slap front and back[1]
EDIT: although I have to say the "front and back" actually came from another campaign[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slip-Slop-Slap
[2] https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=3-EJvs_glCc&list=PLAe0IYRi...
I thought that was an Xzibit song
The issue is fake news is real and has somehow been co-opted by the perpetrators to attack any claim/media group that is critical of them or their actions. If you fact check these people they just scream “fake news” until their followers chant it with them.
Huh I guess it is comparable to “it was AI” lol
This comment has gone up and down like nothing I’ve ever commented before. Legitimately fascinating to watch. It’s gone from -1 back to 1 several times today.
You're calling it ass covering but I kinda see it as buck-passing too. Seems like D'addario didn't want to hold the buck so they kept passing it down until it made its way back to the worker who did it.
Seems to me like that worker's ass wasn't covered at all and now everyone's all up in his shit on his socials, and the layers of management get to wash their hands, even though it's the management and executive that are pushing AI at all costs.
Going forward, I suspect one of the main employment opportunities left for humans in the AI era is "scapegoat". Corporations don't want to take any responsibility for anything. AI can't be responsible. So there's a market opportunity for a person who is willing to take a job where their main value-add is to receive the blame when something goes sideways.
What a sad dystopia we are creating.
Every staff member with a ChatGPT account gets a complimentary promotion to CISO...
Time for Benjamin Malaussène to strike again!
Not sure if I agree.
Until people started getting technical, they weren’t really passing the bucket to anyone. It was only partially with the LANDR lie, and then with the final accusation that they really “passed the bucket”.
Blocking commenters, having employees and endorsers mock customers, all that was 100% Daddario.
In fact a lot of people commended them for not throwing employees under the bus before it happened.
The solution is clear: yes we use AI, and we're okay with it.
There's no way Claude/AI recreated another persons app exactly, with the same name and branding, without being told to do so in some way. I just don't believe it.
And him not using it and calling out AI is just him covering his ass
> There's no way Claude/AI recreated another persons app exactly, with the same name and branding, without being told to do so in some way.
If you give a description of the app you want, and it matches another persons Open Source app. Then why wouldn't Claude do what it does every other time and pull from it's corpus of knowledge?
Now I would expect the human-in-the-chain to verify what is going on and ultimately they are responsible for any output they lay claim to.
In this case, AI assisted or not, it is a dick move. TFA claims they are backing out of this space completely - which is the correct thing to do.
But as with all "my punch simply slipped!" apologies their reputation is tarnished and they will need to demonstrate they are better in future - not simply say so.
> Then why wouldn't Claude do what it does every other time and pull from it's corpus of knowledge?
I dont know why, but I do know know that it doesn't. I know because I've tried similar things when playing around with AI to see what it could do. "Make an app similar to X app [link to repo]"
Depending on how its feeling, it may just read the readme or it may go through the codebase. But I've never gotten line by line code copying.
> I would expect the human-in-the-chain to verify what is going on
I agree with this, to the extent of your second point
> they are responsible for any output they lay claim to.
How far does the rabbit hole go for verifying what is going on? If the LLM did indeed copy an entire codebase at its own behest, what reason would the author have to verify that it wasn't copied, given that every other time they've used an LLM to code it never copied an entire codebase?
A bit outdated, but IME never copies things verbatim because of limitations in context. Even when you want it to be a verbatim copy, like in a migration, it struggles a bit to remember everything exactly from memory and always has to cross-reference.
Might be better in newer models though.
But for a real "copy" it would default to calling `cp` in bash.
> The solution is clear: yes we use AI, and we're okay with it.
Except that some portion of D'addario's customers--presumably those that actually buy their guitar strings to create music via real guitars--aren't okay with it.
Yeah, I think that case is absolutely wild, because ostensibly the point of the recorded music was to showcase the strings.
Its telling that instead of showcasing the quality of their strings, they used an LLM to generate the sounds their strings should make.
Shows how much trust they have in their own product.
Wouldn't this be basically fraudulent advertising?
Maybe they prompted "make it sound like the guitars have D'addario strings"
AFAIK, a lot of commercials, particularly for cars, haven’t really shot the physical product in decades and instead used CGI. I think Ikea also makes heavy use of renderings. It’s all kind of insane. OTOH, a hundred years ago ads all used illustrations… I guess you’d have to show that the real strings don’t sound or behave as shown in the video, however it was created.
In this case there's a difference between CGI and generative AI. However they came up with arrangement of pixels on the screen, the product is still portrayed accurately.
Now, unless the company in question got their new strings into Sona training data, I wager that the generated output has little casual connection with the product being advertised. If I found out IKEA's newest product looks nothing like on the commercial, because the ad was using generative AI and hallucinated something approximating the product, I'd be looking at it as fraudulent too.
IMO in D'addario's case, the analogy would be like using CGI and illustrations to illustrate a painting.
Also, I think when judged by the court of public opinion, the overwhelming answer was "yes, it's fraudulent", or at least "misleading and useless" as most people even complained that the song sounds like an overproduced mess where any string would sound the same.
I don't understand why you're getting downvoted, but you're correct. That's the reason for the complaints and the company has already taken an anti-AI stance precisely for this reason.
It’s not worth getting upset at one or two people downvoting. This is a large forum. There will always be some of that. Plus we have no clue why they did it, it could be valid
I'm not upset, that's not the important part of my message.
> There's no way Claude/AI recreated another persons app exactly
Entropy doesn't need to be set to zero for legally significant duplication
The already embattled Fender CEO said the other day that he plans for Fender to be at the "forefront" of AI, and that covering others' songs was "analogue AI".
The simple truth of the matter is that contempt for your customers is now normal. I expect this from Fender, now; they are utterly without soul.
But D'Addario are really one of the most analogue companies ever and they are still family-owned; they should have understood the magnitude of this problem right at the beginning and just apologised.
At least one of my three guitars will likely continue to have their PB strings, probably, because they still sound the best on my cheap Weissenborn clone.
But it is very disappointing and it leaves a bad taste. Perhaps I will revisit Rotosounds (wound in a factory very near where I grew up) for my PBs. The UK also has Newtone strings so I really have no reason to continue to support D'Addario (though the low-tension Aloha set I really like for the Weissenborn copy that lets me have a 15 on the high D is always backordered).
> The already embattled Fender CEO said the other day that he plans for Fender to be at the "forefront" of AI, and that covering others' songs was "analogue AI". >The simple truth of the matter is that contempt for your customers is now normal. I expect this from Fender, now; they are utterly without soul.
I think to some degree this is going to be inevitable for a while. No matter what people think about the ethics of AI or AI use, the fact of the matter is it exists, and it is shaking up and going to shake up a lot of the world. I personally think "AI" isn't really a product anymore than "The Internet" is a product. It's infrastructure in the same way the internet is, or to quote "Halt and Catch Fire", it's "the thing that gets us to The Thing".
The problem is no one really knows what The Thing looks like, so everyone is throwing anything they can think of at the wall and hoping to see what sticks. And they're dong this because they remember Sears and they remember Blockbuster. No one wants to be the next company that was positioned perfectly to integrate the new technology into their business model and missed the boat completely for short sightedness or lack of speed. "$foo but with AI" is the current generation's "$foo but on the internet", and everyone is scrambling hard to not be the next company that someone writes a "whatever happened to them" youtube video about.
Incidentally, this "AI as infrastructure" view I have is also why I really think governments should be getting into the space of building and distributing training data sets and models. Not only because it could reduce the overall amount of bot scraping and traffic if everyone who wants to build could go to a known good and clean source of training data, but also because nominal usage fees could help manage the copyright concerns. I've pitched it before in more detail, but I imagine something akin to radio broadcast royalty licenses, where people whose copyrighted works are part of the government training sets are paid out "royalties" from the pool of money brought in from licensing the training sets.
> I think to some degree this is going to be inevitable for a while. No matter what people think about the ethics of AI or AI use, the fact of the matter is it exists, and it is shaking up and going to shake up a lot of the world. I personally think "AI" isn't really a product anymore than "The Internet" is a product. It's infrastructure in the same way the internet is, or to quote "Halt and Catch Fire", it's "the thing that gets us to The Thing".
True. But the way it is approached is an exceptionally valuable yardstick for judging people's intent.
There is no way that "being at the forefront of AI" is a strategy that gets Fender anywhere except towards unthinking inward investment. Even in the narrow context of NAM captures and the like, it is clumsily antithetical to their audience to say this.
But writing off the one thing that actually sells guitars in the 21st century (covers bands!) as "analogue AI" is the most extraordinarily tone-deaf, rude, dismissive thing that someone who runs a musical instrument company could ever say.
> writing off the one thing that actually sells guitars in the 21st century (covers bands!) ...
I'm not so sure about that. Guitar bands playing original music is huge where I am right now, shoegaze / nugaze / grunge / dreampop is where the zeitgeist is here. As a middle-aged guy who was a teen during grunge, it's heartening to see the 20 year olds now buying Jaguar guitars (and a bunch of pedals) and new bands emerging each week. Everyone is nerding out over their obscure Bandcamp purchases, and it's definitely a thing that you need to write your own original material. The occasional cover is okay, but there's a definite "ick" to being a cover band.
"Analogue AI" as a description of playing a cover is harsh, but I can also see some of that label sticking. You didn't write the music or the lyrics, you're taking the credit and money for someone else's work. That seems to be some of the anti-AI attitude around here.
But you're right that "the forefront of AI" is not going to appeal to that audience, at all.
(Personally I'm pro-AI - not Suno stuff, but I think it will eventually find a place in the same way that synthesizers & sampling & DAWs did, all of which were regarded as cheating at the time they came out. I remember the grunge albums with "AAD" Analog / Analog / Digital printed on the CD sleeve just as Pro Tools was emerging.)
> I'm not so sure about that.
Pretty sure that, as a first approximation, essentially all bands are covers bands. At a first approximation, all electric guitarists only play along to other people's songs in their bedrooms! The proportion who ever play for anyone else is tiny.
It's just mindblowing to be that rude about the core market, especially for the luxury guitars they want to be known for.
> I remember the grunge albums with "AAD" Analog / Analog / Digital printed on the CD sleeve just as Pro Tools was emerging.)
I'm not sure digital recording is a fair comparison. Though at any rate, the first digitally recorded album (Ry Cooder's Bop Till You Drop from 1979) sounds so sonically dead that its artist has essentially disowned it.
It is, coincidentally, essentially a covers album. Ruined by its production; The Very Thing That Makes You Rich (Makes Me Poor) could have sounded immense and it does not.
I dunno.
Fender USA and Squier Jaguars and lots of pedals are for ppl in original bands.
But the money is in Custom Shop Gibson, Fender and PRS, which are for ppl in the older generations playing mostly in 70s cover bands, or just hanging it in the wall to occasionally play Smoke on the Water. TheGearPage has become a very influential force in the industry almost like HN has.
Okay, that's a point - there's less money in the Squier Jaguars even if they sell more of them. I know I personally can't decide on a Squier Jaguar or Vintera, when I know what I really wanted is a Fender Cobain Jaguar. There's more money in the doctors & lawyers accumulating expensive gear that they rarely ever get to play.
That said - the few people I know in the "rich kid buying gear" segment are deep into AI, and wouldn't blink twice at using it to generate music for their events. Much of their audience wouldn't necessarily care. The equipment they have is more to show off "here is this expensive thing you can't afford, I have it, I don't even use it".
So maybe there's lots of diverse markets and I really don't know how it will play out :)
That's a good point. Interestingly, the person working for D'addario who made the video is in a self declared "east coast's best cover band", and most of the artwork is AI-based, plus a few background songs in the bands Instagram have shown to be AI.
Dunno how the lawyers and doctors think about AI music, though.
I would probably get a Harley Benton JA or MS and do any necessary work.
But then I'm a weirdo; the only guitars that really float my boat the moment are the Duesenberg lap steels and that Eastwood fretless cello guitar...
The new Harley Benton Jazzmaster-style is crazy good and the distressed/relic looks amazing IMO.
They make really good instruments. I don't really play ordinary electric guitar anymore — I'll never be good enough at it whereas I am a good lap steel player — but if I wanted a guitar for a bit of recording I would not really hesitate.
The original Harley Benton/ABM Slider lap steel was outstanding and I was stupid not to get one.
In the late 2010s, the order (literally) from investors was to "hire as many devs as you can". The order now is to position the company somehow as being AI-centric or AI-powered.
> it is shaking up and going to shake up a lot of the world.
The problem is that this is only happening because the powerful are forcing it on us. This is exactly why the backlash against it has gotten so big. Had companies not jumped on the AI bandwagon and forced it down veryone's throats (sometimes putting your job on the line if you refused) the backlash probably would be non-existent. The AI boosters/pro-AI people will of course continue to claim that nobody is forcing you to use AI (I literally had this told to me on a different forum like 4 days ago, it was honestly ridiculous how delusional this particular booster was...)
> The problem is that this is only happening because the powerful are forcing it on us.
Look, I won't deny that like the dot-com bubble and the "cloud" hype of years before that there isn't overhyping and forcing going on. But this feels to me a lot like someone in the mid 90's looking at this "internet" thing and thinking it's all a fad being pushed on us by computer nerds. I'm not saying every company and every attempt to stuff "AI" into everything is going to be some revolution that will stick with us forever, but neither were a lot of early online providers. But like I said, AI is infrastructure, and people are going to figure out how to build things on top of it that will become integrated and standard parts of our lives, just like computers, the internet and the cloud are all today.
I know lots of people who voluntarily use AI regularly without being forced to - a lot more than either people who are anti-AI or people who are forced to use it for work.
That's probably a function of the people I'm around more than anything else. It is also the case that AI is being pushed on people, sometimes forcefully. But the category of people who use it because they want to is very large.
Jeeeeezus. It's lies all the way down. Did we ever arrive at a true statement from them or is that where they left it?
The irony is how unnecessary it was. They could've just said, yeah you're right, we used AI. This is a level of lying you reserve for covering up a murder or something. Maybe they're just worried (and they're right to be worried) that it's easier to make music with AI than with their strings.
Lie and doubling down. And a lot of employees and endorsers fighting people in the comments, and calling people names. Not a good look.
> The worker claimed it was "his first time using AI" and "he didn't know"
This is not the defense they think it is.. If your mechanic rotates your tires and improperly torques the lug bolts "it was my first time using a torque wrench" isn't excusable. It's good to experiment and learn new things. It's not good to throw your little self-study project out into the world with your employer's name behind it and present it as production worthy material.
Before last year, I might've thought it was okay to throw out silly things as advertisements.
Do we know if it was the worker who presented it as such? Everyone has to learn and if they are learning on the job its up to their employer to ensure that the work product is reviewed or overseen by someone with adequate experience.
In this case, the author exchanged messages with someone, and he indeed claimed as such, according to the screenshots.
Oh...
People online post timelapses for their AI generated artwork, that are also AI generated.
I've been thinking about this. Almost every way we have to tell human from AI apart can be adopted and automated by AI. It's sort of a corollary of "every metric can be gamed".
It's disheartening for those of us who intrinsically value human authorship.
Maybe all “content” will just end up devalued and some prestige will move to more physical, local things like live performances, growing your own tomatoes and giving good massages. Nobody will care about showing off their tomatoes online and all that matters is sharing them with real people…
I hope so. I've got no issue with AI, but "influencers" are broadly a net negative on the world. Anything that reduces the amount of power/status/attention they get is a plus for me.
Well, we don't have Star Trek holograms yet, so you can trust what you can see performed in person.
(Good luck getting close enough to actually tell if the live performance is real or faked, though, for anything other than small, local or super niche bands...)
It's an easy "out" for those without the self-respect to admit when they do wrong.
It's like "The computer did it" from the 80's and 90's. Blame the tool for the operator usage.
It's pathetic.
Think about all of the cases that don't come out. Everyone hates AI, yet everyone is using AI.
I refuse to believe nearly 100% of game developers aren't using AI, but how many put the tag of shame on the Steam store page?
It's a very strange situation.
>I refuse to believe nearly 100% of game developers aren't using AI
Do you refuse to believe nearly 100% of written content isn't made by AI? Was your comment?
I struggle to imagine thinking that no one does things themselves, for fun. What a nihilistic view.
I don’t believe they are saying that 100% of the entire game or content is ai, they are saying that they believe that a huge percentage of titles have used AI for at least one part of the game, however small.
I can absolutely believe it, and I think it’s fine. If you have AI code up the logic for something boring but necessary (the setting screen ui, for one example. Don’t argue against this one example, that isn’t the point) it will leave a developer to work on the parts of games that actually make a difference to the experience.
Frankly, it would be silly not to use ai for some things. The trouble is that if it’s a binary “used ai” flag, there is no way to distinguish a one shot Claude slop game from someone who uses AI for internationalization
> Don’t argue against this one example, that isn’t the point
What is the point then? The best games have all of their elements working together in service of their intended experience.
> someone who uses AI for internationalization
Do you think this would be an ok use of AI for a game? Did you not see the outrage over Hollow Knight: Silksong's translation last year? How every time a game is discovered to have used AI for translation there is an immediate backlash?
The point is that some parts of games truly don't impact the experience.
Name a game whose settings screen added to the gameplay in any meaningful way. Hell, name a game from memory that didn't have the same settings screen with minor styling variations as every other game you played. What exactly am I missing out on by having a resolution dropdown that was hand coded? Does a bespoke "ultra" graphics slider bring the characters to life in a way that AI just can't? Besides, using AI isn't mutually exclusive with all of the elements working together. My point is that AI, wielded properly, makes that easier to achieve. If you don't have to spend a month hand coding sliders for a settings screen, you can get on with making the actual game. Do you also rail against game engines which provide all of this stuff in a generic way?
I do think that using AI to help with internationalization is fine, as long as you QA it just like any code or content that is created by man or machine. It's a tool, and you have to know how and when to use any tool. You can get plenty of good translation out of an AI if you are using it properly.
Also worth noting that Silksong was verified to have a human translation team, and they never clarified if AI was used. It's entirely possible that today's SOTA AI would have done a much better job. The problem with your argument about translation is you and I have no idea how many games have been machine translated well, and never saw an issue. Because of the way gamers are (frequently unhinged about minor things. Prone to groupthink. Extremely vocal. Absolute in opinions like "There is no acceptable use for AI in gaming"), you just can't stick your neck out and say, "We used AI for our localizations, then had native speakers QA it, and not one had issues." You risk becoming a lightning rod for puritans because you wanted to give Romanians a chance to play a game in their own language.
Even if you disagree on using AI for these things, I can keep coming up with ways that AI can make a game better. That's why I told you not to argue against specific examples. Maybe a game designer told an AI to review the code and find performance improvement opportunities. Would you be upset if the game was half the size, and could run higher frame-rates with the exact same content? Is that still an unacceptable us of AI, or would you rather that the man hours that could otherwise go to things that humans are better at get spent on optimizations. I personally would rather have a game with better performance from an AI and more human created side quests, than a game with better performance and fewer side quests because they ran out of budget hiring people to dig into compiler settings.
So yeah, I think it is completely reasonable to use AI in gaming or any domain of programming. I've been around long enough to remember human teams turning out absolute steaming piles of garbage. The issue isn't AI, the issue is people turning out steaming piles of garbage. AI just makes that easier, but by no means does it make it inherent to use.
> Name a game whose settings screen added to the gameplay in any meaningful way
Most of these are going to be smaller indie games that already don't have many settings to set. Off the top of my head, I'd probably say Ultrakill takes the cake with its opening screen. Based on the description of the expectations, my guess is you're mostly basing your expectations off of large AAA games with multiple pages of settings? Fair enough that they should mostly be implementing "standards" correctly, and theming and character take a back seat.
It sounds like your overall point mostly relates not to settings screens, but things that "don't meaningfully affect gameplay". I think that's a much better argument than the one your example point led me to understand.
As a final note, it's worth reiterating that Steam does not require disclosure for AI-gen code. That settings menu example you were mentioning would be fine, as long as it used art assets generated by a human.
> Name a game whose settings screen added to the gameplay in any meaningful way. Hell, name a game from memory that didn't have the same settings screen with minor styling variations as every other game you played.
This mentality is exactly why most modern AAA games are so generic and uninteresting. Great games are more than just their gameplay; they're complete, coherent experiences assembled by people who care about every part of them, not just the parts they deem to be "the important ones". Someone who doesn't care at all what their game's settings menu looks like probably doesn't truly care about any other part of the game, either - it suggests their primary concern is not the quality of the game, but how quickly and cheaply it can be made.
Games having menus and HUD interfaces that fit the rest of their aesthetic was once the standard, before the current trend of minimalism took over. Why do you think that is? Was it just because the developers of yesteryear were all idiots wasting time and budget on things that didn't matter instead of maximizing shareholder value? Or was it because they were focused on making a high quality, coherent game first, and making it "efficiently" second?
> Do you also rail against game engines which provide all of this stuff in a generic way?
Yes, every other game being made in Unreal Engine nowadays is one of the biggest contributing factors to them all feeling so samey (and running badly). Developers who don't care about the quality of the game and just want to get it out the door with the minimum effort possible gravitate towards Unreal Engine, because it's made for them, and this is reflected in the end product.
> I can keep coming up with ways that AI can make a game better.
No, you can come up with ways that AI can make the game easier and cheaper to make at the cost of craftsmanship. It's not the same thing. Adding more side quests won't make the game better if they're not made by people who care about the game as a whole and all its little details. Whatever improvements or optimizations your AI can come up with, a skilled human developer could come up with, too, the difference being that the human demands a living wage in exchange for his work, and that's just awful, isn't it? It's simply not possible for the entirety of the game to be crafted with care without going over budget (let's ignore all the past examples of games that did exactly this, with much smaller budgets, before unappealing ultra realistic graphics became the standard).
> I struggle to imagine thinking that no one does things themselves, for fun. What a nihilistic view.
Come on. There are shades here.
I guarantee that even your best programmers are using AI to run down certain classes of bugs--especially in corporate environments. Asking the AI to help you unwind some screwy source control merge or to remember some obscure set of flags is a damn good usage of AI, for example. Nobody thinks twice of using a search engine for this so AI is a no-brainer.
The issue is when people use the AI for all the code. I have to tell AI all the time "That code is there because X and you mangling it is a problem." or "You violated Y. Explain to me why you did that anyway and don't do it again."
The problem is that to do that you have to know the code and you don't know the code if you didn't write it.
Steam doesn’t need a AI disclosure label for things that are not player-facing IIRC.
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What bothers me about the D'Addario thing is that it never crossed the mind of that employee or the company what they're doing was wrong.
Their customers are musicians. They want to hear what the strings sound like in a demo. What they did was not just dishonest, it's contrary to literally everything their customers do.
Whoever did it has no sense and shouldn't be working in that business. Full stop.
I say this as a D'Addario customer of 20+ years that will never buy their strings again.
Marketing has become so disconnected from reality that such things have been normalized and trivialized.
For example: since a few years now, it became extremely common for apps and games to be advertised with fake screenshots, fake gameplay, and fake interactions.
AI just put all that on turbo mode.
A marketing manager coming from apps/games (or other industry where this is common) joining D'addario will just push for AI music to be used because "that's how things are done".
[dead]
> It then turned out that the developer forgot to mention that originally he did upload an astrology app for review. Gruber felt duped, and noted that it's unclear whether an updated build containing the new astronomy app was ever submitted to Apple for review
I think it’s shaping up like he didn’t “forget” to mention it. This looks like an intentional play for attention. It worked very well. Too well, in fact, which drew enough eyes on to the situation to start noticing the cracks in his story.
A key part of the Gruber retraction article is that Apple rejected a different app named Asterly. He then copied the Dark Hours app, including the name, from someone else and tried to imply that was the app at the center of the controversy.
If he had actually written his own astronomy app and swapped it into the story he may have gotten away with it. Doing the wholesale copying of someone else’s work, including the name of the project and stripping the license in the process, is what got him caught.
App Store rejection stories are always popular. I see at least one post a month on Hacker News from an app developer trying to get attention because their app was rejected and it usually receives moderate social media attention. I think this person saw an opportunity to ride that anger for some personal publicity and went for it. He flew too close to the sun and got too much attention, though, so his mistruths were revealed. Now he’s trying some CYA techniques because the original ruse backfired.
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This has nothing to do with Gruber fans or not. Your take just isn't as smart as you thought it is. Highly regarded newspapers, tv programs or books have updates / retractions all the time as even with the best fact checking it's possible that something slips through.
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I've only changed "redactions" into "updates / retractions" as that was a typo.
Please take a look at https://www.nytimes.com/international/section/corrections for a small selection of what slips through fact checking on a well established and reputable newspaper.
I don't doubt that massive organizations make a lot of errors.
I don't think it makes your point, tho. The question is error per volume.
I seriously doubt Gruber does the same amount of fact checking as a serious publication. And that was my point above.
But I could be wrong - if you actually know I'd love the answer.
If your question is if a single person running a private blog has the same fact checking resources as a big news corporation, the answer is no but I'm not sure why you'd need me to tell you that.
As mentioned in Gruber's retraction (https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...) it's the first time he had to retract something in 24 years. It doesn't really make sense to compare the two in any case as the stakes and resources are very different.
No, my question is whether the per-story fact checking is equal, or much less.
I suspect it's much less. Do you know otherwise?
> my question is whether the per-story fact checking is equal, or much less.
How could a one man operation have the fact checking machinery of some big paper, eg the NYT? Of course it’s less.
Keep in mind that he usually posts multiple times per weekday.
No. You misunderstand my question. Again.
I want to know if the human effort, per story, is the same as other publications. Does Gruber make a real fact checking effort, or does he merely trust his gut?
The retraction post from Gruber details ways in which he tried to fact-check this, including confirming that his understanding was correct with Mr. Godier and even running a draft of the post by him to make sure he'd stated the "facts" that Godier presented him correctly.
I'm not really sure what you're implicitly expecting him to have done "better" here. Ask Godier for a signed affidavit? Not publish this until he could get a statement from Apple to get their side of the story? (Which is to say, not publish it at all because the chances of Apple giving anyone "their side" of something like this is essentially zero.)
> The retraction post from Gruber details ways in which he tried to fact-check this
Yes it does. To fact check this story - he asked the source (twice) if he was lying.
> I'm not really sure what you're implicitly expecting him to have done "better" here.
He could have asked for the full text of the rejection letter, which would have revealed the name switch. For starters.
Other journalists make a much stronger effort to avoid these kinds of errors.
I don't know, maybe google a few things? The most obvious search terms for me, turned up the pre-existence of the legitimate astronomy app, not to mention the trademarked name collision with a horror video game.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49217212
Perhaps engage critical thinking? Apply the CRAAP Test? Seek some independent confirmation of facts, rather than just being a mouthpiece for some hysterical acquaintance? If I had a Bitcoin for every time I heard some gamer was "banned for no reason!!1"
Apple could've denied the app just for clashing with the name of an existing game... a game that involved demons tossing fortune-telling cards around
I make a real fact-checking effort. In this case, the developer (Godier) sent me a video of the app in action. It’s a real app. He couldn’t send me a TestFlight to run (he said) because TestFlight submissions are taking a week or longer to get approved.
Obviously what I did wasn’t enough, but trust me, I try.
Fair enough.
Did you ask him for the full rejection letter? That's the issue I raised below. I'm wondering if he forged the app name.
It seems like the situation still remains a little ambiguous - and forging the name on that letter would be definitive proof.
On the other hand, if you didn't ask for it - why not? It seems like the very least amount of verification you could have done.
Did it simply not occur to you that a source might lie?
> The question is error per volume
> my question is whether the per-story fact checking is equal, or much less
Which is it?
My dear friend, both questions are asking about the same ratio, just using different language.
How is this Gruber's fault? What level of verification do you expect of a tech blog discussing the experience of another tech blogger?
When you spread disinformation you should bear the cost of it.
Gruber has a massive audience. He should try harder.
The embarrassment is the cost.
Agreed. Which is why I raise the point.
This is a very strange take. We got a full-throated retraction. Error correction is a hallmark of trustworthiness.
> We got a full-throated retraction.
Not really. When he says "I was misled" he's passing the blame. Other statements are equally defensive.
Notice how the retractions of larger publications do not make similar claims. They state the error and move on.
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Also note that Goodier's post that kicked off Gruber's post now says it had a section about "an astronomy app I am working on that began as an astrology app," [1] but the older version of the article clearly implied that the author was baffled as to why Apple would ever think it related to Tarot cards. [2]
1. https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/07/browsers-have-standa...
2. https://web.archive.org/web/20260807141155/https://blog.terr...
At this rate we will need Gruber to do a retraction retraction in order to be more aggressive about the bs he fell into.
OP or dang should change the link to the DF retraction. While the app’s author has apparently produced some quality products, this puts a big asterisk next to that reputation.
That was already submitted and discussed [0], there's a reason I submitted this response by the author.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228166
Maybe our attention is being farmed? I have a friend who does astrology readings for a living and was curious why the app store doesn't allow astrology apps, a quick search revealed astrology apps exist on the app store so that's a red herring.
In app categories that bring a lot of low-effort submissions and clones, Apple requires new submissions to bring something new to the table.
Before these requirements the app store was filling up with thousands of flashlight apps, todo lists, and other simple apps that people would build (or clone) to get something into the app store.
Make me sad that my original flashlight app (pre App Store) might not be accepted if I tried to publish it. It is an artifact of history I guess, so maybe that could be an exception.
If you read the related articles you'd see the App Store has decided there are enough of these types of apps and they don't accept any more unless they're noticeably different
They simply do not allow new astrology apps. They consider the market segment saturated.
Oh but mine will be tron/blade runner themed, the market needs more diversity, the insensative clauds!
That's interesting. I had originally posted a "this dude is classy" comment, and may repost, but I'd like to find out more, beforehand.
Are there any links to this stuff that you can share?
[UPDATED] Ah. I see this post has it[0].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49231394
I did not look into the details myself, but here are the links to the previous post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228166
I know that not everyone is thrilled with Gruber, but I think this is classy (from his article):
> To the best of my recollection, this is the first post I’ve retracted in the 24 years I’ve been writing Daring Fireball. I hope it’s the last. I was misled, both overtly and through omissions, in several ways, but what I publish is my responsibility, and I apologize for the error.
Gruner is a true fan and tends to be overly positive about Apple but I don't doubt his integrity for a second. In cases when his reporting is overly favorable to Apple in my eyes, I do believe that he truly believes what he says.
It was interesting that his first retraction was due to a post being critical of Apple. Not that there hasn't been other critical posts, but he's very positive about the brand.
Gruber himself has written a number of posts critical of Apple, some of them scathingly so.
Yeah, any time I see someone accuse Gruber of being universally positive about Apple I think they can't have been reading his work very often.
Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino: https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/something_is_rotten_in_th...
Apple subsequently stopped providing Apple execs for his annual live podcast recording at WWDC. They don't confirm it was because of that piece (unsurprisingly) but it seems very likely it was.
I came across a theory which seems more likely to me: Gruber lost access to Apple execs after he posted the following regarding Tim Cook and other tech CEOs congratulating Trump on winning the election in 2024:
“I wonder how much Cook dithered over that cheerful-looking exclamation mark. I hope he regrets it. … I wonder how much it stings to be reminded that all the money in the world cannot buy dignity. I wonder too, what taste Cheetos-dusted 78-year-old testicles leave in one’s mouth. Whatever the flavor, I hope it lingers.”
From the very end of this: https://daringfireball.net/2024/11/i_wonder
Anyone that has been in the Apple ecosystem, for any length of time, has been insanely pissed off at them -usually, multiple times.
They are a pretty arrogant megacorp, and tend to make decisions that primarily benefit themselves.
But I generally have a positive relationship with them.
I fully agree. That’s how you own a mistake.
I’ve noticed that when a developer cries foul over an Apple App Store rejection, it often seems to be a red flag that there is something fishy about that developer. Gruber, not to his credit, often does not give Apple the benefit of the doubt on these matters. imho he bears some responsibility if he feels duped.
...and I've noticed that's not always the case. What's the value of such a bland whitewashing comment?
Sure, glad to clarify. The value is to point out something that I’ve noticed a lot of people miss as conversations about App Store rejections tend to take a knee-jerk negative attitude toward Apple. Considering the opposite possibility would clear up a lot of false conceptions and raise the quality of discussions.
I think it’s entirely possible for someone to clone an app with Claude without realising they’ve done it, if they don’t do your due diligence on it. I.e., if they don’t make any effort to dig into and really understand what they’ve built.
But I also think this is an extreme example of a much more general problem of provenance.
There are a lot of people vibe-coding apps who lack the “basic” skills needed to do this due diligence at even the coarsest level that we arguably see here (not making any comment either way on this specific author).
Does that get them off the hook? I don’t think so. They’ve created a thing and they are naturally responsible for whether or not that thing involves theft or appropriation of IP from other sources.
It’s an “ignorance is not an excuse” kind of thing.
This scales all the way up to agentic development in large organisations, but it also becomes much more granular and subtle, which is perhaps where it becomes more interesting - and certainly a lot more challenging. Where has that chunk of code come from? How do you know where it’s come from? Is there even a feasible way of finding out?
>The original is here: https://darkhours.app
Ooof that is a terrible dark mode theme.
I think "night vision" is different from dark mode. It's meant to prevent your eyes from adjusting to the light - so you can still see the stars - rather than just being easy to look at.
Just to add, photoreceptors in the eyes consist of rods and three types of cones. Rods are what do the majority of the work for night vision and are nearly blind to long wavelengths of light (red).
It's so that you don't lose your dark adaptation. See: https://www.nps.gov/articles/dark-adaptation-of-the-human-ey...
> Apple's App Store that prohibits astrology apps
That's curious. What legitimate-sounding reason could Apple have to reject astrology on their platform? Isn't this exactly the kind of discrimination against fields of endeavour that would make a slam-dunk case for any antitrust enforcement?
Only new submissions seem to be banned because Apple says there are too many. Clearly there are loads if you search the App Store. Gruber quotes and I re-quote:
> Certain kinds of apps, such as dating, flashlight, sound effects, wallpaper, simple timers, and fortune telling, are well established on the App Store and we will not accept new submissions unless they offer a meaningfully different or improved experience. We may remove these apps from the App Store going forward if they are not updated, improved, or do not attract customers. Other kinds of apps, such as drinking games, Kama Sutra, fart, and burp apps, are mediocre, low-quality, or low-effort and do not add value to the App Store.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here, but something tells me they don't defer to a panel of astrology app power users when deciding whether an app is a novel astrology app or not.
Also I'm not sure if I should be insulted when they insist that The Kama Sutra is "low effort".
A few years ago there were horoscope apps with a 3-day free trial, then pay per week subscriptions, that had tens of thousands of suspicious 5 star reviews.
Some of them even made it into the top 20 grossing apps on the store.
All the reviews with text would complain about accidentally subscribing.
Apple was earning a 30% commission on those subscriptions.
They don’t prohibit them.
There are categories of app that already have 100 trillion low effort copy-paste slop apps.
In those categories, Apple applies a more stringent “must demonstrate some real differentiation” criteria. They also prune those categories of existing apps more aggressively.
It’s fair to wonder what counts, and how uniformly they apply it, but the motivation is not, “no astrology apps.”
This guy pumped out slop for a high-slop category. It got rejected. That’s where it started.
All the bullshit and lies from everyone snowballed from that.
> Isn't this exactly the kind of discrimination against fields of endeavour that would make a slam-dunk case for any antitrust enforcement?
No.
The same reason apple could reasonably block people from selling anything with an easily falsifiable claim: misleading consumers is bad, and apps that are misleading aren’t allowed. That already exists.
Telling people you can tell them their future based on the stars is demonstrably misleading lol.
I’m struggling to see how this wasn’t intentional by Godier, but I can’t understand what he was hoping to get out of it. Surely the truth would have come out eventually. Was one day of fame worth it?
Maybe it’s not a developer at all, and a couple of open claws doing random app things…
And blames it on "AI usage".
Oh I recall this story now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49214863
I, too, feel entirely duped. What the heck dude. Uploading an astrology app that later pivoted to astronomy and having that be rejected for astrology is a way different problem from just having the latter rejected for astrology.
Thanks for drawing the chain. Infuriating.
If I understand the story correctly, it's even worse than "pivoted to astronomy". He used Claude to "accidentally" (doubtful) copy an existing astronomy app, bugs and all. It's like a pile of dishonesty upon dishonesty.
Phantom Obligation, the post that Gruber says brought Godier to his attention, seems pretty AI-generated: https://www.terrygodier.com/phantom-obligation
We are personally responsible for what our agents do. I don’t know why someone thinks “oops Claude did it” is a valid excuse.
afaik apple store doesn't prohibit astrology apps. You just can't have cookie cutter astrology apps. I believe dating apps have the same rule.
Grubby.
And Gruber, being Gruber, says that this guy's RSS reader is so good that it would prevent people from switching to Android. Sure.
> David Pierce, at The Verge, put it on a very short list of iOS-exclusive indie apps that keep him from switching to Android.
You are misattributing a quote.
That quote that you posted is from Gruber. Gruber chose to include that in his blog post to say that this app is so good that it keeps people, including Pierce, from switching to Android. I was obviously fully aware that he paraphrased somebody else to include as evidence to support his claim. Pierce, on the other hand, was speaking only for himself.
Choosing to include a properly attributed quote in a blog post is very different to saying something yourself.
Once more, Gruber is the one who claimed that the app kept people from switching to Android by paraphrasing (not quoting) Pierce. Pierce spoke only for himself. You are trying to pick a nit that doesn't exist.