A summer intern once saved Valve from a near-fatal lawsuit
pcgamer.com
pcgamer.com
Also the Half-Life documentary they released last year was one hour long. The Half-Life 2 documentary is two hours long. I sure doesn't feel like 2 hours.
Highly recommended. (There are manual English subtitles included that seem perfect too, if you need them.)
Even if something was genuine...it's hard to tell.
I wonder what other amazing things we missed out on because of political backstabbing, or one-sided corporate lawsuits, or crime and fraud? We'll never know, because those projects don't get documentaries made about them 20 years later.
Practices like abuse of the legal system have deleterious effects in our specific timeline, but I've always thought that for so many things, It's the opportunity cost that dominates. So many fruitful branches get snipped at the bud. Yes, as you said, we'll never know, but maybe it's something we should talk about more. What it could look like. It doesn't have to be done with an ideological approach. Looking at higher order effects can help see true costs and benefits.
Edit: I'm not fixing that Auto-correct. This post has a Hawk button. Press it, I dare you...
For some reason that's something I was always keyed into, even as a little kid. I've always hyper fixated on these possibility nexuses, and had a hard time caring about times when it's hard to break through the walls. Those moments when the threads of fate cross are just so important in the world, and it really is a fundamental phenomenon.
> "The next thing we know, here comes this big stack of counter-claims," said Valve general counsel Karl Quackenbush. "Everything from canceling the 2001 agreement, to obtaining ownership of all the Half-Life IP, to keeping us from doing Steam."
> "We're gonna put Valve out of business, and we're gonna bankrupt the two of you," Lynch said of Vivendi's strategy.
The threat of being litigated into the ground by someone with more money for lawyers is a great truth and competition burying tool and it's used every day.
Meanwhile in the current universe, we sometimes go "Remember Half-Life? It's a shame Valve became a massive success and the sequel was cancelled."
Those words are synonyms. What you seem to be objecting to is that it should not be normal or common. But it is. “Normal” doesn’t mean “acceptable” or “neutral”, it means “standard”, “usual”, “typical”, “expected”, “common”. Slavery was never ethical or good, but at a point in history it was normal.
Don’t avoid what is in front of you. Do fight for a better normal but recognise when something you disapprove of is the current normal.
If you were severely harmed by the actions of a specific person who happened to also be a business executive, should you be allowed to pursue that business executive in court?
Let’s say for example a wealthy man decides, for his personal amusement, to bulldoze your home. The bulldozer is owned by a LLC with no assets or insurance but the man is very rich. Should you be allowed to sue him personally?
How about if a family decides to engage in purposeful behavior in selling a deadly addictive drug that kills hundreds of thousands of people, making billions of dollars. Should they be allowed to walk away?
The “strange” convention that we adhere to is that we let people shield themselves from the consequences of their behavior behind corporate structures. Not the other way around.
The least we can do is ask them to show up in court and explain why that legal fiction should apply to them.
-Lord Thurlow, late 1700s.
In this specific case Gabe Newell fought and miraculously won, but gaben is the exception and most businesses are (rightly) afraid to fight Goliath and that's a big loss to society.
Suppose the source language has words which could be translated into multiple English words -- look at all the power banks which are advertised as charging treasure for example. One can see how bank vs treasure are close, after all. Further, even in English multiple phrases could be used "don't preserve" "bin it" "throw it away" and countless others. Even worse, it could be a company specific phrase which would only stand out as odd "apply procedure 66 to it".
If given a little thought this is exactly the kind of task where a native speaker would shine and LLM might just miss or if given a wide enough net produce a million false positive.
as I said above: I already asked dang to delete this account, I do not want to be here anymore
Hopeless, as I said.
"Come delete my account dang". So weird....
On the other hand, perhaps the summer intern would have had an easier time finding something (and the defense more time to spot potential gaps in their arguments).
What you can’t be sure of is if it claims there is nothing interesting.
False positives are fine for this use case.
But false negatives would not have been, and you don’t have the luxury of choice. Even if the LLM had highlighted twenty matches, there’s no guarantee the one good one would be in there, it might just as well have made twenty false positives.
If it turns up one case winner it doesn’t matter much if it misses others. The Korean intern could have also missed 10 other damning emails.
The really remarkable “hero” here is the Korean junior executive who stupidly mentioned destroying evidence on the record.
Based on my repeated observations of excited interns going above and beyond like this, no, it’s not remarkable.
Hire interns and enjoy their youthful exuberance before they become jaded.
If Valve would've just hired a translator and achieved the same would've we called the translator a hero? Meaning "worthy of admiration due to incredible achievements"?
If being tasked with reading documents and doing so during an internship and just doing the job you're paid for is heroism, that's a very very low bar for heroism we have, I'm scared to hear what's the definition for "professionalism".
Thus that command - is never followed. There are always copies of the bad shit everywhere. The underlings are not that stupid.