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Right? Just straight up documentation with no shame: From an Axios article on this

> 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...

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It'd be even funnier if the 'message' was a text sent from their iphone.
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"Is you taking notes on a criminal f-cking conspiracy?"

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

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I want this to run like a real f-cking business!
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Appalling.
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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?
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These companies are big enough (especially financially) that I'm really surprised that they do not have their own FBI/CIA/NSA departments in the world of corporate espionage.
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Don't worry, some do.
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Exactly. If ever there was a y'all deserve eachother situation, it is this.
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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.
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A sum of people with this attitude is what a megacorp is and why they're hated.
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It’s even more ridiculous when choosing to do it Apple. It’s hard to think of a company with more legal resources and which is more protective of its hardware IP.
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And vindictiveness.

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

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> 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.

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It wasn't very surreptitiously, Google very loudly bought Android Inc. for 50 million in 2005, two years before Apple ripped of the phone that won the iF Design Award in 2006, the LG Prada.
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> Apple ripped of the phone that won the iF Design Award in 2006, the LG Prada.

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

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Android’s original offering was nothing like modern phones. They didn’t have multi touch and they expected physical keyboards. Android added multi-touch in 2.0 Eclair in 2009 as a clear response to iPhone’s popularity
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> 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?

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Disney comes to mind…

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

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Nintendo?
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I’ve been present when the world comes crashing down around people who thought they were too smart to get caught.

The surprise in their eyes is always very genuine.

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Google/Waymo + Uber/Otto comes to mind here with Anthony Levandowski.
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Google and Uber started as courtroom enemies, but probably had to commiserate some on Anthony Levandowski probably being the worst hire they both made.
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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.

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> And also he briefly started a religion

I always assumed this was a tax-avoidance scheme

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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.”

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Either people are being really, really silly (which cannot be discounted), or the potential reward is so high as to override whatever qualms a normal person must have. Is that it? Is this people looking at a solid career at Apple or sudden millions from OpenAI, and thinking the risk is worth it somehow? Or, more darkly, is it people thinking _this is my only chance and I have to take it_? Or is it trickle-down lawlessness?
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Sometimes the reward is pitifully small. There was a podcast about insider trading and sometimes the insiders will give the information for free or a negligible sum. There’s something in human psychology that facilitates collaboration even in unethical acts.
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Intelligence is domain-specific. People who have put too many skill points in technical knowledge often have none left for common sense and street-smarts.
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Intelligence is actually extremely general and transferrable - IQ measures meta skills and ability that predicts success in a plethora of areas.

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

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No, stupidity is very general. The statistical association between different areas of ability, which is reified in the concept of IQ, is because people who are bad at one thing are bad at everything. The Stanford-Binet test was developed as a way to measure mental disability, not giftedness.

(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.

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Statistically yes but we need to look at the actual distribution and I doubt it’s just a handful of outliers.
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INT 18 WIS 3 is a terribly dangerous build in this world.
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To your point, I've come across many who conflate the 2.

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.

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More like lot of people are leaving Apple for OpenAI (no surprise) and an Apple manager wants to send a signal to everyone leaving to chill with what they walk out with. Corps have to perform a lot of theatre because there is lot of info constantly leaking out.
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And now the entire industry knows they are too stupid to be employed.
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Overconfidence. These people think they are much smarter than others to be caught.
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Those people are designers. And they don't necessarily understand software, data, or security. When I explained to my non-technical friends about how they were being tracked by website cookies, it sounded like a sci fi story to them. But yes, it's dumb.

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.

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> This sounds to me like a failure of their manager to do their job to follow the standard exit process.

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

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

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You assume they have a standard exit process.
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A VP is not a designer, and doesn't have a standard anything.
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seemingly smart is the key here. intelligence doesnt make up for ethics.
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And I'd question the intelligence also. I don't think employment at FAANG means a lot in that regard.
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Yeah but it isn't just unethical, it's also deeply stupid -- you will be caught.
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Because companies get an advantage by having their people do this. You only hear about the times they get caught, but apparently they get caught so rarely that it's worth it.
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Everywhere I've ever worked, if I went to management and said "hey, I've got some files from my last job, if you want to see them," they would say "absolutely not, please get rid of them RIGHT NOW," and probably fire me.

But, I don't work in Silicon Valley.

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I had the opposite issue, I once got criticised for not bringing client information with me.
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I work for a Silicon Valley headquartered company and would expect the same.
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Companies don't get to be worth billions of dollars without doing something unethical.
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It's people who hold these beliefs who commit these acts. They're so convinced everyone around them is depraved, usually–at least in part–through personal experience, that they don't stop to consider the alternative.
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Nah. Simple logic: look at Thiel and Musk. Two of the most deplorable human beings out there
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"Picasso had a saying -- 'good artists copy; great artists steal' -- and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."

- Steve Jobs

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Great artists steal ideas, not a painting off a gallery wall.
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> 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/

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Well their whole model is a stolen art collection :)
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Why not both? Three cheers for escape artists!
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a "metal-finishing technique" _is_ an idea.

joke

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When you are bulk copying data off your former employer's network share, that is a lot more than "stealing ideas".
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Having a certain type of finish on the metal is an idea. Tricking someone into using Apple’s exact trade-secret finishing technique is copying. Making a new, even better technique, that’s so good the general public forgets about Apple and thinks you’re the new benchmark… that’s the kind of stealing that quote is talking about.
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Yes, and if you analyze the finished metal and put in the work to reverse engineer it, fine, have at it. That's not even theft. If Apple really wanted to keep it completely secret forever, they can't sell it, so thats the risk they accept.

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

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The concept of applying some kind of Apple-ish texture finish to metal is an idea. A research-heavy, highly specific, finely tuned, multiple step, trade secret, brand signature metal finishing technique is a painting.
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Kinda seems like OpenAI didn’t actually have that idea or the ability to execute it, if they had to go to apple’s supplier and lie to them to get them do it.
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Funny thing, Steve Jobs is the only source that attributes this quote to Picasso, and it seems very likely he made it up.

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

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