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A summer intern once saved Valve from a near-fatal lawsuit
- lofaszvanitt 2y agoVivendi was a big ruthless bogey in that era of gaming.
- fardo 2y agoIn 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.
- Hamuko 2y ago"The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world."
- gkanai 2y ago[flagged]
- yapyap 2y 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 2y agoI 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.
- kortilla 2y agoOrg 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.
- Temporary_31337 2y agoCan we appreciate that Vivendi Universalis went after Gabe personally and no one is in jail for this.
- A_D_E_P_T 2y agoIt'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 2y agoIt may be common, but it is not normal. It is certainly not ethical.
- A_D_E_P_T 2y agoThese 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.
- CPLX 2y agoYou 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.
- regularfry 2y agoWhile not a criminal case, the Stringer Bell rule strikes again.
- wk_end 2y agoI 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.
- Hikikomori 2y agoIt was also a needle in a haystack as they got document dumped on in discovery to exhaust their few remaining resources.
- A_D_E_P_T 2y agoIt'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.
- rightbyte 2y agoMaybe they destroyed every relevant mail but missed that one?
- Hamuko 2y agoI 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 2y agoWhen 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.
- bejd 2y agoMentioned in the article, but the source is the excellent YouTube documentary Valve released for Half-Life 2's 20th Anniversary [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCjNT9qGjh4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCjNT9qGjh4
- Nexxxeh 2y agoThere 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 2y agoThese 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 2y agoIn 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 2y agoAt what timestamp in the documentary do they talk about ?
- kulminni 2y ago1:38:00 - 1:44:00
- mitjam 2y agoThe 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.
- incognition 2y agoDeffo several startups and incumbents doing this for legal discovery nowadays..
- ano-ther 2y agoIn 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).
- rob74 2y agoI 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.
- mschuster91 2y agoAt 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 2y agoYeah 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.
- thrance 2y agoMy 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 2y agoYup, he is very much the French Rupert Murdoch. One of those disgusting piece of garbage that make the world a worse place for everyone.
- yapyap 2y agoTLDR: 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.
- amelius 2y agoNowadays you'd just ask an LLM to read through those Korean emails.
- 4gotunameagain 2y agoAnd you could never be sure it indeed found the needle in the haystack.
- bayindirh 2y ago...or hallucinated it, even if it finds one.
- kortilla 2y agoWell 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.
- paulryanrogers 2y ago"Check yourself" as in hire a translator who reads Korean, then check the output of those yourself.
- kortilla 2y agoPaying for professional translation of 1 email vs 10,000 is a significant difference.
- dan-robertson 2y agoI 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.
- latexr 2y 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.
- mettamage 2y agoI wonder if the summer intern got rewarded for this save
- gary_0 2y agoIt'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 2y agoIt'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...
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- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y agoNot stopping the Florida recount may have changed the entire trajectory of the 21st century.
- Fade_Dance 2y ago
- gizmo 2y agoIf 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.
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- jelder 2y agoI wonder what happened to Andrew the intern.