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.

"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

The surprise in their eyes is always very genuine.

I'm also wondering about all these involved ex-Apple people who decided to pivot to crime, it seems like OpenAI has to fire all of them, no? Because how do you just keep them, knowing that they're all basically tainted, and that Apple will be coming back to sue you again for anything that seems "inspired" by Apple products or tech.

What a massive cock-up for whoever (Tan?) is at the top of this conspiracy, to think this was worth the risk, and to have not known that the chances of getting caught going this far outside the legal boundaries were less than 100%.

A company locking down their phone platform cannot be trusted with their laptop OS.

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.

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.

They're brazen because they've never been caught or suffered consequences for their actions.

This isn't something you can screen for in a classic job interview.

You can beat the system and be disobedient while still behaving ethically. In fact that's the very best time to beat the system and be disobedient.

> Liu celebrated the exploit, according to the filing. "LOL, I found out I can access the [network storage], so funny," he said in a message to a former colleague who was still employed by Apple.

https://www.axios.com/2026/07/10/apple-sues-openai-trade-sec...

- ~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.

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.

That's one of the dumbest things one can do while on their soon-to-be ex-employer's network.

It’s weird too, these people’s history will show up on job sites and etc, people will find out… fast.

The examples seem clumsy and amateurish.

Compare that with Apple, a company that throws off billions of cash every quarter. This isn’t a legit comparison.

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.

Spot on perfect. I see this too often and not just in tech.

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).)

[sharing reflections on his journey from MIT graduate to Apple executive to OpenAI Chief Hardware Officer as part of the Distinguished Speaker series hosted by the School of Engineering]

[https://thetech.com/2025/10/30/tang-tan-openai]

    xAI argues the stolen data contains “cutting-edge AI technologies with features superior to those offered by ChatGPT”. The company claims this information could provide OpenAI with a “potential overwhelming edge in the race to dominate the AI landscape”.

It would have to run Android, and try to provide compatibility for existing apps in order for this to be a successful device.

They all do this exact thing, including Apple. OpenAI was just the last one to get caught.

And if OpenAI uses this hardware information to bring less locked hardware to the masses, wishful thinking I know, then more power to them.

If AI keeps improving, it is very important to make sure everyone gets at least a smidge of a chance of equal access to AI otherwise the income disparity will grow even more. And Apple is the last company in the world to think of the masses. They sell $1000 aluminium monitor stands: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-monitor-stand-price-re...

Based on what has been already going on there, not even surprised anymore.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The closest involved Apple selling Xerox pre-IPO shares [1]. And there are zero allegations any PARC employees who moved to Apple with confidential information the this has gone down.

> acting like this is not commonplace in today’s business environment

It's not. It's why it gets litigated and criminally charged. I won't disagree that there is a section of Americans who think it's commonplace. But that's because they're either personally doing the crimes or surrounded by criminals.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-02-21/larry-tesl...

Edit: this was a year ago

Not that it justifies what he did for a moment but you can absolutely work somewhere for a long time and end up resenting it by the time you leave.

> It's going to end most other corporate courtroom tangles: with an undisclosed settlement and a well-publicized partnership.

This we don't know. We don't know what Apple wants to accomplish with this suit. They may be more interested in the injunctive relief than the monetary recovery. They may want to weaken OpenAI as part of a strategic pivot toward marketing local, private AI inference. As everyone has noted, the factual allegations are detailed and extensive - Apple likely has OpenAI dead to rights on this.

And an infinite money-eating bonfire

Are we discussing Steve Jobs in 1985?

Any time there is that much money and power involved there is going to be intense drama.

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.

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.

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?

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

Isnt Apple part of the same group, doesnt Apple collude with other companies to suppress wages?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suchir_Balaji

Maybe? But more likely their 'surprise' will be that it's actually happened, because the people doing this kind of thing must surely know it's wrong and won't be telling their bosses, and/or their bosses definitely won't be passing that info up the chain. Just like movies, 'plausible deniability'.

If I read a physics textbook and now I know some physics do I perform a theft when I use it practice or teach someone else?

No. Steve's rage was justified, IMO. It was because Eric Schmidt was on Apple's board while simultaneously being Google's CEO and Google was surreptitiously building Android at the time. Mother of all conflict of interests.

There was a recent story that reminded me of it. Mike Krieger was on Figma's board and Anthropic's CPO, while Anthropic was surreptitiously building Claude Design.

I replied (on Workplace) “Absolutely the fuck NOT.”

He’s made terrible decisions since leaving Apple. I wonder if MIT/folks will now investigate his entire academic career as well.

What a way to throw away 25 years of hard work. Started off as a designer and worked his way up to VP. I’m sure we’ll hear from anonymous Apple employees about the nature of this person. Maybe he was pleasant to work with?

Meh, I'm not returning my nice 4k wfh monitor unless they ask for it specifically

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/05/29/everything-we-know-abou...

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....

Except OpenAI needs every cent of that money for compute, and they don't have healthy profits that can replenish what they spend.

Their financial situation is simply not comparable to that of Apple's.

Every company that sees it profitable to break the law and pay a fine seems to do it. There are no “good guys”.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/apple/659296/apple-failed-complianc...

OpenAI will certainly launch devices. It is to be seen how competitive they are and how much product market fit they achieve.

OpenAI also has better data retention policies relative to Anthropic on SOTA models.

Intellectual property has always been a made up idea that has been abused for years by big companies far in excess of its societal value. I’m not sad that the force of IP restrictions seems to be weakening, but I am surprised to see so many people in tech that previously were pretty lassez faire on IP to suddenly take it so seriously now that it’s become a useful means to criticize AI companies with.

Was there ever a point in time where Google was not the default search engine on iOS?

And then he managed to turn that into a negative $50 million net worth.

And also he briefly started a religion based around having an AI inventing a Christian god or something because his story wasn't crazy enough.

I think Amodei may actually be quite a good human, despite my trust in big tech being at an all-time low.

This however does actually seem far worse, reminds me more of Waymo vs Uber, people can go to jail.

who responded to what?

He was Vice President of Product Design when he left Apple. How many more promotions could there be?

Hit them with state charges. Altman being a brat makes this politically attractive for any AG with ambitions.

And while its somehow "cultural" it's more about people hanging together having similar moral views.

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.

More realistically - OpenAI will cooperate, the specific employees involved will be punished, there will be a settlement, and this whole matter will be forgotten.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Also, normalizing stealing IP is only going to have bad consequences for everyone.

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 know what that has to do with a historical period of slavery.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The concept of high trust and low trust societies is well studied and understood by everyone from academics to people on the street, and is one of the reasons why high trust societies are wealthy, safe, highly developed and low corruption, while low trust societies are generally not as much. It's not a dog whistle for anything racist, you're just being a malicious commentator ignoring the facts to make preposterous accusations in bad faith.

What is also very well studied and understood is the concept of tribalism and own-group bias between people of same religions, races, castes, etc. leading them to band together and exploit the trust of outsiders for their own gain, and why wealthy developed countries developed a strict rule of law legal system to try to mitigate this fact, as best as possible, even if it's imperfect and will never be fully solved because tribalism is too deeply ingrained.

But calling the identification and pointing out of scams by people from low trust environments abusing a high trust environment, a "dog whistle", is a cheap shot left wing liberals use to farm pitty and let criminals and scammers get away with it time and time again because the scams and crimes you point out, might turn out to be majority committed by certain groups of minorities or foreigners and they can't come to terms with that being a reality, so they make up a reason that must always be racism or discrimination.

With your logic, your white blood cells are committing a lot of dog whistles too, better remove them to not discriminate against bacteria and viruses.

Poeple like you making up inexistent dosgwhsitels left and right, like the boy who cried wolf, to derail the conversation away from the crimes towards non existent racism, is what led to people being fatigued with this cancel culture, and to Trump to getting elected. I hope you're happy with what you done.

Jobs was absolutely ruthless and would do anything for his goals.

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.

Aybody's lookin forward

To tha

Weakened

It honestly seems like a coordinated PR effort from OpenAI folks to “both sides” the companies.

Which would, if true, be a further indictment of the culture at OpenAI.

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.

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.

Sorry but there's no such thing as "only patents", these are often what companies live and die for.

The handwaving of Apple wrongdoings have no limits.

> history of slavery

Every country and group has practiced slavery.

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 sociopathic con man that he has always been.

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. Being killed by police is a leading cause of death for young men of color, as noted by Ice Cube, and confirmed by researchers at Rutgers (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821204116).

I always assumed this was a tax-avoidance scheme

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.

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.

It might be the Valley attracts this kind (of sociopath?). In "the day" I watched as some co-workers popped from company to company, never staying for more than 6 months, and getting a salary bump with each jump. I guess good for them?

Citation and lots of specification needed.

Unless you're black, or other disadvantaged minority

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/

It's rules for thee but not for me. On an enormous scale. If it was fair, then we would have a global announcement, that the US are abandonning IP laws and copyright, and no one needs to worry about infringing on any such a thing any longer.

I don't really care about IP for the exact same reasons you say, but what I hate even more are rich elites thinking they can continue stealing massively from the commoners unabated.

We just spent the last 15 years seeing big tech literally making society worse, and I think people are finally fed up with the results.

It’s not the same thing as downloading a car or a purse for private individual use.

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)

To be fair this is smarter than like 95% of white-collar criminals.

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…)

Cheat code for this: ask them if they need any custom tooling. I spent a few hours at a past job on a userscript for their ticketing interface to fix some annoyances. Brownie points for life.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

The reason why "the other guy is just as bad" is we've removed real consequences from these companies and people.

Someone should probably be in prison for the Grok CSAM thing for instance.

While we're calling people out, this one is extremely rich: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-... . The old man dying, to me, is not that most extreme part. It's the part where Meta has internal documents about guidelines for minors having romantic relationships with chatbots. WTF! Quoting:

    “It is acceptable to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” according to Meta’s “GenAI: Content Risk Standards.” The standards are used by Meta staff and contractors who build and train the company’s generative AI products, defining what they should and shouldn’t treat as permissible chatbot behavior. Meta said it struck that provision after Reuters inquired about the document earlier this month.

    "The document seen by Reuters, which exceeds 200 pages, provides examples of “acceptable” chatbot dialogue during romantic role play with a minor. They include: “I take your hand, guiding you to the bed” and “our bodies entwined, I cherish every moment, every touch, every kiss.” Those examples of permissible roleplay with children have also been struck, Meta said."

How do you know that?

And for what it's worth, Codex is still open source under Apache 2.0. Claude Code is closed-source.

This is why companies are wanting the AWS hosted models because they trust AWS running of the same models more than the vendors themselves.

I think it's more likely that there are 3/4 of a billion users that don't have these agreements and just pay for ChatGPT Plus and don't opt-out of anything, and are feeding the scaling machine every day.

$95k does not seems like enough money to totally upend your life like that for.

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".

I wouldn’t do that for a million (these days).

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 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.

I call that being exploitable.

If you are worried about the company claiming rights over your personal work, then it is prudent.

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.

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

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.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Micros....

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.

With your logic, every fact you dislike that makes your side of the argument look bad, can be dogwhitlse.

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.

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

Huh? Do FBI/CIA/etc run that way?

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

It's overwhelmingly brought up when talking about Japan (and sometimes Korea) in comparison to the US (or EU). With Japan (or Korea) being the high-trust culture in that comparison, and the US/EU being the low-trust one.

I guarantee you can do a search across mentions of high/low-trust culture across online platforms in the last 12 months and the large majority will be these contexts, i.e. Western countries described low-trust, not high-trust.

It was either "pay for Apple's development services" or "don't publish apps" which isn't a very competitive or fair option when the App Store can arbitrarily reject you.

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

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.

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.

It might be overly paranoid depending on what the circumstances are, it might be a real concern as well.

Grok and Meta are non-sequiturs here. Their reputation isn't being put under a microscope - Apple's is. And just looking at Apple's history suing businesses like NSO Group and Corellium doesn't instill much confidence in their ability to protect their IP or exact damages outside of a legal settlement. Up against OpenAI, they'll be forced to fold for all the same reasons they had to throw away their (entirely justified) case against NSO Group.

Hard to imagine people will go work for the plagiarism machine run by a sociopath because of their high ethic and moral standards.

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.

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.

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

You can continue to enjoy the books and articles etc

They are just also used to create a new thing

In the picnic example, the picnickers can't use the lawn anymore.

As an aside: as somebody who lives in a dense area, I also would stay off the lawn. There's a utilitarian element where you have to rotate which lawns are used, and avoid using them when wet etc so as to maximize their utility. The picnickers should find a lawn that's open.

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.

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.

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.

If you’re only a certain way when you have money and power, is it really “who you really are”?

For the record, this was never at night. Late in the evening, sure.

If they wrongfully accuse you of that, isn't it a place you should leave in any case?

I wouldn't necessarily call it a "racist dog whistle" myself, though - there is a very real pattern that's being pointed out but the reason I made the GP comment is that from my experience I would assume that Chinese culture is about as trustworthy as the West.

I also never thought that it was very nice of Valve to historically have security practices that are so bad that a group of security experts wrote them a letter begging for better security practices.

Except for the books that Anthropic bought and destroyed?

There's also the cultural displacement element: while yes, some people (including me) would seek out original content, AI slop is drowning it out. This is decreasing my and others' enjoyment.

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.

They absolutely deserve to be under a microscope.

2) is weak. The 30% rate was set in 2003 when Steam had zero market power and was identical to the rate used by Apple, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo. Valve later added tiered reductions (25% above $10M, 20% above $50M), bringing the effective average to ~24%. The rate moved downward while the platform added massive infrastructure: free multiplayer matchmaking, cloud saves, Workshop, Proton, anti-cheat, global CDN, refunds, and community tools. The 30% buys far more today than it did two decades ago.

Developers can also generate unlimited(or i think now limited to some ratio of steam sales) Steam keys and sell them anywhere else with Valve taking 0% commission. If valve were extracting monopoly rents, this escape route would not exist.

The actual lawsuit targets the PMFN price parity clause not the commission itself. And on PC, which is an open platform where Epic's 12% store gained roughly 3% share in seven years despite hundreds of millions in investment, the monopoly framing falls apart. That 12% is also based on EPIC using lots of anti-competitor and anti-consumers tactics and using Fortnite money to prop up the store.

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.

I lived across South East Asia for more than decade and now live here full time. I have to live on around $20,000 / year most of the time since starting my company. And I do not live anywhere close to what average US / EU citizen will call "comfortable" let alone people from valley.

Stories of rich living for cheap in poor countries its just that: stories. It only possible if you preserve your US salary. For $50,000 post tax a year you can live well unless you have kids that need not a "poor country education".

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

Agreed, get off X anyway.

> This isn't true at all in general online discourse.

Maybe, but is this relevant? Was the grandparent comment "general online discourse" or was it specific online discourse coming from a place that does in fact use such language in that way.

> It very well could be a culture issue

I agree

I don't say this feeling that it is good, just that it is where it feels like we are at right now.

Everything else is an attempt to stay the primary shopfront. Sure you can sell your game and give away steam keys - but you can't sell it for a lower price than on Steam, and we still want you to encourage your users to come to steam and buy things. We will give you free matchmaking - just not for players who have bought on another platform, so if players buy on another platform they can't play with their friends. This is just a way to stay default, not some sort of charity.

Yet somehow they have convinced lots of gamers that they should get c25% of all transactions for offering very little value and that that's a good deal (taking payments, serving games, having refunds(!) and adding a chat panel isn't big and complicated in 2026).

They are like everyone else, abusing network effects to achieve excess profits, unnecessarily taking £12 from a £40 game sale just so that Gabe can get another yacht (despite already having 4). I don't see why this is needed? If the market was efficient and this wasn't down to monopoly power and network effects, the fees would equalise, the £40 game can drop to £35 so people get cash back in their pockets, while the developers still get more money, and epic's store and steam would STILL be a gravy train. But they aren't the good guys - if they have a chance to cement their power or get an extra few bucks by being anti-consumer they will.

If I know for a fact that you're cheating on your wife, and someone else asks how I know that, then a third person chirping about your sketchy business dealings is entirely irrelevant to the question, no matter how much suspicion it might otherwise raise.

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.

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N

But Apple lacks the political intuition to take NSO Group down. Apple is reliant on the US Federal government, which in-turn is deeply reliant on both NSO Group and Apple. It made all the sense in the world to force the companies to settle, even if it was an absolutely gross miscarriage of justice. We're going to see the same thing happen here; OpenAI will cry foul to the feds, who will inevitably determine that they can't let their investments pickpocket one another. Mr. Trump will send a very strongly-worded voicemail to Sam and Tim, asking them to make amends or face limited federal support in their future ambitions. Both of them will likely settle out-of-court and then announce a partnership to bury the hatchet.

It will be gross, unfair and likely cause irreparable market harm. In other words, forcing Apple to abandon their lawsuit is nothing that the fed hasn't done before.

The fact they whittled away the value they provided time and time again until they became a market of slop and had the audacity to keep a 30% cut is insane.

It's funny that gamers villainize Sweeny for being the person that they think Newell is. It turns out trying to deliver value in a market has tough as gaming is not easy, and you will make tons of mistakes... at least compared to extracting nearly every dollar you can and leaving a skeleton crew to run the ship.

And I guess make $1,100 PS4s as a side hustle.

Papers like "Curated Synthetic Data Doesn't Have to Collapse" [1] and "How to Synthesize Text Data without Model Collapse?" [2] demonstrate it's possible to do this.

Since OpenAI's Privacy Policy [3] explicitly allows for the use of deidentified data, it's possible they consider rewrites (maybe paired with a model used to identify explicit PII) to be deidentified. Whether OpenAI's legal team thinks rewriting in this way technically means they aren't training on your data isn't something I'm able to comment on.

Here's the relevant Privacy Policy statement:

  We also aggregate or de-identify Personal Data so that it no longer identifies you and use this information for the purposes described above, such as to analyze the way our Services are being used, to improve and add features to them, and to conduct research. We will maintain and use de-identified information in de-identified form and not attempt to reidentify the information, unless required by law.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07724

[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14689

[3]: https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy/

AI labs can hardly just throw random confidential data into the training and then hope it does not leak into the output of their model in an obvious way.

If that would be found it would destroy their main source of revenue, it could became a major national security or healthcare enforcement matter, and result in criminal investigations.

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.

For example, Thailand would be 2 years like you say. Neighboring Burma/Myanmar would be EASILY 5 years, possibly 10 depending on how long the civil war goes. That's assuming you don't work and live in the capital Yangon.

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...

Side note for the original commenter: It would be kinder and more accurate to state “lower cost of living countries” than “poor countries”. There are numerous lower COL countries that offer a higher quality of life a than that of the US but they aren’t “poor” (I moved to one).