I think it would be helpful if you explained how distillation works (as relevant to the conversations threads here) because I agree that this is a key point.
This seems like an important post. It looks like these letters are occasionally used to as a tactic, and i can see how such a tactic can really scare employees in a country where legal bills can climb really fast.
> in a country where legal bills can climb really fast
Honest question: Are there countries where this is not the case? I'd be interested to read more about how that manage that. If it's some sort of "protecting the little guy"-type thing or a general suppression of legal costs. Or maybe I'm reading too much into your comment.
It is more that labor protections in most of the industrialized world actually mean something, such that this sort of behavior is generally not even to be considered an option by an employer.
Regulated legal insurance market coupled with „looser pays all the costs“ system.
The insurance doesn’t mind fighting for you because they will get paid by the company making the frivolous suit. You don’t pay much, 10$/month.
Although in this particular case, you wouldn’t even need that, since either you took the documents and that is criminal fraud prosecuted by the state or you didn’t take the documents and then the company would be in hella trouble if they perjured themselves to the public prosecutor claiming you did.
Doesn't that mean that if you have a slam dunk case you can get a super expensive lawyer just to run up costs as much as possible? Hell, could you ask your friend to be your legal representative and have him charge you a gorillion dollar in legal fees? Then when you win you split the loot?
Civilized countries regulate the rates that lawyers can charge for standard work. Also lawyers get only reimbursed for reasonable costs by the loser. Still expensive, but not absurdly so.
No. The fees must be objectively reasonable and usual and customary for the effort and level of skill required. To get fees, you must submit an itemized billing statement that gets picked apart by the other side.
It does, and it absolutely has a chilling effect in countries which don't do things this way.
Sue someone who can spend millions of pounds (for the sake of argument) on defence? Better be certain you can win... against someone who can spend millions of pounds, and probably went to the same public school as the judge.
In America, legal fees can be awarded as additional damages. We should do it more than we do. But given those two options? I'm on Team American Rule, 100%
In England (where pounds come from) costs are not always rewarded, but very frequently, they are: and it's actual costs, not some fixed fee. A litigant who spends more on solicitors indemnifies the loser accordingly.
Your statement is technically correct (and mirrors my initial feelings) but the comment below that notes that we accept many other abstractions seems more “meaningful” in the larger scheme of things.
For instance, a software engineer who also understands how to design microprocessors would indeed in my own evaluation be a “better engineer” than me (someone who does not). Yet, I wonder if they would be meaningfully more productive than a good software engineer who “just” understands how microprocessors work..
The current administration's actions are for sure signaling a distinct lack of predictability or stability.
The U.S. is either harming itself erratically, or systematically enforcing control on US based businesses in a way that is historically more synonymous with, say, China.
A lot of us worry it is the former. I wonder if it's better or worse if it is the latter. The US, having seen that Europe and the world seem to tolerate interference by CPC based on opinions expressed by Alibaba or Chinese car companies, may have decided that it's fair game.
Unfortunately saying it in the press is going to make it even harder for them in the current environment. I know this administration gets non-trivial support from the valley, but what to most outsiders seems like "targeting businesses based on personal vibes" is going to do long-term harm to the U.S.
I hope those who represent technology in government, especially the AI head David Sacks are giving this due consideration.
It seems to be observably true that expressing opinions critical of the administration, even about one's own business, leads to further harm from government right now in the U.S. in a country which is supposed to have strong freedom of speech rights.
It's obviously unfortunate that this is the case.
It's also a shame that this is happening when the folks regulating AI have a tech industry background.
The administration seems to be clearly signaling "stop resisting". I am not sure how you read me as saying that.
I think you are misreading this situation. The Musk-Thiel cluster, of which David Sacks is a major member, is one of the main groups trying to destroy the rule of law and turn the US into a personalist regime. They are doing this because they think they'll be major beneficiaries of the new regime. As they see it, the long term success of the US, ie the rule of law, is against their personal interests.
Buying state owned enterprises and running them more efficiently to double their valuation (or more) has been a reliably profitable business in many countries. This suggests to me that government bureaucracy, lack of accountability etc. could result in “at cost” trending to $100 or more if government buys private companies, or starting close to $100 if government starts a new one.
My favorite part of the paper is that the “attack” isn’t just exploiting a bug — it’s exploiting how different components interpret the same input. Modifying an executable as it’s loaded into memory is one example, but the deeper pattern is the mismatch.
What’s interesting about the malware in this post is that it goes one step further: instead of exploiting mismatches, it corrupts the computation itself — so every infected system agrees on the same wrong answer!
More broadly: any interpretive mismatch between components creates a failure surface. Sometimes it shows up as a bug, sometimes as an exploit primitive, sometimes as a testing blind spot. You see it everywhere — this paper, IDS vs OS, proxies vs backends, test vs prod, and now LLMs vs “guardrails.”
Fun HN moment for me: as I was about to post this, I noticed a reply from @tptacek himself. His 1998 paper with Newsham (IDS vs OS mismatches) was my first exposure to this idea — and in hindsight it nudged me toward infosec, the Atlanta scene, spam filtering (PG's bayesian stuff) and eventually YC.
The paper starts with this Einstein quote "Not everything that is counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted", which seems quite apt for the malware analyzed here :)
On Linux, with a compose key, it's <compose><-><-><.> (at least with the settings I have, I don't think I overrode that one). "⸻" is even more fun. You can even make your own sequences, e.g. I've got <compose><O><h><m> for "Ω", and <compose><m><u> for "μ", very handy for electrical stuff like "160μA at 1.8V needs a resistance of 1.25kΩ, dissipating 288μW".
On a Mac, at least, the "correct combination of buttons" is trivial and easy to remember, even for someone like me who rarely uses em-dash. (But, I want to start using it more because I'm sick to death of people treating it as a scarlet letter.)
