In an era of massive scale companies and giant projects, it's fascinating how often it feels like most of the success of a project or company's big successes ultimately hinge on the actions of a few key individuals in the right place at the right time - and it never fails to surprise me how little overlap these individuals and the actual actual company org charts share.
kortilla 439 days ago [-]
Org charts are structured around running the company day to day. The surprising one-off big boosts from an individual are by definition not reflected in an org chart.
Hamuko 439 days ago [-]
"The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world."
gkanai 439 days ago [-]
[flagged]
yapyap 439 days ago [-]
> If Sega had held onto that Nvidia stock from then... ChatGPT tells me: "So, if you invested $5 million in Nvidia stock at its IPO in 1999, it would be worth approximately $3 billion today, assuming a current share price of $450 and accounting for stock splits."
why not just either do the math yourself or not include it at all? I don’t find GPT math about realtime prices and such to be even slightly reliable given the; market fluctuations , latest training data & of course the hallucinations.
soganess 439 days ago [-]
I found it useful.
I just put an asterisk on the number and moved on. Even without the exact number, I was reminded that 5 million in 1999 value for a company who's crown jewel was what, the riva tnt 2, means a serious amount of the company's worth now.
bejd 439 days ago [-]
Mentioned in the article, but the source is the excellent YouTube documentary Valve released for Half-Life 2's 20th Anniversary [0]
There were so many excellent touches and insights in the documentary. And I got goosebumps in a couple of places.
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.)
garaetjjte 439 days ago [-]
These documentaries are nice but I feel they're missing something by being commissioned. Obviously they don't contain any criticism about Valve, but is it still documentary or just marketing material?
Incipient 438 days ago [-]
In this era of marketing and polish, honesty I don't really take anything from big companies or 'big people' at face value. Everything is scripted and wordsmithed within an inch of its life.
Even if something was genuine...it's hard to tell.
Faelian2 439 days ago [-]
At what timestamp in the documentary do they talk about ?
kulminni 439 days ago [-]
1:38:00 - 1:44:00
gary_0 439 days ago [-]
It's food for thought that something as groundbreaking as HL2 and Steam almost didn't see the light of day and the developers only survived by the skin of their teeth. In some nearby universe the games industry looks very different and sometimes people go "remember Half-Life? It's a shame Valve went out of business and the sequel was canceled."
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.
Fade_Dance 439 days ago [-]
It's also a food for thought that we almost certainly are in that timeline in other areas too. Take your chosen Hawk button issue like net neutrality, walled gardens, anti-competitive acquisitions, or some of the more outright antitrust agreements such as those that are displayed in the recent Google lawsuit (do business with us and be forced to sign an agreement to shut out all of our direct competition, ex: offer a non-Google Android fork and get banned from offering the Play Store on all of the company's devices).
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...
HeatrayEnjoyer 439 days ago [-]
Not stopping the Florida recount may have changed the entire trajectory of the 21st century.
Fade_Dance 439 days ago [-]
Butterfly effect is hard to comprehend isn't it? My favorite tangential stat (adding a little bit of path dependence to the conceptual stew) is the huge difference in outcomes between holding a kid back from first grade or not.
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.
For every Valve saved we have thousands of other being buried. This still happens every day and it works differently from the article more often than not. This strategy is what a lot of big companies with deep pockets use to quash something even when they're in the wrong.
> "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.
Hamuko 439 days ago [-]
>In some nearby universe the games industry looks very different and sometimes people go "remember Half-Life? It's a shame Valve went out of business and the sequel was canceled."
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."
fx1994 439 days ago [-]
after seeing that documentary I have much more respect for Gabe, most of us would not risk like he did, kudos for staying on path and with clean head.
Temporary_31337 439 days ago [-]
Can we appreciate that Vivendi Universalis went after Gabe personally and no one is in jail for this.
A_D_E_P_T 439 days ago [-]
It's totally normal for corporations to go after business executives personally in civil cases, but it's also usually pretty easy for those targeted executives to have the claims against them dismissed. Typically it's just an intimidation tactic.
etiennebausson 439 days ago [-]
It may be common, but it is not normal.
It is certainly not ethical.
latexr 439 days ago [-]
> It may be common, but it is not normal.
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.
CPLX 439 days ago [-]
You might want to think about this this other way.
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.
etiennebausson 439 days ago [-]
That's fair, all your examples seems to signal that the existence of LLC is the root problem.
lb1lf 439 days ago [-]
'Corporations have no bodies to be punished nor any souls to be condemned, hence they do as they please.'
-Lord Thurlow, late 1700s.
A_D_E_P_T 439 days ago [-]
These days, sadly, ethical behavior has almost nothing to do with the civil courts. Even in the article at OP, you can see how cases become little more than battles of financial attrition, with tactics (like dumping millions of foreign-language documents) designed to force your opponent to spend huge sums of money in the hopes of forcing a settlement.
regularfry 439 days ago [-]
While not a criminal case, the Stringer Bell rule strikes again.
mettamage 439 days ago [-]
I wonder if the summer intern got rewarded for this save
gizmo 439 days ago [-]
If you enjoy reading business biographies like me you'll find that gangster tactics like deployed by Vivendi against Valve are surprisingly common. The smaller business has essentially no recourse when faced with an opponent like Vivendi. The courts are unable to hold big businesses to account because (a) diffusion of responsibility and (b) when found guilty the fines are as threatening as a parking ticket.
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.
mitjam 439 days ago [-]
The devil is in the detail, I think in the age of LLMs this will become harder as docs can now be better scanned before they’re handed out.
rob74 439 days ago [-]
I think current LLMs would be completely lost with the task "scan these documents for information that could be risky for our case": they would either produce tons of false positives, overlook actual risks, or both.
maeil 439 days ago [-]
I can personally attest that companies are already using those LLM-based workflows for those exact purposes successfully, performing better than humans, which often isn't a super high bar.
mschuster91 439 days ago [-]
At least you can reasonably use them for translation and in a second pass summarize or just have it detect if a document contains specific keywords / phrases.
chx 439 days ago [-]
Yeah but this is where a human is indispensable.
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.
mschuster91 439 days ago [-]
Sure! But in any case, it's worth a shot to preprocess document dumps with AI first - if it fails to spot anything obvious, you can still go and have humans sift through the pile manually, whereas if it does spot something humans can immediately zero in instead of wasting their time.
chx 439 days ago [-]
hopeless AI cultists everywhere
as I said above: I already asked dang to delete this account, I do not want to be here anymore
mschuster91 438 days ago [-]
AI is a tool, nothing more, nothing less. It is smart to use it when it makes sense, it is dumb to shoehorn it into something it by definition cannot do.
infecto 439 days ago [-]
Just tested out the treasure idea and seems to work fine in ChatGPT. I suspect if given context at the task at hand that the LLM would provide a pretty decent first pass.
chx 439 days ago [-]
Y'all are hopeless. I already asked dang to delete this account.
infecto 439 days ago [-]
What a weird response. Just providing a counterpoint to your idea that I don't believe is correct. I hope dang does not delete your account because I am not sure whats going on here and I hope you find the help/peace you need.
chx 439 days ago [-]
I listed like half a dozen things that could go wrong and the only reply is "look this particular one in this singular case the bullshit is accidentally correct".
Hopeless, as I said.
infecto 439 days ago [-]
Ouch, sorry you are in distress but let me repeat and help flesh it out for you. You would be surprised that when given the context at hand, the level of confusion would be a lot less than your constrained world model envisions. I have been pleasantly surprised with LLMs ability to translate, including legal documents. Should it be the only step in the process? No. Like I originally pointed out, I think a LLM can serve quite well in initial first passes. Its quite naive to hand wave it away with some what-if scenarios and then just become a dismissive immature kid when someone disagrees with you. I can only imagine when you have a corpus to work from of existing legal documents especially for translations, that you get quite close to the spirit of whats written.
"Come delete my account dang". So weird....
infecto 439 days ago [-]
You might be caught off guard then because its already happening successfully. There is a lot of overblown hype but systems already exist that do a pretty good job on first passes and other work that paralegals/juniors would be doing. I know this goes against the anti-LLM narrative here but don't be surprised as it happens.
ano-ther 439 days ago [-]
In a discovery you don’t really have a choice.
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).
incognition 438 days ago [-]
Deffo several startups and incumbents doing this for legal discovery nowadays..
jelder 439 days ago [-]
I wonder what happened to Andrew the intern.
amelius 439 days ago [-]
Nowadays you'd just ask an LLM to read through those Korean emails.
4gotunameagain 439 days ago [-]
And you could never be sure it indeed found the needle in the haystack.
kortilla 439 days ago [-]
Well if it turned something up you can just check the document yourself.
What you can’t be sure of is if it claims there is nothing interesting.
False positives are fine for this use case.
latexr 439 days ago [-]
> 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.
kortilla 439 days ago [-]
That’s what I said?
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.
paulryanrogers 439 days ago [-]
"Check yourself" as in hire a translator who reads Korean, then check the output of those yourself.
dan-robertson 439 days ago [-]
I think that’s within reach of many non-tiny companies. You don’t need to hire someone full time – technical translation work is a service you can already pay for.
kortilla 439 days ago [-]
Paying for professional translation of 1 email vs 10,000 is a significant difference.
bayindirh 439 days ago [-]
...or hallucinated it, even if it finds one.
lofaszvanitt 439 days ago [-]
Vivendi was a big ruthless bogey in that era of gaming.
thrance 439 days ago [-]
My hate for Vivendi and his owner, Vincent Bolloré, grows every time I read about either of them. He is a known far-right billionaire attempting to get his hands on the most media he can, to push his fascist agenda in France. That his company uses scummy practices to bully smaller ones in court is not really surprising.
sersi 439 days ago [-]
Yup, he is very much the French Rupert Murdoch. One of those disgusting piece of garbage that make the world a worse place for everyone.
wk_end 439 days ago [-]
I mean, all the intern did was comb through some documents in his native language. I’m sure if he weren’t there, they would’ve just hired a translator (much cheaper than lawyers). Not to disparage the work they did or anything.
The really remarkable “hero” here is the Korean junior executive who stupidly mentioned destroying evidence on the record.
rob74 439 days ago [-]
Ok, imagine the following: you are a (young and probably underpaid) summer intern; you suddenly get the task to drop whatever else you were doing (which was probably more interesting) and read through megabytes of mind-numbing documents; you have little to no personal "skin in the game"; and still, you somehow manage to muster the motivation to pay enough attention so you are able to spot the one interesting email among the thousands of irrelevant ones. Does it sound more remarkable now?
kortilla 439 days ago [-]
You might be surprised that sometimes people give a shit about the team, regardless of “skin in the game”.
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.
epolanski 439 days ago [-]
I think the previous user is merely pointing out the abuse of words we see in news reporting, "hero" here being the word.
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".
Hikikomori 439 days ago [-]
Hero wasn't used in the article, only in the comments here. Nor did they say that it was anything but luck in the documentary, as they had an intern that knew Korean and was able to find the one document that saved them after looking at less than 1% of them. Valve was on the brink of bankruptcy (Gabe was about to/did put his house on the market), if they needed to hire translator to look over the documents they might not have had the same luck and Vivaldis plan might have worked.
A_D_E_P_T 439 days ago [-]
It's also strange that the Korean side didn't destroy that evidence and handed it over in discovery. Most companies who destroy evidence at least try to do a decent job and go all the way. If the servers and individuals responsible were in Korea, an American civil suit would have a hard time reaching them.
Hamuko 439 days ago [-]
I assume most company executives are not experts at evidence destruction. And in this case, it seems that they destroyed all of the documents and then just sent out a "We've now destroyed everything you asked us" email reply back without thinking to include that in the list of things to destroy.
InDubioProRubio 439 days ago [-]
When the command comes to destroy evidence, the company already unravels. The CEOS and upper echelons do no longer hold the power of career life and death, instead they are just "visibly" pawns in the larger game of society, playing "prison" or "no prison". In that moment, even the most loyal individual realizes that the game is lost- and that deleting evidence that proofs your innocence, would increment you for nothing.
Thus that command - is never followed. There are always copies of the bad shit everywhere. The underlings are not that stupid.
rightbyte 439 days ago [-]
Maybe they destroyed every relevant mail but missed that one?
Hikikomori 439 days ago [-]
It was also a needle in a haystack as they got document dumped on in discovery to exhaust their few remaining resources.
Etheryte 439 days ago [-]
Yeah no, this is such a silly take on the situation. Finding anything useful in literally millions of pages of arbitrary documents, when you don't even know if there is anything useful, is an amazing feat. "Just" hiring a translator could also be prohibitively expensive at this volume when your company is already on the verge of bankruptcy. Even running a regular text search across millions of pages of what was probably a mix of emails, word documents, pdfs, etc takes a while today, never mind in the early 2000s. Keep in mind that this was probably an intern on what was a regular computer at the time, not some fancy distributed compute cluster. Finding anything useful in that pile is a gargantuan feat, even if there was no language barrier.
Ferret7446 439 days ago [-]
I don't think it's a feat, so much as copious amounts of luck (unless this intern is secretly a world champion speed reader).
yapyap 439 days ago [-]
TLDR: a summer intern who spoke Korean was able to find a single email in a million pages of document for a rather malicious counterlawsuit made against Valve because the other company, Vivendi was distributing Valve IP outside of the discussed regions and Valve sued them for that.
439 days ago [-]
Rendered at 11:28:58 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
why not just either do the math yourself or not include it at all? I don’t find GPT math about realtime prices and such to be even slightly reliable given the; market fluctuations , latest training data & of course the hallucinations.
I just put an asterisk on the number and moved on. Even without the exact number, I was reminded that 5 million in 1999 value for a company who's crown jewel was what, the riva tnt 2, means a serious amount of the company's worth now.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCjNT9qGjh4
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.