> OpenAI also instructs new hires on how to avoid scrutiny when they leave Apple. For example, Mr. Tan warns them not to tell Apple that they have taken jobs at OpenAI, so they can stay at Apple as long as they can.
> Apple says it discovered a pattern of OpenAI recruits emailing themselves confidential information when leaving Apple, including Tan.
> OpenAI apparently used confidential Apple hardware information when approaching Apple suppliers, and tricked one company into using a "specific trade secret metal-finishing technique" for an OpenAI device by claiming it had Apple's permission to do so.
> Liu allegedly kept an Apple-issued laptop after departing the company and exploited a vulnerability to download dozens of confidential Apple documents while he was working at OpenAI.
Non-competes and the like are gross but what's described here isn't just "bring your expertise to OpenAI" it's "here is how to steal secrets on your way out" which is even grosser.
As a counterpoint, why should a “metal finishing technique” be proprietary? Lying to the vendor that Apple said it’s ok is obviously wrong, but an employee taking that knowledge in their head doesn’t seem wrong to me. We have moved past the age of indentured apprentices and the freemasons.
Because Apple paid to produce that knowledge? It's good that people can spend a lot of time and money developing new knowledge and then for some period of time they get to exclusively reap the rewards of doing so.
Do you mind if I MITM all of your work output, your emails, your code, your messages, and attach my name to it and then receive your paychecks in exchange for my work?
But if they can pay some people to produce the knowledge they can also pay them to not share it after they change employers. Just like regular noncompete clauses I don't see why this is something that require more than regular contract law or why it should be inherent instead of negotiated for a fee.
> Do you mind if I MITM all of your work output, your emails, your code, your messages, and attach my name to it and then receive your paychecks in exchange for my work?
To me, the fraud is the issue. If the person actually has the knowledge to spec out the whole technique, then sure, they can ask for it. But if they just said "give me what you give Apple" or describes it in detail and the vendor says "no I only will give that when Apple says they're okay", I don't see anything wrong with that either.
Generally speaking, companies retaining a competitive advantage with each other is good for their investors but bad for the public. It's usually to the public's benefit for employees to share knowledge, it makes goods and services cheaper and more available.
Civil disobedience involves flagrantly and publicly and obviously violating the law so you can be arrested to draw attention to whatever issue you have with the law. If you’re breaking the law and trying to get away with it, that’s just criminality and isn’t honorable or respectable.
Civil disobedience is the breaking of laws your conscience tells you are unjust -- and accepting all possible consequences that come along with such an act.
Doesn't mean you have to make it trivial for the consequences to find you by literally walking yourself into jail.
You are mistaken and gp is correct: civil disobedience is usually thought of as done in public. "My conscience tells me it's fine to steal from this rich bastard because property is theft" is not civil disobedience.
That's true, but I still benefit from the games being played. It also weakens the oligarchs slightly by reducing their margins. It's also worth remembering that the laws were written by the oligarchs.
Culture issue. From How to Apply to Y Combinator[1] by Paul Graham:
"Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage."
> we’re not looking for the sort of obedient, middle-of-the-road people that big companies tend to hire. We’re looking for people who like to beat the system.
Recent immigrants from Asia came with government connections or family wealth, so they see themselves as superior, not lucky. They will look down on you, so stealing from you should be expected.
Even second or third generation Asians in the country will defer to their landsmen. Not you. These are people they know socially and who speak the same languages. They’ll steal for them. And when they get into management, they’ll hire only Asians, and fire you.
It’s also cultural in the way Asians have no grasp of intellectual property. They see counterfeit goods as legitimate opportunities. They see theft of IP as flattery. They see corporate espionage as fair use.
The Soviet thing.
The success of oppressive regimes within the Former Soviet Bloc is due to criminals and loyalists, both of whom stripped the populace of cultural pride and identity. Communism is a kleptocracy, disguised as authoritarian.
They scattered like vermin when communism collapsed, but employers should know that anyone who came from Easter Europe with money probably got it dishonestly and they’ll probably try to steal from you.
Culture is not destiny.
Anyone can be hired, have access limits, be trained, and become great employees. But if you’re a manager, it behooves you to identify the cultural influences on employee performance so that you prepare each one for success.
Apple culture.
Apple’s roots are in corporate espionage, Xerox PARC, IBM. It should have recognized that having an entire wing of employees descended from Chinese intelligence officers and CCP members (because ordinary Chinese don’t get exit visas easily) might be a problem.
It’s also cultural when a company becomes so large that it hasn’t even been able to properly discipline the layers of supervisors who allowed theft to occur over a long period of time.
It’s also cultural that Steve Jobs liked to quote Picasso, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” He was a crook. He expected employees to steal. And they did.
The way to tell between that and factual / culturally-fluent: were you able to any strengths of other cultures? Weaknesses of your own?
Or did you go off on an (in this case ill-informed) rant about "they bad"?
The way to cure it is a mixture of reading: business books on culture (like Meyer and Hofstede) and NATO ones. Those are places people need to work together, as opposed to woke ideology.
A significant number of cybercrime today is committed by people from the former Soviet Bloc.
A significant number of intellectual property theft is committed by people from East Asia.
A significant number of rape in Europe is committed by people from Southeast Asia.
A significant number of managers here, with roots in India, only hire people with roots in India.
A significant number of forcibly retracted academic papers are by Asians, even in journals with major ownership stakes by the Chinese government. In contrast, a significant number of voluntarily retracted academic papers are by Westerners.
A significant number of Medicare and Medicaid fraud convictions in the past twenty years have been of people from the former Soviet Bloc and Asia.
A significant number of scams defrauding US victims remotely and in person, in the past decade, have been committed by crime rings out of West Africa, Western Europe, and Eastern Europe.
That’s not racist.
It is unfortunate reality.
If you blindly hire employees without regard to their cultural background, which includes ethnic origin and national identities, even religious beliefs, you are doing a disservice to your organization and your hires.
These former Apple employees were set up to fail by multiple layers of management that did nothing to curb theft, instill loyalty, and train these people that Asian beliefs about intellectual property are considered disloyalty here.
It gets even worse. The person not only kept the laptop and used an exploit to download confidential Apple documents, they bragged about it to a contact who was still working at Apple who was also feeding him information:
> Liu allegedly kept an Apple-issued laptop after departing the company and exploited a vulnerability to download dozens of confidential Apple documents while he was working at OpenAI. He also maintained a relationship with Yu-Ting "Alyssa" Peng, an Apple employee who continued to give him updates on Apple's projects, vendor decisions, and engineering details. When Liu learned he still had access to Apple's systems, he texted Peng "LOL, I found out I can access the [network storage], so funny."
This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you.
Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them and I wipe any access credentials or authenticator codes that might be on any of my devices. I can't imagine being so brazen that you'd keep the company laptop and then start using an exploit to download confidential information for your new employer.
Doing it at a the company that most aggressively enforces secrecy is even crazier.
Some people are blood thirsty and get a little thrill about thinking about harming people, so long as they are a socially appropriate target for their violent impulses.
Some people like to talk about “some people” snidely, instead of just coming out and saying “GP is bloodthirsty and gets a little thrill [etc].” Because of course, that’s what they mean, but they can’t back it up.
Would you like me too? I thought it unnecessary and needlessly rude to single anyone out: There are many examples of HN regulars behaving this way, and in my impression it has considerably increased over the last six years.
I think it’s possible to observe something and be sure that it’s true in aggregate without being able to accuse any one individual of it. I propose that in those cases, bringing it up in response to an individual is not a good move. It doesn’t sound any less accusatory for being ostensibly about the general public.
It’s a criminal charge. Have you seen a legal case for that? It’s always something like The People of California v. Someone. At least in theory, every citizen is an interested party when the prosecutor files a criminal case.
Nah man that's how you end up in the permanent underclass. If you want to make it you have to throw everyone and everything else under the bus, be a bizarrely mustache-twirling evil misanthrope and general freakazoid-type loser, and most importantly get too big to fail / too rich to sue bc you have the good lawyers who can basically stall suits to death. Here's an application to Wendy's.
FYI — the so-called “exploit” was simply a publicly-accessible URL that allowed him to download a handful of files, that’s why they write “dozens” and not “hundreds”, if anything it was only a couple of files (±26 or so) from the same URL which was pointing to a particular folder in the cloud.
Absolutely, but just as it's not ok to enter someone's home just because they forgot to lock the door, it's not ok to exploit access at your old employer because their offboarding process missed something.
I do the same as GP does; I don't want there to be any chance that my former employer has forgotten to revoke access to something, so I make sure to clear out anything that might remain on any device that I don't return to them.
Who knows, maybe another former employee will decide to steal from them around the same time I leave, and me having access credentials on a personal device, even if I haven't used it, might arouse suspicion.
You get trustworthy people by trusting people. Generally when I was there there was a presumption of trust. Given how blatantly the defendants are alleged to have acted, that’s still the case.
> Generally when I was there there was a presumption of trust.
The reality is, there has to be. And, if you can't trust someone then don't work with them.
I was talking to an amazing lawyer/business person I know one day and I asked about writing 'air tight' contracts which would never put you in a position to be screwed. He said something along the lines of, that's impossible. Someone could take you to court and you could still lose even if you think the contract is perfect. What he said next stuck with me over the rest of my career, 'if you truly can't trust someone, no contract will be fool-proof. The solution is simply to not work with or do business with them.'
Um, no. Why would it be their responsibility? There are laws regarding IP theft. If you willingly break them you can't just say "well your security wasn't good enough".
Huh? This analogy makes no sense. It’s beside the point anyways.
The utility of laws isn’t in stopping something from occurring, it’s in establishing remedies for when they do. Someone illegally transferred IP to a competitor that had knowledge they were stealing, and now Apple is seeking their remedy.
There's really no way to prevent an employee from taking a piece of paper or a digital file from one place to another. The most you can prevent is accidental transfer. If they are malicious they will find a way no matter what guardrails you put.
Many devices are indeed locked down. But given that it's an OS company and hardware vendor, many employees have access to hardware with e.g. SoC fusing that allows them to install custom-signed firmware. It's very difficult to make an OS lock out the people whose job it is to build the platform that OS depends on.
I once worked at a cybersecurity firm and they had a particularly botched rollout of MDM to Macs (which would regularly put the machine into an undesirable mode of 100% CPU usage plus max out upload bandwidth repeatedly trying and failing to backup the machine to some online backup service). I had work to do, so I simply disabled the MDM profile for the machine, installed an OS to my liking, and restored the apps I wanted to use, and went about things.
A year or so later the company hit hard times and we had a large layoff that affected me, and at the end of the video call, the directory of my department mentioned that they needed to wipe my laptops but it "wasn't showing up in MDM". I said I'd be glad to jump on a call with IT to fix that, but then he mentioned the IT staff were laid off too.
I then suggested I did get hired for my cybersecurity expertise, that I do take my obligations seriously, and he could just ask me to do whatever they were planning to do from the MDM console, and it would get done. He insisted that wouldn't be necessary since in his worldview the MDM was unbreakable and he just needed to reconnect to Wi-Fi or something.
Very amusing worldview. In the real world, where I live, I would assume a highly competent employee could exfiltrate trade secrets without me being able to catch them via standard / automated means. This particular Apple former employee got caught because he bragged about it, not because of technical means to catch him. As I've pointed out to a number of people, the very best DLP solution can be completely obviated by someone aiming a camera at their company-issue workstation's monitor.
> then suggested I did get hired for my cybersecurity expertise, that I do take my obligations seriously, and he could just ask me to do whatever they were planning to do from the MDM console, and it would get done. He insisted that wouldn't be necessary since in his worldview the MDM was unbreakable and he just needed to reconnect to Wi-Fi or something.
> Very amusing worldview.
It’s ironic that you’re displaying the exact behavior pointed out by the GP:
> This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you.
MDM is implemented to protect company assets regardless of the actions of the users. It would not be due diligence on the part of the director to trust you to wipe your own device.
It’s not clear to me what the point of your comment is other than illustrating that you’re smarter than your director.
Sounds like the boss's response was not to insist the proper procedure be followed, but to assert that the technology had to work as intended, and as soon as he figured out the issue on _his side_ the standard operating procedure could be followed.
I don't think I'm smarter than everyone else, but instead attribute this to organisational dysfunction. The problem (that went on for weeks) of the default MDM deployed software making some computers unusable was one everyone who got afflicted by it just found workarounds for, and in particular, our incentives were to get our jobs done, not to make sure we continued to allow the MDM deployed stuff to do whatever it wanted that was actively harmful to the company's best interests.
Considering the MDM was not implemented properly (particularly in an environment where one hires cybersecurity professionals, who are more likely than most to be able to figure out workarounds to it), it would actually be much more prudent to hire trustworthy staff who can be trusted not to steal company assets, trade secrets, and so on versus thinking you can conduct a zoom call on said company asset and then fire off a command via the MDM to wipe the laptop when the call is over.
I actually think the director was pretty smart, since he managed to avoid having an extended conversation about the lack of working MDM and ability to follow the procedure in front of the other person on the zoom call. Sometimes it's very important to be able to read between the lines of what someone is telling you.
Relying on remote wipes to secure company data is not a particularly strong plan, either (as this Apple saga should make clear); a determined person would simply be either constantly exfiltrating data, disconnect a machine from the network before it can be wiped, or other various plans (and do so without detection). I should know, since my job duties there were to advise customers on how to move towards a zero trust environment.
I once had work MDM on a Mac just... disappear one day. They definitely didn't intentionally remove it, nor did I do anything to remove it, but one day it just wasn't there. Maybe accidentally removed from the MDM management console for some reason?
Either way, everything still worked exactly as before, just now my Mac wasn't reporting back to the company at all. This went on for over a year until eventually I left the business, handed my laptop in physically and went on my way. I assume they noticed at that point, but before then they apparently had no idea.
I probably should have told someone, but since I hadn't done anything I didn't feel bad about it, and it was a lot easier to get stuff done without the corp stuff breaking everything
> I then suggested I did get hired for my cybersecurity expertise, that I do take my obligations seriously, and he could just ask me to do whatever they were planning to do from the MDM console, and it would get done. He insisted that wouldn't be necessary since in his worldview the MDM was unbreakable and he just needed to reconnect to Wi-Fi or something.
Which is hilarious. They've fixed (or at least made it more robust), but until at least Ventura, you want to know how to circumvent MDM entirely on Apple Silicon?
Do a fresh install with Internet access. When the machine goes to do the first reboot during the process, null route three hostnames on your router/DNS: deviceenrollment.apple.com, mdmenrollment.apple.com and iprofiles.apple.com.
Complete setup and get logged in.
You can now remove the null routing. Your machine will never phone home again for MDM enrollment. You can upgrade, all the way to Tahoe. No issues.
As of the more recent releases, the installer does do some checks to ensure connectivity to those hosts, that I haven't bothered or needed to try to circumvent... but yeah, the idea of Apple ensuring their MDM to be unbreakable, durable, robust is laughable.
Is it? I mean legally. Obviously it’s dumb of Apple to have left this guys access open, but that doesn’t mean they actually had any legal responsibility to lock him out. As far as I understand, the law is pretty clear that you can’t access anything you’re not allowed to by policy, whether there’s a technical block or not.
While it doesn't apply in this particular case, for healthcare organizations the HIPAA privacy rule implies a legal responsibility to lock out terminated employees from any access to protected health information.
The phrase for what you’re doing is “victim blaming”. I don’t know what triggers some people to think this way other than a deep desire to find a contrarian take on a situation.
But no, when a person commits a crime the responsibility and accountability for committing that crime is entirely on the person who committed the crime. If you start blaming the victim or downplaying the crime based on the victim’s circumstances, you are backwards.
> It seems strange to imply that people that own nothing must through their taxes pay for protection of property of the people who do own everything
I don’t know what you think you’re implying here, but by the numbers the wealthy and corporations pay significantly more in taxes than the “people who own nothing”. Everyone should get equal protection under the law, ignoring how much they pay in taxes.
All criminals should be afraid of committing crimes equally, because crimes are crimes and society benefits when committing a crime is discouraged.
> Crimes are crimes and must be prosecuted as such.
That would be nice but that is not the current situation, neither my stolen bicycle nor the fraud that caused 2008 had resulted in any arrests. Until such time that all crimes are crimes, it is a valid question.
> by the numbers the wealthy and corporations pay significantly more in taxes than the “people who own nothing”
This statement is highly misleading in three different dimensions:
Firstly, both in UK and in USA individuals pay like 5x more in income tax than corporations pay in tax. So people pay more tax and yet prosecutions against corporations are less than 1% of all prosecutions, that seems questionable.
Secondly, what is the statistics you are citing is actually saying? "Out of the people that declare income to government, those that declare the most income, pay the most tax". That's a bit self-evident, isn't it?
It does not address the claim that wealthiest people don't declare taxable income, and therefore pay little tax.
Thirdly, the measurement needs to be relative, not absolute. The claim "I pay less income tax than Facebook does' is true, but Facebook pays the effective tax rate of about 3%.
It is NEVER any other persons responsibility to prevent you from commiting crimes. Never.
They MAY make it harder for themselves, but at no point are is anyone required to make sure you're not a criminal.
That's a difference between living in a society that robs you on every step and one where you can leave a laptop on a table in a cafe and it stays there.
In relationships, offloading personal responsibility onto someone else (aka blaming another person for your choices and behaviors and thoughts and actions) is something like projection, blame-shifting, codependency.
This makes any healthy relationship impossible, as no one can be responsible for someone else's decisions and actions.
Many emotionally immature folks appeal to this and use guilt and shame to get another person to believe they are responsible for someone else's emotions & choices. It's textbook toxic.
>Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them
Because you're probably come from a high trust culture, but there's people coming from low trust environments where scamming everyone is the norm, and the way they learned to get ahead in life, from school all the way to work and business.
They're brazen because they've never suffered consequences for their actions.
This isn't something you can screen for in a classic job interview.
Ok, the implication that I'm reading between the lines is that this sort of behaviour is somehow more tolerated by people with names like Liu and Tan, but is this actually the case?
I know there's some evidence of Chinese people working at big tech and feeding data back to the CCP but is this a "low trust culture" issue in general or an extrapolation of that one pattern?
> Ok, the implication that I'm reading between the lines is that this sort of behaviour is somehow more tolerated by people with names like Liu and Tan, but is this actually the case?
Of course not. Have you been following national news or politics the past few years, and the continued incredibly strong support bad actors received despite atrocious behavior and even allegedly criminal acts?
I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion. The concept of low and high-trust societies is well-studied [0], though how a given country maps to it may be disputed.
You don’t have to look any first than the White House to say that behavior is well-established in American culture, too. From the prosperity gospel to “don’t hate the player”, etc. this is deeply not a Chinese thing.
I’ve been seeing this “high-trust society” dog whistle a lot lately, and I think it’s one of the funniest of its kind. You truly want me to believe that the United States, a country with a history of slavery and segregation, a country that went through a historical period dominated by people literally called “robber barons,” was a high-trust society before immigrants from less industrialized places came and ruined that?
I think you could be more charitable, as GP said “culture,” not “society.”
Apple alleges not only individual malfeasance, but also recruitment tactics like “show-and-tell” aimed at recruiting those willing to bring company secrets (and discriminating against those who would not).
This is enough to constitute a low-trust culture that self-perpetuates.
Surely given the size of China there are plenty of honorable people. And surely in the US there are many dishonorable people, as you’ve pointed out.
It isn’t a dog whistle. The US actually does have a high-trust society compared to most of the world. Petty theft, snatching, pickpockets, scams, etc are relatively uncommon compared to e.g. many popular places in Europe. Americans are famously vulnerable to it when traveling because it isn’t really part of their domestic threat environment. In many areas, Americans don’t bother to lock anything. You can leave stuff out in public places and it is unlikely to be stolen.
I would say it is lower trust today than when I was a child. Some cities have developed real petty theft problems due to disinterested enforcement. It is still noticeably higher trust than most places in the world I’ve traveled.
I don’t think they were making that comparison, rather that touristy cities have more pickpockets, which is obviously true and expected.
You seem to be very sensitive when it comes to anyone that might deign to question the supremacy of the US and very quick to disparage those outside of it.
I've spent tons of time in NYC, Barcelona and Paris and never ever encountered petty crime even as an observer. It certainly exists to some extent but this whole issue is a hype the kind of which villagers on the net like to argue about.
It really depends on the type of trust you're talking about. You're right that in many places in the US, people generally act honestly. But that's not always true -- porch pirates are still a huge problem in cities, for example.
Policy-wise, I would not describe the US as "high trust" relative to the rest of the first world. Virtually all of our non-senior welfare programs are means-tested or require some proof of virtue (e.g. "I am actively looking for a job" to collect unemployment insurance), meaning that society broadly does not "trust" people to collect benefits honestly unless they're seniors.
We can look this up empirically: https://ourworldindata.org/trust. It shows US is a medium-high trust society; lower than parts of Europe, and lower than China (assuming people answered honestly there!) but higher than most of Africa, South America and Asia.
> But that's not always true -- porch pirates are still a huge problem in cities, for example.
I mean, a huge problem in suburbs and more quiet rural areas too, where porch pirates might in theory stand out more, but also have a lot less through traffic to observe their efforts.
> “high-trust society” dog whistle ... United States
Is that what the GP meant? I would never use "high-trust society" to describe the US within the last, oh, 26 years or so. Belgium, Switzerland, Australia? Those are high-trust societies. You can really feel the difference when you're there.
The US is high-trust for insiders (rich white people). We allowed Donald Trump to loot the richest and most powerful society in history by imagining that he would follow the example of previous presidents instead of seeing him for the psychopathic mob boss that he is and always wanted to be.
Conversely, the US is zero-trust for outsiders such as foreigners, racially disfavored groups, and the poor. Allegedly-dog-eating Haitians and the like. We have guns and are not shy about using them.
Yes. People who grew up in the 40s and 50s in the US are common targets of scams because the world they grew up in is very trusting. Adults of the same age who grew up in the east bloc? Much more skeptical.
The colonies and, later, the United States didn’t just practice slavery; they industrialized it by transporting by force 12.5 million Africans to the Americas for nearly 250 years.
Even as fortunes were made, that didn’t stop the torture, rape, and brutality of these enslaved people.
Even after the Civil War, the descendants of the former enslaved people had to live under the Apartheid-like system of Jim Crow that lasted for another hundred years until the Civil Rights Act was enacted in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
I didn't read this that way at all. Society != country of origin.
The US, like any country, is composed of many different cultures and more or less independent societies, some being high-trust/valuing more cooperation and some low-trust, valuing more competition.
>I’ve been seeing this “high-trust society” dog whistle a lot lately
Brushing scams under the dog whistle rug is a cheap shot left wing liberals use to farm pitty and let criminals and scammers get away with it time and time again.
Your white cells are a dog white too, better remove them to not discriminate against bacteria.
trump totally wasn't elected with the help of foreign interference no sir, it was all on the up and up will of the people to have an incompetent waging war in iran(despite saying he wouldn't) and siphoning up money from crypto scams and insider trading.
> Because you're probably come from a high trust culture where you've been taught reciprocal trust...
That is just a long sentence for "us" vs "those people".
Having said that I don't entirely deny the effect of society on people's behavior. But at the same time, I have seen people from so called high-trust society being all polished and nice on the surface while being assholes and people from so called low-trust society being genuinely decent people despite not having the right name or the surface polish.
Also, assholes tend to attract assholes and people of the same tribe/clan/race tend to form groups.
> This isn't something you can screen for in a classic job interview
Why not? Sounds not that hard.
I actually believe this is something that would make a candidate looks good in an interview for many large corporations.
> Because you're probably come from a high trust culture where you've been taught reciprocal trust, responsibility and accountability, but there's people coming from low trust environments where exploiting loopholes and scamming everyone outside their inner circle is the norm, and it's the way they learned to get ahead in life, from school all the way to work and business.
For an adult, I would attribute this more to internal mental makeup than anything else. I've seen individuals exhibit these positive and negative behaviors irrespective of whether they were in a high-trust society or a low-trust one, a wealthy society or a poverty-riddled one.
Additionally, based on what's going on in the world, I would say that there are very clear signs that a high-trust society is formed when adults with positive behaviors are in power, and a low-trust society is formed when adults with negative behaviors gain power.
Indubitably, there are individuals whose behaviors are moderated by what type of society they're in, but that split between moderated individuals and self-driven individuals is, IMHO, unknown, or at least, unknown to me.
Societies as a collection of all individuals matter more than individual individuals.That's why Japan is the way Japan is and India the way India is.
>Additionally, based on what's going on in the world, I would say that there are very clear signs that a high-trust society is formed when adults with positive behaviors are in power, and a low-trust society is formed when adults with negative behaviors gain power.
Every society on the planet from Japan to North America has its own robber barons that are above the law, the difference is in Taiwan, Japan or Singapore I'm not afraid of getting mugged, broken into or sexually assaulted on the streets at night and people queue politely and orderly for riding the bus.
> Don't blame your leader for how your society looks, blame your society for your leader looks.
Hard disagree. There's a reason collective punishment (a.k.a blaming society) is a war crime and a violation of human rights. Kings (Ghenghis Khan is the most [in]famous example) used to hand out collective punishments to relatives and villages, and that's why human societies had to eventually get rid of them as a collective, leading to the modern era.
Leaders, as autonomous adults, are responsible for their own actions and how they look, not anyone else. They don't even have the disallowed excuse of 'following orders'.
Additionally, Leaders have an outsize impact on human organizations because of hierarchy and power differentials. Society reflects their adult leaders because of this power differential, not the other way around. More specifically, individuals susceptible to influence perpetuate that power differential ('following orders') and diffuse the leadership behaviors into wider society, making that society a reflection of its leadership. And I'm willing to wager that the proportion of folks susceptible to influence far outstrips the proportion of independent thinkers in any society.
Even in democracies (which are mostly representative-based republics), there is a hierarchy with power differentials, and a strong individual can work those hierarchies to remake society.
Even in direct democracies, would you say a 50.1% result in one direction reflects that society as a whole? Mathematically, that's a ridiculous conclusion. And yet, that tiny advantage can result in wholesale changes to society (Brexit cough cough). So where does one draw the line? 51%? 60%? 75%? 95%? What about the 5% that disagrees? Do they deserve any collective punishment for the actions of the 95%? Or are you going to lean on 'collateral damage' as a defense?
> Don't blame your leader for how your society looks
One can blame the leader for their actions, and therefore by extension how the society looks post-action, because those actions are on the society.
To be fair, pre-action one can blame the supporters of the leader for making bad choices, but post-action responsibility is on the leaders.
The real problem is the hierarchical nature of societies and organizations. A leader at the "top" is a winner-take-all situation. Even direct democracies that apply majority rules is a winner-take-all situation, defective from the start. A different construct is needed - effective cooperation without leadership.
Bitcoin is a start towards that effective-cooperation-without-leadership, but it also suffers from the 50.1% problem.
> Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them
Right. I noticed a coworker who recently left the organization was still running some of our software on his personal computer (evident in the access logs) and notified him that I could see, he should be more careful, etc. We agree to these contracts because compliance matters, not just because we need the job.
> Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them […]
At $WORK we have the option of getting a work smartphone or having the company pay for (at portion of) our monthly mobile bill.
I chose a work device because I do not want any cross-contamination. (Others chose payment because they did not want the 'hassle' of carrying a second device (and to save some cash).)
It’s not just wrong, you’re potentially allowing anything you do on that work computer to 1) be owned by the company and 2) be discoverable in court. it’s amazing how many it orgs are so lax with this. personal/work devices should and always be entirely separate. BYOD is a really bad crutch and a potential compliance nightmare timebomb for all parties.
If you are worried about the ethics of using a company laptop to do personal work, you might be taking it a bit far, what damage does this do to the company?
If you are worried about the company claiming rights over your personal work, then it is prudent.
That seems absolutely crazy to do. One could argue that the marginal cost to work for using a work laptop is zero and the work is still yours (still beyond the risk I’m willing to take). Using a company’s AI account is literally using the company’s resources for a personal project. There is no plausible case where they don’t own it.
> Using a company’s AI account is literally using the company’s resources for a personal project. There is no plausible case where they don’t own it.
Honestly, of the two scenarios, this one is the more likely to fall on the employee's side.
We haven't really tested the legal precedent for ownership of LLM outputs very thoroughly yet, and I'm willing to bet a bunch of us still have employment contracts that haven't been updated to cover LLM use...
As for what damage you do, it kind of depends on what you're doing. But in the end you're exposing your work machine to patterns and processes outside your normal job duties, potentially exposing it and the data/access it has to additional risks.
It might be overly paranoid depending on what the circumstances are, it might be a real concern as well.
1) It really had nothing to do with what damage it does to the company. It’s a long story, but I take personal Integrity fairly seriously. It was about how I felt about it, inside. As I progressed, in my self-development, “cash register” honestly became more important.
2) That’s definitely a valid point. I have worked on free/open-source code for most of my adult life. For a long time, it was for my own use, but I started publishing code for use by others, and provenance became a much more important coefficient.
I did the same. Nothing nefarious on my work laptop, but I used it for websurfing (avoiding questionable sites), booking trips, etc.
Then I realized how stupid that was even though my employer was fine with and was never strict with how a work laptop is used.
I realized not only did I not want my work to know what I'm doing on my personal time, the risk of cross-contamination and being accused of stealing confidential documents or a personal text making it look like I'm doing something wrong is too high.
I bought my own cell phone and laptop and now never use my work equipment for anything but work. Not worth the risk.
> I realized not only did I not want my work to know what I'm doing on my personal time, the risk of cross-contamination and being accused of stealing confidential documents or a personal text making it look like I'm doing something wrong is too high.
If they wrongfully accuse you of that, isn't it a place you should leave in any case?
It really depends on where you want to steer your career. There's some roles, especially in management, where "working hours only" isn't really an option; if you aspire to one of those you've gotta convince people you'll do what's necessary.
Some people are in it for the challenge. Someone else's outage? Yeah I'll happily help diagnose it, analysing and figuring out where the issue is can teach you a lot of things.
For the record, this was never at night. Late in the evening, sure.
Also sometimes (depending on the company) being seen to visibly chip in fighting fires can win you real credibility that you can put in the bank and then use later when you want to slightly slack off for a bit.
So it can actually make logical sense to do it occasionally even from a purely selfish perspective if it's half an hour on a random Tuesday evening and you aren't actually doing anything else important.
All depends if the company is actually going to be grateful or not though
This is relatable. Though I’d add that the company can’t be grateful, it’s just a machine. But the colleagues you’re helping out, they absolutely can be grateful, and will sing your praises, leading to positive things happening. In the right type of company.
Keep your ops people happy. Help them when you can, it's the fairest way i would say to not have to be on call. It also makes them feel like they're not on their own. You're all on the same team.
Not sure if upper management sees this stuff. For the number of times I've fixed other people's crap (or found the root cause, so they can just fix it) I don't think I got any recognition for that.
Reap what you sow. The one's who follow US "availability culture" absolutely will get promoted faster than the euro-in-american clothing "I work to live not live to work" crowd.
Marxian style LTV analysis of the economy breaks down hardcore involving anything touching electrons. His analysis of the theory of alienation/exploitation is literally invalid in the era of computers, and exponentially so in the era of AI systems. It's not "exploitation" to be available in exchange for comically large amounts of money.
> His analysis of the theory of alienation/exploitation is literally invalid in the era of computers,
What?
Software development is the poster child for alienation, and LLMs turning your job into one where you manage an incredibly productive idiot turned all of that up to 11.
Company IT policies really got it the wrong way around with “bring your own device”. My personal phone is the last thing I would want them to have a presence. Conversely, having them manage a laptop and workstation for me is never going to give me a device as nice as I’m used to at home.
I am extremely picky about keyboards, screens, and OS configuration as a result of being partially deaf, having poor eyesight, and honestly being a bit of an old stick in the mud. It would be lovely to set aside some space on an old Thinkpad for work tasks. It would be comfortable and easy to isolate and be just like my personal machine.
Instead I get a choice between a MacBook with a fixed alternate key layout or a Windows machine with a locked down bright white wallpaper and a non admin account.
First thing I do at a new job is make friends with IT, if at all possible. I end up being the guy trialling the new high-dpi screens, more RAM in my laptop, and "just DM me in Teams" privileges for tech support. All for not treating these people like tech janitors (and obviously there's nothing wrong with being a janitor).
Like you I keep them separate. Not just my phone. I don't do anything personal on work devices (don't log into personal email or banks, etc...)
But, I believe I'm in the minority. Most of my fellow employees have added corp to their phone. I believe most do personal stuff on their work computer. I was once at an SV party and several Apple employees (3 women, 5 gay men, 3 straight men) said they all used their work laptops to watch porn at home or traveling. I was pretty shocked. Not that they watched but that they used work laptops for it. They all thought it was fine.
> I chose a work device because I do not want any cross-contamination.
This is a wise choice. For me, nothing personal goes onto my work phone or laptop. And nothing work-related goes onto personal devices. Life is just easier that way.
assuming these employees are not just trying to shift the blame to OpenAI to cover their asses.. that's the beauty of American civil courts and the discovery process. An accusation was made. We'll find out through a transparent court process which side is telling the truth (or more likely to be telling the truth in the case of balance of probabilities).
An acquaintance of mine was accidentally wired about $100k when it was supposed to be $5k. Before it could be reversed, they moved accounts and immediately bought a one way flight out of country. They then changed all socials and handles. They are now ignoring all court documents and are on track to get a default judgement against them.
Their rationale? “It’s mine, they owed me this”. They are 100% convinced that they are in the right, not just that they can keep it but that they actually intended to send them this to begin with. I get it $100k isn’t nothing but they’re also throwing their life away for less than what they used to make a year in salary.
People do weird things when given sudden access to money or power.
> People do weird things when given sudden access to money or power.
Given your story its not sounds like this is power grab. More like they actually on spectrum and have some mental issues on top this. Or had mental breakdown because something happened before that money arrived.
Situations when people do something weird, bad or just plain evil for money and power are usually logical. E.g people think they got access to more money they percieve they can earn in next decade, or ever, something that settles them for life.
Earning more than $100,000 and throwing everything away for $95,000 only make sense if you are terminally ill. Or if it was never your real identify in first place and its well planned scam.
I had a client send me an ACH that was legitimately a fat finger extra zero. For me, it was a "lot" of truck payments. For them, it was a rounding error that they were unaware of until I reached out and let them know about their mistake. I couldn't wait to make it right with them because it bothered me so much because suddenly I had a pile of money that was theirs and not mine.
I had a similar situation where someone had their email client configured with my address in the reply-to header. We shared a first initial, last name, and isp… also happened to be my email address. His email was firsnamelastname, or something similar. I emailed the guy several times explaining how to fix it, and that I was getting a lot of his business correspondence. Never heard from him.
Then one day I get a Chase Zelle email saying that someone was sending me money. Something like $500. Logged into the Chase app and sure enough, could have taken it with the click of a button.
I contacted the sender to explain the situation and recommended they call the intended recipient for a correct email address.
Couldn’t image just taking it knowing it wasn’t intended for me.
Had a similar experience. Was at a party when I suddenly received a notification from our country's equivalent to cashapp/Venmo. It was about $450, so not a lot but enough to be significant to many people. About a minute later I get a call from a seemingly young man who's very stressed telling me he sent the money to the wrong number and asking me to send it back. I told him don't worry I'll get your money back but I need to contact customer service first just to make sure it's safe for me to do so. I wanted to avoid some kind of charge back scam or similar.
So I called CS, they said it was safe to return the money and so I did and the guy called back just to thank me.
This reminds me of the terribly designed timesheet system I was using earlier this year, where I accidentally logged like 55 hours of work for something instead of 55 minutes… I got a shocking direct deposit that week and had to mail them back a large check. Really hope they definitely don’t mess up the 1099!
Not to mention that, despite having done nothing wrong, you can still be blamed and suffer the consequences. Imagine that company did notice, and the person who sent the payment went into a panic. They call their bank, that bank calls your bank, they put a hold on your entire account, and now your payroll, bills, leases, etc. all start bouncing and you can't accept payments from other clients to cover anything in the short term.
Now you've done nothing wrong, maybe even haven't noticed yet, and suddenly they kill your business overnight.
> People do weird things when given sudden access to money or power.
It's more that money and power enable you to be who you really are, and amplify your worst traits if you're lacking self-awareness.
There are many people who are rich/wealthy and/or powerful and they're decent individuals living relatively ordinary lives. You don't read about most of them because they're "normal".
If the only reason you didn't behave that way to begin with is that you lack the money and power to evade the consequences, then yes. You really are that person.
while i somewhat agree with that reasoning, it can go too far - most people would murder and kill if there weren't any consequences to doing so. But is it right to say who they really are as being murderers?
> most people would murder and kill if there weren't any consequences to doing so
Do you have any evidence to support this? Feels like this opinion is made up, for unknown reasons.
In reality, psychopathic tendencies are about 4.5% in the general adult population, a far cry from 'most people', with the gold standard assessment being only 1.2%. [1]
From that same article, "The construct of psychopathy is understood generically as a type of personality disorder characterized, among other important features, by the presence of behaviors that conflict with the social, moral, or legal norms of society, giving rise in many cases to clearly criminal behaviors ..."
There's also the bagel experiment described in Freakonomics. [2]
> most people would murder and kill if there weren't any consequences to doing so
Citation needed. There are a lot of ways I can improve as a person, but I can promise you I am not and not ever been a murderer or killer regardless of consequences. Even if someone threatened me or someone else, I would do my best to not kill them and simply diffuse the situation.
> most people would murder and kill if there weren't any consequences to doing so
This is what Christians tell themselves and others to explain why believing in their religion is so important, but it's not even remotely true. Humans evolved community and society long before we evolved organized religion.
I constantly see Christians pitching this like some kind of gotcha: "If you don't believe in God, then how do you know what's right or wrong?" The simple answer is that I have empty and I care about how other people feel; I try to do things that make things better and avoid things that make things worse, both for me and for others.
If the only reason that you don't rape and murder is because you're worried about consequences then that makes you a horrible person whether you act on it or not.
Conversely, it seems as though Christians see these 'teachings' as a get out of moral quandary free card; if the Bible implies it's okay, or you can justify an interpretation where that's the case, then it's completely fine to do whatever you like. Harass or attack trans people, bomb Iran, make miscarriages illegal but refuse to feed the poor or help with daycare - all because one reading of the bible supports the things you want to do (even though it doesn't) but doesn't require what you don't want to do (even though it does, actually).
It's especially interesting when you consider that doing the Right Thing despite the consequences (like when challenging a tyrant) is seen as heroic. The logical consequence is that, if you view God as the ultimate tyrant, challenging him is supremely heroic.
I believe the original statement is an oversimplification. What actually happens is that extreme situations, both positive and negative, can help you discover things about you that you didn't know before.
Apart from that, the problem with "who you really are" is that individual is more of a process than a static thing, so any such reification becomes invalid in the next instant.
You're right that people aren't static, but we should also acknowledge there are lots of people who become rich and powerful and they don't do horrid things. Many are perfectly decent people who care for their families, help those around them, contribute to their communities and use their wealth and power to support causes that are important to them.
You don't hear about these people as much because they're not out looking for attention, making outlandish statements or even trying to "change the world" in a narcisstic Silicon Valley way.
"Who you are" at your core drives the direction you go in when you acquire wealth and power.
Same goes for money: It enables greedy jerks to be more greedy and more of a jerky, and it enables people who e.g. voluntarily donated already to do much more in that direction, too.
I'd say who you really are is whoever you really are. If you're acting like a dick then you really are a dick, I don't care whether your financial situation influences your behavior.
The number of people we got to see on TikTok discover that you can write yourself a cheque for $100k and then get access to that money as though it was some kind of infinite money glitch that no one had ever thought of, manufacturing money out of nowhere that no one would try to get back... ridiculous.
> An acquaintance of mine was accidentally wired about $100k when it was supposed to be $5k. Before it could be reversed, they moved accounts and immediately bought a one way flight out of country. They then changed all socials and handles. They are now ignoring all court documents and are on track to get a default judgement against them.
$95k does not seems like enough money to totally upend your life like that for.
> $95k does not seems like enough money to totally upend your life like that for.
That's because most of us here are so used to the amount of money we earn. But for people who literally struggling with month-to-month payments, 100K feels like a life-changing amount of money. If they were just saving month by month, they might have never reached that amount in their entire life.
Our perspectives here on HN are very one-sided when it comes to things like this, anyone who been poor previously (or is currently) could attest to this.
I don't know, the very same comment mentions that the person was earning 6 figures. Less-than-a-year's-salary is definitely a weird thing to throw a comfortable 6 figure income out the window for - it's not like 95k is "never work a day in your life" money.
> I don't know, the very same comment mentions that the person was earning 6 figures.
What does that mean for where and how the person live though? How much money were they realistically having left at the end of the month? 6 figures surely means a lot in some places, in others not so much and maybe they didn't have much left after all. Even with 1K left in a month on average, that's 95 months (~8 years) of saving for the same amount, maybe it was always the plan to just get the fuck out once they got close to 100K or whatever.
Humans do rash things, especially when some shortcut appears. But all this is also speculation and hypothesizing, who knows the real reasons behind it for sure.
I don’t think that changes the equation any? If you are underwater on 100k/year, you sure as shit are going to end up underwater on 95k for the entire rest of your life…
Now he's up to his ears in debt and a felon in his original country, plus he's not likely to get another six-figure job from any country willing to do a background check. I hope that extra $95k was sufficient to set him up for life.
There was a thread here not too long ago about employees getting fired because they were cheating on their expense accounts. C-level execs cheating on pretty trivial amounts. And others brought up star athletes getting paid millions, then getting busted placing thousands of dollars on insider bets. There's a lot of irrationality in these decisions.
Greed knows no limits. That's how polls showed the happiest people earn around 60-80k a year and the people below and above that threshold, reported to be less and less happy the less they made and also the more they made.
It's as is the more money you make, the more you need to feel fulfilled.
> That's how polls showed the happiest people earn around 60-80k a year, and both the people below and above that threshold, reported to be less and less happy the less they made and also the more they made.
This is a myth. The original 2010 Kahneman-Deaton study showed that how favorably people judged their overall lives continued to improve beyond $75k. Daily emotional well-being appeared to stop improving around that level. [1]
A larger 2021 study by Killingsworth using real-time reports found no happiness plateau at $75k; instead, well-being continued increasing with income, including above $200k. The relationship was logarithmic - going from $40k to $80k mattered more than going from $160k to $200k, but the benefit didn't disappear. [2]
So of course, in 2023, Kahneman and Killingsworth jointly re-analyzed to resolve the conflict, leading to more nuanced conclusions: in the least-happy 15-20%, unhappiness declined as income went up but eventually leveled off; for the majority of people, happiness continued rising with income beyond $75k; in the happiest people, the association sometimes became stronger at higher incomes. [3]
But the poster said that that was basically his yearly salary. He fled the country and has to spend the rest of his life worrying about extradition (and/or having people find out he's a felon) for a year's pay.
There's homeless people living on the streets or people in jail who destroyed their lives for way less than 95k. Often for nothing, like throwing a punch over a parking spot argument.
You'd be surprised how far down poor impulsive choices can drag you down even when there's no money on the line.
What privilege? Anyone's life (someone who lives in the Valley) is worth more than 95k. Anyone who is a software engineer at Apple, is definitively worth more than 95k. The kid is dumb. Not sure how Apple interview processes are these days.
> People do weird things when given sudden access to money or power.
10 years ago my last boss told me one last advice before going onto entrepreneur ventures: « be careful, people do become crazy and stupid with money » (and I guess he knew what he was talking about…)
There's a line from the movie The Way of the Gun that I love about this. The number is higher, but it still applies. Some criminals are loading a $15 million ransom into the back of a truck, and a younger criminal says, "Boy, $15 million is a lot of money, huh?" and James Caan, playing an older, wiser criminal says,
"Money? $15 million is not 'money'. It's a motive, with a universal adapter on it."
Was talking to a lawyer, and tells me how often he has clients say (after a crime, and while trying to resolve things), "We've got this far [in trying to fix it], don't worry, I'm not stupid enough to screw it up". His response, generally, "My career is built on people who did dumber things, and for less, so..."
Rich people do this all day and it's why they're rich. There's nothing shocking about seeing a non-rich person try the same thing in hopes of becoming rich.
> Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back
It’s a total liability to hold onto anything. Even if you don’t do anything with it, it could get stolen or misplaced, and you’re liable. Not worth the headache.
> This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you.
Its also how some folks act like when they've done something they morally can't deal with - their subconscious starts throwing all sorts of obvious signs up until they get caught. I presume this was done for a giant pile of cash, stock, and probably a promise that nobody really cares if you show up or not, enjoy your retirement.
Not so.. He’s being sued personally as well. the lawsuit is Apple vs. “ CHANG LIU, TANG YEW TAN, OPENAI FOUNDATION f/k/a OPENAI, INC., OPENAI GROUP PBC, and IO PRODUCTS, LLC f/k/a IO PRODUCTS, INC.”
Yeah, as long as the feds don't decide that 'OpenAI is too important to our AI ambitions vs. China, et al so we can't afford to punish them in any way that matters', which is probably what's happening here.
OpenAI/Altman are trying to cozy up to Trump so that they can bypass laws and regulations in their quest for infinite growth at no cost (see also: all the NASDAQ 'rules' which didn't apply to SpaceX, the AI company). In return to stroking his ego, etc., Trump gets to seem like he's M'ing AGA by boosting up this new, world-changing technology and helping to keep the US ahead of everyone else. OpenAI, in the administration's eyes, is now 'too big to fail' (because of the blow to Trump's ego) so OpenAI gets to continue to break laws (first copyright violations, now IP theft) with nothing but a slap on the wrist.
> they morally can't deal with - their subconscious starts throwing all sorts of obvious signs up until they get caught
That's the view narcissistic have of human nature: "we feel so bad when we behave selfishly, because deep inside we are so naturally virtuous". It's very comfortable to believe that deep inside we remain virtous/innocent even if our life clearly shows how mediocre we are. In the real world, you are what you do.
These were long tenured and valued employees at Apple. They likely already had healthy pile of cash and stock.
Maybe it was the environment at OpenAI encouraging this behavior. Or, is this a particular set of skills some/all of the individuals mentioned were already well-practiced at?
I hope this case goes to court so we can find out.
This is the caricature of Silicon Valley made real. It doesn't matter how much money Liu had, it isn't enough. It will never be enough. The entire culture is fixated on maximizing growth. Whether that's growth of the corporation or growth of one's own wealth. The Reagan-era "greed is good" thing never really died here (among other places).
> The Reagan-era "greed is good" thing never really died here (among other places).
Greed is good is everywhere on the planet now. Everyone I know in EU is trying to cash in as much as they can while the going is still good because they feel the ladder constantly being pulled from them. Either from their company or from scamming the government and welfare system.
And the compound the issue, the government trying to "equalize" this only makes things worse as they just add more taxes on the honest working class people in their quest to tax "the rich".
I don't think we can escape this downward spiral in any peaceful way. That's probably why the EU is pushing all these privacy invading laws lately, to catch and crush any public uprisings before they happen.
Agreed, we are giving an absolute load of welfare to billionaires. From tax breaks to bailouts, and to your point, it's sucking the life out of the American economy.
> Everyone I know in EU is trying to cash in as much as they can while the going is still good because they feel the ladder constantly being pulled from them
Your friends probably aren't engaging in "greed is good" themselves, just responding to the economic conditions created by people who are engaging in it.
In the American cultural headspace, "greed is good" refers to a very specific brand of robber-baron capitalism. It's a doctrine that was first given academic legitimacy by the University of Chicago's school of economics, then put into practice in the 1980s under the Reagan administration, and nowadays its loudest proponents are Musk and Thiel. It's an economic theory that lionizes extractive behavior by the economic elite, with some bullshit trickle-down argument that's too convoluted to be worth explaining here.
It creates an environment where everyone had to do evil shit just to put a roof over their heads, a self-regulating race to the bottom. Your friends are likely just unwilling participants, a side effect of "greed is good" rather than doers of it.
> "greed is good" refers to a very specific brand of robber-baron capitalism.
It does not. It refers to the Eighties brand of corporate raiders and excess Capitalism. It's a quote from the film, "Wall Street". That whole paragraph is wrongly conflating ideas.
> It refers to the Eighties brand of corporate raiders and excess Capitalism.
Quote from my own comment:
> put into practice in the 1980s under the Reagan administration
Are you contesting the name "greed is good" because it was coined after the underlying theory was crafted? If so, I disagree. We didn't have the word "smartphone" until after those existed. The word "Christianity" wasn't invented while Jesus was alive. Trees existed before we named them. Reagan didn't just pull a new breed of economic policy out of his ass in January of 1980.
>Your friends probably aren't engaging in "greed is good" themselves, just responding to the economic conditions created by people who are engaging in it.
Yes, which is why I said "Everyone I know in EU is trying to cash in as much as they can while the going is still good".
When analyzing an optimization problem, the optimal values for the input variables are often found to lie somewhere between min and max.
It’s not clear that the person you replied to was advocating for one extreme, but even given that your strawman-esque assertion is probably true … I’d suggest analyzing a few other points in the domain beyond merely the two extremes that you contrasted.
Which range of the domain do you think we’d be most likely to find the optimal values for society? Do you believe that range might actually be inclusive of either limit? Are you sure you’d like to live in a world where the extreme limit of income inequality is manifest?
I'm fine with people creating wealth that becomes theirs. That wealth appears because other people place value on it. The wealth is not taken from other people. If you decided to cap it, it caps prosperity of the economy, because their wealth comes from creating what other people want. Why would you want to limit prosperity?
Keep in mind that Mush created 4000 millionaires the day SPCX was IPO'd.
I’m just not convinced that value creation and value extraction are well-linked when examining outlier cases. The nature of outliers makes it far more likely that value extraction would be much more likely to exceed net value creation. Even if for the more median percentiles, value creation and extraction are well-correlated.
I wouldn’t suggest a cap, but I would suggest very high tax rates and a more stern eye towards anti-competitive practices and negative externalities.
As a thought experiment:
Celebrating unbounded greed (the most “extreme” option) would be celebrating when politicians steal as much money as they can by manipulating stock markets and Kalshi and taking crypto bribes, taking kickbacks from contractors and blackmailing or strong-arming the other branches of government.
Celebrating unbounded greed would be celebrating selling poisoned food and telling ourselves that its the stupid people’s fault for buying melamine-contaminated milk without getting it tested by their own independent third party before drinking it. And then blaming the stupid people again when their third party testing lab that was trustworthy gets purchased by the same private equity group that owns the milk company and starts watering down or falsifying their tests.
Celebrating unbounded greed would be celebrating people whose wealth increased by neglecting expensive safety protocols, blowing up neighborhoods with gas explosions, and silencing them by intimidation, as well as blackmailing and bribing the judges overseeing any torts.
The more of this you allow and celebrate, the more your outliers grow and become a true bimodal distribution. Where the peak earners are, by necessity, extracting more value than they create.
The thing is, we have had a lot of things like this happen in most developed countries. There is a lot of corruption, and it’s not divided along party lines. Celebrating and glorifying unbounded greed is likely to lead towards a state where there’s less “rule of law” and more “rule by force”.
I am not talking about people who steal wealth, which is illegal. I'm not celebrating or making excuses for thieves or criminals. I'm talking about people who create wealth via the free market.
I agree that externalities are a problem, as it pushes costs onto others.
> as well as an economy that actually meets the assumptions of a “free market”: i.e. no individual buyer or seller has enough concentrated power to significantly impact the supply-demand curve all by themselves.
The free market does not require that a large player be prohibited from shifting the s-d curve. For example, ever-cheaper computers shifted the curve. And that was good for us.
> For classical economists such as Adam Smith, the term free market refers to a market free from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities. They say this implies that economic rents, which they describe as profits generated from a lack of perfect competition, must be reduced or eliminated as much as possible through free competition. [0]
> The definition of perfect competition is when the following conditions all hold: A large number of sellers and buyers – A large number of consumers with the willingness and ability to buy the product at a certain price, and a large number of producers with the willingness and ability to supply the product at a certain price. As a result, individuals are unable to significantly influence prices. [1]
You are free to say that you personally don't care for "free markets" and use another term to describe the type of market that you prefer. But the textbook definition of "free market" was already defined 250 years ago as a market in which "a large player be prohibited from shifting the s-d curve".
"A free market is an economic system where prices, production, and distribution of goods and services are determined purely by the laws of supply and demand, rather than by government intervention. In an idealized free market, buyers and sellers voluntarily exchange goods, and competition naturally drives innovation, efficiency, and fair pricing."
That's what I'm talking about.
The wikipedia Perfect_competition reference does not mention "free market".
Google says Adam Smith never mentioned the term "perfect competition".
Indeed, it appears I was miseducated to believe there was more of a consensus that "free market" assumes approximately "perfect competition", when in reality there is a less of a consensus than I thought -- e.g. modern followers/revivalists of "Austrian economics" are quite opposed to the idea of perfect competition being a condition of a free market.
Yup, because perfect competition is fundamentally the same as the salary cap, except for companies instead of employees. Specialization leads to natural monopolies at company level just as it does at personal level. Besides, the term monopoly only makes sense when it's state-enforced. In a free market it loses meaning since every company has a monopoly on their exact product.
> Keep in mind that Mush created 4000 millionaires the day SPCX was IPO'd.
while also asserting that:
> I am not talking about people who steal wealth, which is illegal. I'm not celebrating or making excuses for thieves or criminals.
Elon Musk is a great example of that "Lance Armstrong" concept. It would beggar belief for him to have beat everyone else that cheats at business, without breaking laws/regulations himself.
Some news [0] from today:
> The lawsuit alleged that by not disclosing the stock purchases before the legal deadline, Musk was able to keep buying shares at artificially low prices and underpay Twitter investors by at least $150 million for those shares.
> US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan said she “has significant misgivings about the settlement” between Musk and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and described “red flags” in the SEC’s decision-making. This isn’t surprising given that she previously questioned whether the deal is tainted by corruption.
It starts to sound a lot like "the Lance Armstrongs molding the law and its enforcement to their personal desires" as posited in my previous post.
Profitable or not, this sounds a lot like excusing someone who stole $150 million from others by not following the law - because $150M simply isn't much money for a man of his wealth (that $150M is not where he made his money). Even though it appears that he utilized that same vast wealth to avoid any significant consequences for this great theft.
You do make excuses for those with capital, and even here you judge people's actions differently based on how much capital they have - if that $150M were the source of his wealth, your arguments would be different - even though the actions would be the same.
Would it be honest to simply state that those with vast wealth are better, smarter, fitter humans who deserve deference from the rest of society?
> They likely already had healthy pile of cash and stock.
True for every billionaire too. They have so much money not only do they make it faster than they can literally spend it[0]. They have so much money their great grandchildren never have to work, even if they procreate like Musk.
For many people money is not about how it can be used to buy things to improve your life but about the social status that that wealth gives you. Take Musk as an example. He cared a lot about becoming a trillionaire. But even a billion is an incomprehensible level of wealth
[0] on a 5% interest account you'd make >$5k/hr or >$4m every month. Literally the time it takes to spend your money will allow you to recoup it. E.g in the time it takes to buy a Tesla you'll have earned more than a Tesla costs. Same even for supercars, which take longer to buy.
> Its also how some folks act like when they've done something they morally can't deal with
I think you’re projecting some other ideas on to this situation. These people weren’t driven by subconscious guilt about some other decision which drove them to commit literal crimes. This doesn’t even make sense.
People who do this are just corporate climbers who will use anything they can to boost their status. Stealing from past employer feels like a way to make yourself more valuable or indispensable, which gives them a feeling of leverage in their new job.
> I presume this was done for a giant pile of cash, stock, and probably a promise that nobody really cares if you show up or not, enjoy your retirement.
Most likely the opposite: Their new job brought them into a company surrounded by high performers who got their by working hard. They probably felt insecure in such a competitive environment and thought that stealing from Apple could make them appear more valuable so they could keep up with the demands.
Pre-IPO companies in highly competitive markets are not “rest and vest” environments.
I was responding to a comment that said they did this in response to subconscious guilt about stock options.
From the complaint we can see that OpenAI at least looked the other way, but the complaint also has texts from the person to another Apple employee. When you're committed crimes and texting "LOL" as you describe the crimes to a friend, I don't believe for one second that the person is feeling guilty or ashamed.
>>Most likely the opposite: Their new job brought them into a company surrounded by high performers who got their by working hard.
This is just another edition of Google "we only hire the best" with nothing to show for it for 20 years. Were these the high performers, who created the disaster called ChatGPT Work ?
>This is just another edition of Google "we only hire the best" with nothing to show for it for 20 years.
Google was "hiring the best" not because they needed those new hiries to build something to show for, they were hiring them to deprive their competitors of talent using their unlimited ad revenue warchest.
The entire tech scene during the ZIRP era, even more so during COvid, was just adult daycare for smart people, a giant Fugazi that came crashing down. And if the AI bubble pops, it will crash even harder.
> This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you.
Found out I already had a bank account with €2000 balance in my name. Temptation was high to take over the account and withdraw the cash.
Fortunately didn't touch a dime.
Long story short, my identity got stolen, account was used to collect eBay scam money and cash out from ATMs. I was a suspect and investigated for money laundering and membership to organised crime.
I had to sue the Prosecutor's Office to have them investigate the scammers. They initially refused because it was too hard... Italy.
Italy, and beyond... the lobbying that has been done to make identity theft and associated fraud primarily a crime against the institution/business and not you, and the associated implications that you somehow "lost" your identity or failed to protect it (versus the reality, one of those businesses that required that information failed to safeguard it properly) is one of the biggest scams of modern day consumerism.
When I was in the process of buying my home, with perfectly horrible timing something showed up on my credit report, a delinquency and charge off from Verizon of $1,800 or so.
I've never used Verizon. I've been with AT&T for nearly 20 years.
But after calling Verizon to dispute this as identity theft, this is what I learned - that "I" opened a Verizon account at a Walmart in El Paso, and ran up a huge bill calling numbers all around the world.
I live near Seattle. I've been to Texas twice in my life. I was even overseas during part of this alleged activity. I supplied (I shouldn't have to supply all of it, but I did - I needed this resolved because ... mortgage application) police report, travel documents and receipts, hotel overseas, utility bills, AT&T bills.
Verizon's first reply: based on our internal review, we remain satisfied that you are the one responsible for the debt, based on the documentation that was used to open the account.
Me: In that case, I would love to see and be reminded of the documentation I used to open the account, to see if it jogs my memory of some amnesia, apparently.
Verizon: due to customer privacy policy we are unable to show this to you.
Me: "So this documentation is simultaneously enough to prove it really was me, but not enough for you to be satisfied that it may not actually be me and you might be violating some fraudster's identity privacy?"
Basically.
I got it resolved, but it took far too much work.
And all the while, rather than "some company fucked up, and some other company's employee or process didn't catch it", I have to spend hours, and money, demonstrating to some other company that I didn't commit fraud against them, or they can make it impossible for me to buy a house without just paying them the charges someone else incurred.
The way "identity theft" is left for the victim to untangle is such a travesty of justice.
The bank refused to provide me or my lawyer the documentation they had on file of "my" account. I had to sue the Prosecutor's Office to force them to investigate... after 5 years they finally moved and got me the copy of the fake ID with the face of the scammer. Unfortunately they are forced to close that case because the scammer is "person unknown".
Ultimately the case against my "money laundering" got shelved after the statutory 5 year term of them not investing anything...
I wanted to sue the bank, feeling I had a good chance of getting at least partial reimbursement of my legal fees and some fine for them.
But there was simply no more money left, because of all the legal fees...
> >This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply you.
To me this sounds more like an extreme response to imposter syndrome, as in take the documents and the actual knowledge with you so you won't be exposed
> Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them and I wipe any access credentials or authenticator codes that might be on any of my devices. I can't imagine being so brazen that you'd keep the company laptop and then start using an exploit to download confidential information for your new employer.
I work from home and I have a lot of equipment here (because of what I do - think sensor fusion). Everything is labeled with a bright sticky tape that signifies it belongs to my employer. If I'm not using something at the moment, it's safely stowed in a box that is labeled. My SO knows where everything is, so in the event something happens, they know who it belongs to and who to call. In addition, I keep an inventory sheet of everything. I broke it all down easily so that my SO doesn't have to worry. By doing this, it makes it easy on me as well to know what I have, how long I've had it, when it needs to be returned by, etc.
None of that belongs to me, but they trust me with it and I respect that and I take excellent care of all of it. The mindset that these ex-employees have is just mind blowing. I couldn't fathom doing that.
> This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you.
I think this is a cultural difference between security people and large populations of ordinary people. Security people tend to know both that breaking into something is generally possible if you put enough effort into it and that corporations are full of little napoleons who will try to curse your entire family for five generations if you embarrass them in public. And then "never affront the lawnmower" becomes a cultural norm out of self-preservation.
Where as for ordinary people, even in tech, seeing a security lapse is often met with some combination of cynicism and schadenfreude and "LOL" seems like a pretty normal response.
Also notice that you're reading the company's version of events, which is naturally casting this exchange as a conspiracy against the company rather than the former employee reporting the security lapse to their contact who still works there who should have passed it up the chain -- but might not if they're afraid of sticking their hand in the lawnmower.
Meanwhile I have trouble feeling outrage at this sort of thing because I don't think legal protection of trade secrets is a good policy. Competitors have a moral obligation to uncover things like this to increase competition in the market and if the company wants legal protection for its technology then it should file a patent (which will subsequently expire to the benefit of the public) rather than expecting public assistance for its attempt to sustain a monopoly rent forever.
Whenever I start at a company I create a "firewall"[0] between everything. No personal stuff on company machines, no work stuff on personal machines. I don't want them spying on my personal life. I'm not sure why others are okay with their employers spying on them and having access to their devices.
[0] I'm worried if I don't put in quotes people will think I just create a VLAN. I do that but I also mean it in the non technical sense. e.g. if a company wants to use smartphone apps I tell them to give me a company phone, they don't get to use mine for free.
You will be flagged as untrustworthy in any IT/dev role and rightly so. If any employer gets associated with them and they handle customer data, trust in any of your privacy promises will be gone.
As a dev you are often confronted with confidential data, so you should deal with it in a different way.
The crucial part of why non-competes are gross is that they're trying to enforce what you do after someone stopped receiving anything from the past employer. If someone is helping competitors when still working somewhere, or actively taking stuff from their past employer after they've left, then yeah, of course that's dumb and should be punished. But there's no reason a non-compete clause is needed for that!
This may be just one bad employee, i.e., Mr. Tan. Your quoted sentences say OpenAI did such and such, but it may all be just Mr. Tan. That's not to say OpenAI is not responsible because they are supposed to give strong guidance to new hires that they are not to bring any confidential information from their former employer.
Sure, “Trade Secret” non-competes are usually a pretext employers use to keep low-wage workers under their thumbs, but protecting bonafide trade secrets is their only sorta legitimate use, IMO. The world would be better if they were illegal, but letting engineers disperse confidential information from their last employer wouldn’t be the beneficial part.
It seems to be a common trait of the AI people to just brazenly violate the law. It’s like a requirement for working at openAI is to think rules don’t apply to you because you’re so smart.
I hate to use the word sociopath, because it has such a fine point on it, but if you believe there are smart "sociopaths" out there, might they be attracted to AI in general (companies like OpenAI or SpaceXAI specifically)?
Sam Altman raped his sister and assassinated a whistleblower. He's been removed from his last two companies for being a habitual liar (he managed to strongarm his way back into OpenAI of course). He only has money brcause he sold his first company based on fraudulent user numbers.
Hard to imagine people will go work for the plagiarism machine run by a sociopath because of their high ethic and moral standards.
> OpenAI apparently used confidential Apple hardware information when approaching Apple suppliers, and tricked one company into using a "specific trade secret metal-finishing technique" for an OpenAI device by claiming it had Apple's permission to do so.
Reminds me of how Sam Altman told the board that a safety reviewer had approved one of their AI models when the reviewer had done no such things.
I think a mandatory first thing for any engineer is to learn, understand and commit for life to the Ethics of their profession. It's a shame all these very picky recruitment processes and 'culture' of these giant companies didn't care about ethics and morality.
Relevant articles in IEEE Code of Ethics:
3. to avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest whenever possible, and to disclose them to affected parties when they do exist;
4. to avoid unlawful conduct in professional activities, and to reject bribery in all its forms;
From NSPE Code of Ethics for Engineers:
III.4.b. Engineers shall not, without the consent of all interested parties, participate in or represent an adversary interest in connection with a specific project or proceeding in which the engineer has gained particular specialized knowledge on behalf of a former client or employer.
> I think a mandatory first thing for any engineer is to learn, understand and commit for life to the Ethics of their profession.
That’ll never happen with the current incentives. Programming is too easy to get started with and too well-paid to not attract unethical people who are only interested in money.
At the same time why would businesses want programmers with high standards of ethics? Such programmers wouldn't make the child killing drone software, or the software that steals their life savings via dark patterns.
> It's a shame all these very picky recruitment processes and 'culture' of these giant companies didn't care about ethics and morality.
Oh, it absolutely does, just not in the direction that's good for society. OpenAI (as one example) didn't become like this by accident, it was intentional. Sam Altman isn't going to hire ethical leadership for his company, they would just get in his way.
This is obviously true to a large extent, but it is also weirdly necessary to explain basic ethical precepts to a surprisingly large number of otherwise well-educated people. Believe it or not, a significant number of people simple don’t know that it’s unethical to, e.g. exfiltrate code or data from a former employer. Making it clear that this is an ethical line may have some value.
It's more of there has to be some kind of external enforcement or you turn into a low trust 'I got mine' society. Modern capitalism says companies should strip mine everything from human resources to the literal earth don't be surprised when their workers treat them the same way.
Software people want to be “engineers” when it’s prestigious and (financially) beneficial, but avoid the actual classification when it comes with industry standards of behaviour.
> I think a mandatory first thing for any engineer is to learn, understand and commit for life to the Ethics of their profession. It's a shame all these very picky recruitment processes and 'culture' of these giant companies didn't care about ethics and morality.
For some reason, the ethics followed by Asians, especially the Chinese are not fully compatible with the ethics of the west. Sometimes Chinese people call it being smart to circumvent or bypass the rules, something that would be called cheating in the west.
Companies take cultural cues from leadership. When you have a puffed-up sociopath who has never accomplished anything but lying his way to the top, this is what you get.
I'm both infuriated and worried that such a flim-flam man has put himself at the center of the U.S. stock market.
> Non-competes and the like are gross but what's described here isn't just "bring your expertise to OpenAI" it's "here is how to steal secrets on your way out" which is even grosser.
Most of what happened in this case is straight-up illegal and other parts can be covered by NDA. No need for non-competes to prevent any of this.
> it's "here is how to steal secrets on your way out" which is even grosser.
Thank you for recognizing this. As much as the developer community has come out against companies non-competes in the past, we should come down on even harder on one of our own stealing, because this does the most harm against the case against non-competes. It's grosser in the sense that one company doing a foul thing is bad, but ideally people can band together and work to dismantle the foul thing. But a person legitimizing the foul thing is the greater harm.
What does the financial compensation need to be for an engineer to actually do this? I'm gonna assume that if you work at Apple and are being recruited by OpenAI, you are not a dummy. Then you probably know that doing something like this runs the risk of you getting sued by a trillion dollar company.
If I had a potential employer ask me to do this, I would reply "oh hell fucking no", withdraw my application, and notify my companies security, legal and HR teams.
But then again it's easy to have the moral high ground when you're not staring down an offer that will completely change your and your families lives. I'm sure most employees probably thought what I'm thinking until they are looking at a 7 figure offer.
The out of court settlement, OpenAI will pay Apple , with no recognition of guilt... will be in the billions, but 100 times smaller than the business advantages they will get from it.
Its the cost of doing business and OpenAI knowns it.
9. In the months before he left Apple, Mr. Tan met with OpenAI or its collaborators and
discussed meetings with a key Apple supplier. He began emailing himself information about Apple’s
suppliers and internal summaries of the consumer electronics industry. And today, when interviewing
Apple employees for jobs at OpenAI, Mr. Tan uses Apple’s confidential information to gain access
to even more insider knowledge. He has used an Apple internal project codename to ask, “What’s the
plan[?]” for an unannounced Apple product. He has directed job candidates still working for Apple
to bring “Actual parts” from Apple to their interviews for “show and tell” sessions in which he and
his team at OpenAI can elicit still more Apple confidential information. These directions to bring
Apple’s parts to OpenAI job interviews surprised at least one of the candidates, who commented that
he “didn’t even know we could take those from the office.”
10. This is part of OpenAI’s strategy to extract Apple’s confidential information. OpenAI
has been instructing Apple employees to bring “CAD/design artifacts” and “prototypes” to their
interviews and to divulge details about their work such as “subsystem and component selection,” the
“tools or methodologies you use for system integration, such as CAD software, simulation tools,”
and “Vendor selection and communication/collaboration with vendors.”
11. OpenAI also instructs new hires on how to avoid scrutiny when they leave Apple. For
example, Mr. Tan warns them not to tell Apple that they have taken jobs at OpenAI, so they can stay
at Apple as long as they can. After his own departure, Mr. Tan improperly retained or obtained an
internal Apple managers’ document marked “Need to Know” that describes security procedures for
employee departures. Messages left on Apple-issued work devices show that Mr. Tan and his OpenAI
colleagues have been sharing this document with new hires before they give notice to Apple of their
departures, previewing Apple’s security protocols. Unsurprisingly, Apple’s investigation has found
a pattern by employees who depart for OpenAI of taking steps to evade the security processes intended
to protect Apple’s confidential information.
Some of the Apple/Samsung complaint was horseshit (and was a bit of a distraction because they knew they'd need to settle their suit with Nokia).
But it was design copying and IP infringement stuff: duplication of things already in the wild.
This is on another level. If any of this is true, it's extraordinary, and I think OpenAI will likely want to settle quickly, thus increasing Apple's AI-related earnings.
Depends on the objective of Apple. It’s hard to imagine they’re after a quick payout. They may wish to keep this in the news cycle as long as possible. I could see them both harming open ai and sending a message to employees thinking of leaving that if they even consider breaking their confidentiality agreements, it will absolutely ruin their careers.
doubt it - in the uber/waymo thing the guy got pardoned by trump after lobbying from thiel/luckey, probably a similar outcome for this guy since altman has trump's ear rn.
I mean, Trump turns on people in an instant depending on his interests.. he's not a reliable friend. He is, also, very thin-skinned and he (probably?) knows his base is extremely against datacenters. (It's hard to ignore that political reality now -- it's like the nations' most politically unifying thing!) Dario was in the admin's good graces, until very suddenly he wasn't.
I keep seeing this take in the comments, but why wouldn't Apple make an example of OpenAI? They can certainly afford to. There's no lawyering your way out of a case this cut and dry, if it makes it to court. OpenAI has already signaled intent to become a direct competitor to Apple, why wouldn't Apple publicly humiliate them before they can get that product off the ground?
A company that behaves like this in one area, cannot be trusted in any area. Any enterprise that endorses/allows OpenAI products to be used is taking a big risk.
I’ve been at companies where just one group - or even just one person - did something unconscionable and kept getting away with it until the story hit the headlines. And I can tell you, it was never just an isolated incident involving just that group. It’s also all the people who knew something was up and didn’t say anything. And it’s the corporate leadership fostering a pervasive culture of turning a blind eye to ethical problems. Often by allowing people in power to ensure that sounding the alarm is a career-limiting move.
Not being able to prove is one thing, pretending it may not be the case is next level of positivity. There are definitely going to be pockets of hard working smart folks in every place, however the company as a whole would get a bad name even if few folks are indulged and the company is not doing anything about it.
> It’s possible this kind of behavior is endorsed throughout, or it’s possible it’s limited to this specific group.
As others have pointed out elsewhere this is literally the type of behavior OpenAI is founded on. Gathering up other people's IP and using it to build their own thing. It's how all the big LLMs are built.
I'm the farthest thing from an Apple fanboi you can find, but Apple's not so unethical as to make all this (OpenAI trade secret) stuff up. The OpenAI settlement they'll no doubt get from this won't amount to 30 days of their App Store rent-seeking that they were propping up with those lies.
If they can't prove any of this stuff they wouldn't file the suit. No matter what you or I think of Apple, the chances that this went down at least as criminally as they allege, are very high.
The same can be said about Apple. Several companies have complained about them taking a meeting with apple, presenting their product, only to have Apple then rip it off and build it in house. To say nothing of sherlocking.
As an old timer, I saw this firsthand happen with Motorola. Apple did the same shenanigans, stealing IP and engineers. I doubt the iPhone would have happened otherwise.
Jobs was absolutely ruthless and would do anything for his goals.
Eh, I don't think Apple is particularly ethical or anything (I very much dislike their app store policies), but if you have to choose between two devils Apple is vastly preferable because they're not after my data or my job.
Weirdly, this seems like they're trying to train a model to work like Apple? They seem really interested in processes and how stuff is done, rather than only the finished artifacts.
A lot of people have tried to copy Apple’s finished product and they never get it right, because they don’t have the process behind it. How something looks is only a small part of it.
Pretty foolish of them to play so unethically only to lose such a big account and now gain an open-and-shut lawsuit that will seriously damage their ability to compete in hardware for a very long time.
Idea is that Trump would bailout AI companies and call it "job protection" or "America growth" or "national security" because they know the word 'bailout' is politically bad.
Other ideas discussed are that AI companies are going through a chain of larger and larger subsidies: VC --> Big Tech --> Governments. And that these companies haven't been able to make money off of AI so they're priming things for a bailout that's not a bailout wink wink. And that they foresee a situation where Trump will accept bribes in order to heavily regulate some AI companies but not others. Picking winners and losers.
OpenAI is about to get ROCKED on this. From this report, this looks open and shut. Apple has basically infinite money and incredible lawyers. Not sure what OpenAI can counter with unless they have clear, hard evidence this hasn’t been happening.
Is there any other AI company with as much controversy as this company?
- ~murdered~ (dead) employee who's mother is on a anti-sam hate campaign
- ceo fired then coup's his way back into the company
- conflict of interest with Microsoft
Despite Anthropic's bad press, they haven't been as dishonest as this company.
Steve Jobs left because he lost a corporate power struggle. Sam Altman was fired because the board thought he was too fundamentally untrustworthy to remain as CEO (if we're to believe their statement ofc).
Basically nothing. I mean they’ll have to pay up but money clearly isn’t something OpenAI worries about. They’ll just raise more from the infinite vc money tree.
In the end some guy from apple (lets call him Mr. Johnson) will have to hire a plucky band of hackers and security experts to operate from the shadows and get revenge. Isn't having corporations be above the law grand!
Apple may get a chance to rifle through OpenAI's trade secrets. And they may win an outcome where there is direct court supervision over what OpenAI is allowed to build and how.
In the extreme case it may result in OpenAI having to abandon their in-progress consumer hardware products, but honestly that might actually be good for them. I really can't see all that investment being worthwhile. Better for them to stick to their core competency.
Based on a cursory read of the situation, it seems similar (at least on its face) to the Waymo vs Uber situation. In that case, Uber payed a Waymo an equity stake and signed an agreement about which technology they would/wouldn't use. The key person involved also was sentenced to 18 months in prison (pardoned after 6 months).
Well OpenAI is offering equity to the US Government (and who knows who else privately) Tim Apple famously refused to bring manufacturing back to the US when the current president asked and play hardball on infosec. While this is a civil case, increasingly judiciary seems to be an extension of the executive. So it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Yes, the Supreme Court can reverse anything, and they're re-evaluating the Apple/Fortnite case (which was surprising to a lot of people).
I don't like bringing politics, but the recent 5-4 decision on birthright citizenship doesn't promote a lot of credibility in the current Supreme Court.
OpenAI will just put the employees involved under the bus. They can claim the information acquired wasn't used for OpenAI's benefit or authorization especially since the device isn't actually out yet.
Given that they tricked a vendor in using a secret metal finishing technique by lying and saying they had permission… I’d say the “wasn’t used for OpenAI’s benefit” argument is going to be a difficult case to make. They’ve got intent at the very least.
This is when I wish Jobs was still in charge of Apple. I never quite liked him, but I like Altman way less. And Jobs would CRUCIFY the whole openAI team for this. It would be beautiful to watch.
It wouldn’t be effective at accomplishing anything. He wanted to go thermonuclear (his words) on Google and Samsung. Yet here they are, equal heavyweights to Apple.
I love Apple, and I’m a fanboy, but they are not the good guys.
I do hope Anthropic are better with IP, and I think they may be. Given Dario Amodei hasn't been sued by OpenAI while building Anthropic this seems likely.
I think Amodei may actually be quite a good human, despite my trust in big tech being at an all-time low.
Yeah, I find the majority of comments here interesting. Sure, it should be common sense not to email internal documents to yourself when you leave, or keep a company laptop and access internal networks after you no longer work at a place. That's just dumb and unethical and illegal.
But also, I can't find it in myself to really care about this. Trillion-dollar company takes ideas from other trillion-dollar company. Apple has done this to much smaller companies countless times. But OpenAI-on-Apple violence is so far removed from a crime that actually harms normal people that I'm not sure why I should give a shit.
Hot take, but Apple has done the same and worse to many other companies when they could. Of course Apple can sue and they will probably settle some amount with OpenAI, but acting like this is not commonplace in today’s business environment, and OpenAI is uniquely worse at stealing corporate secrets is laughable. Especially considering Apple’s famous history!
I’d guess phone, anything else is too compute-constrained and just an accessory for them, plus has to pay 30% of subscriptions and can be disadvantaged strategically.
Likely a device where the largest share of interaction pattern is through voice conversations and chats with the system to get it to do things for you: messages, email, etc.
It would have to run Android, and try to provide compatibility for existing apps in order for this to be a successful device.
I don't really know, but from what I've heard it sounded kind of like a wearable amazon echo. Because I guess reaching into your pocket for your cell phone is too big a lift? Kind of fits with OpenAI's MO of only selling things that lose money (AFAIK the Echo is still unprofitable?)
I will never grow tired of highly paid so-called geniuses so deluded by their own hubris they think no one will not only not notice them moving GBs of data onto a USB on their last day of work, but assume they also don't have logs of everything you accessed and everything you took.
Little no-name companies have this capability with off the shelf software.
Large companies like Apple have entire departments of staff whose job it is to monitor data theft.
It's bonkers and I love every single story as if it's never been told before.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] thread> OpenAI also instructs new hires on how to avoid scrutiny when they leave Apple. For example, Mr. Tan warns them not to tell Apple that they have taken jobs at OpenAI, so they can stay at Apple as long as they can.
> Apple says it discovered a pattern of OpenAI recruits emailing themselves confidential information when leaving Apple, including Tan.
> OpenAI apparently used confidential Apple hardware information when approaching Apple suppliers, and tricked one company into using a "specific trade secret metal-finishing technique" for an OpenAI device by claiming it had Apple's permission to do so.
> Liu allegedly kept an Apple-issued laptop after departing the company and exploited a vulnerability to download dozens of confidential Apple documents while he was working at OpenAI.
Non-competes and the like are gross but what's described here isn't just "bring your expertise to OpenAI" it's "here is how to steal secrets on your way out" which is even grosser.
Do you mind if I MITM all of your work output, your emails, your code, your messages, and attach my name to it and then receive your paychecks in exchange for my work?
But if they can pay some people to produce the knowledge they can also pay them to not share it after they change employers. Just like regular noncompete clauses I don't see why this is something that require more than regular contract law or why it should be inherent instead of negotiated for a fee.
You just described the whole AI industry
Doesn't mean you have to make it trivial for the consequences to find you by literally walking yourself into jail.
If they released this information publicly then you might have a point.
> If they released this information publicly then you might have a point.
Good point. Conceded.
"Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage."
> we’re not looking for the sort of obedient, middle-of-the-road people that big companies tend to hire. We’re looking for people who like to beat the system.
1: https://www.ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html
Though full disclosure: I did that, so that might colour my view. https://vincenttunru.com/hacking-a-gameshow/
The Asian thing.
Recent immigrants from Asia came with government connections or family wealth, so they see themselves as superior, not lucky. They will look down on you, so stealing from you should be expected.
Even second or third generation Asians in the country will defer to their landsmen. Not you. These are people they know socially and who speak the same languages. They’ll steal for them. And when they get into management, they’ll hire only Asians, and fire you.
It’s also cultural in the way Asians have no grasp of intellectual property. They see counterfeit goods as legitimate opportunities. They see theft of IP as flattery. They see corporate espionage as fair use.
The Soviet thing.
The success of oppressive regimes within the Former Soviet Bloc is due to criminals and loyalists, both of whom stripped the populace of cultural pride and identity. Communism is a kleptocracy, disguised as authoritarian.
They scattered like vermin when communism collapsed, but employers should know that anyone who came from Easter Europe with money probably got it dishonestly and they’ll probably try to steal from you.
Culture is not destiny.
Anyone can be hired, have access limits, be trained, and become great employees. But if you’re a manager, it behooves you to identify the cultural influences on employee performance so that you prepare each one for success.
Apple culture.
Apple’s roots are in corporate espionage, Xerox PARC, IBM. It should have recognized that having an entire wing of employees descended from Chinese intelligence officers and CCP members (because ordinary Chinese don’t get exit visas easily) might be a problem.
It’s also cultural when a company becomes so large that it hasn’t even been able to properly discipline the layers of supervisors who allowed theft to occur over a long period of time.
It’s also cultural that Steve Jobs liked to quote Picasso, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” He was a crook. He expected employees to steal. And they did.
The way to tell between that and factual / culturally-fluent: were you able to any strengths of other cultures? Weaknesses of your own?
Or did you go off on an (in this case ill-informed) rant about "they bad"?
The way to cure it is a mixture of reading: business books on culture (like Meyer and Hofstede) and NATO ones. Those are places people need to work together, as opposed to woke ideology.
Then, application. Travel is good here.
I can support each statement:
A significant number of cybercrime today is committed by people from the former Soviet Bloc.
A significant number of intellectual property theft is committed by people from East Asia.
A significant number of rape in Europe is committed by people from Southeast Asia.
A significant number of managers here, with roots in India, only hire people with roots in India.
A significant number of forcibly retracted academic papers are by Asians, even in journals with major ownership stakes by the Chinese government. In contrast, a significant number of voluntarily retracted academic papers are by Westerners.
A significant number of Medicare and Medicaid fraud convictions in the past twenty years have been of people from the former Soviet Bloc and Asia.
A significant number of scams defrauding US victims remotely and in person, in the past decade, have been committed by crime rings out of West Africa, Western Europe, and Eastern Europe.
That’s not racist. It is unfortunate reality.
If you blindly hire employees without regard to their cultural background, which includes ethnic origin and national identities, even religious beliefs, you are doing a disservice to your organization and your hires.
These former Apple employees were set up to fail by multiple layers of management that did nothing to curb theft, instill loyalty, and train these people that Asian beliefs about intellectual property are considered disloyalty here.
If someone calls himself open, you should know who it is and what to expect.
> Liu allegedly kept an Apple-issued laptop after departing the company and exploited a vulnerability to download dozens of confidential Apple documents while he was working at OpenAI. He also maintained a relationship with Yu-Ting "Alyssa" Peng, an Apple employee who continued to give him updates on Apple's projects, vendor decisions, and engineering details. When Liu learned he still had access to Apple's systems, he texted Peng "LOL, I found out I can access the [network storage], so funny."
This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you.
Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them and I wipe any access credentials or authenticator codes that might be on any of my devices. I can't imagine being so brazen that you'd keep the company laptop and then start using an exploit to download confidential information for your new employer.
Doing it at a the company that most aggressively enforces secrecy is even crazier.
Also, normalizing stealing IP is only going to have bad consequences for everyone.
Some people like to talk about “some people” snidely, instead of just coming out and saying “GP is bloodthirsty and gets a little thrill [etc].” Because of course, that’s what they mean, but they can’t back it up.
Just to clarify, I’m talking about you.
But its also that companies responsibility to ensure that the employer doesn't take anything.
Apple know how to use MDM on Apple laptops, why wasn't the device locked and located.
I do the same as GP does; I don't want there to be any chance that my former employer has forgotten to revoke access to something, so I make sure to clear out anything that might remain on any device that I don't return to them.
Who knows, maybe another former employee will decide to steal from them around the same time I leave, and me having access credentials on a personal device, even if I haven't used it, might arouse suspicion.
In any top r&d area, one wonders if they perhaps should be searching staff on way out and making then sign out and return CAD drawings etc.
Huh? Do FBI/CIA/etc run that way?
The reality is, there has to be. And, if you can't trust someone then don't work with them.
I was talking to an amazing lawyer/business person I know one day and I asked about writing 'air tight' contracts which would never put you in a position to be screwed. He said something along the lines of, that's impossible. Someone could take you to court and you could still lose even if you think the contract is perfect. What he said next stuck with me over the rest of my career, 'if you truly can't trust someone, no contract will be fool-proof. The solution is simply to not work with or do business with them.'
> Liu also failed to return an Apple-issued laptop after his departure.
Should USA just destroy all theirs as no one can used them anyway due to the laws?
The utility of laws isn’t in stopping something from occurring, it’s in establishing remedies for when they do. Someone illegally transferred IP to a competitor that had knowledge they were stealing, and now Apple is seeking their remedy.
“They could have prevented it” is victim blaming.
A year or so later the company hit hard times and we had a large layoff that affected me, and at the end of the video call, the directory of my department mentioned that they needed to wipe my laptops but it "wasn't showing up in MDM". I said I'd be glad to jump on a call with IT to fix that, but then he mentioned the IT staff were laid off too.
I then suggested I did get hired for my cybersecurity expertise, that I do take my obligations seriously, and he could just ask me to do whatever they were planning to do from the MDM console, and it would get done. He insisted that wouldn't be necessary since in his worldview the MDM was unbreakable and he just needed to reconnect to Wi-Fi or something.
Very amusing worldview. In the real world, where I live, I would assume a highly competent employee could exfiltrate trade secrets without me being able to catch them via standard / automated means. This particular Apple former employee got caught because he bragged about it, not because of technical means to catch him. As I've pointed out to a number of people, the very best DLP solution can be completely obviated by someone aiming a camera at their company-issue workstation's monitor.
> Very amusing worldview.
It’s ironic that you’re displaying the exact behavior pointed out by the GP:
> This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you.
MDM is implemented to protect company assets regardless of the actions of the users. It would not be due diligence on the part of the director to trust you to wipe your own device.
It’s not clear to me what the point of your comment is other than illustrating that you’re smarter than your director.
Considering the MDM was not implemented properly (particularly in an environment where one hires cybersecurity professionals, who are more likely than most to be able to figure out workarounds to it), it would actually be much more prudent to hire trustworthy staff who can be trusted not to steal company assets, trade secrets, and so on versus thinking you can conduct a zoom call on said company asset and then fire off a command via the MDM to wipe the laptop when the call is over.
I actually think the director was pretty smart, since he managed to avoid having an extended conversation about the lack of working MDM and ability to follow the procedure in front of the other person on the zoom call. Sometimes it's very important to be able to read between the lines of what someone is telling you.
Relying on remote wipes to secure company data is not a particularly strong plan, either (as this Apple saga should make clear); a determined person would simply be either constantly exfiltrating data, disconnect a machine from the network before it can be wiped, or other various plans (and do so without detection). I should know, since my job duties there were to advise customers on how to move towards a zero trust environment.
Either way, everything still worked exactly as before, just now my Mac wasn't reporting back to the company at all. This went on for over a year until eventually I left the business, handed my laptop in physically and went on my way. I assume they noticed at that point, but before then they apparently had no idea.
I probably should have told someone, but since I hadn't done anything I didn't feel bad about it, and it was a lot easier to get stuff done without the corp stuff breaking everything
Which is hilarious. They've fixed (or at least made it more robust), but until at least Ventura, you want to know how to circumvent MDM entirely on Apple Silicon?
Do a fresh install with Internet access. When the machine goes to do the first reboot during the process, null route three hostnames on your router/DNS: deviceenrollment.apple.com, mdmenrollment.apple.com and iprofiles.apple.com.
Complete setup and get logged in.
You can now remove the null routing. Your machine will never phone home again for MDM enrollment. You can upgrade, all the way to Tahoe. No issues.
As of the more recent releases, the installer does do some checks to ensure connectivity to those hosts, that I haven't bothered or needed to try to circumvent... but yeah, the idea of Apple ensuring their MDM to be unbreakable, durable, robust is laughable.
Is it? I mean legally. Obviously it’s dumb of Apple to have left this guys access open, but that doesn’t mean they actually had any legal responsibility to lock him out. As far as I understand, the law is pretty clear that you can’t access anything you’re not allowed to by policy, whether there’s a technical block or not.
If the property owner doesn’t make bare minimum effort to protect the property
Then how much effort and money should taxpayer spend to protect and prosecute regarding the same property?
It seems strange to imply that people that own nothing must through their taxes pay for protection of property of the people who do own everything.
The phrase for what you’re doing is “victim blaming”. I don’t know what triggers some people to think this way other than a deep desire to find a contrarian take on a situation.
But no, when a person commits a crime the responsibility and accountability for committing that crime is entirely on the person who committed the crime. If you start blaming the victim or downplaying the crime based on the victim’s circumstances, you are backwards.
> It seems strange to imply that people that own nothing must through their taxes pay for protection of property of the people who do own everything
I don’t know what you think you’re implying here, but by the numbers the wealthy and corporations pay significantly more in taxes than the “people who own nothing”. Everyone should get equal protection under the law, ignoring how much they pay in taxes.
All criminals should be afraid of committing crimes equally, because crimes are crimes and society benefits when committing a crime is discouraged.
That would be nice but that is not the current situation, neither my stolen bicycle nor the fraud that caused 2008 had resulted in any arrests. Until such time that all crimes are crimes, it is a valid question.
> by the numbers the wealthy and corporations pay significantly more in taxes than the “people who own nothing”
This statement is highly misleading in three different dimensions:
Firstly, both in UK and in USA individuals pay like 5x more in income tax than corporations pay in tax. So people pay more tax and yet prosecutions against corporations are less than 1% of all prosecutions, that seems questionable.
Secondly, what is the statistics you are citing is actually saying? "Out of the people that declare income to government, those that declare the most income, pay the most tax". That's a bit self-evident, isn't it?
It does not address the claim that wealthiest people don't declare taxable income, and therefore pay little tax.
Thirdly, the measurement needs to be relative, not absolute. The claim "I pay less income tax than Facebook does' is true, but Facebook pays the effective tax rate of about 3%.
They MAY make it harder for themselves, but at no point are is anyone required to make sure you're not a criminal.
That's a difference between living in a society that robs you on every step and one where you can leave a laptop on a table in a cafe and it stays there.
This makes any healthy relationship impossible, as no one can be responsible for someone else's decisions and actions.
Many emotionally immature folks appeal to this and use guilt and shame to get another person to believe they are responsible for someone else's emotions & choices. It's textbook toxic.
Because you're probably come from a high trust culture, but there's people coming from low trust environments where scamming everyone is the norm, and the way they learned to get ahead in life, from school all the way to work and business.
They're brazen because they've never suffered consequences for their actions.
This isn't something you can screen for in a classic job interview.
I know there's some evidence of Chinese people working at big tech and feeding data back to the CCP but is this a "low trust culture" issue in general or an extrapolation of that one pattern?
Of course not. Have you been following national news or politics the past few years, and the continued incredibly strong support bad actors received despite atrocious behavior and even allegedly criminal acts?
The grandparent commentor is just racist.
I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion. The concept of low and high-trust societies is well-studied [0], though how a given country maps to it may be disputed.
0: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3997396/
Apple alleges not only individual malfeasance, but also recruitment tactics like “show-and-tell” aimed at recruiting those willing to bring company secrets (and discriminating against those who would not).
This is enough to constitute a low-trust culture that self-perpetuates.
Surely given the size of China there are plenty of honorable people. And surely in the US there are many dishonorable people, as you’ve pointed out.
I don't know what that has to do with a historical period of slavery.
Unless you're black, or other disadvantaged minority
I would say it is lower trust today than when I was a child. Some cities have developed real petty theft problems due to disinterested enforcement. It is still noticeably higher trust than most places in the world I’ve traveled.
Yes, in non-popular places in Europe those are also quite uncommon, even more then in the US on average..
So the lesson here is that those type of crimes are common in tourist heavy places, like.. Times Square in NYC for example.
Nice try though. Europeans are really sensitive - maybe not high trust societies, but definitely high sensitivity ones.
You seem to be very sensitive when it comes to anyone that might deign to question the supremacy of the US and very quick to disparage those outside of it.
Policy-wise, I would not describe the US as "high trust" relative to the rest of the first world. Virtually all of our non-senior welfare programs are means-tested or require some proof of virtue (e.g. "I am actively looking for a job" to collect unemployment insurance), meaning that society broadly does not "trust" people to collect benefits honestly unless they're seniors.
I mean, a huge problem in suburbs and more quiet rural areas too, where porch pirates might in theory stand out more, but also have a lot less through traffic to observe their efforts.
Citation and lots of specification needed.
Is that what the GP meant? I would never use "high-trust society" to describe the US within the last, oh, 26 years or so. Belgium, Switzerland, Australia? Those are high-trust societies. You can really feel the difference when you're there.
The US is high-trust for insiders (rich white people). We allowed Donald Trump to loot the richest and most powerful society in history by imagining that he would follow the example of previous presidents instead of seeing him for the psychopathic mob boss that he is and always wanted to be.
Conversely, the US is zero-trust for outsiders such as foreigners, racially disfavored groups, and the poor. Allegedly-dog-eating Haitians and the like. We have guns and are not shy about using them.
> history of slavery
Every country and group has practiced slavery.
The colonies and, later, the United States didn’t just practice slavery; they industrialized it by transporting by force 12.5 million Africans to the Americas for nearly 250 years.
Even as fortunes were made, that didn’t stop the torture, rape, and brutality of these enslaved people.
Even after the Civil War, the descendants of the former enslaved people had to live under the Apartheid-like system of Jim Crow that lasted for another hundred years until the Civil Rights Act was enacted in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
Brushing scams under the dog whistle rug is a cheap shot left wing liberals use to farm pitty and let criminals and scammers get away with it time and time again.
Your white cells are a dog white too, better remove them to not discriminate against bacteria.
That is just a long sentence for "us" vs "those people".
Having said that I don't entirely deny the effect of society on people's behavior. But at the same time, I have seen people from so called high-trust society being all polished and nice on the surface while being assholes and people from so called low-trust society being genuinely decent people despite not having the right name or the surface polish.
Also, assholes tend to attract assholes and people of the same tribe/clan/race tend to form groups.
Why not? Sounds not that hard. I actually believe this is something that would make a candidate looks good in an interview for many large corporations.
Because people lie?
It is in fact very easy to scan for.
For an adult, I would attribute this more to internal mental makeup than anything else. I've seen individuals exhibit these positive and negative behaviors irrespective of whether they were in a high-trust society or a low-trust one, a wealthy society or a poverty-riddled one.
Additionally, based on what's going on in the world, I would say that there are very clear signs that a high-trust society is formed when adults with positive behaviors are in power, and a low-trust society is formed when adults with negative behaviors gain power.
Indubitably, there are individuals whose behaviors are moderated by what type of society they're in, but that split between moderated individuals and self-driven individuals is, IMHO, unknown, or at least, unknown to me.
Societies as a collection of all individuals matter more than individual individuals.That's why Japan is the way Japan is and India the way India is.
>Additionally, based on what's going on in the world, I would say that there are very clear signs that a high-trust society is formed when adults with positive behaviors are in power, and a low-trust society is formed when adults with negative behaviors gain power.
Every society on the planet from Japan to North America has its own robber barons that are above the law, the difference is in Taiwan, Japan or Singapore I'm not afraid of getting mugged, broken into or sexually assaulted on the streets at night and people queue politely and orderly for riding the bus.
Hard disagree. There's a reason collective punishment (a.k.a blaming society) is a war crime and a violation of human rights. Kings (Ghenghis Khan is the most [in]famous example) used to hand out collective punishments to relatives and villages, and that's why human societies had to eventually get rid of them as a collective, leading to the modern era.
Leaders, as autonomous adults, are responsible for their own actions and how they look, not anyone else. They don't even have the disallowed excuse of 'following orders'.
Additionally, Leaders have an outsize impact on human organizations because of hierarchy and power differentials. Society reflects their adult leaders because of this power differential, not the other way around. More specifically, individuals susceptible to influence perpetuate that power differential ('following orders') and diffuse the leadership behaviors into wider society, making that society a reflection of its leadership. And I'm willing to wager that the proportion of folks susceptible to influence far outstrips the proportion of independent thinkers in any society.
Even in democracies (which are mostly representative-based republics), there is a hierarchy with power differentials, and a strong individual can work those hierarchies to remake society.
Even in direct democracies, would you say a 50.1% result in one direction reflects that society as a whole? Mathematically, that's a ridiculous conclusion. And yet, that tiny advantage can result in wholesale changes to society (Brexit cough cough). So where does one draw the line? 51%? 60%? 75%? 95%? What about the 5% that disagrees? Do they deserve any collective punishment for the actions of the 95%? Or are you going to lean on 'collateral damage' as a defense?
> Don't blame your leader for how your society looks
One can blame the leader for their actions, and therefore by extension how the society looks post-action, because those actions are on the society.
To be fair, pre-action one can blame the supporters of the leader for making bad choices, but post-action responsibility is on the leaders.
The real problem is the hierarchical nature of societies and organizations. A leader at the "top" is a winner-take-all situation. Even direct democracies that apply majority rules is a winner-take-all situation, defective from the start. A different construct is needed - effective cooperation without leadership.
Bitcoin is a start towards that effective-cooperation-without-leadership, but it also suffers from the 50.1% problem.
Right. I noticed a coworker who recently left the organization was still running some of our software on his personal computer (evident in the access logs) and notified him that I could see, he should be more careful, etc. We agree to these contracts because compliance matters, not just because we need the job.
Meh, I'm not returning my nice 4k wfh monitor unless they ask for it specifically
At $WORK we have the option of getting a work smartphone or having the company pay for (at portion of) our monthly mobile bill.
I chose a work device because I do not want any cross-contamination. (Others chose payment because they did not want the 'hassle' of carrying a second device (and to save some cash).)
At some point, I couldn’t live with myself, and purchased my own computer (better than what work gave me, anyway).
I never used my personal cell for work. The closest thing was coordinating meetups, when traveling.
If you are worried about the company claiming rights over your personal work, then it is prudent.
Honestly, of the two scenarios, this one is the more likely to fall on the employee's side.
We haven't really tested the legal precedent for ownership of LLM outputs very thoroughly yet, and I'm willing to bet a bunch of us still have employment contracts that haven't been updated to cover LLM use...
It might be overly paranoid depending on what the circumstances are, it might be a real concern as well.
2) That’s definitely a valid point. I have worked on free/open-source code for most of my adult life. For a long time, it was for my own use, but I started publishing code for use by others, and provenance became a much more important coefficient.
Then I realized how stupid that was even though my employer was fine with and was never strict with how a work laptop is used.
I realized not only did I not want my work to know what I'm doing on my personal time, the risk of cross-contamination and being accused of stealing confidential documents or a personal text making it look like I'm doing something wrong is too high.
I bought my own cell phone and laptop and now never use my work equipment for anything but work. Not worth the risk.
If they wrongfully accuse you of that, isn't it a place you should leave in any case?
I wasn't reachable by phone for company related stuff outside my regular working hours unless I had on-call-duty, which means it was working hours.
I don't get why people would be proud about not setting boundaries.
For the record, this was never at night. Late in the evening, sure.
So it can actually make logical sense to do it occasionally even from a purely selfish perspective if it's half an hour on a random Tuesday evening and you aren't actually doing anything else important.
All depends if the company is actually going to be grateful or not though
Not sure if upper management sees this stuff. For the number of times I've fixed other people's crap (or found the root cause, so they can just fix it) I don't think I got any recognition for that.
I call that being exploitable.
Marxian style LTV analysis of the economy breaks down hardcore involving anything touching electrons. His analysis of the theory of alienation/exploitation is literally invalid in the era of computers, and exponentially so in the era of AI systems. It's not "exploitation" to be available in exchange for comically large amounts of money.
What?
Software development is the poster child for alienation, and LLMs turning your job into one where you manage an incredibly productive idiot turned all of that up to 11.
I am extremely picky about keyboards, screens, and OS configuration as a result of being partially deaf, having poor eyesight, and honestly being a bit of an old stick in the mud. It would be lovely to set aside some space on an old Thinkpad for work tasks. It would be comfortable and easy to isolate and be just like my personal machine.
Instead I get a choice between a MacBook with a fixed alternate key layout or a Windows machine with a locked down bright white wallpaper and a non admin account.
When she stopped working for them, they informed her, that the number legally belonged to them.
It was not a problem for her, because she wanted to get rid of the number anyway, else too many old clients would call.
But it was an interesting situation nonetheless.
But, I believe I'm in the minority. Most of my fellow employees have added corp to their phone. I believe most do personal stuff on their work computer. I was once at an SV party and several Apple employees (3 women, 5 gay men, 3 straight men) said they all used their work laptops to watch porn at home or traveling. I was pretty shocked. Not that they watched but that they used work laptops for it. They all thought it was fine.
I love that you went there directly, that’s hilarious. I would have wondered the same (wouldn’t we all?), but been embarrassed to ask.
This is a wise choice. For me, nothing personal goes onto my work phone or laptop. And nothing work-related goes onto personal devices. Life is just easier that way.
Spot on perfect. I see this too often and not just in tech.
Their rationale? “It’s mine, they owed me this”. They are 100% convinced that they are in the right, not just that they can keep it but that they actually intended to send them this to begin with. I get it $100k isn’t nothing but they’re also throwing their life away for less than what they used to make a year in salary.
People do weird things when given sudden access to money or power.
Given your story its not sounds like this is power grab. More like they actually on spectrum and have some mental issues on top this. Or had mental breakdown because something happened before that money arrived.
Situations when people do something weird, bad or just plain evil for money and power are usually logical. E.g people think they got access to more money they percieve they can earn in next decade, or ever, something that settles them for life.
Earning more than $100,000 and throwing everything away for $95,000 only make sense if you are terminally ill. Or if it was never your real identify in first place and its well planned scam.
Then one day I get a Chase Zelle email saying that someone was sending me money. Something like $500. Logged into the Chase app and sure enough, could have taken it with the click of a button.
I contacted the sender to explain the situation and recommended they call the intended recipient for a correct email address.
Couldn’t image just taking it knowing it wasn’t intended for me.
So I called CS, they said it was safe to return the money and so I did and the guy called back just to thank me.
Now you've done nothing wrong, maybe even haven't noticed yet, and suddenly they kill your business overnight.
They quite clearly do not believe that. If they did, they wouldn't need to go into hiding or leave the country.
Is this referring to a foreign national who can leave at any time?
It's more that money and power enable you to be who you really are, and amplify your worst traits if you're lacking self-awareness.
There are many people who are rich/wealthy and/or powerful and they're decent individuals living relatively ordinary lives. You don't read about most of them because they're "normal".
If you’re only a certain way when you have money and power, is it really “who you really are”?
…yeah, it’s fitting that sama was the top user here. What a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
Do you have any evidence to support this? Feels like this opinion is made up, for unknown reasons.
In reality, psychopathic tendencies are about 4.5% in the general adult population, a far cry from 'most people', with the gold standard assessment being only 1.2%. [1]
From that same article, "The construct of psychopathy is understood generically as a type of personality disorder characterized, among other important features, by the presence of behaviors that conflict with the social, moral, or legal norms of society, giving rise in many cases to clearly criminal behaviors ..."
There's also the bagel experiment described in Freakonomics. [2]
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
[2] https://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/WhatTheBagelM...
Citation needed. There are a lot of ways I can improve as a person, but I can promise you I am not and not ever been a murderer or killer regardless of consequences. Even if someone threatened me or someone else, I would do my best to not kill them and simply diffuse the situation.
Maybe take some time to reflect.
This is what Christians tell themselves and others to explain why believing in their religion is so important, but it's not even remotely true. Humans evolved community and society long before we evolved organized religion.
I constantly see Christians pitching this like some kind of gotcha: "If you don't believe in God, then how do you know what's right or wrong?" The simple answer is that I have empty and I care about how other people feel; I try to do things that make things better and avoid things that make things worse, both for me and for others.
If the only reason that you don't rape and murder is because you're worried about consequences then that makes you a horrible person whether you act on it or not.
Conversely, it seems as though Christians see these 'teachings' as a get out of moral quandary free card; if the Bible implies it's okay, or you can justify an interpretation where that's the case, then it's completely fine to do whatever you like. Harass or attack trans people, bomb Iran, make miscarriages illegal but refuse to feed the poor or help with daycare - all because one reading of the bible supports the things you want to do (even though it doesn't) but doesn't require what you don't want to do (even though it does, actually).
Apart from that, the problem with "who you really are" is that individual is more of a process than a static thing, so any such reification becomes invalid in the next instant.
You don't hear about these people as much because they're not out looking for attention, making outlandish statements or even trying to "change the world" in a narcisstic Silicon Valley way.
"Who you are" at your core drives the direction you go in when you acquire wealth and power.
To be fair this is smarter than like 95% of white-collar criminals.
$95k does not seems like enough money to totally upend your life like that for.
That's because most of us here are so used to the amount of money we earn. But for people who literally struggling with month-to-month payments, 100K feels like a life-changing amount of money. If they were just saving month by month, they might have never reached that amount in their entire life.
Our perspectives here on HN are very one-sided when it comes to things like this, anyone who been poor previously (or is currently) could attest to this.
What does that mean for where and how the person live though? How much money were they realistically having left at the end of the month? 6 figures surely means a lot in some places, in others not so much and maybe they didn't have much left after all. Even with 1K left in a month on average, that's 95 months (~8 years) of saving for the same amount, maybe it was always the plan to just get the fuck out once they got close to 100K or whatever.
Humans do rash things, especially when some shortcut appears. But all this is also speculation and hypothesizing, who knows the real reasons behind it for sure.
Crazy how many people try to find excuses for crime. There's people living on fractions of that that don't commit crime. No, income is no excuse.
It's as is the more money you make, the more you need to feel fulfilled.
This is a myth. The original 2010 Kahneman-Deaton study showed that how favorably people judged their overall lives continued to improve beyond $75k. Daily emotional well-being appeared to stop improving around that level. [1]
A larger 2021 study by Killingsworth using real-time reports found no happiness plateau at $75k; instead, well-being continued increasing with income, including above $200k. The relationship was logarithmic - going from $40k to $80k mattered more than going from $160k to $200k, but the benefit didn't disappear. [2]
So of course, in 2023, Kahneman and Killingsworth jointly re-analyzed to resolve the conflict, leading to more nuanced conclusions: in the least-happy 15-20%, unhappiness declined as income went up but eventually leveled off; for the majority of people, happiness continued rising with income beyond $75k; in the happiest people, the association sometimes became stronger at higher incomes. [3]
Science, baby!
[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1011492107
[2] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2016976118
[3] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120
Not if the jump from 80k to 120k also means a jump from working 40h to 60h.
You'd be surprised how far down poor impulsive choices can drag you down even when there's no money on the line.
Kid 1: What are you going to do with your $20,000
Kid2: quit school
Homeless man: good idea, school is for fools!!
10 years ago my last boss told me one last advice before going onto entrepreneur ventures: « be careful, people do become crazy and stupid with money » (and I guess he knew what he was talking about…)
"Money? $15 million is not 'money'. It's a motive, with a universal adapter on it."
I wouldn’t do that for a million (these days).
My first thought was I hope they didn't make this mistake for everyone, and second thought how do I safely return this.
(Turns out it was a one off mistake, and returning the excess was pretty straightforward though probably the largest bank transfer I've ever made)
Sometimes there are no consequences
It’s a total liability to hold onto anything. Even if you don’t do anything with it, it could get stolen or misplaced, and you’re liable. Not worth the headache.
Its also how some folks act like when they've done something they morally can't deal with - their subconscious starts throwing all sorts of obvious signs up until they get caught. I presume this was done for a giant pile of cash, stock, and probably a promise that nobody really cares if you show up or not, enjoy your retirement.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1832
OpenAI/Altman are trying to cozy up to Trump so that they can bypass laws and regulations in their quest for infinite growth at no cost (see also: all the NASDAQ 'rules' which didn't apply to SpaceX, the AI company). In return to stroking his ego, etc., Trump gets to seem like he's M'ing AGA by boosting up this new, world-changing technology and helping to keep the US ahead of everyone else. OpenAI, in the administration's eyes, is now 'too big to fail' (because of the blow to Trump's ego) so OpenAI gets to continue to break laws (first copyright violations, now IP theft) with nothing but a slap on the wrist.
Maybe it was the environment at OpenAI encouraging this behavior. Or, is this a particular set of skills some/all of the individuals mentioned were already well-practiced at?
I hope this case goes to court so we can find out.
Greed is good is everywhere on the planet now. Everyone I know in EU is trying to cash in as much as they can while the going is still good because they feel the ladder constantly being pulled from them. Either from their company or from scamming the government and welfare system.
And the compound the issue, the government trying to "equalize" this only makes things worse as they just add more taxes on the honest working class people in their quest to tax "the rich".
I don't think we can escape this downward spiral in any peaceful way. That's probably why the EU is pushing all these privacy invading laws lately, to catch and crush any public uprisings before they happen.
Your friends probably aren't engaging in "greed is good" themselves, just responding to the economic conditions created by people who are engaging in it.
In the American cultural headspace, "greed is good" refers to a very specific brand of robber-baron capitalism. It's a doctrine that was first given academic legitimacy by the University of Chicago's school of economics, then put into practice in the 1980s under the Reagan administration, and nowadays its loudest proponents are Musk and Thiel. It's an economic theory that lionizes extractive behavior by the economic elite, with some bullshit trickle-down argument that's too convoluted to be worth explaining here.
It creates an environment where everyone had to do evil shit just to put a roof over their heads, a self-regulating race to the bottom. Your friends are likely just unwilling participants, a side effect of "greed is good" rather than doers of it.
It does not. It refers to the Eighties brand of corporate raiders and excess Capitalism. It's a quote from the film, "Wall Street". That whole paragraph is wrongly conflating ideas.
Quote from my own comment:
> put into practice in the 1980s under the Reagan administration
Are you contesting the name "greed is good" because it was coined after the underlying theory was crafted? If so, I disagree. We didn't have the word "smartphone" until after those existed. The word "Christianity" wasn't invented while Jesus was alive. Trees existed before we named them. Reagan didn't just pull a new breed of economic policy out of his ass in January of 1980.
Yes, which is why I said "Everyone I know in EU is trying to cash in as much as they can while the going is still good".
It’s not clear that the person you replied to was advocating for one extreme, but even given that your strawman-esque assertion is probably true … I’d suggest analyzing a few other points in the domain beyond merely the two extremes that you contrasted.
Which range of the domain do you think we’d be most likely to find the optimal values for society? Do you believe that range might actually be inclusive of either limit? Are you sure you’d like to live in a world where the extreme limit of income inequality is manifest?
Keep in mind that Mush created 4000 millionaires the day SPCX was IPO'd.
I wouldn’t suggest a cap, but I would suggest very high tax rates and a more stern eye towards anti-competitive practices and negative externalities.
As a thought experiment:
Celebrating unbounded greed (the most “extreme” option) would be celebrating when politicians steal as much money as they can by manipulating stock markets and Kalshi and taking crypto bribes, taking kickbacks from contractors and blackmailing or strong-arming the other branches of government.
Celebrating unbounded greed would be celebrating selling poisoned food and telling ourselves that its the stupid people’s fault for buying melamine-contaminated milk without getting it tested by their own independent third party before drinking it. And then blaming the stupid people again when their third party testing lab that was trustworthy gets purchased by the same private equity group that owns the milk company and starts watering down or falsifying their tests.
Celebrating unbounded greed would be celebrating people whose wealth increased by neglecting expensive safety protocols, blowing up neighborhoods with gas explosions, and silencing them by intimidation, as well as blackmailing and bribing the judges overseeing any torts.
The more of this you allow and celebrate, the more your outliers grow and become a true bimodal distribution. Where the peak earners are, by necessity, extracting more value than they create.
The thing is, we have had a lot of things like this happen in most developed countries. There is a lot of corruption, and it’s not divided along party lines. Celebrating and glorifying unbounded greed is likely to lead towards a state where there’s less “rule of law” and more “rule by force”.
I am not talking about people who steal wealth, which is illegal. I'm not celebrating or making excuses for thieves or criminals. I'm talking about people who create wealth via the free market.
I agree that externalities are a problem, as it pushes costs onto others.
> as well as an economy that actually meets the assumptions of a “free market”: i.e. no individual buyer or seller has enough concentrated power to significantly impact the supply-demand curve all by themselves.
The free market does not require that a large player be prohibited from shifting the s-d curve. For example, ever-cheaper computers shifted the curve. And that was good for us.
> For classical economists such as Adam Smith, the term free market refers to a market free from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities. They say this implies that economic rents, which they describe as profits generated from a lack of perfect competition, must be reduced or eliminated as much as possible through free competition. [0]
> The definition of perfect competition is when the following conditions all hold: A large number of sellers and buyers – A large number of consumers with the willingness and ability to buy the product at a certain price, and a large number of producers with the willingness and ability to supply the product at a certain price. As a result, individuals are unable to significantly influence prices. [1]
You are free to say that you personally don't care for "free markets" and use another term to describe the type of market that you prefer. But the textbook definition of "free market" was already defined 250 years ago as a market in which "a large player be prohibited from shifting the s-d curve".
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition
"A free market is an economic system where prices, production, and distribution of goods and services are determined purely by the laws of supply and demand, rather than by government intervention. In an idealized free market, buyers and sellers voluntarily exchange goods, and competition naturally drives innovation, efficiency, and fair pricing."
That's what I'm talking about.
The wikipedia Perfect_competition reference does not mention "free market".
Google says Adam Smith never mentioned the term "perfect competition".
I made no such claim.
> Keep in mind that Mush created 4000 millionaires the day SPCX was IPO'd.
while also asserting that:
> I am not talking about people who steal wealth, which is illegal. I'm not celebrating or making excuses for thieves or criminals.
Elon Musk is a great example of that "Lance Armstrong" concept. It would beggar belief for him to have beat everyone else that cheats at business, without breaking laws/regulations himself.
Some news [0] from today:
> The lawsuit alleged that by not disclosing the stock purchases before the legal deadline, Musk was able to keep buying shares at artificially low prices and underpay Twitter investors by at least $150 million for those shares.
> US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan said she “has significant misgivings about the settlement” between Musk and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and described “red flags” in the SEC’s decision-making. This isn’t surprising given that she previously questioned whether the deal is tainted by corruption.
It starts to sound a lot like "the Lance Armstrongs molding the law and its enforcement to their personal desires" as posited in my previous post.
0: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/judge-doesnt-lik...
Twitter is not the source of Musk's wealth. We don't know if it is profitable to him or not, many allege he loses money on it.
A lawsuit is not a criminal proceeding.
You do make excuses for those with capital, and even here you judge people's actions differently based on how much capital they have - if that $150M were the source of his wealth, your arguments would be different - even though the actions would be the same.
Would it be honest to simply state that those with vast wealth are better, smarter, fitter humans who deserve deference from the rest of society?
For many people money is not about how it can be used to buy things to improve your life but about the social status that that wealth gives you. Take Musk as an example. He cared a lot about becoming a trillionaire. But even a billion is an incomprehensible level of wealth
[0] on a 5% interest account you'd make >$5k/hr or >$4m every month. Literally the time it takes to spend your money will allow you to recoup it. E.g in the time it takes to buy a Tesla you'll have earned more than a Tesla costs. Same even for supercars, which take longer to buy.
I think you’re projecting some other ideas on to this situation. These people weren’t driven by subconscious guilt about some other decision which drove them to commit literal crimes. This doesn’t even make sense.
People who do this are just corporate climbers who will use anything they can to boost their status. Stealing from past employer feels like a way to make yourself more valuable or indispensable, which gives them a feeling of leverage in their new job.
> I presume this was done for a giant pile of cash, stock, and probably a promise that nobody really cares if you show up or not, enjoy your retirement.
Most likely the opposite: Their new job brought them into a company surrounded by high performers who got their by working hard. They probably felt insecure in such a competitive environment and thought that stealing from Apple could make them appear more valuable so they could keep up with the demands.
Pre-IPO companies in highly competitive markets are not “rest and vest” environments.
From the complaint we can see that OpenAI at least looked the other way, but the complaint also has texts from the person to another Apple employee. When you're committed crimes and texting "LOL" as you describe the crimes to a friend, I don't believe for one second that the person is feeling guilty or ashamed.
This is just another edition of Google "we only hire the best" with nothing to show for it for 20 years. Were these the high performers, who created the disaster called ChatGPT Work ?
Google was "hiring the best" not because they needed those new hiries to build something to show for, they were hiring them to deprive their competitors of talent using their unlimited ad revenue warchest.
The entire tech scene during the ZIRP era, even more so during COvid, was just adult daycare for smart people, a giant Fugazi that came crashing down. And if the AI bubble pops, it will crash even harder.
Found out I already had a bank account with €2000 balance in my name. Temptation was high to take over the account and withdraw the cash.
Fortunately didn't touch a dime.
Long story short, my identity got stolen, account was used to collect eBay scam money and cash out from ATMs. I was a suspect and investigated for money laundering and membership to organised crime.
I had to sue the Prosecutor's Office to have them investigate the scammers. They initially refused because it was too hard... Italy.
When I was in the process of buying my home, with perfectly horrible timing something showed up on my credit report, a delinquency and charge off from Verizon of $1,800 or so.
I've never used Verizon. I've been with AT&T for nearly 20 years.
But after calling Verizon to dispute this as identity theft, this is what I learned - that "I" opened a Verizon account at a Walmart in El Paso, and ran up a huge bill calling numbers all around the world.
I live near Seattle. I've been to Texas twice in my life. I was even overseas during part of this alleged activity. I supplied (I shouldn't have to supply all of it, but I did - I needed this resolved because ... mortgage application) police report, travel documents and receipts, hotel overseas, utility bills, AT&T bills.
Verizon's first reply: based on our internal review, we remain satisfied that you are the one responsible for the debt, based on the documentation that was used to open the account.
Me: In that case, I would love to see and be reminded of the documentation I used to open the account, to see if it jogs my memory of some amnesia, apparently.
Verizon: due to customer privacy policy we are unable to show this to you.
Me: "So this documentation is simultaneously enough to prove it really was me, but not enough for you to be satisfied that it may not actually be me and you might be violating some fraudster's identity privacy?"
Basically.
I got it resolved, but it took far too much work.
And all the while, rather than "some company fucked up, and some other company's employee or process didn't catch it", I have to spend hours, and money, demonstrating to some other company that I didn't commit fraud against them, or they can make it impossible for me to buy a house without just paying them the charges someone else incurred.
The bank refused to provide me or my lawyer the documentation they had on file of "my" account. I had to sue the Prosecutor's Office to force them to investigate... after 5 years they finally moved and got me the copy of the fake ID with the face of the scammer. Unfortunately they are forced to close that case because the scammer is "person unknown".
Ultimately the case against my "money laundering" got shelved after the statutory 5 year term of them not investing anything...
I've seen it argued that "identity theft" is the way businesses with poor fraud detection make that your problem.
I.e. there's no "identity theft", there's fraud, and the company that was defrauded tries to weasel out like it's not their laxity at fault.
To me this sounds more like an extreme response to imposter syndrome, as in take the documents and the actual knowledge with you so you won't be exposed
I work from home and I have a lot of equipment here (because of what I do - think sensor fusion). Everything is labeled with a bright sticky tape that signifies it belongs to my employer. If I'm not using something at the moment, it's safely stowed in a box that is labeled. My SO knows where everything is, so in the event something happens, they know who it belongs to and who to call. In addition, I keep an inventory sheet of everything. I broke it all down easily so that my SO doesn't have to worry. By doing this, it makes it easy on me as well to know what I have, how long I've had it, when it needs to be returned by, etc.
None of that belongs to me, but they trust me with it and I respect that and I take excellent care of all of it. The mindset that these ex-employees have is just mind blowing. I couldn't fathom doing that.
Which means by definition that the people at the top of the economic pyramid are the very worst of us.
I think this is a cultural difference between security people and large populations of ordinary people. Security people tend to know both that breaking into something is generally possible if you put enough effort into it and that corporations are full of little napoleons who will try to curse your entire family for five generations if you embarrass them in public. And then "never affront the lawnmower" becomes a cultural norm out of self-preservation.
Where as for ordinary people, even in tech, seeing a security lapse is often met with some combination of cynicism and schadenfreude and "LOL" seems like a pretty normal response.
Also notice that you're reading the company's version of events, which is naturally casting this exchange as a conspiracy against the company rather than the former employee reporting the security lapse to their contact who still works there who should have passed it up the chain -- but might not if they're afraid of sticking their hand in the lawnmower.
Meanwhile I have trouble feeling outrage at this sort of thing because I don't think legal protection of trade secrets is a good policy. Competitors have a moral obligation to uncover things like this to increase competition in the market and if the company wants legal protection for its technology then it should file a patent (which will subsequently expire to the benefit of the public) rather than expecting public assistance for its attempt to sustain a monopoly rent forever.
[0] I'm worried if I don't put in quotes people will think I just create a VLAN. I do that but I also mean it in the non technical sense. e.g. if a company wants to use smartphone apps I tell them to give me a company phone, they don't get to use mine for free.
As a dev you are often confronted with confidential data, so you should deal with it in a different way.
It’s weird too, these people’s history will show up on job sites and etc, people will find out… fast.
Hard to imagine people will go work for the plagiarism machine run by a sociopath because of their high ethic and moral standards.
Isnt Apple part of the same group, doesnt Apple collude with other companies to suppress wages?
That's one of the dumbest things one can do while on their soon-to-be ex-employer's network.
Reminds me of how Sam Altman told the board that a safety reviewer had approved one of their AI models when the reviewer had done no such things.
These are supposedly our brightest minds..
Relevant articles in IEEE Code of Ethics:
3. to avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest whenever possible, and to disclose them to affected parties when they do exist;
4. to avoid unlawful conduct in professional activities, and to reject bribery in all its forms;
From NSPE Code of Ethics for Engineers:
III.4.b. Engineers shall not, without the consent of all interested parties, participate in or represent an adversary interest in connection with a specific project or proceeding in which the engineer has gained particular specialized knowledge on behalf of a former client or employer.
https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8 https://www.nspe.org/career-growth/nspe-code-ethics-engineer...
That’ll never happen with the current incentives. Programming is too easy to get started with and too well-paid to not attract unethical people who are only interested in money.
Oh, it absolutely does, just not in the direction that's good for society. OpenAI (as one example) didn't become like this by accident, it was intentional. Sam Altman isn't going to hire ethical leadership for his company, they would just get in his way.
This clearly doesn't work as an argument if A and B are people. Seems like classic 'two wrongs make a right' reasoning.
Nah this is just pushed on you to disempower you. If you take trade secrets elsewhere lawyers will be used to attack you.
Speaking of lawyers when they move practices they take their IP with them, funny that.
For some reason, the ethics followed by Asians, especially the Chinese are not fully compatible with the ethics of the west. Sometimes Chinese people call it being smart to circumvent or bypass the rules, something that would be called cheating in the west.
I'm both infuriated and worried that such a flim-flam man has put himself at the center of the U.S. stock market.
Most of what happened in this case is straight-up illegal and other parts can be covered by NDA. No need for non-competes to prevent any of this.
Thank you for recognizing this. As much as the developer community has come out against companies non-competes in the past, we should come down on even harder on one of our own stealing, because this does the most harm against the case against non-competes. It's grosser in the sense that one company doing a foul thing is bad, but ideally people can band together and work to dismantle the foul thing. But a person legitimizing the foul thing is the greater harm.
If I had a potential employer ask me to do this, I would reply "oh hell fucking no", withdraw my application, and notify my companies security, legal and HR teams.
But then again it's easy to have the moral high ground when you're not staring down an offer that will completely change your and your families lives. I'm sure most employees probably thought what I'm thinking until they are looking at a 7 figure offer.
Its the cost of doing business and OpenAI knowns it.
Two very different things!
The burden of proof falls on you to defend that theory.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.47...
9. In the months before he left Apple, Mr. Tan met with OpenAI or its collaborators and discussed meetings with a key Apple supplier. He began emailing himself information about Apple’s suppliers and internal summaries of the consumer electronics industry. And today, when interviewing Apple employees for jobs at OpenAI, Mr. Tan uses Apple’s confidential information to gain access to even more insider knowledge. He has used an Apple internal project codename to ask, “What’s the plan[?]” for an unannounced Apple product. He has directed job candidates still working for Apple to bring “Actual parts” from Apple to their interviews for “show and tell” sessions in which he and his team at OpenAI can elicit still more Apple confidential information. These directions to bring Apple’s parts to OpenAI job interviews surprised at least one of the candidates, who commented that he “didn’t even know we could take those from the office.”
10. This is part of OpenAI’s strategy to extract Apple’s confidential information. OpenAI has been instructing Apple employees to bring “CAD/design artifacts” and “prototypes” to their interviews and to divulge details about their work such as “subsystem and component selection,” the “tools or methodologies you use for system integration, such as CAD software, simulation tools,” and “Vendor selection and communication/collaboration with vendors.”
11. OpenAI also instructs new hires on how to avoid scrutiny when they leave Apple. For example, Mr. Tan warns them not to tell Apple that they have taken jobs at OpenAI, so they can stay at Apple as long as they can. After his own departure, Mr. Tan improperly retained or obtained an internal Apple managers’ document marked “Need to Know” that describes security procedures for employee departures. Messages left on Apple-issued work devices show that Mr. Tan and his OpenAI colleagues have been sharing this document with new hires before they give notice to Apple of their departures, previewing Apple’s security protocols. Unsurprisingly, Apple’s investigation has found a pattern by employees who depart for OpenAI of taking steps to evade the security processes intended to protect Apple’s confidential information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._v._Samsung_Electron....
But it was design copying and IP infringement stuff: duplication of things already in the wild.
This is on another level. If any of this is true, it's extraordinary, and I think OpenAI will likely want to settle quickly, thus increasing Apple's AI-related earnings.
Discovery is going to be great fun (for Apple).
It’s possible this kind of behavior is endorsed throughout, or it’s possible it’s limited to this specific group.
We know nothing beyond what Apple has alleged.
If it is, would you extend your opinion to say Apple turns a blind eye to ethical issues as well?
All of the employees divulging secrets came from Apple after all. The person named in the lawsuit was a 24 year Apple veteran and a VP at departure.
> It very well could be a culture issue
I agree
As others have pointed out elsewhere this is literally the type of behavior OpenAI is founded on. Gathering up other people's IP and using it to build their own thing. It's how all the big LLMs are built.
A company locking down their phone platform cannot be trusted with their laptop OS.
If they can't prove any of this stuff they wouldn't file the suit. No matter what you or I think of Apple, the chances that this went down at least as criminally as they allege, are very high.
Apple colluded with other companies to suppress wages.
Jobs was absolutely ruthless and would do anything for his goals.
Other ideas discussed are that AI companies are going through a chain of larger and larger subsidies: VC --> Big Tech --> Governments. And that these companies haven't been able to make money off of AI so they're priming things for a bailout that's not a bailout wink wink. And that they foresee a situation where Trump will accept bribes in order to heavily regulate some AI companies but not others. Picking winners and losers.
- ~murdered~ (dead) employee who's mother is on a anti-sam hate campaign - ceo fired then coup's his way back into the company - conflict of interest with Microsoft
Despite Anthropic's bad press, they haven't been as dishonest as this company.
Are we discussing Steve Jobs in 1985?
Any time there is that much money and power involved there is going to be intense drama.
Steve Jobs left because he lost a corporate power struggle. Sam Altman was fired because the board thought he was too fundamentally untrustworthy to remain as CEO (if we're to believe their statement ofc).
Different kinds of "controversy" IMO
Sam stayed because we won a corporate power struggle.
Likely Steve Jobs left because if we stayed we would have been fired or removed of all responsibilities.
I don't like bringing politics, but the recent 5-4 decision on birthright citizenship doesn't promote a lot of credibility in the current Supreme Court.
That said, silicon valley is full of stories where people brazenly stole from company A to start company B and pretty much got away with it.
EDIT: this is the one I remember:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadence_Design_Systems%2C_Inc....
I love Apple, and I’m a fanboy, but they are not the good guys.
I think Amodei may actually be quite a good human, despite my trust in big tech being at an all-time low.
Who is surprised by this development?
These people think OpenAI can/will protect them?
But also, I can't find it in myself to really care about this. Trillion-dollar company takes ideas from other trillion-dollar company. Apple has done this to much smaller companies countless times. But OpenAI-on-Apple violence is so far removed from a crime that actually harms normal people that I'm not sure why I should give a shit.
I’m guessing a wrist wearable
Aybody's lookin forward
To tha
Weakened
It would have to run Android, and try to provide compatibility for existing apps in order for this to be a successful device.
Little no-name companies have this capability with off the shelf software.
Large companies like Apple have entire departments of staff whose job it is to monitor data theft.
It's bonkers and I love every single story as if it's never been told before.