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.

> 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".

> they moved accounts and immediately bought a one way flight out of country

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

> 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.

> immediately bought a one way flight out of country

Is this referring to a foreign national who can leave at any time?

> 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.

They quite clearly do not believe that. If they did, they wouldn't need to go into hiding or leave the country.

This honestly sounds like mental illness.

Exactly that.

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.

Depending on where you live, your employer may be legally required to accommodate your disabilities. Here in France, HR are usually dutiful about it.

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.

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.

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.

But it's Apple, which is a huge target. Never mind these individuals, you will have China, Russia and other seeking to infiltrate it.

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.

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.

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.

Apple is obviously the victim but prevention is easier than what is happening now, which is potentially going to court, discovery, etc.

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If you leave your house unlocked and someone steals your stuff AND is never caught, you're SOL.

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Some people care about justice in general?

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

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.

Why don’t you care about the rule of law?

Bad people in control of AI is incredibly dangerous.

> current DOJ isn't doing so hot

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

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.

US office culture is generally pretty high trust. It has relatively high autonomy, authority, and low surveillance norms.

I don't know what that has to do with a historical period of slavery.

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 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.

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100%.

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).

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.

> history of slavery

Every country and group has practiced slavery.

Heh, as a (very white) American I presumed it was America in general today. From what I can see, it seems to be turning into a place where it's all scams, rug-pulls, crypto and sports gambling. This concerns me about the world that my 9 year old is growing up in, the only world he's ever known, even the early 2010s seemed to be higher trust than the past decade has felt like.

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 think you’ve made an extreme leap in your interpretation of the comment you’re replying to…

> 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?

The grandparent commentor is just racist.

It's more about people with "everybody steals so I should steal too" also known as "tylko frajer by nie ukradł" -- "only a loser wouldn't steal that" -- mentality.

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

Or you can just snap a photo with your personal phone.

> Because, the lack of mention of that word IS a culture issue.

or, how you interpret the question is part of the interview process...

That's literally what they're looking for. To filter out ethical founders.

wat

pretty sure PG and sama had a pretty serious falling out because it turns out sama is a complete snake

but you know, go off king (or whatever)

Meh. It's one megacorp stealing stuff from another megacorp, hardly "appalling", who cares. I'd probably react the same way; I just wouldn't leak it to my next employer, that's dumb.

It is but it is the Silicon Valley way and business way for many. Steamroll and do whatever it takes to win and be successful. Morals what are those?

I want this to run like a real f-cking business!

> because Android re-skinned to use BUTTONS.

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.

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

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

Amazing character. Started as a regular robot-loving engineering kid, was in the right place at the right time and earned something like $140 million from Google, mostly from truly ludicrous performance bonuses, went to Uber for another giant payout, was worth nine figures. And sure, he was convicted for crimes, but he got one of those definitely-legitimate Trump pardons.

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.

When all that went down, I was at Facebook. And some recruiter posted the news that Anthony was no longer at Uber, with a message like “this is a great opportunity to secure a top tier hire!”

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

A VP is not a designer, and doesn't have a standard anything.

I work for a Silicon Valley headquartered company and would expect the same.

Companies don't get to be worth billions of dollars without doing something unethical.

> Through Apollinaire, Picasso contacted the poet’s ex-secretary, Honore-Joseph Géry Pieret, who was ready to steal artifacts for a reasonable price. In 1907, Pieret broke into the Louvre and took several sculptures with him. Months later, Picasso would reveal his ground-breaking Cubist work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon which was heavily inspired by Iberian and African sculpture.

https://www.thecollector.com/famous-artists-turned-crime/

Well their whole model is a stolen art collection :)

Why not both? Three cheers for escape artists!

a "metal-finishing technique" _is_ an idea.

joke

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.

Trade secrets. A legally recognized thing, and legally protected.

And NDAs. I may develop a non-patentable technique. That doesn't mean I can't share it with you under NDA and, if you breach said NDA, enforce it.

I'm describing "intellectual property," patents being only one way to legally protect such property.