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That's something that normal boring suits can and do remedy. Companies sue and win over denied government contracts all the time.

> First of all, Apple CPUs are not the fastest.

The cores are. Nothing is beating a M4/M5 on single CPU performance, and per-cycle nothing is even particularly close.

At the whole-chip level, there are bigger devices from the x86 vendors which will pull ahead on parallel benchmarks. And Apple's unfortunate allergy to effective cooling techniques (like, "faster fans move more air") means that they tend to throttle on chip-scale loads[1].

But if you just want to Run One Thing really fast, which even today still correlates better to "machine feels fast" than parallel loads, Apple is the undisputed king.

[1] One of the reasons Geekbench 6, which controversially includes cooling pauses, looks so much better for Apple than version 5 did.

This framing seems weird:

> Two days after receiving the Apple threat notification, Gibson contacted a forensic expert with extensive experience investigating spyware attacks.

Surely as a professional "exploit developer", Gibson himself should have been about as expert at this particular niche as any human being on the planet already.

I mean, sure, absolutely he should have called in his friends in the community and gotten more eyes on the device. But the way that's written it sounds like he took it into the local Genius Bar.

It also, in context, feels a little obfuscatory. Like he's trying to flag the involvement of senior folks who he can't name.

Sure, because it's not my logic!

The founder in the linked article thought that she was on the right side of the line. She wasn't. You personally might think you're too smart to[1] fall afoul of this kind of thing and that all your cheating[2] will be non-prosecutable.

But quite frankly most "criminally liable" misrepresentations to investors aren't prosecuted (basically none of them are), so the fact that this one was is more a statement about the influence of JP Morgan and the mind of this one prosecutor. And blanket statements that absolutely none of Uber's shenanigans were prosecutable seem laughable. Crimes abound.

The point wasn't to nitpick about crimes and penalties. It was that this crime happened in the context of a culture that structurally encouraged it, and we would all do well to recognize that instead of nitpicking fake reasons why it would never happen to us.

[1] The ironic analogy to hubris in security analysis isn't lost on me

[2] Because again in this world All Founders Cheat a Little Bit. We all know it.

Potato/potatoe. Existing taxi medallion holders were absolutely harmed by Uber. Existing licensed hotel operators were absolutely harmed by AirBnB. And we all celebrated that to great effect here. But it was breaking the rules. We just think THOSE rules were bad but THESE rules are good.

Well, it's not our call to make, it's the prosecutors'. And you (yes, you personally) aren't nearly as insulated from this kind of risk as you think.

> she bragged to her lead engineer she wouldn't go to prison

So... obviously she was wrong. But the line between "just cutting a few corners" and prosecutable criminality isn't nearly as bright as we in the peanut gallery like to think. Lots of very successful startup launches (Uber and AirBnB are famous examples) were kinda/sorta/prettymuch illegal by the plain language of the laws they were (not) operating under. And they got stinking rich! PG himself has an example in one of the very early essays about how Viaweb kinda just skipped most of the early bureaucracy and accounting they were supposed to have been doing, figuring it would all just work out. And it did.

Kids see those examples and figure that a little cheating here or there probably isn't going to send them to jail. And it usually doesn't. Except when it does. And the distinction, for a lot of people in this community and right here on this forum, is very much a "There but for the grace of God go I" phenomenon.

Startup culture tells you to cheat, basically. Knowing how not to cheat isn't in the instruction manual.