> 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.

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

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.

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 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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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/

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

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.

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

Unless you're black, or other disadvantaged minority

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.

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).

> 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.

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.

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, or having my bike stolen, and people queue politely and orderly for riding the bus.

And in democracies, the behavior of those elected into power is a direct reflection of that society and its population. Trump didn't make America like that, American people made America's leader be like that. Trump is a reflection of your society that's why he got into power, because people see themselves in him.

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.

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).)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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".

Person from that kind of country likely had to spend $100,000 just to find job and move to US and survive there for the first time.

Legal migration to US is super hard and super expensive. You have to be both very successful in what you do and very dedicated in order to do it. Or very rich. And it take years.

People who choose to migrate to US and manage to do it isnt the type to throw it away on small scam.

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).

I understand that side note wasnt for me, but yeah most of cheaper developing South East Asia countries are not "poor". Though there are ones you can call that, but again in a such countries you dont really want anyone to know you have $100,000 somewhere on a bank because its can get unsafe very fast. Its either "live just a little better than locals" or get in trouble.

PS: I talking of Myanmar, most of Laos and Cambodia.

Easy to live on sub 700$ a month if you're happy with air conditioned studio, mostly asian food, scooter and not going to high end bars.

Get the 1 bedroom apartment, quite often takeaway/delivered western food sub 1500$ a month.

Go eat out western food everyday, live in a 3 bedroom in the nicest district go to fancy bars etc and yeah maybe you can reach your 5k a month...

People have no clue / are not willing to experience adjustment for 3 weeks... But easily possible to live here for budgets mentioned above...

Plus health insurance like Cigna for $100-200 unless you want to pay $10,000-20,000 in vinmec if you crash on a motorbike or get other serious sickness.

Plus border runs like $200-300 three times a year or often for cheaper depend on your paasport.

Problem that I doubt its how average SWE on HN imagine "comfortable" living.

Then if you have a partner who is not remote worker and kids there will be other surpeises for you.

Why would you go to vinmec if you can use google translate / chatgpt to gwt better and cheaper service.

Border runs default are 4 times a year but only need to cost 140$ each or cheaper if you're willing to organize / drive yourself.

Comfortable is subjective and humans can change. Yay.

Well if you wanna move the posts and all... But even then with ai etc a degree becomes less relevant rather than your /their problem solving ability

If you're born there you unlikely to ever end up in US on $100,000+ job unless your whole family or village invest in it.

If you're expat you will soon end up finding out that as expat you'll pay completely different prices and starting local business is just impossible unless you become part of a family.

How the hell you end up in US on $100,000+ job? How much time it took and how much you spent on education / job search / migration to US?

If you're from India then likely all your relatives invested into your education and migrarion.

And that’s not available income. France median pre-tax "net" income is ~€2.100 / month.

Nothing of it available in cheap country for expat. If you move to developing country you better pay for health insurance like 80-250 EUR / month / person.

Also if you have a partner who is not remote worker they might not be able to find well paid job there. If you have kids then giving them good modern education in English is exorbitantly expensive.

I wont even start about fact that government of cheap country might change and you lose your residence permit, social circle or even property. And in most of countries that are easy to enter never give permanent residences and passports. You have to pay pay pay all the time or jump countries.

They are not free, the costs are deducted from the gross income listed above. Not that fundamentally different than employers paying for your health insurance (besides the system being way more efficient etc.)

And good education is either non existing in cheap cities or expensive in expensive ones.

As it is in most if not all of the world? Free, high quality, public education is a rare thing, in most countries, even fully developed expensive ones.

Even when the schools themselves are nominally free you see well-off highly educated people do their best and pay a very large premium to get to live into the proper, usually expensive, neighbourhoods so their kids can live in the "right" school district to get into the "right" school.

Which is just paying a premium for supposedly better education. An indirect education cost.

And that is on top of the taxes deducted from the gross salary figures I mentioned, which are, in part, used to cover said "free" education.

And the actual cost of healthcare to the organisations paying for it is actually far lower than the US system, probably partly because it's more regulated and also because there is far less litigation so insuranace for doctors is cheaper.

So I don't think the US system is "more efficient", unless by "efficient" you mean in extracting money from patients / their insurances. In the US hospitals exist to make money, in the EU it's more about providing treatment.

As a supporting point for

> 50,000 sounds like a lot. Most people in West European countries don’t make that much.

And a counter-point to

> 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 […] And I do not live anywhere close to what average US / EU citizen will call "comfortable" […]. 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".

> I wont even start about fact that government of cheap country might change and you lose your residence permit, social circle or even property. And in most of countries that are easy to enter never give permanent residences and passports.

Good, because that is an entirely different and very loosely related point.

I am afraid I am not getting your point.

I do care about having to waste my life setting DIY solutions because country I live in doesnt have it.

I just lived around the world a bit especially in said cheap countries. A lot of people who spend 3-6 months travelling there after college or while nomading seriously undersell how much hassle living there can be if you're there for good.

Its a good to have a job or company in US / EU while living in SEA knowing you can always return if something go sour or when you decide to start a family. Its nowhere as easy if you have hypothetical scenario of moving there for a decade.

Thats all.

There of course cities with a lot of expats and activities, but imagine what - living there is not cheap. Cheaper than US / EU, but you still gonna need that $2000 / month.

Wont even start on topic of lost opportunities from lack of networking since we talk of some extreme downshifting here. But most people need friends and safety net at least.

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.

So with half $500,000 US dollars you could survive on 1666.66 per month in Yugoslavia most people, however, will spend beyond that amount however, the temptation is too high. Soccer players and basketball players, well actually most people will simply not have the discipline.

So one ends with $100k and out of US. What can be done? Adriatic is one option. $100K will last long enough for something else to come up.

Also idk where you get data on "most people". My "most people" consider "(major US Bank) savings account" a losing proposition against even inflation.

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.

It means they lived somewhere where a 6-figure income is feasible, which already puts it on the expensive end of the spectrum. If they are fleeing to somewhere where 95k looks like retirement money, that's not going to be a place where replacing that 6-figure income is feasible (especially with a default judgement against them blocking access to the whole US-influenced banking network)

Talk about deeply unfair ...

For sure unfair. It drove whole generations to seek to emigrate to the US to work in Silicon Valley - one lucky break in the Bay Area, or 10-15 years of regular work, could set your whole family up for life back home. Now the equation is shifting, as US immigration policies become less predictable, and BigTech is back in layoff mode.

I expect that the EU's more moderate (but still high globally) salaries coupled to robust worker protections, cheap healthcare + education systems, are going to start looking pretty good for the next while.

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 if the more money you make, the more you need to feel fulfilled, so people start stealing and scamming to cover a self inflicted psychological money deficit.

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 the MO 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 (layoffs and wage stagnation everywhere, housing costs massively outpacing wage growth, etc). Either from scamming their company or from scamming the government and welfare system.

And the compound the issue, the government trying to "fix" this only makes things worse as they just add more taxes on the honest working class people in their quest to tax "the rich" and give to the poor, which is only a populist measure for votes, nothing that actually fixes the problem since none of the globalist robber barons are affected by such policies as all their wealth is tied in a network of international foundations, charities, trust funds, etc. so when you add a 3 Euro tax on Aliexpress items, you're only gonna hurt the guy trying to repair his TV and washing machine, not the real estate magnate living in Monaco.

I don't think we can escape this downward spiral in any peaceful and democratic 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 1981. The Chicago School is informative of neocon economic policy, and once you get past the pictures of frogs, not much has changed about the modern conservative economic platform.

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”.

Relatively unbounded greed can probably work quite well in a society with a strong rule of law to protect against corruption, dangerous/damaging corner cutting and fraud… 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.

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

-------------------

> I’m just not convinced that value creation and value extraction are well-linked when examining outlier cases.

>> I am not talking about people who steal wealth, which is illegal. I'm not celebrating or making excuses for thieves or criminals.

Why would anyone assume that the most extreme outliers wouldn't (generally) be breaking some rules that the mode follow; breaking those particular rules would help them become an extreme outlier. Wouldn't it follow that if some % people are breaking rules to their advantage and getting away with it, that to exceed even those other "cheaters" that the most extreme outliers nearly must also be breaking those rules? It's like watching Lance Armstrong beat all the other cheaters and saying "There's no way he could be cheating!"

It feels like a fantasy to put so much blind faith in all the most extreme outliers and assert that none of them are doing anything illegal. Should we not tax illegal behavior much more severely than legal behavior? Would that not be rational?

Also --- of COURSE you "celebrate / make excuses for thieves and criminals". Uber would be a fantastic example of a group of criminals that you celebrate and make excuses for. Before Uber, if someone (even a municipal taxi driver) tried to pick someone up at an airport who flagged them down like a taxi, they would go to jail if they hadn't paid for an exclusive "airport taxi" license. Uber arranged taxis for airport travelers all the time - and they frustrated law enforcement using actual Obstruction of Justice via their "Greyball"[2] program. You can make excuses for them that none of this was found to be illegal/criminal, but Ycombinator partners are on record saying that the Lyft founders did, in fact, believe that what they were doing could very well land them in jail [3]. YCombinator partners encouraged them to move forward.

But you'd celebrate the Uber/Lyft founders and the YCombinator partners (as would I, for breaking the taxi cartel system that was even worse for the median American). And you have not ever celebrated the taxi drivers who went to jail for picking up passengers flagging them down at the airport before Uber/Lyft.

Perhaps this is because, to some degree, "capitalist" society is somewhat like a "racist" or "sexist" society, except instead of determining an individual's worth based on their race, capitalist societies discriminate based on how much capital one has. If you control enough capital, the laws are very malleable - what's illegal or not is what those with enough capital decide should be illegal or not.

Should the Lance Armstrongs of the business world be taxed the same as those who actually are not doping, but whose names we don't recall? Given that capital accumulation yields political/legislative/executive power, that might ensure that the Lance Armstrongs get to mold the law and its enforcement to their desires.

2: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-...

3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm-ZIiwiN1o&t=8m46s

"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 explicitly made no such claim: "I am not talking about people who steal wealth, which is illegal."

> 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 who break the law, 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 have been the same.

Would it be honest to simply state that those with vast wealth are the smartest, fittest, best humans among us and deserve deference from the rest of society? Vast wealth could then be a very convenient proxy for who should be granted the most power in our society, because they are the smartest, fittest, and best of us. They are smarter and better, so they would be the most adept at wielding that power - thus we should grant them as much power as possible so that it is all concentrated in the best hands.

My core thesis remains the same: An individual's captured/extracted value likely exceeds net value creation when examining the individual outliers who capture the most value. Therefore it is reasonable to tax them at a higher rate, to recapture some of that excess extracted wealth which went above and beyond their net wealth creation.

I would also say that even in the purest hypothetical case, it is reasonable for a society to decide not to grant 100% of all net created value to the individuals who created it, and for the society to capture some of it for broader societal purposes. I think reasonable people can agree that there would be real problems inherent in living in a world where the most extreme limit of income inequality is manifested - most of those problems would be related to concentrating power in the hands of those who break the rules to maximally enrich themselves.

This is all in line with my original assertion that the optimal choice between "maximizing greed is best!!" and "everyone should earn exactly the same as everyone else no matter what!" is....probably somewhere in between those two extremes.

  > They likely already had healthy pile of cash and stock.

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 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.

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 and confirm my innocence. 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 investigating 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.

When these kind of generalizations sound like they are flattening any resemblance of reality, it is because they are

Evil. Yes it’s fashionable. Doesn’t make it untrue.

Most thieves, murderers, etc were poor, they weren't? Then they were explained as special cases.

When you come with a premade conclusion based on ideology it is usually very easy to find "proofs".

Think it a different way, most of the people reading this forum are at the world's top 1%. I venture to guess you as well, are you evil for hoarding all that cash? Was your 9-5 work epitome of evil?

I am honest these days about my life, choices, etc. I have done much that is flatly wrong and I would love to somehow make up for it. I cannot. Society is structured in such a way to promote evil and suppress good. That structure is continually reinforced by evil people seeking to retain their advantage.

A thing is what it is.

I think this is a marking of the overly dramatic and self centered nature of the american progressive movement, but I digress

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.

Whereas 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 leave a company

[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.

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.

> 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...

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

The surprise in their eyes is always very genuine.

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

(Einstein would have had an unexceptional score on an IQ test, had he ever taken one. His schoolteachers thought him destined for failure.)

To put it another way, polymaths are unusual but idiots are everywhere. And people who are outstandingly good at say, computer engineering can be mediocre at philosophy or business administration.

Psychometrists distiguish between crystallized and fluid intelligence. Expertise is a combination of knowledge and ability. But ability itself is multifaceted, and raw talent goes untapped without the motivation to study and the opportunity to work.

For most areas of human endeavor, being smart enough is all that is required. Being a genius helped Albert Einstein reimagine physics, but did not make him a better patent clerk.

> stupidity is very general

So then what do you call the general ability of the absence of stupidity?

Einstein does have a high IQ.

> Expertise is a combination of knowledge and ability

Yes expertise is not the same as intelligence.

Specific measures of ability tend to cluster at the low end more than they do at the high end. This explains both the correlations among abilities, and the fact that high abilities tend to be domain-specific.

An IQ score over 70 has a clinical meaning: it defines the absence of mental retardation. Scores of 90 and 160 are equivalent for this purpose.

"Giftedness" in a domain-general sense is an abstract concept that may or may not map onto something real. The validity of IQ testing derives from measuring the other end of the scale.

Steve declared thermonuclear war on Google 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.

Nice, albeit implausible story. Apple had been working on multi touch screens for a long time before that. They applied for a patent on it from 2004[1]. And TBF, neither Apple nor LG invented capacitive touch screens. Multiple discovery is a thing.

[1]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7663607B2/en

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

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

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 always assumed this was a tax-avoidance scheme

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

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.

I was more surprised by how they managed to keep using work devices after termination. This sounds to me like a failure of their manager to do their job to follow the standard exit process.

But, I don't work in Silicon Valley.

- Steve Jobs

joke

But thats very different than scheming to steal actual property, which these files are.

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

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

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.

If someone calls himself open, you should know who it is and what to expect.

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?

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

"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

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.

Don’t be such an idiot simp for billionaires who don’t give a shit about you

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)

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

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

The main higher-level factor is our patriarchal culture (and more bad things tend to stem from places where that’s intense).

Let’s organize the temporal order a bit. This is what some research turned up.

“Groups of senior employees, concerned with Altman’s leadership and lack of transparency, asked Loopt’s board on two occasions to fire him as C.E.O., according to Hagey.”

“As Mark Jacobstein, an older Loopt employee who was asked by investors to act as Altman’s “babysitter,” later told Keach Hagey, for “The Optimist,” a biography of Altman, “There’s a blurring between ‘I think I can maybe accomplish this thing’ and ‘I have already accomplished this thing’ that in its most toxic form leads to Theranos,” Elizabeth Holmes’s fraudulent startup.”

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/veLhW

I read he’s a vegetarian out of concern for animals, and that’s a good moral sign (but perhaps less relevant here).

Are / were there precursor concerns arising to signal back then? I don’t know.

"Despite potential warning signs, we believe Sam to be an ethical person"

and not

"We know that Sam is an unethical person, but that's either not a problem, or an actual asset when it comes to running our venture fund"

The former is definitely still an error, but it's quite different from the accusation being leveled on this thread.

That’s covered by my options: “doesn’t do a good job of filtering”.

> due to, you know... their lack of ethics.

Being unethical and being able to hide it are entirely orthogonal.

While there's no shortage of horror stories and I think greater scrutiny/criticism is warranted, I doubt that it's an actual criminal organization.

Though full disclosure: I did that, so that might colour my view. https://vincenttunru.com/hacking-a-gameshow/

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.

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.

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!

But, it does mean that obviously they have zero regard for pesky things like "trade secrets" or IP. They shit on IP, like, as a rule.

This is why I was frustrated nobody was prosecuting the AI companies in the beginning when the IP theft first started. Sure, we might not care if they stole books off of libgen, whatever. But big picture here, is this a precedent we want to allow and what are the consequences?

Turns out the consequences were obvious: intra-American espionage and corporate sabotage. Oops, that doesn't bode well for home-grown AI.