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Comment by throwaway9QZAB | Hacker News Reader

I feel extremely uncharitable but I don't see any other comments raising this - this reads like a lot like the writings of people who believe they're being 'gangstalked'. Meetings being added/removed to calendars to mess with you, an 'implied' threat being left in the notes section of a hidden slide in a presentation, meeting notes being manipulated to make them look bad, this sort of thing.

Maybe I'm just extremely lucky but I've never worked with anyone who would put in the effort for this sort of thing, even if they really disliked the person. And some of it just makes no sense - an implied murder/suicide threat, in the notes section in a hidden slide in a slideshow?

Also the formatting being a long screed with random bolding doesn't help, although that could well be a non-native speaker not realising how this appears to natives.

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Exactly my thoughts. I'm surprised that the majority of commenters here are taking this at face value. Especially, as you mentioned, the "implied hidden suicide/murder threat". If it was as the author described, 99% of people at any company on Earth would be absolutely shocked and appalled by something like that. Unless Apple is some truly some kind of other-worldly hellhole, they would not have gotten the reaction that they did.

I'm obviously not qualified to diagnose anyone, especially from reading a single blog post. But have any of the other commenters stopped and considered whether it rings true that her coworker shouted "Die!" at her on her way to the bathroom? Or does that sound more like something that someone with, say, paranoid schizophrenia would say?

I also feel uncharitable bringing this up, but it appears nobody in the comments has yet considered that this could be GPT-3 generated text. I only noticed this as a possiblity once you pointed out the random bolding. Some of the article items that seem suspect:

- fully random bolding

- long, rambling, not entirely coherent (understandable given the subject matter, of course. however, the author also has a PHD?)

- inconsistent naming, e.g. iBuddy

- broad conclusion that doesn't fully match the content

- a nondescript screenshot which doesn't implicate anybody

- separated into 5 segments ("parts"), although the segments aren't narratively meaningful

- a huge list of accusations (of varying degrees of believably) interwoven as though they were more related textually rather than contextually

I hope it's not GPT-3, and that if this is true the victim gets their due justice, but it's worth consideration.

I find this easier to believe than that some of these events described actually happened.

> Maybe I'm just extremely lucky but I've never worked with anyone who would put in the effort for this sort of thing, even if they really disliked the person.

I wouldn't be surprised if that kind of behaviour is endemic in organisations that use a stack ranking system [0], as Microsoft did in the past.

P.S.: I am not implying Apple uses stack ranking.

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[0]: https://www.perdoo.com/resources/stack-ranking/

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