Ars Technica makes up quotes from Matplotlib maintainer; pulls story

infosec.exchange

555 points·robin_reala··6 comments

Already being discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949

This error by Ars is a whole new layer on top of that story.

It’s extremely generous to call deliberate slop generation an error.

Look again, that post already includes the Ars story (near the top).

There have been several, but the most recent thread in the sequence is about this specifically (as latexr already pointed out). If anyone wants to catch up, here's the list in reverse order:

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – More Things Have Happened - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949 - Feb 2026 (271 comments)

AI Bot crabby-rathbun is still going - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008617 - Feb 2026 (28 comments)

The "AI agent hit piece" situation clarifies how dumb we are acting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006843 - Feb 2026 (118 comments)

An AI agent published a hit piece on me - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729 - Feb 2026 (941 comments)

AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559 - Feb 2026 (744 comments)

Yes, I think that's enough overlap that we can move the comments thither. I'll put a link to https://infosec.exchange/@mttaggart/116065340523529645 in the toptext there as well.

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