https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZLoMrRgFFE

The idea behind the quote most likely came from T.S. Eliot: Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

Steve declared thermonuclear war on Google because Android re-skinned to use BUTTONS.

If I remember, there was a former Apple employee, who was quite influential with The House of Mouse…

But, I don't work in Silicon Valley.

Wisdom seems like making good choices for long-term positive outcomes, where there are no rulebooks, lots of uncertainty, and the incentives thrown in your face to act in one direction are only a tiny fraction of the whole picture.

Intelligence seems like an aptitude to grasp concepts that lend itself to wielding a specific thing to a certain utilitarian end.

I'm sure others have said it better than me. But the folks I've met who are obviously intelligent seem to lack the ability to understand the consequences of their choices, and have already predetermined they're not only justified in their myopia, but somehow assume/ presume social support from everyone around them no matter how short-sighted their ideas are that come with obvious negative consequences if you look even one-step beyond their immediate outcomes.

Something like that. All to support your point.

It's very safe to assume Apple has a standard exit process, for low level ICs.

Tan was Apple's vice president of iPhone and Apple Watch product design. This person worked for Apple for 25 years and likely a friend of top executives. I wouldn't be surprised if he just hugged everyone and casually walked out on his last day.

If you don’t believe in IQ consider agency and conscientiousness

You’re describing patents?

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

Not blaming you, just highlighting the flaw in your argument. Because, the lack of mention of that word IS a culture issue.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

A nice side effect of that was I could clearly control when the phone won't even be on me and I had set that expectation - like treks, or short personal vacations, sleeping hours (yes!). I had championed the "follow the sun" policy in my company when it came to on-call rotation, but somehow some of my fellow country men/women colleagues took pride in "being available". Anyway, their time, their choice.

Later some of my colleagues were surprised when they couldn't install certain apps, couldn't do certain things and often used to wonder "does the company take screenshots of my phone?" because the permission was present :D

It’s as if they had two choices:

“we’ll provide clothes but you can bring your own lunch!”; vs

“wear your own clothes and we’ll provide lunch!”

and they chose the weird one not the helpful one.

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 get it, it's inconvenient. I've gone to offsites and given don't have corp on my phone I have to pull out my corp laptop to contact people and/or lookup stuff that they wouldn't. It would also be much nicer to set personal appointments or deal with personal things I need to during business hours on a laptop than my phone. On rare occasions I bring my laptop to work if I know I'm going to need access to my stuff even though all of it is in the cloud so theoretically I could access it from a work laptop.

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. It came up because, for some reason I mentioned I always take 2 laptops on business trips, my personal one and my work one. They said they never do that, they just take their work one and do personal stuff. I asked, what about porn and they all said they watched on work laptops.

That was a very long way to say I think people like myself who separate the two are rare.

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.

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.

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.

I think you’re projecting some other ideas on to this situation. These people weren’t driven by subconscious guilt about being paid a lot which drove them to commit literal crimes, in order to solidify their new high paying job. 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.

Which means by definition that the people at the top of the economic pyramid are the very worst of us.

You get paid for about a year to do nothing so that the trade secrets from your firm (trading strategies) expire.

That's very different from a non-compete. A non-compete is about your own know-how, not the company's.

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.

> To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath. Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly. The real evidence, detailed herein, more than meets the clear and convincing standard to find a violation. The Court refers the matter to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate.

> [..]

> Neither Apple, nor its counsel, corrected the, now obvious, lies. They did not seek to withdraw the testimony or to have it stricken (although Apple did request that the Court strike other testimony). Thus, Apple will be held to have adopted the lies and misrepresentations to this Court.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...

Apple colluded with other companies to suppress wages.

At no point is money as a resource being spent on this legal case any kind of meaningful constraint. Equally true for both open ai and apple.

You? You're toast if you need legal justice with either co on the other side. The law exists so that the strongest might not always get their way. It was a good ideal, maybe we should bring it back.

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

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.

and

https://x.com/drewpusateri

Take something down and most of the Internet is too lazy to dig up an archive and they wander off to find something else to score internet points off of.

This is the sort of company they are, and it's just the tip of the iceberg: https://clawd.rip

All I did was quote a fact without any additional comments, and you are the one being dismissive and handwaving it away.

They knew exactly how developers worked from using figma as training data.

Yes. They're constantly lying, and constantly getting caught for it. They have a reputation for it. Why do you think this would be any different?

Their standard opt-out agreement frames it as if they won't train on your data, but they do anyway, due to legal loopholes. They essentially clean-room everyone who opts-out, so while it's "technically" not training on "your" data, to the model it makes no difference. Your alpha and IP is not safe. Paying customers are now more easily able to clone your business as well, not just Anthropic themselves.

The only reason this hasn't leaked yet is fear. Anthropic is a very litigious and dangerous company. Only a matter of time though, someone there will grow a spine and speak up.

Still, a rare exception of a company that seems worth the openness of one's mind. It's pretty shameful that this alone is worthy of praise, even forgetting the things Valve does that are just generally positive.

1) Lots of people think they are partly complicit in all the skins trading/gambling that children do, which is basically skirting gambling laws. This has culminated in a current lawsuit in New York which claims they broke gambling laws.

2) They also currently have a large antitrust lawsuit going on, due to them requiring Most Favored Nation pricing while setting a 30% commission fee vs 12% on competitor platforms, which exploits market position and artificially raises game prices to Steam's benefit.

Large corporations are not your friend. They are the enemy; they vary only in type and depth of diabolicalness.